Part 12 (1/2)

AFTER THE VINEYARD, Barbara and I could feel the pendulu and co Kate and Tootten ain in the nuptial ht up in the spirit of these proceedings, I started work on a wedding story At least I thought it was a story It turned out to be a novel, though, one that was cleaved right down the center, a wedding anchoring each half Compared with the book that preceded it-, final descent-this new novel was a breezy tale that see my way back to the cautious, hard-won optimism that characterizes hth unfaht be a recurring one, but I hadn't had it since, and I took this to mean that my mother was finally at rest, or perhaps that I was It see alive was at soevity of the women on my mother's side of the family, Russo males had a piss-poor track record, and somewhere in the back of ical destiny withto my doctor, in excellent health

So Barbara and I started ed dra parents nor heart-stopping hters' educations were paid for By autupeople were eed an obvious question: what in the world were Barbara and I going to do with ourselves? At long last we'd been left to our own devices, only to discover we couldn't recollect precisely what those devices were Perhaps we'd need all new ones

One of the things we'd been unable to do while ether I could go off on a book tour, or to LA or New York for a scriptas Barbara remained behind to hold down the fort, and of course she could visit her fao places together For years we'd longed for an apartment in Boston so ouldn't have to fly out of Portland, Maine, the preferred airport of hijackers and no one else A place in the city would also give us somewhere to spend the darkest months of Maine's interh Meanwhile, the theht and appropriate Weddings are all about our hopes for and faith in the future, right? Right

Except not entirely As I knew all too well fro ress, weddings are also about the past

KATE'S WEDDING HAD BEEN HELD at the Royal Society for the Arts, a series of underground vaults, formerly wine cellars, just off the Strand She and To in London, so there'd been no question of having the cere was relatively small: Tom's family; some friends from the Slade Art School, where they'd iven the distance and expense, not many family members from our side of the Atlanticand his wife, Carole, both of who Street,” Greg said, taking in the venue It wasn't as grand as ”Royal Society”brick vaults, candlelit for the occasion, were i remotely like it in an upstate mill town The person ould've appreciated it the most, of course, was roo their photos taken, the how-far-we'd-all-coent Nat Sobel, ent, i that as a boy he, too, lived near a tannery that released its toxins into the local strea on the dye batch And so, flutes of Prosecco in hand, we began swapping stories about the worst jobs we'd ever had

I recalled my brief nonunion construction job in Johnstown Other suet union work at an hourly rate nearly that h, jobs were scarce, and I hadn't gotten one Nonunion construction was a different world The first e had to drill holes in a concrete abutment, not a difficult task if you have a drill We didn't What we did have was a jackhammer and a fore The jackha his weapon on my shoulder, I held on for dear life as we jacked horizontally into the wall, sharp shards of concrete blasting back into our faces Another thing we didn't have was a spare set of goggles

This story in a lot of bad-job contests unless your co the wettest, foulest, lowest-paid, andhad worked in one for a couple er The first and probably nastiest job in the bea the skins, which arrived at the loading dock on railroad cars, still reeking of the slaughterhouse The word skin probably gives the wrong i, calf, cow-unattached fro and, especially with cows, surprisingly heavy (Our grandfather gave hi hides fro table) When the skin arrived in the beam house, the top side was still covered with coarse hair, the underside with patches of ristle The stench? You don't want to know, but iht-hour shi+ft unloading a railcar full of them in extre assured us, things got even worse Here the skins were sube vats and soaked for days in a chemical bath that stripped offflesh Naturally, these chemicals could easily do the same to hair on the hands and forearms ofrubber gloves were issued You'd think the skins would be lighter , because untanned skins reabsorb thealso turns the heavy skins slippery The rubber gloves rab hold of, as does the fact that you're bent over the vat and standing on a wet concrete floor

At some point, like the men farther down the line who prod the tanned skins into staking machines and roller presses, you'll do what you know you shouldn't: you will take off the rubber gloves, because that immediately makes the job easier At the end of your shi+ft you'll wash your hands and arorously with the coarsest soap you can find, and when you get horadually lose the hair on your hands and forear seeers itch A little at first, then a lot Your skin begins to feel odd, alotten beneath it and what you're trying to scratch isn't on the surface Finally it itches so bad you can't stand it anyive the skin a twist, then a pull The skin, several layers of it, colove (On the other side of the Atlantic, at the Royal Society for the Arts,as he pulled off the i becoes on your raw flesh Later, soe your raw thu at least soloves

This is only the beginning, though, just the beaood-bye-to the skins, the foul chemical air, even your coworkers, because let's face it, the ones who've been at it for a while, ht You all make the sao back to college, and for that the others hate you Meanwhile, you can't i used to work like this, or that the day will ever co outside into the fresh air you'll decide it's easier to just stay where you are, take a seat on a pallet of deco hides, wipe your hands on your pants, and eat your sandwich right there-because what the hell, it's been forever since you could really s anyway Plus, in the beam house there's entertainment You can watch the rats chase the terrified cats that have been introduced to hunt the for the first ti in two places at once I had one dry, wing-tipped foot in the candlelit world of a fancy arts society in London in 2007; the other work-booted foot was sloshi+ng through the wet, slippery beam-house floor in Gloversville, New York, circa 1970 That younger me wasn't a novelist, or even a husband or a father He was just a twenty-year-old whose future could be stolen froht indeed be complicit in the theft, because I re road construction with my father, my body lean and hard fro back to school I could live withStreet and do that hard, honest work -tipped ne flute, felt a sudden crushi+ng guilt, as if to be where I was I must've cheated destiny or, worse, swapped destinies with soerously, though I couldn't tell if that was due toparty-with Kate absolutely radiant in the first hour of herher arh her fiance's-had at thiswomen, their feet planted squarely in the candlelit world before them, on this day-for theht couilty about what they'd been spared in life, keenly aware of how things, but for the grace of God,way off

”More Prosecco?” one of the waiters inquired

”Yes, please,” I told her, holding out lass Gloversville, I reminded myself, was on the other side of the world ”Absolutely Lay it on ht to the bri we didn't fully cootten off with Kate's We'd feared a London wedding would be a logistical night on the other side of the Atlantic had the unintended consequence of lowering everyone's expectations, at least of us nobody assumed ould deal with day-to-day details and crises Toot made without us We showed up We wrote the check

By contrast, Eer and would take place in Camden, where a leefully i be remembered With no ocean to protect us, our very different faent, none of them seasoned travelers, needed assistance at every juncture My own Gloversville squad wasn'tby car And of course there was our future son-in-law's family and friends to consider Add to all this the nor anxieties about who, for personal reasons, should be kept well clear of whom, and ould happen if the Red Staters were allowed too close proxi threatened to overwhelm us, we reminded ourselves that our tribulations would have been multiplied exponentially if my mother had been alive

Truth be told, Barbara and Eed ahead with the book I hoped would pay for them About this time I had a few odd dreams aboutto knohy I'd abandoned her there and when I was coet her These made me wary, but they were too co froht I was doing pretty well, certainly better than onist, Jack Griffin At the book's outset he'd been heading to the first wedding on Cape Cod with an urn containing his father's ashes in the right wheel well of his trunk; now, driving to the second wedding, this one in Maine, he'd added hismy own mother's ashes hadn't been easy, but htforward task Death had made his mother even more loquacious than she'd been in life, even e, both of which were colish professor, she was (to , in part because she was about as different as anyone could be from my own e and profession, all that temperae wasn't failing All of which allowedfiction, not thinly veiled autobiography

IT WAS AROUND this ti a Gloversville postn Inside were two books, the first a copy of hs The e nae and law school, had spent his life in Gloversville, and who, as he explained in the accoly identified with Lucy Lynch, the book's protagonist, who'd done the sa to Lucy's friend Robert Noonan, an artist who in the novel flees their boyhood town, never to return I couldn't really blao back to Gloversville

The other book in the padded envelope was Toward Civic Integrity: Re-establishi+ng the Micropolis, written by, well, Vincent DeSantis, and seeing this my heart sank, as it always does when I'm sent books I haven't asked for with a vieardfor a blurb, and his book, despite its rather scholarly title, wasn't an esoteric work of nonfiction It was about Gloversville, and the question he posed hether it and silobal twenty-first century or were in inevitable and irreversible decline ”All is not lost in your hometown,” the author assured me ”A network of dedicated and talented individuals has lately been working to reassemble the pieces of this fractured micropolis” My knee-jerk reaction to this Hu's horses and all the king's menI tossed the book on a tall stack of volumes whose common denominator was that I was unlikely to read them in this or any other lifetime Not interested

Yet that wasn't quite true Since Kate's wedding hts I was also worried about Greg hiery to replace avalve, but he still couldn't sleep very well lying down and was getting by on a couple hours a night Though I'd tried to keep in touch, when I inquired about his health he always put reat for an old guy” Then we'd talk about what our kids were up to and whatnew And eventually the talk would turn to Gloversville: who'd been jailed or diagnosed, who'd gone into a nursing hoet his beam-house experiences out of my head, he launched into a litany of Gloversville hich I was all too faled by machines or slowly poisoned or killed in accidents The three guys orked the spray line in oneof the saeous it made the New York Times Then there was the retarded boy hired to clean out the blues room, so named because the chrome used to tan the skins turned them blue The world of leather is full of scraps-strips of worthless skin and hoof and tail-and every now and then these have to be disposed of and the whole lethal place, including its giant vats, swa, when this kid didn't come home, his mother called the shop to see if he was still around No, she was told, everybody fro her son was found lying on the blues roo retire a press when his partner inadvertently stepped on the pedal that starts the rollers, catching the man's hand-more like a fin, now-in the mechanism Yet another day, when it was unseasonably cold on the floor, the foreman sent a man to fire up a boiler that hadn't been inspected in twenty years, and it pro hi my cousin of other men who died, their farandfather's days, ones I'd heard sodid, but I understood why he needed to repeat theuys who lived this life in this world are, like World War II veterans, ive a shi+t

But whyup after such conversations with e I wasn't at all sure I was entitled to Obviously, I'd never spent a minute in the beam house Unlike my cousin Jim, on hot summer days I don't have to lance with a needle the hard pustules that still forht does one who'd fled at the earliest opportunity have to speak for those who remained behind? If Vincent DeSantis isn't pissed, why should I be?

NOT LONG AFTER E novel, at the lastpoor Jack Griffin back fro His parents' ashes finally scattered, he was able to ain in the present The book caetting that apartment in Boston, so when hborhoods-the North End, which we both loved though it see for; the South End, which onderful but not well served by the T; the Back Bay, which had little, at least in our view, to recole of blocks near South Station called the Leather District, which was convenient to both the train station and the Silver Line T that provided a straight shot out to Logan Airport E in Amherst, Kate and To both couples easier Because, alas, ere entering a neorld, one where we had to share our newly hters Holidays would now have to be rotated-Christ at the other

That first year Christlorious days' worth of long dinners fueled by red wine, followed by card and board games that lasted into the wee hours andSuch festivities would have been impossible if my mother had been alive, whichthem There were times when, to me, at least, she felt oddly present Why, she seeood times when I was alive to enjoy them? Had she ever had any idea that she was the one who'd been putting a da woman she'd always been the life of the party, and she continued to think of herself in that role, even forty years after she could no longer play it ”Re Street?” she liked to ask, genuinely bewildered that fun should elude us so coh, caland, Kate, partly at his insistence, confessed that she hadn't been doing so well in London When she began to explain as troubling her, the sys caely on edge, borderline manic We'd noticed that when anyone used the small, communal laptop computer we kept in the kitchen, she'd leave the room and return only when it was unoccupied Over the last nineof a keyboard, for instance-had begun to inspire in her not just annoyance but also genuine terror Boarding the Tube or a London bus, she had to scan the compartment for laptop users and stay as far away from them as possible If somebody pulled out a computer after she was settled, she had toho her nuts, would help, but in Ca done soht she'd identified the problem, and she meant to see somebody as soon as she returned to London For Barbara and ed for Kate to see a well-regarded anxiety specialist in Portland, and it took hinosis She suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder With appropriate treatment, she would be fine Without it, he warned, it would eat her alive

The next day she and Toood therapists there, and we returned to Caan to read with foreboding that quickly escalated into full-blown horror and roiling nausea Because right there in the introduction was the long parade of bizarre behaviors I'd been witnessing in my mother since I was a boy: how she always had to keep her possessions arranged ”just so,” her love of arbitrary rules for their own sake, her need to ”even things up” (the saht and left of the s she'd already checked in order to ”be sure,” but then continuing to worry anyway Worse, all this was here defined as mental illness That, of course, had been nosis: ”You do know your ht?”

But surely his observation wasn't intended to be clinical He'd only meant that for the sake of my own sanity I'd do well to accept that my mother was ”batty,” half a bubble off of plus short of a ladder Supply your own coe of this book was neither comic nor euphemistic Here my mother's ”nerves” were anxieties and panic attacks Nor were such distinctionspanics (unlike nerves) were serious conditions that demanded treatment Mental illness, like physical illness, first required diagnosis, then appropriate therapy Kate had already gotten the first and was e on the second My mother had received neither, and the result had been precisely what the Portland anxiety specialist predicted She'd gradually been eaten alive