Now those same people are either staying at home in their cement-and-burglar-barred pillboxes and getting into urban pioneering or whatever their checkbooks allow; or else they’ve sold out and gone back to KC or decided to make a new start in the Twin Cities or Portland, where life’s slower (and cheaper). Though plenty, I’m sure, are lonely and bored silly wherever they are and are wishing someone would try to rob them.
But in Haddam, their place has been taken by, of all things, more Jerseyites, down from Baleville and Totowa or up the dogleg from Vineland and Millville — day-trippers driving 206 “just to remember where it goes” and who stop in here (unhappily rechristened “Haddam the Pleasant” by the village council) for a snack and a look-around. These people — I’ve watched them through the office window when I’ve been “on point” on the weekend — all seem to be a less purposeful lot of humans. They have more kids that’re noisier, drive rattier cars with exterior parts missing and don’t mind parking in handicap spaces or across a driveway or beside a fire hydrant as though they didn’t have fire hydrants where they come from. They keep the yogurt franchise jumping and bang down truckloads of chocolate-chip cookies, but few of them ever sit down at The Two Lawyers for an actual lunch, fewer still spend a night in the August Inn, and none get interested in houses — though sometimes they’ll waste half your day larky-farking around looking at places they’ll forget the instant they’re back in their Firebirds and Montegos, beetle-browing it down to Manahawkin. (Shax Murphy, who took over the agency when old man Otto Schwindell passed on, tried instituting a credit check before allowing a house to be shown over 400K. But the rest of us did some lobbying after a rock star got turned away, then spent two million at Century 21.)
I turn off Seminary out of the holiday traffic, coast down Constitution Street behind downtown, past the library, across Plum Road at the blinker, and cruise along outside the metal-picket fence behind which my son Ralph Bascombe lies buried, out as far as Haddam Medical Center, where I make a left at Erato, then over to Clio, where my two rental houses sit in their quiet neighborhood.
It might seem unusual that a man my age and nature (unadventuresome) would get involved in potentially venal landlording, chockablock as it is with shady, unreliable tenants, vicious damage-deposit squabbles, dishonest repair persons, bad checks, hectoring late-night phone calls over roof leaks, sewage backups, sidewalk repairs, barking dogs, crummy water heaters, falling plaster and noisy parties requiring the police being called, often eventuating in lengthy lawsuits. The quick and simple answer is that I decided none of these potential nightmares would be my story, which is how it’s mostly happened. The two houses I own, side by side, are on a quiet, well-treed street in the established black neighborhood known as Wallace Hill, snugged in between our small CBD and the richer white demesnes on the west side, more or less behind the hospital. Reliable, relatively prosperous middle-aged and older Negro families have lived here for decades in small, close-set homes they keep in much better than average condition and whose values (with a few eyesore exceptions) have gone steadily up — if not keeping exact pace with the white sections, at least approximating them but also not suffering price slippage related to recent sags in white-collar employment. It’s America like it used to be, only blacker.
Most of the residents on these streets are blue-collar professionals — plumbers or small-engine mechanics or lawn-care partners who work out of garage setups that come right off their taxes. There are a couple of elderly Pullman porters and several working moms who’re teachers, plus plenty of retirees whose mortgages are paid off and who are perfectly happy to be going nowhere. Lately a few black dentists and internists and three trial lawyer couples have decided to move back to a neighborhood similar to where they grew up, or at least where they might’ve grown up if their families hadn’t been trial lawyers and dentists themselves, and they hadn’t gone to Andover and Brown. Eventually, of course, as in-town property becomes more valuable (they aren’t making any more of it), all the families here will realize big profits and move away to Arizona or down South, where their ancestors were once property themselves, and the whole area will be gentrified by incoming whites and rich blacks, after which my small investment, with its few-but-bearable headaches, will turn into a gold mine. (This demographic shifting is, in fact, slower-moving in the stable black neighborhoods, since there aren’t that many places for a well-heeled black American to go that’s better than where he or she already is.)
Though that isn’t the whole picture.
Since my divorce and, more pointedly, after my former life came to a sudden end and I suffered what must’ve been a kind of survivable “psychic detachment” and took off in a fugue for Florida and afterward to as far away as France, I had been uneasily aware that I had never done very much in my life that was honestly good except for myself and my loved ones (and not all of them would agree even with that). Writing sports, as anyone can tell you who’s ever done it or read it, is at best offering a harmless way to burn up a few unpromising brain cells while someone eats breakfast cereal, waits nervously in the doctor’s office for CAT-scan results or mulls away dreamy, solitary minutes in the can. And as far as my own hometown was concerned, apart from transporting the occasional half-flattened squirrel to the vet, or calling the fire department once when my elderly neighbors the Deffeyes let their gas barbecue set their back porch on fire and threatened the neighborhood, or some other act of tepid suburban heroism, I’d probably contributed as little to the commonweal as it was possible for a busy man to contribute without being plain evil. This, though I’d lived in Haddam fifteen years, ridden the prosperity curve right through the roof, enjoyed its civic amenities, sent my kids to its schools, made frequent and regular use of the streets, curb cuts, sewers, water mains, police and fire, plus various other departments dedicated to my well-being. Almost two years ago, however, while driving home in a weary semi-daze after a long, unproductive morning of house showings, I took a wrong turn and ended up behind Haddam Medical Center on little Clio Street, where most of our town’s Negro citizens were sitting out on their porches in the late August heat, fanning themselves and chatting porch to porch, pitchers of iced tea and jars of water at their feet and little oscillating fans connected with cords through the windows to keep the air moving. As I drove past they all looked out at me serenely (or so I judged). One elderly woman waved. A group of boys stood on the street corner wearing baggy athletic shorts, holding basketballs, smoking cigarettes and talking, their arms draped around each other’s shoulders. None of them seemed to notice me, or do anything menacing. So that for some reason I felt compelled to make the block and do the whole tour over, which I did — complete with the old woman waving as if she’d never laid eyes on me or my car in her life, much less two minutes before.
And what I thought, when I’d driven around a third time, was that I’d passed down this street and the four or five others like it in the darktown section of Haddam at least five hundred times in the decade and a half I’d lived here, and didn’t know a single soul; I had been invited into no one’s home, had paid no social calls, never sold a house here, had probably never even walked down a single sidewalk (though I had no fear about doing it day or night). And yet I considered this to be a bedrock, first-rate neighborhood and these souls its just and sovereign protectors.
On my fourth trip around the block, naturally no one waved at me (two people in fact came to the top of their porch steps and frowned, and the boys with the basketballs glowered with their hands on their hips). However, I had seen two identical next-door houses — single-storey, American-vernacular frame structures in slightly run-down condition, with keyboard awnings, brick-veneer half-fronts, raised, roofed porches and a fenced alley in between, both with a Trenton realty company’s FOR SALE sign out front. I discreetly jotted down the phone number, then went straight to the office and put in a call to investigate price and the possibility of buying both places. I hadn’t been in the realty business long and was happy to think about diversifying my assets and stashing money away where it’d be hard to get at. And I thought that if I could buy both houses at a bargain, I could then rent them to whoever wanted to live there — black retirees on fixed incomes, or not-entirely-healthy elderlies still able to look after their affairs and not be a burden on their kids, or young-marrieds in need of a sensibly priced but sturdy leg up in life — people I could assure a comfortable existence in the face of housing costs going sky-high and until such time as they could move into a perpetual-care facility or buy a starter home of their own. All of which would bestow on me the satisfaction of reinvesting in my community, providing affordable housing options, maintaining a neighborhood integrity I admired, while covering my financial backside and establishing a greater sense of connectedness, something I’d lacked since before Ann moved to Deep River two years before.