Independence Day

INDEPENDENCE DAY

Streets away, in the summoning, glimmery early-morning heat, a car alarm breaks into life, shattering all silences. Bwoop-bwip! Bwoop-bwip! Bwoop-bwip! On the front steps of 46 Clio Street, reading my paper, I gaze up into the azure heavens through sycamore boughs, take a breath, blink and wait for peace.

I am here before nine, again in my red REALTOR jacket and my own The Rock shirt, awaiting the Markhams, currently on their way down from New Brunswick. Though unlike most of my previous intercourse with them, this time there is not a long story. Possibly there is even a hopeful one.

At the end of yesterday’s bewildering if not completely demoralizing events, Irv was good enough to chauffeur me back up to Cooperstown — a drive during which he talked a mile a minute and in an almost desperate way about needing to get out of the simulator business, except that in his current view and based on careful analysis, the rah-rah, back-slap, yahoo days in his industry were all done, so that a policy favoring a career move seemed foolhardy, whereas holding his cards seemed wise. Continuity — an earnest new commanding metaphor — was applicable to all and was taking up the slack for synchronicity (which never carries you far enough).

When we arrived long into the shaded dewy hours of early evening, the Deerslayer lot was jammed full of new vacationer cars and my Ford had been towed away, since inasmuch as I was no longer a paying guest my license number was no longer on file. Irv and I and the resurrected Erma then sat in the office at the Mobil station behind Doubleday Field and waited until the tow-truck driver arrived with keys to the razor-wire impoundment, during which time I decided to make my necessary calls before paying my sixty dollars, saying good-bye and turning homeward alone.

My second call and inexcusably late was to Rocky and Carlo’s, to leave a message with Nick the bartender. Sally would receive this when she got in from South Mantoloking, and among its profuse apologies were instructions to go straight to the Algonquin (my first call), where I’d reserved a big suite for her, there to check in and order room service. Later that night, from the village of Long Eddy, New York, halfway down the Delaware, we spoke and I told her all about the day’s lamentable happenings and some odd feeling of peculiar and not easily explainable hope I’d already started to revive by then, after which we were able to impress each other with our seriousness and the possibilities for commitment in ways we admitted were “dangerous” and “anxious-making” and that we had never quite advanced to in the solitary months of only “seeing” each other. (Who knows why we hadn’t, except there’s nothing like tragedy or at least a grave injury or major inconvenience to cut through red tape and bullshit and reveal anyone’s best nature.)

Joe and Phyllis Markham, when I reached them, were as meek as mice on hearing they’d missed their chance on the Houlihan house, that I was now fresh out of good ideas and a long way from home, that my already afflicted son had been poleaxed playing baseball and was at that moment in ominous surgery at Yale-New Haven and would probably lose his vision. In my voice, I know, were the somber tonalities and slow, end-stop rhythms of resignation, of having run the course, made the valiant try in more ways than ten, endured imprecation, come back from the trash heap with no hard feelings, and yet in a moment or two I would say good-bye forever. (“Realty death” is the industry buzzword.)

“Frank, look,” Joe said, annoyingly tapping a pencil lead on the receiver from within his medium-priced double at the Raritan Ramada and seeming as clearheaded, plainspoken and ready to own up to reality as a Lutheran preacher at the funeral of his impoverished aunt. “Is there any way Phyl and I could get a peek at that colored rental property you mentioned? I know I got away from myself a little on Friday when I flared up that way. And I probably owe you an apology.” (For calling me an asshole, a prick, a shithead? Why not, I thought, though that was as close as we got.) “There’s one colored family in Island Pond who’s been there since the Underground Railroad. Everybody treats ’em like regular citizens. Sonja goes to school right beside one of them every day.”

“Tell him we want to look at it tomorrow,” I heard Phyllis say. Changes had occurred aloft, I realized, a storm pushed on out to sea. In the realty business, change is good; from 100 percent for to 150 percent against, or vice versa, are everyday occurrences and signs of promising instability. My job is to make all that seem normal (and, if possible, make every nutty change in a client’s mind seem smarter than anything I myself could’ve advised).

“Joe, I’ll be home tonight around eleven, God willing.” I leaned wearily against the window glass at the Mobil, the da-ding, da-ding, da-ding of the customer bell going constantly. (There was no use picking up the racial cudgels to try explaining to Joe that it was not “a colored house” but my house.) “So if I don’t call you, I’ll meet you on the porch at forty-six Clio Street at nine a.m. tomorrow.”

“Four-six Clio, check,” Joe said militarily.

“When can we move in?” Phyllis said from the background.

“Tomorrow morning if you want to. It’s ready to go. It just needs airing out.”

“It’s ready to go,” Joe said brusquely.

“Oh, thank God,” I heard Phyllis say.

“I guess you heard that,” Joe said, brimming with relief and craven satisfaction.

“I’ll see you there, Joe.” And in that way the deal was sealed.

The car alarm goes just as suddenly silent, and quiet morning reconvenes. (These almost never herald an actual robbery.) Down the block some kids are hovering around what looks like a red coffee can they’ve set in the middle of the street. No doubt they’re following through on plans for an early-morning detonation to alert the neighbors that it’s a holiday. Fireworks, of course, are unthinkably illegal in Haddam, and once the explosion blows, it’s automatic that a cruiser will idle through the neighborhood, an HPD officer inquiring if we’ve heard or seen people shooting or carrying guns. I’ve noticed Myrlene Beavers twice behind her screen, her walker glinting out of the murk. She seems not to notice me today but to concentrate her vigilance on the boys, one of whom — his little face shiny and black — is sporting a bright Uncle Sam costume and will no doubt be marching in the parade later on (assuming he’s not in jail). There is yet no sign of the Markhams, or for that matter the McLeods, whom I also have business with.

Since arriving at eight, I’ve mowed the small front yard with the (supplied) hand mower, watered the parched grass and sprayed the metal siding using my hose from home. I’ve cut back the dead hydrangea branches and the spirea and the roses, hauled the refuse to the back alley and opened windows and doors front and back to get air flowing inside the house. I’ve swept the porch, the front walk, run the tap in all the sinks, flushed the commode, used my broom to jab any cobwebs out from the ceiling corners and finished up by taking down the FOR RENT sign and stowing it in my trunk just to minimize the Markhams’ feelings of displacement.

As always, I’ve noticed an awkward, flat-footed sensation involved with showing my own rental house (though I’ve done it several times since the Harrises left). The rooms seem somehow too large (or small), too drab and unhopeful, already used up and going nowhere, as though the only thing to truly revive the place would be for me to move in myself and turn it homey with my own possessions and positive attitudes. It’s possible, of course, that this reaction is only compensatory for some wrong take a potential renter might fall victim to, since my underlying feeling is that I like the house exactly the way I liked it the day I bought it almost two years ago, and the McLeods’ house the same. (I’ve seen a curtain twitch there now, but no face shows behind it — someone observing me, someone who doesn’t enjoy paying his or her rent.) I admire its clean, tidy, unassuming adequacy, its sturdy rightness, finished off by the soffit vents, the new wrought-iron banister on the stoop, even the flashing to prevent ice dams and water “creep” during January thaws. It would be my dream house if I were a renter: tight, shipshape, cozy. A no-brainer.

In the Trenton Times I find holiday news, most of it not good. A man in Providence has sneaked a peek down a fireworks cannon at the most imperfect of moments and lost his life. Two people in far distant parts of the country have been shot with crossbows (both times at picnics). There’s a “rash” of arsons, though fewer boating mishaps than might seem likely. I’ve even found a squib for the murder I stumbled upon three nights back: the vacationers were from Utah; they were bound for the Cape; the husband was stabbed; the alleged assailants were fifteen — the age of my son — and from Bridgeport. No names are given, so that all seems insulated from me now, only the relatives left to bear the brunt.

On the briefer, lighter side, the Beach Boys are at Bally’s grandstand for one show only, flag-pole sales have once again skyrocketed, harness racing is celebrating its birthday (150) and a kidney transplant team (five men and a black Lab) is at this hour swimming the Channel — their foreseeable impediments: oil slicks, jellyfish and the twenty-one miles themselves (though not their kidneys).

Though the most interesting news is of two natures. One pertains to the demonstration at the Baseball Hall of Fame yesterday, the one that diverted Paul and me off our course and onward to what fate held in store. The demonstrators who blocked the Hall’s doors for an important hour were, it turns out, rising in support of a lovable Yankee shortstop from the Forties, who deserved (they felt) a place, a plaque and a bust inside but who in the view of the sportswriter pundits was never good enough and had come by his obscurity honestly. (I side with the protesters on the principle of Who cares anyway?)

Yet of even more exotic interest is the “Haddam story,” the discovery by our streets crew of a whole human skeleton unearthed, so the Times says, Friday morning at nine (on Cleveland Street, the 100 block) by a backhoe operator trenching our new sewer line under the provisos of our “well-being” bond. Details are sketchy due to the backhoe operator’s poor command of English, but there’s speculation by the town historian that the remains could be “very old, indeed, by Haddam standards,” though another rumor has it that the bones are a “female Negro servant” who disappeared a hundred years ago when the Presidents Streets were a dairy farm. Still another theorizes an Italian construction worker was “buried alive” in the Twenties when the town was replatted. Local residents have already half-seriously named the bones “Homo haddamus pithecarius,” and an archaeological team from Fairleigh Dickinson is planning to have a look. Meanwhile, the remains are in the morgue. More later, we think, and hope.

When I arrived last night at eleven, having beaten it home in four hours to an odd day-within-night indigo luminance down the quiet streets of town (many house lights were still lit), a message was waiting from Ann, declaring that Paul had come through his surgery “okay” and there was reason for hope, though he would probably develop glaucoma by fifty and need glasses much sooner. He was “resting comfortably” in any event, and I could call her anytime at a 203 number, a Scottish Inn in Hamden (the closer-in New Haven places already filled again with holiday voyagers).

“It was funny, almost,” Ann said drowsily, I supposed from bed. “When he came out of it he just jabbered on and on about the Baseball Hall of Fame. All about the exhibits he’d seen and the … I guess they’re statues. Right? He thought he’d had a splendid time. I asked him how you’d liked it, and he said you hadn’t been able to go. He said you’d had a date with somebody. So … some things are funny.”

A languor in Ann’s voice made me think of the last year of our marriage, eight years ago nearly, when we made love half waking in the middle of the night (and only then), half aware, half believing the other might be someone else, performing love’s acts in a half-ritual, half-blind, purely corporal way that never went on long and didn’t qualify as much or dignify passion, so vaguely willed and distant from true intimacy was it, so inhibited by longing and dread. (This was not so long after Ralph’s death.)

But where had passion gone? I wondered it all the time. And why, when we needed it so? The morning after such a night’s squandering, I’d wake and feel I’d done good for humanity but not much for anyone I knew. Ann would act as if she’d had a dream she only remotely remembered as pleasant. And then it was over for a long time, until our needs would once more rise (sometimes weeks and weeks later) and, aided by sleep, our ancient fears suppressed, we would meet again. Desire, turned to habit, allowed to go sadly astray by fools. (We could do better now, or so I decided last night, since we understand each other better, having nothing to offer or take away and therefore nothing worth holding back or protecting. It is a kind of progress.)

“Has he done any sort of barking?” I asked.

“No,” Ann said, “not that I’ve heard him. Maybe he’ll quit that now.”

“How’s Clarissa?” Emptying my pockets, I’d found the tiny red bow she’d presented me out of her hair, companion to the one Paul had eaten. No doubt, I thought, it’s she who’ll decide what goes on my tombstone. And she will be exacting.

“Oh, she’s fine. She stayed down to see Cats and the Italian fireworks over the river. She’s interested in taking care of her brother, in addition to being slightly glad it happened.”

“That’s a dim view.” (Although it was probably not a far-fetched one.)

“I feel just a little dim.” She sighed, and I could tell, as used to be true, she was in no rush to get off now, could’ve talked to me for hours, asked and answered many questions (such as why I never wrote about her), laughed, gotten angry, come back from anger, sighed, gotten nowhere, gone to sleep on the phone with me at the other end, and in that way soothed the rub of events. It would’ve been a perfect time to ask her why she hadn’t worn her wedding ring in Oneonta, whether she had a boyfriend, if she and Charley were on the fritz. Plus other queries: Did she really believe I never told the truth and that Charley’s dull truths were better? Did she think I was a coward? Didn’t she know why I never wrote about her? More, even. Only I found that these questions had no weight now, and that we were, by some dark and final magic, no longer in the other’s audience. It was odd. “Did you get anything interesting accomplished in two days? I hope so.”

“We didn’t get around to any current events,” I said to amuse her. “I heard most of his views. We talked over some other important things. It might be better. He might be better. I don’t know. His accident cut everything short.” With my tongue I touched the sore, bitten inside of my mouth. I did not mean to talk specifics with her.

“You two are so much alike, it makes me sad,” she said sadly. “I can actually see it in his eyes, and they’re my eyes. I think I understand you both too well.” She breathed in, then out. “What are you doing for the holiday?”

“A date.” I said this too forcefully.

“A date. That’s a good idea.” She paused. “I’ve become very impersonal now. I felt it when I saw you this afternoon. You seemed very personal, even when I didn’t recognize you. I actually envied you. Part of me cares about things, but part doesn’t really seem to.”

“It’s just a phase,” I said. “It’s just today.”

“Do you really think I’m a person of little faith? You accused me of that when you got mad at me. I wanted you to know that it worried me.”

“No,” I said. “You’re not. I was just disappointed in myself. I don’t think you are.” (Though it’s possible she is.)

“I don’t want to be,” Ann said in a mournful voice. “I certainly wouldn’t like it if life was just made up of the specific grievances we could answer all strung together and that was it. I decided that’s what you meant about me — that I was a problem solver. That I just liked specific answers to specific questions.”

“Liked them instead of what?” I said. Though I guessed I knew.

“Oh. I don’t know, Frank. Instead of being interested in important things that’re hard to recognize? Like when we were kids. Just life. I’m very tired of some problems.”

“It’s human nature not to get to the bottom of things.”

“And that doesn’t ever get uninteresting to you, does it?” I thought she might be smiling, but not necessarily happily.

“Sometimes,” I said. “More recently it has.”

“A big forest of fallen trees,” she said in a dreamy way. “That doesn’t seem so bad today.”

“Don’t you think I could bring him down here in September?” I knew this was not the best time to ask. I had asked seven hours before. But when was the best time? I didn’t want to wait.

“Oh,” she said, staring I was sure out a frosted air-conditioned window at the small lights of Hamden and the Wilbur Cross, a-strearn with cars bound for less adventuresome distances, the holiday almost over before the day even arrived. I would miss it with my son. “We’ll have to talk to him. I’ll talk to Charley. We’ll have to see what his ombudsman says. In principle it might be all right. Isn’t that okay to say now?”

“In principle it’s fine. I just think I could be some use to him now. You know? More than his ombudsman.”

“Ummm,” she said. And I couldn’t think of anything else to say, staring at the mulberry leafage, my reflection cast back: a man alone at a desk by a telephone, a table lamp, the rest dark. The complex odors of backyard cooking over with hours before still floated out of the evening. “He’ll want to know when you’re coming to visit him.” She said this without inflection.

“I’ll drive up Friday. Tell him I’ll visit him wherever he’s in custody.” Then I almost said, “He bought you and Clarissa some presents.” But true to my word, I forbore.

And then she was silent, taking time to assess. “Doing anything wholeheartedly is rare. That’s probably why you said that. I was shitty the other night, I’m sorry.”

“That’s okay,” I said brightly. “It’s harder, that’s for sure.”

“You know, when I saw you today I felt very good about you. That was the first time in a long time. It seemed very strange. Did you notice it?”

I couldn’t answer that, so I just said, “That’s not bad, though, is it?” my voice still bright. “That’s an advance.”

“You always seem like you want something from me,” she said. “But I think maybe you just want to make me feel better when you’re around. Is that right?”

“I do want you to feel better,” I said. “That’s right.” It is part of the Existence Period — and I think now not a good part — to seem to want something but then not to.

Ann paused again. “Do you remember I said it’s not easy being an ex-spouse?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Well, it’s not easy not being one, either.”

“No,” I said, “it’s not,” and then I said nothing.

“So. Call up tomorrow,” she said cheerfully — disappointed, I knew, by some more complicated, possibly sad, even interesting truth she had heard herself speak and been surprised by but that I hadn’t risen to. “Call the hospital. He’ll need to talk to his Dad. Maybe he’ll tell you about the Hall of Fame.”

“Okay,” I said softly.

“Bye-bye.”

“Bye-bye,” I said, and we hung up.

Blam!

I watch the red coffee can spin high as the rooftops, become a small, whirly shadow on the sky, then lazily sink back toward the hot pavement.

All the kids hightail it down the street, their feet slapping, including Uncle Sam, holding for some reason the top of his head, where he has no tall hat.

“You gon git yo eye put out!” someone shouts.

“Wooo, wooo, wooo, got damn!” is what they say in answer. Across Clio Street a young black woman in astonishing yellow short shorts and a yellow buxom halter top leans out over her porch rail, watching the boys as they scatter. The can hits the pavement in front of her house, torn and jagged, bounces and goes still. “Ah-mo beat ya’ll butts!” she shouts out as Uncle Sam rounds the corner onto Erato on one hopping, skidding foot, still holding his bare head, and then is gone. “Ah-mo call the cops ’n’ they gon beat ya’ll butts too!” she says. The boys are laughing in the distance. There is, I see, a FOR SALE sign in front of her house, conspicuous in the little privet-hedged and grassy postage-stamp yard. It is new, not ours.

With her hands on the banister, the woman turns her gaze my way, where I’m seated on my porch steps with my paper, gazing back in a neighborly way. She is barefooted and no doubt has just been waked up. “’Cause ah-mo be glaaad to git outa this place, y’unnerstan?” she says to the street, to me, to whoever might have a door open or a window ajar and be listening. “’Cause it’s noisy up here, ya’ll. Ah’m tellin ya’ll. Ya’ll be noiseee!”

I smile at her. She looks at me in my red jacket, then throws her head back and laughs as if I was the silliest person she ever saw. She puts her hand up like a church witness, lowers her head, then wanders back inside.

Crows fly over — two, six, twelve — in ragged, dipping lines, squawking as though to say, “Today is not a holiday for crows. Crows work.” I hear the Haddam H.S. band, as I did Friday morning, early again on its practice grounds, rich, full-brass crescendos streets away, a last fine-tuning before the parade. “Com-onna-my-house-my-house-a-com-on” seems to be their rouser. The crows squawk, then dive crazily through the morning’s hot air. The neighborhood seems unburdened, peopled, serene.

And then I see the Markhams’ beater Nova appear at the top of the street, a half hour late. It slows as though its occupants were consulting a map, then begins again bumpily down my way, approaches the house with my car in front, veers, someone waves from inside, and then, at last, they have come to rest.

Oh, we got into such a bind, Frank,” Phyllis says, not quite able to portray for me what she and Joe have been forced through. Her blue eyes seem bluer than ever, as if she has changed to vivider contacts. “We felt like we were strapped to a runaway train. She just wouldn’t quit showing us houses.” She, of course, refers to the horror-show realty associate from East Brunswick. Phyllis looks at me in dejected wonderment for the way some people will act.

We’re on the stoop of 46 Clio, paused as though to defeat a final reluctance before commencing our ritual walk-thru. I’ve already pointed out some improvements — a foundation vent, new flashing — noted the convenience of in-town shopping, hospital, train and schools. (No mention has been made by them of other races in close proximity.)

“I guess she was going to make us buy a house if it killed her,” Phyllis says, bringing the Other Realtor story to a close. “Joe sure wanted to murder her. I just wanted to call you.”

It is of course foregone that they will rent the house and move in as early as within the hour. Though in the spirit of lagniappe I am acting as if all is not yet quite settled. Another realtor might adopt a supercilious spirit toward the Markhams for being hopeless donkeys who wouldn’t know a good deal if it grabbed them by the nuts. But to me it’s ennobling to help others face their hard choices, pilot them toward a reconciliation with life (it’s useful in piloting toward one’s own). In this case, I’m helping them believe renting is what they should do (being wise and cautious), by promoting the fantasy that each is acting in his own best interest by attempting to make the other happy.

“Now, I can tell this is a completely stable neighborhood,” Joe says with more of an off-duty military style now. (He means, though, no Negroes in evidence, which he takes to be a blessing.) He’s remained on the bottom step, small hands inserted in his pockets. He’s dressed entirely in Sears khaki and looks like a lumberyard foreman, his nutty goatee gone, his pecker shorts, flip-flops and generic smokes all gone, his little cheeky face as peaceable and wide-eyed as a baby’s, his lips pale with medicated normalcy. (The “big cave-in” has apparently been averted.) He is, I’m sure, contemplating the front bumper of my Crown Vic, where sometime in the last three days Paul — or someone like Paul — has affixed a LICK BUSH sticker which, also in the spirit of lagniappe, I’m leaving on.

Joe senses, I’m sure, his gaze carrying across the newly mown lawn and down Clio Street, that this neighborhood is a close replica writ small of the nicer parts of Haddam he was offered and mulishly turned down, and of nicer parts he wasn’t offered and couldn’t afford. Only he seems happy now, which is my wish for him: to put an end to his unhappy season of wandering, set aside his ideas of the economy’s false bottom or whether a significant event ever occurred in this house, to be a chooser instead of a bad-tempered beggar, to view life across a flatter plain (as he may be doing) and come down off the realty frontier.

Though specifically my wish is that the Markhams would move into 46 Clio, ostensibly as a defensive holding action, but gradually get to know their neighbors, talk yard-to-yard, make friends, see the wisdom of bargaining for a break in the rent in exchange for minor upkeep responsibilities, join the PTA, give pottery and papermaking demonstrations at the block association mixers, become active in the ACLU or the Urban League, begin to calculate their enhanced positive cash flow against the dour financial imperatives of ownership in fashioning an improved quality of life, and eventually stay ten years — after which they can move to Siesta Key and buy a condo (if condos still exist in 1998), using the money they’ve saved by renting. In other words, do in New Jersey exactly what they did in Vermont — arrive and depart — only with happier results. (Conservative, long-term renters are, of course, any landlord’s dream.)

“I think we’re damn lucky not to have got sucked into that Hanrahan house.” Joe looks at me with a bully’s self-assurance, as if he’s just figured this out by staring down the street — though of course he’s only angling for approval (which I’m happy to supply).

“I don’t think you ever saw yourself in that house, Joe. I don’t really think you liked it.” He’s still staring off from the bottom step, waiting, I take it, for nothing.

“I didn’t like having a prison in my back yard,” Phyllis says, fingering the doorbell, which chimes a distant, lonesome two tones back in the empty rooms. She is dressed in her own standard roomy, hip-concealing pleated khakis and sleeveless white ruffle-front blouse that makes her appear swollen. In spite of trying to act plucky, she looks hollow-cheeked and spent, her face too flushed, her fingernails worked down, her eyes moist as if she might start crying for no reason — though her red mushroom cut is as ever neat, clean and fluffy. (Possibly she’s experiencing recurrent health woes, though it’s more likely her last few days on earth have simply been as rigorous as mine.)

And yet despite these diminishments, I sense an earnest, almost equable acceptance is descending on both the Markhams: certain fires gone out; other, smaller ones being ignited. So that it’s conceivable they’re on the threshold of unexpected bliss, know it instinctually like a lucky charm but can’t quite get it straight, so long has their luck been shitty.

“My view’s simple,” Joe says, apropos of the lost Hanrahan option. “If somebody buys a house you think you want before you can get it, they just wanted it more than you did. It’s no tragedy.” He shakes his head at the sound wisdom of this, though once again it’s verbatim “realtor’s wisdom” I provided long months ago but actually don’t mind hearing now.

“You’re right there, Joe,” I say. “You’re really right. Let’s take a look inside, whaddaya say?”

A walk-thru of an empty house you expect to rent (and not buy and live in till you croak) is not so much a careful inspection as a half-assed once-over in which you hope to find as little as possible to drive you crazy.

The Harrises’ house, in spite of opened doors, raised windows and every single tap run for at least a minute, has clung to its unwelcoming older-citizen odor of sink traps and mouse bait, and generally stayed dank and chilly throughout. As a consequence, Phyllis lingers noncommittally near the windows, while Joe heads right off for the bathroom and a quick closet count. She touches the nubbly plaster walls and looks out through the blue blinds, first at the close-by McLeods’, then down at the narrow side yard, then into the back, where the garage sits locked up in the morning sunshine, surrounded by a bed of day lilies weeks past bloom. (I’ve left the push mower against the garage wall where they can notice it.) She tries one sink faucet, opens one cabinet and the refrigerator (which I have somehow failed to inspect but am relieved to find doesn’t stink), then walks to the back door, leans and looks out its window, as if in her mind right outside should be a verdant mountain pinnacle in full view, where she could hike today and take a drink from a cold spring, then lie faceup in gentians and columbines as pillowy clouds scud past, causing no car alarms to go off. She has wanted to come here, and now here she is, though it requires a specific moment of wistful renunciation, during which she may once again be seeing backward to today from an uncertain future, a time when Joe is “gone,” the older kids are even more scattered and alienated, Sonja is with her own second husband and his kids in Tucumcari, and all she can do is wonder how things took the peculiar course they did. Such a view would make anyone but a Taoist Sage a little abstracted.

She turns to me and smiles actually wistfully. I am in the arched doorway connecting the small dining room with the small, neat kitchen, my hands in my red windbreaker pockets. I regard her companionably while fingering the house keys. I am where a loved one would wait below a mistletoe sprig at Christmas, though my reverie of a physical Phyllis has become another holiday statistic.

“We did think about just staying permanently in a motel,” she says almost as a warning. “Joe considered becoming an independent contractor at the book company. The money’s so much better that way, but you pay for your own benefits, which is a big consideration for me now. We met another young couple there who were doing it, but they didn’t have a child, and it’s hard to go off to school from a Ramada. The clean sheets and cable are attractive to Joe. He even called some nine hundred number at two o’clock this morning about moving to Florida. We were just beyond making sense.”

Joe is in the bathroom, studiously testing the sink and both faucets, checking out the medicine cabinet. He does not know how to rent a house and can only think in terms of permanence.

“I expect you all to keep right on looking,” I say. “I expect to sell you a house.” I smile at her, as I have in other houses, in direr straits than now, which in fact are not so dire but pretty damn good at $575.

“We were burning our candle at both ends, I guess,” she says, standing in the middle of the empty red-tiled kitchen. It is not the right trope, but I understand. “We need to burn one end at a time for a while.”

“Your candle lasts longer that way,” I say idiotically. There isn’t much that really needs saying in any case. They’re renting, not buying, and she is simply not used to it either. All is fine.

“Bip, bip, bip, bip, bip, bip, bip,” Joe can be heard saying back in the bedroom, seizing his chance to check the filters on the window unit.

“How’s your son?” Phyllis looks at me oddly, as if it has occurred to her at this very second that I’m not at his bedside but am here showing a short-term rental on the 4th of July with my child on the critical list. A sense of shared parental responsibility but also personal accusation clouds her eyes.

“He came through the surgery real well, thanks.” I fidget the keys in my pocket to make a distracting sound. “He’ll have to wear glasses. But he’s moving down here with me in September.” Perhaps in a year, as a trusted older boy, he can even escort Sonja on a date to a mall.

“Well, he’s lucky,” Phyllis says, swaying a little, her hands judgmentally down in her own generous pockets. “Fireworks are dangerous no matter whose hands they’re in. They’re banned in Vermont.” She now wants me out of her house. In the span of sixty seconds she’s assumed responsibility for things here.

“I’m sure he’s learned his lesson,” I say, and then we stand saying nothing, listening to Joe’s footsteps in the other rooms, the sound of closet doors being cracked open and reopened to check for settling, light switches clicked up and down, walls thumped for studs — all activities accompanied by the occasional “Bip, bip, bip” or an “Okay, yep, I get it,” now and then an “Uh-oh,” though most often “Hmm-hmmm.” All, of course, is in perfect, turn-key condition; the house was gone over by Everick and Wardell after the Harrises left, and I have checked it myself (though not lately).

“No basement, huh?” Joe says, appearing suddenly in the hall doorway, from which he takes a quick look around the ceiling and back out toward the open front door. The house is warming now, its floors shiny with outside light, its dank odors shifting away through the open windows. “I’ll have to improvise a kiln somewhere else, I guess.” (No mention of Phyllis’s papermaking needs.)

“They just didn’t build ’em in this neighborhood.” I nod, touch my sore, bitten cheek with my tonguetip, feel relieved Joe isn’t planning to fire pots on site.

“You can bet it’s a groundwater consideration,” Joe says in a spurious engineer’s voice, going to the window and looking out as Phyllis did, straight into the side of the McLeods’ house, where my hope is he doesn’t come eye-to-eye with a shirtless Larry McLeod aiming his 9-mm. across the side yard. “Anything really bad ever happen in this house, Frank?” He scratches the back of his bristly neck and peers down at something outside that has caught his eye — a cat, possibly.

“Nothing I know about. I guess all houses have pasts. The ones I’ve lived in all sure did. Somebody’s bound to have died in some room here sometime. I just don’t know who.” I say this to annoy him, knowing he’s out of options, and because I know his question is a two-bit subterfuge for broaching the race issue. He doesn’t want credit for broaching it, but he’d be happy if I would.

“Just wondering,” Joe says. “We built our own house in Vermont, is all. Nothing bad ever happened there.” He continues staring down, inventorying other gambits. “I guess this is a drug-free zone.” Phyllis looks over at him as if she’d just realized she hated him.

“S’far’s I know,” I say. “It’s a changing universe, of course.”

“Right. No shit.” Joe shakes his head in the fresh window light.

“Frank can’t be held responsible for the neighbors,” Phyllis says crabbily (though it’s not completely true). She has been standing under the arch with me, looking at the empty walls and floors, possibly envisioning her lost life as a child. Only her mind’s made up.

“Who lives next door?” Joe says.

“On the other side, an elderly couple named Broadnax. Rufus was a Pullman porter on the New York Central. You won’t see them much, but I’m sure you’ll like them. Over on the other side is a younger couple” (of miscreants). “She’s from Minnesota. He’s a Viet vet. They’re interesting folks. I own that house too.”

“You own ‘em both?” Joe turns and gives me a crafty, squint-eyed look, as if I’d just grown vastly in his estimation and was probably crooked.

“Just these two,” I say.

“So you’re holdin’ onto ’em till they’re worth a fortune?” He smirks. For the moment he has begun speaking in a Texas accent.

“They’re already worth a fortune. I’m just waiting till they’re worth two fortunes.”

Joe adopts an even more ludicrous, self-satisfied expression of appreciation. He’s always had my number but now sees we are much more of a pair and a lot sharper cookies than he ever thought (even if we are crooked), since socking away for the future’s exactly what he believes in doing — and might be doing if he hadn’t plunged off on a two-decade Wanderjahr to the land of mud season, black ice, disappointing perk tests and feast-or-famine resales, only to reenter the real world with just the vaguest memory of which coin a quarter was and which was a dime.

“It’s all still a matter of perception, idn’t it?” Joe says enigmatically.

“It seems to be, these days,” I say, thinking perhaps he’s talking about real estate. I more noisily jingle the keys to signal my readiness to get a move on — though I have little to do until noon.

“Okay, well, I’m pretty satisfied here,” Joe says decisively, Texas accent gone, nodding his head vigorously. Through the window he’s been looking out, and across the side yard, I see little Winnie McLeod’s sleepy face behind the thin curtain, frowning at us. “Whaddaya think, baby doll?”

“I can make it nicer,” Phyllis says, her voice moving around the empty room like a trapped spirit. (I’ve never imagined Phyllis as “baby doll” but am willing to.)

“Maybe Frank’ll sell it to us when we come into our inheritance.” Joe gives me a little tongue-out, sly-boots wink.

“Two inheritances,” I say and wink back. “This baby’ll cost ya.”

“Yeah, okay. Two, then,” Joe says. “When we make two fortunes we can own a five-and-a-half-room house in the darky section of Haddam, New Jersey. That’s a deal, isn’t it? That’s a success story you can brag to your grandkids about.” Joe rolls his eyes humorously to the ceiling and gives his shiny forehead a thump with his middle finger. “How ‘bout the election? How d’ya choose?”

“I’m joined at the hip with the tax-and-spenders, I guess.” Joe wouldn’t be asking if he weren’t at this very moment vacating long-held principles of cultural liberalism in favor of something leaner and meaner and more suitable to his new gestalt. He expects me to sanction this too.

“You mean joined at the wallet,” Joe says dopily. “But hell, yes. Me too.” This to my absolute surprise. “Just don’t ask me. My old man”—the Chinese-slum king of Aliquippa—“had a wide streak of social conscience. He was a Socialist. But what the fuck. Maybe living here’ll pound some sense in my head. Now Phyllis, here, she’s the mahout, she rides the elephant.” Phyllis starts for the door, tired and unamused by politics. Joe fastens on me a gaping, blunt-toothed, baby-faced smile of philosophical comradeship. These things, of course, are never as you expect. Anytime you find you’re right, you should be wrong.

It is good to stand out on the hot sidewalk with the two of them under the spreading sycamore, and encouraging to see how quickly and tidily permanence asserts its illusion and begins to confer a bounty.

In fifteen minutes the Markhams have become longtime residents, and I their unwieldy, unwished-for guest. An invitation to come back, have lemonade, sit out back on nylon lawn chairs is definitely not forthcoming. They both squint from the pavement to the sun and the untroubled beryl sky as though they judge a good soaking rain — and not my paltry, unremarked watering — to be the only thing that’ll do their yard any good.

We have painlessly agreed on a month-to-month, with three months in advance as a security blanket for me — though I’ve consented to remit a month if they find a house worth buying in the first thirty days (fat chance). I’ve passed along our agency’s “What’s The Diff?” booklet, spelling out in layman’s terms the pros and cons of renting vs. buying: “Never pay over 20 percent of gross income on housing,” although “You always sleep better in a place you own” (debatable). There’s nothing, however, about needing to “see” yourself, or securing sanction or the likelihood of significant events ever having occurred in your chosen abode. Those issues are best dealt with by a shrink, not a realtor. Finally we’ve agreed to sign the papers tomorrow in my office, and I’ve told them to feel free to haul in their sleeping bags and camp out in their “own house” tonight. Who could say nay?

“Sonja’s going to find it real eye-opening here,” Phyllis the Republican says with confidence. “It’s what we came down here for, but maybe we didn’t know it.”

“Reality check,” Joe says stonily. They’re both referring to the race issue, albeit deviously, while holding each other’s hand.

We are beside my car, which gleams blue and hot in the ten o’clock sun. I have the Harrises’ accumulated junk mail and the Trenton Times tucked under my arm, and have handed over their keys.

I know that filtering up like rare and rich incense in both the Markhams’ nostrils is the up-to-now endangered prospect of life’s happy continuance — a different notion entirely from Irv Ornstein’s indecisive, religio-ethnic-historical one, though he might claim they’re the same. An abrupter feeling is the Markhams’, though, tantamount to the end of a prison sentence imposed for crimes they’ve been helpless to avoid: the ordinary misdemeanors and misprisions of life, of which we’re all innocent and guilty. Alive but unrecognized in their pleased but dizzied heads is at least now the possibility of calling on Myrlene Beavers with a hot huckleberry pie or a blemished-second “gift” pot from Joe’s new kiln; or of finding common ground regarding in-law problems with Negro neighbors more their age; of letting little dark-skinned kids sleep over; of nurturing what they both always knew they owned in their hearts but never exactly found an occasion to act on in the monochrome Green Mountains: that magical sixth-sense understanding of the other races, which always made the Markhams see themselves as out-of-the-ordinary white folks.

A police cruiser, our lone Negro officer at the wheel, finally passes slowly by, on the lookout for the Clio Street bombers. He waves perfunctorily and continues on. He is now their neighbor.

“Look, when we get all our shit moved in, we’ll get you over here for a meal,” Joe says, turning loose Phyllis’s hand and trussing a short proprietary arm even more closely about her rounded shoulders. It is obvious she’s informed him of her newest medical sorrows, which may be why he came around to renting, which may be why she told him. Another reality check.

“That’s a meal I’m happy to wait for,” I say, wiping a driblet of sweat off my neck, feeling the touchy spot where I was struck by a baseball in a far-off city. I have expected Joe to bring up the lease-purchase concept at least once, but he hasn’t. Possibly he still harbors subconscious suspicions I’m a homosexual, which makes him standoffish.

I take a guarded look up at the old brick-veneer facade and curtained windows at #44, where there is no movement though I know surveillance is ongoing, and where I feel for an uneasy moment certain my $450 is being held hostage to the McLeods’ ingrown convictions regarding privacy and soleness, having nothing to do with financial distress, lost jobs or embarrassment (which I would know how to cope with). I am, in fact, less concerned for my money than with the prospect of my own life’s happy continuance with this problem unresolved. And yet I’m capable of making more of anything than I should, and I might just as well take a more complex approach to the unknown — such as never asking them for another goddamned nickel and seeing what effect that produces over time. Today, after all, is not only the fourth, but the Fourth. And as with the stolid, unpromising, unlikable Markhams, real independence must sometimes be shoved down your throat.

On a street we cannot see, a car alarm (possibly the same one as before) sets off loudly, and at hectic intervals, bwoop-bwip, bwoop-bwip, just as the bells at St. Leo’s begin tolling ten. It makes for a minor cacophony: thirteen clocks striking at the same second. Joe and Phyllis smile and shake their heads, look around at the heavens as if they were breaking open and this was the only signal they would hear. Though they have decided to try being happy, are in a firm acceptance mode and would agree at this moment to like anything. It must be said, at last, that I admire them.

I take a parting glimpse at Myrlene Beavers’s, where the silver bars of her walker are visible behind the screen. She is watching too, phone in her quaverous grip, alert to fresh outrage. “Who are these people? What do they hope to achieve? If only Tom were alive to take care of it.”

I’m shaking Joe Markham’s hand almost without knowing it. It is good to leave now, as I have done the best I can by everyone. What more can you do for wayward strangers than to shelter them?

Itake a morning’s ride up into town now, bent on nothing special — a drive-by of my hot-dog stand on the Green, a pass of the parade’s staging grounds for a sniff of the holiday aromas, a cruise (like a tourist’s) down my own street to inspect the site of Homo haddamus pithecarius, whose appearance, irrespective of provenance — M or F, human or ape, freedman or slave — I have a certain natural interest in. Who of us, after all, would be buried minus the hope of being returned someday to the air and light, to the curious, the tentative and even affectionate regard of our fellow uprights? None of us, I grant you, would mind a second appraisal with the benefit of some time having passed.

I in fact enjoy such a yearly drive through town, end to end, without my usual purposes to spur me (a property-line check, a roof and foundation write-up, an eleventh-hour visit before a closing), just a drive to take a look but not to touch or feel or be involved. Such a tour embodies its own quiet participation, since there is sovereign civic good in being a bystander, a watcher, one of those whom civic substance and display are meant to serve — the public.

Seminary Street has a measly, uncrowded, preparade staticness to it all around. The town’s new bunting is swagged on our three stoplights, the sidewalk flags not flying but lank. Citizens on the sidewalks all seem at yawing loose ends, their faces wide and uncommunicative as they stop to watch the parade crew blocking the curbs with sawhorses for the bands and floats that will follow, as if (they seem to say) this should be a usual Monday, one should be getting other things done and started. Skinny neighborhood boys I don’t recognize slalom the hot middle stripes on skateboards, their arms floating out for balance, while at the Virtual Profusion and the former Benetton and Laura Ashley (now in new personas as Foot Locker and The Gap) clerks are shoving sale tables back to their storefronts, preparing to wait in the cool indoors for crowds that may finally come.

It is an odd holiday, to be sure — one a man or woman could easily grow abstracted about, its practical importance to the task of holding back wild and dark misrule never altogether clear or provable; as though independence were only private and too crucial to celebrate with others; as though we should all just get on with being independent, given that it is after all the normal, commonsensical human condition, to be taken for granted unless opposed or thwarted, in which case unreserved, even absurd measures should be taken to restore or reimagine it (as I’ve tried to do with my son but that he has accomplished alone). Best maybe just to pass the day as the original signers did and as I prefer to do, in a country-like setting near to home, alone with your thoughts, your fears, your hopes, your “moments of reason” for what new world lies fearsomely ahead.

I cruise now out toward the big unfinished Shop Rite at the eastern verge of town, where Haddam borders on woodsy Haddam Township, past the Shalom Temple, the defunct Jap car dealer and the Magyar Bank, up old Route 27 toward New Brunswick. The Shop Rite was scheduled to be up and going by New Year’s, but its satellite businesses (a TCBY, a Color Tile and a Pet Depot) began dragging their feet after the stock market dip and the resultant “chill” in the local climate, so that all work is at present on hold. I, in fact, wouldn’t be sad or consider myself an antidevelopment traitor to see the whole shebang fold its tents and leave the business to our merchants in town; turn the land into a people’s park or a public vegetable garden; make friends in a new way. (Such things, of course, never happen.)

Out on the wide parking lot, fairly baking in the heat, waits most of our parade, its constituents wandering about in unparade-like disorder: a colonial fife-and-drum band from De Tocqueville Academy; a regiment of coonskin-cap regulars in buckskins, accompanied by several burly men in Mother Hubbards and combat boots (dressed to show independence can be won at the cost of looking ridiculous). Here is a brigade of beefy, wired-up wheelchair vets in American-flag shirts, doing weaves and wheelies while passing basketballs (others simply sit smoking and talking in the sunshine). Waiting, too, is another Mustang regatta, a female clown troupe, some local car dealers in good-guy cowboy hats, ready to chauffeur our elected officials (not yet arrived) in the backs of new convertibles, while a passel of political ingenues are all set to ride behind on a flatbed truck, wearing oversize baby diapers and convict clothes. A swank silver bus parked all by itself under the shadeless Shop Rite sign contains the Fruehlingheisen Banjo and Saxophone Band from Dover, Delaware, most of whose members have postponed coming out. And last but not least, two Chevy bigfoots, one red, one blue, sit mid-lot, ready to rumble down Seminary at parade’s end, their tiny cabs like teacups above their giant cleated wheels. (Later on there’re plans for them to crush some Japanese cars out at the Revolutionary War Battlefield.) All that’s lacking, in my view, are harem guards, who would make Paul Bascombe happy.

From where I stop out on the shoulder for a look, nothing yet seems inspired or up to parade pitch. Several tissue-paper floats are not yet manned or hitched up. The centerpiece Haddam High band has not appeared. And marshals in hot swallowtail coats and tricorne hats are hiking around with walkie-talkies and clipboards, conferring with parade captains and gazing at their watches. All in fact seems timeless and desultory, most of the participants standing alone in the sun in their costumes, looking off much as the fantasy ballplayers did in Cooperstown yesterday, and much, I’m sure, for the same reasons: they’re bored, or else full of longing for something they can’t quite name.

I decide to make a fast swerve through the lot entrance, avoid the whole parade assemblage and continue back out onto 27 toward town, satisfied that I’ve glimpsed behind the parade’s façade and not been the least disappointed. Even the smallest public rigmarole is a pain in the ass, its true importance measurable not in the final effect but by how willing we are to leave our usual selves behind and by how much colossal bullshit and anarchy we’re willing to put up with in a worthwhile cause. I always like it better when clowns seem to try to be happy.

Unexpectedly, though, just as I make my turn around and through the Shop Rite entrance, bent on escape, a man — one of the swallowtail marshals in a hat, red sash and high-buttoned shoes, who’s been consulting a clipboard while talking to one of the young men wearing diapers — starts hurriedly toward my moving car. He waves his clipboard as if he knows me and has an aim, means to share a holiday greeting or message, perhaps even get me in on the fun as someone’s substitute. (He may have noticed my LICK BUSH sticker and thinks I’m in the mood for high jinks.) Only I’m in another mood, perfectly good but one I’m happy to keep to myself, and so continue swerving without acknowledging him, right back onto 27. There’s no telling, after all, who he might be: someone with a lengthy realty complaint, or possibly Mr. Fred Koeppel of Griggstown, who “needs” to discuss a negotiated commission on his house, which’ll sell itself anyway (so let it). Or possibly (and this happens with too great a frequency) he’s somebody from my former married days who happened to be in the Yale Club just yesterday morning and saw Ann and wants to report she looks “great,” “super,” “dynamite”—one of those. But I’m not interested. Independence Day, at least for the daylight hours, confers upon us the opportunity to act as independently as we know how. And my determination, this day, is to stay free of suspicious greetings.

I drive back in on sunny and fast-emptying Seminary, where the actual civic razzmatazz still seems a good hour off — past the closed PO, the closed Frenchy’s Gulf, the nearly empty August Inn, the Coffee Spot, around the Square, past the Press Box Bar, the closed Lauren-Schwindell office, Garden State S&L, the somnolent Institute itself and the always officially open but actually profoundly closed First Presbyterian, where the WELCOME sign out front says, Happy Birthday, America! * 5K Race * HE Can Help You At The Finish Line!

Though farther on and across from Village Hall on Haddam Green there is action, with plenty of citizens already arrived in musing good spirits. A red-and-white-striped carnival marquee has been put up in the open middle sward, with our newly refurbished Victorian bandstand shining whitely in the elms and beeches and crawling with kids. Many Haddamites are simply out here strolling around as they might on some lane in County Antrim, though wearing frilly pastel dresses, seersuckers, white bucks, boaters and pink parasols, and looking — many of them — like self-conscious extras in a Fifties movie about the South. Out-of-place country-yokel music is blaring from a little glass-sided trailer owned by the station where I read Doctor Zhivago to the blind, and the police and fire departments have their free exhibits of flameproof suits, bomb-defusing shields and sniper rifles set up side by side under the big tent. The CYO has just begun its continuous volleyball game, the hospital its free blood pressure testing, the Lions and AA their joint free-coffee canteen, while the Young Democrats and Young Republicans are in the process of hosing down a mudhole for their annual tug-of-war. Otherwise, various village businesses, with their employees turned out in white aprons and red bow ties, have joined forces behind long slug-bucket grills to hawk meatless leanburgers, while some costumed Pennsylvania Dutch dancers perform folk didoes on a portable dance floor to music only they can hear. Later on, a dog show is planned.

Off to the left, across from the lawn of Village Hall, where seven years ago I achieved the profound and unwelcome independence of divorce, my silver “Firecracker Weenie Firecracker” cart sits in the warm witch hazel shade, attracting a small, dedicated crowd including Uncle Sam and two other Clio Street bombers, a few of my neighbors, plus Ed McSweeny in a business suit and a briefcase and Shax Murphy wearing a pair of pink go-to-hell pants, a bright-green blazer and running shoes — and looking, despite his Harvard background, like nothing so much as a realtor. Wardell and Everick’s gleaming onyx faces are visible back inside the trailer under the awning. Dressed in silly waiters’ tunics and paper caps, they are dispensing free Polish dogs and waxed-paper root beer mugs and occasionally rattling the “Clair Devane Fund” canisters Vonda has made up in our office. I have tried now on three occasions to sound out the two of them about Clair, whom they adored and treated like a rambunctious niece. But they have avoided me each time. And I’ve realized, as a consequence, that what I probably wanted was not to hear words about Clair at all but to hear something life-affirming and flattering about myself, and they are merely wise to me and have chosen not to let me get started. (Though it’s also possible that they’ve been stung to silence now by the two days when they were held by the police, treated harshly and then released without comment or ceremony — deemed, after all and as they are, entirely innocent.)

And yet, all is as I’ve expected and modestly planned it: no great shakes, but no small shakes either — a fine achievement for a day such at this, following a day such as that.

I pull unnoticed to the curb on the east edge of the Green, just at Cromwell Lane, let down my window to the music and crowd hum and heat, and simply sit and watch: millers and strollers, oldsters and lovers, singles and families with kids, everyone out for a morning’s smiley look-see, then an amble up Seminary for the parade, before hearkening to the day’s remains with a practical eye. There is the easeful feeling that the 4th is a day one can leave to chance; though as the hours slide toward dark it will still seem best to find oneself at home. Possibly it’s too close to Flag Day, which itself is too close to Memorial Day, which is already too damn close to Father’s Day. Too much even well-motivated celebration can pose problems.

I of course think of Paul, cased in gauze and bandages in not-so-faraway Connecticut, who would find something funny to say at the day’s innocent expense: “You know you’re an American when you …” (get socked in the eye). “They laughed at me in America when I …” (barked like a Pomeranian). “Americans never, or almost never …” (see their fathers every day).

Surprisingly, I have not thought of him at length since early dawn, when I woke up in a gray light and cold from a dream in which, on a lawn like the Deerslayer’s, he was dragged to earth by a dog that looked like old Keester and torn bloody, while I stood on the porch nuzzling and whispering with an indistinct woman wearing a bikini and a chef’s hat, whom I couldn’t break away from to offer help. It is a dream with no mystery — like most dreams — and merely punctuates our puny efforts to gain dominion over our unbrave natures in behalf of advancing toward what we deem to be right. (The complex dilemma of independence is not so simple a matter, which is why we fight to be known by how hard we try rather than by how completely we succeed.)

Though where Paul is concerned I’ve only just begun trying. And while I don’t subscribe to the “crash-bam” theory of human improvement, which says you must knock good sense into your head and bad sense out, yesterday may have cleared our air and accounts and opened, along with wounds, an unexpected window for hope to go free. A last in some ways, but a first in others. “The soul becomes,” as the great man said, by which he meant, I think, slowly.

Last night, when I stopped in the moon-shot river village of Long Eddy, New York, a TOWN MEETING TONITE sign had been posted in both directions. “Reagan Cabinet Minister to Explain Things and Answer Questions” was their important agenda, there on the banks of the Delaware, where just below town single fishermen in ghostly silhouette stood in the darkly glittering stream, their rods and lines flicking and arcing through the hot swarms of insects.

At a pay phone on a closed-up filling station wall, I made a brief reconnaissance call down to Karl Bemish, to learn if the menacing “Mexicans” had had their fates sealed at the business end of Karl’s alley sweeper. (Not, I prayed.)

“Oh well, jeez, hell no, Franky. Those guys,” Karl said merrily from his cockpit behind the pop-stand window. It was nine. “The cops got them three skunks. They went to knock over a Hillcrest Farms over in New Hope. But the guy runnin’ it was a cop himself. And he came out the front blazin’ with an AK-47. Shot out the glass, all the tires, penetrated the engine block, cracked the frame, shot all three of ‘em in the course. None of them died, though, which is sort of a shame. Did it standing right on the sidewalk. I guess you need to be a cop to run a small business these days.”

“Boy,” I said, “boy-oh-boy.” Across silent, deserted Highway 97, all the windows in the belfried town hall were blazing and plenty of cars and pickups sat parked out front. I wondered who the “Reagan Minister” might’ve been — possibly someone on his way to prison and a Christian conversion.

“I bet you’re having a bang-up time, aren’t you, with your kid?” Mugs were clanking in the background. I could hear muffled, satisfied voices of late-night customers as Karl opened and shut the window slide and the cash register dinged. Good emanations, all.

“We had some problems,” I said, feeling numbed by the day’s menu of sad events, plus the driving, plus my skull and all my bones beginning to ache.

“Ahh, you prolly got your expectations jacked up too high,” Karl said, preoccupied yet annoying. “It’s like armies moving on their bellies. It’s slow going.”

“I never thought that’s what that meant,” I said, good emanations rising away into the mosquitoey darkness.

“D’you think he trusts you?” Clink, clink, clink. “Thanks, guy.”

“Yeah. I think he does.”

“Well, but you can’t tell when you’re getting anyplace with kids. You just have to hope they don’t grow up like these little Mexican twerps, pulling stickups and getting shot. I take myself out to dinner and drink a toast to good luck every third Sunday in June.”

“Why didn’t you have any kids, Karl?” A lone citizen of Long Eddy, a small man in a pale shirt, stepped out the front door to the top of the town hall steps, lit a cigarette and stood drinking in the smoke and considering the evening’s sweet benefactions. He was, I supposed, a disgruntled refugee from the cabinet minister’s explanations — possibly a moderate — and I felt envy for whatever he might’ve had on his mind just at that instant, the mere nothing-much of it: the satisfactions of optional community involvement, a point of honest disagreement with a trusted public servant, a short beer later with friends, a short drive home, a quiet after-hours entry to his own bed, followed by the slow caressing carriage to sleep at the hands of a willing other. Could he know, I wondered, how lucky he was? There was hardly a doubt he did.

“Oh, Millie and I tried our best,” Karl said drolly. “Or I guess we did. Maybe we didn’t do it right. Let’s see now, first you put it in, then …” Karl was obviously in a mood to celebrate not being robbed and murdered. I held the receiver out in the dark so I wouldn’t have to hear his rube’s routine, and in that splitting instant I missed New Jersey and my life in it with a grinding, exile’s poignancy.

“I’m just glad you’re all right down there, Karl,” I broke back in, without having listened.

“We’re pretty damn busy down here,” he brayed back. “Fifty paid customers since eleven a.m.”

“And no robberies.”

“What’s that?”

“No robberies,” I said more loudly.

“No. Right. We’re actually geniuses, Frank. Geniuses on a small scale. We’re what this country’s all about.” Clink, clink, clink, mugs colliding. “Thanks, pal.”

“Maybe,” I said, watching the pale-shirted man flick away his smoke, spit on the porch steps, run both hands back through his hair and reenter the tall door, revealing a coldly brilliant yellow light within.

“You can’t tell me ole Bonzo’s uncle’s that fulla shit,” Karl said vehemently, referring to our President of the moment, whose cabinet minister was only yards away from me. “Because if he’s that fulla shit, I’m fulla shit. And I’m not fulla shit. That’s what I know. I’m not fulla shit. Not everybody can say that.” I wondered what our customers could be thinking, hearing Karl bellowing away behind his little sliding screen about not being fulla shit.

“I don’t like him,” I said, though it made me feel debilitated to say so.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. You believe God resides in all of us, nobility of man, help the poor, give it all away. Yakkedy, yakkedy, yak. I believe God resides in heaven, and I’m down here selling birch beer on my own.”

“I don’t believe in God, Karl. I believe it takes all kinds.”

“No it don’t,” he said. Karl might’ve been drunk or having another small stroke. “What I think is, Frank, you seem one way and are another, if you want to know the gospel truth, speaking of God. You’re a conservative in a fuckin’ liberal’s zoot suit.”

“I’m a liberal in a liberal’s zoot suit,” I said. Or, I thought, but certainly didn’t admit to Karl, a liberal in a conservative’s zoot suit. In three days I’d been called a burglar, a priest, a homosexual, a nervous nelly, and now a conservative, none of which was true. (It was not an ordinary weekend.) “I do like to help the poor and displaced, Karl. I sure as hell in fact dragged you to the surface when you were tits-up.”

“That was just for sport,” he said. “And that’s why you have so much effing trouble with your son. Your message is all mixed up. You’re lucky he’ll have anything to do with you at all.”

“Why don’t you bite my ass, Karl?” I shouted, standing in the dark, wondering if there wasn’t some simple, legal way to put Karl out on the street, where he’d have more time to practice psychology. (Spiteful thoughts are not unique to conservatives.)

“I’m too busy to gas with you now,” Karl said. I heard the cash register ding again. “Thanks a million. Hey, pardon me, ladies, you want your change, don’t you? Two cents is two cents. Next. Come on, don’t be shy, sweetheart.” I waited for Karl to blast back something else infuriating, something more about my message being mixed. But he simply put the phone down without hanging it up, as if he meant to return, so that for a minute I could hear him going about his business serving customers. But in a while I put my receiver back on the hook and just stared out at the sparkling, alluring river beyond me in the dark, letting my breathing come back to normal.

My call to the Algonquin and Sally had a completely different, unexpected and altogether positive result, which, when I got home and found out Paul had weathered his surgery as well as could be hoped, allowed me to crawl in bed with all the windows open and the fan on (no more thought of reading Carl Becker or drifting to sleep) and to swoon off into profound unconscious while the cicadas sang their songs in the silent trees.

Sally, to my surprise, was as sympathetic as a blood relative to my long story about Paul’s getting beaned, our never making it into the Hall of Fame, my having to stay in Oneonta, then heading home late rather than pounding down to NYC to share the night with her, and instead dispatching her to the nicest place I could think of (albeit for another night alone). Sally said she thought she could hear something new in my voice, and for the first time: something “more human” and even “powerful” and “angular,” whereas, she reminded me, I had seemed until this weekend “pretty buttoned up and well insulated,” “priestly” (this again), often downright “ornery and exclusive,” though “down deep” she’d always thought I was a good guy and actually not cold but pretty sympathetic. (I had thought most of these last things about myself for years.) This time, though, she said, she thought she heard worry and some fear in my voice (buzzy timbres familiar, no doubt, from her dying clients’ critiques of Les Misérables or M. Butterfly on their chatty return trips to the Shore, but apparently not incompatible with “powerful” or “angular”). She could tell I’d been “vitally moved” by something “deep and complicated,” which my son’s injury may have been “only the tip of the iceberg for.” It may, she said, have everything to do with my gradual emergence from the Existence Period, which she actually said was a “simulated way to live your life,” a sort of “mechanical isolation that couldn’t go on forever;” I was probably already off and running into “some other epoch,” maybe some more “permanent period” she was glad to see because it boded well for me as a person, even if the two of us didn’t end up together (which it seemed might be the case, since she didn’t really know what I meant by love and probably wouldn’t trust it).

I, of course, was simply relieved she wasn’t sitting back with her long legs parked on a silken footrest, ordering tins of Beluga caviar and thousand-dollar bottles of champagne and calling up everybody she knew from Beardsville to Phnom Penh and regaling them at length about what a poor shiftless specimen I was — really just pathetic when you got right down to it — and actually comical (something I’d already admitted to), given my idiotic and juvenile attempts to make good. Just such narrowly missed human connections as this can in fact be fatal, no matter who’s at fault, and often result in unrecoverable free fall and a too-hasty conclusion that “the whole goddamn thing’s not worth bothering with or it wouldn’t be so goddamn confusing all the goddamn time,” after which one party (or both) just wanders off and never thinks to look toward the other again. Such is the iffiness of romance.

Sally, however, seemed willing to take a longer look, a deeper breath, blink hard and follow her gut instincts about me, which meant looking for good sides (making me up with the brighter facets out). All of which was damn lucky for me since, standing there by the dark gas station in Long Eddy, I could sense like a faint, sweet perfume in the night the possibility of better yet to come, only I had no list of particulars to feel better about, and not much light on my horizon except a keyhole hope to try to make it brighter.

And indeed, before I finally climbed back in my car and headed off into the lush night toward Jersey, she began talking at first about whether or not it would ever be possible for her to get married after all these years, and then about what kind of permanent epoch might be dawning in her life. (Such thoughts are apparently infectious.) She went on to tell me — in much more dramatic tones than Joe Markham had on Friday morning — that she’d had dark moments of doubting her own judgment about many things, and that she worried about not knowing the difference between risking something (which she considered morally necessary) and throwing caution to the winds (which she considered stupid and, I supposed, had to do with me). In several electrifying leaps and connections that made good sense to her, she said she wasn’t a woman who thought other adults needed mothering, and if that’s what I wanted I should definitely look elsewhere; she said that making her up (which she referred to then as “reassembling”) just to make love appealing was actually intolerable, no matter what she’d said yesterday, and that I couldn’t just keep switching words around indefinitely to suit myself but needed instead to accept the unmanageable in others; and finally that while she might understand me pretty well and even like me a lot, there was no reason to think that necessarily meant anything about true affection, which she again reminded me I’d said I was beyond anyway. (These accounted, I’m sure, for the feelings of congestion she experienced early Friday morning and that prompted her call to me while I was in bed snuffling over my Becker and the difference between making history and writing it.)

I told her, raptly watching while the last of the night’s anglers waded back across the ever darker but still brilliant surface of the Delaware, that I once again had no expectations for reassembling her, or for mothering either, though from time to time I might need a facilitator (it didn’t seem necessary to give in on everything), and that I’d thought in these last days about several aspects of an enduring relationship with her, that it didn’t seem at all like a business deal, and that I liked the idea plenty, in fact felt a kind of whirring elevation about her and the whole prospect — which I did. Plus, I had a strong urge to make her happy, which didn’t seem in the least way smooth (or cowardly, as Ann had said), and wished in fact she’d take the train to Haddam the next day, by which time the Markhams and the parade would be in the record books and we could resume our speculations into the evening, lie out in the grass on the Great Lawn of the Institute (where I still had privileges as temporal consultant without portfolio) and watch Christian fireworks, after which we might ignite some sparks of our own (a borrowed idea, but still a good one).

“That all sounds nice,” Sally said from her suite on West Forty-fourth. “It seems reckless, though. Doesn’t it to you? After the other night, when it seemed all so over with?” Her voice suddenly sounded mournful and skeptical at once, which wasn’t the tone I’d exactly hoped for.

“Not to me it doesn’t,” I said out of the dark. “To me it seems great. Even if it is reckless it seems great.” (Supposedly I was the one tarred with the “caution” brush.)

“Something about all those things I said to you about myself and about you, and now taking the train down and lying in the grass watching fireworks. It’s suddenly made me feel like I don’t know what I’m getting into, like I’m out of place.”

“Look,” I said, “if Wally shows up, I’ll do the honorable thing, assuming I know what it is or who he is.”

“Well, that’s sweet,” she said. “You’re sweet. I know you’d try to do that. I’m not going to think about Wally showing up anymore, though.”

“That’s a good idea,” I said. “That’s what I’m doing too. So don’t worry about feeling out of place. That’s what I’m here for.”

“That’s an encouraging start,” she said. “It is. It’s always encouraging to know what you’re here for.”

And in that way last night it all began to seem promising and doable, if lacking in long-term specifics. I finished our talk by telling her not that I loved her but that I wasn’t beyond affection, which she said she was glad to hear. Then I beat it back down the road toward Haddam as fast as humanly possible.

Out in the unshaded center of the Haddam green, I notice all citizens beginning to look up. Young moms with prams and jogger pairs in Lycra tights, cadres of long-haired boys with skateboards on shoulders, men in bright braces wiping sweat off their brows, all gaze into heaven’s vault beyond linden, witch hazel and beech limbs. The Dutch dancers stop their bustle and hurry off the floor, the police and firemen step out of their tent to the grass, seeking to see. Everick and Wardell, Uncle Sam and I (fellow townsman, alone in my car with the sunroof back), each raise eyes to the firmament, while the honky-country music comes to a stop, just as if there were one special moment of portent in this day, to be overseen by some infallible Mr. Big with a knack for coincidence and surprises. Not so far away, still on their practice field, I hear the Haddam band lock down on one sustained note in perfect major-key unison. Then the crowd — as random minglers, they have not precisely been a crowd — makes a hushed, suspiring “Ohh” like an assent to a single telepathic message. And suddenly down out of the sky come four men en parachute! smoke canisters bracketed to their feet — one red, one white, one blue, one (oddly) bright yellow like a caution to the other three. They for a moment make me dizzy.

The helmeted parachutists, wearing stars ‘n’ stripes, jumpsuits and cumbersome packs binding their torsos and backsides, all come careening to earth within five seconds, landing semi-gracefully with a hop-skip-jump close by the Dutch dance floor. Each man — and I only guess they’re men, though reason would have it they’re not just men; conceivably they’re also kidney-transplant survivors, AIDS patients, unwed mothers, ex-gamblers or the children of any of these — each apparent man promptly flourishes a rakish hand like a circus performer, does a partly-smoke-obscured but still stylish star turn to the crowd and, after a smattering of stunned and I can only say is sincere and relieved applause, begins strenuously reefing in his silks and lines, and sets about getting the hell on to the next jump, in Wickatunk — all this before my momentary dizziness has really begun to clear. (Possibly I’m more drained than I thought.)

Though it is wonderful: a bright and chancy spectacle of short duration enhancing the day’s modest storage of fun. More of this would be better all around, even at the risk of someone’s chute not opening.

The crowd begins straying apart again, becoming single but gratified minglers. The dancers — skirts bunched in front like frontier women — return to their dance floor, and someone reignites the hillbilly music, with a strutting fiddle and steel guitar out ahead and a throaty female singing, “If you loved me half as much as I loved you.”

I climb out of my car onto the grass and stare at the sky to glimpse the plane the jumpers have leaped free of, some little muttering dot on the infinite. As always, this is what interests me: the jump, of course, but the hazardous place jumped from even more; the old safety, the ordinary and predictable, which makes a swan dive into invisible empty air seem perfect, lovely, the one thing that’ll do. This provokes butterflies, ignites danger.

Needless to say, I would never consider it, even if I packed my own gear with a sapper’s precision, made friends I could die with, serviced the plane with my own lubricants, turned the prop, piloted the crate to the very spot in space, and even uttered the words they all must utter at least silently as they go — right? “Life’s too short” (or long). “I have nothing to lose but my fears” (wrong). “What’s anything worth if you won’t risk pissing it away?” (Taken together, I’m sure it’s what “Geronimo” means in Apache.) I, though, would always find a reason not to risk it; since for me, the wire, the plane, the platform, the bridge, the trestle, the window ledge — these would preoccupy me, flatter my nerve with their own prosy hazards, greater even than the risk of brilliantly daring death. I’m no hero, as my wife suggested years ago.

Nothing’s up there to see anyway, no low-flying Cessna or Beech Bonanza recircling the drop site. Only, miles and miles high, the silver-glinting needle’s-eye flash of a big Boeing or Lockheed inches its way out to sea and beyond, a sight that on most days would make me long to be anywhere but where I am, but that on this day, with near disaster so close behind me, leaves me happy to be here. In Haddam.

And so I continue my bystander’s cruise around town for the purpose of my own and civic betterment.

A loop through the Gothic, bowery, boxwood-hedged Institute grounds and out the “backs” and around and down onto the Presidents Streets — oak-dappled Coolidge, where I was bopped on the head, wider and less gentrified Jefferson, and on to Cleveland, where the search is under way for signs of history and continuance in the dirt in front of my house and the Zumbros’. Though no one’s digging this morning. A yellow “crime scene” tape has been stretched around two mulberries and the backhoe, and serves to define the orange-clay hole where evidence has been uncovered. I look down and in from my car window, for some reason not wanting to get out but willing to see something, anything, conclusive — my own dwelling being just to starboard. Yet only a cat stands in the open trench, the McPhersons’ big black tom, Gordy, covering up his private business with patience. Time, forward and back, seems suddenly not of the essence on my street, and I ease away having found out nothing, but not at all dissatisfied.

I take a sinuous drive across Taft Lane and up through the Choir College grounds, where it’s tranquil and deserted, the flat brick buildings shut tight and echoless for the summer — only the tennis courts in use by citizens in no humor for a parade.

A slow turn then past the high school, where the sixty-member Hornet band is wandering off the practice field, sweltering red tunics slung over their sweaty shoulders, trombones and trumpets in hand, the brawnier instruments — bass drums, sousaphones, cymbals, a bracketed Chinese gong and a portable piano — already strapped atop their waiting school bus, ready for the short trip to the Shop Rite.

On down Pleasant Valley Road along the west boundary fence of the cemetery, wherein tiny American flags bristle from many graves and my first son, Ralph Bascombe, lies near three of the “original signers,” but where I will not rest, since early this very morning, in a mood of transition and progress and to take command of final things, I decided (in bed with the atlas) on a burial plot as far from here as is not totally ridiculous. Cut Off, Louisiana, is my first choice; Esperance, New York, was too close. Someplace, though, where there’s a peaceful view, little traffic noise, minimum earthly history and where anyone who comes to visit will do so just because he or she means to (nothing on the way to Six Flags or Glacier) and, once arrived, will feel I had my head on straight as to location. Otherwise, to be buried “at home,” behind my own old house and forever beside my forever young and lost son, would paralyze me good and proper and possibly keep me from maximizing my remaining years. The thought would never leave me as I went about my daily rounds of house selling: “Someday, someday, someday, I’ll be right out there….” It would be worse than having tenure at Princeton.

The strongest feeling I have now when I pass along these streets and lanes and drives and ways and places for my usual reasons — to snapshot a listing, dig up a comp for a market analysis, accompany an appraiser to his tasks — is that holding the line on the life we promised ourselves in the Sixties is getting hard as hell. We want to feel our community as a fixed, continuous entity, the way Irv said, as being anchored into the rock of permanence; but we know it’s not, that in fact beneath the surface (or rankly all over the surface) it’s anything but. We and it are anchored only to contingency like a bottle on a wave, seeking a quiet eddy. The very effort of maintenance can pull you under.

On the brighter side, and in the way that good news can seem like bad, being a realtor, while occasionally rendering you a Pollyanna, also makes you come to grips with contingency and even sell it as a source of strength and father to true self-sufficience, by insisting that you not give up the faith that people have to be housed and will be. In this way, realty is the “True American profession coping hands-on with the fundamental spatial experience of life: more people, less space, fewer choices.” (This, of course, was in a book I read.)

Two, make that two, full-size moving vans are parked prominently in front of two houses, side by side, on Loud Road this late holiday morning, just around the corner from my old once-happily married house on Hoving. One, a bullish green-and-white Bekins is open at all ports; the other, a jauntier blue-and-white Atlas, is unloading off the back. (Regrettably there’s no green-and-yellow Mayflower.) Signs in front of each house have identical YOU MISSED IT! stickers plastered over FOR SALE. Neither is our listing, though neither are they Bohemia or Buy and Large or some New Egypt outfit, but the reputable local Century 21 and a new Coldwell Banker just opened last fall.

Clearly it is a good day for a fresh start, coming or going. My new tenants must feel this spirit in the air. All neighborhood lawns mowed, edged and rolled, many facades newly painted, trimmed and bulwarked since spring, foundations repointed, trees and plantings green and in full fig. All prices slightly softened. Indeed, if I didn’t rue the sight of them and didn’t mind risking a facedown with Larry McLeod, I’d drive down Clio Street, see how things have progressed since ten and wish the Markhams well all over again.

Instead I make my old, familiar turn down fragrant, bonneted Hoving Road, a turn I virtually never make these days but should, since my memories have almost all boiled down to good ones or at least to tolerable, instructive ones, and I have nothing to fear. Appearances here have remained much the same through the decade, since it is in essence a rich street of hedges and deep, shadowed lawns, gazebos in the rear, well-out-of-sight pools and tennis courts, slate roofs, flagstone verandas, seasonal gardens somehow always in bloom — country estates, really, shrunk to town size but retaining the spirit of abundance. Farther up at #4, the Chief Justice of the NJ Supreme Court has died, though his widow stays actively on. The Deffeyes, our aged next-door neighbors from day one, have had their ashes mingled (though on two foreign shores). The daughter of a famous Soviet dissident poet, who arrived before I left, seeking only privacy and pleasant, unthreatening surroundings, but who found instead diffidence, condescension and cold shoulders, has now departed for home, where she is rumored to be in an institution. Ditto a rock star who bought in at #2, visited once, wasn’t welcomed, didn’t spend the night — then went back permanently to L.A. Both listings were ours.

The Institute has done its very best to keep alive a homey, lived-in feel at my former home, now officially the Chaim Yankowicz Ecumenical Center, and straight ahead amid my old and amiable beeches, red oaks, Japanese maples and pachysandra. Yet as I pull to a halt across the street for a long-overdue reconnoitering, I cannot help but register its more plainly institutional vibes — the original half-timbers replaced and painted a more burnished mahogany, new security windows and exterior low lights on the neater, better-kept lawn; the driveway resurfaced, leveled and converted to semicircular; a metal fire escape on the east side, where the garage was but isn’t now. I’ve heard from people in my office that there’s also a new “simplified” floor plan, a digital sprinkler-and-alarm matrix and glowing red EXIT lozenges above every exterior door — all to insure the comfort and security of foreign religious dignitaries who show up, I’m sure, with nothing more weighty in mind than a little suburban R&R, some off-the-record chitchat, and a chance to watch cable.

For a while after I sold out, a group of my former neighbors laid siege to the planning board with complaints and petitions about increased traffic flow, spot zoning, “strangers on the block” and weakened price structures should the Institute put its plans in gear. An injunction was even briefly obtained and two “old families” who’d been here forty years moved out (to Palm Beach in both cases, both selling to the Institute for choker prices). Eventually the furor burned down to embers. The Institute agreed to remove its barely noticeable sign from the head of the driveway and install some expensive landscaping (two adult ginkgoes trucked in and added to one property line; my old tulip tree sacrificed). As a final settlement, the Board of Overseers bought the house of the lawyer who filed the injunction. After which everyone got happy, except for a few founder types who hold it against me and bluster at cocktail parties that they knew I couldn’t afford to live here and didn’t belong way back in ’70, and why didn’t I just go back to where I came from — though they’re not sure where that is.

And yet and yet, do I sense, as I sit here, a melancholy? The same scent of loss I sniffed three nights ago at Sally’s and almost shed a tear over, because I’d once merely been near there in a prior epoch of life and was in the neighborhood again, feeling unsanctioned by the place? And so shouldn’t I feel it even more here, because my stay was longer, because I loved here, buried a son nearby, lost a fine, permanent life here, lived on alone until I couldn’t stand it another minute and now find it changed into the Chaim Yankowicz Center, as indifferent to me as a gumdrop? Indeed, it’s worth asking again: is there any cause to think a place — any place — within its plaster and joists, its trees and plantings, in its putative essence ever shelters some spirit ghost of us as proof of its significance and ours?

No! Not one bit! Only other humans do that, and then only under special circumstances, which is a lesson of the Existence Period worth holding onto. We just have to be smart enough to quit asking places for what they can’t provide, and begin to invent other options — the way Joe Markham has, at least temporarily, and my son, Paul, may be doing now — as gestures of our God-required but not God-assured independence.

The truth is — and this may be my faith in progress talking — my old Hoving Road house looks more like a funeral home now than it looks like my house or a house where any past of mine took place. And this odd feeling I have is of having passed on (not in the bad way) to a recognition that ghosts ascribed to places where you once were only confuse matters with their intractable lack of corroborating substance. I frankly think that if I sat here in my car five more minutes, staring out at my old house like a visitant to an oracle’s flame, I’d find that what felt like melancholy was just a prelude to bursting out laughing and needlessly freezing a sweet small piece of my heart I’d be better off to keep than lose.

Now look here, would you buy a used house from this man?” I hear a sly voice speak, and bolt around startled out of my wits to find the flat, grinning moon face of Carter Knott outside my window. Carter’s head is cocked to the side, his feet apart, arms crossed like an old judge. He’s in damp purple swimming trunks, wet parchment sandals and a short purple terry-cloth cabana jacket that exposes his slightly rounded belly, all of which means he’s gotten out of his pool down at #22 and snuck this far just to scare the piss out of me.

I would in fact be embarrassed as hell if anybody else had caught me twaddling away out here like a nutcase. But Carter is arguably my best friend in town, which means he and I “go back” (to my solitary, somber year in the Divorced Men’s Club in ’83) and also that we regularly bump into each other in the lobby at United Jersey and discuss bidnus, and that we’re willing to stand in most any weather outside Cox’s News, arms folded around our newspapers, yakking committedly about the chances of the Giants or the Eagles, the Mets or the Phils, whatever exchange won’t take longer than ninety seconds, after which we might not see each other for six months, by which time a new sports season and a new set of issues will have taken up. Carter, I’m positive, couldn’t tell me where I was born, or when, or what my father’s job was, or what college I attended (he would probably guess Auburn), though I know he attended Penn and studied, of all things, classics. He knew Ann when she still lived in Haddam, but he may not know we had a son who died, or why I moved from my old house across the street, or what I do in my spare time. It is our unspoken rule never to exchange dinner invitations or to meet for drinks or lunch, since neither of us would have the least interest in what the other was up to and would both get bored and depressed and end up ruining our relationship. And yet in the way known best to suburbanites, he is my compañero.

After the Divorced Men disbanded (I left for France, one member committed suicide, others just drifted off), Carter put together a good post-divorce rebound and was living a freewheeling bachelor’s life in a big custom-built home with vaulted ceilings, fieldstone fireplaces, stained-glass windows and bidets, out in some newly rich man’s subdivision beyond Pennington. Somewhere about 1985, Garden State Savings (which he was president of) decided to turn a corner and get into more aggressive instruments, which Carter couldn’t see the wisdom in. So that the other stockholders bought him out for a big hunk of change, after which he went happily home to Pennington, got to tinkering with some concepts for converting invisible-pet-fence technology into sophisticated home-security applications. And the next thing he knew, he was running another company, had fifteen employees, four million new dollars in the bank, had been in operation two and a half years and was being wholly bought out by a Dutch company interested in only one tiny microchip adaptation Carter’d been wily enough to apply for a patent on. Carter once again was only too happy to cash out, after which he took in another eight million and bought an outlandish, all-white, ultra-modern, Gothic Revival neighborhood nightmare at #22, married the former wife of one of the aggressive new S&L directors and essentially retired to supervise his portfolio. (Needless to say, his is not the only story in Haddam with these as major plot elements.)

“I figured I’d caught you out here pullin’ on old rudy in your red jacket and gettin’ teary about your old house,” Carter says, hooding his lower lip to look scandalized. He is small and tanned and slender, with short black hair that lies stiffly over on both sides of a wide, straight, scalp-revealing part. He is the standard for what used to be known as the Boston Look, though Carter actually hails from tiny Gouldtown in the New Jersey breadbasket and, though he doesn’t look it, is as honest and unpretentious as a feed-store owner.

“I was just doping out a market analysis, Carter,” I lie, “getting set to take in the parade. So I’m happy to have you startle the crap out of me.” It’s evident I have no such appraisal paperwork on the seat, only the Harrises’ junk mail and some leftovers from my trip with Paul, most of which are in the back: the basketball paperweight and earring gifts, the crumpled copy of Self-Reliance, his Walkman, my Olympus, his copy of The New Yorker, his odorous Happiness Is Being Single tee-shirt and his Paramount bag containing a copy of the Declaration of Independence and some brochures from the Baseball Hall of Fame. (Carter, though, isn’t close enough to see and wouldn’t care anyway.)

“Frank, I’m gonna bet you didn’t know John Adams and Thomas Jefferson died on the very same day.” Carter mimps his regular closed-mouth smile and spreads his tanned legs farther apart, as if this was leading up to a randy joke.

“I didn’t,” I say, though of course I do, since it came up in the reading for my just completed trip and now seems ludicrous. I’m thinking that Carter looks ludicrous himself in his purple ensemble, standing actually out in Hoving Road while he quizzes me about history. “But let me try a guess,” I say. “How ’bout July 4th, 1826, fifty years exactly after the signing of the Declaration, and didn’t Jefferson say as his last words, ‘Is it the Fourth?’”

“Okay, okay. I didn’t realize you were a history professor. And Adams said, ‘Jefferson still lives.’” Carter smiles self-mockingly. He loves this kind of stagy palaver and kept us all in stitches in the Divorced Men. “My kids let me in on it.” He flashes his big straight teeth, which makes me remember how much I like him and the nights with our bereft compatriots, hunched around late tables at the August Inn or the Press Box Bar or out fishing the ocean after midnight, when life was all fucked up and, as such, much simpler than now, and as a group we learned to like it.

“Mine too,” I lie (again).

“Both your rascals in fine fettle up in New London or wherever it is?”

“Deep River.” Carter is more in the know than I’d have guessed, though a retailing of yesterday’s events would cloud his sunny day. (I wonder, though, how he knows.)

I look up Hoving Road as a black Mercedes limo appears and turns right into the semicircular driveway of my old house and passes impressively around to the front door, where I have stood six thousand times contemplating the moon and mare’s tails in a winter’s sky and letting my spirits rise (sometimes with difficulty, sometimes not) to heaven. A surprising pang circuits through me at this very mind’s image, and I’m suddenly afraid I may yield to what I said I wouldn’t yield to over a simple domicile — sadness, displacement, lack of sanction. (Though by using Carter’s presence I can fight it back.)

“Frank, d’you ever bump into ole Ann?” Carter says soberly for my sake, sticking his two hands up his opposite cabana coat sleeves and giving his forearms a good rough scratching. Carter’s calves are as hairless as a turnip, and above his left knee is a deep and slick-pink dent I’ve of course seen before, where a big gout of tissue and muscle were once scooped violently out. Carter, despite his Boston banker’s look and his screwy cabana suit, was once a Ranger in Vietnam, and is in fact a valorous war hero and to me all the more admirable for not being self-conscious about it.

“Not much, Carter,” I say to the Ann question and blink my reluctance up at him. The sun is just behind his head.

“You know, I thought I saw her at the Yale-Penn game last fall. She was with a big crowd of people. How long you two been kaput now?”

“Seven years, almost.”

“Well, there’s your biblical allotment.” Carter nods, still scratching his arm like a chimp.

“You catchin’ any fish, Carter?” I say. It is Carter who has sponsored me for the Red Man Club, but now never goes himself since his own kids live in California with their mom and tend to meet him in Big Sky or Paris. To my knowledge I’m the only member who regularly plies the Red Man’s unruffled waters, and soon expect to do more of it with my son, if I’m lucky enough.

Carter shakes his head. “Frank, I never go,” he says regretfully. “It’s a scandal. I need to.”

“Well, gimme a call.” I’m ready to leave, am already thinking about Sally, who’s coming at six. Carter’s and my ninety seconds are up.

Where the Mercedes has drawn to a halt in front of my former front door, a small, liveried driver in a black cap has jumped out and begun hauling bulky suitcases from the trunk. Then out from the back seat emerges a stupendously tall and thin black African man in a bright jungle-green dashiki and matching cap. He is long and long-headed, splendid enough to be a prince, a virtual Milt the Stilt when he reaches his full elevation. He looks out at the quiet, hedge-bound neighborhood, sees Carter and me scoping him out, and waves a great, slow-moving, pink-palmed hand toward us, letting it wag side to side like a practiced blessing. Carter and I rapidly — me in my car, him out — raise ours and wave back and smile and nod as if we wished we could speak his lingo so he could know the good things we’re thinking about him but unfortunately we can’t, whereupon the limo driver leads the great man straight into my house.

Carter says nothing, steps back and looks both ways down the curving street. He was not part of the injunction junta but came along afterward and thinks, I’m sure, that the Ecumenical Center is a good neighbor, which is what I always felt would be the case. It’s not true that you can get used to anything, but you can get used to much more than you think and even learn to like it.

Carter, it’s my guess, is now inventorying his day’s thoughts, jokes, headlines, sports scores, trying to determine if there’s anything he can say to interest me that won’t take over thirty more seconds yet still provide him an exit line so he can go plop back in his pool. I, of course, am doing the same. Save when tragedies strike, there’s little that really needs to be said to most people you know.

“So any news about your little agent’s murder?” Carter says in a businesslike voice, choosing a proper tragedy and replanting his paper-clad feet even farther apart on the smooth pavement and assuming an expression of dogged, hard-mouthed, law ’n’ order intolerance for all unwanted abridgments of personal freedoms.

“We’re offering a reward, but not that I know of,” I say, hard-mouthed myself, thinking once again of Clair’s bright face and her sharp-eyed, self-certain sweetness, which cut me no slack yet brought me to ecstasy, if but briefly. “It’s like she got struck by lightning,” I say, and realize I’m describing only her disappearance from my life, not her departure from this earth.

Carter shakes his head and makes of his lips a pocket of compressed air, which causes him to look deformed before he lets it all out with a ptttt noise. “They oughta just start stringin’ those kinda guys up by their dicks and lettin’ ’em hang.”

“I think so too,” I say. And I do.

Because there is truly nothing more to say after this, Carter may be about to ask me my view of the election and its possible radiant lines into the realty business and by that route snake around to politics. He considers himself a “Strong Defense — Goldwater Republican” and likes treading a line of jokey, condescending disparagement toward me. (It is his one unlikable quality, one I’ve found typical of the suddenly wealthy. Naturally he was a Democrat in college.) But politics is a bad topic for Independence Day.

“I heard you reading Caravans on the radio last week,” Carter says, nodding. “I really enjoyed that a lot. I just wanted you to know.” Though his thinking is suddenly commandeered by a whole new thought. “Okay, now look,” he says, his eyes turned intent. “You’re our words guy, Frank. I’d think a lot of things these days might make you want to go back to writing stories.” Having said this, he looks down, cinches his purple belt tight around his belly and peers at his small feet in their paper sleeves as if something about them has changed.

“Why do you think that, Carter? Does now seem like a dramatic time to be alive? I’m pretty happy with it, but it hasn’t to me. I’d find it encouraging if you thought so.” The limo is now swinging around to leave, its heavy pipes murmuring against the driveway surface. I’m frankly flattered Carter knows anything about my prior writing life.

My fingers, delving half-consciously between my seat and the passenger’s, come up with the tiny red bow Clarissa gave me. Along with Carter’s personal crediting of my long-ago and momentary life as a writer, finding this makes me feel measurably better, since my spirits had drooped over thoughts of Clair.

“It just seems to me like a lot more things need explaining these days, Frank.” Carter is still peering at his toes. “When you and I were in college, ideas dominated the world — even if most of them were stupid. Now I can’t even think of a single new big idea, can you?” He looks up, then down at Clarissa’s red bow, which I’m holding in my palm, and wrinkles his nose as though I were presenting him with a riddle. Carter, I sense, has been sitting too long on the sidelines counting his money, so that the world seems both simple and simply screwed up. He may, I’m afraid, be on the brink of voicing some horseshit, right-wing dictum about freedom, banning the income tax, and government interventionism in a free-market economy—“ideas” to feed his need for some certitude and whole-heartedness between now and cocktail hour. He of course is not interested in my former writing career.

But if Carter were to ask me — as a man once did on a plane to Dallas back when I was a sportswriter — what I thought he ought to do with his life now that he’d come into a bank vault full of loot, I’d tell him what I told that man: dedicate your life to public service; do a tour with VISTA or the Red Cross, or hand-deliver essential services to the sick and elderly in West Virginia or Detroit (the man on the Dallas flight wasn’t interested in this advice and said he thought he might just “travel” instead). Carter indeed would probably like to be put in touch with Irv Ornstein, once he’s retired from his fantasy baseball career. Irv, panting to get free of the simulator business, could tempt Carter with the big new commanding metaphor of continuity, and the two of them could start cooking up some sort of self-help scheme to franchise on television and make another fortune.

Or I could suggest he come down just the way I did and have a talk with our crew at L & S, since we have yet to replace Clair but soon must. Stepping into her shoes could satisfy his unsatisfied needs by championing the “idea” of doing something for others. He’s at least as qualified as I was, and in some of the same ways — except that he’s married.

Or possibly he should take up words, pen some stories of his own to fling out into the void. But as for me on that score — I’ve been there. The air’s too thin. Thanks, but no thanks.

I muse up at Carter’s small, delicate features, which seem added on to a flat map. I mean to look as though I can’t imagine a single idea, good or bad, but know there to be plenty floating around loose. (My most obvious idea would be misconstrued, turned into a debate I don’t care to have, ending us up in the politics of stalemate.)

“Most important ideas still probably start with physical acts, Carter,” I say (his friend). “You’re an old classicist. Maybe what you need to do is get off your butt and stir up some dust.”

Carter stares at me a long moment and says nothing, but is clearly thinking. Finally he says, “You know, I am still in the Active Reserves. If Bush could get a little conflict fired up when he gets in, I could be called up for serious midlife ass kicking.”

“There’s an idea, I guess.” My daughter’s red bow is attached to my little finger like a reminder, and what I’m reminded of is my LICK BUSH sticker, which I’m sorry Carter hasn’t seen. Though this is enough, and I ease my car down into gear. The limo’s taillights brighten at Venetian Way, swing left and glide from sight. “You might arrange to get yourself killed doing that.”

“I-BOG is what we used to say in my platoon: In a blaze of glory.” Carter mugs a little and rolls his eyes. He’s no fool. His fighting days are long over, and I’m sure he’s glad of it. “You relatively happy with your current life’s travails, ole Franko? Still planning on staying in town?” He does not exactly mean “travails” but something more innocent, and smiles at me with purest, conversation-ending sincerity built upon the rock of lived life.

“Yep,” I say, with goodwill in all ways equal to his. “You already know I believe home’s where you pay the mortgage, Carter.”

“I’d think real estate might get a little tiresome. About as ridiculous as most jobs.”

“So far, not. So far it’s fine. You oughta try it, since you’re retired.”

“I’m not that retired.” He winks at me for reasons that aren’t clear.

“I’m headed for the parade, ole Knott-head. You endure a fine Independence Day.”

Carter snaps up a crisp, absurd little army salute in his colorful poolside attire. “Ten-four. Go forth and do well, Cap’n Bascombe. Bring back glory and victory or at least tales of glory and victory. Jefferson still lives.”

“I’ll do my best,” I say, slightly embarrassed. “I’ll do my best.” And I motor off into my day, smiling.

And that is simply that. The whole nine yards, that which it was all about for a time, ending well, followed by a short drive to a parade.

There is, naturally, much that’s left unanswered, much that’s left till later, much that’s best forgotten. Paul Bascombe, I still believe, will come to live with me for some part of his crucial years. It may not be a month from now or six. A year could go by, and there would still be time enough to participate in his new self-discovery.

It is also possible that I will soon be married, following years supposing I never could again, and so would no longer view myself as the suspicious bachelor, as I admit I sometimes still do. The Permanent Period, this would be, that long, stretching-out time when my dreams would have mystery like any ordinary person’s; when whatever I do or say, who I marry, how my kids turn out, becomes what the world — if it makes note at all — knows of me, how I’m seen, understood, even how I think of myself before whatever there is that’s wild and unassuagable rises and cheerlessly hauls me off to oblivion.

Up Constitution Street, from my car seat, I now can see the marchers passing beyond crowded spectators’ heads, hear the booms of the big drums, the cymbals, see the girls in red and white skirtlets high-prancing, batons spinning, a red banner held aloft ahead of flashing trumpets borrowing the sun’s spangly light. It is not a bad day to be on earth.

I park behind our office and beside the Press Box Bar, lock up and then stand out in the noon heat below a whitening sky and begin my satisfied amble up to the crowd. “Ba-boom, ba-boom, ba-boom, ba-boom! Hail to the victors valiant, hail to the conquering heroes …” Ours is a familiar fight song, and everyone up ahead of me applauds.

Late last night when I was dead asleep and the worst of my day’s events were put to rest after a long trial-by-error followed by the reemergence of some small hope (which is merely human), my phone rang. And when I said hello from the darkness, there was a moment I took to be dead silence on the line, though gradually I heard a breath, then the sound of a receiver touching what must’ve been a face. There was a sigh, and the sound of someone going, “Ssss, tsss. Uh-huh, uh-huh,” followed by an even deeper and less certain “Ummm.”

And I suddenly said, because someone was there I felt I knew, “I’m glad you called.” I pressed the receiver to my ear and opened my eyes in the dark. “I just got here,” I said. “Now’s not a bad time at all. This is a full-time job. Let me hear your thinking. I’ll try to add a part to the puzzle. It can be simpler than you think.”

Whoever was there — and of course I don’t know who, really — breathed again two times, three. Then the breath grew thin and brief. I heard another sound, “Uh-huh.” Then our connection was gone, and even before I’d put down the phone I’d returned to the deepest sleep imaginable.

And I am in the crowd just as the drums are passing — always the last in line — their boom-boom-booming in my ears and all around. I see the sun above the street, breathe in the day’s rich, warm smell. Someone calls out, “Clear a path, make room, make room, please!” The trumpets go again. My heartbeat quickens. I feel the push, pull, the weave and sway of others.