Spirit of the Place (9781101617021) (42 page)

He rose and walked to the door and gestured down the hallway for the nurse. He asked her to tell Babette to come in.

Babette came quickly. She had changed into a billowing muumuu with hibisci in bloom and a panther about to pounce, and a straw hat sporting guavas. Earrings featuring plastic bananas hung down. She saw in Orville's glance what was what.

“No, not yet!” she cried out. “Please, no!”

Orville brought her to Bill's bedside. She sat on the bed and removed her hat.

“He looks so sweet,” she blurted out. Tears were running through her makeup like rain through dust. “So young. He's like a little baby! Sweet. And he smells so nice.”

Orville took her hand and showed her how to massage his hand, his cheek, with him. Soon her hand relaxed. He felt her feeling what he had felt: her husband's torment lessened, lightened, as if the light from the room had been drawn into him. Within that body lying there, almost a glow. Lambent.

She started sobbing. Orville sat beside her and put his arm around her broad back. She cried into his neck. The spasm left. She pulled away.

“Babette,” he said, “listen.” He took her hand. He turned to Bill and put her hand upon Bill's open palm and said firmly, “You can go now, Bill.”

“No! No you can't!” She tugged Orville's hand away and held it up above the sheets.

“Go on.” He put her hand once again on Bill's open palm. “You tell him.”

They sat motionless, and silent, for what seemed a long time.

Babette moved Bill's hand, in hers, to her lap. Looking down at it shyly like a little girl who is talking to an imaginary friend so important that she's more real than a live one, she said, “Scally?”

Embarrassed, she looked up at Orville and said, “That's what I called him, y'know, all these years, our secret name. ‘Scally' for the scallions he loved so much. He called me that name too, ‘Scally.' We never told anybody, it was so silly—‘Dr. and Mrs. Scally' we called ourselves at home and we laughed—oh, we laughed! It was silly but it was ours, our whole lives . . .”

She broke down again. Then, lifting her head to look at Bill squarely, and with each word more sure, she became the wife, the woman who had stayed right there with him just like this all these years no matter what. The woman who had, in a pinch, shown up with him and helped him as a good mother might. Through the early death of their handicapped only child and the trials of doctoring Columbians and all the secrets and lies and truths of the life of the town that they shared, because the only person he could tell them to was her.

“Scally, can you hear me? It's all right. You . . . you . . .” She turned to Orville. “I can't.”

He smiled at her. Put a hand on her shoulder.

“You . . . you can go now, my . . . my dearest love.”

They both felt a wave of sorrow. Tears came to Orville's eyes, eased down his cheeks. Babette sobbed hard. Her whole body shook. The plastic banana earrings swung wildly against her neck, trees in a hurricane.

They sat together on Bill's bed. Everything was still.

As they calmed they became aware that the light had gone out of Bill. Orville leaned over and felt for a carotid pulse. Still there, some. His body was not dead, but his spirit was somewhere else. You could never have measured it, yet for the past hour Orville had felt it had been there, as the pilot flame of a furnace in an old house is there—and now it was not. There, not. The old house, floor by floor, cools.

Babette wept more gently now, tears of release washing out the fear.

“He'll be all right now, dear,” Orville said, rising. His hand still rested on her shoulder, much as Bill's, at the right times, had rested on his. “He'll be fine.”

A few nurses were in the doorway.

“He'll be going now,” he said to them. “Soon.”

They began to cry. He started to make his way out, past them, feeling really old. Old age spread its wings in him, and he felt the creaking of betrayal.

“Are you leaving?” Babette cried out, again fearful.

“No, dear. I'll just be down the hall.”

Bill's body kept on for a few more hours of its eighty-third year in the world and then stopped. By that time their tears had softened, washed of fear. What was there to be afraid of anymore? The softened tears were those of surrender to Bill's life, to the way his life had been aligned with all of theirs for both a long time and a brief time and a final time. The surrender was to being part of something greater, which can't help but bring a sense of awe.

Like, Orville thought, when you stand in a redwood grove and look up or stand on a canyon rim and look down or you hold your baby in your arms who one day if you're lucky will be holding you in his or her arms, and you realize that your life is a speck in the time of that redwood or in the stone of that canyon or the revolution of that baby and that man. The awe of being a part of a whole, even for a moment of your life.

Out of nowhere came a crush of despair, knocking him down mercilessly, a hellbent descent. I'm alone. Alone! Who can I call? Miranda? No. Who?

He looked at the clock. Past midnight. Morning in Rome. He picked up the phone.

· 34 ·

Two days later, on the morning of the Columbus Day and Bill Starbuck Funeral Parade, Columbians awoke to find their town prematurely glazed with ice. During the night a freak ice storm had hit. Worse, it had hit on one of those “bad cement days,” when the dust spewing from the Universal Atlas and the Lone Star was fierce and the wind was wrong.

Everything was coated in ice. Thick ice. Concretized ice. Over and over, Columbians, walking out their front doors, looked with wonder at the fairyland of glazed trees and bushes and houses and cars and were startled to find their legs going out from under them and the porch or steps or walk coming up to meet them. For a sickening instant they were suspended above the world. Then came a sickening
thwaPP!
Down, they tried gingerly to move things like elbows and knees and backs and butts to see if anything was broken. It did not bode well for the combined holiday and funeral parade.

Cray and Amy had stayed over at Orville's house. Orville would be leaving the following day, and Cray had come up with the idea that he and Amy, together, should have a sleepover with Uncle O. After all, there was no school on Columbus Day. They could all go to the parade together. Miranda and Penny could meet them there.

The sleepover had been wild and fun—they stayed up until two in the morning. Cray had lost a tooth, and they'd put it under the pillow for the tooth fairy. Cray wondered how she'd know that he wasn't at home. Amy assured him that she had her ways.

Both kids slept late, so late that Orville had to wake them both and rush to get the finicky Cray his ritual breakfast. The tooth fairy left a five-dollar bill. Cray was high as a kite.

“When I put my tongue where my tooth was,” Cray said, “it feels all like soft butter.”

Finally they were done and dressed warmly and out the front door. They stood for a second staring at the crystalline world. The Courthouse Square was glistening in the bright sunlight. All the trees, every single one and every single inch of each one, were coated in ice. The pricker bushes just off the porch steps were bent over by the concretized ice, as if in pain. Orville stared at the black twigs at the core of the icy fingers. Further off, the black skeleton of each bush and tree diminished into a hazy dendritic array much like, he thought, the nerve cells in our brains haze off to connect with other hazed-out dendrites, making the connections that allow us to build bridges and go to the moon and tell stories and get lost and find each other again and see the pattern in the ice storm and the connections with the pattern in the brain and be in the mysteries of flight and of the divine. From a distance, all that was left of trees were vaguely treelike clouds of sparkling ice, delicate as water or rain, transformed to huge glittering lollipops, enticing in the angled light of the autumn sun. The ice gave off a bluish hue—a shade of portent. He breathed deeply, trying to take in the moment forever.

Cray took a running start, skidded down the steps and then, waving his arms to balance on the walk, fell into a pricker bush, grabbing at it to break his fall. Twigs snapped off.

“Look,” Cray said, holding up a bunch and looking at the core of black in the white-blue ice, “like the legs of insects, or crabs.”

“Or of elephants,” said Orville.

“Elephants? Are you crazy?”

“Yes, I am.”

“He told me once,” Amy said to Cray, “that his mind is so crazy it should be
illegal.”

“And it is, you know,” Orville said. “Americo issued a proclamation the other day saying that it's illegal in Columbia to have a mind like mine. But in Italy it's not.”

“It's not illegal in Italy?”

“Illegal?” he said in mock amazement. “In Italy it's not only legal, it's a religion. They've built a fountain to it called the Orvy's Mind Fountain. Tourists throw pennies into it, and—”

“Really, Orvy?” Cray asked, wide-eyed.

“Don't believe anything he says, Cray.”

“Exactly,” Orville said. “You'd be crazy to. Come on, my little miracles, let's rock and
roll!
”

They did, slipping and sliding and sprinting and sailing along the iced pavement, around the edge of the square to Fourth, and down Washington to the Episcopal Church for Bill's memorial service.

Because of the weather the church was not full. Driving was impossible, walking a risk. Fewer than a hundred hardy souls had come out to say good-bye to Bill. In the front row was Babette, all in black with a pillbox hat and veil almost covering her silver hair. Something on her lapel glittered green and white—a small jade scallion? Beside her was a man in deepest black with a large head of shocking white hair.

Henry Schooner. Alone. Orville hadn't seen him since the night the breakfront had fallen on Maxie. At Albany Medical, they'd set the leg but the prognosis for full recovery of the leg was not good. They'd flown him down to Texas Children's Hospital in Houston. Nelda Jo's father, a rich oil and gas man from Bartlesville, Oklahoma, had contacts there. Henry had been in Houston for the past ten days. He'd issued a statement about the tragedy and was suspending his campaign until further notice. Someone had taken a photo of them leaving Albany Medical for the airport. Henry and Nelda Jo, in perfect black, on either side of Maxie on a stretcher, a desolate look in the boy's eyes.

Good for him, Orville thought now, to come for Bill. And yet, and yet. No one had talked much about
how
the breakfront had come to fall on the boy. Just a tragic accident, that's all. But Orville knew it would have taken something much more for it to fall, not just a boy bumping into it or even running into it. Not even an “accident-prone” boy, no.

Orville consciously lifted his gaze up over Henry's head to the altar, to Bill.

His casket lay in the front of the soaring nave, a relic of times without breakage in Columbia, when soarings were possible. Orville was surprised to find himself so aware of the history of the town and of how Bill fit into it. Everything he saw and heard reminded him of Miranda showing him things in their “historical outings” when they first fell in love. Like her pointing out to him the name “Starbuck” on the original “List of the Proprietors of Columbia,” the 1783 parchment brought out by Mrs. Tarr in the
DAR
Library after they—with Amy—had picketed for the Worth. Like why he and Cray and Amy and the other mourners were sitting in an Episcopal church rather than a Quaker one—because the discovery of oil had led to the victory of the whores and gamblers, depleting the Nantucket Quaker stock until all that was left of their grand utopian endeavor was that one-room Meeting House down on Coffin.

That day with her at the Meeting House, he recalled now, I had let go. Told her of my dismay at being the doctor for the Columbians. She laughed, said “Yes!” and took me to the library and showed me the documents, the Town Seal, told me the story. For the first time,
my
history linked arms with
history.
She understood what I'd gone through, made me feel I was okay. That day, in the cold outside the library, we fell in love.

Miranda was supposed to have met them at the church. He figured the weather had prevented her from getting out of the house—the walk was too icy to risk it alone, and scraping her car off and getting it out would have been too much. Or maybe she'd tried and had fallen down and couldn't get up? He felt a touch of cold sweat. Should he go back to the house and call her? No, calm down. She's resourceful, sensible. She'd never put herself in danger that way. Probably waiting for the salt she threw down to work. Or was she reluctant to see him again after the argument in the leaf pile?

The eulogy was going on. Toby oop den Dyke, editor of
The Crier,
was telling Bill's story. With muffled coughs and nose blowings, Columbians started to weep.

The day before, Orville had closed down Bill's office. He went in the
IN
, sat in Bill's chair, feeling how the seat now had a year's worth of his own butt indented in its leather—a small refinement of Bill's big butt sitting there for a half-century, but still a kind of signature. He stared up at the twelve-point buck with the glazed eyes, at the photo of the early Columbian town doctor with his gun and jaunty cowboy hat and tragic end, at the chrome stirrups, at the big ornamental bottle of Starbusol, more bottles of the stuff stashed all around the place. Saw himself as a boy being understood—no, loved, for it
was
love between Bill and him, wise love—being started on his journey of trying to care, trying to help.

Leaning back in the leather chair, staring up at the stamped-tin ceiling, a thought came to him:
What if I stayed?

Suddenly it was as if he were seeing himself floating up there, looking down on himself ten years on. There he was down there—older, fatter, balder—sitting with a patient, half-listening to her, someone he couldn't identify. Ten years on, sitting there doing his thing as Bill had always done his thing and as had all the other doctors all the way back to the days of the Wild West.

Great, just great, he'd said to himself, getting up to go, you're starting to see
yourself
flying around! Time to hightail it outta town, partner.

Leaving, he'd taken two souvenirs: a small bottle of Starbusol and a prescription pad reading
Willam Starbuck, M.D.
He'd failed to find a successor. This was the end of the line. Even if a new doctor came to Columbia, he or she would never want this little old house in the bad part of town as an office. He went out the
OUT
and locked the door behind him. The circle of doctoring here had gone flatline. He felt shaken.

“In 1830,” Toby oop den Dyke was saying now, “when the Columbian economy died and the other Quaker merchants left, Bill's great-grandfather, Caleb Starbuck, stayed. A hundred years later, Starbucks were still here. Bill opened his practice in 1929. He left just once, to serve in World War II in England. Thus, today, our military parade. He came back and practiced until 1984. Fifty-five years. And for all those years, if we called, Bill came. In tough times, he always would tell me, ‘Y'know, I think I've had enough of this work. I'm gonna leave, day after tomorrow. Heh heh.'”

Everybody laughed—they'd all heard Bill say it.

Orville found himself wishing that he had been asked to speak, that he could have publicly shared his love of Bill with everyone. But you haven't earned it, he said to himself. You're nothing to this town, to these people. In their minds, you're history.

“Many of you were brought into the world by Bill,” Toby was saying. “Many more of you were cared for by him, and the cemetery where we'll lay him to rest in a few minutes is filled with those he helped on their last journey out. What better tribute could there be to a man's life than to know that if you go anywhere in Columbia, or even anywhere in Kinderhook County, if you mention the name ‘Bill' in a certain way, people know who you mean. More than that, people
understand.
We all love you, Bill, and we'll miss you.” Toby stopped. Even he, the epitome of journalistic deflection and Yankee control, choked up. Columbians broke down and wept with him. The coughing and nose blowing and little cries signified the softening contagion of grief. “Bill,” Toby finished, “go in peace.”

The casket was carried out by the men and placed in an old open farm wagon made of wood and iron, with iron-rimmed spoked wheels, a relic from a farmer whose life Bill had saved three times in three different ways. It was driven by the farmer and pulled by a team of two matched roan mares. Ahead, a saddled but riderless black gelding at the end of a long lead line pranced on the icy roadbed, startled by the crowd, its hooves going
Clack, tee-clack! Clackettee clack!
like gunshots off the concrete ice. Its breath made tailed cylinders of clouds in the clear air of the strangely cold October morning. The image of the horse-drawn carriage and riderless black horse called back to those old enough the funeral procession of John F. Kennedy, that bitterly cold and shiny day—much like his Inaugural Day when Robert Frost couldn't see to read his poem because of the glare and recited it by heart—that bitter day that broke America's spirit.

Bill's war marched first. Following the color guard and veterans of Bill's war came the Fish Hawk Marching Band and the riderless horse and the wagon with the casket and the veterans of other wars. The sole remaining Spanish-American War veteran had been carted in from his nursing home and bundled up and wedged upright in between Babette and Americo in the mayor's pink Caddy convertible. Americo waved politically, Babette nodded uncomfortably, and the vet wobbled to and fro with each grand arc of the mayor's arm. Just behind them walked the dignitaries of Columbia, and in that line was Henry Schooner. He wore a smart full-length black cashmere coat and a serene black homburg hat. His hair was a white ring under the black rim—the very picture of mourning. Mostly he walked with his head bowed. Occasionally he would lift his chin as if bravely confronting some inevitable horror that lay ahead for him and for America.

Every war after was represented nicely, even Vietnam. The Vietnam vets, Hayley's son Whiz and Tommy Kline of Whale Oil and Gas among them, were classmates of Orville. They wore combat pajamas and floppy jungle hats in contrast to the snappy regimentals and dress hats or movie helmets of all the other wars. Greenie Sellers, in what Orville recognized as an Italian traffic cop's uniform and hat, marched hand in hand with Blinky the Clown, who carried a flag with a flower that read,
I LOVE BEGONIAS
.

Orville walked with the regular Columbians, Amy holding one hand and Cray the other. Penny joined them. Her colorfully feathered black hat was enormous. Good for her, he thought, adding a
zetz
to the parade.

Columbus Day itself was the minor motif this year. The Knights of Columbus carried fake blunderbusses as they walked alongside a float in which three little girls in cutout ships labeled the
Niña,
the
Pinta,
and the
Santa Maria
walked around among a passel of lolling, pipe-smoking Indians.