Richard Ford - Let Me Be Frank With You

“All right,” Ms. Pines said. “That’s a good way to put it. I like the way you say things, Mr. Bascombe.”

“Call me Frank,” I said, again.

“All right, Frank, I will.”

She smiled and let herself out the storm door, took her careful steps down the still-icy steps and was gone.

OUT THE HADDAM GREAT ROAD, JUST PAST five, freezing rain has turned the blacktop into after-hours, dodge-em cars. Only a few of us are braving it, our headlights glaring off the pavement like sheeny novas. A Ford Explorer (why is it always a Ford Explorer?) has already gone in the ditch, its driver waving me on with a shrug. A wrecker’s on its way.

Off in the trees on both sides, immense, manorial houses twinkle through. Yuletide spruces framed in picture windows blaze outward, sharing Christmas cheer with the less monied. Years ago, I drove out here on just such a gloomy-wintry night to hand-deliver a two-million-dollar, full-price offer on a slant-roof, architect-designed monstrosity that’s long since been torn down, and calamitously hit a dog , precisely next door to the house I was hoping to sell. As with the Explorer, I went straight in the ditch, but clambered out, up, and across the black-ice road to bring whatever helpless help I could to the poor wrecked beast, who’d made a whump when I hit it, boding ill. (I, of course, feared it was my clients’ dog.) There the poor thing lay, in the ice-crusted grass in front of number 2605, breathing deep, rasping, not-long-for-this-world breaths, its sorrowing eyes resigned and open to the snowy night — its last — not offering to move or even to notice me beside it on my knees, my cold hand on its hairy, hard ribs, feeling them rise and fall, rise and fall. It was a hound, a black and tan, somebody’s old lovebug — a wiggly crotch sniffer and shoe muncher bought for the kids yet surviving on after they’d gone, and prime now to be hit. “What can I do for you, ole Towser?” I said these absurd words, knowing their answer—“Nothing, thanks. You’ve done enough.” After minutes, I hiked up to the house I was selling, shamefaced and in shock. I informed my clients what I’d terribly done. We all three walked down to the road in the snow, but the old boy had passed beyond us and was (because it was damn cold) grown stiff and peaceful and perfect. They didn’t know whose dog it was — a hunter’s, strayed away in the night, they thought, though it was past the season for that. My clients — the Armentis, long since beyond life’s pale themselves — felt a sorrow for me and my plight, and let me go home with the promise to “do something about the dog” in the morning. I shouldn’t worry. It was a terrible night to be out — which it was. In my realtor’s memory they accepted the offer following some testy back-and-forths with the young Bengali buyers — I often recollect such matters more positively than was true. It was a long time ago. Twenty years, at least. The dog, of course, lives on.

I’M ON MY PILGRIM’S WAY TONIGHT — IT’S ONLY 5:10 but could easily be midnight — to visit my former wife, Ann Dykstra, a resident now of the Beth Wessel Wing at the Community at Carnage Hill, a state-of-the-art, staged-care facility, out here in what was once, when we were married, forty years ago, the verdant Haddam hinterlands. The “Community” today borders a Robert Trent Jones faux links course, hidden from the road by a swatch of woods, the leaves now down. A birch-bark canoe “institute” sits off to the left in deeper timber, its lights busily yellowing the snow-flittery night. Other grand houses are semivisible, accessible by gates with uniformed protection. Once it was possible to cast my eye over almost any piece of settled landscape here-around and know how it would look in the future; what uses it’d be set to by succeeding waves of human purpose — as if a logic lay buried within, the genome of its later what’s-it. Though out here, now, all is frankly enigma. Probably it’s my age — which explains more and more about me, like a master decryption code. In New Jersey we’ve now built to the edge of the last million acres of remotely developable land. We’re on track to use it up by midcentury. Property taxes are capped, but no one wants to sell, since no one wants to buy. All of which keeps prices high but values low. (I’ve seen only one lonely Sotheby’s sign the whole way here.) Householders of many of these expensive piles are now renting their eight-thousand-foot trophy villas to Rutgers students with rich parents — taking the long view about upkeep and wear and tear when the lease comes up.

Meanwhile Haddam itself is countenancing service cutbacks. Too much money’s “lost” to wages, the Republicans on the Boro council say. The budget gap’s at fifteen mil. Many old town-fixture employees have been pink-slipped in these days before Christmas. The previous manger scene, mothballed a decade ago, the wise men all portrayed as strapping Aryans instead of dusky Levantines and Negroes, has been revived — the rental company for the race-appropriate manger having upped their prices. Holly boughs now adorn only every third lamppost on Seminary Street. Santa’s magic sleigh on the Square now has a smaller driver at the reins — the original, life-size Santa was stolen, possibly by the Rutgers students. Three prime storefronts are currently sitting empty (unthinkable in earlier days). Townhouse construction — a well-known morbid sign — goes on apace across from where my son Ralph Bascombe lies buried in the cemetery under a linden tree, lately broken off by the hurricane. Rumor has it a Dollar Store and an Arby’s are buying in where Laura Ashley and Anthropologie once thrived. “The middle isn’t holding” was The Packet’ s Yeatsian assessment.

Though every Haddam citizen I have a word with — not that many, admittedly — seems on board with the new austerity, even if it promises a dead stop to what was once our reality. “Feeling the pinch,” “cinching the family belt up two notches,” appear to make us feel at one with the rest of the world’s economic downturn — which we know to be bad, but not that bad, not yet, not here.

Possibly I’m the only one paying close attention. I still possess a municipal memory from my years of selling and reselling, mortgaging and re-mortgaging, eventually overseeing the razing and replacing of many a dream home. Clearly, though, some wound has scarred our psyche. And it’s a mystery how it will sort out before the last sprawl-able acre’s paved over and there’s no place left to go but away and down.

MY MISSION INTO THE NIGHT’S SINISTER WEATHER, four days before Christmas, is to deliver to Ann a special, yoga-approved, form-fitted, densely foamed and molded orthopedic pillow, which she can sleep on, and that’s recommended by neurologists in Switzerland to homeopathically “treat” Parkinson’s — of which she’s a new sufferer — by reducing stress levels associated with poor sleep, which themselves are associated with neck pain, which is associated with too-vivid dreams, all associated with Parkinson’s. Ann has resided in the Beth Wessel, able-bodied/independent wing since last June. She has her own two-bedroom, Feng-Shui-approved apartment, does her own cooking, drives her own Focus, occasionally sees old friends from De Tocqueville Academy, where she once coached the Lady Linksters, and has even acquired a “boyfriend”—a former Philadelphia cop named “Buck.” (He has a last name, but I can’t pronounce it, since it’s Polish.) Buck’s a large, dull piece of cordwood in his seventies, given to loose-fitting permanently-belted trousers, matching beige sweatshirts of the kind sold at Kmart, big galunker, imitation-suede shoes, and the thinnest of thin pale hosiery. Somewhere, someone convinced Buck that a sculpted “imperial” and a pair of black horn-rimmed Dave Garroway specs would make him look less like a Polish meatball, and make people take him more seriously, which probably never happens — though he’s officially on the record as “handsome.” He could pass as the “good” cop who genially interrogates the poor black kid from the projects, until he suddenly loses his temper, bulges his eyes, balls up his horseshoe fists in the kid’s face, and scares the shit out of him. Buck’s carrying around a different John Grisham book every time I see him and refers to himself only as a “first responder.” (I’ve seen his old Blazer in the parking lot with “Frst Rspndr” on his yellow Jersey plate.) I regularly encounter him lurking in the big public “living room”—he doesn’t have enough to do, with no robberies and home invasions to get his mitts into. He likes the idea that Ann (who he infuriatingly calls “Miss Annie”)… that Ann and I “go way back,” which isn’t quite the word for it; and that he and I share private, implicitly sexual understandings about her that men such as we are would never speak about, but that in the aggregate are “special,” possibly symbolic, and render us both lucky-to-have-lived-this-long foot soldiers in Miss Annie’s army.