The Vagabonds
Copyright © 2004 by Nicholas Delbanco
All rights reserved.
Warner Books
Hachette Book Group, USA
237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Visit our Web site at
www.hachettebookgroupusa.com
First eBook Edition: November 2004
ISBN: 978-0-446-53482-6
Contents
ALSO BY NICHOLAS DELBANCO
Fiction
What Remains
Old Scores
In the Name of Mercy
The Writers’ Trade, & Other Stories
About My Table, & Other Stories
Stillness
Sherbrookes
Possession
Small Rain
Fathering
In the Middle Distance
News
Consider Sappho Burning
Grasse 3/23/66
The Martlet’s Tale
Nonfiction
The Countess of Stanlein Restored: A History of the Countess of Stanlein ex-Paganini Stradivarius Violoncello of 1707
The Lost Suitcase: Reflections on the Literary Life
Running in Place: Scenes from the South of France
The Beaux Arts Trio: A Portrait
Group Portrait: Conrad, Crane, Ford, James, & Wells
Books Edited
The Sincerest Form: Writing Fiction by Imitation
The Writing Life: The Hopwood Lectures, Fifth Series
Talking Horse: Bernard Malamud on Life and Work
(with A. Cheuse)
Speaking of Writing: Selected Hopwood Lectures
Writers and Their Craft: Short Stories & Essays on the Narrative
(with L. Goldstein)
Stillness and Shadows
(two novels by John Gardner)
To
Larry Kirshbaum and Jamie Raab
In Deepest Gratitude
The four historical figures here named—Thomas Edison, Harvey Firestone, Henry Ford and, from time to time, John Burroughs—did call themselves “the vagabonds” and take road trips together. Three members of that famed quartet took a meal on the porch of “Grandmother’s House” some fifteen miles outside of Albany, New York, on August 31, 1916. That day they passed through Saratoga Springs and the lines of verse quoted in Chapter 4 were written by Burroughs himself. Ford did have a Japanese cook named Yukio, and it was the magnate’s intention to join the party in Plattsburgh—an intention he had to defer.
Here my accurate reportage ends. No one by the name of Peter Barclay was ever in Firestone’s employ, and any resemblance, as they say, of any members of the Dancey family to anyone alive or dead is coincidental. Those who wish a full account of “The Camping Trips of Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Harvey Firestone, and John Burroughs” should instead consult the authoritative
There to Breathe the Beauty,
by Norman Brauer (Norman Brauer Publications, Dalton, Pa., 1955). Mine is a novel, not a work of nonfiction; a work shaped by fancy, not fact.
Nonetheless I’ve profited from the expert advice of friends. Harold Skramstad—then president of what was then called Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village—first brought “the vagabonds” to my attention in 1988; more than fifteen years thereafter I continue to be in his debt. B. Joseph White—then dean of the University of Michigan Business School—first walked me through the issues of inheritance and, as it were, postmortem trust and control. Thomas Lynch of Lynch & Sons, James Blume of J.B. Blume, Inc., and Bruce Wallace of Hooper, Hathaway, Price, Beuche & Wallace instructed me in the niceties of undertaking, finance and the law, respectively. They taught me what I did not know and corrected what I got wrong; I could not have fleshed in these bare bones without them, and any errata are mine.
As always I’m grateful to my literary agent, Gail Hochman; she was part of this project from its beginning and kept me at last to the last. My friends and colleagues Andrea Barrett, Andrea Beauchamp, James Landis and Jon Manchip White read the book in nearly finished manuscript. It is the better for their encouragement and close-hauled critiques. I finished
The Vagabonds
in Bellagio, at the Villa Serbelloni, and am grateful to the Rockefeller Foundation in general and Ms. Gianna Celli in particular for providing space and time. That I owe all the rest, and more, to my wife Elena continues happily to be the case. To have such a partner in and witness to the world we share is to beggar language; there’s no sufficient way to say it. To my final, closest reader: thanks, thanks, thanks, thanks, thanks.
IX.
I hereby give to my said executor full power to sell, lease without limit as to period or terms, and mortgage, pledge, invest, re- invest, exchange, manage, control, and in any way, use, and deal with, any and all property of my estate, without application to any court or authority for leave or confirmation, unless the same shall be expressly required by law and shall be unwaivable even by this provision of my will, and to that end, said executor may sell such property for cash or upon credit, upon such terms as to him may seem sufficient; continue present investments; invest and re-invest any such property or securities in such a manner as he shall deem adequate and safe, free from any limitations imposed by law; borrow on the credit of, exchange, pledge, or mortgage any of such property; deposit any securities with voting trustees or for other purposes; exercise any and all rights which have accrued or may accrue appurtenant to any securities; and use the principal and income of my estate not herein specifically devised or bequeathed as he may deem advisable; and compromise any and all claims in favor of my estate or against it.
From: The Will of Henry Ford, this 3rd day of February A.D. 1936
Come, Thomas, leave your shop while we have time
And let’s take to the open road for the strawberry days!
From: “Letter to Thomas Edison from John Burroughs”
Daniel Mark Epstein
2003
A
gull above her circles, pauses in its rising flight and releases what it carries and lets the thing plummet and crack. It is, she knows, a razor clam, or maybe a mussel or oyster; the parking lot has been littered with shells, a white glaze of shattered dropped shellfish, and there are only two cars. Joanna drives past. A brand-new Volvo station wagon, complete with baby seat and snowshoes, waits at the edge of the path to the beach; a fisherman’s truck stands idling there also, and the man inside raises his hand. She waves back—it’s the thing to do—but parks at the end of the lot. There, smoking, she stares at the bay.
This day it’s green and wintry, wind-roiled, with ice in its foam. She rolls her window open and hears the crackling tide. The sound, Joanna tells herself, is like a cocktail shaker’s, the salt and sand and wave spume all freezing and mixed in together. No ships are on the water, no line at the horizon’s edge beneath a glaucous sky. This is her lunch break and time to be private; holding the smoke, she inhales.
The winter has been long. It is February 10. Ice and snow have settled in, and she feels the way that clam would feel if it knew itself caught in the gull’s outstretched beak and ready to be dropped. Last night had been a good one, or as good as she expects to have, with Harry the lodger appreciative and the spaghetti in her homemade garlic and pesto sauce cooked just the way she liked it and both of them, as he put it, lubricated by wine.
“I’m feeling lubricated,” he said. “I’m just about feeling no pain.”
Joanna had lit candles and the lanterns in the dining room. She was wearing her blue toreador pants and the white Mexican peasant’s blouse with the red embroidery, and Harry called her his flag.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Red, white and blue,” he told her, and they clicked glasses and kissed.
He could be sweet when he wanted, and last night he’d wanted to, so after the salad and ice cream they went upstairs to his room. The whole house is hers, of course, and in the middle of a February cold snap there are no other paying guests, but it excited Joanna to be in his room and not on her own sleigh bed with the cat and bills and unwashed sheets; she took better care of
his
space, since, after all, Harry rented it and expected fresh laundry each week. So they were getting down to business, his mouth a mix of pesto sauce and cigar smoke and that Pinot Noir she’d ordered two cases of for Christmas, and still had three bottles of, his arms about her, leg on leg, when the telephone rang in the hallway and, after two rings, ceased ringing and then began again. This was her signal from Leah and she knew she had to answer because her daughter only called that way on the private number when she needed help, and meant it.
“Oh, lover,” breathed Joanna, “wait, I’ll be right back.”
He could be a bastard when he wanted, and last night he’d wanted to while she got on the phone. It was Leah in trouble, big surprise—who has taken, lately, to calling herself Artemisia, because Artemisia was an artist, a painter in the old days when young women weren’t supposed to paint, and who’d been raped for her presumption, or so the story went. And since fifteen-year- old Leah is into nose rings and tattoos this year she likes to think her name is Artemisia, Art for short . . .
“Mom, the car is out of gas,” she said. “And I’m up here in Truro and there’s no gas stations open and I need you to come up and get us.”
“Us?”
“Me and Stacey and a couple guys.”
“I’m busy,” said Joanna. Because Harry was behind her now, his hand on her ass and his pants off already, and when Leah-Artemisia said, “But Mom, it’s
cold . . . ,” he reached over and pulled out the cord from the plug and the phone went dead. And so she was caught in the middle again, the rock that is Harry her lodger and the hard place that’s her daughter; by the time she’d wriggled out of it and finished staking out her claim—telling him don’t you
ever do that, don’t you
ever
touch this telephone, telling Leah who called a second time that no, she wasn’t coming because this is a mess you’ve made for yourself and the other kids have parents too; whose car were you driving and what were you doing anyhow in Truro?—by the time the argument was over she had been cold sober, the small sweet flare of pleasure gone. Harry lay back with his nose in a book, his stinking feet on the afghan she’d made and had been so proud of, and that was the end of that.
Another gull, rising, drops lunch. In summertime the lot is full, with a line of cars waiting to enter, but now the hard paved surface is a plate for gulls to feast off; no competition on the ground—just her and the truck and the Volvo and none of them looking for shells. She hates self-pity, guards against it, but sometimes—this is one of them—the gray sky and the empty beach and big house near the harbor she tries to make the payments on all seem to be working together and working against her, bringing her down. This morning in the living room there had been birds, a pair of them, terrified and battering at windows and shitting all over the furniture and window wells. Their wings and tails were black with soot, so they must have come through the chimney, and by the time she got them out—removing the screens and opening the windows and ducking under their frenzied rush—by the time she’d finished cleaning up and replacing the screens in the half-frozen frames and shutting the flue in the fireplace chimney she’d been late for work. It made no difference, of course; there were no customers at nine o’clock, and when she told Maisie about the birds—grackles, maybe, or starlings, not crows—Maisie nodded, unsurprised. “It happens.”
“Shit happens,” said Joanna. “That’s what we used to say.”
“They gather by the chimney,” Maisie explained. “They warm themselves at the furnace updraft and get a little dopey and fall in.”
“At your house too?”
“Not since Tom installed a chimney cap. It’s good for keeping bats away. And squirrels and raccoons; you ought to get a chimney cap.”
“I ought to do a lot of things,” she told her boss-friend bitterly. “I ought to sell the goddam house is what I ought to do.”
“Who’d buy it?” Maisie asked, and turned to the stock on the shelves.
A light snow falls. Joanna finishes her cigarette and drops it out the door and starts up Trusty-Rusty and, once the engine catches, eases it into reverse. Her lunch break is ending; she needs to get back into town. She helps Maisie out three days a week, and though there’ve been only two sales this morning—a cardigan, a pair of gloves—it matters to them both that they pretend she’s useful and there’s a reason to get dressed and drive herself to the store and check the order pads and rearrange the inventory they both know won’t sell. In summertime the place is full, young mothers and couples or women alone—on rainy days so many of them you’d think scarves are a necessity, or harem pants, or wide-brimmed hats, which is why the place is called The Bare Necessities. From Memorial through Labor Day, Main Street is busy, hopping, and it’s worth your life to find a parking place and what jogs or drives or bicycles past the store is tourists all day long.