Baker Towers (35 page)

For his part, he remembered her vividly—the aunt who’d followed him through a snowstorm, her face wrapped in a scarf, her eyes tearing in the wind. His father’s sister who had never married, who’d lived in a boardinghouse in Washington, D.C., until she went crazy and came back to Bakerton to live with her mother. She didn’t seem crazy now, just extremely quiet. Her house was messy, in a way that comforted him. He felt strangely at home.

She asked no questions, which pleased him. He got enough of those from his father:
When are you coming back? What will become of you? For
God’s sake, have you lost your mind?
Except for a couple of phone calls from the road, Arthur hadn’t spoken to him in months. He’d tried to make the old man understand that college was a dead issue. There was nothing he wanted to study, and he didn’t need the deferment. He’d failed his Selective Service physical. His asthma had bought him freedom, and possibly saved his life.

Away from school, the world opened to him. There was plenty he could do. He knew everything about motorcycles, and he could fake his way around a lawnmower, a snowmobile, any kind of small engine. In Allerton, Texas, he’d stopped to help a biker broken down on the highway. They had shared a joint; then the biker, a wild-haired, Injun-looking guy named Grif, had offered him a place to sleep. There was plenty of floor space in his trailer. A buddy of his needed help in his garage.

Arthur set up his bedroll in Grif’s trailer. Each day he changed oil and rotated tires. At night he and Grif shared joints, road stories and, oddly, books.
On the Road, Siddartha
and
Doors of Perception,
which Grif referred to, not unseriously, as The Oracle. Arthur read them all, glad his father couldn’t see him. The old man would have been entirely too pleased, which would have ruined Arthur’s enjoyment. That reading could be pleasurable was an astonishing discovery. He’d never voluntarily read a book in his life.

One night, a little stoned, he telephoned his father. He didn’t mention reading, just rambled on about Grif, the desert heat, his job in the garage.

The old man had nearly dropped the phone. “A grease monkey?” he said.

“Don’t knock it,” Arthur told him. Cars, trucks, everything broke
down eventually. A mechanic was like a doctor, or an undertaker. A steady stream of business was guaranteed.

He stayed in Allerton a full month, until Grif decided to drive the trailer down to Mexico. “You’re welcome to come,” he said, but Arthur was already safe from the draft. They said their good-byes and Arthur hit the road, with Grif’s tattered copy of The Oracle stowed in his saddlebag. He crossed Texas in two days; then Louisiana and Mississippi, stopping to camp along the Natchez Trace. By August he was riding into Bakerton.

H
E EXPLORED THE TOWN
. On hot days he climbed the hill to the municipal swimming pool, an old bath towel looped around his neck, The Oracle tucked under his arm. He borrowed other books from the public library—
Great Expectations, The Last of the Mohicans,
books he’d been assigned in high school but had never actually read. “How’s this one?” he’d ask the pretty dark-haired girl who stamped them at the front desk.

“I liked it,” she’d answer each time, but that was the most he could get out of her. Her reticence baffled him. He’d never had a problem talking to girls.

Finally he figured it out. “Will you cut my hair?” he asked his aunt. She sat him on the back stoop, an old bedsheet over his shoulders, and went crazy with a pair of kitchen scissors. His ponytail lay on the grass like a dead animal.

“Can you get it any shorter?” he asked, and she kept cutting. Finally, she handed him a mirror.

“You look handsome,” she observed, and Arthur had to agree. His head felt curiously light, an agreeable sensation. He thought:
Now my brain can breathe.

He liked talking to people. In the pool hall, the post office, the sidewalk in front of the fire hall, nobody was in a hurry. He was surprised when strangers recognized his name.
Georgie’s boy,
they said, their faces lighting with recognition.
Mrs. Hauser’s nephew.
Afterward they greeted him like a relative, these people he’d never seen before in his life. It was because of his father that he belonged here. The realization filled him with a strange gratitude. He found himself missing the old man—a feeling that had haunted his childhood, the long winters at school. He hadn’t missed his father in years.

“Stay as long as you like,” his aunt told him. She wasn’t crazy, he decided; she just had trouble remembering his name. Depending on the day, she might call him Angie, Nicholas, Sandy or Chick.

In the evenings they ate together at the big table in the kitchen. She cooked piles of noodles, fried eggplant, an Italian soup he couldn’t get enough of. “Have some more, Angie,” she said, refilling his bowl. He had never eaten so well in his life.

She asked him, once, about his mother.

“She’s fine,” he said automatically. A moment passed before he understood the question. She hadn’t asked how his mother was doing. She’d asked
what is she like.

“You never met her?” he asked.

“Oh, no. She came once to visit, but I was living in Washington then. Joyce said she was a beautiful girl.”

Arthur frowned. He would never have called his mother
a beautiful girl.
In recent years she had grown fragile and desiccated, her thin shoulders
slightly stooped. It seemed incredible that they were talking about the same person.

“They’ve been married, like, fifty years,” he said. “Maybe not fifty, but a long time. It’s weird that you never met her.”

“Georgie has been gone for so long,” his aunt said. “And so far away.”

Arthur considered this. Philadelphia wasn’t that far, maybe four hundred miles. He’d ridden twice that in a single day.

“She’s a regular mother,” he said. “She likes nice things. Like all mothers, I guess.” As he said it, he realized it wasn’t right. There were other kinds of mothers. In Bakerton, mothers—like everything else—were probably different.

“She likes art,” he said. “She collects antiques. And she likes to travel.”

“Like you,” his aunt said.

“I guess.” Arthur couldn’t imagine his mother riding a motorcycle across the country. She spent every spring at a spa in Switzerland, breathing mountain air.

“You should phone her,” his aunt said. “Let her know where you are. She must be worried about you.”

“She’s in Europe. She probably doesn’t even know I left home.”

His aunt refilled his soup bowl. He cut them each a slice of bread. They ate the rest of the meal in silence, as they usually did. Then Arthur got up to clear their plates from the table. “They’re getting divorced,” he said.

His aunt colored.

“They should have done it years ago, if you ask me. I think they were waiting for me to grow up.” He rinsed the plates at the sink, his back to her. Still she didn’t speak.

“They think I’m upset about it, but I’m not. He’s always working, and she’s always gone. I don’t think they even like each other. I can’t figure out why they ever got married in the first place.” He filled the sink with water. “They both changed. That’s what my dad says.”

“That happens sometimes,” his aunt said.

T
he town wore away like a bar of soap. Each year, smaller and less distinct, the letters of its name fading. The thing it had been became harder to discern.

Whole neighborhoods went up for sale. School enrollment dropped. Every sort of job disappeared. There were fewer cars to service, fewer teeth to fill, no houses whatsoever to build.

The landscape softened. One by one the tipples fell. The conveyors were dismantled. Aging machinery was carted away: longwalls, mantrips, shuttlecars. Outbuildings were demolished and sold for scrap, or left to rust in the weather. Black scars were left behind, as though the earth had been burned.

In springtime a fleet of trucks climbed Saxon Mountain, dieseling loudly: a low convoy of blunt shapes, their purpose unknown. Gary Poblocki saw them and spread the word on his CB radio. His brother Bernie, back from Vietnam, suspected the army. Bernie always suspected the army, but this time no one had a better theory.

The trucks funneled into the valley, their empty beds clattering. They circled the Towers and slowed.

The morning was still; there was no breeze to ignite the bony piles. In the April sunlight they looked like what they were: two eighty-foot heaps of mine dirt, brought over by the truckload from the Three, the Five and the Twelve. Dug by pick and shovel, by longwall, by Lee Norse and Wilcox machines; hauled by donkey, by conveyor, by shuttlecar. By English and Irish, Italian and Slavish, the hands and backs and lungs of four generations of men.

The Towers had proved that Bakerton was working. Their absence would prove the opposite. The piles would be leveled in three days and the dirt carted westward, to backfill a thousand acres of wetlands on the outskirts of Cleveland.

A crew was already waiting. The driver signaled. Gears grinding, the machine opened its jaws.

L
UCY HAD BEEN WORKING
at Miners’ for three years when Leonard Stusick came home. She was trimming Dorothy’s hedges on Polish Hill when he drove up to his mother’s house in a U-Haul truck. The sight of the truck moved her in a way she couldn’t have predicted. She was like a shipwreck survivor clinging to her raft; overhead, the rhythmic chop of helicopter blades. Crossing the street to greet him, she felt her eyes tearing. They both wondered what was wrong with her.

He had finished his residency that spring. Like Lucy, he could have gone anywhere; yet he, too, had chosen Bakerton. Months would pass before they spoke of why. First they would work together on the pulmonary ward at Miners’; dance together at the fire hall and watch the fireworks at
Dago Day; then drink too much and wake up together, awkwardly, in Lucy’s bed.

Later it would seem as if she’d always known it. The others had been mere filler: the college boys, the men in Pittsburgh, the long series of thrilling disappointments, from Steven Fleck onward. All those years she’d been passing time, waiting for Leonard to grow up.

T
he wedding was held at St. Casimir’s, where the bride had been baptized, where both sets of grandparents had been married. Joyce Hauser, visibly pregnant, was the matron of honor. Her husband gave the bride away.

George Novak paid for the wedding: the polka band, the hall rental, the three elderly cooks at the Polish Legion, who spent the morning stuffing cabbage at lightning speed. The whole affair cost half what he’d paid for his new Cadillac, and it brought him greater pleasure. It was the hometown wedding he’d never had.

The news had shocked him at first. Arthur was twenty-two, barely old enough to vote.
You’re just a kid,
George had told him.
What’s the rush?

Come meet Susan,
Arthur said bashfully.
Then you’ll understand.

And he had. Susan Jevic was lovely in ways George found achingly familiar: her intelligence and kindness, her sincerity and warmth.
Don’t worry,
he reassured Marion, who had boycotted the whole affair.
Arthur will be fine.
Any boy would be fine, married to such a girl. George thought
of himself at that age, the summer he had come home on furlough. The summer he should have married Ev.

They hadn’t spoken in years, not since his foolish proposal. She had told him not to phone her; sick with shame, he had obeyed. Instead he made weekly calls to his sisters, angling for news of her. It was Joyce who’d told him about Leonard, that he’d been accepted into the medical school at Penn.

George tracked down the boy easily enough, took him out for a couple of steak dinners. Leonard was bright and earnest, serious and polite, without the stubborn streak George saw in his own son. For his part, he was grateful for the company. Since his divorce he dined alone at lunch counters or ate sandwiches standing over the kitchen sink.

He’d offered the boy a job at Quigley’s, stocking shelves on Sunday afternoons, unloading trucks late at night. When the hours became too much for him, George had simply mailed in the tuition checks, a thousand dollars here and there, from the college fund Arthur would never spend.
It’s nothing to me,
he told Leonard, and this was true. He could drive his Cadillacs for four years instead of three. The money meant nothing at all.

He did it for Ev, for Gene and for himself—the young man he’d once been, full of ambition, hungry to learn.
Your dad was my friend,
he told Leonard, who’d agreed not to tell his mother.
He would want me to help.

A
HUNDRED GUESTS
attended the wedding. After dinner, they lined up for the bridal dance. The band launched into a joyful mazurka. The bride sat on a chair in the middle of the dance floor, and Joyce removed the bridal veil. The crowd clapped and whooped as Joyce
replaced the veil with a babushka. She tied a lacy white apron at Susan’s waist.

They danced together first, the teacher and her student. The guests waited, clapping in time with the music. The line wrapped twice around the dance floor.

Susan danced next with her sister Irene, grown gray and stout; then a long series of blue-eyed Jevics. She danced with George Novak, then Dorothy, then Arthur’s handsome uncle Sandy in his white leisure suit. She danced with Lucy Stusick, with Leonard, some Scarponi cousins she couldn’t name. Her co-workers from the library, then Jerry Bernardi, who’d driven there in his hearse. The Poblockis took their turns, the Wojicks and Klezeks and Yurkoviches. She danced with every man, woman and child on Polish Hill.

Each guest slipped a dollar into her lacy apron, then joined the circle around the floor. Spinning round and round, Susan didn’t notice the commotion, the decorated monstrosity her brothers had brought in through the back door.