“Do you have a family?” I said.
“I had a husband,” Ms. Pines said. “We separated in ’01. He passed on in ’04. I kept our apartment. He was a police sergeant.”
“I see.” I’m deeply sorry wouldn’t have worked any better than Oh, great, that’s perfect. He’s out of the way. And you’re still damn good looking. Words.
“I teach high school in Wall Township,” Ms. Pines said, dabbing her lips. “We shut school down after the storm. Which isn’t the worst thing that could happen to me under these circumstances.” She regarded her busted-arm cast. “Our students are in limbo, of course. We’ll have to make provisions for them after Christmas.” She smiled at me with grim Christmas-no-cheer and took another sip of coffee.
“What do you teach?” I said, across the table. Snow had ceased in my small back yard, leaving the air mealy gray. A pair of enormous, self-important crows had arrived to scrounge in the pachysandra below the suet feeder.
“History,” Ms. Pines said. “I’m a Barnard grad. From ’76. The bicentennial year.”
“That’s great,” I said. “My daughter almost went there.”
Another silence invoked itself. I could’ve told her I’d gone to Michigan, have two children, an ex-wife and a current one, that I’d sold real estate here and at The Shore for twenty years, once wrote a book, served in an undistinguished fashion in the marines, and was born in Mississippi — bangety, bangety, bangety, boop. Or I could let silence do its sovereign work, and see if something of more material import opened up. It would be a loss if some hopeful topic couldn’t now be broached, given all. Nothing intimate, sensitive, or soul-baring. Nothing about the world becoming a better place. But something any two citizens could talk about, any ole time, to mutual profit — our perplexing races notwithstanding.
“You said your father grew up here?” I smiled what must’ve been a loony smile, but a signal of where our conversation might veer if we let it.
“He did. Yes,” Ms. Pines said and cleared her throat formally. “He was the first of his family to attend college. He played football at Rutgers. In the ’50s. He did extremely well. Studied engineering. Took his doctorate. He became the first Negro to work at a high level at Bell Laboratories. He was an audio specialist. He was very smart.”
“Like Paul Robeson,” I blurted — in spite of every living cell urging me not to say “Like Paul Robeson.”
“Um-hm,” Ms. Pines said, uninterested in Paul Robeson. “Some people are better as ideas than as humans, Mr. Bascombe. My father was that sort of man. I think he thought of himself as an idea more than as a man. Our race suffers from that.”
“So does ours,” I said, glad to see Paul Robeson drift off downstream.
“We lived in this house,” Ms. Pines said, “from 1959 to 1969. My father insisted on living in a white neighborhood. Though it didn’t work out very well.”
“Did your mother not like it?” Why would I assume that?
“Yes. My mother was an opera singer. Or would’ve been. She was out of place wherever she was. She was Italian. She preferred New York — where she was from. I was the only one of us who truly liked it in Haddam. I loved going to school. My brother didn’t have an easy time.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Well.” Ms. Pines looked away out the sliding door, where the crows were standing atop the melting snow-crust gawking in at us through the window. “I considered calling you before I came.”
“Why?” I said, smiley, smiley, smiley.
“I was nervous. Because if you knew who I was — or am — possibly you wouldn’t have liked me to come.”
“Why?” I said. “I’m glad you came.”
“Well. That’s kind.”
“They sound like interesting people. I’m sorry I didn’t know them. Your parents.”
“Do you not know about them?” Ms. Pines eyed me appraisingly, her chin raised a guarded inch. She placed her un-injured hand on top of the one that had the cast and breathed audibly. “Hartwick Pines?” she intoned. “You don’t know about him?”
“No,” I said. “Was that his name?” A name reminiscent of a woodwinds camp in the Michigan forests. Or a Nuremberg judge. Or a signatory of Dumbarton Oaks.
“I’d have thought they were infamous.”
“What did they do?” I said.
“And you don’t know?” Ms. Pines said.
“Tell me.”
“I really didn’t mean to venture into this, Mr. Bascombe. I only felt required to come—after living not very far away for so long a time. I’m sorry.”
“I’m really glad you did,” I said. “I try to visit all the places I’ve lived at least once every ten years. It puts things in perspective. Everything’s smaller — like you said.”
“I imagine,” Ms. Pines said. As expected, we’d banged right into something with meat on its bones: being the first Negroes in a white suburban neighborhood with a boy-genius father and a high-strung temperamental operatic white mother. It had the precise mix of history and mystery the suburbs rarely get credit for — a story 60 Minutes or The NewsHour could run with; or ESPN, if the old man had been a standout for the Crimson Knights, gotten drafted by the Giants but chose the life of the mind instead. Even better if the mother had made it at least into the chorus at the Met, and the brother became a priest or a poet. There was even a possible as-told-to angle I could write. People tell me things. I also listen, and have a pleasant, absorptive, non-judgmental face, which made me a good living in the realty business (though doesn’t make me anything these days).
“Do you ever dream about yourself when you were young, Mr. Bascombe?” Ms. Pines said, blinking at me. “Not that you’re old, of course.”
“Frank,” I said. “Yes, I do. I’m always twenty-eight in my dreams, and I have a mustache and smoke a pipe. I actually try not to remember my dreams. Forgetting’s better.”
“I’m sure you’re right,” Ms. Pines said, staring at the yellow rim of her Haddam CC 4-Ball mug.
Just at that precise instant one of the cloudy little gut bubbles we all experience descended distressingly out of my stomach and down, in such a blazing hurry-up, I barely caught it and clamped the exit shut. One more second would’ve cast a bad atmosphere on everything and everyone. My son Paul Bascombe used to call this being “fartational.” Memps, our oncologist-neighbor’s wiggly, old red wiener dog from our days on Cleveland Lane, was forever wandering nosily into our house and cutting big stinkers, one after another. “Out! Memps,” Paul would loudly decree (with relish). “Memps is fartational! Out, bad Memps!” Poor Memps would scuttle out the door, as if he knew — though not without a couple more salvos.
I was disconcertingly “all-but-Memps”—though not detectably, thanks be to god. It must’ve shown, though, in my mouth’s rigorous set, because Ms. Pines’ sloe eyes rose to me, settled back to her coffee mug rim, then fastened on me again as if I might be “experiencing” something, another episode, like my vertigo whoosh twenty minutes ago that I thought she hadn’t seen, but that might require a 911 call this time around — like her husband. Lentil soup was the culprit.
“I feel like I’ll be dying at the right time,” I said — why, I didn’t know — as though that had been the thread we’d been following; not whether our dreams were worth remembering; or what it was like to be a Negro in apartheid Haddam and have high-strung, overachieving parents for whom nothing could be normal. A squiggle of lower bowel pain made me squirm, then went its way.