The ways a writer – or at least this one – remembers

In her latest post, Ronni Bennett at Time Goes By cites the latest studies showing that the brain doesn’t necessarily deteriorate as we grow older. Over the last decade, there’s been increasing evidence that it’s not so much that we remember less; it’s that we remember differently.  While short-term memory declines with old age, long-term memory seems to be enhanced. Older people generally are given to remembering; they use the past in the present, in their day-to-day living of it.  If they’re artists, they use it in their creative endeavors.

It seems to me that another reason the past is so important at this age is that we’re closer to the end. There is less future to contemplate, and a lot more past. We may not be into summing up our lives just yet, but we tend to see them whole in a way that we didn’t when we were younger. A writer, at least this writer, may see her characters in the same way – with a beginning, middle, and end. Whole. Even if the story, novel or poem doesn’t actually describe the whole.

I think of the past as a wonderful treasure trove. As I dig, more keeps being unearthed. Like the rocks in New England that seem to re-emerge each year even though I thought we’d dug them all last spring. There’s always more to be discovered. That doesn’t have to mean the details of my living – the kind of icing on my fourth birthday cake, the name of my first bicycle, my grandmother’s hairstyle….   It can mean the surprise of an imagined character, place or action. I don’t know quite how I understand that that’s how it would have been: it simply makes sense when I write it. Somehow, I know, and I know because of what I remember without knowing exactly what that is.

Watching my mother die with Alzheimer’s, I learned a lot about memory. Most of all, I learned that it’s not just memories that we lose when we lose memory, it’s the framework and context for everything we are and do, for the meaning of our lives.

Here’s a draft excerpt from Digging to Russia, a book I’m slowly, slowly writing. It’s easier to share it here, then write what I’m trying to say for this post in “post language.”

It’s not exactly true that what we are is what we remember, is it? Our memories aren’t stacked inside of us like dominoes. You remove some and they all go tumbling. Or like a jigsaw puzzle – lose enough pieces and the picture no longer makes much sense. Our memories aren’t us, there’s something else there holding us together, and yet my past leads into my present. My present is rooted in my past, and starts crumbling when the past does.

One day I asked my mother if she’d like us to go through the story of her life together. I saw her hesitate. On the one hand, she enjoyed hearing things about herself that she’d forgotten; they verified her existence. On the other, she didn’t want anyone to know how little she remembered, to see the holes in the cloth of her life, to discover that she was so scantily dressed it was embarrassing.

Worst of all, even though we put the pieces together they’d be lost to her again by the time we finished, or sooner. She’d be stripped down all over again.

We sat in her room at the Home – a bevy of mothers, fathers and grandmothers, brothers and sisters, her husband, her children staring down at us from the photos on the wall. “I don’t want those there,” she told me yesterday. “Take them away.” They’d been on her bedroom wall for twenty years, maybe more, but now she wanted them gone. They taunted her. She didn’t know who those people were; she wasn’t even sure she wanted to know anymore.

I made sure her back was to them.

We would start as near the beginning as we could – a good place to start since that’s where she’d mostly been left. On another wall, hanging in view of both of us, was her baptismal certificate or, in ornate German letters, Tauf Schein. A fair-skinned Jesus wreathed in vines stood on a stone pedestal and reached out with welcoming arms.

“Alicea Albertine Wacker, tochter von Jacob Wacker and seiner Ehefrau Katherine geb. Borger ist am 14 November 1917 in der Evang. Luth. Friedenkirche in namen des Dreieinigen Gottes getauft worden.” In the name of the Three-in-One-God. Born again.

“Do you remember your baptism? You were three years old. I wonder why they waited so long.”

Grandma had lost two children by then. Two still births, and granddad another by his first wife. Maybe they were waiting to make sure this one would live. There was a dove on the certificate, but the first of the Three-in-one-God is missing. Where’s God the Father?

“I don’t remember.”

“That’s not surprising. You were very young.”

I tried to remember it for her. Granddad, costumed for the occasion in his Sunday suit, grave, distracted, worrying about a disappointing beet harvest. Grandma, dressed in her only best dress, a busy flower print, earnest, yearning for God. Thin-as-a-rail-Herr Rolf Steinhauer and plump, red-cheeked Herr Albert Rothe, both there to witness, Herr Rothe holding Alicea in his arms. Beside him, his beaming frau. Pastor Amen, looking a little silly, his side-whiskers twitching when he talks, sprinkling water on Alicea, making her giggle because the water is dribbling down her forehead to her nose. It tickles. Above her the Holy Spirit is flying around in the eves while Jesus watches tenderly from a stained glass window.

“Do you remember the church?”

“Yes. Mom, Pop, and…

“Your brother, Clarence.”

“He was a good brother.”

“Did you sing in church?”

“Oh, yes. We sang.” She sang in a small wavering voice:

“So nimm denn meine Hände und führe mich bis an mein selig Ende und ewiglich.
Ich mag allein nicht gehen, nicht einen Schritt: wo du wirst gehn und stehen, da nimm mich mit.”

I imagined her, tiny, blue-eyed, with her kid’s thin, high-pitched voice, stuffed into a congregation of gutteral harmonies, caught in a press of big coats damp from the snow. There are no pictures of God the Father but she always thought of Him when she smelled dank wool.

“Did you always believe in God?” That wasn’t a fair question, was it? Would she recall if she hadn’t? Mightn’t a God denial be one of the first things in her memory bank to go?

“Of course.”

“Everybody in the family believed in God, didn’t they?”

“Of course. Why wouldn’t they?”

“What about Uncle Heine?”

She looks worried. “I’m not sure. We’ll have to ask him,” she replied. “Heine’s crazy,” she added in a hushed tone so no one would hear.

“Did you ever try to dig a hole to China?”

“That would be a dumb thing to do,” she said.

“To Russia, then?”

“Even dumber,” she laughed. She stopped abruptly and frowned. “Let’s get on with it,” she said, irritated that the story of her life was so slow to unfold.

“Didn’t you do anything dumb when you were a kid?” I persisted.

She smiled the little girl smile that’s persuaded the staff at the Home that she’s sweet. “I got lost,” she said. “I was trying to shake salt on a wild turkey’s tail.”

“Now that,” I grinned, “is a dumb thing to do. Why did you do it?”

“To tame him. Uncle Heine told me that if I salted its tail, the turkey would be my friend. So I took mom’s salt shaker and a long blue ribbon to leash him and went looking.”

I’m glad that the hole to Russia was mine alone. That she has her own ambition to remember, to tame a funny looking bird as big as herself, to make a friend of it, to loop a blue ribbon around its odd neck and bring it home, to sit on the steps with it and share secrets. “Was Grandma mad that you took her salt shaker?”

“No. Mom thought it was funny. Pop was mad because I got way the other side of the wheat field.”

I wondered, was he angry with Heine for telling her the turkey story? He was a grim man, Granddad Jake, during my mother’s growing up. When he came in to eat, everyone kept quiet because that’s what you did when a German farmer came in from the fields. He didn’t talk to his family. She’s told me many times that she was afraid of him. Not to get Freudian about it – that’s passé and I haven’t done it for years – but did Granddad’s grimness set up all the men that followed him in my mother’s life? Including my father?

“They were very proud of you, you know. Both Grandma and Granddad.”

She lit up for a moment. Poor pale wisp of a woman, bent and beaten. Lights up and got that sweet look again. “I know,” she said.

Well, I thought, we might as well remember the most traumatic event of her life next. Chronologically, it made sense, and it was something that stayed with her in some form. For weeks she had talked about it. Is the memory, what she had of it, still there?

“They must have been so upset when you got shot.”

“Yes. I got shot you know. I’ve been shot.”

I nodded. “Tell me about it.”

“They took me to Denver in the train,” she said proudly. “All the way to Denver.”

“Did it hurt?” I asked.

“I remember Heine holding me on the train.”

Heine?

When she did her genealogy, she collected the newspaper item about it; I’ve looked at it with her. “Killed While Playing With Shotgun.” It was a cool, sweet-smelling evening and Grandma and Granddad were away for a few hours, maybe at church worshipping the God who lets terrible things happen. The children were outside on the front lawn. Cousins George and Tillie, ages five and six, were making my high chair-bound four-year-old mother laugh. Her little brother, Gearhardt, was crooning to himself in a playpen on the porch. Twelve-year-old Clarence was sitting on the steps whittling. Uncle Heine sat in the living room vamping up his shot-gun. He was going hunting the next day. He set the rifle down when Clarence called to him, “Hey, Uncle Heine. Can I come with you tomorrow?”

“Of course, Clare,” Heine said, leaning out the screen door. He walked out onto the porch, sat down next to Clarence and put an arm around his shoulders. “Can you get away from the beets long enough? Will Brother Jake let you?”

“I think so, Uncle. I’m pretty sure he will.”

Neither of them noticed when George went into the house. Neither of them heard him dragging the gun across the floor to the screen door. They didn’t hear anything until the gun went off and Alicea wailed with pain. And young Gearhardt, well there was nothing much left of him but frothing bits of baby bone and blood.

It’s the essence of tragic accident to be an event that didn’t have to happen, that no one could have foreseen or they wouldn’t have done the small, apparently inconsequential thing that caused it. It’s one of those events that, afterwards, no one wants to think about ever again – but of course they have to. One of those things that God lets happen, God knows why. Did Grandma scream at Heine when she saw what was left of her boy? How could something like that happen and no one be to blame? If anyone was, it had to be Uncle Heine.

Poor Heine, some people seem doomed to be responsible for the misfortunes of others. Some drunk drivers kill; most don’t. Some smokers grind out the last bit of fire in a cigarette on a park trail and all they’re guilty of is littering; others do the same and they’ve started major conflagrations. They’ve burned down whole forests.

“Did Grandma or granddad blame Uncle Heine when you got shot?”

“Heine’s crazy, you know.” She frowned, trying to think about him but there was nothing else there. At least right then.

Odd about memory. She remembered that ninety-years-ago-train, that hulking, rocking, whistling night train and the adults hovering over her, terrified they would lose her too, passionately wishing her long life, loving her more than they knew how to say. She didn’t remember being shot. She didn’t remember that much more recently, a few decades ago, a doctor discovered shotgun pellets in her back that might explain her oscoleocis. The pellets have lasted years longer than the memory. She doesn’t remember her bit-by-bit curving spine, even though it’s always been there. Just the train that showed her how much her parents loved her. And Heine.

She used to wait in the evenings at New Dawning Home for Heine to come get her and take her home. Her life was an excursion; she’d overstayed and it wasn’t fun anymore. Night after night, he failed to come. But because she forgot he hadn’t almost as soon as he didn’t, she didn’t grow impatient or despairing. She just waited the next night, with the same eagerness as the night before.

“I’m tired of this,” she muttered.

“Yes, I can see you’re tired. I’m going to let you rest now.” At this rate, even the few memories she has left – small, warm, bejeweled with feeling – won’t be shared before they disappear forever. I kissed her forehead, a dry neutral sort of place that required nothing of me but a slight stoop and a slighter pucker. I never learned to hug my mother and still can’t, even now. I walked out of the room. I never walk out without seeing something in the way she watches me go, or maybe it’s a gesture without any of the usual defining characteristics of gesture, that says “Don’t go. Not yet. You’re the only person here who knows who I am.” But do I know? And whether I do or not, I want out. I don’t want to be here, doing claustrophobia in the emptying rooms of her mind.

What I want is for there to be a library somewhere – not a place that holds the usual sorts of books made of paper, glue, and leather-but an ethereal library where memories are kept until someone needs to check them out. It affirms the significance of our lives; what we remember isn’t just flotsam that dissipates when we’re gone; it’s all there still, wherever “there” is, stored, kept safe.

My mother will be able to check out memories and find herself again in them. Why not? If she doesn’t get there, if death or some other incapacitating condition prevents it, then I – looking through the stacks in Biography, (Dewey Decimal System 920-928 but organized alphabetically) – will check out her life and make what use of it I can. Biographers elaborate on what little they can discover, and so will I. And if memory is mostly imagination anyway, there’s no reason why I shouldn’t thumb through what I can find of her reminiscences and add a few riffs of my own.

Old artists like mountains

Some old artists are like mountains in the geography of our lives, and when we lose them everything changes – east is no longer surely east; west has lost its place; we don’t know quite where we are. I’m sure a lot of people felt this way when Frank Sinatra died. Although Elvis didn’t live long enough to become old, the effect of his death was at least as devastating for vast numbers of people. Some of us experience this phenomenon when not-as-famous people disappear: Bobby Short, Ernest Hemingway, Margaret Bourke White ….

Leonard Bernstein was one of those mountains for many, many people. I was living in Vermont when we heard he’d died. Two people were visiting us on that early fall evening – a violist and the violist’s mother, who also happens to be an enthusiastic member of New York City’s large classical music audience. I remember it was hard to take in because he’d been larger than life, so why wasn’t he bigger than death?

Leonard Bernstein, 1971. In rehearsal of his "Mass." U.S. Library of Congress. Creative Commons.

The violist learned about it on the telephone, as if we were living then on some kind of cultural outpost. But even there, the world around us physically changed. I looked around; there was an emptiness where there had once been activity, confusion and music. A mountain.

I never had an especially profound connection to Bernstein. He just was. I come from the generation that discovered him as a child when we started watching television. Suddenly, there was someone besides my hopelessly unimaginative mother to teach me about music. I loved “On the Town” and eventually “Candide.” On my first day ever in New York City in the early sixties, I remember standing on a nearly empty street while someone, I have no memory who, told me that, at that very moment, an important rehearsal was being conducted in the undistinguished building in front of us. I learned later that the show was “West Side Story.”

The years passed and Lennie Bernstein conducted, played the piano, wrote, and wheeled and dealed. Like many people, I worried that he was spreading himself too thin and would never compose his Ninth Symphony, his Messiah – his work for the ages. But he did compose. He kept doing all of it. The years passed and he was there as surely as Times Square or the Statue of Liberty. I listened to gossip about his personal life – why not, it was always salacious and always interesting. Leonard Bernstein was New York in every way.

Composer Ned Rorem, who, by the way, is still writing songs and books at age 87, wrote in his 1990 essay “Lenny is Dead:”
Was he too young to die? What is too young? Lenny led four lives in one, so he was not 72 years old but 288. Was he, as so many have meanly claimed, paying for the rough life he led? As he lived many lives, so he died many deaths. Smoking may have been one cause, but so was overwork, and especially sorrow at a world he so longed to change but which remained as philistine and foolish as before. Which may ultimately be the brokenhearted reason any artist dies. Or any person.

So what was he really like? Lenny was like everyone else, only more so. But nobody else was like him.

The critics be damned!

The critics be damned!

It is never right to ask an artist, whether old or young, what a painting, a piece of writing or a musical composition means, says my friend Sally. Many of us seem to have accepted that principle where the graphic arts and music are concerned, but when there’s something in writing, we expect it to open its meaning to us immediately, and if it doesn’t, we want an interpretation. We demand an interpretation! A host of critics are depending on us for their livelihoods.

Not so, says Sally. You must make of these what you will. They’re yours to understand in any way you choose.

Wes Adams and the last vaudeville circuit

My friend, Wes Adams, played the last vaudeville circuit in the United States. When he died at the age of 79 in 1987, I inherited several drawers-full of old reviews, playbills, and photographs. I used to talk about donating the whole lot of it to the New York Library for the Performing Arts, but I think, even then, I knew there had to be a way to honor him that didn’t involve putting his remains in a museum archive, preserved but lost to sight. By the time Wes died in an apartment fire, he’d lost most of his contemporaries to time and death, he had only two blood relatives that I knew of, both of them remote, no children, and in fact, almost no one. He left no legacy, except what I could make of the smoky souvenirs I uncovered in his apartment. He’d told all of us anecdotes from his show career, but not enough to put the whole thing together.

Someday I want to put some of the diaries and much of the memorabilia on-line. It’s an America and an American people should know more about.

Wes grew up Swedish American on Minnesota’s Iron Ridge, blond and reticent, but determined to go into show business. Since he was handsome and well-spoken he found himself at the age of 20 in Coffee-Miller Players, a troupe that toured the middle U.S., performing mostly in theater space in high schools and colleges. He was very young, ambitious, and impatient. So it wasn’t surprising that he quit after a few seasons and, on September 13, 1929, arrived in New York City. At 18 Charles Street in the Village. Not that far from where he was to die 59 years later.

“Becoming worried about eating. Little money left,” he wrote in his diary. He may have worried about food, but almost every night he went to another play, movie or concert. He was in training for the theater, I guess. Less than a month later he found a job with Arthur Murray. This was before the man had a chain of studios and appeared on TV every week. Murray became a good friend, and one of the first of many names Wes dropped over the years. But there were many more he never did.

Even though it was 1929, the stock market crashed and not everyone could afford to learn to dance, the Arthur Murray gig turned out to be one of the most important in his life because he met Lisa there, and in time the two of them became a dancing duo. They eventually called themselves Wes Adams and Lisa and they began to get jobs in hotel ballrooms, at weddings…. those kinds of jobs. It was the beginning of their kind of ballroom dancing, one that was also theater. One of their most popular acts, especially among the jet set in Europe, was about the Duke of Windsor and his American wife, apparently among Europe’s most famous boors.

Unfortunately, in 1930 Lisa’s wealthy parents decided to send her off on a European tour-but misfortune soon turned to fortune when Wes found another partner and became part of Doc Rockwell’s vaudeville company. In this instance, he couldn’t drop names: by the time, I knew him, no one knew anything about “Doc Rockwell – Quack, Quack, Quack” whose most famous comedy routine was one where he portrayed a doctor with a stethoscope holding a five-foot banana stalk. He was at the height of his career in the early 1930s, appearing at Radio City Music Hall and the Ziegfeld Theater, pulling down $3,500 a week in the middle of the depression.  (He was also the father of American Nazi George Lincoln Rockwell, an embarrassment since he numbered Groucho Marx, Fanny Brice and Jack Benny among his friends.) It was Doc Rockwell and vaudeville that turned Wes Adams and Lisa into a thriving dance act.

The decade of the thirties may have been hell for much of the country, but it was wonderful for the two dancers. A gig on a cruise took them to Cuba where they became famous in Havana society, and where they eventually had to flee one of the island nation’s many revolutions.

They traveled and performed in Alexandria (Egypt), Bucharest, Budapest, Paris, London, the French Riviera and Spain, until they had to flee the Spanish Civil War. They were the opening act for people like Marlene Dietrich. In 1939, they danced at the wedding of the Egyptian Princess Fawzia, King Farouk’s sister, to the Crown Prince of Iran, at the Abdine Palace in Cairo. (There’s old footage of the event-though not the entertainment-on YouTube.) They became friends with members of the Royal Ballet and Margot Fonteyn in London. (I have several of her Christmas cards.)

World War II ended the most wonderful decade of Wes’s life. The dancers returned to the U.S.; Lisa fell in love with a Canadian and joined the Canadian version of the WACs; Wes tried out other partners, but the act never caught fire again, even when Lisa’s marriage ended a few years later. Lisa and Wes remained close friends. Wes moved on; he got involved in making TV and motion picture documentaries. He moved to Christopher Street in New York. He continued to travel whenever he could.

When I first met Wes, he was freelancing for the National Council of Churches and had just returned from Senegal where he’d been the translator for the novelist and movie maker, Ousmane Sembene. He’d been practicing his French (and his Spanish) in his diaries for years, one reason parts of his career will always be a mystery to me.

Wes Adams was a kind gentle man when I met him, one who loved beauty and life. He wasn’t quite an artist anymore, but someone who, for a brief magical decade, lived the artist’s version of the proverbial “life of Riley.”

Some old artists of distinction I have known… and inadvertently learned from

I

It might have been more than two years ago now. I was driving on a country road on a winter day in northern California, an inconspicuous day of no particular note, when I heard a voice from the past. I determined very soon that I wasn’t hallucinating. I was listening to San Francisco station KPFA and they were rebroadcasting commentary from a decades-old reading of Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” on their sister station WBAI in New York. The voice was interested and interesting, dulcet, mellifluous, with the perfect American English of the dramatic stage. Ann Dunnigan had died in 1997, but here she was, as I had known her, still alive in her work.

Ann Dunnigan was a re-creator, that is, a translator, who made the first American translation of Tolstoy’s monumental work. I’d never thought about it before, but she must have come late to the art of translating. As a young woman she pursued a career in the theater, appearing in more than one Broadway play. I know she married a doctor, but I’m not certain what happened to him: they had a son, John. Since her first publication was in 1960 – she would have been 50 – she must have been in her forties when, a lover of Chekhov, she learned Russian and turned translator. She went on to translate most of Chekhov’s work and much of Tolstoy’s and Dostoyevsky’s.

I was a little surprised by Ann; I didn’t expect someone who looked like Celeste Holm and was the very picture of sophistication and elegance, to befriend a rather clumsy, lost soul like me.

Sorry. I couldn't find my one sole picture of Ann, so here's Celeste Holm! Photo by Perfect Show in Flickr. Creative Commons license.

After all, she was also a good friend of E.L. Doctorow. But we had dinner with her, we sat in her apartment, admired her book-lined walls, and shared a cocktail. I remember she and I passed an hour or two in Central Park watching people. (It was one of her favorite pastimes.) We even went to the Met’s “Boris Goudonov” together, eating first, as befit the occasion, at The Russian Tea Room.

Boris teaches his son about the extent of his empire.

My partner, who had the same literary agent as Ann, once told me that she’d claimed her father had been a gun runner in pre-Communist China. Even though she never mentioned it to me and her obituary says nary a word about it, I believed it. She had that kind of glamour, the kind you only see in the thirties and forties movies where gun-runners were not that unusual.

Ann wasn’t afraid to make a fool of herself. She and a group of other unlikely actors (they included Ronnie Elliot who I knew as a singer with the Weavers), appeared in a contemporary version of “Antigone” at the New York Shakespeare Festival production of the play at the Public Theater in 1982. From our point of view, it was a slightly ridiculous “Antigone,” but Ann treated the experience with aplomb.

Ann and I worked together on a project that never quite got off the ground, a collection of sayings from the very wise. She had grown up a Christian scientist and was a disciple of Joseph Campbell. She was confident in the reality of the spiritual, and I think she probably died as gracefully as anyone I’ve ever met.

Ann Dunnigan always treated me as if I were her equal when I knew, because it was just so obvious, that she worked with a discipline, precision and passion that I could only dream about then. She was a wonderful model without ever intending it.

Louise Bourgeois’s Spider

Louise Bourgeois died recently at the age of 98. I don’t know her work well; I mostly want to call attention to it because she was someone who worked and worked well to an advanced age—her last pieces were finished in the week before her death. She’s fascinating also because her achievements weren’t widely applauded until she was almost 70.

Photo by LoopZilla on Flickr. Creative Commons license.

For many years after her husband’s death she held salons in her New York City home. A visitor to one of those events was evidently awed by her age: “It is indeed a privilege to be present as she teeters into the salon with the help of her walker.” I don’t think this reveals much about Bourgeois, but I loved the picture of  her teetering with the help of a walker: I hope it would have amused her as much as it did me.

Bourgeois was born into a middle class family in Paris. Her childhood wasn’t one she ever put behind her: in fact most of her work is about her mother, her father and her governess. Her father was apparently a big personality: she loved him dearly but never forgave him for the humiliations he perpetuated against her, teasing her in front of others, and serially betraying her mother:  she was still very young when she discovered that her father and her governess were having an affair. It was evidently a long-lived one and her hatred for him and the governess festered until she engaged it and turned it into her art at a late age.

One of her early sculptures (1974) was a piece entitled Destruction of the Father, composed largely of body parts. She described it as a kind of dream in which the children turn on the father over the dining table and dismember him.

Body parts were at the heart of much of her work where they gave shape to memories and emotions. Looking at her work is like being set loose in a dream where physical parts, processes and events are organized in ways that make us remember things about ourselves and our lives that we would rather forget, very fundamental things, often things of childhood. “An artist,” she said, “can show things that other people are terrified of expressing.”

Eyeballs. Williams College of Art. Photo by Cyradis on Flickr. Creative Commons license.

In the ’90s, Bourgeois began creating mammoth spiders at the Tate in Great Britain, Rockefeller Plaza in New York, Havana, Bilbao, St. Petersburg, Seoul…. They are called Maman (mother). Spiders spin like her mother (a weaver of tapestries); they are, she said, like her mother, “helpful and protective.”

Spider at the Tate. London 2008. Photo by Ronnie23 at Flickr. Creative Commons license.

There’s ambiguity here — isn’t there? Spiders of this size are also menacing.  To my knowledge, she never said that. I did. Perhaps I will someday stand under Maman and find her body a sheltering experience, and not at all an eerie one. Until then….

I also wonder about Maman who, after all, was created by Louise Bourgeois who said of herself in relation to her mother:  “My mother was a restorer, she repaired broken things. I don’t do that. I destroy things. I cannot go the straight line. I must destroy, rebuild, destroy again. My rhythm is not the same. My mother moved in a straight line: I go from one extreme to the other.”

Louise Bourgeois stands alongside her "Eye to Eye, 1970 at the Guggenheim Museum, NYC. Photo by doublelibra on Flickr. Creative Commons License.

If you’re intrigued, there’s a wealth of video of Bourgeois and her work on Youtube!!!

Some stories about old men and Vermont

I drove over to Coventry to see Fred (see my post of May 3) one day last week and discovered an enormous structure about a quarter of a mile from his house that made no sense at all. He’s imported barns, bridges and school houses —but what was this? Fred came to the door, did a double take—he hadn’t seen me for seven years—and invited me in. “What,” I asked, “is that curious structure down there?” Well, it seemed that last year, he heard reports from the Newport County Airport that they were going to get rid of a stage from the Phish good-bye concert six years ago. The concert had brought 30,000 people to a town of no more than 1,000 on a very rainy weekend. Since it was historic and he liked it the building, Fred had somehow come up with $4,000 to buy it and $3,000 to bring it to his farm. At 91 he’s still collecting!

The concert. Unfortunately, Fred's building isn't visible and I didn't take a camera!!! Photo by Dave Kleinschmidt. Creative Commons license.

Fred’s not just collecting, he’s recreating. On a bluff close to the house, he showed me three snow rollers of three different sizes he’d recreated from parts he’d gathered. For the uninitiated, snow rollers were the way roads were made passable before automobiles and plows. They pressed it down rather than pushed it away.

A snowroller. Unpainted. Photo by Just chaos. Creative Commons license.

I’d never seen painted snow rollers before. Fred assured me he’d found red paint on one. Of course, red paint made sense. It was the color of barns; it was cheap and available. But what about red and yellow? They were the most cheerful snow rollers I’d ever seen.

He showed me the carriage he’s rebuilding now, and we toured one of the barns again while a sudden rain fell outside. Despite Fred’s worry that no one will really want  his collection when he dies, there has been progress made. Three hundred hours of video tape have been recorded and paper records have been made. The collection won’t sink into total oblivion, although many of its actual artifacts may not survive and many of Fred’s stories will probably be lost.

Of course, Fred is going to live much, much longer. His wife Vivian assured me and him of that. They still go to local dances to clog.

Another day, in the late morning, I was introduced to a potter in Mill Village, which, I suppose, might be described as a sort of even more rural suburb to rural Craftsbury, Vermont.  Mill Village is one of those places that look perfect, though, of course, it probably isn’t. For one thing, Lynn Flory, the potter, had a bad headache when we arrived. She’d recently lost a dog. She’d lost one or more lovers over the past few years. But her pottery was beautiful. Elegant. And more various than that of any potter I’ve seen in a very long time.

Her studio has long, wide views of hills on every side. She’s also built a house for an old book collection, one I long had my eye on since it always seemed to me that nothing could be more wonderful than the life of an antiquarian book seller in the New England countryside. If you didn’t have to make a living from the selling. Since I would have had to and hadn’t any money, I never bought it, but I can think of no better place for it.

At any rate, back to the story. Lynn Flory was a disciple and student of the potter Otto Heino, who recently died at 94 years of age. He’d been potting until shortly before his death. Otto, I was told, since I know little of contemporary pottery and pots, was a very famous man who, with his wife, had worked for a decade to discover the formula for a buttery yellow glaze that was so valuable the pots he made with it had made him a millionaire.

Otto Heino. Photo by Mel Melcon/Los Angeles Times.

Now, Lynn Flory had inherited the formula from him.

Before we left, she showed us the huge brick kiln he’d sent her from California. Soon, I presume, some amazing yellow pottery will be fired there. And there will be more riches from old artists.

The Northeast Kingdom isn’t like any place else.

The Northeast Kingdom of Vermont isn’t like any place else. While I know that’s true of many places, it’s even more uniquely true of Glover where Runaway Pond ran away some 200 years ago. No matter how interesting the geological incident and human accident are that caused a pond of two billion gallons to make a 26-mile dash to the Canadian border and raise the level of the very large Lake Memphremagog a foot—no matter that I made that excuse for my last quick trip back—what’s really interesting about the Northeast Kingdom is more profound and more dramatic.

Lupines in Stowe. A little further south, but just a few days ago. Photo by paul+photos=moody. Creative Commons license.

First of all, the place is more beautiful than most. This spring the hillsides and valleys are as green as Irish; the gardens and meadows are dancing with lupines. There’s a blue heron nest on the beaver dam. The rain that came down the Saturday of the Runaway Pond celebration was as mammoth as the Pond must have been, turned white water when it broke through the embankment. Lightning stretched the sky wider than the horizon, thunder rumbled like the end time. We were having sugar on snow: two cardboard boxes of snow collected from the winter, syrup from Ted’s maples heated to just the right temperature, raised donuts made by Becky from June’s recipe, the sourest pickles I’ve ever tasted and the first ever made by Sarah, who’s Ted and Becky’s daughter and a medical doctor to boot. She intends to try again.

Rain was promised for the whole weekend, but like most promised rain, it came and it went. On Saturday, it cleared long enough for the celebration on the Glover green. The Bread and Puppet performance of  “The Story of Runaway Pond” had just started when we arrived after a superb breakfast at the tiny Busy Bee, the town’s only restaurant, just across from the general store. A few stragglers from the morning’s footrace were still clearing the finish line; we had to dodge through the mud to make sure no one thought we were among them. The Runaway Pond script is based on a many-stanza-poem by Harry Alonzo Phillips, the poet laureate of Glover (c. 1929) and a descendant of Spencer Chamberlain, a half-breed from New Hampshire and the hero of the piece.

“Spencer, the son of brave of yore,
Made this long run at twenty-four;
Descending from a dauntless race,
He met the Devil face to face;
And conquered Death here in the dell,
Which on that summer day befell.”

Chamberlain ran to save the miller’s wife, left to grind at Willson’s Mill while her husband and 59 others dug to create a channel that would bring more water to the Barton River and increase the mill’s production. It’s a run of five miles over fallen trees and through thick underbrush, but he reached the mill just ahead of the rushing water. “Shouts: ‘Woman! Do you hear the roar? The Pond is coming! Climb the hill! Nor prison wall nor granite tower/Could stand against such water-power.’ She stood fearful, “like marble white,” so he grabbed her up in his arms and mounted the hill out of the path of the flood. Since Stefan played the miller’s wife and her son, Cavin, was Spencer in this particular staging, Spencer was a little uncomfortable and fudged the rescue, but just a little.

Photos by Jack Sumberg in the "Runaway Pond" booklet (Bread & Puppet Press).

Of course, over the years the story has been embroidered. Chamberlain stopped to savor a piece of pie. He celebrated with all the diggers with a locally-made beer at the end of the run (and not whiskey as the older accounts report). As he ran around the audience again and again, the cheer went up from nearly every one of us: ” Run Chamberlain, run!”

It’s charming; it’s funny; it’s an honest-to-goodness work of art, and no one from Glover will ever grow tired of it.

People sauntered from one tent to another, buying their Runaway tee shirts, talking to the local entrepreneurs who set up shops on the green. Further down Rt. 16 (that is, Glover Street), we sat with a friend and resident of the Glover Nursing Home to watch the noon time parade sponsored by the Glover Library. The residents were to judge the best of the non-motorized participants (which eliminates those stalwarts of every community parade-the fire engine, old tractors, old cars). Here they came: the cast of the play (the ones that aren’t cardboard): a wheeled contraption depicting the pond (rather abstractly, I thought – the water, two runaway fish, a jug of whiskey….); an old Glover Fire Department wagon drawn by two handsome draft horses; the model of the Old Stone House that’s been in every parade in the county for the last twenty years; a miniature horse named Thomas and two alpacas; two ducks; the twenty visiting descendants of Spencer Chamberlain. Further down the street, at the town hall, was a splendid quilt show with turn-of-the-last-century quilts alongside some contemporary beauties.

In the afternoon when the rain returned, guides recruited from the area’s naturalist élite, took intrepid hikers into the woods, through streams and up bluffs on geological jaunts to the dry bed of the pond. There was a self-guided tour as well. But I was doing sugar on snow with family and friends on a hilltop farm. So much for science, said I, as I watched the rain from the window.

That evening at Glover Graded School, after a church supper, the school kids presented their version of Runaway Pond. Not brilliant theater, but their parents were proud and everyone yelled “Run Chamberlain, Run” as the star of the production raced around the gym. Then, the MacArthur family (the three surviving children of Margaret MacArthur) sang. Margaret died almost four years ago now, but twenty years ago she worked with neighboring Craftsbury Graded School kids, to write a song about Runaway Pond. The MacArthurs sang songs from rural New England, and especially Vermont—songs about family, snails in the garden, peace- “O had I a golden thread.” A door was open on the other side of the stage and outside, children were swinging on swings-up, up, higher and higher. That’s when I understood more profoundly than I usually do that one of the reasons all of this was so compelling is that they’re all here—great grandparents, grandparents, parents and kids. Glover is one of the few places left in the United States where the children come back, where the generations have rooted themselves so deeply in the seasons, the land and the history of the place that they come back, and most of them stay.

The next day, the deluge could no longer be held back and it was pouring  when we arrived, but they were there, one hundred or more people. The shape note singers had finished their hymns and gypsy tunes; the Bread and Puppet band was playing jazzed-up renditions of the old songs that are so deeply part of us we forget we know them word for word until we hear them again. “The Story of Runaway Pond” was presented once again. There was a competition among newly baked cakes and pies. Everyone was drinking coffee from an old copper kettle that was first used at the centennial 100 years before. I dipped my cup in and was surprised at how good the stuff tasted, especially in an interminable rain. Vermont’s fresh-faced governor showed up. He’s Republican and most of the people present were Democrats or Progressive party people, but we were polite and he pulled it off nicely, reading the history, saying all the right things while his aides held an umbrella over his head. He pulled the rope to unveil a new  plaque, and looked on as the Chamberlains were introduced—as well as a surprising number of  descendants of the original diggers. All these people with all this history.

The rain was still coming down as some children dug up a time capsule.

But there’s far more to the Northeast Kingdom than Runaway Pond. Add it to what’s happening at Parker Pie in West Glover. Until seven or eight years ago, it was a failing general store. I used to stop at its single pump for gas on the way home. Today, Parker Pie has become a first class deli and restaurant (its specialty pizzas are to dream about), a meeting place for every age, and a music venue whose popularity is spreading across the state and into a few others, and Canada besides. It’s wall-to-wall people on Thursday nights when bands of every variety show up. I didn’t stay long enough to see him, but Johnny Rodgers, a stone mason and the local Assemblyman, my used-to-be neighbor, debuted  a comedy routine there last Saturday night. Local artists exhibit on the walls and sell their goods in the deli.

At the same time art galleries and new artists are springing up all over the region and, while dairy farms die or turn into mega-dairies, small organic vegetable farms, sheep and goat cheese makers, maple syrup producers,  honey bee farms, Christmas wreaths, apple orchards, breweries and wineries are happening everywhere.

All of this and more is happening because years ago the back-to-the-land movement of ’60s and ’70s hippies and the funky political pageantry of Bread and Puppet joined with the energy, creativity and down-to-earth hard work of local people: Scots-Irish, French Canadian, German, you name it…. The result is a renaissance of  horticulture and animal husbandry and art and literature that has grown like the wild lupines and this year is exploding into bloom all over the Kingdom.

Some of the young people who migrated to the region four decades ago are gray-haired now, but still creating, still making, still changing this part of the world, alongside their children and their children’s children, and all those  people whose roots go back for generations. Old artists are flourishing  in the Northeast Kingdom.

For excerpts from the actual puppet play, and interviews with some of the Glover celebrants, go to http://www.7dvt.com/2010runaway-pond-bicentennial

For an historian’s look at the subject, visit Jack Sumberg’s blog at runawayponders.blogspot.com/

The Aquacizers Murder Club

XII

The murder is solved:  the Brand New Beginnings Band concert and the end of our story

The Brand New Beginnings Band plays a concert twice a year at the auditorium in the Universalist Church, one of those large antiseptic spaces with cushioned seats and adequate acoustics. There are usually about fifty people in the band and a few hundred in the audience – no one counts but the place always seems about right – everyone fits. Although none of us plays an instrument, we try to attend the concerts since Charlotte’s husband is one of the conductors. The band is rather good, depending on your listening experience and what you’d expect since anyone who thinks he can play is welcome to try. A few of the players were music professionals once, before they got old and retired. They’re all very focused and lively.

We aquacizers plus one – Frances has come – sit together at the concert, front and center. Safety in numbers, I guess. The tension among us is palpable, as if we each had a special grandchild playing her first tuba solo, instead of a murdering acquaintance playing a glockenspiel. By the time we’re all here, most of the band members are in place, blowing out their horns, tapping on their drums and rumbling on the tympani, practicing a phrase from Sousa or Gershwin, laughing at each other’s jokes. Adele Monk hasn’t appeared yet.

“Lily, did you see who just came into the room?” asks Letitia.

“No. Where? Who?”

“To the left of us, in the front row.”

“How weird. What is Candy doing here with her brood?” I watch as she gets the children settled, one on either side and the third half-asleep in the stroller, and wonder how she’ll keep them quiet during the concert. Of course, if the band plays loud enough maybe no one will be able to hear Wally yell.

“She just lost her brother,” growls Harriet. “Why doesn’t she show some respect and stay home?”

“Maybe she’s here to taunt Adele,” says Letitia.

“Or take revenge,” suggests Frances.

“Maybe Candy doesn’t intend to stay long with her unruly kids, maybe just long enough to do something awful,” says Harriet.

“There must be a plainclothes policeman here somewhere,” says Clare. “Keeping an eye on Adele. Making certain she doesn’t hurt anyone else.”

“Yeah,” says Charlotte. “For sure. My husband promised it.”

“Let’s not worry then,” says Jeanette. “There won’t be any violence, the proper authorities are already here.”

“But where is Adele?” I ask.

The sound man, an old geezer from the church, turns on the mike and it squeals like an out-sized wild pig; we jump in unison. Which is when Adele chooses to appear on stage behind her glockenspiel. She looks down at her music, up at the conductor who is arguing with the geezer, out at Candy and her children, and then-finally – at us. We all glare at her.

She still wears a red wig, but her face doesn’t seem as lined, and she’s wearing an excessive amount of eye makeup so that her eyes are large and dangerous; her expression is terrible. I shudder. I’ve never done that before. To be seventy and shudder for the first time is unsettling.

Adele turns back to her music as the band quiets, waiting for Charlotte’s Ollie  to appear and conduct. Finally, Ollie walks out and nods to the audience, a broad smile across his face as everyone applauds and the band stands. He gives a short military bow, then turns back to the waiting instrumentalists who, at his signal, sit in broken unison. He taps his baton on the music stand in front of him, and everyone readies their instruments. Adele raises her glockenspiel hammers. Ollie lifts his arms, and we’re off on a rousing rendition of  “Stars and Stripes Forever.”

We keep watch on Adele through the next four selections, almost as if we expect her to turn her glockenspiel on its side, and – lo and behold – it’s a machine gun, it’s been one all along, and she’s shooting up the audience, beginning with us. She must be aware of our communal glare, but she doesn’t look at us again. She just looks at the music and hammers away, smiling when she taps out an especially clever phrase.

I look over at Candy who’s staring at us. Is she sizing us up to make sure we’re not a threat to her intentions, whatever they are? Probably. That’s what she’s done ever since her mother died. Her intentions never made too much sense to me, but I can understand why a bunch of old ladies, an Aquacizers Murder Club, for God’s sake, might alarm her, hanging out around her children, catching her off guard at the drugstore.

It’s while I watch her, some time into Bernstein’s “On the Town” medley, that I begin to think about Bustamenté again. Why did Candy come to see her on the day of Winsome’s murder? It made sense that Adele would visit Bustamenté to buy an alibi. She already almost owned the big vet. It made sense that Blue Hair couldn’t remember who had visited that day because she didn’t know what Adele looked like. Not in disguise. The visitor had to be Adele, not Candy.  And yet, Blue Hair assured me it was Candy.

That was when I had my epiphany.

What if it was Candy who had come to buy an alibi? What if Candy was the killer, first of her mother, then of Albert and Bev? What if she had been the real embezzler from the beginning and what if what Blue Hair heard as threats from Adele were also declarations of innocence? What if Adele had come back in disguise to try to convince Winsome of her innocence? We don’t know that Winsome didn’t know who she really was. They seemed to have gotten close. Winsome would be the easiest to convince, if there was any doubt at all. And even Blue Hair had admitted there was some.

The music ends. While Ollie introduces Victor Herbert’s “March of the Toys,” I start a rumor on one side in Frances’s ear and on the other, in Letitia’s: “Adele isn’t the murderer. Candy is.”

I know I’m taking a chance because, after all, I could be wrong. But no, I know I’m right. I look over to find Candy, and I spy only two sleeping children. “Where’s Candy?” I ask as Ollie signals the downbeat for the “March of the Toys.”

“She took the youngest to the bathroom,” says Letitia. “It’s okay. She’s not guilty of anything but being a mother.”

“No, no,” I whisper, panicky now as I try to explain. “I found out this morning that it was Candy who visited Bustamenté after Winsome was killed. It was Candy who wanted an alibi, not Adele.”

“Are you sure?” says Frances. “Are you certain it’s Candy?”

“Oh, come on,” whispers Harriet. “She’s a mother. She wouldn’t kill her own mother. She wouldn’t kill her very own brother, no matter how awful he was. You’re just overwrought about this whole thing, Lily.”

“Hush. I’m trying to hear the music,” breathes Charlotte.

“We jumped to conclusions. There’s no reason to think Adele killed anyone. She didn’t even do the embezzling. It’s Candy who did it. Her brother and mother tried to protect her and her children by blaming it on Adele.”

“Are you sure?” asks Letitia.

“Of course not. But sure enough so that I want to check that Candy’s gone to the bathroom and not the back stage.”

Harriet gives me a quick nod and heads up the aisle to the back to look in the bathroom. Frances, who is the most confident of all of us socially, heads for the stairs to the stage with Clare in close pursuit. While the band plays on, they creep up the right stage stairs and slip behind the curtain. Adele, suddenly aware of them, stops playing her glock in amazement. Then continues. The “March of the Toys” is her big number and it’s time for her solo.

The rest of us sit impatiently listening to Adele’s spritely glockenspiel solo, waiting for godknowswhat to happen next. The band burnishes the solo with a rollicking flourish and applause overwhelms all of us. It’s time for intermission. Waving her program high above her head, Harriet sprints clumsily down the aisle to us. “She’s not there,” she shouts. Most of the audience, those still sitting and those making their way to the back for refreshments, ignore her. She’s clearly a nutcase and most of us have seen lots of her kind by this time in our lives.

“Watch and shout if you see Candy,” I tell Letitia. “Maybe she’ll go around back and down the left stage stairs.” She nods. I can see excitement forming in little beads of sweat across her forehead. Charlotte and I make a dash for the right stage stairs. Adele has disappeared behind the curtain with the other percussionists.

“She’s back here somewhere,” Frances tells me when I catch up to her. “She was standing here behind Adele when we came for her. I don’t know what she was going to do. Anyway, she’s still here back stage; we lost sight of her when all the musicians came back.”

“Is there a door to the outside? There must be one.”

“The cops have that staked,” says Frances, grinning. “She’s not going anywhere.”

“The kids,” says Charlotte. “She won’t leave without the kids.” She whips the curtain back and stares down from the stage. “They’re still there. Letitia!” she shouts. “Watch the kids!”

“And Adele,” I ask Frances. “Where is she?”

“I think she’s afraid of us, poor thing. She’s mixing with the musicians to avoid us. Clare’s looking for her.”

I can see her now: Clare following Adele through a labyrinth of black-skirted-and-slacked, white-shirted musicians.

“What was Candy wearing?” I ask Frances.

“What else?” she answers. “Black slacks and a white shirt.”

“Let’s separate and look for her.”

“What will we do with her when we find her?”

Frances shrugs.

She and I begin to move quickly around the back stage, each of us taking a section. It’s a big space and, in addition to fifty musicians, it’s filled with scenery for an upcoming production of “Music Man.” Everywhere Candy’s gone, she’s knocked things down: pieces of the town square, the basketball backboard, the whole town library and everyone has to scramble over and around them. We can almost follow her by tracing the path of destruction.

Worse, after just a few minutes everyone looks like her; it’s a band of Candys. If she plays an instrument, she can pick up a horn and sit with the rest and we’ll never find her.
Letitia is the first to spot her, stage front and center, fiddling with a horn, signaling to somebody, oh yes, to her kids, signaling to them to come join her.“Watch out for the kids,” Letitia shouts.

Moments later, they’re scrambling onto the stage. Wally screams and beats double-fisted on as many drums as he can get to, while his little brother throws one of his old-fashioned tantrums. The girl clashes the cymbals together like a skilled percussionist. The loudest I’ve ever heard. It’s as if this had been the plan all along – children running interference for their murdering mother.

The band members try to stop them; poor Ollie stands precariously atop his conductor’s perch, waves his baton and yells; women try to cajole the children, their mewling voices mixing with the percussion. Candy laughs, picks up a horn and blows a Wagnerian howl.

While the band is tumbling all over itself to stop the chaos, the audience crowds to the edge of the stage to watch. Is this part of the program? Or is something going wrong? Candy puts down the horn and with her youngest child wailing at her side, picks up the glockenspiel, raises it above her head, and as Adele comes out to stop her, throws it as hard as she can at the woman – who goes down, clutching her instrument, her red wig askew, her costume jewelry flashing, her scarlet nails clawing at the air. Clare grabs the toddler and Charlotte tackles Wally. Frances grasps Candy from behind and the two of us hold her, while the little girl, suddenly bewildered and trailing a cymbal behind, comes over to be near her mother.

The police take charge, thank God. Candy is in cuffs and the kids, still bleating, have been placed in the capable hands of lady cops. The band wanders around the stage, righting chairs, music stands and instruments. We, a sorry bunch of old women, the Aquacizer Murder Club, limp off stage and up the aisles to be interviewed while hundreds of other old people stare and wonder why we’ve made such a fuss on such a lovely night for a concert.

“So many crazies, and I think they’re all from Garden Path.” “I’m certain of it; I recognize some of them.” “Remind me never to move there.” “Poor old ladies; they’ve all gone bonkers.” “Must be something in the water at that park.”

Adele goes back to her place to finish playing the concert. The glock is only a little bent and she compensates. We meet with the police who confirm that Candy is the one they wanted all along. They thank us for not letting them botch it. I think they’re kidding, but I can’t be sure.

_______

In conclusion….

We’re unusually silent at our next aquacize, as if the social energy that ties us together has lost its zest. The case has been solved.

“You know, we’re pretty amazing,” says Letitia finally. “We solved a murder; we helped seize a murderer. Not bad for the first time out.”

“I hope you’re not suggesting that we do this again any time soon,” says Jeanette.

“I think we‘re all due a long rest,” says Maude. “Did Clare say to change sides?”

“Left side,” Letitia and I say together. We’re doing rocking horse.

“You’re going to tell us everything you’ve found out, Lily, when you and Letitia went to The Nutty Irishman with Adele. What did she tell you?”

“What did you have to drink?” asks Maude.

“She treated us to daiquiris,” says Letitia. “Strawberry and lime. They were sublime.”

“Oh, my,” says Jeanette.

“As we’d surmised,” I pant, breathless from rocking horse, “Adele came to the Garden Path in disguise to get to know Winsome and to convince her that she, Adele, was innocent. That meant she also had to convince her of Candy’s guilt. That was the hard part. How do you persuade a mother her daughter is the thief and not you?”

“That must have been a project,” says Charlotte.

“Not that hard given Candy’s record,” says Jeanette.

“Candy killed her mother when Winsome confronted her about the embezzling and threatened to go to the police.”

“But in the beginning, why did Winsome and everyone else think Adele did the embezzling? Why not Candy?” asks Harriet.

“Toy soldier,” Clare sings out.

“What did she say?” asks Maude.

“Toy soldier,” Letitia says.

“Candy was just a volunteer at Puss’s Emporium. To help her mother out, she said. But really she was helping herself out, and it wasn’t the first time. She did have a record,” I report.

“Candy’s oldest was a baby then, and all the elderly ladies thought she was just the cutest. Adele, on the other hand, wasn’t a very nice person.  You know how we felt about her, and with us she was even pretending to be someone else! Polly. A nice person.”

“The kind of person who buys other people daiquiris,” murmurs Maude.

“No one really likes Adele,” I continue, ignoring her. “So it wasn’t that hard for Candy and brother Albert to frame her, with a little innocent assistance from Winsome.”

“I would have bet on Candy’s innocence over Adele’s any day of the week,” says Harriet. “Shows you just never know.”

Everyone is silent, contemplating the sinful ways of human beings. Clare calls out “the other side,” and we all follow suit.

“So, did you have more than one daiquiri?” asks Maude.

“Oh, yes,” says Letitia.

“Many more,” I report.

“What I don’t understand is why Candy killed Bev and Albert,” says Harriet, slashing at the water haphazardly.

“Albert had never forgiven Candy and her mother for not vouching for his innocence in the embezzlement,” she explains. “Candy had promised him little or no jail time and then he got a longer sentence than Adele. She’d double-crossed him and sent him off to prison in her place.”

“But as much as he hated his mother and his sister and blamed them for everything, Albert was never a murderer. Just a creep and a thief,” I add.

“Jacks,” Clare calls.

“What did she say?” asks Maude.

“Jacks,” several of us respond. We begin to jump so vigorously we don’t notice someone has come poolside. “Good morning, ladies,” says Burridge Fowler.

“Good morning, Burridge,” Jeanette and Clare say both at once.

“I wanted to thank you for solving Winsome’s murder. It makes me happy I can tell you. I brought you all some early Gravensteins.”  He puts a paper bag-full on a table.

“Thank you, Burridge. What a sweet thing to do,” says Jennifer.

“You’re such a gentleman, Burridge,” Clare adds.

“They look delicious,” exclaims Harriet. “I think I’ll make you a pie.”

“Why that would be wonderful,” Burridge blushes. “Just fine. But you don’t have to. You ladies deserve every apple and then some. Just help yourselves.”

“They’re beautiful apples,” says Charlotte. “Good apples for pies,” she adds.

“Everyone jig,” says Clare.

“So go on, Letitia. Lily. Why did Candy end up killing Albert and Bev?”

“Albert and Bev knew that Adele was around. They’d heard her threats to retaliate, and she’d just gotten out of prison,” says Letitia.

“When Winsome was murdered, they assumed Adele had done it,” I continue.

“So when Albert caught sight of Adele, he panicked. He figured she’d be out to get him next,” Charlotte guesses.

“Right,” says Letitia.

“Hula hoop,” calls Clare, and we all begin to hula.

“At first he and Bev were going to run,” I say, “but poor Albert came up with a scheme instead: why not just confess that he’d help frame Adele? He could go to the police and tell them everything. He’d get time served and Candy would go to prison. Adele would be grateful for his help and willing to forgive and forget.”

“But someone, probably Bev, had already told Candy that Albert caught sight of Adele at the swimming pool. Candy went to see her brother, hoping, probably, to incite him to do something about the woman before it was too late. Maybe she could get Albert to murder Adele, whatever….”

“Albert’s planned confession didn’t sit well with her.”

“And so,” says Charlotte, guessing again, “she figured she had no choice but to kill Albert and Bev.”

“Oh, my,” says Maude. “It’s all so complicated, isn’t it?”

“Lovely hula hands,” sings Jeanette, trying to change the subject which isn’t, and never has been, to her taste. Everyone joins in humming. “Graceful as the birds in motion, Gliding like the gulls over the ocean…” Gradually, the humming fades but we keep hulaing.

“Why in the world did she come after Adele at the concert?”

“By then the police were closing in, she didn’t care anymore. She just wanted to make Adele’s life hell. Or at least that’s what I think. What do you think, Letitia?”

“I think she never gave up, I think Candy thought she’d come out on top until the last minute. Somehow she was going to make it look like Adele was threatening her life, not vice versa. Her kids would help save her. It would all be fine.”

“What about the kids? What’s going to happen to them?” asks Harriet.

“They’re with their paternal grandmother,” Letitia answers, “who, as it turns out is soft, warm and sticky sweet. It’ll all be okay.”

“To the wall for knee bends,” calls out Clare. “Let’s get on with it.”

The Aquacizers Murder Club

XI

The Aquacizers Murder Club almost disbands again

The next morning at aquacize, no one does much but paddle and hang off the side of the pool, while we tell them everything that’s happened. Polly isn’t here, of course, but she hasn’t been arrested either. The kindly policeman explained to me this morning when I called to ask that there was no hard evidence against her. Impersonating someone else in an old folks park hardly constitutes murder. Albert and Bev had friends in the drug business and their deaths more probably had to do with that than with a vendetta by a nutty embezzler.

“Oh, sure,” says Harriet. “He can talk. He doesn’t even know her. What if she comes? She’s late sometimes. What will we do? I refuse to exercise next to a murderer.”

“I don’t think she’ll come,” murmurs Clare. “Whether or not she’s a murderer, she’s been pretending to be someone she’s not, and that’s pretty scary. She knows we’re on to her.”

“She won’t come, Harriet,” says Jeanette in a soothing voice. “We’ll probably never see her again. What we must do is get on with our lives and forget about this whole affair.”

“I think we should exercise,” says Charlotte. “We’ll all feel better if we do what we normally do.”

“The evidence against her is overwhelming,” says Maude, who clearly has no intention of exercising, since she’s left her hearing aids in and is keeping her head well above water. “I think we should try to finish the job and bring her to justice.”

“I agree,” says Letitia.”

“I don’t know,” I say. “I saw their bloody bodies. I don’t know that I want anything more to do with any of it.”

“I’m so glad I wasn’t with you,” says Maude with a shudder.

“You’re both wimps,” says Letitia. “The Brand New Beginnings Band concert is tonight. You know how proud she is of her performance on the glockenspiel. She’ll be there, I’ll bet. She won’t come back here, but she’ll be there. They need her and they don’t know she’s a murderess.”

“So what are you suggesting?”

“That we out her there, maybe in front of everyone. That we confront her and bring her down before she kills again.”

“Who else do we think she wants to kill?” asks Maude.

“Maybe Candy. Maybe she wants to destroy Puss’s Emporium. Remember, she threatened everyone, according to Della.”

“That’s terrible,” says Clare. “Do you really think she’d burn down the store?”

“The cats,” moaned Letitia. “All those wonderful cats.”

“Let’s all calm down,” says Jeanette. “Why don’t we go sit in the hot tub and talk. That might help.”

And so we do. Seven of us, stuffed in.

“What did you and Polly do yesterday?” I ask Charlotte once we’re settled and basking.

“I had her in my house – I shudder to think – and my grandson came over with his computer, and we looked up Candy. I thought at the time we were having a pleasant time, but now, omygod, that woman was in my house…. I actually shared my favorite orange blossom tea with her. Then she had to go, I guess to do the murders.”

“Did you find out anything interesting about Candy?” asks Letitia, in hopes of changing the subject and calming poor Charlotte.

“Yes, yes. It was there in black and white so I guess it was all true. Oh my dears, our Winsome had such children!!”

“What did you learn, Charlotte?”

“Candy has a criminal record, would you believe it? Ten years ago, she served a jail sentence. She has no husband because he’s in prison, too. It doesn’t speak well for our dear departed friend, does it? First, that terrible Albert. And now his sister.”

Hot water bubbles up around us; a cool breeze ripples across a flower bed. The groundskeeper is mowing somewhere. “Anything else?” I ask.

“Nothing important. That was enough.”

“Oh, dear,” I suddenly remember. “I forgot to go back to Puss’s and pay off Bustamenté yesterday.”

“Murder can be distracting,” Maude says. “Don’t worry, Lily. What can she do? You’ll pay her when you get there again.”

“So how can we out Polly? Do we just have to wait for the police to jail her?”

“We don’t want to upset the band. They’ve practiced hard. And no matter what we think of her, the band needs her glockenspiel. They’re playing a “Florentiner March” that’s full of bells,” says Clare.

——-

We all murmur in agreement. There’s really nothing we can do. So we sit and stew and worry instead. We’ve lived long enough to know that justice isn’t that common a thing. What if Adele Monk gets off scot free!

Since Letitia has a new cat to tend to, I ask Maude to go with me to Puss’s Emporium so that I can finish paying off Bustamenté. I have to admit that I’m feeling better, having no mystery to solve and no murderer to look for. I can spend some time among the used bric-a-brac, teflonware and whatever else their thrift shop has to offer. Maude stays a few minutes at the front of the store contemplating Lucre Lucy and talking to the clerk in charge.

I wander over to look for Bustamenté. She’s nowhere to be seen; I wonder if she’s heard about Albert and Bev and is staying out of sight. I wonder if Adele has talked to her since the murders. But why would she? The truth is out and the police probably have a tail on her.

“Where’s Bustamenté?” I ask a volunteer staff.

“She’s in the office with a sick cat,” the staffer replies. I retrace my steps and head for the door of the veterinary examining room. “Hey,” says the staffer. “You can’t go in there. She doesn’t like that.”

I shrug. I know she’ll like my sixty dollars; she’ll have to put up with me.
When I push the door open, I’m surprised to find the big vet sitting on the edge of an examining table, tears running down her swollen red cheeks, her shoulders shaking. “Hey Bustamenté,” I say. “I’ve brought you your money. Are you all right?”

She reaches out with one hand for the money, and I hand it to her.

“About time,” she mutters.

“Do you have a problem?” I ask. “You must have heard about Albert and Bev. Your friend Adele has been real, real busy.”

“I didn’t bargain for any of this,” she says. “I should’ve told her to get lost.” She sniffles. “Just get out, will you? I didn’t do anything wrong. I just told her what everyone else was doing.”

“Yeah. Sure. I’ll bet you also promised her an alibi the day of Winsome’s death,” I reply. “She throws something at me – I think it’s a blood pressure gauge for cats – and I duck out the door and head for a table in Blue Hair’s section covered with bric-a-brac, most with a cat theme. I’m studying salt and pepper shakers with linking tails when Blue Hair appears at my side.

“Say,” she says in a half whisper, “I remembered who came to see Bustamenté on the day of Winsome’s murder.”

“And who was that?” I ask, humoring her. The details are just distracting now.

“It was Candy. I thought and I thought and I’m sure – it was Winsome’s daughter, Candy.”

What is it that bothers me? I’d assumed until Blue Hair’s declaration that it was Adele. Of course. She had Bustamenté on her payroll. If she needed an alibi or some information, the big vet was there to help. So why did Candy and Bev show up instead, and what did they want? I spin around – believe me old ladies don’t often do that – and head back to find Bustamenté. I’d never asked her much about her relationship with Candy. But the big woman has leapt down from her examining table and made a run for it. She’s gone. When I ask where, the volunteer answers with a smirk that the tough vet wasn’t feeling well.

The next post will bring out mystery to a startling conclusion when the Aquacizers Murder Club attends the Brand New Beginnings Band concert.