Phases of Gravity (7 page)

Baedecker was surprised to realize that he recognized his surroundings. He knew that around the next curve in the road there would appear a dairy with a floral clock in the center of the driveway. The dairy came into sight. There was no clock, but the parking lot looked newly paved. The purple-shingled house to the left of the road was the one his mother used to refer to as the old stagecoach stop. He saw the sagging second-floor porch and was sure it was the same building. The sudden superimposition of forgotten memories over reality was disturbing to Baedecker, a sense of déjà vu that did not dissipate. He looked straight ahead and knew that it would be only a long sweep of curve and then another mile before Glen Oak would declare itself as a fringe of trees and a single, green water tower visible above the cornfields.

"You ever meet Joe Namath?" asked Ackroyd.

"No, I never have," said Baedecker. On a clear day, from thirty-five thousand feet in a 747, Illinois would be a verdant patchwork of rectangles. Baedecker knew that the right angle ruled the Midwest in the same way that the sinuous, senseless curves of erosion ruled the Southwest where he had done most of his flying. From two hundred nautical miles up, the Midwest had been a smudge of green and brown hues glimpsed between white cloud masses. From the moon

it had been nothing at all. Baedecker had never even thought to look for the United States during his forty-six hours on the moon.

"Just a real nice guy. Not stuck-up like some famous people you meet, you know? Damn shame about his knee."

The water tower was different. A tall, white, metal structure had replaced the old green one. It burned in the rich, slanting rays of the late-summer evening sun. Baedecker felt a curious emotion seize him somewhere between the heart and throat. It was not nostalgia or some resurrected form of homesickness. Baedecker realized that the scalding wave of feeling flowing through him was simple awe at an unexpected confrontation with beauty. He had felt the same surprised pain as a child in the Chicago Art Institute one rainy afternoon while standing in front of a Degas oil of a young ballerina carrying an armful of oranges. He had experienced the same sharp slice of emotion upon seeing his son Scott, purple, bruised, slick, and squawking, a few seconds after his birth. Baedecker had no idea why he felt this now, but invisible thumbs pressed at the hollow of his throat, and there was a burning behind his eyes.

"Bet you don't recognize the old place," said Ackroyd. "How long's it been since you been back, Dick?"

Glen Oak appeared as a skirmish line of trees, resolved itself into a huddle of white homes, and widened to fill the windshield. The road curved again past a Sunoco station, past an old brick home, which Baedecker remembered his mother saying had once been a way station on the underground railroad, and past a white sign that read GLEN OAK—POP. 1275—SPEED ELECTRICALLY TIMED.

"Nineteen fifty-six," said Baedecker. "No, 1957. My mother's funeral. She died the year after my father."

"They're buried out in the Calvary Cemetery," said Ackroyd as if he were sharing a new fact.

"Yes."

"Would you like to go out there now? Before it gets dark? I wouldn't mind waiting."

"No." Baedecker glanced quickly to his left, horrified at the idea of visiting his parents' graves while Bill Ackroyd sat waiting in his idling Bonneville. "No, thanks, I'm tired. I'd like to check into the motel. Is the one on the north side of town still called the Day's End Inn?"

Ackroyd chuckled and slapped the steering wheel. "Jesus, that old roadhouse? No, sir, they tore that place down in '62, year after Jackie and I moved here from Lafayette. Nope, the nearest other place is the Motel Six over on I-74 off the Elmwood exit."

"That will be fine," said Baedecker.

"Aw, naw," said Ackroyd and turned a stricken face to Baedecker. "I mean, we'd planned on you staying with us, Dick. I mean, we've got plenty of room, and I okayed it with Marge Seaton and the council. The Motel Six's way the hell gone, twenty minutes by the hardroad."

The hardroad. That was what everyone in Glen Oak had called the paved highway that doubled as the main street. It had been four decades since he had heard the phrase. Baedecker shook his head and looked out the window as they moved slowly down that main street. Glen Oak's business section was two and a half blocks long. The sidewalks were raised strips of concrete three tiers high. The storefronts were dark, and the diagonal parking places were empty except

for a few pickup trucks in front of a tavern near the park. Baedecker tried to fit the images of these tired, flat-fronted buildings into the template of his memory, but there was little conjunction, only a vague sense of structures missing like gaps in a once-familiar smile.

"Jackie kept some supper warm, but we could go out to Old Settlers and get in on the fish fry if you'd like."

"I'm pretty tired," said Baedecker.

"Good enough," said Ackroyd. "We'll take care of all the formalities tomorrow, then. Marge'd be pretty busy tonight anyway, what with the raffle and all. Terry, my boy Terry, he's been dying to meet you. He's a real hero to you . . . I mean, shit, you know what I mean. Terry's real excited about space and everything. It was Terry that did a school report on you last year and remembered you'd lived here for a while. To tell you the truth, that's what gave me the idea of you being guest of honor at Old Settlers. Terry was so interested in this being your hometown and all. 'Course Marge and the others would have loved the idea anyway but, you know, it would mean an awful lot to Terry if you could spend the two nights with us."

Even at the crawling pace at which they were moving, they had already traveled the length of Glen Oak's main street. Ackroyd turned right and slowed to a stop near the old Catholic church. It was a part of town Baedecker had rarely walked in as a boy because Chuck Compton, the school bully, had lived there. It was the only part of town he had come to when he had returned for his parents' funerals.

"It really wouldn't put us out," said Ackroyd. "We'd be real honored to have you, and the Motel Six's probably full with truckers this late on a Friday."

Baedecker looked at the brown church. He remembered it as being much larger. He felt a strange lassitude descend over him. The summer heat, the long weeks of traveling, the disappointment of seeing his son at the Poona ashram, all conspired to reduce him to this state of sad passivity. Baedecker recognized the feeling from his first months in the Marine Corps in the summer of 1951. From there and from the first weeks after Joan had left him.

"I wouldn't want to be any trouble," he said.

Ackroyd grinned his relief and gripped Baedecker's upper arm for a second. "Shoot, no trouble. Jackie's looking forward to meeting you, and Terry'll never forget having a real-life astronaut visit."

The car moved ahead slowly through alternate streaks of cream-rich evening light and stripes of dark tree-shadow.

The bats were out when Baedecker went for a walk an hour later. Their choppy, half-seen flits of movement sliced pieces from the dull dome of evening sky. The sun was gone but the day clung to light the same way that Baedecker, as a boy on such an August evening, had clung to the last sweet weeks of summer vacation. It took Baedecker only a few minutes to walk to the old part of town, to his part of town. He was pleased to be outside and alone.

Ackroyd lived in a development of twenty-or-so ranch houses on the northeast corner of town where Baedecker remembered only fields and a stream where muskrats could be caught. Ackroyd's house was of a pseudo-Spanish design with a boat and trailer in the garage and an RV in the driveway. Inside, the rooms were filled with heavy, Ethan Allen furniture. Ackroyd's wife, Jackie, had closely permed curls, laugh wrinkles around her eyes, and a pleasant overbite, which made her appear to be constantly smiling. She was some years younger than her husband. Their only child, Terry, a pale boy who looked to be thirteen or fourteen, was as thin and quiet as his father was stout and hearty.

"Say hello to Mr. Baedecker, Terry. Go on, tell him how much you've been looking forward to this." The boy was propelled forward by a shove of Ackroyd's huge palm.

Baedecker bent over but still could not find the boy's gaze, and his open hand felt only the briefest touch of moist fingers. Terry's brown hair grew longest in front and dropped over his eyes like a visor. The boy mumbled something.

"Nice to meet you," said Baedecker.

"Terry," said his mother, "go on now. Show Mr. Baedecker his guest room. Then show him your room. I'm sure Mr. Baedecker will be very interested." She smiled at Baedecker and he thought of early photos of Eleanor Roosevelt.

The boy turned and led the way down the stairs, taking them two at a time. The guest room was in the basement. The bed looked comfortable, and there was an attached bathroom. The boy's room was across a carpeted expanse of open area, which might have been planned as a recreation room.

"I guess Mom wanted you to see this," muttered Terry and flicked on a dim light in his room. Baedecker looked in, blinked, and stepped in farther to look again.

There was a single bed, neatly made, a small desk, a minicomponent stereo, and three dark walls with shelves, posters, a few books, models, all the usual paraphernalia of an adolescent boy. But the fourth wall was different.

It was an Apollo 8 photograph, one of the Earthrise pictures taken from the external camera's high-speed series on the first and third lunar orbits. The picture had once captured the imagination of the world but had been so overused during the intervening years that Baedecker no longer took any notice of it. But here it was different. The photo had been enlarged to make a supergraphic, floor-to-ceiling wallpaper stretching the width of the room. The earth was a bold blue and white, the sky black, the foreground a dull gray. It was as if the boy's basement room opened onto the lunar surface. The dark walls and dim track lighting added to the illusion.

"Mom's idea," mumbled the boy. He tapped nervously at a stack of tape cassettes on his desk. "I think she got it on sale."

"Did you make the models?" asked Baedecker. Shelves were filled with gray plastic dreadnoughts from Star Wars, Star Trek, and Battlestar Galactica. Two large space shuttles hung from dark thread in a corner.

The boy made a motion with shoulders and hand, an abbreviated half shrug that reminded Baedecker of his son Scott when he had struck out in a Little League game.

"Dad helped."

"Are you interested in space, Terry?"

"Yeah." The boy hesitated and looked up at Baedecker. In his dark eyes there was a brief panic of summoned courage. "I mean, I useta be. You know, when I was younger. I mean, I still like it and all, but that's sort of kid stuff, you know? What I'd really like to be is, well, like a lead guitarist in a group like Twisted Sister." He stopped talking and looked steadily at Baedecker.

Baedecker could not stop a wide grin. He touched the boy's shoulder briefly, firmly. "Good. Good. Let's go upstairs, shall we?"

The streets were dark except for occasional streetlights and the blue flicker of televisions through windows. Baedecker breathed in the scent of freshly cut grass and unseen fields. The stars were hesitant to appear. Except for an occasional car passing on the hardroad a block west, the only noise was the muted but excited gabble of the hidden televisions. Baedecker remembered the sound of console radios through some of these same screen doors and windows. He thought that the radio voices had held more authority and depth.

Glen Oak had never had many oak trees, but in the forties it had been resplendent with giant elms, incredibly massive trees arcing their heavy limbs in a latticework of branches which turned even the widest side street into a tunnel of dappled light and shadow. The elms were Glen Oak. Even a ten-year-old boy had realized that as he rode his bike toward the town on a summer evening, pedaling furiously toward the oasis of trees and Saturday dinner.

Now most of the elms were gone. Baedecker assumed that various epidemics of disease had claimed them. The wide streets were open to the sky. There was still a proliferation of smaller trees. Given the slightest breeze, leaves danced in front of streetlights and threw shadows across the sidewalk. Large old homes set far back from the sidewalks still had their upper stories guarded by gently rustling foliage. But the giant elms of Baedecker's childhood were gone. He wondered if people returning to former homes in small towns all over the nation had noticed this loss. Like the smell of burning leaves in the autumn, it was something that gnawed at his generation by its absence.

The bats danced and dodged against a violet sky. A few stars had come out. Baedecker crossed into a schoolyard, which occupied an entire block. The tall, old elementary school, its shuttered belfry the home for the ancestors of many of this night's crop of bats, had long since been torn down and replaced by a cluster of brick-and-glass boxes huddled at the base of a larger brick-and-glass box, which filled much of the square block. Baedecker guessed that the larger structure was the gymnasium for the consolidated school. There had been no elementary school gym in his day; when they needed one, they walked the two blocks to the high school. Baedecker remembered the old school as being the centerpiece of acres of grass, half a dozen baseball diamonds, and two playground areas—one for the small children and another boasting the high, three-humped slide for the upper grades. All of this had been guarded by the sentinel-silent line of tall trees along the perimeter of the block. Now the low buildings and monstrous gymnasium claimed most of the space. There were no trees. The playgrounds had been reduced to a strip of asphalt and a wooden, stockadelike structure built in a square of sand. Baedecker walked over and sat on a lower level of the thing. It made him think of a poorly designed gallows.

He could see his old home across the street. Even in the fading twilight he could tell that little had been done to change it. Light spilled from the bay windows on both floors. There was siding now where once there had been old clapboard. A garage and asphalt drive had been added where the gravel driveway had once curved around to the backyard. Baedecker guessed that the barn was no longer behind the house. Near the front walk a tall birch grew where none had been before. For a moment Baedecker searched his memory, trying in vain to remember a sapling there. Then he realized that it could have been planted after he had moved away and the tree still would be forty years old.