Let Me Be Frank With You (9 page)

“Well,” Ms. Pines said. “I don't know.” She'd recovered, but didn't appear to know what to do. She wasn't tacking toward the front door, but wasn't advancing toward me in the breakfast room/sunporch either. Poise had given way to perplexity. “Is that still the door to the cellar?” She was eyeing the basement door halfway down the shadowed hall between us. Her eyes seemed to fix on the glass knob, then switched up to me, as if the door might burst open and reveal who knew what.

“It is,” I said over my chair back. “It's full of spooks down there.” Not ideal.

Ms. Pines pursed her lips, exhaled an audible breath. “I'm sure.”

“Want to take a gander?” Another phrase I'd never uttered in my life on earth—but wary not to say something to make the world an even less good place: “It's black as coal down there . . . dingy as hell, too . . . venture down there, and the jig'll be up.” Words were failing me more than usual. Better to use fewer of them.

“There's probably some places one oughtn't go,” Ms. Pines said.

“I feel that way about California,” I said over the chair back. “Colorado, too. And Texas.”

Ms. Pines cast a patient-impatient smile toward me. She
seemed about to say something, then didn't. And by refraining, she immediately took command not just of me and our moment, but somehow of my entire house. I didn't really mind.

“How did your family come to live here?” I said. Would I ask a white person that? (“Dad moved us all out here from Peoria in '58, and we had a heckuva time at first . . .”) For most questions there's an answer.

“Oh, well,” Ms. Pines said from the foyer, “my father grew
up
in Haddam. On Clio Street.” She ventured a step nearer into the hall. “That's the muse of history.”

“Come sit down,” I said and popped up, pushing a second wire-back café chair—Sally's—away from the table for her to occupy.

She came toward me, looking left, then right, assessing what we'd done to the hall and the kitchen and the breakfast sunroom. New therma-panes where there'd been gunked patio doors. Green, replica Mexican tiles. A prior owner had “opened out the kitchen” twenty years ago, then moved away to Bernardsville.

“It's all very nice,” Ms. Pines said, looking over-dressed now in her red Christmas coat and mistletoe topper. Her presence was like having a census taker visit and surprisingly become your friend.

“I've got some coffee made.”

Ms. Pines was still looking around the sunroom, her eyes stopping on my cherished, framed Block Island map. “Where's that?” she said, furrowing a brow, as if the map was a problem.

“Block Island,” I said. “I went there years ago. It's in Rhode Island, which most people don't know.” Bzzz, bzzz, bzzz.

“I see.” She set her big purse on the floor and seated herself primly in the café chair.

“Take off your coat,” I said. “It's warm.” Sally, lifetime Chicagoan, is always cold.

“Thank you.” She unbuttoned her red coat to reveal a green, wool two-piece suit sporting good-sized gold buttons and a Peter Pan collar. Pricey but stylish, and right for a woman of her vintage. With her coat off, her left arm also revealed the blunt end of a cumbersome white-plaster cast above her black gloved hand. “I have this wound to contend with.” She frowned at the cast's bulk.

“How'd you manage that?” I set a yellow mug of coffee down, the sugar bowl, milk caddy, and a spoon. Old Rose was in the air again, not all that agreeable with the coffee aroma. She removed her other glove and laid it on the table.

“I'm a hurricane victim,” she said, arranging both her hands, cast and all, on the glass table surface. She said
hurricane
to sound like “hair-a-cun,” then inhaled a considerable
breath, which she let out slowly. I all at once sensed I
was
about to hear an appeal for the Mount Pisgah cemetery maintenance fund, or some Nationalist Chinese outreach. “My home is in Lavallette,” Ms. Pines said. “We took a pretty considerable beating. I'm lucky I only broke my arm.”

“I'm sorry you did,” I said brightly, wrong about the solicitation. “Is your house intact?”

“It was ruined.” Ms. Pines smiled ruefully at her coffee, deliberately spooning in sugar. “I had a nice condominium.” She made the same “umm-hmmm” sound she'd made on the stairs. The sugar spoon tinkled as she moved it.

No words came out of me. Words can also be the feeblest emissaries for our feelings. Ms. Pines seemed to understand what silence signified.

“I'm back over here because of that,” she said, and lifted her chin as she stirred her coffee, then regarded me in what looked like an unexpected sternness. “I have friends in Haddam. On Gulick Road. They're putting me up until I can determine what to do.”

“I'm sure you had insurance,” I said, my second, or possibly third, idiotic remark in five minutes.

“Everyone had insurance.” Ms. Pines right-handedly brought her coffee to her lips. I'd forgotten a napkin and jumped up, snatched a paper one out of the kitchen holder, and set it beside her spoon. “We just don't know,” she said,
setting her mug onto the napkin. “Haddam CC 4-Ball” was printed on it—a memento of my former wife, Ann, from long, long ago.

“Do you have a family?” I said.

“I had a husband,” Ms. Pines said. “We separated in '01. He passed on in '04. I kept our apartment. He was a police sergeant.”

“I see.”
I'm deeply sorry
wouldn't have worked any better than
Oh, great, that's perfect
.
He's out of the way. And you're still damn good looking
. Words.

“I teach high school in Wall Township,” Ms. Pines said, dabbing her lips. “We shut school down after the storm. Which isn't the worst thing that could happen to me under these circumstances.” She regarded her busted-arm cast. “Our students are in limbo, of course. We'll have to make provisions for them after Christmas.” She smiled at me with grim Christmas-no-cheer and took another sip of coffee.

“What do you teach?” I said, across the table. Snow had ceased in my small back yard, leaving the air mealy gray. A pair of enormous, self-important crows had arrived to scrounge in the pachysandra below the suet feeder.

“History,” Ms. Pines said. “I'm a Barnard grad. From '76. The bicentennial year.”

“That's great,” I said. “My daughter almost went there.”

Another silence invoked itself. I could've told her I'd
gone to Michigan, have two children, an ex-wife and a current one, that I'd sold real estate here and at The Shore for twenty years, once wrote a book, served in an undistinguished fashion in the marines, and was born in Mississippi—bangety, bangety, bangety, boop. Or I could let silence do its sovereign work, and see if something of more material import opened up. It would be a loss if some hopeful topic couldn't now be broached, given all. Nothing intimate, sensitive, or soul-baring. Nothing about the world becoming a better place. But something any two citizens could talk about, any ole time, to mutual profit—our perplexing races notwithstanding.

“You said your father grew up here?” I smiled what must've been a loony smile, but a signal of where our conversation might veer if we let it.

“He did. Yes,” Ms. Pines said and cleared her throat formally. “He was the first of his family to attend college. He played football at Rutgers. In the '50s. He did extremely well. Studied engineering. Took his doctorate. He became the first Negro to work at a high level at Bell Laboratories. He was an audio specialist. He was very smart.”

“Like Paul Robeson,” I blurted—in spite of every living cell urging me not to say “Like Paul Robeson.”

“Um-hm,” Ms. Pines said, uninterested in Paul Robeson. “Some people are better as ideas than as humans, Mr. Bascombe. My father was that sort of man. I think he
thought of himself as an idea more than as a man. Our race suffers from that.”

“So does ours,” I said, glad to see Paul Robeson drift off downstream.

“We lived in this house,” Ms. Pines said, “from 1959 to 1969. My father insisted on living in a white neighborhood. Though it didn't work out very well.”

“Did your mother not like it?” Why would I assume that?

“Yes. My mother was an opera singer. Or would've been. She was out of place wherever she was. She was Italian. She preferred New York—where she was from. I was the only one of us who truly liked it in Haddam. I loved going to school. My brother didn't have an easy time.”

“I'm sorry,” I said.

“Well.” Ms. Pines looked away out the sliding door, where the crows were standing atop the melting snow-crust gawking in at us through the window. “I considered calling you before I came.”

“Why?” I said, smiley, smiley, smiley.

“I was nervous. Because if you knew who I was—or am—possibly you wouldn't have liked me to come.”

“Why?” I said. “I'm glad you came.”

“Well. That's kind.”

“They sound like interesting people. I'm sorry I didn't know them. Your parents.”

“Do you
not
know about them?” Ms. Pines eyed me appraisingly, her chin raised a guarded inch. She placed her un-injured hand on top of the one that had the cast and breathed audibly. “Hartwick Pines?” she intoned. “You don't know about him?”

“No,” I said. “Was that his name?” A name reminiscent of a woodwinds camp in the Michigan forests. Or a Nuremberg judge. Or a signatory of Dumbarton Oaks.

“I'd have thought they were infamous.”

“What did they do?” I said.

“And you don't know?” Ms. Pines said.

“Tell me.”

“I really didn't mean to venture into this, Mr. Bascombe. I only felt required to
come
—after living not very far away for so long a time. I'm sorry.”

“I'm really glad you did,” I said. “I try to visit all the places I've lived at least once every ten years. It puts things in perspective. Everything's smaller—like
you
said.”

“I imagine,” Ms. Pines said. As expected, we'd banged right into something with meat on its bones: being the first Negroes in a white suburban neighborhood with a boy-genius father and a high-strung temperamental operatic white mother. It had the precise mix of history and mystery the suburbs rarely get credit for—a story
60 Minutes
or
The NewsHour
could run with; or ESPN, if the old man had been
a standout for the Crimson Knights, gotten drafted by the Giants but chose the life of the mind instead. Even better if the mother had made it at least into the chorus at the Met, and the brother became a priest or a poet. There was even a possible as-told-to angle I could write. People tell me things. I also listen, and have a pleasant, absorptive, non-judgmental face, which made me a good living in the realty business (though doesn't make me anything these days).

“Do you ever dream about yourself when you were young, Mr. Bascombe?” Ms. Pines said, blinking at me. “Not that you're old, of course.”

“Frank,” I said. “Yes, I do. I'm always twenty-eight in my dreams, and I have a mustache and smoke a pipe. I actually try not to remember my dreams. Forgetting's better.”

“I'm sure you're right,” Ms. Pines said, staring at the yellow rim of her Haddam CC 4-Ball mug.

Just at that precise instant one of the cloudy little gut bubbles we all experience descended distressingly out of my stomach and down, in such a blazing hurry-up, I barely caught it and clamped the exit shut. One more second would've cast a bad atmosphere on everything and everyone. My son Paul Bascombe used to call this being “fartational.” Memps, our oncologist-neighbor's wiggly, old red wiener dog from our days on Cleveland Lane, was forever wandering nosily into our house and cutting big stinkers, one after
another. “Out! Memps,” Paul would loudly decree (with relish). “Memps is fartational! Out, bad Memps!” Poor Memps would scuttle out the door, as if he knew—though not without a couple more salvos.

I was disconcertingly “all-but-Memps”—though not detectably, thanks be to god. It must've shown, though, in my mouth's rigorous set, because Ms. Pines' sloe eyes rose to me, settled back to her coffee mug rim, then fastened on me again as if I might be “experiencing” something, another episode, like my vertigo whoosh twenty minutes ago that I thought she hadn't seen, but that might require a 911 call this time around—like her husband. Lentil soup was the culprit.

“I feel like I'll be dying at the right time,” I said—why, I didn't know—as though that had been the thread we'd been following;
not
whether our dreams were worth remembering; or what it was like to be a Negro in apartheid Haddam and have high-strung, overachieving parents for whom nothing could be normal. A squiggle of lower bowel pain made me squirm, then went its way.

“Are you dying now?” Ms. Pines looked concerned, and impatient—in case I was.

“I don't think so,” I said. “I was thinking yesterday about all the animal species that were on the planet when I was born and that are still around. Pretty soon they won't be. It's probably a good time to be checking out.”

Ms. Pines seemed puzzled. Who wouldn't be? We'd been on the brink of a revelation. Possibly dramatic. Clearly she wanted to get back to it. She was operating on strong imperative now. Unlike me. “I . . .” she started to say, then stopped and shook her head, on which was perched her Christmas tam, which she'd forgotten about and that made her look ever-so-slightly elfin, but still dignified.

“I have dream conversations with my son Ralph,” I said. “He died in '79. He's forty-three in my dreams and a stockbroker. He gives me investment advice. I enjoy thinking it could be true.”

Ms. Pines just began, without responding. “My father, when we lived here, Mr. Bascombe, became distrustful. And very insular. He'd advanced at Bell by honest effort and genius. But it didn't, somehow, make him very happy. His parents lived over a few blocks on Clio. But we never saw
them
. He hardly ever went out in his yard. Which made my mother more restless and unhappy than she already was. She believed she belonged onstage at the Metropolitan, and marrying my father had been a serious miscalculation. Though I believe she loved him. She had my brother, Ellis, and me to bring up, though. So she was trapped here.”