Richard Ford - Independence Day

Best would be … well, good for a time was Cathy Flaherty in a wintry, many-windowed flat overlooking the estuary in Saint-Valéry (walks along the cold Picardy coast, fishermen fishing, foggy views across foggy bays, etc., etc.). Good was the early days (even the middle to late days) of my unrequited love for Nurse Vicki Arcenault of Pheasant Meadow and Barnegat Pines (now a Catholic mother of two in Reno, where she heads the trauma unit at Reno St. Veronica’s). Good was even much of my sportswriting work (for a time, at least), my days back then happily dedicated to giving voice to the inarticulate and inane in order that an abstracted-but-still-yearning readership be painlessly diverted.

All that was good , sometimes even mysterious, sometimes so outwardly complicated as to seem interesting and even transporting, which is what most life gets by on and what we’ll take as scrip against what’s eternally due us.

But best? There’s no use going through that card sort. Best’s a concept without reference once you’re married and have loused that up; maybe even once you’ve had your first banana split at age five and find, upon finishing it off, that you could handle another one. Forget best, in other words. Best’s gone.

M y lady friend Sally Caldwell is the widow of a boy I attended Gulf Pines Military Academy with, Wally “Weasel” Caldwell of Lake Forest, Illinois; and for that reason Sally and I sometimes act as if we have a long, bittersweet history together of love lost and fate reconciled — which we don’t. Sally, who’s forty-two, merely saw my snapshot, address and a short personal reminiscence of Wally in the Pine Boughs alumni book printed for our 20th Gulf Pines reunion, which I didn’t attend. At the time she didn’t know me from Bela Lugosi’s ghost. Only in trying to dream up a good reminiscence and skimming through my old yearbook for somebody I could attribute something amusing to, I chose Wally and sent in a mirthful but affectionate account that made fleeting reference to his having once drunkenly washed his socks in a urinal (a complete fabrication; I, in fact, chose him because I discovered from another school publication that he was deceased). But it was my “reminiscence” that Sally happened to see. I barely, in fact, had any memory of Wally, except that he was a fat, bespectacled boy with blackheads who was always trying to smoke Chesterfields using a cigarette holder — a character who, in spite of a certain likeness, turned out not to be Wally Caldwell at all but somebody else, whose name I never could remember. I have since explained my whole gambit to Sally, and we have had a good laugh about it.

I learned later from Sally that Wally had gone to Vietnam about the time I enlisted in the Marines, had come damn close to getting blown to bits in some ridiculous Navy mishap which left him intermittently distracted, though he came home to Chicago (Sally and two kids waiting devotedly), unpacked his bags, talked about studying biology, but after two weeks simply disappeared. Completely. Gone. The End. A nice boy who would’ve made a better than average horticulturist, became forever a mystery.

Sally, however, unlike the calculating Ann Dykstra, never remarried. Finally, for IRS reasons, she was forced to obtain a divorce by having Wally declared a croaker. But she went right on and raised her kids as a single mom in the Chicago suburb of Hoffman Estates, earned her B.A. in marketing administration from Loyola while holding down a full-time job in the adventure-travel industry. Wally’s well-heeled Lake Forest parents provided her with make-ends-meet money and moral support, having realized she was not the cause of their son’s going loony and that some human conditions are beyond love’s reach.

Years went by.

But as quick as the kids were old enough to be safely dumped out of the nest, Sally put into motion her plan for setting sail with whatever fresh wind was blowing. And in 1983, on a rental-car trip to Atlantic City, she happened to turn off the Garden State in search of a clean rest room, stumbled all at once upon the Shore, South Mantoloking and the big old Queen-Anne-style double-gallery beach house facing the sea, a place she could afford with her parents’ and in-laws’ help, and where her kids would be happy coming home to with their friends and spouses, while she got her feet wet in some new business enterprise. (As it happened, as marketing director and later owner of an agency that finds tickets to Broadway shows for people in the later stages of terminal illness but who somehow think that seeing a revival of Oliver or the original London cast of Hair will make life — discolored by impending death — seem brighter. Curtain Call is her company’s name.)

I luckily enough got into the picture when Sally read my bio and reminiscence about ersatz Wally in the Pine Boughs , saw I was a realtor in central New Jersey and tracked me down, thinking I might help her find bigger space for her business.

I came over one Saturday morning almost a year ago, and got a look at her — angularly pretty, frosted-blond, blue-eyed, tall in the extreme, with long, flashing model’s legs (one an inch shorter than the other from a freak tennis accident, but not an issue) and the occasional habit of looking at you out the corner of her eyes as though most of what you were talking about was mighty damn silly. I took her to lunch at Johnny Matassa’s in Point Pleasant, a lunch that lasted well past dark and moved over subjects far afield of office space — Vietnam, the coming election prospects for the Democrats, the sad state of American theater and elder care, and how lucky we were to have kids who weren’t drug addicts, young litigators-to-be or maladjusted sociopaths (my luck there may be waning). And from there the rest was old hat: the inevitable usual, with a weather eye out for health concerns.

A t Lower Squankum I turn off then slide over to NJ 34, which becomes NJ 35, the beach highway, and head into the steamy swarm of 4th of July early-bird traffic, those who so love misery and wall-to-wall car companionship that they’re willing to rise before dawn and drive ten hours from Ohio. (Many of these Buckeye Staters, I notice, are Bush supporters, which makes the holiday spirit seem meanly expropriated.)

Along the beach drag through Bay Head and West Mantoloking, patriotic pennants and American flags are snapping along the curb-side, and down the short streets past the seawall I can see sails tilting and springing at close quarters on a hazy blue-steel sea. Though there’s no actual feel of shimmery patriot fervor, just the everyday summery wrangle of loud Harleys, mopeds, topless Jeeps with jutting surfboards, squeezed in too close to Lincolns and Prowlers with stickers saying TRY BURNING THIS ONE! Here the baked sidewalks are cluttered with itchy, skinny bikini’d teens waiting on line for saltwater taffy and snow cones, while out on the beach the wooden lifeguard stands are occupied by brawny hunks and hunkettes, their arms folded, staring thoughtlessly at the waves. Parking lots are all full; motels, efficiencies and trailer hookups on the landward side have been booked for months, their renter-occupants basking in lawn chairs brought from home, or stretched out reading on skimpy porches bordered by holly shrubs. Others simply stand on old, Thirties shuffleboard pavements, sticks in hand, wondering: Wasn’t this once — summer — a time of inner joy?

Though off to the right the view inland opens behind the town toward the broad reach of cloudy, brackish estuarial veldt, wintry and sprouted with low-tide pussy willows, rose hips and rotting boat husks stuck in the muck; and, overseeing all, farther and across, a great water tower, pink as a primrose, beyond which regimented housing takes up again. Silver Bay this is, its sky fletched with darkened gulls gliding to sea behind the morning’s storm. I pass a lone and leathered biker, standing on the shoulder beside his broken-down chopper just watching, taking it all in across the panoramic estuary, trying, I suppose, to imagine how to get from here to there, where help might be.