Chapter 6.
"A Letter for Emily"
Chapter 6. Our Man Across the Street.
Jack Shane had just emptied his garden cart of grass clippings in the street.
He was a man of late middle age, stocky athleticism still obvious in his moments, from what Pete could see from the driveway across Byers Avenue.
Shane slowly looked up, and felt himself scrutinized, the way a man with thick lenses will, from a distance. Jack took a few steps in his direction.
“Hi, Chris?” he squinted tentatively.
“No, I’m Pete,” he replied with a grin. “Chris is the tall one. I’m the crazy one…”
“Peter?”
“Yes, that’s right. You must be Mr. Shane.”
Jack Shane nodded as the look of suspicion faded from his eyes, magnified as if from curved mirrors. Jack had watched his mother’s house across the street a few days already.
“Well,” Jack apologized in distinctive North County tone. “I didn’t know what your mother’s plans were. I been picking up the mail, just like she said…”
‘Thanks, Mr. Shane. She appreciates that. Should be back in a few days once Gracey gets the new baby settled.”
“How’s your sister doing?” asked Shane amiably. Like most retired firemen, he was a talker. The kind you like instantly.
“She had the baby Friday morning. Nine pounds three ounces,” Pete recited, realizing too late she had a name.
Shane grinned at the thought of a new baby and looked down at his feet.
“Nicetameecha finally,” he said. Jack was a good man.
The pause.
“I came out when I recognized the car,” Jack added.
Pete regarded hom a moement, realizing he knew nothing of the man’s background.
“Lived here long?” he mentioned, nodding to the house across the street from his mother’s, where once had been old woods, sumacs, rocky outcroppings and his secret places of childhood.
Pete stepped closer toward the friendliness in Jack’s eye.
“Seventeen years!” said jack proudly.
Pete turned to face his mother’s place.
“I lived here on Byers Avenue, uh, fourteen years,” said Pete looking back with a moment of calculation.
“Oh,” offered Jack. “We moved here seventeen years ago, so we didn’t overlap.’
The year after Jack arrived, Pete’s doctoral work in Houston was wrapped up. Fifteen years back. No wonder. Pete silently called to mind the years in Texas, doing time, he would tell people. There were years he never returned to River Falls.
He glanced past Jack’s face, searching for things he wanted to know without asking. Too early to ask. Not yet. This man Shane, who was he? Safe enough to be across the street watching his mother’s place while she helped in Schenectady.
Easy, he told himself.
Just watch.
* * *
He paused a moment on the front steps and watched jack a few moments from behind the hemlock hedge. He noticed how the man cared for his yard and gardens. Sure, the plaster elves nd burro weren’t exactly in keeping with the modest cottages along Byers Avenue, but there was something surpassingly solid about Shane.
The house, his mother’s house, was cooler within, and arranged as if by someone with time to attend the smallest details. He saw it hadn’t changed, never seemed to change much between visits, now occupied forty years, and the adults who acknowledged him as elder brother, had come from this same place.
It was as if each book, each potting and each chair had a tale to reveal, a story involving him, his sisters and younger brother.
It was curious how he thought of his only brother. The youngest sib, by that time a very middle-aged wood worker, no, shop manager would tacitly acquiesce to introductions as the little brother, despite superior stature and bulk.
Of his sisters, he thought constantly.
One could not help but be reminded of their growth and development by the portraits, by the photos of Gracey’s young son, by the outpourings on grand scale of the graphic art that marked their lives. And soon, very soon, the portrait of little Emily would take its place on the shelf, and the race would be on.
Els had trained in graphic arts and over the years developed an enviable reputation for her architectural renderings in the state. These and Trapp’s sculpture supported Potterbrook Farm, and one could trace her growth on her mother’s walls and the shelves from the architect’s daughter, E. Glenn’s first, to that day, as he stood in the quiet high ceilinged and airy living room watching, considering the layers of experience represented by these accumulated artifacts.
He couldn’t decide which, the large oils or the macramé, were more impressive. And then there werethe few samples from Trapp’s sculpture studio, and here too, the signs of maturing judgment and taste were obvious.
Good old Trapp: Trapp Sandhurst, sculptor.
On the table, the low coffee table just beneath Ellsie’s magnificent microscopic study of frost crystals, rose a simple loop, springing like a calyx and flower from its massive granite base. Attractive for mysterious reasons. Mahogany laminated to good effect, like a three-dimensional, lacquered Rohrschach, this slightly twisting form, like a tactile Moebius strip.
To Peter, this was ethereal geometry, this abstraction, brought to mind a more specific form. It was a mahogany section through a large organ, as if someone had with a knife, neatly sliced free and connected strip from a large mahogany pear.
A hollow pear.
The fact of its abstract identity revealed subconsciously, it came so suddenly and perfectly to his imagination that it startled him. That that subconscious recognition had come to him years ago.
He closed the door behind him and walked toward the mahogany loop on its heavy marble base sitting on a low table.
A uterus.
The blood-brown of wood, the course of its upper circuit as it curved around to describe a more narrow form below.
It was a perfect section from a large wooden uterus, three times scale, perched in upright attitude upon its slab of milled Vermont stone.
Of course, the chuckles from the artists and their kin could have been predicted. Simply an abstraction that had sprung from Trapp Sandhurst’s imagination without preconceived models of form, in three dimensional mahogany.
In fact, Dr. Banning’s discovery, he now knew, was justified in that biologist’s raging imagination.
When that was, the exact year he meant, when Trapp and Ellsie had begun seeing each other, he had forgotten. Twenty years? More?
They had always joked, these two artists of Potterbrook Farm, that marriage was out of the question at hazard of their creative integrity. He wondered whether Ells had inspired this organ in fine wood, and about all the psychobabble about male compensation. Men who, lacking a uterus, spent their lives applying muscles and wit to match what women could manage with the slightest inconvenience.
Of course, it was a uterus.
And on the dividing half wall between living room and hallway, in a more conspicuous site for first-time visitors, an elaborately folded loop in figured maple, the product of Trapp’s ripened artistic maturity, a work of pure abstraction a frea greater distance from biology, closer to mathematics.
He could see, with the biologist’s instinct for morphology, the organic evolution of the reknown Sandhurst arabesque, his crowning architectural achievement, the signature for which he was justly famous in the galleries of Santa Fe, Wiltshire boulevard and New York City.
In the beginning, there was the circle.
Dr. Peter Banning imagined the cartoon, like a visual addendum to the abstract sections of an old Disney film. The dancing circle. It spins and twists, according to the musical score. Igor Stravinsky, perhaps. The sensuousness of the basic curve without reference to human form. The colors chosen from the entire gamut of exotic hardwoods hauled from tropical jungles on barges. The waxy sheen of the artist’s models, the wax strip dancing in his imagination, and bouncing as the music modulated to a new key.
But the surface of the Sandhurst Loop was no chemically induced hallucination, for he could touch it and marvel at the depth and warmth of grain. As real as flesh.
It had the same symmetry as the first swallows he would watch, spinning and turning, in the evening air above red tile roofs of Heidelberg, the one he could not help comparing to that Bach Fugue, for some reason called the Little Fugue in G which seemed to serve for all his flght of fancy with recurrent mathematical underpinning.
But.
The iced tea tasted fine, and he had no time for such daydreams. For the briefest instant, he would consider putting these fleeting images to paper, but that was such trouble. And once committed, they would think him crazy. All those notes scribbled on scraps of canary paper, the file cards that collected, reminded him of ambitions he no longer entertained.
From the kitchen window, the lawns colored deep, verdant green from chill rains, lay expansive, lawns once his responsibility to mow each Saturday morning, for which he was paid two dollars. Away near the fence, beyond the garden, the garden kept annually by a mother to remind her of the coming season’s blizzards, were white houses, the yards of the next block over. Houses where other boys had lived. And their names?
He paused a moment at the kitchen window to consider, and as if in answer to his ponderings, the neighborhood echoed through the trees, and he thought he heard his own name. His name Peter called by a young mother’s voice not many years past her own adolescence, and some kid shouted in response.
Not him, no, not him. Forty years too late to be calling for him. Some new, shrill-voiced, excitable young Peter. The neighborhood seemed to sprout them year after year.
It suddenly struck him odd that he would date the fields and homes from the time of his own childhood, hardly considering the possibility of the generations before, or since.
Peter!