The remains

Chapter 20

For a change it had been a night without dreams, a night without voices, a night without texts. But then it had also been a night of sleeplessness. Or, when I did manage to sleep at all, I would wake up minutes later with a start, as if to sleep even for a minute was to let my guard down. My mind and my body were speaking to me, telling me I had to start getting to the bottom of the reasons behind Franny’s paintings. It meant that instead of going straight to work, I would go see Franny’s mother, speak to her face to face.

I called Robyn from the car just as I was crossing the Hudson River via the South Troy Bridge. I told her I’d be in sometime later that morning after I took care of some personal business. She told me “No sweat.” That she owed me for all those nights I closed up alone.

“Take the freaking day, Bec,” she insisted.

I told her I wouldn’t know what to freaking do with myself.

Ten minutes later I entered into what Michael would no doubt refer to as ‘Indian Country’. This was the rural farm-scape of Brunswick Hills and beyond that, the foothills that eventually turned into the blue mountains of Massachusetts. I cruised U.S. Rural Route 2 that paralleled the winding path of the Postenkill, a stream as wide and deep in parts as a river. It always ran fast and frothy white in early October from the September rains that soaked the region. Trooper Dan taught us to fish for trout in the stream back when we were twin pups. While I never caught much of anything (the only thing I hated more than touching a live fish was a worm), Molly never made it home without a fish or two in her creel (she loved the feel of live fish and worms). Thinking back on it, her fishing prowess made my Dad proud, especially in light of my, ah, girlish apprehension. For years I’ve sometimes wondered if Molly might have been the boy Dad never had.

After a while I made it through the small town of Postenkill with its two or three antique shops, general store and one-bay firehouse. From there I continued along Route 2 until I came to Garfield Road where I hooked a sharp right at the Civil War cemetery.

It had been a long time since I’d made a trek back to this country and I felt the years piling up in my stomach like so many bricks. Ten bricks to be exact-one for every year I’d been away. Ten years that coincided with Molly’s death. It’s not that I made a conscious decision never to return. It’s just that there was nothing left for me here. Nothing other than the shell of a house that had been handed down to me by my parents upon their deaths along with the land that went with it, including a major chunk of Mount Desolation.

I hadn’t been entirely neglectful.

I paid the taxes on the property, even paid a local carpenter to keep the house up and to mow the field grass. But since Molly passed on, I hadn’t been able to get myself to return to the old homestead, as if some invisible force-field was holding me back-the never too distant memory of a monster who once lurked inside the deep woods. Not even Michael, my former husband, had laid eyes on the place.

So why then, after all this time, had I come back to the Brunswick Hills?

Frances Scaramuzzi and his mother had been my neighbors; which in this unspoiled country meant that our respective spreads were located a good three miles from one another. Out of sight but not out of mind.

The sun was shining bright as I pulled into the driveway of Franny’s two-story white clapboard farmhouse. I cut the engine on the Cabriolet, got out. Immediately I was struck by the smell of the land, of the century old trees that surrounded me, their leaves golden and shedding in the fall breeze.

Just like my parents’ place, the Scaramuzzi farm no longer supported any livestock or animals. But the barn and the fields beyond it were still there. The fields of tall grass seemed to go on forever until they touched the foothills just a mile eastward.

Walking over the gravel drive I made my way up onto the wood porch, reached my hand out for the doorbell. But before I could press it, I heard a car pulling up behind me onto the gravel drive.

Caroline. Franny’s mom.

She drove a blue Chevy pickup that had to be ten years older than me and that still looked to be in tip-top shape. Stenciled on both the driver and passenger side doors were the words ‘Scaramuzzi Farms’ on behalf of the vegetable-slash-art stand that Mrs. Scaramuzzi used to set up on the front lawn from spring to late fall. The art part of the enterprise came about when Franny started selling his original oil paintings alongside the ears of corn, potatoes, tomatoes, pumpkins, cucumbers and summer squash, plus homemade apple and blueberry pies.

Now that he could regularly command five figures or more for his work, Franny no longer had to hawk it out of a three-sided shack on the front lawn. It also meant his mother no longer had to make ends meet by selling homegrown vegetables and baked goods.

Planting a smile, albeit a nervous one, on my face, I watched the small but still athletic woman exit the truck, slam the door closed with a vigor that betrayed her seventy-plus years. As she made her way up the drive she began to take more shape and I was able to make out her smiling, smooth face, her brown eyes and friendly mouth.

She was wearing a red bandanna over long but thick salt and pepper hair. In each of her earlobes she sported dangling silver earrings. She wore an eggshell-colored turtleneck over a pair of well worn Levis and for shoes, a pair of green Crocs over gray wool socks.

She stopped upon reaching the porch steps.

“Something’s wrong with this scenario young lady,” she smiled. “Aren’t you supposed to be critiquing my Francis right about now?”

I laughed because, well, yes I was supposed to be critiquing him. In theory anyway.

“Come on, Mrs. S,” I said, “you know as well as I do that Franny critiques us.”

Laughing, she turned away, as if the comment made her blush, even though it had been directed at her son.

“’Sides,” I said, “Robyn has been begging me to get some one on one face-time with our most gifted artist-in-residence.”

“Don’t forget famous,” Mrs. S said.

I raised my eyebrows while she made the stairs, walked on past me, and opened the unlocked door.

“Just yesterday,” she went on speaking as we entered the house, “I got a call from New York. An associate producer from MSNBC, grew up in this area.”

“You’ve got to be kidding,” I said, moving into the semi-dark, musty smelling living room.

“I kid you not. Woman by the name of…” She peered upwards as if her memory escaped her. And apparently it had. “Oh I forget her name. But she had a nice voice and she was all excited about Franny, his art. She’s putting together a primetime special report on autistic savants. Musical savants, mathematical, literary. Franny would cover the visual arts aspect.”

She headed through the living room and into the kitchen at the end of it. When I entered behind her, I watched her take a tea kettle from off the gas stove and begin filling it with water from the tap.

“So don’t leave me in the dark, Mrs. S. Did you accept?”

“I haven’t called back,” she admitted solemnly. “To be honest, I have not made up my mind about it.”

“It could mean fame and fortune for Franny,” I said, stating the obvious. “A spot on MSNBC in the primetime would catapult him into the limelight.”

“Which is exactly what worries me, Rebecca.” She sighed as she joined me at the large harvest table. “It’s just that Franny has never been beyond the farm. Oh, he goes to Albany of course. To the Albany Art Center. But I just can’t imagine how he might handle going on national television in New York City. I…” She let the thought trail off while shaking her head, staring down at the table-top.

Her gestures, her ambivalence: they made me wonder who was more scared of Franny’s moving on. This lovely widow or Franny himself.

There was a long pause. Long enough for it to become a little uncomfortable. When the tea kettle whistle blew, it nearly frightened me out of my chair. Mrs. Scaramuzzi got up.

“Enough television talk,” she ordered. “Obviously you’ve made a prodigal return to your homeland to meet with me up close and personal. So let’s get to it.”

Grabbing hold of the tea kettle she set it onto an unlit burner.

“But before we get started,” she went on, “I’d like it if you’d call me, Caroline. Mrs. Scaramuzzi was my husband’s mother.”

I laughed.

“Caroline,” I said, trying it on for size. “Caroline is fine.”

I got up from the table to help her with the tea. While Caroline set out mugs with good old fashioned Salada tea bags in them, I picked up the kettle and began pouring in the hot water.

“Go sit, Caroline,” I insisted. “I’ll get this.”

“A guest in my own home,” she said, sitting back down at the table. “Feels kind of sweet.”

“How do you take your tea?” I asked, while replacing the kettle onto the stove.

“Naked,” she said. “Like my men.”

The ice broken, we both had a good laugh while I carried the mugs back over to the table.