Richard Ford - The Lay of the Land

A pair of whitetails suddenly appears in my headlights, and I have to idle up close and beep-beep before they snort, flag their tails and saunter onto the road edge and begin nibbling grass, unfazed. De Tocqueville, back in the twenties, was in fact a vaunted hunting woods for rich Gotham investment bigwigs (part of the carnage) and was then called Muirgris, which is embossed on the gate in Latin. Packard-loads of happy fat men in tweeds rumbled down on weekends, disported like pashas, drank like Frenchmen, consorted with ladies imported from Philly and occasionally stepped outside to blow the local fauna to smithereens, before packing up on Sundays and happily motoring home.

Muirgris is now De Tocqueville — and a bane of the old roisterers — a “sanctuary” overrun with deer, turkeys, skunks, possum, squirrels, raccoons, porcupines, some say a catamount and a bear or two, all of which enjoy refuge. Disgruntled Haddam home owners living outside the Muirgris boundaries have voiced complaints about predation issues (deer and bunnies eating their winged euonymus) and made dark threats about hiring professional hunter-trappers to “thin the herd” using controversial net-and-bolt devices, all of which has the gentle De Tocqueville staffers up in arms. There have been property-line confrontations, township-council shouting scenes, police called at late hours. Lawsuits have been filed as the animals have crowded inside, seeking protection, and new worries about Lyme disease, bird flu and rabies are now rumored. A relative of one of the original old sports, an interior design consultant from Gotham, gave a speech at commencement, saying his forebear would want Muirgris to stay up with the new century’s values and be as “green” today as he was “bloody-minded” in his own time. So far, the issue is far from decided.

I wind a cautious way down to campus — speed bump to speed bump. The school’s buildings are all sited around the old rogues’ hunting lodge, a regal log and sandstone Adirondack-style dacha now converted into an “Admin Mansion,” with earth-friendly faculty and classroom modules built down into the woods, as if prep school was a dreamy summer camp on Lake Memphremagog, instead of a hot petri dish where the future of the fortunate gets on track, while the less lucky schlump off to Colgate and Minnesota-Duluth. My son Paul didn’t rate a sniff here ten years ago.

Ann’s styleless brown Honda Accord sits alone in the shadowy, sodium-lit faculty lot, the rest of the De Tocqueville staff long gone for Turkey Day festivities. It’s possible Ann wants to discuss the children today: Clarissa’s revised gender agenda and lack of life direction; Paul’s arrival tomorrow with a companion; how to apportion visiting hours, etc. She may, in fact, be afraid of Paul, as I slightly am, though he claims she’s his “favorite parent.” Having children can sometimes feel like a long, not very intense depression, since after a while neither party has much left to give the other (except love, which isn’t always simple). You’re each, after all, taken up with your own business — staying alive, in my case. And for reasons they have no control over, the children are always aware they’re waiting for you to croak. Paul has expressed this very view as a “generic fact” of parent-child relations, point-blank to his mother, which is probably why she fears him. Clarissa’s current gift-of-life to me is the rarest exception, though one partly entered on by her — and why not — because it allows her to think of herself as equally rare and exceptional.

In any case, conversations with one’s ex-wife always exist in a breed-unto-themselves/zero-gravity atmosphere that’s attractive for its old familiarities, but finally less interesting than communication with an alien. Whenever I’m around Ann, no matter how civil or chatty or congenial we manage it, no matter what the advertised subject matter (it was worse when the kids were younger), her silent thoughts always turn to the old go-nowhere ifs and what-ifs, all the ways “certain people” (who else?) should be, but mysteriously are not. Try, try, try to be better. Award good-citizenship medals, wait patiently at bedsides, shell out my last dime for kids’ therapy — still Ann can’t ignore the one fatally blown circuit from long ago, the one that doused the lights and put karmic unity forever out of reach. The Permanent Period again stands me in good stead here by allowing me to take for granted exactly who I am — good, or awful — not who I should be, and along the way blurs the past to haze. But Ann is finally a life-long essentialist and thinks there’s a way all things should be, no matter how the land lies around her feet. Whereas I am a lifelong practitioner of choices and always see things as possibly different from how they look.

But even with these asymmetries being in continuous effect, I constantly carry around a sometimes heart-wrenching, hand-sweating fear that Ann will manage to die before I do (the odds there have clearly shifted to my favor). Each time I’m about to see her — the few times since she moved back to Haddam last year — I’ve sunk myself into a deep fret that she’s about to release a truckload of bad news. A mysterious lesion, a “shadow,” a changed mole, blood where you don’t want blood, all requiring ominous tests, the clock ticking — all things I know about now. Following which, I won’t know what the hell to do! If loving somebody you’ll never really know again and only rarely see can be difficult — though I don’t really mind it — think about having to grieve for that person long after any shared life is over, life that could’ve made grieving worthwhile. You think grief like that, grief once removed, can’t be experienced? It can kill you dead as a mackerel. I, in fact, wouldn’t last a minute and would head straight to the Raritan bridge at Perth Amboy and leave my car a derelict on the Parkway. Think about that the next time you see such a vehicle and wonder where the driver went.

D e Tocqueville Academy is a day school only. Even the Arab and Sri Lankan kids have well-heeled host families and good places to go — the Vineyard, the Eastern Shore — for holidays. A couple of dim fluorescent lights are left burning in the Admin Mansion, just like at the seminary, and down toward the classroom modules, past the postmodern ecumenical chapel, toward the glass-exterior athletic installation, a scattering of yellow lights prickles through the oaks and copper beeches as the day is ending. I’m confident I’m being observed on a bank of TV screens from some warm security bunker close by, the watchful crew standing around with coffee mugs, studying me, a “person of interest, doing what, we don’t know,” my name already jittering through the FBI computer at Quantico. Am I wanted? Was I wanted? Should I be? I’m surprised Ann can stand it here, that the practical-bone, non-joiner Michigan girl in her can put up with all this supervised, pseudo-communal, faux-humanistic, all-pull-together atmosphere that infests these private school faculties like mustard gas — everyone burnishing his eccentricities smooth so as to offend no one, yet remaining coiled like rattlers, ready to “become difficult” and “have problems” with colleagues whose eccentricities aren’t burnished the same way. You think it’s the psychotic parents and the hostile, under-medicated kids who drive you crazy. But no. It’s always your colleagues — I know this from a year’s teaching at a small New England college back in the day. It’s the Marcis and the Jasons, the exotic Ber -nards and the brawny Ludmillas, over for the Fulbright year from Latvia, who send you screaming off into the trees to join the endangered species hiding there. In-depth communication with smaller and smaller like-minded groups is the disease of the suburbs. And De Tocqueville’s where it thrives.