Points North, page 10
“No more blind dates,” Jim said.
“She teaches girls’ phys ed over at Theenie’s school,” Charlie said. “A real outdoorswoman, Jimbo, very healthful lifestyle, the build of a Norse goddess. She may be Norwegian, for all I know. Her first name’s Hildy. She saw you play ball a few years ago over at the university. She wants to take you on a hike up Jay Peak. She belongs to the Green Mountain Club, the Appalachian Club, has two hundred and twelve species on her bird life-list—”
“I don’t keep life-lists and I hate to hike for the sake of hiking,” Jim said. “I have to have a destination, like a trout pond.”
“Hildy’s an expert fly-fisher. Also, she loves to travel. She’s traveled to Alaska and British Columbia.”
“Good for her. Tell Hildy I’ve traveled much in Kingdom County.”
“Very funny, Henry David. I think she’s had her eye on you for a while. She could support you with her teacher’s salary and you could quit your day job at the paper and write your own stories fulltime.”
“I don’t want to quit my job at the paper. That’s where my material comes from.”
For a time the brothers sipped their beer and said nothing. In the Kingdom it was not unusual for your best friend also to be a sibling. Jim and Charlie were comfortable together talking or not talking. They always had been.
“Why is it,” Jim said, “that married people want everybody else to be married?”
“I don’t know,” Charlie said. “It speaks well for the married state. Can you imagine where I’d be if Theenie hadn’t taken me in hand? Probably in jail. Or dead.”
“I don’t want to be taken in hand,” Jim said. “Not by a Norse goddess named Hildy. Not by anybody. Hey, it seemed good to take a swipe at a baseball again. Down in Boston I didn’t have time to play. Tell Hildy, meaning no disrespect, that I’m not ready to date yet. Maybe Betsy was right. Maybe I never will be.”
* * *
Sunday at noon, when they reached the top of Jay Peak, Jim felt as though he’d been walked into the ground. Hildy was as sturdy as a pulling pony at Kingdom Fair. She glowed with good health and purposefulness. They’d fished up the mountain on the Jay Branch, where she’d caught four trout to his one. On their way she’d added a rare carnivorous sundew to her life-list of boreal alpine plants. At first Jim thought she might be having a religious epiphany over the discovery. The day before Hildy had attended the Outlaws home opener against the Landing. “Just one small tip,” Hildy told him after the game. “When you bat? Keep your hands back a split second longer. You’ll find you drive the ball harder.”
Jim had gone three for four with two long line-drive doubles. He had looked at Charlie, who shrugged and grinned.
Now, high on the mountain, looking out over the forests of four different states and a huge swath of Quebec, they made a small fire and ate fried trout with bread and butter and strong tea. Hildy said grace. Afterward she inquired if he had been saved.
Jim said that most of the Kinnesons, including himself, were freethinking apostates and beyond help in that department. Hildy said no one was beyond Jesus’ help if they would come to him with a humble heart. Her eyes glowed with evangelical fervor and something more besides.
Lately Jim had imagined that he heard Frannie’s voice in his head. “Quick,” his former girlfriend said, “tell her the last time you called on Jesus for help he was off dynamiting trout with the Chosen Twelve.”
“Will you please be quiet?” Jim said.
“What?” Hildy said. “Listen, there are different ways to be saved. I can put you in the mood right now.”
“Run for the hills,” Frannie’s voice said in his head. “The woman means to have her way with you. Go, before she places you in some kind of submission hold and it’s too late.”
The gym teacher began to unbutton her L.L. Bean hiking shirt. She did not seem to be wearing a bra. Could Charlie be in on all this? Or even Athena? No. In her athletic way Hildy was very attractive. Why not? It would take his mind off his phantom former girlfriend.
“We’ll have our own little decathlon,” Hildy said, giggling.
Nearby, someone gave out a long yodel, like a rooster crowing. “Hello, folks,” a voice said. “Nice day for a hike.”
A young man and woman dressed up like Swiss mountaineers stood on the trail a few feet away. They wore leather knee pants, Birkenstocks, bright red vests over green shirts, caps with feathers.
“Are we interrupting something?” the young woman said.
Jim jumped to his feet. “Not at all,” he said.
Hildy was buttoning up her shirt.
On their way back down the mountain, Jim and Hildy couldn’t help bursting out laughing—laughing at themselves mainly. Jim liked this girl very much, as he had Betsy. There was only one difficulty.
She wasn’t Frannie.
* * *
Sometimes Jim took a weekend and canoed up to the Kinneson family hunting and fishing cabin on the Upper Kingdom River. There in the ancestral camp, where he’d gone with his father and Charlie and his grandfather, James Kinneson II, he fished the river for his beloved brook trout, explored the surrounding wilderness, and worked on his collection of stories. He’d begun sending out individual pieces to small magazines, mostly literary reviews and quarterlies. One evening in May he returned from camp to find a package containing six copies of a respected Midwestern review containing a story he’d submitted months ago and nearly given up hope for. It was called “A Diminished Thing,” a line from Frost’s celebrated poem “The Ovenbird.” In it, against the background of a Vermont village like Kingdom Common that had lost its furniture factory, its Academy, and most of its surrounding farms, with a hand-lettered sign at the village limits, buried under snow half of the year, that said, PLEASE, OUR TOWN NEEDS A DOCTOR, he had told the story of his yearlong romance with Frannie. No one from the review had even contacted him to tell him they’d accepted his submission. There it was, his first published fiction. He could scarcely have been happier had he won the Nobel Prize.
To celebrate Jim’s news, his brother and sister-in-law took him to dinner at the hotel. Over Armand St. Onge’s locally famous porc sucre d’erable and poutine, and Molson’s that Armand still smuggled into the Kingdom from Canada, with its higher octane and yeastier flavor, Charlie produced a copy of the Memphremagog Express from his briefcase. “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury,” he said, may I direct your attention to Exhibit A.” He opened the paper, and read aloud:
Dear Lonely Hearts,
Young man, midtwenties, in literary profession, loves fishing, walking in the rain, long fireside chats. Looking for companionship, commitment. Sense of humor a must.
Seventh-generation Vermonter
“What’s this about?” Jim said. “You want to hook me up with a man? What do you know about me that I don’t know about myself?”
“You’re missing the point,” Charlie said. He handed the newspaper to Jim. “Read it for yourself.”
Jim scanned the letter. “Christ Jesus, Charlie. This is me, isn’t it?”
“Charlie, you are insane,” Athena said. “I should have gone the lonely-hearts route myself.”
“Not at all,” Charlie said. “I gave my own P. O. box. No one will ever guess who it is.”
“This takes the cake,” Jim said. “I’ll never mention dating again. I’ll go into the woods and build a pillar like Simeon Stylites. I’ll live the life of an anchorite.” He was laughing despite himself.
“Don’t try to change the subject, bub,” Charlie said. “I’ll screen the applicants. Just pass along the cream of the crop to you.”
Jim said, “What do you hear from Frannie, Miss Athena? Still engaged to be engaged?”
“She’s finishing up her residency in psychiatry,” Athena said. “Out in Vancouver. I think she’s engaged to be engaged to someone new. She’s as picky as you are, Jimmy.”
“Let’s not start up with Frannie again,” Charlie said. “I could never figure out what you saw in her in the first place, Jim. You never knew what she’d say next. I married an outspoken woman and look what I’ve been reduced to. This weekend, Jimmy. Ste. Catherine Street. I’ll chaperone—”
“You aren’t going within a country mile of Ste. Catherine Street, buster,” Athena said. “Not this weekend, not any weekend. As your wonderful dad would say, that’s the beginning and the end of it.”
* * *
Over the next couple of weeks Charlie passed along to Jim a letter from a young woman veterinarian in Pond in the Sky who specialized in rescuing and rehabilitating stray and mistreated animals. She owned eleven dogs, nineteen cats, and a six-foot-long reticulated python. “Must love critters,” she stipulated, which Jim did, though not quite enough to respond. Another correspondent wrote declaring that she too was a writer. Did he have an agent and if so would he be willing to share their name? (No and no.)
“Listen to this, Jim,” Charlie said. “‘Just out of school. Shy but passionate. Discover for yourself.’”
“She’s probably all of thirteen,” Jim said. “This may seem strange, but I’d rather not spend the next ten years writing stories from a jail cell.”
“I’ll find out who she is and run a background check,” Charlie said.
“Who’s meeting this crazed waif, you or your brother?” Athena said. “You’re becoming altogether too personally invested in these idiotic assignations, Charlie.”
Just then Doc Harrison, Prof. Chadburn, and Jim and Charlie’s dad, Editor Kinneson came in, stomping the spring snow off their feet. They sat down at an adjacent table and ordered a round of Armand’s contraband Molsons to toast Jim and his maiden publication.
“Your ‘Our town needs a doctor’ sign’s going to be buried out of sight if this keeps up, Doc,” Charlie said. “Any luck yet?”
“I’ve been advertising in the medical journals, too,” Doc said. “But no. I can’t seem to find anyone who wants to starve to death up here at the far end of nowhere. Even for a full partnership with the option to buy me out for a song. How you doing, Miss Athena?”
“All systems seem to be on go,” Athena said, patting her midriff. “Seven months left and counting.”
Jim looked at Charlie. For once in his life, his older brother seemed thunderstruck. “I’ll be damned,” he said.
“That, too, no doubt,” principal Athena said. Then, “You’re going to be an uncle, Jimmy. If it’s a boy, we’ll name him for you.”
* * *
When Jim finally wrote back to “Shy But Passionate” in what he regarded as something akin to an act of desperation, though he could not seem to prevent himself from doing so, she agreed to meet him in the hotel dining room for drinks and dinner on a Friday evening in early June. It was lilac time in Kingdom Common, and at last the snow was gone. The High Falls was just a faint echo of its former self during runoff, and the peeper frogs were singing along the marshy banks of the Lower Kingdom River like the jingle of so many sleigh bells. In streams all over the Kingdom brook trout were biting like mad.
As Friday night approached Jim felt alternately apprehensive and strangely hopeful. Somehow he felt that she must be gorgeous, like Frannie and her cousin Athena. By the weekend he was dying to “discover for himself.”
Jim was waiting at the hotel at 6:30. He’d brought a cut-glass vase of yellow roses cut from his mother’s old-fashioned Harrisons. Later a country band would set up on the small stage at one end of the bar and couples would two-step and waltz to songs immortalized by Hank Williams, Patsy Cline, and Lefty Frizzell. Armand’s Molsons would be in high demand and as much French as English would be spoken in the dining room of the hotel. This was the world Jim wrote about, the world he loved. But what would “Shy But Passionate” think? Two years ago he had invited a young woman, a pretty graduate teaching assistant at Harvard, to spend a weekend at his parents’ farmhouse across the river. He’d brought her to a dance at the hotel, and she’d fled back to Cambridge on the first morning train.
Seven o’clock came and went with no sign of Jim’s pen pal. At a little after eight Charlie and Athena stopped by and sat down at Jim’s table to commiserate with him. Athena looked at the yellow roses, then at Jim. Only when he saw his own expression reflected on her face did he realize how disappointed he was. He grinned at his brother and sister-in-law and shrugged.
“To hell with her then,” Charlie said. “It’s her loss. Tell you what, bud. How’s about you and I spend the weekend up at camp? I can’t come in until tomorrow afternoon but you can paddle up in the Old Town in the morning and I’ll row up in the bateau as soon as I can get off. We’ll catch some brookies, drink some beer, clear our heads of all this. No more lonely-hearts letters, I promise. You’ll find who you’re looking for when the right time comes.”
Jim wasn’t so sure. Nor did he feel much like going up to the hunting and fishing camp, which was where he and Frannie had first made love. But he couldn’t possibly avoid every place where they’d done that. In their short year together they’d made love all over the Kingdom.
“How’s young Jim?” Jim said to Athena.
Athena smiled. “Young Jim turned out to be young Ruthie—after your wonderful mom. She’s fine.”
“Now that I’m going to be a father,” Charlie said. “I realize better than ever that life goes on and has to go on. Not going fishing with your brother may protect you from the humiliation of being outfished three trout to one the way you were by the Norsewoman. It won’t help you get over that scheming French tart that ditched you a decade ago. You have to stop basking in your broken heart, son. See you at camp. Around midafternoon. Any small yellow mayfly ought to be deadly this time of year. We’ll hit the evening hatch, clean up.”
* * *
The following dawn Jim slid Gramp’s green canvas Old Town into the bed of his pickup and drove up the River Road to Pond Number One in the Chain of Ponds just south of the border. Trout were rising to the surface but Jim had much larger quarry in mind, the big red Canadian squaretails that lived in the icy depths of Three and the mile of alternating whitewater and swirling green pools between Three and the big lake. This time of year a streamer fly known as a Little Brook Trout because that is what it resembled was irresistible to the cannibalistic lunkers in the river.
By the time he was paddling up the west shoreline of Three, Jim was glad he’d come. He could never remember a time when he hadn’t experienced some elevated sense of well-being from going to the woods or out onto the remote ponds and rivers of the Kingdom. He angled the bow of the canoe toward a headland beyond which the camp, still invisible, sat one hundred yards up the slope from the shore in a mixed stand of hardwoods whose fresh new leaves were still more yellow than green. As he rounded the headland, he caught, on the morning breeze, the unmistakable tang of woodsmoke. He hadn’t checked to see if the old lumbering bateau was upside down under a tarp in the same spruce trees where he’d launched the Old Town on One. Maybe Charlie’d gotten away early after all. But the bateau wasn’t visible near the small landing dock in front of the camp. It wasn’t unusual for other fishermen or hunters, known or unknown, to use the Kinneson camp for a night or two. The door was left unlocked year-round. Leave the woodbox full for the next party was the code. That was all. Jim wondered where the fire-builder might be. Probably off fishing some remote cove of the pond out of sight from the camp.
He ran the canoe onto the gravel strip beside the spruce-pole dock and headed up toward the porch. He always remembered the camp as bigger than it was because it had seemed large to him as a boy. “Charlie?” he called out. “That you?”
Frannie Lafleur stepped out onto the porch. She was wearing a red hunting jacket, denim slacks, rubber-bottomed hunting pacs laced halfway to the top of their leather uppers, a red-and-black checked flannel shirt beneath the jacket. Her raven hair hung straight to her waist and her lavender eyes, the color of wildwood violets, were full of humor.
“Hello, James,” she said. “You look surprised. Who did you expect? One of your little lonely-heart harlots no doubt. ‘Shy But Passionate,’ or one of her sorry ilk. Oh, yes. Cousin Athena has kept me all too well informed concerning your latest capers. Will you shake hands with me? Or do you intend to stand there and pout for a year or two?”
They shook hands as they had long ago on the granite steps of the Academy on the day they first met. Frannie continued to hold his hand in hers as she said, in her musical French accent, “Eh, bien. I can plainly see why no physician would wish to settle up here. Just as I remember, it’s the end of the known world. You must know, James, that I spoke with our good Dr. Harrison last evening. We made, he and I, a bargain. He needs a partner, someone to take over when he retires. I need a practice to start out in. Do you still carouse every evening at that so-called hotel with your insane brother, swilling Molsons? That will soon come to a screeching halt, a bit of preventive medicine.”
Jim well remembered from their high school days that Frannie liked to drink a cold one in the evening herself. Not so much, though, as she liked to tease him. She still held his hand firmly in hers.
“Do you remember those wicked schoolgirls who called me a nigger on my first day at the Academy? I will become their personal physician and kill them with kindness.”
“I thought you were studying to be a psychiatrist,” Jim said, returning the pressure on his hand.
“I am a psychiatrist. Surely you know that a psychiatrist is an M.D. before she is a psychiatrist. It so happens that the hospital in Memphremagog needs a consulting psychiatrist two afternoons a week. Of course they will hire me. Do you have any idea what a field day I’ll have up here in the Kingdom, James? It’s a treasure chest of serious mental and emotional disorders.”
“And stories.”
“Yes, disorders and stories.”
Out on Three a loon hooted. Frannie hooted back, her call indistinguishable from the loon’s. Jim’s heart turned over in his chest.
