Trailerpark (15 page)

 

The conceit that certain people, especially female people, resemble certain flowers is not very original, but then, it's not without its uses either. Especially if you can obtain enough significant information about the flower to gain at the same time significant information about the person. For instance, Noni Hubner was like a kind of orchid that grows in northern New England—the pink lady's-slipper,
Cypripedium acaule
. It may surprise you that orchids actually appear in these latitudes, but they do. And the pink lady's-slipper, as it happens, is one of the more common members of the orchid family to appear in New Hampshire, Vermont and Maine, so that you often discover it in open pine woods, or on the east-facing slopes of riverbanks. It blooms in June when the plant's delicate throat swells and turns pink. Sometimes the orchid is white, but then you'll go back the following June and discover that it has bloomed a deep shade of pink, as if it had suffered a wound in your absence. People who love the sight of these orchids know that regardless of how plentiful they seem, you must not pick them. Nor should you transplant them, as they seldom survive a change of habitat for longer than a few years. In fact, most people who know where you can find such a lovely, fragile flower will not tell you the location, because they are afraid you will go there, and in your affection and delight, will pick the beautiful pink lady's-slipper or will try to transplant it nearer your home.

L
EON
L
A
R
OCHE
,
THE BANK TELLER
, tried to tell this story once to his friend and neighbor, Captain Dewey Knox (U.S. Army, ret.). Leon was in his late twenties when he made the attempt, and he had been drinking beer with the Captain in the Captain's trailer for several hours, so he was slightly drunk, or he probably would not have tried to tell it at all. It's not so much that you will say things when drunk that you'd never say when sober, as much as you will try to say things you'd ordinarily know simply could not be said. It's your judgment about the sayable that goes, not your inhibitions.

The two men had been talking about a kid who used to live at the trailerpark, Buddy Smith, who had been a thief and a liar and whose father, Tom Smith, had finally thrown him out of the trailer he'd shared with his son for most of the kid's life. Six months after the son had departed, the father shot himself, and nobody understood any of it. The son never showed up in Catamount again, not even for the funeral, and that had been the end of the matter, except when folks now and then wondered about what might have happened to Buddy Smith and wondered why his father, a sociable though utterly private man, had killed himself. Most people believed that by now the kid was locked up in jail somewhere out West, where his mother was supposed to live, and that Tom Smith had shot himself in the mouth with his shotgun because, since he had been living alone, his drinking had got out of hand, and you know how too much drinking alone can make you depressed. Nobody thought the two events, the son's departure and the father's suicide, were connected. At least not in such a way as to think the suicide could have been avoided, which is to say, at least not in such a way as you could blame the son for the death of the father.

“I liked Buddy,” Leon said, gazing into his glass. The two men were seated at the Captain's kitchen table, the television set still rumbling behind them in the living room, for when Leon had knocked on the door and had offered to share a six-pack of beer with him, the Captain had been watching the evening news and in his pleasure had neglected to shut the machine off. The older man had been grateful for the interruption—it was a frosty November night, and people generally didn't go calling on people on nights like this—and when the first six-pack had been drunk, the Captain had started offering beer from his refrigerator, until they had found themselves working their way through a third six-pack. The Captain said he didn't mind, it was a Friday night anyhow, and he was restless and felt like having company, so what the hell, crack open another, Leon, and relax, for chrissakes, you're too uptight, boy. You remind me of myself when I was your age, he told Leon. Some people have to learn to relax, have to force themselves to do it, and then after a while it comes naturally, he said laughing, as if to prove how finally it had come naturally to him.

“No, I really liked Buddy, although I can't say I knew him very well. He was a chess player. I never knew that until one night after work I went into the Hawthorne House for a drink, because I was angry, pissed off, from having been yelled at once too often by Bob Fosse at the bank. You wouldn't believe that man, I don't believe that man. After what, seven years, and he still treats me like shit. Anyhow, I went into the Hawthorne House, which is unusual for me, because that place can be kind of rough, you know, and I hate the smell of it, like urine and old beer, but like I said, I was angry at Bob Fosse and needed a drink to calm down.

“Buddy was in a corner playing one of the pinball machines, alone, as usual. He never seemed to have any friends in town, even though there are plenty of kids his age in town, too many of them, who don't seem to do anything except hang around drinking beer and flexing their muscles and getting themselves tattooed. Buddy was like that, or at least he seemed like that, but even so, he kept pretty much to himself. But then, too, Buddy didn't exactly look like those guys, either. I mean, he was always clean-looking, and he wore his hair short, and he took good care of his clothes. He looked like a recruit in the army home on leave. Even so, he never seemed to do much except hang around the trailerpark or up at the Hawthorne House, as if waiting for someone supposed to pick him up there and take him to someplace far away and very different from this place. Those other guys his age were made in Catamount, New Hampshire, to stay in Catamount, New Hampshire, and eventually to die in Catamount, New Hampshire. It was stamped all over their faces, all over their bulky muscles, all over the way they talked and laughed and punched each other around.”

The Captain knew the type. He shoved his paw across his white crewcut and sighed. Bring back the draft, he intoned, and in a year the streets of America will be cleared of that type and safe to walk in again.

“Buddy had spent a year in the service, the Marines, I think he told me, and just as he was about to be shipped overseas to Germany or someplace, he was in an automobile accident that put a metal plate into his head and got him discharged. He told me that while we were sitting at the bar, but I don't think I believed him, because while he was telling me all this, he kept smiling at me and watching my eyes, as if he was putting me on, just to see if I'd believe some lie.

“He was a chess player. He said he wasn't very good, but he liked to play, which is true as well for me, so I said we should get together to play chess sometime, and he thought that was a great idea. He knew no one who played chess around here, and neither did I. He had a way of watching the point of his cigarette while he smoked that was unusual. I bought him a second beer, and we talked about how hard it was living in a small town in New Hampshire, how boring it was and how mean-minded the people were. He said he was leaving for the West Coast as soon as he got some money that was owed him by a guy in the Marines, and then he asked me why I stayed here, living in Catamount, going back and forth every day from the trailerpark to the bank. My mother lives in Concord, where I grew up, and this was the best job I could find when I got out of New Hampshire Commercial College, and I go to Boston sometimes on weekends, I told him. He was curious about that, about what I do in Boston on weekends, and I told him the truth, that I go around to the bars and maybe take a meal at a fancy restaurant and go to a movie. That's all. He didn't believe me, but he was very nice, very cheerful and friendly. He said I probably stayed home every weekend and watched TV.

“By then the place was filling up and had got pretty noisy. The juke box was playing and two or three couples were dancing, and you had to holler to be heard, so I asked Buddy if he wanted to come back to my place for some supper and a few games of chess. He asked me if I had anything to drink, apologizing as he asked, explaining that he was broke or else he'd have offered to buy the beer. I had plenty of beer in the refrigerator, plus a bottle of scotch I keep around, and I had planned to go on home and cook up a couple of hamburgers for myself anyhow. I hadn't played any chess in over a year, not since my brother was back East visiting my mother two Thanksgivings ago. Buddy said fine, so I paid, and we left in my car.

“When we got to the trailer, he opened a beer and set up the chessboard in the living room while I cooked hamburgers. He had the television on and was watching it and drinking beer and seemed very relaxed to me. But he seemed sad, too. It's hard to explain. He probably reminded me of myself somehow, sitting there alone, with the television set on and a chessboard set up in front of him. I walked into the living room to say something to him, I don't know what, just something that wouldn't make him seem so sad and alone to me, maybe, and when I passed behind his chair, I lay my hand on his shoulder in a friendly way. You know? Just lay my hand on his shoulder as I passed behind his chair.

“What happened then was … embarrassing. I don't know why I'm telling this to you, I've never told anyone else, but it's bothered me ever since. He grabbed at my hand as if it were an insect, a spider or something, and threw it off his shoulder. When he stood up and turned to face me, he was red-faced and enraged, sputtering at me, calling me a fairy, all kinds of names. He knocked over the chessboard, made a few wild moves around the room as if he was trying to find a way out without passing me, and finally went by me as if I had some kind of disease he could catch, and slammed the door.”

The Captain was at the refrigerator and had drawn out a pair of beers. He let the door shut on its own and stood facing it. “Well … so he decided you had … unnatural desires, eh?”

“Apparently. Yes, he did. But I didn't.”

Of course. The Captain was still facing the closed refrigerator door.

“It was just that he had looked so sad and alone there, so pitiful. I can't describe it. Sometimes you can have a feeling toward a person that makes you want to do that, to place a hand on him and that's all, just to comfort him, even though he doesn't know he needs comfort—no, especially because he doesn't know he needs comfort. But I don't know why I'm telling you this. I must need comfort and not know it or something,” Leon said, and he laughed lightly, nervously.

The Captain laughed with him and turned and sat back down at the table. Leon, his face pinched in thought, opened the bottle and filled his glass, then studied the glass carefully, watching the bubbles rise inside and the moisture drip down the outside. The Captain filled his pipe from a brown leather pouch and lit it, drawing in the smoke rapidly until he had it going on its own. Then he asked Leon if it was true, was he a fairy?

Leon slowly looked up at the older man, the way you would look at a falling tree if you had got unexpectedly caught beneath it. It was too late to step out of its path. “Yes,” he said. “I suppose I am.”

The Captain smiled and revealed that he had always thought so, but Leon was not to worry, because his secret was safe. He understood that sort of thing, it happened all the time in the service. Well, not all the time, but often enough that you had to learn to be tolerant, so long as people kept these things to themselves. He continued talking a few seconds longer, but Leon was already standing and pulling on his jacket, then moving for the door.

At the door, he apologized for having drunk so much of the Captain's beer, and then stepped outside to the cold night air. It was a clear sky, with falling stars and a crescent moon that looked like a narrow streak against the dark blue sky.

T
HE REAL ESTATE MAN
H
AROLD
D
AME
was dying. Doctor Wickshaw gave him one month to six, and when he explained what few remaining services there were available for the real estate man, whether they kept him in the hospital or put him in a nursing home, and the costs of those services, the real estate man's son and daughter-in-law, who had been running the business alone for nearly a year anyhow, decided to bring him home, to install him in his bedroom on the second floor and to hire a nurse to take care of him for the one month to six he had left. She could administer the drugs he required, she could clean and feed him and take care of his bedding, she could watch after his dying, and when he was dead, she could leave.

Decisions like this are hard, the son of the real estate man explained to his wife, who had reservations about having the old man in the house for one to six months, a living corpse, practically (though out of respect for her husband's feelings she did not exactly put it that way), a total invalid drugged against pain, helpless and dependent as a newborn infant and daily becoming more so, shrinking into himself, unable to speak coherently or even to recognize who was in the room—it probably meant they wouldn't be able to go to Florida for the month of January the way they'd planned.

Nonsense, the husband assured her, unless of course the old man happened to die during that particular month, in which case there would be the funeral to take care of, but they could fly back for that, if necessary. All they had to do was be sure that the nurse they hired was honest, competent and pleasant to be around, for after all, they themselves would have to be around her for one to six months, not counting the month of January, when they would be in Florida. The wife wondered if the nurse would have to eat with them. Of course not. She could take the room next to the old man's, and she could eat there. The son and daughter-in-law would continue living downstairs in their wing of the house, where they had lived ever since the son had been brought into the business, and they would practically never see the woman.

There are several ways to go about hiring a private nurse to provide this kind of care, but when you live in a small town in a rural state like New Hampshire, probably the easiest way is to let your physician take care of it. Harold Dame's son and daughter-in-law were busy people, especially with the old man so sick and for the last year unable to run the business the way he used to, so they had explained at great length to Doctor Wickshaw, an intelligent and tactful man, precisely what kind of woman they were looking for, and he had proceeded to find them just such a woman.

Doctor Wickshaw was what you might call an artistic man, in that he was the president of the Catamount Drama Club, the coordinator for the annual Suncook Valley Arts Festival, and owned a large collection of works by contemporary New Hampshire painters and sculptors. His wife was a potter and wore smocks and sandals and large gold hoops in her pierced ears. He had a white Vandyke beard, a rosy complexion, and the kind of round belly on a slender body that a man who enjoys exotic food and interesting wine often wears. He was good-natured, affluent (for he had been the only physician in town for over twenty-five years and had invested heavily and wisely in real estate), and somewhat eccentric. In the summer months he frequently wore Bermuda shorts and shortsleeved shirts to the office.

For over a year, he had been looking for a nurse who could double as a receptionist, and he had interviewed and rejected every local person even remotely qualified for the job and then had advertised in Concord, twenty-five miles away, and after interviewing and rejecting the few applicants who had come out from Concord, he had nearly given up the search. Very few people who have qualifications for such specialized work as nursing are willing to live in a small mill town like Catamount, a town that has been dying for a half-century, a town where the poor are not only always with you but where annually they seem to increase in geometric proportion to the rich. The old buildings, designed and constructed when labor was cheap and materials plentiful, grow older and shabbier and eventually fall, to be replaced by asphalt lots or else by corrugated iron, sheet metal and plastic structures whose function, regardless of the name of the building or the owner, seems to be strictly that of temporary storage. It occurred to Doctor Wickshaw, however, that if somehow a nurse could be lured to this town and could be made to stay for several seasons, she would discover, as he himself had discovered years ago, that it offered numerous advantages and pleasures not obtainable in the cities and attractive suburbs to the south. There was the beauty of the landscape, the lakes and forests, the rivers and mountains, the flowers and wildlife; there was the comfort of living among people whose names and family histories you knew, people who would come to your aid when you needed it and who would leave you alone when you desired it; there was the security of living in a community that still honored the old-fashioned virtues of thrift, honesty, independence and respect for the independence of one's neighbors, love of God, love of country, and love of family.

“There has got to be someone left in the world who has a decent education and still cares for this kind of life,” the doctor told his wife.

She agreed, but all she'd seen lately of people with educations and options who happened to opt for living “up here among the savages,” as she put it, were hippies and real estate developers. Everyone else, she reminded him, if it's possible, leaves.

“We haven't left,” Doctor Wickshaw proudly announced.

“No,” she said. “We haven't.”

Along about the time the doctor no longer felt able to hold this type of conversation with his wife—due to his failure to find a nurse willing to come out here to Catamount and work for little more than half of what she could make in Concord or down in Manchester, New Hampshire—the son and daughter-in-law of Harold Dame, the real estate man, had come to him and asked him to locate and hire for them a private nurse for the old man's final one to six months. They were willing to pay whatever it cost—for they already knew how much it would cost to keep the old man in the hospital or in a nursing home, and there wasn't a private nurse in the world who would charge them that much.

The doctor pondered a moment and informed them that he probably could get someone to come out of Boston, thanks to certain collegial connections he maintained there, and if they wished, he would do all the interviewing and hiring himself, for after all, who knew the medical and personal needs of Harold Dame better than he, Sam Wickshaw, his personal physician and his old friend and hunting companion of days gone by?

The son and daughter-in-law were relieved and went quickly on to their scheduled meeting with a surveyor out at Suncook Pond. The doctor picked up his phone and dialed Doctor Furman Bisher in Brookline, Massachusetts, a heart specialist with a summer home on Lake Winnepesaukee, and that is how Harold Dame, the real estate man, came to be cared for in his dying months by Carol Constant, a twenty-eight-year-old, recently divorced black woman from West Roxbury, Massachusetts, an unemployed nurse trying to return to the profession she had left three years ago to marry a man and care for his sick and aged mother. The mother had died, the man had gone to New York with a girl who wrote for TV, and Carol, after filing for divorce, had started looking for work. One of the physicians who had interviewed her, since many of his patients were black professional people and he was therefore in the market for a black nurse, was Doctor Furman Bisher. He had declined to hire her because Carol was not, to his eyes, an especially pretty woman. She was extremely dark, with a broad flat nose and liquid brown eyes. Her hair she kept cropped close to her head, almost like a skullcap. Also, she was a large woman, well muscled and tall, almost masculine, a little frightening to a man like Doctor Furman Bisher. But he had admired her obvious intelligence, and her credentials were impeccable, and she seemed to be an extremely pleasant woman, good-natured and kind, so he had not hesitated to recommend her to his New Hampshire colleague. “She's a black woman,” he warned Doctor Wickshaw, “but she's sensible. She needs a long-term private job like this to build up her file, which frankly was a little thin for me to take her on here. But she ought to be perfect for your needs up there in the boondocks,” he joked.

 

When Carol was first led into Harold Dame's room on the fourth floor of the Concord Hospital, she knew immediately that he could not see her, and she was relieved. Doctor Wickshaw had met her at the bus station downtown, and he had stared at her whenever he thought she wasn't looking, and at the hospital the receptionists, nurses and orderlies, even the elevator operator, had noticeably marked her presence as a foreign presence, and she had started to worry about her clothing, her shoes, her handbag—they were wrong, loud, shabby, large. Of course, she knew what the real problem was, and she knew too that it was not a problem as such, the way loud or shabby clothing was a problem, that is, as something that could be solved. No, this was a fact, a condition. She had not seen a human face that was not gray or pink or peach-colored since the moment she had boarded the bus in Park Square in Boston. All right, then. It was a condition, a working condition, and she would endure it. She had known it would be this way. She was no fool, and she knew her geography; she also knew herself and knew that to live and work wholly among white people would continually embarrass her, which in turn would anger her. Beyond that, she knew her anger would end up defeating her true purposes here, and, therefore, to avoid being angry, she would have to accept being embarrassed.

The nearly dead man in the hospital bed relieved her of her embarrassment, however, and for a moment she forgot the portly, red-faced doctor with the ostentatiously pointed beard, and the blond, square-faced head nurse who had imperiously demanded to know her business with the patient, requiring the doctor to explain elaborately that she was being considered for a position as Mr. Dame's private nurse. The shrunken, ash-gray man lay inertly beneath the sheet, a short, narrow mound encircled by tubes and chrome-plated armatures. His wrinkled lids closed over bulbous eyes like onion skins, and his small, open, toothless mouth was sharp-edged and dark, like a hole punched in dry ground.

“He's sleeping,” Doctor Wickshaw mumbled, as he flipped open Harold Dame's file, perused it momentarily, and then passed it on to Carol. “His heart and lungs are strong,” he said smiling. “So unless he catches pneumonia, he could last six or seven months. Of course, he may go tomorrow, too. The surgeon's report is right there,” he said, pointing over her shoulder to a faded, photocopied sheet with scribbling across it.

Carol read the file slowly, page by page—notes by the attending physician, Doctor Samuel F. Wickshaw, notes from the half-dozen laboratories consulted, notes from the surgeon who had done the exploratory, notes from the anesthesiologist, remarks and observations from the nutritionist, instructions from Doctor Wickshaw to the square-faced head nurse, and on down the line—so that, by the time she had finished reading, she had imagined a body for this man lying in front of her, an old, diseased, misused but still somehow stubbornly sturdy body. Yes, she decided, she could administer to that body the few services it would require until it expired. They weren't technically difficult to administer, and the man would not interfere much, she knew, for he would be conscious only intermittently, and less so with each passing week. And the pay—they had discussed it on the telephone, she and the Doctor, and had agreed on a figure that was almost the same as she would have received in Boston—was satisfactory. She asked a few questions about the son and daughter-in-law, learned that they were working people who would be living in the house but in a separate wing of the house, that in fact they would be away much of the time and would most definitely not interfere with her whatsoever, and agreed to take the job.

“Excellent!” Doctor Wickshaw exclaimed. He moved closer, his cheeks reddening with pleasure. “I'm sure you're going to enjoy it up here.”

“I am?” She took a backward step toward the man in the bed.

“Yes, the fall! It's beautiful in the fall! The leaves! Look!” he said, pointing out the window.

Carol turned and looked out the large window to the hospital grounds below, and then beyond the grounds to the rippling, tree-covered hills spreading away to the west, a thick carpet of orange, yellow and red all the way to the horizon. It was late afternoon, and the sunlight touched the treetops and brought the colors forward as if on an outstretched hand.

“People drive hundreds of miles just to see these colors,” he said in a reverent voice. “And all we have to do is look out our windows. Isn't it
something?
”

“Yes. Yes, it is something.”

He took a step back. “Well, now, let's get ol' Harold out of here and back in Catamount where he belongs, eh? The Dame place is lovely,” he assured her. “Up high, a lovely view of the lake, that's Skitter Lake, and even a view of the White Mountains on clear days. You're going to love it!” he promised.

 

For the first two days and nights at the house it rained, a cold, raw, wind-blown rain, and when it cleared, most of the leaves had been driven from the trees and lay wetly on the ground, heavy and faded to dull shades of brown and yellow. The trees were now skeletal, black and boney and nervous-looking. That first afternoon, Carol had met Harold Dame's son and daughter-in-law, and they had approved of her, but she hadn't seen them since, though several times during those first days she heard them come and go, returning from the office in downtown Catamount for food and sleep. They did not check in on the old man, she knew, for her room connected to his through a bathroom and she slept with both doors open.