The Great Northern Express (22 page)

Yet I still find it thrilling to drive through the muscular sprawl of industrial cities on the eastern fringe of America's Midwest. How Walt Whitman would have loved the steel mills
and railyards and automobile plants and petroleum refineries of Detroit and Gary and Erie and Cleveland and Cincinnati and Buffalo! The colossal football and baseball stadiums. The busy river barges and ingenious technological know-how that even in an economic recession keeps America going from one day to the next. Whitman would have known exactly what to say about all this. Any one of these Rust Belt cities would be likely territory for a young contemporary Whitman or Twain to stake out a claim and dig in. So, sure, go West, you aspiring poets and playwrights and novelists of early twenty-first-century America. Just remember, you don't need to go farther west than Buffalo if you don't want to. The great Buffalo novel? You bet.

As for me, when I walked into my friend Jonathon Welch's great Talking Leaves Books, in Buffalo, on the next-to-last day of my tour, and saw the colorful jackets of books that were my dear old acquaintances and books that might soon become new ones, I knew that wherever I have gone and might yet go, each time I step inside an independent bookstore I return again to the world of books, which has been my truest home for the more than sixty years.

Back in Orleans in the uncertain spring of 1965, Phillis and I decided, with a few of our young teaching colleagues, to hold a huge end-of-the-school-year gala celebrating the history and literature of the Northeast Kingdom. One evening was dedicated to the kids reading their essays and stories on various topics: the Reverend Alexander Twilight, the African American graduate of Middlebury College who built the magnificent stone academy on the hill; Robert Rogers and his Rangers; Robert Frost's connection with the Kingdom; and the early Abenaki and French Canadian history of northern Vermont. The next night Jim
Hayford read from his poetry and talked about his life and times in the Kingdom and beyond. Old-timers visited our classes and told stories about Prohibition and the Great Depression. The grand finale of this well-intended, if slightly deranged, frenzy of local culture, at a time when the kids should have been preparing for their finals, was an absolutely lunatic brainchild of my own devising.

Somehow, along with teaching, coaching, and story writing, not to mention finishing up my graduate thesis and embarking, with all the intrepidness of the absolutely clueless, on not one but
two
early attempts at book-length fiction—somehow I had found time to cajole our seniors into presenting, at the Orleans town hall on the final night of the Northeast Kingdom Weekend, a performance of
Our Town
. But not just any performance of
Our Town
. Nothing would do but, in keeping with the festival's local theme, I must doctor Thornton Wilder's masterpiece by adapting it to the Kingdom, with the assistance of my star pupil, Bill, and some of his classmates. Changing Grover's Corners to Orleans, not scrupling to substitute the names of real townspeople for characters in the play, and replacing the New Hampshire geography of
Our Town
with that of northern Vermont, we rehearsed night and day, planning to take the town by storm and finish up the Festival with a production that the good people of Orleans would never forget.

And to this day, they have not.

The town hall was the ideal venue for our project. With its heaving old wooden aisles, canted like the deck of a storm-tossed sailing ship, and its faded purple stage curtain redolent of mildew and the stardust of dozens of school and town plays and the brave collective hopes of scores of graduation valedictories—and let us not omit the bloody stains of not a few town-meeting brawls—the place was emblematic of our town. For a backdrop, the stage boasted several painted flats left over from a long-ago production of
Arsenic and Old Lace
. Teddy in his pith helmet, headed down cellar. The two patrician poisoner aunts, offering tea to an unsuspecting gentleman boarder. The mad doctor with his gleaming instruments of terror. In the disused orchestra well sat a piano once used to accompany silent movies, whose sole function for years had been to bang out, in hideous, off-key strains, the graduation march.

It's amazing how well Wilder's timeless play still reflects the human details of life in any American small town, and the hall was packed for the premiere. True, there was some ill-suppressed laughter when the curtain went up on the bare, stark stage, with the narrator—good old Bill—and the miming actors. But the audience was quickly drawn in by the stately rhythms of daily life in Grover's Corners, aka Orleans, and the substitutions of Kingdom names and anecdotes.

Soon it became apparent that
other
alterations had been made to the play, alterations I had not known about until now. These included references to old and current local love affairs, bitter feuds that had gone on for years, and the unsavory private habits, real or imagined, of a number of prominent Orleans citizens, including the local reverend, the mayor, the mill manager, some of us teachers, and old Prof. The audience began to murmur. A chill ran up my back as Big Prof, in the role of his father, came on stage staggering home from a school board meeting, muttering, “These Christly teachers aren't earning their pay. I'll get to the bottom of this or today isn't a three-quart day!”

Had the young rapscallions actually gotten their hands on some booze? The actors, now passing around a flask, were speaking directly to the audience about the townspeople's most private transgressions. Interactive theater had come to Orleans years ahead of the rest of the country. The mayor, a notorious alcoholic, lay passed out on the proscenium. The reverend's wife was picking the postmaster's pocket; the lecherous old business teacher had his hand on little Emily Webb's knee. What the hell was happening?

Up onto the stage rampaged the real Prof, red-faced, demanding that the production be halted, cuffing Big and Little,
rushing from actor to actor like a mad bull. I ran onto the stage and shouted, “The play's the thing! It must go on.”

Our undaunted leader had been drinking all afternoon, and his efforts to stop the presentation were ineffectual. Big and Little were laughing at their father. “Hand over that Christly flask,” he roared, lunging for Big. The boys tossed the flask over Prof's head, behind their backs, under their legs, playing keep-away with it.

“Mosher, you crazy son of a bitch, stop this so-called play,” Prof bellowed.

“The play must and will continue,” I intoned. “Get back to your right lines, kids.”

“No!” bayed Prof. Lowering his big round cannonball of a head, he came charging across the stage, determined to butt me into next Wednesday. Prof had several inches and a good hundred pounds on me. But I was young and wiry and brimming over with a whole school year of grievances against him and the board of education and authority in general. My employer's words of a year ago, at our teaching interview, flashed through my mind. “If you have to knock 'em down, make sure they stay down.” As he charged me, trumpeting like a rogue elephant, I slipped aside and administered a swift, ungentle rap to his right ear, and he crashed head-first into the six-by-four-foot plywood flat of Teddy from
Arsenic and Old Lace
. Prof's head, sticking through the splintered hole in the flat, bore a striking resemblance to Teddy's. All my superintendent needed was a pith helmet.

“Waaah!” Prof roared. With the sheet of plywood still attached to his neck, he began to plunge around the crowded stage in a panic, scattering the young thespians.

“Dad! Hold still. What are you doing?” Big Prof shouted.

“Where's Mosher?” Prof shouted. “I'm going to kill Mosher.”

School board members were hastening down the aisles, making for the stage. That was fine by me. I'd give them a dose of the same, the cheapskates. Prof was swinging the plywood flat from side to side. Finally, he pushed the thing off his head.

I don't know what the audience thought. Later some claimed that they supposed Prof's antics and mine were part of the performance. Then a transformation seemed to come over the old administrator. Grinning hideously, he approached me, right hand extended. “I'm sorry, Mosher,” he said. “I owe you an apology.”

As he started to extend his hand, he said, “Oops. I dropped my hat.”

He hadn't been wearing a hat, and that should have tipped me off. As he bent over to retrieve his nonexistent chapeau, I too bent over, and Prof delivered a tremendous uppercut to the side of my jaw. Miraculously, he didn't break it, but the blow lifted me off my feet and sent me sailing backward into the flat of the dear old-maid sisters. As I slid down it, I saw Prof collapsed facedown nearby. I was sure he was dead. Somehow, I had managed to murder the superintendent of schools. But no, he'd merely passed out. Students and school board members rushed hither and yon on the stage, which, Jim Hayford later remarked, resembled nothing so much as the body-strewn stage of the Globe Theater in the last scene of
Hamlet
.

Bill, the Middlebury-bound scholar and narrator of
Our Town
, put his arm under my shoulders and helped me to my feet. Some of the students laughed. Others applauded. Slowly, I raised a directorial finger.

“Ring down the curtain,” I croaked out, and as someone blessedly did, I had the distinct impression that the curtain was about to come down on my short-lived career as a teacher as well.

“Not necessarily,” Prof said to me a couple of nights later. His wife had kicked him out of the house temporarily, and he was holed up at the local hotel. “Up here in the Kingdom, folks will just respect both of us more after our little dust-up at the hall.”

We sipped our beers, bought earlier that evening in the next town over. Prof grinned at me. “No hard feelings?”

“None,” I said. After all, what was a little slugfest, in front of half the town, between fishing partners and friends?

“Remember when we went to get old Hayford's piano?” Prof said, chuckling.

“I do.”

“That was a good time, wasn't it?”

“It was.”

For the fourth or fifth time that evening, Prof put out his hand, and for the fourth or fifth time, somewhat warily, I shook it.

“Don't fall for that ‘I dropped my hat' business again, okay?” Prof advised. “That's the oldest bar-fighting trick in the book.”

“I won't,” I said.

“So which do you think it'll be?” he asked, genuinely interested. “The University of Pennsylvania? Or another year here in the Kingdom?”

“I've been thinking about that,” I said. “I can't really see myself as an Ivy League graduate student. Or as a professor at some college. Can you?”

Prof cracked open two more cold ones, shook my hand again, and looked me square in the eye. “Nope,” he said. “I most surely cannot.” And then, echoing Verna's words on the evening of the day Phillis and I got married, “Welcome home, my friend.”

Like my uncle Reg, Francis Phelan, the on-the-skids hero of William Kennedy's novel
Ironweed
, was once a promising young baseball player. In
Ironweed
Kennedy evokes Depression-era Albany the way Reg evoked the Catskills in his own long-missing stories. Yet as I walked along Francis's Broadway, headed from downtown out toward the SUNY Albany campus, there were few signs of Kennedy's shabby old watering places where hard-nosed minor-league third basemen were lionized, aldermen bribed, union organizers shot and clubbed, and local stories spun into myth at a time when myth still mattered. Half-looking for Frankie Leikheim's plumbing shop, where Francis, marvelously, finds a piece of twine to tie up his flapping shoe, knowing that the only place I'd ever find it was between the covers of Kennedy's great novel, I wandered out to the university campus and sat down on a bench near the library.

Three hours before my final event, at the Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza, I was tired. Tired of the driving, the talks, the interviews. Tired from the aftereffects of my MacArthur Grant treatments, tired of the swirling memories of my life as a reader and writer. Disappointments from the Great American Book Tour? Not a one. I'd never supposed that canvassing the bookstores of America like a latter-day Willy Loman was going to make me a best-selling author. Only that the tour would help me reach whatever potential audience was out there for my stories, as indeed it had. When I'd left home, the late-spring woods of northern New England were still more gold than green. Now the trees on the SUNY Albany campus were starting to yellow again. My journey had encompassed parts of three seasons.

You'd think that a writer would be temperamentally introspective, if not outright introverted. Actually, I've always found other people's stories to be more interesting than my own. For decades my working life has consisted of sitting down at the kitchen table every morning and filling up yellow legal tablets. My fellowship temporarily emancipated me from that regimen. It allowed me the time to take a trip I had long wished to make and also to take inventory of my own life at a critical juncture.