Some Other Town (19 page)

Head up now, Mrs. Eberline scowls, rises, and starts for the door. But at the threshold she stops, takes one more look toward the closet. Then she steps outside, and without turning back, lets the screen bang shut loudly behind her.

I return to clear our tea tray. I must hurry if I'm still to find Ben. But in the kitchen I look up at the window and see the sky is turning to dusk. Once again, Mrs. E has outstayed her welcome and now it is too late to find Ben. In the time it would take me to drive to his farm, it will be dark and impossible to search.

Then tomorrow, I think. Tomorrow whatever else happens—tomorrow I will find Ben.

I sigh and go back to the tray. I begin placing our cups in the sink. And it is then that I find Mrs. E and I have a new issue. One of my mother's teaspoons is missing.

A small postscript to Mrs. Eberline's visit, although I did not say it to her of course: How coincident she should think Ben is hiding out in this house. The fact is, at times I too have had the sense he is here. Always it is fleeting, however. I do not, like Mrs. E, expect to find him behind the dust ruffle of my bed. It's just that sometimes while passing an open door I think I have caught a glimpse of him. There, lying stretched out by the fire, his feet in his old woolly socks, crossed at the ankle, toe jiggling. There again, out in back on the lawn, raising his iced tea in salute. And for a moment, again there at the window upstairs, shaking his head at Mrs. E.

It is only my imagination, I know. Wishful thinking, hallucinations of sorts, arising for an instant to stand in for Ben. Side effects of sensory deprivation.

Such things can happen to people. People with missing limbs,
for example, who feel shooting pain in an absent knee. Or the deaf who hear someone calling their name, or the blind who see shooting stars. So why not also when someone disappears, someone important to you, who has somehow got caught in your being? I think it can be just the same. Some of him still remains.

Tonight then as I am falling asleep, I roll toward the far side of the bed. And there deep in the folds of the sheets, I catch the faint, clean scent of Ben Adams.

Something I didn't mention: Last night on TV on the late night news, a story from the West Coast. An update on news that had aired several weeks before—a drowning, the victim a large man in his fifties, mentally ill, they don't know.

I remember the original story. It got a lot of national play, and it was a hard one for most of us to take. In the middle of the day, the story went, a man waded far out in the ocean, announced he was ending it all, and then began thrashing and calling for help because he did not know how to swim. Desperate to help, a woman on the beach called the local police, then the fire department. But, as the story explained, tax revenue for the county was low for the year, affecting the budget for rescue, and all the policemen and firemen too had orders not to go in after swimmers. Regulations, their superiors said. No one was to be saved from the sea. Well maybe only small children. So first responders just stood on the sand that day and watched the man out in the ocean fight for his life and then drown.

Tonight's follow-up covered a hearing in the town near where the man died. People who saw him spoke. Ten firemen turned out at the beach, they said, and not one of them got his boots wet. Fuck regulations, one speaker said. Those responders were all still men. They could have saved the guy if they'd been men.

So now this morning, again the dream. This time when the truck sails out over the bridge, local farmers gather below. They see the truck somersault high in the air, hit the ice, then start to go under. No one moves, they just watch the truck sink. And I am there in the crowd beside them all, staring dim-witted and hollow.

I awake from the dream weeping, my bed pillow sodden, the sheets twisted onto the floor.

And then there is something more. I lift my head. A scent in the air, wafting, familiar, autumnal. A slight singe to the air, now biting. Smoke, something burning. Out in my yard.

Fully awake, I rise and rush to the window. Mrs. Eberline, it can only be Mrs. E. I lean over the sill and look out. And I see her there two stories below me stoking a miniature bonfire, just under my silver maple. Stoking with what now look to be the silver maple's twigs. Hurling them back at my house must no longer suffice, Mrs. E has moved on to a pyre. Open flames here this early dawn. With the morning breeze about to pick up.

“Mrs. Eberline,” I cry. And then I go for a roar. “Stop!”

With Mrs. E now temporarily back in her house, the bonfire in my yard doused and out, I decide to deal with this new crisis later and head off to work at the Project. My plan is to check in just long enough to tell the editors I'm taking the day off. I'll say something's come up, it looks like a friend is in trouble, and I need to go to him now. Then I'll be off to Ben.

But as soon as I arrive at the Project, I know something is up there as well. The editors are all aflutter. And when I see what it is, I know then too my escape plan will have to wait. The Personality, it turns out, indeed is coming to visit. Marcie was right about that one. The Personality in fact is expected at any time, Dr. Steinem has just informed us. And with very little warning or for that matter concern, he has asked us to take her to lunch.

This is no small request on Steinem's part. As I've said, we are not fond of the Personality here. She cannot be up to anything good, and we wish Steinem had not invited her. We would just as soon he were not banging her either.

“She will break his heart,” Celeste says. “It is why the woman is here, she has come to break his heart.”

Poor Dr. Steinem. We are all of us worried for him. But among us, it is Celeste who is most concerned. It is Celeste who looks after his welfare, who takes a real interest in him. Which is in her own interest as well, of course. Steinem is the reason Celeste stays employed. She could hardly be working anywhere else, not with all her long tea breaks, her many errors of every day. But here at
the Project, until the Personality that is, Celeste was always Steinem's favorite. He hired her first, he took her under his wing. We suspect there was even a romance, although Celeste demurs and we have no absolute proof.

Still, whatever Celeste's feelings for Steinem, or our views, it is unlikely they will change anything much. There is just too much history with the Personality here. Frances is our clearest on the subject. She is coming, Frances says, it's decided, and we are stuck with her now for lunch.

Frances likes to think she here knows the most about the Personality. How Steinem chose her, how she first came to the Project. It was after Sally Ann had turned in her early outlines, Frances says, mostly just cat-rat-bat-gnat sorts of words. And Dr. Steinem, seeing the need to supplement, also hoping to convince adopters of the good basal-reader news, decided audio tapes were in order. It was a simple idea, and like Steinem, dull. For each grade's series, the Project would record long tedious lists of vocabulary words and offer the tapes free with the readers. Because, as he explained in the grant for the program, children must hear how new words sound before they can be expected to read them.

“‘Oh' sounds before ‘oo,'” Dr. Steinem reminded. And then stressed the need for perfect pronunciation from just the right friendly voice. From someone with flair who also liked children. Or at least pretended she did. Which, Frances says, is why he proposed MaryBeth.

The fact is, Frances is not the only one here who knows about MaryBeth. For some time, I have had her number as well, it is not just at the Project I've run into her. A few years ago now, long before Steinem brought MaryBeth on board, I read a newspaper
interview with her. I had at that point no reason to disapprove of the woman. But as I read on, I did.

I remember picking up the society-and-entertainment section of the paper that Sunday because I had read everything else and did not yet want to do the dishes. I do not often read the society-and-entertainment section. It is usually just photos of aged matrons posing on charity ball stairs. Or sometimes a feature article or two on a small-town lady entrepreneur, the latest woman to start a needlepoint birthday card shop. The article normally makes the woman out as some kind of pioneer, when really she's just indulging her hobbies, with her husband, the surgeon, backing her. It is irritating, reading such stories, when there are women in this world who are pioneers in fact. There is the woman in this town, for instance, who started a low-income women's health center. Among her other good deeds, this founder raised money for poor women's flights to obtain legal New York abortions, when our state was not yet so enlightened. This woman has more than once been imperiled by mobs at her own clinic doors. And there are other such pioneers in this town as well, it is just that the papers don't know about them. Although to be fair, it could be pioneers don't grant interviews.

At any rate, the article on the Personality caught my eye. It was a syndicated story—filler our paper sometimes pays for—an exclusive with Miss MaryBeth Malone. Miss MaryBeth from children's educational TV, specifically
The Magic Garden
.

The story was supposed to be just about the show, which was celebrating its fifteenth year.
Magic Garden
was a half hour of oddly informative hand puppets, it was one of the oldest children's programs on TV. But as it turned out, the article was more
about MaryBeth. She had a way of making herself come up. And even though she was not the show's original host and was at that point relatively new, the interviewer kept asking her well how does it feel, fifteen years in children's TV? He asked because he thought that he had to, you could tell.

From the first, the interview made me nervous. It was, for one thing, overly candid, and it occurred to me that MaryBeth and the interviewer had most likely been out drinking beforehand. More than this, however, there was just something strange about a woman who consorted with puppets. MaryBeth sounded suspect from the beginning, as when, right away, she took full credit for the
Garden
's fifteen years. She said it felt good all those years. Gratifying, actually. Her show's little made-up world had helped a lot of children grow up in that time. Young adults were forever stopping her on the street and thanking her for their fantasies.

I could not tell what the interviewer made of that comment, but it seemed to get his attention. And for the rest of the article he just let her go on. The two of them reminisced over the show's long run and then generally went into a tell-all.

“Oh yes,” MaryBeth said, “and then there was the time we had to move on from Sampson, our original lion puppet. Mr. Bixler, our lead puppeteer for ten years, had retired, and the new fellow Drawley just could not get Sampson's voice down. It was a deep voice, but the new fellow made it sound too gruff.”

And here MaryBeth paused the story to explain how we in television must walk a fine line between what is interesting and challenging for children and what will only frighten them out of their little minds. “In Mr. Drawley's case,” she told the interviewer, “we were concerned his lion voice was just too scary. We
were afraid we'd have bed wetters on our hands. So we had no choice, we had to get rid of Sampson.”

It was no easy task, MaryBeth continued. “Children are very involved in our show, our little puppets are real friends to them. We could not just let Sampson disappear and expect the children to forget him.”

But then MaryBeth stopped, she chuckled, the interviewer described her as chuckling, and she disclosed how she and the producers came up with the Magic Forest. It was the first time they used the forest on the show, and it was perfect, MaryBeth said, she didn't know why they hadn't thought of a forest before. They simply had Sampson run off to the Magic Forest. It was something the children could understand, how Sampson, a lion, would be happier in a forest than a garden.

“Although to be safe,” she said, “we broke the idea gradually to the children. We told them at first that Sampson had gone to the forest just to visit some lion friends and had Sampson write letters to the children. I read them aloud to the other puppets, to Arnold especially, Mr. Drawley's new rabbit. The children didn't yet know Arnold was Sampson's replacement. They still thought Sampson was coming back.”

But then, MaryBeth told the interviewer, we let Sampson's letters drop off, we let the children just not think about Sampson for a while. And finally one day, when we thought the children had got used to Sampson's absence, we told them how he had written one last letter to them. That in fact Sampson wasn't just visiting the forest anymore, he'd decided to move there permanently. He had written to say he had fallen in love. It was his old high school lion girlfriend, they'd been seeing a lot of each other in the forest.
And now they were getting married and planned to settle down right where they were.

Sampson closed by saying he hoped the children would be happy for him. He would certainly have nice memories of them all and when he had little lion children of his own he'd make sure they tuned into
Magic Garden
every day. The children at home should know he would be there watching the show along with them.

“The Magic Forest was a lifesaver,” MaryBeth said. “The children accepted Sampson's leaving. Their mothers wrote to say how happy they were for Sampson and his new wife. So that then, when we got into trouble on the show, we knew there was always the forest. We even changed the backdrop, we had a new one painted and added a hill and just over the hill, we had them paint the tops of a few trees. We had them put in a road sign, the kind with arrows, with ‘Magic Forest' on the one pointing over the hill.

“Without the Forest,” MaryBeth said, “I don't know what we would have done about poor old Rufus that day in the station's parking lot.”