Читать книгу The Late Matthew Brown - Paul Ketzle - Страница 11

two

Magnolia Grove, the neighborhood in which I live, is a transitional community, marching slowly but certainly toward complete self-sufficiency in my lifetime. The neighborhood was not designed this way; it was actually not designed at all, at least not as a unified community. The plots are irregular, as if haphazardly drawn and placed, as are the roads, which wind creek-like through the clusters of dense foliage. Structures sprawl, outwards, upwards, asymmetric and geometric dreams of genius and hazardous whimsy. No serious limitations guide their constructions but for gravity, and even that appears in some cases to have been an afterthought. Many of the homes here predate the War, while some date only to the suburban boom of the fifties, though even most of these owners have modeled their homes to the antebellum period. There’s no room here for anything new. Frank Lloyd Wright designed a house here somewhere, I’m told, buried deep behind a thicket or glade, off some overgrown drive. The owners want its location kept secret. We understand, the other homeowners—that overarching desire for privacy and seclusion, to turn away from the bustling outside world and recapture something we’ve lost.

This desire was, in fact, what led us to make our collective decision. Nearly all exiting streets, those that led directly out of the neighborhood, would be blocked off. Too many automobiles, uninvited and suspicious, ventured past our homes at night while we peered out from behind our drapes and blinds. Too many commuters cut through during rush hours to avoid the expressway. Too many west-siders, unwanted, unwelcome. We needed to close ranks, establish our independence and community solidarity.

Our best option, at least at first, was to make entrance and escape a more difficult proposition. Initially this was done by simple barricade. Drivers, though, apparently found these obstacles too constraining. Not a week would go by without someone running down the wood and metal stops. I understood the temptation, found myself on several occasions, with each wrong turn, suddenly facing the steady blip of orange, taunting me, teasing out the impulse to accelerate swiftly and grind down the obstructions.

The ever-increasing rebellion was cured for everyone eventually, once construction crews were brought in to erect concrete dividers, the perpendicular median strips that blurred any notion of continuity. This path ended; another began just beyond. Roads were renamed to further obscure past associations. Fifth Avenue became Sycamore. Third became Greenwich. Lafayette became Oak. Calhoun became St. Francis.

One homeowner, a self-employed landscape artist, oversaw the layering of grasses, flowers, trees, to give the barriers an untouchable quality, like fine china. These end-stops became, in most cases, aesthetically far superior to the yards they bordered. The landscaper left fliers wedged beneath door-knockers, between iron gate railings, under doors and into vase-lined hallways. Discounts for all community members. In response, homeowners on some dead-ends, annoyed by the seemingly ceaseless leafleting, tore out the daylilies and St. Johns wort and creeping thyme and replaced them with mammoth aloe plants and flowering cacti. Tempers flared.

Traffic out of and into the remaining opening has grown as a consequence of our roadblocks, and the single lane has slowed travel time down to a trickle. Left turns are restricted to low-volume hours. Trucks fifteen tons or over, or above ten feet in height, are prohibited. We welcome the rule of law. We’ve discussed widening the entrance to four lanes, plus a fifth for left turns. We considered petitioning the city for a traffic signal.

“This is all just so dumb,” Hero observed immediately upon her arrival. “You can’t just lock everyone out.”

But as I explained to her, that was the idea.

Someday soon, our community will be guarded by a gate, a swinging mechanical arm, a sequence of four numbers, and a speaker phone by which guests can contact their respective hosts. But there’s more. The plan, from what I’m told, is for this neighborhood to withdraw even farther, to finally sever our bonds with the outside world, to become, in some sense, completely self-reliant. We will have our own grocery stores, our own gas stations, our own movie theater. I imagine we’ll need our own office buildings, our own airport. Auto factories to make our cars and parts. Our own ranches and fields of crops. Slaughterhouses and textile factories and newspapers and universities. A new South, wholly self-sufficient.

Homes in Magnolia Grove are upper end, in price if nothing else, when there are actually ones for sale. But this happens rarely. I have only ever seen two houses here on the market. Despite this, the homeowner’s association still produces promotional materials, perhaps if only to keep public interest and property values high. The latest bulletin describes, among other things, the neighborhood’s goal as:

Building a New South for the 21st Century

The pamphlet’s cover is glossy, with a color photograph. A family barbecues in their rolling, green backyard, smiling, young children bouncing on a trampoline. Spanish moss drapes elegantly across the boughs and awnings. The father wears a white chef’s cap and sauce-stained apron. I knew him. Not well, but enough to nod as our shopping carts passed each other down grocery aisles, by the condiments, the charcoal, the bleached white breads. Bill Dreiser. A civil service engineer from three streets over who, rumor had it, made enough in a sudden stock windfall to buy this same pictured family a second home somewhere in the Pacific Northwest, near Portland or Seattle or somewhere in Northern California. Rumor had it he also bought a sailboat.

And then, while clear-cutting his new property one afternoon last summer, a tree fell on him—crushed him in the flash of an instant. When his family couldn’t find him for dinner, they searched the grounds, only to discover a trace of his shirt under the fallen log. And when, after several hours of cutting, they were finally able to remove the colossal trunk, using two pickups and over a dozen men, there was nothing recognizable beneath, nothing distinctly human for his grieving widow and children to claim—only bone and hair and pulp.

In his still-smiling photograph, I notice Bill’s graying mustache is trimmed crooked, angled upward on one side. I seem to remember this about him in person, too. One of the young girls on the trampoline, wearing a cartoon print T-shirt of a blue genie, appears caught in mid-fall, slightly blurred, frozen in time and space, as she gleefully shoots us the finger.

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Hero arrived in the middle of what she mockingly termed “The Reconstruction.” At 407 St. Francis Avenue, the two-story manor house I inherited a few years ago after my grandfather’s death, the structure of things is in perpetual flux. It’s a long-term renovation, piece-by-piece, as I have sought to restore the home’s original splendor. In its 170-year history, mirroring my own family’s evolution from Southern aristocracy to significantly poorer but quietly respected, the building has evolved dramatically as generations of my family have sought to move the structure farther and farther away from its roots—dragging it, awkward and uncomfortable, into their present. Officially, no new work had been done on the house in a hundred years—no zoning permits, no building plans of any sort; yet the house I now occupied bore little resemblance to the one laid out in the original blueprints I’d recovered from the county clerk’s office, which to the untrained eye revealed only the faintest traces of its early eighteenth-century roots.

A variety of odd additions had been made to the back and sides of the building, including a den with three walls, an attached chapel with no walls (just a stucco oval without windows) and a glass dome for a greenhouse out back. The only thing I found that seemed still directly connected to its past was the crumbling family burial plot, with its newest addition, my grandfather Devon, as Old South as they come, joining seven generations of decomposing Browns.

Most of the additions were shoddily done. My first inspection revealed mismatched lines running throughout the structure, water damage and other sure signs of leakage, irregularly shaped doorways and windows. The upstairs bathroom was missing a section connecting the sink to the drainage pipe, and half the sand dollar tiles had been stripped from the walls with what might have been the tip of a Phillips screwdriver, leaving trails in the plaster like asterisks, drifting off into incomplete thoughts.

When I learned I’d inherited this house, I couldn’t wait to move back in, despite these unsightly and potentially unsound changes, because I knew just how rare it was to find a vacancy in Magnolia Grove, and someday living in Magnolia Grove is the goal of every authentic Southern son who grows up knowing its name. But it will take years, perhaps decades, to finish restoring the place to its former glory as our family’s traditional antebellum manor house. A lifetime, even. I began almost immediately after taking possession, and six years later I still felt that I was only just getting started, the past still far out ahead of me.

In the cool of the mornings, Hero and I took our breakfast on the cracked back patio, which I hoped soon to demolish in favor of the original wraparound porch. The newly retro-designed kitchen was still on the planning board. So much was still on the planning board. I’d blown through a large chunk of my inheritance just to complete the few projects I’d started, and I was already beginning to venture into debt. It was worth it, though, I reasoned, and someday, Hero would be able to stay in this house of our ancestors, maybe even live here herself once I was gone. All of this assuming, of course, that we survived this first visit.

“Why don’t you have a pet name for me?” Hero scowled from across her newly discovered favorite breakfast: cheese grits.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, other fathers call their kids dumb things like Sugar or Pumpkin. All you ever call me is Hero.”

“Which is the name you came with.”

“So?”

“You want me to give you a pet name?”

“I want to know why you don’t call me anything.”

After almost a week of meals filled with blank, silent stares, we decided something had to be done, so we developed this method of discussion: In the morning we asked each other a question, some tidbit about our respective pasts, presents and future dreams. Those little joys and tragedies that gain significance by sheer accumulation. Nothing too personal. Then after dinner, during dessert, we’d ask a follow-up and sift for some significance amid the random flotsam gathered in our nets. This was Hero’s idea, so naturally her questions were better. I would ask some banal question about her school or friends, carefully avoiding any area that might seem too personal. She, on the other hand, like any good predator, knew how to go for the jugular.

“You hate my name. Don’t you.”

This was after dinner and partway into dessert. All day I’d been struggling with our morning session, foolishly hoping she’d let the matter drop. I swallowed uncomfortably and scratched my knee.

“Why would you say that?

“I don’t know. Something in your face. Your nose scrunches up when you say it. Like you’ve eaten something sour.”

“It doesn’t matter what I think.”

“I didn’t say it did. I’m just asking.”

“Fine. I probably would have picked something else.”

She smiled. Once again, as had happened so often during her visit over the past week, it occurred to me that I might have found just the wrong thing to say.

“And what would you have called me?”

“One thing at a time,” I stalled, taking an earnest spoonful from my bowl. “I’m still working on the pet name… Puddin’.”

She frowned over her grape Jell-O.

“That’s the best you can do?”

“It’s a start.”

“That’s barely even trying. Why don’t you call me Hamburger? Or, wait! What’d we have for dinner last night?”

“I’m doing my best.”

“Spaghetti! Or how about Meatball?”

“You’re the one who suggested Pumpkin,” I said.

Hero’s face puckered. “That was an example.”

“I’m just saying.”

“My sweet Noodle,” she mocked, bracing her chin on folded hands. “My darling little Marinara.”

“Marinara’s kinda nice,” I said. “Let’s go with that.”

As evening set in, we walked the neighborhood. It was for exercise, so naturally her idea, and it was a rare opportunity to explore the place I lived. After six years living here again, I had not found the time or been pushed by strong inclination. Most often, I was either racing to or from work, or buried deep in one project or another, observing the necessary detachment from streets and houses and landscapes beyond the borders of my front lawn.

But here at the close of the day, we had time to meander with no expressed purpose or design. Up and down the blocks, past shaded and glowing windows, perfectly tailored lawns and next year’s luxury automobiles.

My next door neighbor Alfred was clipping hedges below his front windows. Alfred was a veteran, a widower, and seemingly obsessed with how I organized my affairs. He was not only my Magnolia Grove block president, but also vice-chair of the entire Neighborhood Association. He saw to it that the rules were followed, and when they weren’t, he made sure a penalty was paid. He also took a surprisingly dim view of my reconstruction plans. It wasn’t the retrofitting that was the problem, given the popularity of neoclassical homes; rather, he found my insistence on an authentic renovation perplexing. In a neighborhood perpetually reaching toward modernity, there were specifications and regulations to follow, security elements to maintain, beautification standards to meet, and my idea of a historically accurate home was, as he put it, “potentially depressive of property values”—all of which explained why he, along with everyone else on my block and the Neighborhood Association itself, was in the process of suing me out of house and home.

He stopped clipping to wave and smile. I waved back.

“This place isn’t what I expected,” Hero said, as we climbed the set of meandering public stairs into the upper level of the neighborhood. “Not at all.”

“Worse, then?”

“Hard to say. My expectations were pretty low.”

I nodded, but said nothing.

“When I think of the South, I picture everything in black and white. Fire hoses. Police dogs. We Shall Overcome.”

“That’s the Old South. Things are different now.”

“It’s so lush here. The trees, the vines.”

“We’re doing our best to change that. It’s a constant battle for supremacy.”

“And it’s got all this history. But what’s freaky, though, is how much of it isn’t different at all. Standing around, sometimes, I think I could be anywhere. I mean, that could be anyone’s McDonalds and Jiffy Lube.”

“Is that a compliment or a criticism?”

“I’m not sure yet.”

We walked side by side, her hands swinging loose. I started to reach out to hold one of hers, then laid my arm on her shoulder instead. She let it rest there for a moment. Then she stepped forward with a shrug—gentle, but firm and definite.

We passed a series of lawns with poster board signs for competing political campaigns—judges and congressmen and governor.

“You should know I don’t blame you for all this.”

“The South?”

“No. My birth. It’s not your fault,” she said, walking ahead of me. “Wait. Strike that. I should say, it is your fault. But I still don’t blame you.”

“Look on the bright side,” I said, feigning cheerfulness. “You’re a girl with two fathers.”

Hero shook her head. “Right now, I’m a girl with no father.”

“I see.”

I didn’t argue with her, even to protest for my own sake. The man she had spent her whole life up to this point believing to be her father was Geoffrey Grace, a community college professor and Val’s now ex-husband. What little I knew of him had come from brief and bitter rants over the phone from Val. Hero hadn’t really talked to me about him at all. As we strolled about in the fading light, I began to wonder if her coming here was turning into something of a mistake. Just another in a long line for me. In a short three weeks, we’d be facing an unspoken reality: we had no plans beyond this moment and no need, either. Our lives could continue on as before, as if we didn’t exist. Once she left, we could easily never see each other again.

There were times, like this one, when it felt like this choice might even be best.

“You sure don’t talk like the stereotypical Southerner.”

“Not folksy enough for you?”

“No,” she said, “it’s not that. You’ve got a nice but subtle twang.”

“Thanks. Been practicing my whole life.”

“You just don’t sound like a dumb hick.”

“Fair enough,” I replied. “You don’t sound twelve, either.”

Hero paused in front of an expansive yard. The house was a good thirty yards off the sidewalk, largely hidden from view behind a cluster of palms and extensive tropical landscaping and iron fencing. On every avenue and lane, the remnants of long-deposed Southern aristocracy lay cloistered.

We moved deeper in, left on Summit Avenue, past Coral Court, up Inspiration Drive. The roads sloped upward, toward the crest of a hill that gave Magnolia Grove its towering quality. In a countryside otherwise flat, it had a feeling of regality that I’d always admired. Heavy rains barely touched us here as waters ran slowly, gradually downhill and downtown. But it was the aged and rising trees that gave it a presence, its soaring majesty.

Our path took us around and through the lavish and overwhelming. The streets wound and curved about. Everywhere deserted and still but for the occasional motorist, the slam of a door, the sputter and jerk of the automated sprinkler systems. Dim figures in windows watched as we passed, cautious and concealed and searching for signs of suspicious activities, for loitering, for an errant step onto private property. Mobile phones at the ready. Eyes following our every move.