For a long while I drove past abandoned factories and empty railroad yards. Then little by little I eased into Ohio’s grape country. It isn’t the Napa Valley, but it is still quite impressive. One vineyard after another, for I don’t know how many miles, taking advantage of the warm lake air. I reached Erie, Pennsylvania at nine. Buffalo, New York at 10:30. Buffalo is a big Hannawa. Which doesn’t say much about either city.
I got on the turnpike and headed into the bumpy bowels of upstate New York. At a service plaza outside Rochester I stopped for gas. I bought a rubbery chicken sandwich for my lunch. I found a nice plot of grass for James to irrigate.
I reached Syracuse at two o’clock. I took I-81 north. Ninety minutes later I was in Watertown, population 27,705. What London is to the English and Paris to the French, Watertown is to the people of Jefferson County, New York. The big city they outwardly loathe while secretly lusting to visit.
LaFargeville was just 15 miles up the road. But I’d been driving, and thinking, for ten hours. I was pooped. Physically and psychologically. I got off the interstate and drove downtown. I checked into the Best Western. It was right there on Washington Street. Right about where fifty years before I’d caught the Greyhound Bus to Hannawa and Hemphill College. It was a pet-friendly hotel, meaning that James could stay in my room for an extra ten dollars. I didn’t take him with me into the lobby. I figured they’d take one look at the big bear and charge me an extra hundred.
Tuesday, August 1
I walked James around the hotel grounds until he found just the right spot on the dew-soaked grass to pee. Then we headed up Route 12 toward LaFargeville. Outside Watertown we were immediately surrounded by cow pastures and cornfields. As far as I knew, those were the very same cows and the very same stalks of corn that drove me out of LaFargeville in the fifties.
This narrow plain between Lake Ontario to the west and the Adirondack Mountains to the east is low and scruffy. Which makes it hot and buggy in the summer and absolutely uninhabitable in the winter. The lake winds drive the temperatures low and pile the snow high. There’s not much for people to do up there but make babies and cheese. And they make a lot of both. And both leave as soon as they’re properly aged. I turned onto Route 180 and headed toward LaFargeville.
My first stop was Grove Cemetery. I followed the looping drive around to where we Madisons have been burying each other for 150 years.
Grove Cemetery is well named. The graves are forever in the shadows of the great oaks towering above them. The older stones are covered with moss. I let James run free and walked across the slippery grass to my parents’ headstone. I hadn’t been there in sixteen years. Since my mother’s funeral. And I’d never seen the date of her death chiseled on the stone. It threw me for a loop.
My mother had survived my father by twelve years. Those twelve years weren’t very happy ones for her. But neither were the forty-two years she’d been married to my father. She loved my father, I think. And she loved us kids, I’m sure. But she wasn’t so keen on herself. She never kept herself fixed up as well as she might. “What’s the use with all the work I’ve got to do?” she’d say. And she never allowed herself to have a good time. “How can I enjoy myself with all the work I’ve got waiting at home?” she’d say. Today your family would force you to see somebody. You’d be diagnosed with clinical depression and given some pills. But back then when my mother was struggling to stay afloat, depression was seen as a moral weakness. And a stigma on the entire family. All my father could do was warn my brother and me that, “Mama’s a little down in the dumps today.”
My father, on the other hand, was the happiest man on the planet. He loved being a dairy farmer. He loved his cows. He loved going out to the barn and sticking those milking machine nozzles on their teats. He loved taking his filled cans of milk to the dairy. He loved handing the money over to my mother when he got back. “Not much for all the work, is it?” she’d say.
My brother, George Jr., is buried next to my mother and father. He died when I was sixteen. In Korea. When he was nineteen. My parents bought a plot next to his for themselves. They bought one for me, too. One big enough for a future husband and for any future children that might, like George Jr., die before their time.
I can’t blame my parents for thinking that I’d stay in LaFargeville, or at least settle down nearby in Depauville or Clayton. Even when I went off to Hemphill College to study library science, I’m sure they figured I wouldn’t end up any farther away than Alexandria Bay, or, since I was proving to be a headstrong girl with gumption, Watertown. Little did they know that my sights were set on Syracuse. When I was ten, my Aunt Dorothy took me to the main library in downtown Syracuse. I was staying with her that summer, helping her with her housework while she was recovering from her “women’s problem” surgery. Anyway, I took one look at that big castle full of books and knew I wanted to spend the rest of my life in there, bathed in all that respectful silence, sniffing in all that slowly decaying ink and paper, far away from the smell and moo of my father’s cows.
Instead, I met and married Lawrence Sprowls, who after a few fairly happy years of marriage metamorphosed into a skirtchasing skunk. But that marriage did keep me far away from LaFargeville. And it did land me the best-possible job in the world: head librarian of The Hannawa Herald-Union. I remember what I wrote my aunt a few months after getting the job: It’s better than a castle, auntie. It’s a newsroom.
I sat on the ground in front of my parent’s stone. I clapped my hands for James. He came running. He plopped next to me. Begged me to scratch his floppy ears. “There’s nothing wrong with spending your life in LaFargeville,” I told him, “being a dairy farmer or a dairy farmer’s wife. But I sure knew it wasn’t for me. I knew from the get-go I’d have to go somewhere else and be somebody else. I would have exploded like an over-baked potato if I’d stayed here. And maybe that’s what Violeta Bell did, James. Maybe she was from some boring little place like this. She knew it was either escape or explode. She gave herself a new name and a new history. More than likely she’s no more Romanian than you are.” I took him by the ears and stared into his eyes. “You’re not, are you?”
James waited for me to struggle to my feet then followed me to the car. “Maybe she had an aunt who took her to an antique store once,” I said. “Maybe she fell in love with all the fancy old stuff and knew that was just the life for her. Not that we want to paint her too sympathetically, of course. She was very likely a crook. Very likely she changed her identity to stay out of jail. We’re not talking about Mother Teresa here, James. But criminality aside, you’ve got to admire someone who knows what it takes to be happy inside their own skin.”
We drove into LaFargeville. It was as humble as it was when I was a girl. A hundred modest houses. A bank. A school and three churches. No real downtown.
LaFargeville is-how should I put it-very white. Everybody is either German or English. Everybody is either a practicing Catholic or a well-practiced Protestant. Everybody is either a Republican who votes Republican all of the time or a Democrat who votes Republican most of the time. Everybody is either married or wishes they were.
I drove past the house on Maple Street where my niece, Joyce, grew up. After my mother died, Joyce was my only living relative in LaFargeville. Now she was gone, too. For thirty odd years she’d militantly extolled the virtues of remaining single. Then five years ago she met a widower at a stamp collector’s show in St. Louis and married him. She now lives in Wahoo, Nebraska. She keeps begging me to visit.
I drove by the house on Mill Street where my girlfriend Edna Schwed used to live. It used to be painted white, like most of the houses in LaFargeville. Now it was painted pink. Which made me suspect that Edna still might live there. Pink was always her favorite color. I thought about stopping. But good gravy, what if Edna did still live there? What on earth would we talk about? Other than what her neighbors thought about her pink house?