Independence Day (48 page)

Here you’d expect to find no planning boards, PUDs, finicky building codes, septic standards, sidewalk ordinances or ridgetop laws; just an as yet unspoilt place to site your summer cabin or mobile home where and exactly how you want it, right down the road from a good Guinea restaurant, with its own marinara and Genesee on tap, and where a 10 a.m. night owl’s mass is still celebrated Sundays at St. Joe’s in Milford. It’s the perfect mix, in other words, of small-scale Vermont atmospherics with unpretentious, upstate hardscrabble, all an afternoon’s drive from the G.W. Bridge. (Dark rumors may now and then surface that it’s also a prime location for big-city muscle to off-load their mistakes, but no place is without a downside.)

Meanwhile, my spirits have taken a strong upward turn and I’d now like to try hauling Paul into a planned off-the-cuff give-and-take squarely on the notion of Independence Day itself, and to point out that the holiday isn’t just a moth-bit old relic-joke with men dressed up like Uncle Sam and harem guards on hogs doing circles within circles in shopping-mall lots; but in fact it’s an observance of human possibility, which applies a canny pressure on each of us to contemplate what we’re dependent on (barking in honor of dead basset hounds, thinking we’re thinking, penis tingling, etc.) and after that to consider in what ways we’re independent or might be; and finally how we might decide—for the general good—not to worry about it much at all.

This may be the only way an as-needed parent can in good faith make contact with his son’s life problems; which is to say sidereally, by raising a canopy of useful postulates above him like stars and hoping he’ll connect them up to his own sightings and views like an astronomer. Anything more purely parental—wading in and doing some stern stable-cleaning about stealing rubbers, wrecking cars, kicking security personnel, braining stepfathers (who might even deserve it), torturing innocent birds, eventually hauling up his court appearance and how that might correlate inversely with coming to Haddam to live with me and after that with his chances of ever getting into Williams on a “need scholarship”—simply wouldn’t work. In the dizzyingly brief time we have together, he would only retreat into raucous barking, furtive smiles and sullener silences, ending up with me in a fury and in all likelihood ferrying him back to Deep River, feeling myself to be (and being) a ruinous failure. I don’t, after all, know what’s wrong him, am not even certain anything is, or that
wrong
isn’t just a metaphor for something else, which may itself already be a metaphor. Though probably what’s amiss, if anything, is not much different from what’s indistinctly amiss with all of us at one time or another—we’re not happy, we don’t know why, and we drive ourselves loony trying to get better.

Paul has stashed his Walkman back in his bag and set his
New Yorker
on the dash, where it reflects distractingly in the windshield, but he has also grabbed up the slender green-jacketed Emerson off the back seat, where it’s been on top of my red REALTOR windbreaker, and begun giving it a look. This is better than I could’ve planned, though it’s clear he hasn’t cracked the copy I mailed him.

“Do you think you’d rather have a child with Down’s syndrome or a child with just regular mental illness?” he says, leafing casually backward through
Self-Reliance
as if it were
Time
.

“I’m pretty pleased with how you and Clarissa turned out. So I guess I’d rather have neither one.” A mental mug shot of the little feral Mongoloid back in Friendly’s hours ago opens a cruel vein of awareness that Paul may think he’s that or heading that way.

“Choose,” Paul says, still leafing. “Then give me your reasons.”

On the right, outside pretty little Federalist Milford, we cruise by the Corvette Hall of Fame, a shrine Paul, if he saw it, would vigorously insist on touring since, for reasons of Charley’s Old Greenwich tastes, he’s claimed the Corvette as his favorite car. (He likes them, he says, because they’ll melt.) Only he doesn’t see it because he’s looking through Emerson! (Plus, I’m now headed for the barn and a tall, stiff drink and an evening in a big wicker rocker made by native artisans working with local materials.)

“Ordinary mental illness, then,” I say. “You can sometimes cure that. Down’s syndrome you’re pretty much stuck with.”

Paul’s eyes, his mother’s slate-gray ones, flicker at me astutely, acknowledging something—I’m not certain what. “Sometimes,” he says in a dark voice.

“Do you still want to be a mime?” We have passed out along the little Susquehanna again—more postcard corn patches, blue and white silos, more snowmobile repairs.

“I didn’t
want
to be a mime. That was a joke at camp. I
want
to be a cartoonist. I just can’t draw.” He scratches his scalp with the warty side of his hand and sniffs, then makes a seemingly involuntary little
eeeck
noise back in his throat, grimaces, then stations both hands in front of his face, palms out, doing the man-in-the-glass-box and, looking over at me, still grimacing, silently mouthing “Help me, help me.” He then quits and immediately begins flipping Emerson pages backward again. “What’s this supposed to be about?” He stares down at the page he happens to have opened. “Is it a novel?”

“It’s a terrific book,” I say, uncertain how to promote it. “It’s got—“

“You’ve got a lot of things underlined in it,” Paul says. “You must’ve had it in college.” (A rare reference to my having had a life prior to his. For a boy in the clench of the past, he has little interest in life before his own. My or his mother’s family history, for instance, lack novelty. Not that I entirely blame him.)

“You’re welcome to read it.”

“Wel-come, welcome,” he says to mock me. “And that’s the
way
it is, Frank,” he says, reverting to his Cronkite voice again, staring down at
Self-Reliance
on his lap as though it interested him.

Then almost surprisingly we are on the south fringes of Cooperstown, coming in past a fenced sale lot packed with used speedboats, another lot with “bigfoot” trucks, a prim white Methodist church with a VACATION BIBLE SCHOOL sign, right in line with a smattering of neat, overpriced, Forties-vintage mom and pop motels with their lots already full of luggage-crammed sedans and station wagons. At the actual village limits sign, a big new billboard demands the passerby “Vote Yes!” However, I see no signs for the Deerslayer or the Hall of Fame, which simply means to me that Cooperstown doesn’t put its trust in celebrity or glamour but prefers standing on its own civic feet.

“‘The great man,’” Paul reads in a pseudo-reverent Charlton Heston voice, “‘is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.’ Blah, blah, blah, blah-blah, blah, blah. Glub, glub, glub. ‘The objection to conforming to usages that have become dead to you is that it scatters your force. It loses your time and blurs the impression of your character.’ Quack, quack, quack, quack. I am the great man, the grape man, the grapefruit, I am the fish stick—“

“To be great is usually to be misunderstood,” I say, watching traffic and looking for signs. “That’s a good line for you to remember. There’re some other good ones.”

“I’ve got enough things I remember already,” he says. “I’m drowning. Glub, glub, glub.” He raises his hands and makes swimming-drowning motions, then makes a quick, confidential
eeeck
like an old gate needing oiling, then grimaces again.

“Reading it’s good enough, then. There’s not going to be a test.”

“Test. Tests make me really mad,” Paul says, and suddenly with his dirty fingers rips out the page he’s just read from.

“Don’t do that!” I make a grab for it, crunching the green cover so that I dent its shiny paper. “You have to be a complete nitwit asshole to do that!” I stuff the book between my legs, though Paul still has the torn page and is folding it carefully into quarters. This qualifies as oppositional.

“I’ll keep it instead of remembering it.” He maintains his poise, while mine’s all lost. He sticks the folded page into his shorts pocket and looks out his window the other way. I am glaring at him. “I just took a page from your book.” He says this in his Heston voice. “Do you by the way see yourself as a complete failure?”

“At what?” I say bitterly. “And get this fucking
New Yorker
off the dashboard.” I grab it and wing it in the back. We’re now encountering increased vehicular traffic, entering shady little bendy-narrow village streets. Two paperboys sit side by side on a street corner, folding from stacks of afternoon papers. Outside, the air—which of course I can’t feel—looks cool and moist and inviting, though I’m sure it’s hot.

“At anything.” He makes his little
eeeck
sound far down his throat, as if I’m not supposed to hear it.

My chest feels emptied with outrage and regret (over a page in a book?), but I answer because I’m asked. “My marriage to your mother and your upbringing. These haven’t been the major accomplishments in my current term. Everything else is absolutely great, though.” I am gaunt with how little I want to be in the car alone with my son, only barely arrived upon the storied streets of our destination. My jaw has gone steely, my back aches again and the interior feels thick and airless, as if I’m being gassed by fearsome dread. I wish to a lonely, faraway and inattentive god that Sally Caldwell were in this car with us; or better yet, that Sally was here and Paul was back in Deep River, torturing birds, inflicting injuries and dispensing his smoky dread within the population there. (The Existence Period was patented to ward off such unwelcome feelings. Only it isn’t working.)

“Do you remember how old Mr. Toby would be if he hadn’t gotten run over?”

I’m just about to ask him if he’s been snuffing grackles for fun. “Thirteen, why?” My eyes are fast seeking any DEERSLAYER INN sign.

“That’s something I can’t quit thinking about,” he says for possibly the thirtieth time, as we come to the center-of-town intersection, where some kids dressed exactly like Paul are slouching delinquently on the corner curb, playing idiotic Hacky Sack right in among the passersby. Town seems to be a little brick and white-shuttered village, shaded by big scarlet oaks and hickories, all as charming and snappily tended to as a well-kept cemetery.

“Why do you think you think about that?” I say irritably.

“I don’t know. It seems like it ruined everything that was fixed back then.”

“It didn’t. Nothing’s fixed anyway. Why don’t you try writing some of it down.” For some reason I feel aggravated by the story of my mother and the nun on Horn Island and wanting (God knows why) more children.

“You mean like a journal?” He eyes me dubiously.

“Right. Like that.”

“We did that at camp. Then we used our journals to wipe our asses and threw them in bonfires. That was the best use for them.”

Around and down the cross street I now unexpectedly see the Baseball Hall of Fame, a pale-red-brick Greek Revival, post-office-looking building, and I make a quick, hazardous right off what was Chestnut and onto what is Main, postponing my drink for a drive-by and a closer look.

Full of baseball vacationers, Main Street has the soullessly equable, bustly air of a better-than-average small-college town the week the kids come back for fall. Shops on both sides are selling showcases full of baseball
everything:
uniforms, cards, posters, bumper stickers, no doubt hubcaps and condoms; and these share the street with just ordinary villagey business entities—a drugstore, a dad ‘n’ lad, two flower shops, a tavern, a German bakery and several realty offices, their mullioned windows crammed with snapshots of A-frames and “view properties” on Lake So-and-so.

Unlike stolid Deep River and stiff-necked Ridgefield, Cooperstown has more than ample 4th of July street regalia strung up on the lampposts and crossing wires, stoplights and even parking meters, as if to say there’s a right way to do things and this is it. Posters on every corner promise a “Big Celebrity Parade” with “country music stars” on Monday, and all visitors strolling the sidewalks seem glad to be here. It seems in fact and on first blush like an ideal place to live, worship, thrive, raise a family, grow old, get sick and die. And yet: Some suspicion lurks—in the crowds themselves, in the too-frequent street-corner baskets of redder-than-red geraniums and the too-visible French
poubelle
trash containers, in the telltale sight of a red double-decker City of Westminster bus and there being no
mention
of the Hall of Fame
anywhere
—that the town is just a replica (of a legitimate place), a period backdrop to the Hall of Fame or to something even less specific, with nothing authentic (crime, despair, litter, the rapture) really going on no matter what civic illusion the city fathers maintain. (In this way, of course, it’s no less than what I imagined, and still a potentially perfect setting in which to woo one’s son away from his problems and bestow good counsel—if, that is, one’s son weren’t an asshole.)

We cruise slowly by the unimpressive little brick-arched entryway to the Hall, with its even more post-office-ish, Old-Glory-on-a-pole look and a single flourishing sugar maple out front. Several noisy citizens seem to be parading in a little circle on the sidewalk, doing their best, it looks like, to get in the way of paying customers who have walked over from nearby inns or hotels or RV parks and want to get inside for a quick evening tour. These circlers all have placards and signs and sandwich boards and, when I let Paul’s window down to hear, are chanting what sounds like “shooter, shooter, shooter.” (It’s hard to know what could be worth picketing in a place like this.)