Operator - 01 Read online

  Three towers thrust up from the site, looming over Conestoga like the witches from Macbeth over their cauldrons. In front of them are several buildings, the largest made of staged platforms with crazy pipes running through them. It looks like a competition diving platform constructed with a Lego kit. The platform structure is flanked by a schoolhouse-style administration building on one side and an enormous warehouse on the other. The buildings are crowded together – piled up against each other like old shoeboxes in a closet. The enormous yard in front of the mill has fallen into disuse, and grass has grown over the railroad tracks. A boxcar stands empty in the yard, waiting to be loaded. I see the first touch of red light hit the top of one of the towers in anticipation of the arriving dawn. Before I have a chance to think too much, I put my hand on the fence, testing the links. Then I back up a few yards and with three steps I am up and over. My real workout is just beginning.

  * * *

  The interment ceremony is brief. The cemetery behind Riverbend Church is the oldest in Conestoga, dating from the time of the town’s first settlement as a royal charter to a wealthy merchant in 1745. Conestoga has been going downhill ever since. Mel – Melissa Jane Harris – was Catholic but because of the manner of her death, she can’t be buried at Holy Oak Cemetery. Mel’s parents managed to convince the parish priest to say a few words for her, which he does. Then some of Mel’s friends and students say a few more words. I have certainly attended more funerals than any of the 300 Conestogans standing around me but this ceremony is especially raw. Nobody should have to bury a girl like Mel.

  My mother is not around, which is just as well. She was never close to Mel. I haven’t spoken a word to the woman for twelve years and a burial doesn’t seem like the right place to break the silence. I’m standing between Amelia and Ginny, who is leaning on my shoulder and sobs through the whole wretched affair. My sister Jamie is on Ginny’s right and Jeff is on the other side of Amelia. In the end, I put a shovelful of dirt onto the grave, hug my sisters, and shake hands with Jeff before walking silently from the gathering. I’m remembering my father’s funeral. He’s here somewhere, too.

  Veronica stands waiting for me outside the cemetery. I didn’t see her during the interment, but that’s not surprising given the size of the crowd. It must have been intimidating for her. When a small town buries one of its children, it is a communal enterprise. Every family in Conestoga had some connection to Mel and would have, even had she not been teaching half of their children. For days now, Ed and Beth Harris’s home will have been overflowing with people stopping over to deliver pies and casseroles. They won’t cook for months. For the next year, they’ll get a call every few days from some fellow parishioner, asking them to play bridge or go to a movie. It will probably take them a few months to identify the pattern. For all of its flaws, Conestoga takes care of its own.

  “Where should we go?” Veronica asks. She’s wearing another simple but expensive-looking black dress under the same jacket with a different set of pearls. This strand is a bit longer, long enough for her to twist into a loop with her finger while she bites her lip, waiting for my reply.

  I have to think for a moment. Conestoga has exactly one diner and three bars, but it will be difficult to talk privately at any of them. I suddenly realize that I’m already attracting stares from people leaving the cemetery. I can see a pair of middle-aged women looking at me as the one with a moon-shaped face points at me insistently with a jabbing gesture and whispers furiously into the other’s ear. I think the thinner one is my mother’s hairdresser. My return might rival the funeral itself for gossip value and I have a strong urge to disappear. Not Conestoga, then.

  “Let’s go to the coffee shop in Dill Springs,” I suggest. “It’s about twenty minutes’ drive south.”

  I’ve walked to the cemetery from my motel, so Veronica drives. Her SLK-350 roadster with its 268 horsepower motor makes short work of route 9W as we head south. Dill Springs is the northernmost town in the Catskills within a two-hour drive of New York City and it wears an urbane air that marks it a world apart from Conestoga. The coffee shop is set in an old storefront with hardwood floors and a vast ceiling of worked tin. It’s different from what I remember – it now looks more like a Starbucks without the generic Pottery Barn interior. Veronica orders a cappuccino while I puzzle over the menu for a moment, finally asking for the closest approximation to real black coffee that I can find. We sit down in leather armchairs set at an angle to one another and I have the transitory sensation that I’m in someone’s living room. There are some impressively detailed portraits of kitchen appliances on the wall and I wonder for a second if they might be Ginny’s, but the name on them is Jennie Schaeffer.

  “You said that you met Mel in Russia?” I ask after we’ve sat in silence for a few moments. The car ride was also quiet. I wonder if I’ve been rude. Soil gets in your blood and the smells of my hometown – that mixture of red earth and river – have finally caught up with me. I realize that Veronica hasn’t spoken, not because she lacks curiosity, but because she’s both intuitive enough to have figured this out for herself and patient enough to wait for me to start talking.

  “Yes I did. We were roommates. We taught English on the Glasnost program. They pay your room and board, you get a small stipend and you get to learn Russian intensively while you teach English. Mel was there for two years – I lasted almost four.”

  “Four years is a long time to teach English abroad, isn’t it? Where in Russia were you?”

  “St. Petersburg. That’s probably why I stayed so long. Most kids who join end up in some tiny village in the middle of nowhere and come back after a year or two. But St. Petersburg – it was just unbelievable. Even with the mosquitoes in the summer and the dreary winters it was just an amazing place. I still miss it.”

  “When did you get back?” I ask, because I realize I have no idea how Mel spent her life after I left home. I never asked.

  “I came back about two years ago. Mel left a year before I did.” Veronica starts telling me details about the time they spent in St. Petersburg. It’s a lovely city. I went there a number of times for work. I listen to her describe her experiences and I can’t help thinking how different the Mel she knew sounds from the seventeen-year-old girl I remember.

  “What are you doing now?”

  “Ah – now I’m writing silly feature stories for the White Plains Gazette while I dream about my future job as foreign correspondent for The New York Times. And living with my parents in Greenwich,” she adds, waving her hand over her head in a southeasterly direction.

  “You drove back there last night? How far is that?” In fact I know that it is over 90 miles and on the wrong side of the Hudson.

  “No, I’m staying in a B&B in Rhinebeck for the weekend. It’s amazing how nice everything is when you get just a little further south of Conestoga,” she says off-handedly and then colors, adding, “I’m sorry,” as she realizes she’s insulted my hometown.

  “Don’t be. You’re absolutely right. Fifty years ago, Conestoga was a solid working class town. Then the mill started losing business and laying people off every year and the town shrank with it. People who held on, like my family, were living on a tightrope. A lot of them drank or gambled,” and here I think of my Dad, “and a lot of people got involved in bad things. After the mill closed,” I swallow some of the hot black coffee, which is not bad in spite of its pretentious name and inflated price, “things got worse. A lot worse, I think.” If what I’ve seen on my morning run is representative of the whole town, I’m downplaying the truth. The best sections of Conestoga now look like Newark, New Jersey, or the Compton section of Los Angeles. The houses are shabby and the yards unkempt, but there are expensive cars in some driveways. There is money in Conestoga, but it’s the wrong kind.

  “So, the guy you were,” I pause, trying to find a polite phrase, “talking to last night – what’s his story?”

  Veronica smiles sourly. “George. Trouble. Big trouble,
that’s his story. I could see it in him from the beginning, but Mel didn’t have that instinct. She trusted people, took them at their word. She was so naïve. And he was this big shot banker, very charming when he wanted to be, knew everyone in town and took her out places she couldn’t afford to go. But he was a player, you know – there were probably ten other girls besides Mel at the same time, most of them Russian with no brains, but legs up to here,” she chops her hand at her Adam’s apple, “who would do anything for a nice meal or a night out at a club. And he had a temper – almost as bad as mine.” She smiles briefly, flashing perfectly straight white teeth. “One day, about a year after they started dating, Mel came home from a weekend with a bruise on her cheek and said that she tripped and hit a doorknob. Then a few weeks later it was a broken arm – this time she fell playing tennis. Then finally she showed up with a black eye and that’s when I called her parents. She spent a whole weekend crying on and off the phone with them. I asked a friend of mine who had connections to do me a favor and the next week a messenger showed up at our door with an envelope. There were a whole bunch of pictures of George with other women. Mel left the country three days after that.”

  I think about that last part for a moment but don’t say anything. I can tell that Veronica is aggrieved, really upset. George’s appearance at the funeral home must have been a slap in the face. “How did they get back together here?” I ask.

  “They didn’t!” she hisses, almost spitting. “No way. He left St. Petersburg about six months after she did and moved to Manhattan. Then another six months later I get a call from her saying that George showed up at her school. It really scared her. I mean, that’s like a five-hour drive round-trip, right? I actually flew back home to stay with her for a week. Then about a month later he appeared outside her place, pounding on her door in the middle of the night. She threatened to call the police and he finally left. When I got back she hadn’t seen him for nearly a year. Then last year he started calling again and about two months ago he showed up at her place and tried to force her into his car. Her landlord started hitting George with a rake and someone called the police this time. Right afterward, Mel took out a restraining order on George and as far as I know he hasn’t been around since then. Until last night.”

  “And last night he was saying that he was her fiancé?”

  “Yes! Can you believe it? I’m standing there talking to Mrs. Harris and suddenly I hear his voice. He’s chatting up some bimbo, telling her that he and Mel were engaged and giving her some sob story. He wouldn’t dare say that to her parents, but can you imagine? Mel is lying there literally twenty feet away from him and he’s hitting on some nineteen-year-old. So when he leaves I follow him out. I tell him exactly what I think of him. And that’s just when you show up to rescue me,” Veronica smiles charmingly, her soft pink lipstick glowing against those white teeth.

  “George looked like he was about to take a swing at you,” I observe.

  Veronica nods vigorously. “How stupid am I? I’m standing there in the dark on a deserted street arguing with this crazy guy who beat up my best friend? I just got so angry and I thought, ‘I’m not going to let him get away with that – not here.’ And I don’t stop to think that he might actually hurt me.” She puts a hand over her eyes, massaging her forehead, and leans back in her chair. Her feet slide out of her shoes and she props them up on the inlaid wood coffee table between us. Black wool stockings cover her legs. “That was very clever, by the way, how you handled George last night,” she says, smiling at me.

  I shrug again. I feel myself being pulled in an uncomfortable direction.

  “No, seriously, it was. You just played dumb and whisked me away before he could even respond. No confrontation, no fight. Pretty smart. You’re a man of twists and turns, aren’t you?” she smiles. I raise an eyebrow because I get the reference, but I don’t respond. “And here we’ve been sitting for nearly an hour and I keep talking and talking and you’ve hardly said two words about yourself.”

  I stop a moment to consider that. “It’s been a long time since I was home and you’re helping me catch up, which I appreciate.”

  “You know Melissa talked about you a lot. She really idolized you,” Veronica says. Her voice quiets as her tone turns more serious.

  She catches me off-guard again. I actually stutter when I respond.

  “I…I would have thought that she hated me. I walked out on her – I abandoned her.”

  Veronica shakes her head with conviction. “She didn’t think that. I mean…of course she missed you. I think she spent her first two weeks of college crying. But she didn’t blame you. You left your mother, not Mel. And you still helped support your family, didn’t you, even if you didn’t stay in Conestoga? That’s a lot to carry for an eighteen-year-old.” I see a spark of compassion in Veronica’s eyes and look away.

  “It wasn’t like that. I was a stupid kid.”

  I can feel my face burning. Veronica is so earnest that I can almost see things from her perspective. But what looks brave to her was just plain fear and immaturity. Yes, I was furious at my mother but even more mortified by my reaction to her ultimatum. “With your father gone, you have to help me support the family,” she’d said to me exactly one day after my Dad’s funeral. “Ned Vickers will give you a job at his machine shop.” It wasn’t a discussion, just a statement of fact. Like the solid sound of a prison door slamming shut. I ran upstairs and threw some clothes and a few personal items in a duffle and then I walked out of that house and never looked back. It was just a few weeks after my eighteenth birthday.

  I couldn’t go to Michigan and play football after my mother told me I’d be starving my sisters, but I was damn well not going to get stuck in Conestoga for the rest of my life. So I enlisted. I sent money back home every month: that was atonement. In all the time since, even after I left the Army, I’ve been too ashamed to come home and face my mother. At least once a month for the past few years, Ginny calls, pleading with me to make peace with mother. And Amelia tries to goad me by saying I’m too proud to make amends. The truth is worse. Thinking about my mother reminds me of the conceited self-image I had in high school and how quickly it fell apart when I was asked to make a real sacrifice. Running off and enlisting was a hasty, angry decision. I had no idea of the consequences, of the price I’d pay for that moment of rebellion. And I am only just beginning to understand how childish I was. My mother is not an easy person to like, but she has given her entire life to her family. I ran when I was asked to sacrifice a few years.

  It was different with Mel, of course. We dated for three years in high school. She knew why I left Conestoga and abandoned my football scholarship and she understood my choice on some level. I stayed with her family while I was winding my way through the enlistment process. Maybe if I’d actually gone to Michigan when she headed to Syracuse, we would have ended up married. She wrote me nearly every day that summer before she went to school, but I was in basic training and it was hard for me to write back. Eventually our worlds became so different that the letters slowed down then stopped altogether. Despite everything Veronica has said, I don’t know how Mel really felt about me.

  But Veronica doesn’t give up easily; I already know that about her. She shakes her head resolutely. “You were a soldier, weren’t you? Mel talked about the medals you earned in Afghanistan.”

  Here it is, the conversation I’ve been trying to avoid. “That was a long time ago. I spent most of my time in the Army in a clerical division.” Technically, this is almost true. Veronica looks skeptical, narrows her eyes, but lets it pass. I change the subject and ask her about her career. She chats animatedly about her editor and the difficulty of getting real estate developers to comment on zoning issues, the awful lack of good restaurants in Westchester County and her strong desire to land a job in the city and move out of her parents’ place. When the conversation lulls again, we leave the coffee shop. She drops me at my motel, wrinkling her nose when she catches sight of i
t. She asks me for my cell number and I give it to her, thinking with a twinge of regret that I will probably never see her again.

  I’m wrong, of course.

  * * *

  I stop ten feet from the door to my childhood house, realizing that I have no idea what I’m going to do when I see my mother. What can I possibly say to unravel a dozen years of silence? My pride is gone. Everything I’ve seen and experienced since I left home tells me that I’ve been a fool to not hold on tightly to my family. I just don’t know how to take the first step. It doesn’t occur to me that I already have.

  The Herne house is a pre-war Victorian with a wraparound porch and a detached one-car garage. It is painted in a matte, off-white color that probably has some artsy sounding name like “eggshell” or “ochre”. Still, the yard and the house itself have been cared for better than most of the other houses in the neighborhood, or the town for that matter. The grass in the yard is trimmed, a flowerbed of chrysanthemums is gamely holding on more than a month past Labor Day and a pile of autumnal leaves has been neatly raked to the side of the porch. It’s a big house for Mom and Ginny, but Amelia and Jeff live just a town over and Jamie teaches in Albany, about an hour north.

  Ginny answers the door and winks at me, then gives me a big hug. She’s more excited than anyone and knows how hard this is for me. The smell of roast turkey hits me like a body blow, flooding me with memories. I walk stiffly into the living room and I get the sense that time has paused while I’ve been away. The TV is new, or at least newer than the 27-inch walnut console I remember, but the floral sofa and stuffed armchairs look not a day older. Amelia and Jeff are both in high spirits and Jamie pecks me on the cheek while she continues an animated conversation on her cell phone. I stand there in the living room, rooted in place until my mother emerges from the kitchen wearing a calico apron. I see immediately that she has passed through middle age. Her hair is steel gray and a network of lines maps the contours of her face. She’s very near retirement age and has not lived an easy life. With a jolt, I realize that my mother has become old. I never saw my dad age and it’s a shock to see how my mother has changed.