And the veal piccata was indeed splendid, and went well with the Valpolicella.
Over coffee, Meyer said, “It’s like coming back to life. All this. I was shut down for a year. Now there is a kind of internal pressure that every now and then pops another area of me wide open the way it once was. When I take pleasure in it, then I feel guilty that I owe this conditional resurrection to Norma.”
“Conditional?”
“Of course. How long does it last? Only until the next animal gives me a choice between acting like a man or sitting on the floor and forgetting my name. At times I am anxious to find out, and at other times I hope there will never be another confrontation.”
“You’ll be fine.”
“My words to myself exactly. Meyer, I say to myself, you’ll be fine. Just fine.” His smile was wry.
I looked around at the patrons of the restaurant and the bar. Politicos, many of them young. Lawyers and elected officials and appointees. Some with their wives or girls. It looked to me as if a lot of the city and county business might be transacted right here. They had a lot of energy, these Italianate young men, a feverish gregariousness. I wondered aloud why they seemed so frantic about having a good time.
Meyer studied the question and finally said, “It’s energy without a productive outlet, I think. Most of these Mohawk Valley cities are dying, have been for years: Albany, Troy, Amsterdam, Utica, Syracuse, Rome. And so they made an industry out of government. State office buildings in the decaying downtowns. A proliferation of committees, surveys, advisory boards, commissions, legal actions, grants, welfare, zoning boards, road departments, health care groups… thousands upon thousands of people making a reasonably good living working for city, county, state, and federal governments in these dwindling cities, passing the same tax dollars back and forth. I think that man, by instinct, is productive. He wants to make something, a stone ax, a big ger cave, better arrows, whatever. But these bright and energetic men know in their hearts they are not making anything. They use every connection, every contact, every device, to stay within reach of public monies. Working within an abstraction is just not a totally honorable way of life. Hence the air of jumpy joy, the backslaps ringing too loudly, compliments too extravagant, toasts too ornate, marriages too brief, lawsuits too long-drawn, obligatory forms too complex and too long. Their city has gone stale, and as the light wanes, they dance.”
“Very poetic, Professor.”
“Valpolicella tends to do that to me.”
“I’ve missed your impromptu lectures.”
“Be careful what you say, I may try to make up for the lost year.”
“I haven’t missed them that much.”
Eighteen
AFTER BREAKFAST, the morning news on the car radio said that the high for the day was estimated to be one hundred and two degrees in downtown Utica, a record for the last day of July. I drove, following the directions given me at the motel desk when we checked out.
We headed out of the valley, up Deerfield Hill, past television towers, on a two-lane road so steep in places that the little dark-red car had a problem handling both the grade and the air conditioning, lugging down until it shifted itself into a lower gear. After the suburban houses came the small rundown farms, barns dark-gray and sagging, a few horses grazing. The farms were on a plateau where the road led straight into the distance, toward the misted foothills of the Adirondacks.
There was less traffic headed north than I expected. No doubt the vacation-bound had left the city on Friday. It was a little cooler on the plateau. We had merged with Route S, and I wanted to get to the post office in Poland-as the man at the desk suggested-to find out how I might find Mrs. Fox.
We came down off the plateau to run along a creek valley into Poland, a small commuter town with such large maples bordering the main street that they gave an illusion of coolness on this summer Saturday. Route 8 turned left by a tiny island of greenery in the middle of the village. Meyer spotted the post office ahead on the right, and I stayed at the wheel while he went in.
He came out quite soon and said, “We stay on Route Eight up through Cold Brook, another village the size of this one. And we’ll see the name on a mailbox on the right side of the road, across from the house. The house is a mobile home. He said he thought it was gray and blue, but he wasn’t sure. He guessed it at about ten miles past the far edge of Cold Brook. Strange thing, though.”
“Such as?”
“He was reasonably cordial when I went to the window. But when I told him who I was trying to find, he got very short with me. Abrupt and impatient. He gave me the information and walked away. He registered disapproval of her, and of me for asking how to find her.”
It was only two miles between villages, and I checked the speedometer when we left Cold Brook. Soon the road made a long curve up a gentle slope, and a sign at the top of the hill told us we had entered the Adirondack Park Preserve.
The man had underestimated by about three miles. When we came to her place, I began to understand why he had acted as he did. At one time evergreens had been planted in a long line, close together, along the left side of the road to provide, I guessed, a snow fence to keep the road clear in winter. The trees were very large. Several of them were gone, and her trailer sat in the gap about fifty feet from the road and parallel to it. It could have once been gray and blue. There was a big battered red-and-white four-wheel-drive Bronco on extra wide and extra tall tires parked in the dirt driveway headed out, leaving us no room to turn in.
I parked beyond her mailbox and we got out and stood there, stunned by the profusion of junk that filled the yard from fence to fence. Car parts, refrigerators, cargo trailers without wheels, stovewood, rolls of roofing paper, bed frames, broken rocking chairs, broken deck furniture, piles of cinder block, piles of roof tiles, a stack of full sheets of plywood, moldering away. Glass bottles, plastic bottles, cans, fenders, old washing machines, fencing wire, window frames, 55-gallon drums rust red, an old horse-drawn sleigh, crates half full of empty soft drink bottles, and many other bulky objects which did not seem to have had any useful purpose ever. The scene stunned the mind. It was impossible to take it all in at once. In a strange way it had an almost artistic impact, a new art form devised in three dimensions to show the collapse of Western civilization. It made me think of an object I had seen in New York when a woman persuaded me to go with her to an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. That object was a realisticlooking plastic hamburger on a bun with an ooze of mustard, pickle, and catsup. It was ten feet in diameter and stood five feet high. This scene had that same total familiarity plus unreality.
“Maybe she’s in violation of the zoning laws,” Meyer murmured.
“If those are her own clothes hung out over there on the fence to dry, she is sizable.”
We walked in, past the big vehicle. She must have seen us through the window. She opened the nar row door of the trailer and stepped down onto the top step of the three that led to the door. The trailer was up on cinder blocks.
“What are you looking for?”
“Mrs. Helen June Fox?”
“What do you want her for?”
She was a fairly tall woman. Her brown hair hung stringy straight, unbrushed. Her enormous breasts stretched the damp fabric of a pink T-shirt, sagging toward the protruding belly that bulged over the belt that held up her knee-length khaki shorts. She wore ragged white deck shoes, and there were scars and scratches on her plump white legs from insect bites. Her features were strong, the jaw heavy, the eyes muddy, unfriendly, and unwavering. The mouth was a little crescent, a tight inverted smile, like a bulldog. She and her clothing were smudged and stained. She was an untidy mess, and yet she radiated such a forceful presence that in some strange way she was almost attractive. She held herself well. One could see that twentyfive years ago she had been one hell of a woman, and she remembered how it had been and had retained the pattern of responding to admiration.