The Fall of the Year (16 page)

No one paid any attention to me as I walked, past barrels of Chinese candy and shelves lined with porcelain Buddhas and mandarins and watercolor prints of pagodas with hanging gardens, to a high desk at the back of the store. On a stool behind the desk sat Dr. Rong, reading a thick book with a battered red cover. A blue kettle simmered on a hotplate on the desk. Beside it was a teapot decorated with pink and purple periwinkle blossoms. Sam sat perfectly immobile, as still as the porcelain mandarins for sale in his shop. His jacket gleamed as white as ever.

“
Pickwick Paper
,” Sam said by way of greeting, holding up the spine of the red book so I could see its title. “Funny as a crutch, Frank Bennett. You want a job sweeping floor? Shooting rats?”

Already laughing, I set the lacquered teakwood box down on Sam's desk. “I've brought you your Chinese bank, Sam.”

“How many times I tell you, call Doctor. Dr. Rong. So. Pull up stool. We brew friendship tea anyway.”

I sat down on a tall stool across the desk from Sam and smiled happily at my old friend, who looked just the same as he had four years before. He slid open the lid of the teakwood box, rummaged under the stacks of envelopes, and fished out two or three roots, which he broke into small pieces. He dropped the broken roots into the periwinkle teapot and covered them with boiling water from the blue kettle. Immediately the unmistakable pungency of jin-chen tea, of friendship, drifted out of the steaming pot into the room. Sam reached into a cubbyhole under the desk and brought out two handleless periwinkle teacups.

“Let steep now,” he said. He riffled through the envelopes in the box. “Four year ago, Frank Bennett, when I leave Celestial Kingdom, I take address of all banking clients in black account book. Didn't need envelopes in Chinese bank. Then lately I get thinking. What if envelopes up at the end-of-earth Kingdom fall into wrong hands instead of Rong's hands? Cause much bad trouble for clients, eh? Same kind trouble Sam had in Kingdom. Many very respectable Chinese-Americans run out of country. Still. You could have mailed. U.S. mail one thing in land of the free Sam more less trusts.”

“I wanted to see you, Dr. Rong.”

“So look. What I tell you long time ago? What I write on scroll? ‘World change, human bean stay same.' Eh? Eh, Frank Bennett? Ha! Here come first ones already. Early today.”

I turned around on my stool to see what Sam was scowling at. In front of the Land of the Free #2 a Gray Line bus was disgorging tourists. Wielding cameras and guidebooks, they came pouring into the shop and began to mill here, there, and everywhere, sniffing the dried octopus, pinching the Chinese cabbage, holding eggshell porcelain teacups up to the light.

“Hey!” Dr. Rong shouted. “You break, you buy. Or go to prison. You want go prison this morning?”

He winked at me and chuckled gleefully over the idea of sending a busload of retired Iowa schoolteachers to jail. Then he filled the two periwinkle cups, and together he and I sipped the hot beverage, flavored like the Vermont woods in the fall, like ancient Chinese villages, like ironical conversation and laughter and friendship.

“Dr. Rong,” I said. “I want to ask you a question.”

“So ask.”

“I'm enrolled to start seminary this coming fall. But recently—I don't know.”

“Do what heart tells,” Sam said immediately. “Now I ask you a question. Why Sam E. Rong set up Emporium Two here this rundown warehouse? Why I sit up on high stool like Ury Heep, porcelain fortuneteller in old broken-down carnival?”

“Because you're on the tour bus line here?”

“Not on any bus line at all till I open shop. No. Tell you what. You and I change place. You sit behind desk. Then you know why I come here. Get good laugh besides.”

From Dr. Rong's stool behind the desk I could see everything that went on in the Land of the Free #2 and on the sidewalk in front. But Sam shook his head. “You looking in wrong direction, Frank, as usual. Look out side window.”

I peered out the narrow window to my right. At first I saw only the alleyway, strewn with broken wooden crates, and beyond, a section of bleak cityscape. Then, looming up in a space between two distant rooftops, as sudden and surprising as Dr. Rong's own appearance in Kingdom Common eight years ago, was the crowned head and torch of the Statue of Liberty, magnified by the smog and morning haze.

“So. What think?”

Perched high on Sam's stool in this place far from home, listening to the gabble of the early-morning tourists and staring out at the miragelike statue, I had no idea what to think, about the Land of the Free #2 or exactly why I had come to Staten Island or, for that matter, what my heart told me about my future.

“I don't know, Dr. Rong,” I admitted.

“No,” Sam agreed, laughing. “I not know, either. Life full of mysteries, eh? All we can say.”

Sam returned to his seat. He poured us more hot tea. “Catch up on news now. How old judge? How Bumper? Louvia find coins I hide in garden? Talk, Frank. Gossip. Enjoy tea. Sam Rong, Frank Bennett, Mr. Charles Dickens. Best of friends, eh? That one thing we know for sure.”

I nodded and smiled and lifted my thin teacup in agreement. Sipping the jin-chen tea and inhaling the strong and enduring scent of friendship, which now seemed to fill every corner of the Land of the Free #2 and the entire neighborhood and all Staten Island, I had no notion where my own life might lead me, now or later. But I was glad beyond words to have made this trip to see my old friend Sam E. Rong, whoever he might be. For now, that was enough.

6

All citizens of the Kingdom Republic will enjoy complete personal freedom so long as their actions and beliefs do not encroach on the freedom of other Republic citizens.

—The Kingdom Republic Constitution, as quoted in Father George, “A Short History”

 

A
T SIXTY-EIGHT
, with chronic angina, Father George needed more help in the parish than I could give him that summer. From time to time a priest from Memphremagog or Pond in the Sky would come to Kingdom Common to celebrate Sunday mass when Father George simply didn't feel up to doing it himself. At other times he seemed much the same as ever. But as the summer wore on, it was evident that the job was becoming too much for him.

One of my duties that summer was to drive Father George to his doctor appointments and, two or three times a week, out into the country for short rides. While returning from one of these excursions one afternoon, soon after I'd visited Sam Rong in Staten Island, he asked me to pull up beside the baseball infield at the south end of the common. We got out and walked over to the unpainted bleachers along the third-base line, where Father George sat down. Although it was a hot day, I had brought his lap blanket from the car. I arranged the blanket over his legs and sat down beside him.

Father George leaned over and pulled up a few blades of grass. He tossed them into the air to see which way the breeze was blowing, in or out, an old power hitter's habit. It was something the greatest scholar and third baseman in the history of Kingdom County had done a thousand times while kneeling in the on-deck circle or waiting at third for the surprise bunt, the smashing line drive, the soaring, windblown foul fly ball. But today the grass fell straight back to the field; there was no wind at all.

As we looked out over the diamond in the late-afternoon sunlight, I suddenly began to laugh. I'd remembered an evening here on the ball field, one of many, when I was twelve or thirteen. I was crouched at home plate with my twenty-eight-inch Adirondack while Father George, then in his fifties, stood out on the mound beside a gallon pail of baseballs and threw me one pitch after another, trying to teach me how to hit a curve ball.

“What's funny?” he said.

“You and me. Us. Remember those batting practice sessions? You were pretty tough on me.”

“I was tough on all my players.”

“You were tougher on me. One evening you were out there with a bucket of balls—I can see us right now—and you told me if I didn't learn to wait on your curve and go with it, I'd never amount to anything.”

Father George grinned. Though he'd lost weight recently, his voice was still strong, and as wryly humorous as ever. “Did I say that?”

“You did. It was almost too dark to see the ball, at least until it was right on me. We'd probably been here an hour already, and I was frustrated and mad besides. When you told me that, about not amounting to anything, I'd had it. I shouted out to you that baseball was just a game. You remember what you said?”

Father George shook his head.

“You stared in at me and you said, and I'm quoting you exactly, ‘I'm not talking baseball, son. I'm talking life. You don't learn how to hit that dinky little bender of mine, you aren't ever going to amount to anything in
life
.'”

Father George nodded. “I was tough on you. And before you got to high school you learned how to hit a curve ball.”

“And amounted to something?”

If he heard, Father George didn't answer. He was looking out over the diamond, his blue eyes focused somewhere beyond deepest center field. Then he turned to me and said, “Your first class meets tonight, Frank. At the courthouse.”

“My first what?”

“Your first citizenship class—for immigrants who want to become Americans. I used to call it night school. Right up until this morning I thought I could still teach it. But I can't. I don't have the strength. You'll have to teach it for me.”

Something akin to panic came over me. “I never taught a class in my life, Father George. I'm not a teacher. I wouldn't have any idea what to teach. Or how to teach it.”

“You're a natural, son,” Father George said, gesturing out toward home plate. “You'll do just fine.”

 

The front doors of the courthouse weren't locked when I arrived. Walking in quickly, so as not to lose courage, I went up the flight of stairs to the courtroom. It was a long room with a very high stamped-tin ceiling and propeller-blade fans hanging down, and it occupied most of the second story. Two rows of tall windows faced each other on the west and east. On the wall behind the judge's bench was a mural, painted decades ago, of Lake Memphremagog and the Canadian mountains to the north. Just to the right of the mural was a plaque inscribed with the one-sentence constitution of the Kingdom Republic, which had declared its independence from both the United States and Vermont in 1810. The room smelled like old legal tomes and oiled wooden floors, like furniture polish and officialdom.

I sat down in the front row of benches. In the dwindling evening light, the empty courtroom with its plain wooden seats and old-fashioned ceiling and wooden paneling looked as disused as the roped-off balcony, recently judged to be unsafe. Someone had wheeled a portable blackboard out in front of the defense attorney's table. This was the only indication that a class would be taught here tonight. Something about the arrangement of the blackboard, attorneys' tables, and empty jury chairs made me think of a stage set, with me as the principal player. A player who had forgotten all his lines, if he'd ever learned them.

“What in blazes are you doing here?”

I whirled around. The man had come in so quietly, and I had been so absorbed in my apprehension of the class to come, that I hadn't heard him. He was standing in the center aisle, just a few feet away, a big man of about forty-five, wearing a blue uniform. He had a gray crew cut and a bullet-shaped head. On the lapel of his uniform jacket was a metal name tag: Inspector P. W. Bull, U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service.

“I asked what you're doing here,” Inspector Bull said. “How did you get in?”

“The same way you did. The doors were unlocked.”

“Do you always walk through unlocked doors?”

I couldn't help it. I laughed out loud.

P. W. Bull, in the meantime, jutted his truculent chin even farther forward. I actually thought he might lose his balance and topple over onto his face. “I said, do you always walk through unlocked doors?”

“Always,” I said, smiling.

“Then you can walk right back out again. You want to be an American? You'd better learn how to tell American time. Now go on back outside until I officially open the door. I could have you arrested for trespassing.”

Suddenly I was sick of Inspector P. W. Bull. I stood up, with the folder Father George had given me in my hands.

Inspector Bull was three or four inches taller than I was and seventy or eighty pounds heavier. But when I took three quick steps toward him, the big man took a step backward.

“I know how to tell time,” I said. “And I'm not here to take the citizenship class. I'm here to teach it.”

P.W. Bull gave me a long and incredulous look. Finally he said, “What kind of joke is this, anyway? Father George Lecoeur is teaching this class. Who the hell are you?”

“I'm Frank Bennett, and Father George has asked me to teach the class because he's too sick to do it himself. That's number one. Number two, I don't like being sworn at. Don't do it again.”

I looked hard at Inspector P.W. Bull for a second or two longer, then turned around and went up to the front of the courtroom and found the switch to the lights. They were old-fashioned globe lights hanging from the ceiling on slender metal rods, and when I flipped them on and looked back, P.W. Bull was still standing in the aisle, bent forward like a bellicose gander, his mouth slightly open. Once again I felt like laughing, but this time I didn't.

As soon as the doors were “officially” opened, students began to arrive. I knew some by name, including, to my considerable surprise, Louvia the Fortuneteller who, I had supposed, was already an American citizen. In all there were eleven. Except for Louvia, who sequestered herself at the rear of the courtroom, they sat scattered on either side of the aisle in the first two rows of spectators' benches. While I greeted them, P.W. Bull visited with the two selectmen who had arranged for the citizenship class to use the courthouse, Roy Quinn and the Reverend Miles Johnstone.