The Monsters of Templeton Page 4

  She was right, though; it was the best snack I’d ever had. In those years, though I did chafe against her will, Vi was always right. I couldn’t imagine her being wrong; in those first years my mother was my only friend, and I hers. But when I was at last off to kindergarten, she went to nursing school in Oneonta and took a job at Finch Hospital in town, and then her world suddenly expanded. Then she had friends, women who sat with her over coffee cake, rubbing their arches, complaining. Once in a while, in high school, I suspected a few of these women to be more than friends, especially the ones who were in Averell Cottage bright and early on a Saturday morning to eat my mother’s omelets and watch cartoons with me. There would be something about their broad hips, their hungry, bitten mouths, the smiles on their faces when they didn’t think I was watching, which would make me suspect things before I could even understand them. When my mother later called herself a pan-sexual when she was drunk and I was sixteen years old, it would be clear, then, like a period at the end of a very long sentence.

  That was Vivienne’s life in the years after I was born. She was a critical care nurse, soothing the last days of the hopeless cases with a depth of gentleness that I rarely saw from her but knew was in there, somewhere. And in the months before I myself returned to Templeton an outcast, she awoke some days grateful that she ever survived the 1970s. On others, she felt as if she had wasted everything; she had always poured so much of herself into me that she was afraid there was none left for her anymore. When she began her long walk toward Jesus, she prayed hours upon hours of fervent prayer trying to protect me from the terrible pitfalls she saw on my path. She sat at the kitchen table, head bent, trying to will me into success, deep into the night. She imprecated, she begged. At some point the prayer clicked, and she understood such a wispy thing as faith.

  And on some nights on the opposite side of the country, I paused over my esoteric texts in a kitchen in San Francisco, and looked up, as if I had heard something. The enormous, pulsing world seemed so treacherous at that moment, sirens bursting up the streets toward danger, toward death, everything in turmoil. During the winter after the attack on New York City, the country was grim, gray, a wobble away from a headlong fall into apocalypse. The world as I knew it was always just about to end; we were fragile; I was fragile. It would take just a nudge for my own self to free-fall.

  Perhaps with all this in mind one can understand why Vivienne reacted the way she did on the day of the monster, the day I returned. There were the strange parallels there: the pregnancy, the singlehood, the ambition suddenly curtailed. A return to Templeton in disgrace. Her own ambition lopped off, yet again, like a tulip beheaded by a stick. How she must have looked up at me that morning, as I stood there, twenty-eight years old and filthy from my trip, skinny, hair shorn, heartsore, miserable, eyes swollen from too much crying. How she must have seen only a failure, nothing like the elegant success she had always wanted me to be. A waste of all those years, squeezing herself dry. And how I must have been hateful to her, just about then.

  George Franklin Temple Upton (Vivienne’s father) 1935.

  At two years old, with orphan girls at Pomeroy Hall. See how they’re dressed in antiquated clothing, long out of style. This was by design: his grandmother, Hannah Clarke Temple, who raised George, was the director of the orphanage. She thought such dress made potential parents for her orphans harken back to their own childhoods, and be more ready to adopt.

  4

  The Running Buds (Big Tom, Little Thom, Johann, Sol, Doug, Frankie) Speak

  WE RUN; WE like to run; we have run together for twenty-nine years now; we will run until we can run no more. Until our hips click and shatter apart, until our lungs revolt and bleed. Until we pass from middle age into old age, as we once passed from youth into middle age. Running. In the winter, we run, through the soft snow, slipping over the ice. In the Templeton summer, soft as chamois, glowing from within, we run. We run in the morning, when the beauty of our town gives us pause. When it is ours and ours alone, the tourists still tunneling into their dreams of baseball, of Clydesdales, of golf. Oh, the beauty of the town, oh the sunrise over the town as we crest the hill by the gym all spread before us like a feast, our hospital with its fingerlike smokestack, beyond, the lake like a chip of serpentine, and the baseball museum, and the Farmers’ Museum, and the hills, and in the foggy hollow, our houses, fanned across the town, where, inside, our families sleep, peaceful. But we, the Running Buds, are together, moving, we behold this as we have beheld it for twenty-nine summers, twenty-nine winters, twenty-nine springs and falls.

  There is sometimes no conversation but companionable spitting, and sometimes we talk of our families, of our problems.

  How Big Tom’s middle child worries him, hanging with those meth-heads at the Sugar Shack in Fly Creek.

  Of Sol’s wife troubles, on his third wife and still no children of his own, the marriage souring as we speak.

  Of Little Thom’s thrombosis.

  Of Doug’s war with the IRS. Of Doug’s many affairs.

  Of Johann’s daughter suddenly a lesbian, seems a disease now, all these pretty young girls with shorn heads.

  Of our joke-man, Frankie, and his parents’ passing. His jokes are now bitter, making us take them as we take black coffee: wincing, grimacing, swallowing fast.

  Oh, we know such things about one another, such dark things, even when we haven’t spoken them. There is something in the rhythm of the run that tells them, something that spreads our sorrows into the heads of the others and gives us some solace, though unspoken. We know of the affairs, we know of the desires, we know what we know, and we will never tell. And we are the kings of this town as we run, we own this town, some of us have owned it for generations; we, alone awake as everyone else sleeps, we guard the town with our daily circuit. With our footsteps, with our jokes, with our farts. We are sentries, keeping the place pristine, keeping the danger at bay: together, running, we keep the town safe.

  We were the first ones to hear poor Dr. Cluny’s calls in that foggy dawn, we on our run, we changed our course to reach him, we believed him. We threw off the ropes of our own motorboats, we sped over the wakening water out to see. There it was, massive and white, beautiful, beautiful, so beautiful. Doug wouldn’t admit it, but it made him weep. It made more than Doug weep; Sol might have felt a rending in him, Frankie might have thought of his parents and coughed to keep from sobbing. Big Tom, Little Thom, Johann, all blink-blinking. It was as if a dear and secret part of us had disappeared, as if we saw our own old age, and we were alone on a dock, in a camping chair, fishing, stiff and unable to move, there, in the fog, alone.

  We were the ones to go back for the other boats. We were the ones to tie the ropes to the tail, and begin our slow pull back. We tied the great beast up to the boulders under the statue of Natty Bumppo and his dog, or Chingachgook and his dog, we don’t exactly know which is depicted in the bronze of that strange statue; we were the ones to awaken Dr. Zuckerman at the Biological Field Station, we were the ones to call the National Guard.

  Then, when we had done so, we put our hands upon the freezing cold monster, our monster. And this is what we felt: vertigo, an icicle through our strong hearts, our long-lost childhoods. Sunshine in a field and crickets and the sweet tealeaf stink of a new ball mitt and a rock glinting with mica and a chaw of bubblegum wrapping its sweet sweet tendrils down our throats and the warm breeze up our shorts and the low vibrato of lake loons and the sun and the sun and the warm sun and this is what we felt; the sun.

  5

  Secrets of a Tiny Town

  UP SURFACED THE monster, and after the monster there came the crowd.

  From Main Street they came with their bags of baseball paraphernalia, with their country club rackets, with their cameras. In the brightening July morning, they milled and they gasped, they sipped their coffee, they shuffled in their slippers, and some, sensing the history of the moment, wept, and others saw them weeping and wept louder. In the amassing gro
up, I lost the lassitude that touching the monster had given me. Anyone could have been in the crowd: high school sweethearts gone paunchy and Republican; girls from my soccer team I’d have difficulty recognizing; old doctors who knew too much about my vital functions. When I saw my elementary school principal, a bald little elf of a man, come toward me with his arms outstretched and great teary tracks down his face, about to shout Willie! You’re home!, I turned and fled back over the neighbor’s property, over the Shadow Brook bridge, up the hill and onto the cool orange shag carpet of the 1970s wing of Averell Cottage. I couldn’t bear to face them, not yet.

  In a city, any city, one can be anonymous; this is the blessing of cities. In Templeton, our tiny hamlet, I was Willie Upton; Scion of the Great Temple Family; Track and Soccer Star; Homecoming Queen; Local Girl Made Good; Soon to Be Great Disappointment to All. I leaned against the cool glass pane until my heart stopped leaping about my chest like a goosed frog. Until I dragged myself, step by step, across the length of the house, up the creaking stairs, past the hallway plastered with portraits of my many, many ancestors, and up into my girlhood room. The bedroom was part of the original cottage and had also been my mother’s as a girl. It hadn’t been redecorated since. The walls were a dusky rose behind the framed needlepoint pieces but a pale lavender in places touched by the sun. The peonies on the curtains were only faint shadows now. There was a huge four-poster bed and a princess rotary phone. After I went to graduate school, the posters I had taped up on the door and closets were taken down, my stuffed animals placed neatly in the antique bassinet in the corner, my books ordered on the shelves, my trophies packed in some box lost in some corner of the attic. Now frosting everything was a half-inch of dust. I could hear the noise of the crowd begin to swell and rise down at Lakefront Park, and pulled my blinds down against the day.

  In the forgiving darkness, I sat on the bed and kicked off my shoes, and when I looked up, I saw something pulsing gently in the corner. It was the Averell Cottage ghost, I knew. To my mother it had looked like a bird; to me, a washed-out inkstain, a violet shadow so vague and shy that it was only perceivable indirectly, like a leftover halo from gazing at a bare bulb too long, an enigma that dissolves whenever you try to fix on it.

  “Hello,” I said, going perfectly still, looking at my knees. “It’s nice to see you again.”

  I saw, or felt, the ghost inch closer, looming darker in my periphery.

  “So, I’m back for a while,” I said. “If that’s okay with you.”

  In answer, it grew lighter, from violet to purple to periwinkle to pink and slipped, still pulsing, away.

  It was a good ghost. I had lived with it until I left for college, awakening often in the middle of the night to see a quick dark slippage from my sight, as if it sat in vigil over my sleep. I sensed its oblique presence grow swollen and dark if I lied on the phone or slammed my door or screamed at my mother, or even picked my nose. It loved hygiene, the ghost, hated sweat and spit and bile, all the bad humors of the body. The only time I ever felt threatened by it was once, during high school, when I snuck a would-be suitor up the back stairwell and into my room because I had grown tired of my virginity, and wanted it to go away. Then, the ghost burst into a tremendous bruise-colored mass at the edges of our sight, and fading in its center to invisibility, it swelled so big it filled the room, pushing both of us up against the wall, sucking out our breath, making the boy freak and escape outside again. By school on Monday, a lock of his hair had turned white and he stopped talking to girls completely, and eventually, in college, he came blazing out of the closet in full Eurotrash regalia.

  For a moment, I felt I was alone, and then, even with my eyes closed, I felt the ghost slipping back in, intangible. “I guess you can tell,” I said, opening my eyes. “I’m very, very sad.”

  A pause; a pulse. “It’s about a boy,” I said. “Well. A man.” I waited; a darker ring emerged. “I hate him,” I said. The ghost came closer, then, a moist, dark air, that smelled of anise and the cool violet smell of shadows. I grew very tired and lay back on the pillow.

  “But it’s not just me, you know. The whole world’s sad,” I said. “It’s like a virus. It’s going to end badly. Glaciers melting, ozone depleted. Terrorists blowing up buildings, nuclear rods infecting the aqueducts. Influenza hopping from the pigeons to the humans, killing millions. Billions. People rotting in the street. The sun bursting open, shattering us eight minutes later. If not that, starvation. Cannibalism. Freakish mutated babies with eyeballs in their navels. It’s a terrible place to bring a child into,” I said. “This world. It is terrible. Just terrible.”

  I thought of my best friend, Clarissa, home in San Francisco. Her sick body curled under a sheet, her boyfriend, Sully, stroking her face, putting her to sleep. I thought of calling her, but my limbs were too heavy to move. I thought of the monster, then of the Lump in my gut, dividing and dividing and dividing itself, then of Primus Dwyer. And then I remembered the long sweep of upstate New York through my windshield in the dark of that morning, the hunchbacked barns falling into themselves, the deer darting startled through the dark. How—after those forty straight hours of driving, after the late hallucinations of Primus Dwyer sitting there beside me, grinning, his round glasses glinting—when I rounded the bend at the Farmers’ Museum and saw my tiny little town clumped in the dark there, a perfect model town (so sweet, so good), I felt something essential in me dissolve and begin to fade away.

  My eyes closed then, despite myself. “I’m supposed to be in Alaska. I’m supposed to be searching for the first human on this continent.” I sighed and said with great effort, “I’m not supposed to be in Templeton.” And then I was asleep.

  I HAD HAD a dream about Primus Dwyer and awoke with the hard-bitten landscape of Alaska vibrating in my mind. A softer light was coming through my shades, and I lifted them to find twilight and a red-striped tent poking above the trees down in Lakefront Park. It was there, I thought, to protect the monster from the July sun. My shower with its hot water, with the soap and shampoo, almost made me cry with relief, and when I emerged and saw myself in the fogged mirror, I saw that I looked better. Still skinny, still lost-seeming. But my face had de-puffed and my eyes had emerged above my cheekbones, and, even then, the small imp of vanity chuckled in my ear. I did not look bad, it told me; I was still a pretty girl. And even my navel, where I pressed my hands and felt a pulse through my skin, was still flat.

  I found a huge old tee shirt, and went downstairs. My mother turned from the kitchen counter with a raw chicken breast in her hands, and smiled uncertainly at me. “She’s up,” she said, her voice rough, as if she’d just awoken herself. “Sleeping Beauty. You were out for thirty-six hours. I had to hold a mirror above you to make sure you were breathing.”

  “Was I?” I said.

  “Barely,” she said. She stuffed the breast with a heady mixture of cilantro, feta, jalapeños. “You’ve missed all the hoopla. It’s very exciting.” She nodded toward the television, where on the screen a newscaster was flushed with excitement, gibbering on mute and gesturing toward the monster rotting on camera, its delicate hand curled on its chest—a large, yellow, lumpy thing looking not unlike a half-submerged ball of butter. Behind him was the bronze statue of the Mohican and his dog. Lakefront Park. My mother smiled, expectant.

  “Oh. You mean the monster,” I said. “I know. I was there when they brought it in.”

  Vi looked surprised, then frowned, as if I’d refused a gift she’d put a great deal of thought into, and turned back to her chicken breasts, arranging them in pink, gelatinous mounds on the tray. Her iron cross clinked against the counter. I watched as a new newscaster began interviewing a scientist: DR. HERMAN KWAN, the banner read below him, WORLD-FAMOUS VERTEBRATE BIOLOGIST. I turned up the volume.

  “The world,” the newscaster said, biting into his words as if they were crackers, “is waiting with bated breath—no pun intended, baited, ha—to know what, exactly, the people of Templeton, New Y
ork, towed in yesterday morning from Lake Glimmerglass. What can you tell us, Dr. Kwan?”

  “I don’t, well,” said the biologist, straightening and restraightening his glasses with his thumb. He was sweating under the limelight, great bags of wet darkening the armpits of his shirt. “To be perfectly honest, I don’t think we’re able to say, yet. To say, really. It’s just. Well, beautiful. The most beautiful thing I have ever seen,” and here he blinked rapidly with emotion. “It is an historic day.”

  “Historic?” said the newscaster to the camera, crunching, crunching. “Dr. Kwan, please explain to our viewers why?”

  “Well, Peter, we haven’t had a discovery of this magnitude. Well, since fishermen caught a new species of coelacanth off the coast of Sulawesi in Indonesia. 1938. A living dinosaur. An animal that had totally disappeared off the fossil record for eighty million years. Then we found it again! But, then again, this discovery in Lake Glimmerglass might be far greater than even that. We have simply no idea as yet what the animal. Well, even what it is. It may be a new species entirely. It may not even have a fossil record!” And the biologist gave a bark of a laugh.

  “That’s truly incredible, incredible. Professor Kwan, some of our viewers would like to know if this find is possibly ‘the missing link.’ What do you believe?” said the newscaster with great gravity.

  The biologist seemed to struggle with this, and his mouth worked for a moment as he thought.

  In the silence, my mother said, almost so low that I didn’t hear her, “Sunshine, I have something I need to tell you.”

  I waited, but she said nothing more, and the biologist finally spluttered to life. “Sorry?” he said. “But the missing link between what and what?”

  “Oh,” the newscaster said, struggling. “Between fish and, I suppose, well…nonfish?”