Robert Coover - John's Wife

Opal’s occasional visits to Barnaby were among the few that shattered man now received, Alf being about the only person outside of immediate family who still looked in regularly upon the old master builder since the stroke that had ripped away the main connections. His patient now lived alone in a three-room unit in the “professionally assisted” retirement center his son-in-law had built, a morose and defeated man, severed from his simplest habits, his speech difficult to comprehend even when he was coherent, which most often he was not, so far as Alf could tell. The old fellow wept a lot, especially whenever his daughter was mentioned. He spoke of John’s wife as if she had been taken away and no longer existed, even though, on different days than Alf, she paid him weekly visits, according to the log in the main lobby. Barn sometimes wept over his wife Audrey, too, reenacting her deathbed scene, if that was what it was, but at other times he did not even remember who she was. He rarely remembered who Alf was, confusing him with old friends and relatives long dead, when acknowledging him at all. Others, still living, did drop by from time to time, at least early on, but the awkwardness of the exchange, its often bitter and bizarre nature, discouraged them. Barnaby had gone into deep retreat, making his visitors feel like intruders, disturbers of his misery’s sour peace, so most stopped coming, sent notes instead which Barnaby left unopened. Alf supposed at first that depression over Audrey’s death had fused the poor man’s circuits, but in time he came to understand that it had more to do with some final desperate conflict with John, real or imagined, who could say. Something maybe about the new civic center. Difficult as things were between Barnaby and his son-in-law over the years, they might never have reached such a crisis, Alf now figured, tuning in as best he could, had it not been for John’s paving over of the city park. Probably looked like outright treachery. Barnaby had drawn up the park plans while he was still in the army back during the war, and as soon as he got out he had razed the old wooden buildings that stood there, rolled the terrain out for the landscapers, personally planted the first tree and put the gingerbread on the bandstand, doing it all at cost or less, part of his vision of a builder’s place in his community, and now suddenly there was his son-in-law, moving his bulldozers in. Had to upset him, and maybe all the more so that his name was attached to it. John’s project was popular enough: a low-budget preformed concrete structure with an auditorium, gymnasium, Olympic-sized swimming pool with retractable roof (much ballyhooed, but more like a car sunroof, once in place), and ample parking space, which most people saw as a means of revitalizing the decaying town center, turning it into a kind of Main Street mall. John’s old high school coach and airport manager, now a councilman, had rallied city hall support, John’s father had helped the city get partial funding for it from the state, and downtown businessmen had put up a substantial part of the rest, using the Town Crier column header as a fund-gathering slogan: “You Can Bank On It!” As for the park, John’s argument was that it had become little more than an outsized litter basket, too expensive to keep safe and clean, and a breeding ground for crime and drugs. These days, nature lovers — and he (though armed) was one — went out of town for their rustic pleasures; the tired old park, ravaged by Dutch elm disease and a farm for vermin, was an anachronism. Saved them all money, too: the park land, he pointed out, was free.

There were plenty who disagreed. Committees were formed up to try to save the park, there were door-to-door campaigns, petitions for a referendum. Marge, needless to say, though Lorraine did, was mad as a wet hen. Lollie’s helpmeet Waldo thereupon started calling her a “wet Hun” and dropped out of the club golf tournament that summer in protest against her constant bellyaching, which he said was polluting the course with acid pain, and also his heinie. Marge had her small successes, but Barnaby, at the time clear-sighted still, saw clearly the futility of this homely town-meetinghall approach: John had the mayor and the city council in his back pocket, plus the full weight of state and national government behind him, probably even majority support in town, and the park had been allowed to fall into a state of serious disrepair — part of John’s strategy, Barnaby supposed. Had to credit the boy’s wile. First, he destroys the town center with his junky outlying malls, then he puts the squeeze on that center’s ruined faithful to buy themselves something back, cutting himself a handsome profit each direction. So ruthless was he, Barnaby actually began to fear for his daughter for whom, until then, he had only, John being the sort of husband that he was, felt sorry. Of course, there was nothing wrong with a civic center — hell, Barnaby would happily have built one twice as beautiful for half the money John was asking — but why, he wanted to know, did the town’s only park have to be sacrificed for it? Too few objected, and they objectors more by reflex than by rage. Even Ellsworth, who should have known better, homespun tree-loving eulogies aside, seemed unable to resist the appeal of John’s grand but fraudulent architectural drawings, which he published regularly in The Town Crier , fanciful as illustrations in children’s books. There was only one way to stop him, Barnaby came to feel, and that was somehow to wrest his old company back from John, something only he and, with Audrey gone, he alone could do. Wouldn’t be easy. It would mean risking everything he had. Might even alienate his daughter, an almost unbearable thought, she being all he had left in this world save his builder’s pride. But he glimpsed a way, lonely and heroic though it was. One last grand adventure, come what may: he saw a path and took it. Well. A catastrophe, of course, worse than ever he could have guessed. Ruined. Made the villain of a plot no longer his. Humiliated in front of his own daughter. Stripped of everything he had. Though he never figured out how or why. Betrayal probably. Didn’t matter. When it was over, half of him was crushed and embittered, the other half was dead.

Dutch, would-be emulator of John’s killer instincts, though only half so sure a shot, looked on admiringly as his ex-battery mate and fellow hunter gunned down his own in-law, toying with the hapless dodderer before finishing him off as one might shoot away the knees of a dumbstruck moose so as to create a moving target. Shot him down, then gutted him, cleaned him out. Many in town suspected betrayal, meaning Maynard, but Dutch knew better, having sat with John in his motel Back Room sucking a beer while on the other side of the mirrors poor old Barnaby with Maynard’s slick collusion spread the hand they’d hoped to play. Dutch, as always slow to pick up on the story stuff of numbers, was a bit baffled at the time, understanding the conspiracy’s dynamics but not the details, until the whipped and humbled Nerd, deftly pressed one afternoon at the motel bar, filled him in, at least enough to outline the plot by which the old man had hoped to retake the firm he had lost by an ill-writ will. Audrey’s doing. After the wedding, the construction business, enlarged by the assets John brought in, was still, as Barnaby thought, three-fourths in the family, jointly owned by himself, his wife, his daughter, plus her husband John, a quarter each. In effect, though, it was a troublesomely fifty-fifty partnership between the two men, Barnaby the senior partner and a bully of a sort, full of antique certainties, John forced to bide his time. Audrey, meanwhile, anticipating as most wives do a prolonged widowhood, with John’s advice so revised the family will as to change the shares to thirds on the death of any member, business a nuisance to her once Barnaby was gone and trusting her much-loved son-in-law to further gild her golden years, sparing her the details. And thus, when unexpectedly she popped off first instead, Barnaby was left with the short straw, a minor shareholder in the enterprise he had with his own hands created and by which he felt his life defined, now suddenly overruled by John at every turn, turns taken often and without remorse or pity, though always with a smile. Embittered, exasperated, but unbeaten (“It was the civic center that broke his water,” Nerd told Dutch over an unhappy happy hour martini, “worse than rape, he said, the town like some kind of woman to him, to do that to the city park …”), Barnaby, abetted by Maynard, devised a scheme to recapture what he’d lost.