The Marriage of Sticks (13 page)

A letter came from Hugh:

I had a dream last night and have no idea what it means. But I wanted to tell you because I think it has to do with us.

I’m in Los Angeles and need a car, so I go to a used car lot and buy an Oldsmobile 88 from the 1960s. It’s canary yellow and in good shape, especially the radio. But what’s really extraordinary is, the engine is a large potato! Someone replaced the original with this giant spud. For some wonderful reason, it works perfectly. I’m driving around L.A. in my old new car with a potato engine and feeling great. I have the only automobile in the world whose engine you could cook and eat if you were hungry.

One day I stop at a light and the engine stalls. That worries me, especially because the thing has well over a hundred thousand miles on it. So I pull into a gas station and tell the mechanic what happened. He opens the hood and isn’t surprised at what he sees. He tells me to drive it into the garage. He and another guy winch the potato out of the car and throw it on the ground. It breaks in half. I’m horrified.

Inside, like any normal tired out engine, it’s glutted with thick black oil and gunk. I ask how much it’ll cost to replace it. They say they can only put in a new, normal motor but it’s not expensive—a few hundred dollars. Right before I wake up, I can’t decide what to do. I keep thinking, Why can’t they put another potato in there. I don’t want a regular engine. What does this mean, Miranda?

“How do I know what it means, Miranda?” Frances Hatch said. “I’m not Carl Jung!

“Your boyfriend had a dream about potatoes and you’re asking
me
to interpret it? I’m just old. Being old doesn’t mean you know more; it means you ate enough fiber. Most of my life, people didn’t have psychiatry to rely on. If you had a bad dream, it was either something you ate last night or a vivid imagination.

“I don’t believe in interpreting dreams. You should avoid it too. Don’t worry about what Hugh’s dream says; worry about what he says when his eyes are
open.
If he’s not anxiety-ridden about his wife and kids, don’t you be! Are you his conscience or his lover? I think it’s great he’ll throw everything over for you. That’s the way romance should be!

“It’s arrogant to think you know what’s right. Morality is only cowardice most of the time. We don’t avoid misbehaving because it’s not proper; what we’re really afraid of is how far down it looks to the bottom. It
is
far, and you may
get
killed when you hit. But sometimes you survive the jump, and down there the world is a million times better than where you’re living now.”

When I called to say I wanted to see him, Hugh asked what had changed my mind. I said the days were dead without him and I couldn’t stand it anymore.

We met on neutral ground—a favorite restaurant—but we were out of there and back in my bed within an hour.

If I’d had any fears he would leave, they disappeared quickly. He moved into my apartment within two weeks. He brought so little with him that I worried he might be thinking of the move as a test drive: since all of his belongings were still at his place, he could always go back to them if we failed.

But one Saturday when he was at his office, the doorbell downstairs rang. A furniture store was there to deliver a big cushy chair I hadn’t ordered. When they said a Hugh Oakley
had,
I clapped my hands. Hugh loved reading at night but said it could only be done in a perfect chair. Now he had bought one for his new home.

Charlotte refused to let me meet their children. She was convinced I was only a blip on the screen of her husband’s Midlife Crisis. Consequently, when he came to his senses, they would reconcile and I’d be yesterday’s news. Why expose their children to further confusion?

Hugh didn’t care what she felt and was adamant about my spending time with them. I said no. They lived in a parallel universe I was not yet part of. There would be time in the future. Secretly I was petrified of what would happen when we did meet. I imagined two children glaring with fiery eyes that would melt me before I had a chance to say I would do anything to be their friend.

He missed his kids terribly, so I encouraged him to see them whenever he could. I knew in certain ways he missed Charlotte too. I was sure there were conversations and meetings going on between them that he never told me about. His emotions tacked back and forth like a sailboat in a gale.

What could I do to help? Be his friend. Let him know how much I loved and appreciated him. Hold my tongue when necessary; try to be considerate when the first instinct was to snap at anything I didn’t understand or that threatened me. For all of my adult life, Hugh Oakley had lived in marriage, a foreign country I had never known. It was easy to imagine what the place was like, but imagining was like reading a brochure at the travel agency. You could never really know the place itself till you got there.

“Have you ever heard of Crane’s View?” Frances was smiling and her eyes were closed. She was sitting by a window in her red-carpeted living room, her face lit by the morning sun. A few minutes before, when I’d come in and kissed her cheek, it was almost hot.

We were drinking gunpowder tea and eating English muffins, her favorite breakfast.

“What’s Crane’s View?”

“A town on the Hudson about an hour away. I discovered it thirty years ago and bought a house there. It’s a small place, but it has a spectacular view of the river. That’s why I bought it.”

“I didn’t know you owned a house, Frances. Do you ever go there?”

“Not anymore. It makes me sad. I had two good love affairs and a nice dog in that house. Spent most of a year there once when I was angry with New York and was boycotting it. Anyway, I was thinking about it last week. Houses shouldn’t be empty. They should either be lived in or sold. Would you like to have it?”

I shook my head and put down the cup. “You can’t just give away a house. Are you crazy?”

She opened her eyes and slowly brought the muffin to her mouth. A blob of marmalade started a slow slide off the edge. Very carefully she caught it with her thumb and shoved it back onto the top. She looked at me coldly but didn’t say anything until she had finished chewing. “Excuse me, I can do whatever I want. Don’t be obnoxious and treat me like an old nitwit. If I want to give you my house, I’ll give you my house. You don’t have to
take
it, but that’s your choice.”

“But—”

“Miranda, you’ve said at least four times how you and Hugh would like to move. Your apartment is too small and you need someplace where you can start a new life together from scratch. I agree. I don’t know if you’d like Crane’s View. It’s a small town. There’s not much to do there. But both of you could commute to the city. It’s only an hour on the train and the ride is pretty—right alongside the river the whole way. At least go have a look. What do you have to lose?”

The next Sunday we rented a car, picked up Frances, and drove to Crane’s View. It was the first time she had left her apartment in months. She was both thrilled and scared to be out in the world again. Most of the day she wouldn’t let go of my arm but was so excited she didn’t stop talking for a minute.

From their first meeting, Frances and Hugh liked each other very much. Her life and the people she’d known fascinated him. Her greatest pleasure was talking about her experiences to someone who cared. They also argued all the time, but Frances loved a good fight. Despite her great age, there was still a big fire in her that longed to be fed. Hugh sensed this immediately and to my dismay started an argument with her the first time they met. The look on her face was pure joy. In the middle of the battle, Frances slapped a hand down on her birdie knee and proclaimed, “If you hadn’t said that, someone else would have.
That’s
the difference between the clever and the great.” Hugh hooted and said he was going to pray to Saint Gildas, who protected people from dog bites.

As we were leaving, she pulled me aside and said, “He’s so different from your description, Miranda. So much better and so much more annoying!”

We visited her together after that. When Hugh did our shopping he invariably brought back a variety of Ding Dongs, Pinwheels, Twinkies, and other sweets for her. When I told Frances he was the one who bought her the junk food, tears came to her eyes. But the poster won her heart forever.

Seeing it the first time, I asked how the hell he’d found it. Hugh said only that he’d been lucky. His assistant Courtney later admitted Hugh had all of his European contacts on the lookout for months before they tracked one down in Wroclaw, Poland. It was a large color poster from the Ronacher Theater in Vienna advertising a 1922 performance by The Enormous Shumda, “world renowned” ventriloquist and, of course, the great love of Frances Hatch’s life. On the poster he is standing with arms crossed, looking huge, confident, and mysterious in a tuxedo and full-length cape. He’s a handsome man with gleaming black hair combed straight back and a wicked little goatee. When Frances saw the picture, she touched her cheeks and exclaimed, “That goatee! He always put Florida Water on it first thing in the morning before he did anything else. You never smelled anything so good in your life.”

As we drove out of New York City that day, she started talking about him again. “In a funny way, Shumda gave me Crane’s View. Not directly. He was gone years before I ever came up here. But Tyndall lived here, and he was Shumda’s biggest fan.”

I turned around and looked at her in the backseat. She was wearing a tomato red wool cap and a fur coat that had seen better days.

“Tyndall, the oil man?”

Frances nodded. “Yes. We met him in Bucharest in the twenties. Back there he was just another fan of Shumda. We kept in touch over the years. In the early fifties he invited me for a weekend to Crane’s View. I fell in love with the place and kept coming back. It was the perfect escape from New York and Lionel was always glad to have me.

“They had a murder there last year.” She didn’t say anything for a while and when I turned to check her, she was asleep. That was one of the few symptoms of her almost hundred years: she fell asleep faster than any person I’d ever known.

We rode in comfortable silence a long time. I looked out the window and watched the city turn into suburbs and then almost country. Hugh put his hand on my knee and said softly. “I love you. Know that?”

I looked at him and said, “No one in the world could be happier than I am right now. No one.”

We didn’t wake Frances until we saw the first exit sign for Crane’s View. In fact, we didn’t wake her at all: a mile before the turnoff, we both jumped when she called out, “Take the next right!”

I turned the rearview mirror to see her. “How’d you know when to wake up?”

She patted away a yawn. “Lionel Tyndall always had a crush on me. He was as ugly as an egg salad sandwich, but that was okay. I’m no prize in that department myself. No, my mistake was sleeping with him a few times. He didn’t know what he was doing. But
I
did and that made him unreasonable. The guy didn’t know the difference between his big head and his little one. Now go right, Hugh. That’s it. We’re almost there.”

She continued talking as we drove toward the town. I didn’t know what to expect, but what was there pretty much fit what I had imagined. Crane’s View itself was cute and small. The stores in the town center were the basics—food, clothes, hardware, and newspapers—with a couple of specialty shops. It was a town built on hills and from those hills you often caught glimpses of the Hudson River below. Driving around that first day, I kept thinking, It’s a nice place, a real 1950s small upstate town. But there was nothing special about it. I wondered why Frances said she loved it. Crane’s View was everything Frances Hatch wasn’t—quiet, slow moving, unsurprising.

“Stop here! This is the place for lunch. They’ve got the best pizza in the county.”

Hugh braked hard and swerved into a parking spot in front of a dumpy-looking pizza joint. We got out of the car and Frances led the way inside. We were welcomed by the delicious smell of hot garlic. A couple of town studs leaned against the counter and gave us the slow once-over. We each ordered a slice of pizza; when they arrived, they were each as big as an LP record. Frances shook crushed hot pepper all over hers. We took soft drinks out of a refrigerator and sat down at a scarred table.

While we were eating, a handsome man in an expensive-looking double-breasted suit came in. He stopped when he saw us and his face lit up with a big wholehearted smile.

“Frances! What are you doing here?”

“Frannie!”

He came over and they embraced. “I am really happy to see you, old woman! Why didn’t you call and say you were coming? We coulda had a dinner or something.”

“I wanted to see the look on your face when you saw I was still alive. Frannie, these are my friends Miranda and Hugh. This is Frannie McCabe, chief of police. I’ve known him for twenty-five years. How are you, Chief?”

“Good! I’m a married man again. Magda and I finally did it, though I had to carry her kickin’ and screamin’ to the altar.”

“Good for you! Magda McCabe, huh? That’s a nice name. Listen, we’re going to my house after lunch. Is everything all right over there?”

He crossed his arms and looked at the ceiling, exasperated. “Frances, have we had this conversation before? You
know
I keep an eye on the house for you! How many times do I have to tell you? It could use a paint job, but we’ve talked about that. Otherwise it’s fine. You going to start living there again?”

“No, but they may. That’s why we came up to see it.”

McCabe pulled out a chair and sat down. “It’s a nice house, but if you’re going to live there, it needs work. Definitely a paint job, and the basement gets damp. I could introduce you to some people who’d do the job right and not charge too much.”

Frances finished her pizza and brushed off her hands. “Frannie is the king of Crane’s View. He knows everybody. If they’re not in his family, they used to be in his gang. He was a juvenile delinquent when he was a kid. That’s how we got to know each other: he broke into my house when he was fifteen but I happened to be there at the time.” She turned toward him. “Why don’t you go over there with us?”