Chapter 8

Not all of Fair Mantle is quaint or historic. There’s a dismal side: a neighborhood alongside weedy, rusty, long-abandoned railroad tracks. Here the homes are little more than woodframe hovels that had once been cottages for servants of the families who owned Fair Mantle’s grander houses. Paint rolls like flayed wallpaper away from small, square shingles cracked and blackened by years of dirt and weather. Every here and there, green trash bags or clear plastic wrap take the place of window glass. Stoops dip inward at angles that hint the gentlest touch will collapse them altogether. There are no sidewalks. Lawns are little more than swatches of prickly, dried-out weeds.

One house, a cottage, stands out from all the rest. The paint is fairly fresh, the windows have real glass, and the stoop is made of brick. This is where Gustie and the girls live. Its appearance is largely the work of Tom Von Aldo, who also makes sure the inside is freshly painted and in good repair.

Gustie has decorated the interior in a style she calls comfortable necessity. There is no attempt to conform to fashion, taste or historic period. The emphasis is on comfort of body and spirit. If a piece or two happen to match, so be it. The colors are subtle, and the house always smells of baked goods and spicy potpourri. Sometimes Tom buys wood for the little brick fireplace in the tiny parlor.

Gustie has just finished making drapes from an old quilt she found in a thrift shop. Tom helps her hang them in the parlor. Together they sit at the dining room table, surveying Gustie’s work over mugs of hot chocolate. The lights are low. Gustie’s manner is tranbquil. Her face reflects no thought or emotion. There’s certainly no connection to her comment, “She’s back. Greeta saw her buying a copy of the paper she worked for.”

Tom doesn’t know what Gustie’s talking about. “Who?”

“Farrell Schmidt.”

“Oh.”

“Must be something to do with her mother’s estate. I heard it still wasn’t settled. Not that there was anything much to settle.”

“How do you know about her mom’s estate?”

“The day she came into the office crying. She told us she was losing everything, and she didn’t know what she was going to do. Remember?”

“No.”

“You’re kidding. Everybody in Fair Mantle Village knew.”

“I didn’t.”

“Yes, you did. You were there. You just weren’t paying attention.”

“Maybe other things deserved my attention.”

“Better things! We all had better things to think about. I don’t know why she thought we were interested in her problems. God, she’s so bizarre! I mean, didn’t you ever stop to wonder about her? She’s afraid to fly. She’s afraid of trains. She’s afraid to drive distances at night. She doesn’t go to New York because she’d have to drive through a tunnel. Then, once she’s in the city, chances are she’ll have to use an elevator, or be in a place with crowds, still more stuff she can’t stand.

“And she can’t ride buses, either. I remember when she was still with the paper, covering a drug-abuse outing with a local school group. Howard, my detective friend who’s the drug abuse teacher, told me she got bus sick and they had to find her a seat up front for the whole ride. Can you imagine? I’d have died of embarrassment. No, on second thought, I wouldn’t be caught dead deliberately throwing myself into something I knew I couldn’t handle.”

Tom has heard the stories. How couldn’t he? Everybody talks about Farrell. She’s different. Not in looks. In what she does, like playing reproductions of historic wooden, one-keyed flutes, and watching Russian moves, and knowing how to fence. Still, he can’t deny Gustie is right. There are so many ordinary things that Farrell can’t stomach and so many things that frighten her. Why, then, is she here, forsaking the physical safety of a home two hours away to live in a region threatened by a volcano? The earth is going to quake, and ash is going to fall from the sky. Inevitably, lava will flow, setting fire to the woodlands. Fair Mantle Village will be destroyed. All of the township of Fair Mantle will be destroyed.
And Farrell Schmidt will be part of it all.

Why? Tom asks himself. Delusion? Does she imagine she’s still with the paper? Her work for the paper was the only thing that got her through the terror of nor’easters and ice storms of the past two, three years. No, she can’t believe the volcano is real, else she wouldn’t be here. She’ll say she’s sick or something, and bow out of the job.

But the situation is indeed real. Farrell had gone home and packed and returned to Fair Mantle with enough clothes to last until spring. Right now, Tom figures, she’s probably in Brut’s study, doing mental cartwheels to put his confused community relations strategy into understandable English.

Tom wants to talk to Gustie about the volcano, but he can’t. Gustie doesn’t know about the volcano. Nobody is supposed to know, though Tom’s superiors in Trenton concede it’s going to be no easy trick to hide a growing volcano from public view. The state could close off trails deep within the park for reasons ranging from fire prevention to fallen trees or state forestry research, but there was no way on earth it could restrict air space without inviting at least one pilot from the county airport to think something strange was going on.

No, you can’t hide a volcano, Tom thinks. It’s going to get bigger and bigger and bigger. People are going to notice. Everything he prophesied to Farrell will come to pass.

Gustie motions that she wants to sit on his lap. “What’s the matter? Still at the park?” she says as he backs the chair away from the table. She knows just where to put her weight.

Tom reaches under her loose sweater. “There’s this song that Effen plays. A French song written in the fifteenth century. It’s slow and dignified, like something you’d hear at the Vatican. But you know what? It’s all about how this guy wants to keep his lady locked up so he can make love to her. It’s pretty descriptive.”

“How descriptive?”

Von Aldo thinks. The song is in Old French. He remembers the melody, but the only words he can think of are “dessous la boudinette,” and he can’t remember what they mean. He has an idea, but all of a sudden, he isn’t sure he wants to tell Gustie. Making love is one thing; talking about the mechanics of making love, quite another. He’s never liked men who speak of the particulars. It’s not a matter of sensitivity, but of taste. After all, people don’t go around verbally sketching what they do during a visit to the toilet. Why should a romp between the sheets be any different? We all have the same parts. Everybody knows how to use what part for which effect.
He prefers to show Gustie what the words mean.

The two have buried their hands in each other’s clothing when Anne, the thirteen-year-old, creeps downstairs from the room she shares with her sister, then sneaks past Tom and Gustie and into the kitchen, where she opens the refrigerator door and gazes at the well-stocked shelves.

Anne has long, thick, jet-black hair, and her mom’s big, charcoal-grey eyes. She’s small, but not ethereal. Tom felt the floor shake and caught her draft as she scurried by.

He’s never slobbered over Gustie in the girls’ presence. He’s not about to start. He quickly puts his hands back where they belong and emits a small, self-conscious laugh. “Oops.” Gustie twists toward the kitchen.

Anne is looking into the fridge, but she’s not seeing anything. She has what Gustie calls “That Look,” the purposeful lack of emotion mixed with deliberate thought. The look comes upon her mostly when Tom is around. Does she do it on purpose? Gustie can’t say. She’s never confronted Anne about it. She feels ashamed. She’s too afraid of what the girl will say. And she’s too afraid she’ll agree.

Blushing, Gustie asks her, “Can I get you something, sweetie?”

Anne closes the fridge, grabs a few chocolate chip cookies from the ceramic hen cookie jar, and takes her time going back upstairs. She doesn’t look at Gustie or Tom.

Tom feels for Gustie. “Kids,” he says, trying to make light of the matter. “They all weird out when they hit seventh grade.”

Gustie adjusts her sweater in a fit of forced nonchalance. “I don’t care. I’ve got my own life to take care of. If she can’t understand, that’s her problem.”

Still, Gustie leaves the comfort of Tom’s lap and starts heating milk for another round of hot chocolate.

Tom has second thoughts about staying. It’s awfully quiet upstairs. Not at all what you’d expect from two young girls. It doesn’t console him to know they use earphones with their cassette players. Kids that age should be blasting music and shouting at each other, not holding back as if there were an invalid grandparent in the house. It’s not natural. It gives him the creeps. He wraps his arms around Gustie as she stirs the milk in the saucepan. The girls may look like her, but they’re not at all like her. She’s solid; soundly built, like an aqueduct that’s survived from antiquity. The girls are lean-tos in a pasture: fragile, ready to collapse at the slightest puff of ill wind.

He kisses the top of her head; tells her how, come spring, he’ll rent a house at the Shore for a week or two, just for Gustie and himself. The girls can stay with their grandparents. He and Gustie will be able to do whatever they like whenever they like, unfettered by little faces bearing the pious, eyes-to-heaven mask of candidate saints.

The simile makes Gustie giggle, but she doesn’t deny childhood can’t last forever. Before she knows it, she says, she and Anne will be fighting about boys and Anne’s desire to stay out all night. The prospect terrifies her. She can’t imagine what life will be like when the girls are older. She has premonitions that she’ll never have the chance to know. Either she’ll be dead, or the girls will be dead, or something will have happened to pull them far away from each other. She shudders.

Tom doesn’t understand what she’s talking about. “Maybe they won’t give you a hard time after all. But you know the saying: Forewarned is forearmed. Better to anticipate the worst and build your defenses now than to sit back and hope for the best later.”

Gustie agrees, but she swears that, at heart, she’s inconsolable. She can always tell when something bad is going to happen. She’s been “telling” so since she was Anne’s age, and her mother came to pick her up at school the day her little cousin died. She could never forget how, that very morning, she had stood in front of her closet wondering what to wear, and she suddenly thought, “Something bad is going to happen today.” She wanted to wear one of her favorite outfits, yet she knew that, if something bad really did happen, she’d never again be able to wear that outfit.
The page on Tom’s belt beeps. He kisses Gustie on the nose and says he’s got to go to Fair Mantle Village. Either a pipe has burst or the blast furnace chimney’s finally fallen down.

“Sure,”Gustie says. Her tone is distant. She stays at the stove, stirring the milk, as Tom grabs his ranger’s jacket and hurries out to his official state car.