Richard Ford - Let Me Be Frank With You

“They have to do that,” Sally said, finishing a client report at the dining room table. Being a grief counselor-in-training, she’s now versed in all things publicly protective and child sensitive. “It’s part of their release deal. If you petition the court, he’ll have to move. It’s pretty unfair, if you ask me.”

I took little note, but not no note.

Not long before that, in August, another letter turned up, this one addressed to me on official blue-and-white American Express letterhead. It contained a brand-new AMEX card in the name of a Muhammad Ali Akbar, who as far as I could find out, no one here-around knew. This letter I hand-delivered to the Haddam PD, but have since heard nothing back. Twice then in the fall, the Garden State Bank, which has foreclosed on two houses on our block, authorized the same police to stage mock hostage extractions in one of the now-empty homes, just a few doors down. We all stood in our yards and watched as SWAT units broke in the front door of what had been a former Democratic mayor’s daughter’s townhouse, until she got divorced and booted out. There was a lot of wild shouting and bullhorns blaring and lights flashing and sirens whooping, plus the appearance of some kind of robot. After which a tiny African American woman (Officer Sanger, whom we all know) was led out in handcuffs and driven away to “safety.”

How these occurrences foretell changes that’ll eventuate in a Vietnamese massage becoming my new neighbor is far from clear. But it happens — like tectonic plates, whose movement you don’t feel ’til it’s the big one and your QOL goes away in an afternoon.

All signs bear watching: how many visits Animal Control makes to your block in a month; whether the lady across the street marries her Jamaican gardener to secure him a green card; how often a barking dog appears on the roof next door — like in Bangalore or Karachi; how many Koreans of the same family grouping buy in, in a two-year period. Last week I walked out to sprinkle sno-melt on the walk so the postman, who happens to be named Scott Fitzgerald, wouldn’t slip and end up suing me. And right in the crusty grass I found someone’s upper plate — as intimate and shocking as a human body part. Who knows who’d left it there — as a joke, out of frustration, as an act of vengeance, or just as a sign of things to come that can’t at this late stage in civilization be interpreted. My old, departed friend Carter Knott (an Alzheimer’s casualty who one winter night went kayaking off Barnegat Lighthouse and never found the shore again) used to say to me: “The geniuses are the people who spot the trends, Frank, the ones who see Orion where the rest of us assholes just see a bunch of pretty stars.” What’s trending around me now and here — my own neighborhood — I’m sure I’ll never have the time or genius to figure out.

I DO NOTICE, AS I CROSS HODGE ROAD TO THE WELL-HEELED west side — my window down to take in the unseasonable springtime breezes — that a briny-sulfur tang now floats about, as if the hurricane’s insult has vaporized and come inland, two months on, leaving a new stinging atmosphere everyone senses but would just as soon not. Possibly the radio callers aren’t so crazy after all.

Eddie Medley’s big, in-town mansion at #28 is, to my eye, little changed from his glory days of invention, mammon, the Swedish wife, boats, cars, voyages — the grinning, well-heeled devil-may-care-when-everybody-was-your-pal. Eddie’s is one of the old, lauded west-side ramblers, far back from the street and visible only in peeks through the privet and yews and rhododendrons the driveway winds through. Ann used to covet Eddie’s house as her “perfect house,” disparaging our old Tudor half-timber as kitsch — which it was, and which was the idea. (I loved it and mourned when it got hauled down by a family of right-wing, proto-Tea-Party Kentucky brown-shirts, who backed David Duke for President and kept a private army at the ready in the coal-mining hills, but who ultimately grew demoralized by how many Jews there were up the seaboard — plenty — and retreated back to Ironville where white people run everything.)

Eddie’s house indeed rambles all the hell around into the trees in “wings” that extend from the pillared and pedimented Greek Revival original home place. The add-ons were built by successive generations of owners, so kids could have their own “space,” so phalanxes of new wives could have a dance-and-yoga studio, a dark room, a gallery for the mezzo-American collection, a solarium, a herbarium, a print shop, a greenhouse, and a screening room. Plus, a granny apartment, and more than one neat little place just to be quiet in and think, while the men of the house were off in Hong Kong and Dubai doing mammoth deals to bring in tons of money to pay for everything. It’s not an unusual house history on the west side. Though the unhappy result is that few who abide here now have much of a toehold on where they live — the way real people used to. Money sweeps in, money sweeps out. Only the houses — grand and still and equity-rich — testify to the lives that pass through.

Eddie, however, is an exception, having owned his big larruping, cobbled-up pile since the ’70s, when he paid 350K and could now (Eddie’s “now,” of course, is about to transfer to “then”) bring 4 mil and maybe more. Though as I come to a stop in the pea-gravel front turnaround that encircles a lump of female-inspired bronze sculpture that could be a Henry Moore, I see his house has suffered considerable “deferred maintenance”—realtor lingo for physical decline destined to inflict wounds to the wallet. Eddie’s house could use a paint job, a new roof, new sills and soffits, and some repointing in its brick foundation and chimneys. The Greek columns could stand new pedestals. The rambling wings are also showing subsidence signs, suggesting unaddressed water issues (or worse). Four million might be optimistic. Not that Eddie gives a shit. Though if an emir or an oligarch or an African warlord with a Wharton MBA bought the place, the first thing he’d do would be to level it, the way the rabid Kentuckians leveled my old house, flattening the past and all my old dreams in a day.

As I’m climbing out of my car, Eddie’s white front door unexpectedly opens back and out toddles Fike Birdsong — a human I do not want to see, and giving an unhappy twist to the words a sight for sore eyes . Fike’s dented old Cherokee, I now see at the house side of the driveway, where I hadn’t noticed it but should’ve.

Fike is a minister-minus-portfolio; an eager-beaver balls-of-his-feet Alabama Princetonian and Theological Institute grad, who’s always popping up when you don’t want him to, and who nobody in his right mind would trust with a congregation of goats. Fike’s lurked around Haddam for years, doing the morning devotional on WHAD, filling in at Newark airport as a “Delta chaplain” (plane-crash duties), and officiating at funerals and weddings where nobody has any beliefs but wants a church send-off anyway. He’s also an egregious Romney-Ryan supporter (his car bears their sticker), and since the election behaves as if “Mitt” actually won, only the rest of us are too stupid to know it.

Fike’s also a preposterous in-line skater. I often see him whizzing down Seminary Street in an electric green zoom helmet, dick-packer tights way too small for his bulgy dimensions, and orange-and-black Princeton knee pads. He’s been married multiple times, has kids scattered all over, lives in a dismal little bachelor rental in Penns Neck, and always acts as if he and I are old friends. Which we’re not. Fike never ventures near spiritual matters with me, preferring to steer as near as possible to right-wing politics, where his heart is, and which he may believe we share. You know people in a town this size, whether you know them or not. I’m certain Fike’s never come closer to a “godly experience” than a duck has to driving a school bus. He is a typical southerner in this way. Seeing him here makes me want to jump in my car and speed away.