Villages Read online

  The last summer of the ’sixties brought more news than comfort: Nixon and Kissinger trying to bomb their way to an acceptable surrender in Vietnam, Ted Kennedy drowning a starry-eyed young campaign worker at Chappaquiddick, the first man on the moon looking like a Puppetoon. Judy Garland dead, Bishop Pike gone missing, a pregnant Sharon Tate stabbed to death in Los Angeles, everywhere in the United States defiance and hatred of the government. But in Owen’s vicinity the news was Alissa Morrissey’s pregnancy, and his hidden tie to the event tugged him close to the dreadful, ruinous realm behind the headlines, where people made their bets and met the consequences. It affronted his innermost innocence that his body in experimenting with freedom could have thrown off, once again, a consequence as irrevocable as this, this living being whose cells daily multiplied along the majestic, ramifying routes laid down by DNA. Poor Ian preened, his pompous little goatee waggling as he parried the party jests, for though not ancient he was older than the others, and Alissa’s pregnancy, like the Biblical Sarah’s, had not been looked for. Owen felt a searing guilt toward Ian, whom he had never liked but who seemed in this biological event totally a victim, blindsided, smugly oblivious. Why so much tender remorse toward Ian, and so little toward the child that he feared to be his own, and even less toward Alissa? Swiftly she had sized up the situation and decided to jettison her lover to keep her baby safe. He thought back to his first triangle, his father and mother and himself. His mother had given him love and guidance and a sense of his life’s being a charmed one, but when his parents quarrelled his sympathy went always to his father, his wan, worried, literal-minded, beaten-down father. Men understand men, mechanisms with very few levers—a few earthy appetites, an atavistic warrior pride and stoicism. Women are shining moon-creatures, who hurt us when they withhold themselves, and again when they don’t.

  xi. Developments in Hardware

  Seduced and seducing, Owen now bore upon him the scent of love. He had established himself, at the level of pheromones, as a man with a taste for what women can give. Discreetly, by way of murmurs and hand-squeezes, teasing and flattery, they flocked around him. Time was pressing on their generation, though they still considered themselves in their primes, with an infinity of options still open. He slowly got used to the sight of his former mistress, once so privately wanton, publicly pregnant; she complained so all could hear of the pains the child was bringing her, her legs, her back—her beautiful bare back. In the last months she had to spend hours in bed to keep from losing this intricate invader of her body. When the child was born, only three weeks premature, it was a girl, who everybody said looked just like Ian. The little preemie, not quite six pounds, had Ian’s sharp shrivelled features and his artist’s squint, peering up from the vanilla-colored carrycot where she lay as if into too bright a light. Owen had been sure it was going to be a boy; a weight of seriousness felt lifted from his shoulders.

  “A chip off the old block,” Ed said in his ear. Ed was leaning on Owen from behind, there among the guests crowding around on the Slades’ sunporch to view the infant, now three months old, with her red face and scanty fine hair. It was Easter of the new decade; an unfiltered sun cut through the bare trees onto the wicker porch furniture and off the noontime cocktail glasses and into tiny Nina’s squinting eyes. The Morrisseys’ willingness to toy alliteratively with their children’s names struck Owen as crass and cast a baleful backward light upon the joys of his affair. Alissa still carried her baby weight. Her breasts, which had been just the right size for him—round handfuls—strained with their new burden against the silk underblouse and purple jacket of her Easter outfit. People had dressed up, even though few of them went to church, even on Easter. The Slades, the squarest couple in this set, did go and had fallen into the habit of giving this brunch party; it had come to be expected of them, as part of the set’s annual festive cycle. This year, the baby came, as if to replenish the children who were growing too old to engage in the Easter-egg hunt that the Slades dutifully staged. Owen could see nothing of himself in the infant with her florid little face and wide-open steel-blue eyes. There was an annoying heaviness of meaning in the touch of Ed’s hand on his back; Owen turned to relieve himself of it, facing his partner.

  “Hard to see the goatee,” he said.

  Ed barely smiled. He too, away from Stacey’s salads and sprouts, had put on weight. Stacey had left him and gone back to California. A bachelor again, traipsing from house to house as a dinner guest, Ed presented it as a simple matter of her being too young, and a member of another culture. California wasn’t another state, it was another country. Connecticut had never seemed real to her—too green, too quaint, everything too close together—and, with the hours he had to keep at the plant, she was lonely. Thus he reframed what must have felt to him as a shameful failure—a lack of juice, of enough entertainment value to a young woman. If only they had produced a baby, he speculated to Owen, it might have been different. He had wanted one, she hadn’t. Owen often thought back to the night they had smoked pot and Stacey had stayed on the floor. He wondered if her offer of a blow job had been unique to him or been repeated more successfully with others around Middle Falls. He was sorry she was gone, because he would accept the offer now. He understood it better now: it had been no big deal. She had had an expansive Western nature and Ed was an emotionally cramped nerd from the Bronx, where a gangster tact and taciturnity ruled the streets. To know more than you say was part of Ed’s code, here in Middle Falls, where the game was gossip; he somehow knew about Owen and Alissa and the baby, but would keep the secret.

  Phyllis, three glasses of white wine to the good, wanted to hold the baby. She had dressed, showing her contempt for this most Christian of holidays, in tight blue jeans, small pearl earrings, and a man’s striped shirt folded back at the cuffs as if to expose the thousand-dollar Swiss watch Owen had given her for their fifteenth wedding anniversary. “It’s been so long,” she explained, bending her tall, slim-hipped body down through the shards of porch sunlight and in her hands quickly gathering up the little blanketed body from the carrycot. Alissa couldn’t conceal her alarm—her glasses flashed—and she rose in her chair and almost reached out, but Phyllis gently beamed down upon the mother a gracious smile of reassurance. “I haven’t forgotten about the head,” she said, and showed how she was supporting it with her left hand. “How hot their little skulls are!” she said, and gazed into the infant’s face as if searching out a meaning there, a riddle, in the unfocused wide stare. “Oh, Alissa,” Phyllis went on in that soft yet somehow commanding voice that Owen had once strained to overhear, “she’s exquisite. Owen,” she went on, finding his face in the clustered, hushed group, “we must have one more, before it’s too late.”

  “We’ll talk about it,” he said, bewildered when this stopgap of a reply sprang laughter among their friends.

  Phyllis with her eerie dreaming appropriation of the child had created a tension. Only the infant did not feel it. Her blue eyes, darker than her mother’s abraded color, had closed. “Dear little Nina,” Phyllis told her. “You’re perfect. You’ll do wonderfully well.” She kissed the bulging red forehead, which rumpled with an eddy of a frown, and looked to the women nearest her. “Who wants to be next?” Phyllis asked benignly, and several pairs of hands quickly reached out to treasure little Nina in turn.

  In the red Stingray going home, Owen dared tell her, “I’m not sure Alissa was quite ready for you to grab her baby like that.”

  “She loved it,” Phyllis said. “All women want to have their babies admired. Alissa would have been hurt if we hadn’t begged her to hold it. Her.”

  “I missed the begging part. Uh—I assume you were joking about another child. Eve is going to be seven, and she’s been the baby all her life. You don’t want to go back to diapers and being up at night and all that, do you?”

  “Only if it will bring us closer together.”

  “How could we be closer? My God, we’re practically welded together.”


  She didn’t speak for a moment, then said, “Of course I was joking, Owen. You must be crazy, to think I’d have another baby with you.”

  This was more absolute than he wanted—on the opposite end of the curve from her betranced party deportment. The real Phyllis was becoming harder and harder for him to locate. He offered, less able than she to tolerate silence in the car, “I thought with Eve off most of the day you could go back somewhere, maybe to Trinity or even Yale, for a course or two. Some kind of refresher, to get you back into your Ph.D. thesis.”

  “Or I could go back to the ballet lessons I dropped when I was eleven,” she said, so serenely he didn’t realize for some seconds that she was being ironical.

  In Haskells Crossing, in the twenty-first century, Easter shows the rich to good advantage. They attend church then, and at Christmas, if never else, as if keeping up the supernatural contract by which they have prospered. The Episcopal is the church of choice, three and a half centuries after the Puritans established their iron theocratic rule. They were fanatics; the United States is a conservative country built upon radicalism. The white wooden Congregational church in many a New England town has grown seedy—the paint peeling, the steeple nearly toppling with dry rot, the bulletin board outside advertising sermons with jocular sermon titles like I’M O.K., GOD’S O.K., or FORBIDDEN FRUITS CREATE MANY JAMS—compared with the sharply gabled, half-timbered structures devoted to Cranmer’s graceful words and Henry the Eighth’s regal whim.

  Owen, though himself rich enough, thanks to the split-up and sale of E-O Data in the ’seventies, viewed the rich, the hereditary rich, as an exotic tribe. He believed that the mill-owning wealth of Alton had oppressed his father and had defrauded his grandfather. Certain local textile fortunes had had, in Willow, the mythic resonance of the Mellons, Fricks, and Carnegies in Pittsburgh. But, though he strained to see over the spiky sandstone wall of the Pomeroy estate near Cedar Top, and overheard the distant splashing of a swimming pool, he had never encountered any of these fabulous creatures. At the Scheherazade—a windowless, slant-floored hall, with a siding of tin sheets stamped to resemble bricks, an interior decorated by a few Chinese lamps and Art Deco stripes, an outside ticket booth containing the owner’s gray-haired wife, and a marquee whose lights attracted masses of moths in the summer—the rich, played by Cary Grant and Fred Astaire, Joan Blondell and Katharine Hepburn, Charles Coburn and Eugene Pallette, were projected in an affectionate silvery light, as stars in a comedy of misunderstanding eventually remedied by sexual attraction and a limitless reserve of lightly taxed money. What a triumph of capitalist art that was, deflecting the poor from hatred of the rich into a chuckling pity for them! With a flick of changed fortune, the poor might be rich themselves, as foolish and happy. For the moguls manufacturing these films it was, of course, no fantasy. They had made it in America. So, in a lesser way, had Owen.

  Now he can see in three dimensions and natural color, at the ten o’clock Easter service at Haskells Crossing’s Saint Barnabas, the Wainthrop clan, taking up two front pews. The eighty-year-old matriarch, long a widow, is enthroned in a wheelchair that blocks half the aisle; congregants going up to the rail for communion step around it. Before the service begins, one by one her grandsons, each clad in a blazer and rep tie and button-down broadcloth shirt, lean or squeeze past their elders to do this eldest, in her rigid blue hair and black straw sunhat, honor with a kiss smuggled sideways under the hat’s broad rim. Not a pasha or Mafia don could more grandly receive dutiful homage. Owen pictures all the money stoppered by the octogenarian’s living body, like tons of wheat waiting to pour forth from a prairie grain elevator’s unloading chute. In the meantime, enough trickles through: the boys in their blazers sport the honey tans of winter vacations spent in the Bahamas and weekends spent skiing, and the girls, even those at the awkward age, with braces and acne, display costly dresses and animating hopes of good schools and a fair value on the marriage market. Wealth is health.

  Their parents, the middle generation, sit through the readings, the prayers of the people, and the sermon (Yes, He is risen, as He rises up in our lives, on many a personal Easter!) with the polite, slightly smiling expressions they bring to the myriad board meetings and bibulous social gatherings that maintain their membership in the network of the profitably engaged. Owen especially admires two peculiar traits of the male rich: their ability to grow more and more polite as the object of their courtesy becomes more and more annoying, and their ability to wear shoes, not just moccasins but loafers of fine leather, without socks. Owen, of humbler origins, is unable to conceal annoyance and to endure shoes, sticky and unclean, on his feet without socks, the thicker and woollier the better. Rich men and boys deny themselves the comfort of socks in order, he has decided, to display their thoroughbred ankles. Owen also admires the ability of the rich of both sexes, at cocktail parties, to pop enigmatic hors d’oeuvres into their mouths and, when they discover how fiendishly hot they are, to not spit them out but instead meekly, painfully swallow, giving themselves esophageal cancer miles down the road.

  The crammed two pews contain every life-stage from terminal disablement through alcoholic corpulence, deep-lined sun damage, gym-hardened muscularity, spa-enhanced svelteness, teen-age bloom and sudden growth spurt, adolescent squirminess and giggliness, childish pudginess suffocatingly wrapped in boredom, toddler stupefaction and imminent tantrum, on down to the recently baptized infant sleeping in milky bliss on her young mother’s lap. The Wainthrops form a synoptic image of life’s tragic progress, but it is an image overlaid with graciousness, mannerliness, and tribal consciousness of a value greater than the sum of its parts. Not for the rich the scattered wandering, the flight from the ill-equipped nuclear family into America’s wasteland of tawdry entertainments, of shopping-mall parking lots as large as lakes and seedy roadside bars advertising karaoke on Wednesday nights, of deserted downtowns and razed forests, of roving job to job and mate to mate, amid such meagre electronic distractions as heist movies featuring car wrecks and fireballs and television comedies that reflect as in a fuzzy, fizzing mirror the awkward comedy of our desperate daily improvisations beyond the ordering principles of church, village, and family hierarchy. Only the rich—and not all of them, for some turn rebellious and others topple through self-neglect into lower castes—can afford the old structures that carry us from cradle to grave, well-fed, well-clothed, and well-respected. To Owen, an only child most intensely himself when engrossed in coded conversation with the coolly burning face of a cathode-ray tube, the interlocking clans of Haskells Crossing are paradigms of community, a web spun stronger than as of steel. The women are mostly of Anglo-Saxon blood—fair, with forthright warrior jaws—and the men so big-boned they look a touch sheepish in their tailored business suits. However, the web has snared, here and there, brides of Asian or Latin blood, and grooms recruited from swarthier races—the Jewish lawyer, the Italo-American bond salesman—to keep the gene pool fresh.

  After church, while Julia, drawing upon her years of experience, is giving a lengthy piece of advice to the rector, Owen finds himself standing on the fringe of the Wainthrop cluster, and especially close to the young mother of the sleeping infant, who is now weakly, crankily awake and being jostled on her mother’s twitching hip. The woman is more statuesque than she had appeared in the crammed pew. She has the glossy long free-falling hair of ’sixties flower children and Nordic features slightly larger than lifesize. Her feet are long and strong, in high heels held in place by white thongs wrapping several times around her ankles; her blond hair sets off unplucked dark eyebrows and pouting broad lips lipsticked a luminescent coral tint. She has jumped the season by donning (the Sunday having begun sunny though it is now turning cloudy and cooler) a minidress of broad horizontal stripes the colors of half the rainbow, its fit everywhere tight, as if her body might overpower her clothes at any moment. As Owen furtively watches, other Wainthrops come up to her to admire the new baby and to receive and give the deft little air-ki
sses of the rich. He has to look away; his gaze could become an indiscretion; here is the kind of raw big beauty, radiant as a naked mother’s breadth in the eyes of her speechless son, that bids his male heart, old as he has become, to worship, to drop his body at her knees in pure pagan adoration, on this specifically Christian terrain of Haskells Crossing.

  Who wants to be next? Phyllis had asked, there on the Slades’ sunporch, and it was some time before Owen could have answered. He was more and more on the road, as E-O Data struggled to hold its place in an industry ever more tipped to the West Coast. In 1968 he had travelled to a computer conference in San Francisco to see a former radar technician named Douglas Engelbart demonstrate a hand-held invention called an “X-Y position indicator for a monitor system,” soon to be called a “mouse.” In a ninety-minute lecture Engelbart showed, via a computer twenty-five miles away, how commands could be issued, with no text command, to a monitor screen divided into windows. Owen realized that the hardware of the future was here, and back at E-O he experimented with integrating the X-Y principle with the light pen that was still the tool for computer-aided design. But in the absence of pixel-specific pinpointing, dependent upon sufficient computer capacity to store and resolve the line-scan CRT, he was still stuck, for his second redesign of DigitEyes (DigitEyes 2.2), with the light pen, placed directly on the monitor screen to communicate an X-Y address. Enlargement or rotation of a sketched vector image still required a variety of numerical line commands. The speed and precision of the graphics were dazzling, and enlargements and reductions to the 103 order were possible, but the methods were still tied to an alphanumeric machine-language with its cumbersome manual.