It is the nature and pleasure of townspeople to distrust the city. All the guiding principles that might flow from acenter of ideas and cultural energies are regarded as corrupt, one or another kind of pornography. This is how it iswith towns.
But Blacksmith is nowhere near a large city. We don't feel threatened and aggrieved in quite the same way othertowns do. We're not smack in the path of history and its contaminations. If our complaints have a focal point, itwould have to be the TV set, where the outer torment lurks, causing fears and secret desires. Certainly little or noresentment attaches to the College-on-the-Hill as an emblem of ruinous influence. The school occupies an everserene edge of the townscape, semidetached, more or less scenic, suspended in political calm. Not a place designedto aggravate suspicions.
In light snow I drove to the airport outside Iron City, a large town sunk in confusion, a center of abandonment andbroken glass rather than a place of fully realized urban decay. Bee, my twelve-year-old, was due in on a flight fromWashington, with two stops and one change of planes along the way. But it was her mother, Tweedy Browner, whoshowed up in the arrivals area, a small dusty third-world place in a state of halted renovation. For a moment I thoughtBee was dead and Tweedy had come to tell me in person.
"Where is Bee?""She's flying in later today. That's why I'm here. To spend some time with her. I have to go to Boston tomorrow.
Family business.""But where is she?""With her father.""I'm her father, Tweedy.""Malcolm Hunt, stupid. My husband.""He's your husband, he's not her father.""Do you still love me, Tuck?" she said.
She called me Tuck, which is what her mother used to call her father. All the male Browners were called Tuck. Whenthe line began to pale, producing a series of aesthetes and incompetents, they gave the name to any man who marriedinto the family, within reason. I was the first of these and kept expecting to hear a note of overrefined irony in theirvoices when they called me by that name. I thought that when tradition becomes too flexible, irony enters the voice.
Nasality, sarcasm, self-caricature and so on. They would punish me by mocking themselves. But they were sweetabout it, entirely sincere, even grateful to me for allowing them to carry on.
She wore a Shetland sweater, tweed skirt, knee socks and penny loafers. There was a sense of Protestant disrepairabout her, a collapsed aura in which her body struggled to survive. The fair and angular face, the slightly bulgingeyes, the signs of strain and complaint that showed about the mouth and around the eyes, the pulsing at the temple,the raised veins in the hands and neck. Cigarette ash clung to the loose weave of her sweater.
"For the third time. Where is she?""Indonesia, more or less. Malcolm's working in deep cover, sponsoring a Communist revival. It's part of an elegantscheme designed to topple Castro. Let's get out of here, Tuck, before children come swarming around to beg.""Is she coming alone?""Why wouldn't she be?""From the Far East to Iron City can't be that simple.""Bee can cope when she has to. She wants to be a travel writer as a matter of actual fact. Sits a horse well."She took a deep drag on her cigarette and exhaled smoke in rapid expert streams from nose and mouth, a routine sheused when she wanted to express impatience with her immediate surroundings. There were no bars or restaurants atthe airport—just a stand with prepackaged sandwiches, presided over by a man with sect marks on his face. We gotTweedy's luggage, went out to the car and drove through Iron City, past deserted factories, on mainly desertedavenues, a city of hills, occasional cobbled streets, fine old homes here and there, holiday wreaths in the windows.
"Tuck, I'm not happy.""Why not?""I thought you'd love me forever, frankly. I depend on you for that. Malcolm's away so much.""We get a divorce, you take all my money, you marry a well-to-do, well-connected, well-tailored diplomat whosecretly runs agents in and out of sensitive and inaccessible areas.""Malcolm has always been drawn to jungly places."We were traveling parallel to railroad tracks. The weeds were full of Styrofoam cups, tossed from train windows orwind-blown north from the depot.
"Janet has been drawn to Montana, to an ashram," I said.
"Janet Savory? Good God, whatever for?""Her name is Mother Devi now. She operates the ashram's business activities. Investments, real estate, tax shelters.
It's what Janet has always wanted. Peace of mind in a profit-oriented context.""Marvelous bone structure, Janet.""She had a talent for stealth.""You say that with such bitterness. I've never known you to be bitter, Tuck.""Stupid but not bitter.""What do you mean by stealth? Was she covert, like Malcolm?""She wouldn't tell me how much money she made. I think she used to read my mail. Right after Heinrich was born,she got me involved in a complex investment scheme with a bunch of multilingual people. She said she hadinformation.""But she was wrong and you lost vast sums.""We made vast sums. I was entangled, enmeshed. She was always maneuvering. My security was threatened. Mysense of a long and uneventful life. She wanted to incorporate us. We got phone calls from Liechtenstein, theHebrides. Fictional places, plot devices."'That doesn't sound like the Janet Savory I spent a delightful half hour with. The Janet with the high cheekbones andwry voice.""You all had high cheekbones. Every one of you. Marvelous bone structure. Thank God for Babette and her longfleshy face.""Isn't there somewhere we can get a civilized meal?" Tweedy said. "A tableclothy place with icy pats of butter.
Malcolm and I once took tea with Colonel Qaddafí. A charming and ruthless man, one of the few terrorists we've metwho lives up to his public billing."The snow had stopped falling. We drove through a warehouse district, more deserted streets, a bleakness andanonymity that registered in the mind as a ghostly longing for something that was far beyond retrieval. There werelonely cafes, another stretch of track, freight cars paused at a siding. Tweedy chain-smoked extra-longs, shootingexasperated streams of smoke in every direction.
"God, Tuck, we were good together.""Good at what?""Fool, you're supposed to look at me in a fond and nostalgic way, smiling ruefully.""You wore gloves to bed.""I still do.""Gloves, eyeshades and socks.""You know my flaws. You always did. I'm ultrasensitive to many things.""Sunlight, air, food, water, sex.""Carcinogenic, every one of them.""What's the family business in Boston all about?""I have to reassure my mother that Malcolm isn't dead. She's taken quite a shine to him, for whatever reason.""Why does she think he's dead?""When Malcolm goes into deep cover, it's as though he never existed. He disappears not only here and now butretroactively. No trace of the man remains. I sometimes wonder if the man I'm married to is in fact Malcolm Hunt ora completely different person who is himself operating under deep cover. It's frankly worrisome. I don't know whichhalf of Malcolm's life is real, which half is intelligence. I'm hoping Bee can shed some light."Traffic lights swayed on cables in a sudden gust. This was the city's main street, a series of discount stores,check-cashing places, wholesale outlets. A tall old Moorish movie theater, now remarkably a mosque. Blankstructures called the Terminal Building, the Packer Building, the Commerce Building. How close this was to aclassic photography of regret.
"A gray day in Iron City," I said. "We may as well go back to the airport.""How is Hitler?'!
"Fine, solid, dependable.""You look good, Tuck.""I don't feel good.""You never felt good. You're the old Tuck. You were always the old Tuck. We loved each other, didn't we? We toldeach other everything, within the limits of one's preoccupation with breeding and tact. Malcolm tells me nothing.
Who is he? What does he do?"She sat with her legs tucked under her, facing me, and flicked ashes into her shoes, which sat on the rubber mat.
"Wasn't it marvelous to grow up tall and straight, among geldings and mares, with a daddy who wore blue blazersand crisp gray flannels?""Don't ask me.""Mother used to stand in the arbor with an armful of cut flowers. Just stand there, being what she was."At the airport we waited in a mist of plaster dust, among............