The Marriage of Sticks Part 10

When I called to say I wanted to see him, Hugh asked what had changed my mind. I said the days were dead without him and I couldn't stand it anymore.

We met on neutral ground-a favorite restaurant-but we were out of there and back in my bed within an hour.

If I'd had any fears he would leave, they disappeared quickly. He moved into my apartment within two weeks. He brought so little with him that I worried he might be thinking of the move as a test drive: since all of his belongings were still at his place, he could always go back to them if we failed.

But one Sat.u.r.day when he was at his office, the doorbell downstairs rang. A furniture store was there to deliver a big cushy chair I hadn't ordered. When they said a Hugh Oakley had, I clapped my hands. Hugh loved reading at night but said it could only be done in a perfect chair. Now he had bought one for his new home.

Charlotte refused to let me meet their children. She was convinced I was only a blip on the screen of her husband's Midlife Crisis. Consequently, when he came to his senses, they would reconcile and I'd be yesterday's news. Why expose their children to further confusion?

Hugh didn't care what she felt and was adamant about my spending time with them. I said no. They lived in a parallel universe I was not yet part of. There would be time in the future. Secretly I was petrified of what would happen when we did meet. I imagined two children glaring with fiery eyes that would melt me before I had a chance to say I would do anything to be their friend.

He missed his kids terribly, so I encouraged him to see them whenever he could. I knew in certain ways he missed Charlotte too. I was sure there were conversations and meetings going on between them that he never told me about. His emotions tacked back and forth like a sailboat in a gale.

What could I do to help? Be his friend. Let him know how much I loved and appreciated him. Hold my tongue when necessary; try to be considerate when the first instinct was to snap at anything I didn't understand or that threatened me. For all of my adult life, Hugh Oakley had lived in marriage, a foreign country I had never known. It was easy to imagine what the place was like, but imagining was like reading a brochure at the travel agency. You could never really know the place itself till you got there.

"Have you ever heard of Crane's View?" Frances was smiling and her eyes were closed. She was sitting by a window in her red-carpeted living room, her face lit by the morning sun. A few minutes before, when I'd come in and kissed her cheek, it was almost hot.

We were drinking gunpowder tea and eating English m.u.f.fins, her favorite breakfast.

"What's Crane's View?"

"A town on the Hudson about an hour away. I discovered it thirty years ago and bought a house there. It's a small place, but it has a spectacular view of the river. That's why I bought it."

"I didn't know you owned a house, Frances. Do you ever go there?"

"Not anymore. It makes me sad. I had two good love affairs and a nice dog in that house. Spent most of a year there once when I was angry with New York and was boycotting it. Anyway, I was thinking about it last week. Houses shouldn't be empty. They should either be lived in or sold. Would you like to have it?"

I shook my head and put down the cup. "You can't just give away a house. Are you crazy?"

She opened her eyes and slowly brought the m.u.f.fin to her mouth. A blob of marmalade started a slow slide off the edge. Very carefully she caught it with her thumb and shoved it back onto the top. She looked at me coldly but didn't say anything until she had finished chewing. "Excuse me, I can do whatever I want. Don't be obnoxious and treat me like an old nitwit. If I want to give you my house, I'll give you my house. You don't have to take it, but that's your choice."

"But-"

"Miranda, you've said at least four times how you and Hugh would like to move. Your apartment is too small and you need someplace where you can start a new life together from scratch. I agree. I don't know if you'd like Crane's View. It's a small town. There's not much to do there. But both of you could commute to the city. It's only an hour on the train and the ride is pretty-right alongside the river the whole way. At least go have a look. What do you have to lose?"

The next Sunday we rented a car, picked up Frances, and drove to Crane's View. It was the first time she had left her apartment in months. She was both thrilled and scared to be out in the world again. Most of the day she wouldn't let go of my arm but was so excited she didn't stop talking for a minute.

From their first meeting, Frances and Hugh liked each other very much. Her life and the people she'd known fascinated him. Her greatest pleasure was talking about her experiences to someone who cared. They also argued all the time, but Frances loved a good fight. Despite her great age, there was still a big fire in her that longed to be fed. Hugh sensed this immediately and to my dismay started an argument with her the first time they met. The look on her face was pure joy. In the middle of the battle, Frances slapped a hand down on her birdie knee and proclaimed, "If you hadn't said that, someone else would have. That's the difference between the clever and the great," Hugh hooted and said he was going to pray to Saint Gildas, who protected people from dog bites.

As we were leaving, she pulled me aside and said, "He's so different from your description, Miranda. So much better and so much more annoying!"

We visited her together after that. When Hugh did our shopping he invariably brought back a variety of Ding Dongs, Pinwheels, Twinkies, and other sweets for her. When I told Frances he was the one who bought her the junk food, tears came to her eyes. But the poster won her heart forever.

Seeing it the first time, I asked how the h.e.l.l he'd found it. Hugh said only that he'd been lucky. His a.s.sistant Courtney later admitted Hugh had all of his European contacts on the lookout for months before they tracked one down in Wroclaw, Poland. It was a large color poster from the Ronacher Theater in Vienna advertising a 1922 performance by The Enormous Shumda, "world renowned" ventriloquist and, of course, the great love of Frances Hatch's life. On the poster he is standing with arms crossed, looking huge, confident, and mysterious in a tuxedo and full-length cape. He's a handsome man with gleaming black hair combed straight back and a wicked little goatee. When Frances saw the picture, she touched her cheeks and exclaimed, "That goatee! He always put Florida Water on it first thing in the morning before he did anything else. You never smelled anything so good in your life."

As we drove out of New York City that day, she started talking about him again. "In a funny way, Shumda gave me Crane's View. Not directly. He was gone years before I ever came up here. But Tyndall lived here, and he was Shumda's biggest fan."

I turned around and looked at her in the backseat. She was wearing a tomato red wool cap and a fur coat that had seen better days.

"Tyndall, the oil man?"

Frances nodded. "Yes. We met him in Bucharest in the twenties. Back there he was just another fan of Shumda. We kept in touch over the years. In the early fifties he invited me for a weekend to Crane's View. I fell in love with the place and kept coming back. It was the perfect escape from New York and Lionel was always glad to have me.

"They had a murder there last year." She didn't say anything for a while and when I turned to check her, she was asleep. That was one of the few symptoms of her almost hundred years: she fell asleep faster than any person I'd ever known.

We rode in comfortable silence a long time. I looked out the window and watched the city turn into suburbs and then almost country. Hugh put his hand on my knee and said softly. "I love you. Know that?"

I looked at him and said, "No one in the world could be happier than I am right now. No one."

We didn't wake Frances until we saw the first exit sign for Crane's View. In fact, we didn't wake her at all: a mile before the turnoff, we both jumped when she called out, "Take the next right!"

I turned the rearview mirror to see her. "How'd you know when to wake up?"

She patted away a yawn. "Lionel Tyndall always had a crush on me. He was as ugly as an egg salad sandwich, but that was okay. I'm no prize in that department myself. No, my mistake was sleeping with him a few times. He didn't know what he was doing. But I did and that made him unreasonable. The guy didn't know the difference between his big head and his little one. Now go right, Hugh. That's it. We're almost there."

She continued talking as we drove toward the town. I didn't know what to expect, but what was there pretty much fit what I had imagined. Crane's View itself was cute and small. The stores in the town center were the basics-food, clothes, hardware, and newspapers-with a couple of specialty shops. It was a town built on hills and from those hills you often caught glimpses of the Hudson River below. Driving around that first day, I kept thinking, It's a nice place, a real 1950s small upstate town. But there was nothing special about it. I wondered why Frances said she loved it. Crane's View was everything Frances Hatch wasn't-quiet, slow moving, unsurprising.

"Stop here! This is the place for lunch. They've got the best pizza in the county."

Hugh braked hard and swerved into a parking spot in front of a dumpy-looking pizza joint. We got out of the car and Frances led the way inside. We were welcomed by the delicious smell of hot garlic. A couple of town studs leaned against the counter and gave us the slow once-over. We each ordered a slice of pizza; when they arrived, they were each as big as an LP record. Frances shook crushed hot pepper all over hers. We took soft drinks out of a refrigerator and sat down at a scarred table.

While we were eating, a handsome man in an expensive-looking double-breasted suit came in. He stopped when he saw us and his face lit up with a big wholehearted smile.

"Frances! What are you doing here?"

"Frannie!"

He came over and they embraced. "I am really happy to see you, old woman! Why didn't you call and say you were coming? We coulda had a dinner or something."

"I wanted to see the look on your face when you saw I was still alive. Frannie, these are my friends Miranda and Hugh. This is Frannie McCabe, chief of police. I've known him for twenty-five years. How are you, Chief?"

"Good! I'm a married man again. Magda and I finally did it, though I had to carry her kickin' and screamin' to the altar."

"Good for you! Magda McCabe, huh? That's a nice name. Listen, we're going to my house after lunch. Is everything all right over there?"

He crossed his arms and looked at the ceiling, exasperated. "Frances, have we had this conversation before? You know I keep an eye on the house for you! How many times do I have to tell you? It could use a paint job, but we've talked about that. Otherwise it's fine. You going to start living there again?"

"No, but they may. That's why we came up to see it."

McCabe pulled out a chair and sat down. "It's a nice house, but if you're going to live there, it needs work. Definitely a paint job, and the bas.e.m.e.nt gets damp. I could introduce you to some people who'd do the job right and not charge too much."

Frances finished her pizza and brushed off her hands. "Frannie is the king of Crane's View. He knows everybody. If they're not in his family, they used to be in his gang. He was a juvenile delinquent when he was a kid. That's how we got to know each other: he broke into my house when he was fifteen but I happened to be there at the time." She turned toward him. "Why don't you go over there with us?"

"I would, but I have too much stuff to do. There's a zoning meeting this afternoon and I gotta be there. The company that bought the Tyndall house sold it after the murder there last year. Can't say as I blame them. Now a consortium's sniffing around. They want to tear it down and build a hotel or something. What's a dull little town like ours going to do with a hotel? Who's going to stay there, Rip Van Winkle?

"Anyway, I gotta go. If you two need anything, she has my phone number. I wish you were moving back, Frances. I'd rather visit you here than down at that creepy apartment in the city."

They kissed and we shook hands. Starting for the door, he was called back by the smirking counterman, who held out the pizza he'd ordered. McCabe grinned and went back for it.

"Is there much crime here? You mentioned a murder before."

His smile evaporated and he stared at me before answering. "That was a one-time thing. There were a lot of extenuating circ.u.mstances. Crane's View is a quiet town. Dull most of the time. Lotta blue-collar people here, some commuters. Everyone works hard. On the weekends they mow their lawn or watch a game. I've been a cop here a long time. The worst crime we have is, once in a while someone gets his car boosted. That's all.

"Listen, I really gotta go. Ms. Hatch, I will talk to you soon. And let me know if you folks are going to move in. I'll send some people over before you do to straighten the house up so at least it'll be livable when you first get in."

The counterman yodeled out, "Byyyyye, Chief!"

McCabe gave him the finger and smiled. "I don't get no respect." Then he was gone. I watched him get into a beautiful silver car and drive away.

"Drives a very nice car for a policeman."

Hugh had watched too, and he nodded. "Did you see the wrist.w.a.tch he was wearing? That was a Da Vinci! We're talking about serious money for that timepiece."

Frances shrugged. "He's loaded. He doesn't need to be a cop, but does it because he likes it. Made a lot of money with his first wife. Something to do with television. He told me once but I forget."

"I like him. He's a tough guy." Hugh put up his fists and pretended to box.

"You do? He reminds me of one of the gangsters in Goodfellas, I wouldn't want to mess with him."

Frances patted my hand. "No, you wouldn't. He's like a Russell's viper if you cross him. But a great friend and one of the few people you can depend on completely. Shall we go? I'm excited to see my house."

This time Frances sat in the front seat and directed Hugh to the house. As we drove through Crane's View, I kept imagining myself there, walking down this street, shopping at that store. Letters to us would arrive at the small gray post office at the end of Main Street. After a while, we would know the names of the men on the orange garbage truck stopped at a corner. Young kids rode bicycles in woozy lines down the sidewalk. Dogs crossed the road at their own pace. Two girls had set up a lemonade stand on one side of a tree-lined street. The sun through the leaves dappled the girls and they frowned at us when we drove by.

"Hugh, look!"

A pretty teenager was walking a bullterrier that looked like Hugh's. The two were in no hurry. The dog sniffed something on the sidewalk, tail wagging slowly. The girl wore a Walkman and waited for him with arms crossed. She looked up as we pa.s.sed and waved. Frances waved back.

"That's Barbara Flood. Good-looking girl, huh? Her grandfather was Tyndall's gardener. Turn right here."

"She's the first black person I've seen here."

Frances gave Hugh a shove. "Don't start with the liberal agenda. There are plenty of blacks in Crane's View. The mayor is black."

He caught my eye in the mirror and winked. "I was just making an observation."

"Yeah, well it weighed ten pounds. This is it. Stop here."

"This house? You're joking."

Frances's voice slashed down like a karate chop. "What's the matter with it?"

I bent forward for a better look. "Nothing's the matter. It's just big. You said it was small. This is not a small house, Frances."

It was blue, sort of. Blue with white trim. But the years had faded the paint to the color of a pair of old jeans. The white around the windows and door had yellowed and was peeling off everywhere. McCabe was right-the first thing it would need would be lots of paint. The house was square, shaped like a hatbox, with two floors and a large porch in front. The night before we drove there, Hugh and I had spent a whole dinner wondering what it would look like. Neither of our imaginings had come even close to this.

189 Broadway // Crane's View, New York "Here Hugh, you open the door. I want to take a look around." Frances handed him keys and walked toward the porch steps. Leaning forward, she kissed the wooden newel post. "Haven't seen you in a long time." Slowly climbing, she patted the banister as she went. At the top, she reached out and pressed the doorbell. It rang loudly inside.

Hugh put his arm around my shoulder. "Did you hear that? A real bell! Ding dong!"

I quietly asked, "What do you think?"

"I like it! Reminds me of a house in an Edward Hopper painting. It'll need a lot of work, though. I can see that already." He put his hands on his hips and looked appraisingly at the house.

"It's sure a lot bigger than I'd imagined. I thought it would be a kind of large bungalow."

Frances walked to the end of the porch and stopped. Her back was to us. She didn't turn around for the longest time.

"What's she doing?"

"Remembering, probably. Let's go inside. I can't wait to see what it's like." Hugh slotted the key and turned it in the lock a couple of times. Before pushing the door open, he slid his hand back and forth over the surface. "Nice door, huh? Oak."

It swung open. The first odors of our new home drifted out to say h.e.l.lo: dust, damp, old cloth, and something in complete contrast to empty-house bouquet. Hugh entered while I stood in the doorway, trying to figure out that one smell. Clean and sweet, it was not at all appropriate in a building that had been closed and unused for years. It was fresh, delicious. I couldn't put my finger on what it was.

"Miranda, are you coming?"

"In a second. Go ahead."

I heard Hugh walk across the floor, then a door creak open. He said a quiet "Wow" to something in there, then his feet started across the floor again. What was that smell? I took a few steps into the house, looked around, and closed my eyes.

When I opened them a moment later, the hallway was full of people. Full of children, rather, with a few adults standing around watching the show. Kids were running, jumping, making faces at each other, and playing. They ran back and forth from room to room, stomped up and down the staircase, ate yellow and blue cake (that was it-cake smell!), blew plastic horns, hit each other. Most wore pastel party hats. Seeing them, I realized what this was-a kid's birthday party.

I was not surprised. I must repeat that, because it is very important. From one second to the next, Frances Hatch's empty house was in a flash full of the happy chaos of a child's birthday party, but none of it surprised me. I simply watched and accepted it.

One little boy in a crooked party hat stood in the middle of the hall watching the party whirl around him. He wore a white b.u.t.ton-down shirt, stiff new blue jeans, and zebra-striped sneakers. He looked like a miniature Hugh Oakley, even to the color and texture of his long hair and the broad grin on his face. A smile I knew so well now and loved. This had to be Hugh's boy.

He looked directly at me and did the most wonderful thing. Slowly closing his eyes, he shuddered all over. I knew it was from delight at the party around him. For it was his party, his birthday.

His name was Jack Oakley and he was eight years old. He was the son Hugh and I would have when we lived together in this house. We had already talked a lot about having children, joked about what their names would be. Jack and Ciara. Saint Ciara of Tipperary who put out fire with her prayers. And now here was our Jack Oakley standing in front of me, eight years old today, looking like his father. There was some of me in him too. The high forehead and upward curve of the eyebrows.

I didn't move, scared if I did, this gorgeous vision of our future would go away. The boy looked at me and, still smiling, threw his small hands in the air as if they were full of confetti.

"Miranda?"

Startled, I jerked my head to the left. Hugh walked toward me, smiling just like his son. Our son. I looked back to where the boy had been standing. Everything was gone-Jack, the kids, the party.

"Are you okay?"

"We have to live here, Hugh. We have to live in this house."

"But you haven't even looked around yet! You haven't moved from this spot. Come on, I've got to show you something." He put his arm around my shoulders and gently pushed me along. I went but looked back once, twice, just in case Jack was there again. The little boy, our little boy, come to show us how wonderful it would be for all of us here.

6. The Tarzan Hotel.