Chapter 3

Every town has at least one person who makes a living doing something few want to do. In Fair Mantle, that person is Francis Noel Hume, called F.N. or “Effen” in deference to his formal use of these first two initials.

He’s a willowy, seemingly ageless creation who has a wavy mass of silvering, golden brown hair, a finely featured face, and friendly hazel eyes that glow blue in sunlight. Like a precocious schoolboy, he’s bookish and refined yet ready to cut loose at the smallest provocation. Much of what he does during his waking hours takes place behind the walls of a yellow Victorian house on sycamore-lined Main Street at the north end of town.

The House (its actual business name) is a grand, three-story home with white gingerbread trim, tall, green shutters, and two conical turrets. Terracotta gargoyles shaped like a cross between a dog and a lion stand watch atop the peaked, slate roofs.

In spring and summer, well-groomed visitors spend hours on the open wraparound porch, rocking in white wicker chairs, surrounded by lilacs and a low wall of hydrangeas. The south side of the house, where the porch meets the steps to the back door, drips wisteria. Rose bushes line the crooked flagstone path that brings visitors from the red brick sidewalk to the smooth, white-stoned stairs at the front of the house. A rose bower with stone benches and birdbaths all but consume the small, square back yard. Inside, spacious rooms with tall windows and high, medallioned ceilings are decorated with knobby, Gothic furnishings and Oriental rugs that agree with the building’s time period.

In all, the locals never tire of gushing how The House is a delight to the eye, a comfort to the soul, and the American dream come true. But nobody wants to live there. Not even Effen lives there, though he often crashes out on the camelback sofa in the study.

The House is the place you go to when you want your friends to see you for the last time, and it’s the place you go to when you need that final ride to church.

Locals say that one of the nicest things about Effen’s business is the owner’s sense of basic human decency. He doesn’t advertise. The only sign is a small brass plaque at the side of the front door, beneath the doorbell. The memorial cards distributed at wakes contain the name of the business and the name of the town where it’s located, but that’s all. If you need Effen’s services, you find him by way of a client or the telephone directory.

Tonight, while Tom Von Aldo jockeys tourists through the simulated past, Effen bids good night to the last of his own visitors and starts to close shop.

The air is heavy with the scent of roses and carnations. A distant recording of Monteverdi’s Vespers of 1610 can be heard ever so faintly at the foot of the cedar staircase in the foyer. The verses have a lot of s’s; it sounds like whispers chasing each other.

Going upstairs, Effen notices light coming from the old smoking room, which is now the anteroom to the restroom, which, in the best tradition of home, is for use by women and men alike.

The smoking room, which is completely tiled, has a black-and-white chessboard floor, and mosaic murals depicting scenes from “MacBeth” and “Pilgrim’s Progress.” The heavily leaded Tiffany lamps are lighted, but the room is empty.

Catching a whiff of cleanser and a familiar, lapping noise, Effen at once guesses what is taking place, steps toward the room without a sound and peeks inside. As he suspects, Gustie is on her knees, scrubbing the old, white porcelain toilet. More cleanser is heaped around the white porcelain sink in little clumps of blue.

Gustie doesn’t bother with the long-handled brush beneath the sink. She’s flung the jacket of her black wool suit over the top of the glass shower door and is attacking the depths of the bowl with a lowly sponge.

She’s a naturally pretty woman in her mid-thirties, with athletic, white-pink arms and a neck faintly creased with jewel lines. Her china-smooth face, which she never makes up, is red with exertion; strands of straight, black hair cling to her face in wet threads. She doesn’t notice the peach-colored bra straps that have slipped below the short sleeves of her white rayon blouse. Her position threatens to split her skirt at the seams, but Effen trusts she won’t let herself go that far. The suit isn’t expensive, but she paid too much to abuse it.

It physically pains him to see her work. “Hey, this isn’t in your job description.” He reaches into the bowl just as she makes another pass with the sponge. Blue water splashes on his jacket and vest, delicately speckling the black wool.

“See? That’s what you get for getting in the way.” Gustie’s voice has a breathy catch. She grabs a fresh sponge and dabs the spots with mom-like authority. Effen endures the abuse with silent gratitude. “Now what are we listening to, the Monteverdi?” Gustie asks.

Effen listens. “So it is! They’ve reached the Nisi Dominus already?”

The voices have stopped chasing each other and are united in the cantering rhythm of words that roughly translate into “Children are like arrows in the hand of a giant. Happy the man whose quiver is full of them. He shall not be shamed by his enemies at the gate.”

Gustie crushes the left side of her mouth in a smile. “God, Eff, you and this music! It’s funny, but when I came to work for you, and you said about using music, I thought maybe it was this gut-wrenching mourner’s stuff. You know, fat women with weepy, wobbly voices; tuba dirges; melodramatic organs; sobbing tenors. Not this,. Anything but this!”

Effen is pleased. “You like it? It’s early seventeenth century polyphony. Dignified. Subtle. Filled with hope and solace.”

“IS that all?”

“That’s all it has to be. Why? How do you see it?”

Concentrating, Gustie makes a face. “It isn’t subtle, that’s for sure. It sort of glitters, the way diamonds scatter light. It reminds me of a church my parents used to drag me to when I was a kid, when we vacationed at the Shore. The place looked like it belonged in Vatican City. It was small (I think it sat fewer than three hundred), and it had this big, green copper dome, and a bell tower. And it had all these stained glass windows. Inside, there were white marble columns and shiny brass fixtures, and hanging, cut glass lamps. The walls were full of paintings of saints and popes and Bible scenes. When the sunlight hit the windows, it was like sitting in a treasure chest. All that glitter and color …”

Effen knows the church but doesn’t let on. Gustie would want to know what he was doing at the Shore, and he just doesn’t want to bore her with ancient history.

“Actually, this kind of music, counterpoint, was meant to have an echo effect,” he says. “Composers played upon the resonance of all those wonderful, vast Gothic churches. The sound was supposed to entrance the faithful and carry them to a higher, better world.”

Gustie laces him with a look of ineffable admiration. “You know the strangest stuff.”

“I’m a disgruntled Catholic. Disgruntled Catholics dig into things. Our souls are salvageable so long as we don’t spread The Word to the ungruntled brethren.”

Gustie’s steady smile masks her shudder. He shouldn’t talk like that. It’s disrespectful. Not just toward the Church. Toward everyone who has ever turned to The House in their time of need.

For the dozenth time she asks Effen if he doesn’t mind dropping her off at Historic Fair Mantle Village. Her girls, ages eight and thirteen, are village volunteers. It’s one of the few things they can afford to do outside of activities in public school. Tom Von Aldo picked them up at school and brought them to the village this afternoon. Effen assures he he’s only too glad to help. Leaving The House in the care of Matt and Ben, his two young assistants, he goes out to warm the little Cabriolet for Gustie.

The village is in a thickly wooded state park a mile outside Fair Mantle and is reached by way of winding, hilly back roads bordered by low stone walls. Not many people are out. The Cab’s headlights cast a merciless glare on the rain-slicked macadam. Overhead, utility wires sag beneath the weight of sodden, leafless vines. Puffs of flimsy white clouds scud low in the sky. Light fogs swirls wherever the road dips.

The village parking lot is nearly empty.

“I thought you were sold out,” Effen says. “The lantern tours always sell out. What happened? Did another publicity person walk out on you?”

Gustie looks around as Effen pulls into a spot near the path leading to the visitors center. “We didn’t take on another publicity person. I guess Farrell Schmidt lied to us before she walked out. She didn’t mail the brochures after all.”

“Somebody mailed them. I got one.”

Gustie grudgingly admits the brochures did indeed go out. Maybe. “But as sure as God made daylight, publicity’s more than brochures already printed and lying around in a box, waiting to be stamped and labeled. Come to think of it, I didn’t see anything in the papers recently. So see? She just didn’t do it, Eff. She just couldn’t follow through with the press releases and the phone calls and all the other stuff you have to do in public relations. We should’ve known something like this was going to happen.”

“Now, now, Gus.”

“Yeah, I know you don’t like gossip, but this isn’t gossip. It’s truth. You know Farrell. She was the great arts editor, remember? Ha! There she was, making a measly three hundred a week for a minor-league weekly, still living home with her mommy and acting like she was working for the New York Times. Bruton was out of his mind to think she would help the village.”

“Bruton was not out of his mind. There was nobody else to do the publicity. He tapped her, and, you must admit, she didn’t do nothing.”

“It wasn’t enough.”

“We all do what we can. We can do no more.”

“And Farrell Schmidt is the kind of person who does less and ends up letting everybody down.”

“Not everybody. Only herself.”

“Are you scolding me?”

“No.” He adds, silently, I’m scolding myself.

Usually during a lantern tour, the air around the village is filled with the sound of music, laughter and rambunctious children. Not this night. Now it’s so quiet, you can hear the delicate scrape of pebbles as Effen and Gustie walk the crunchy, lightly muddy path to the visitors center.

Greeta sits behind the welcome desk, engrossed in a dog-eared paperback with a crushed spine. She advises the new arrivals that Von Aldo is at the chapel, “along with everyone else, most likely.”

“Everyone?” Effen doesn’t hide his skepticism. “Are the tours running behind schedule?”
Still reading, Greeta widens and eyes and intones, “You’ll see.”

“Everyone” is a crowd of a dozen mumbling people gathered outside the chapel, staring up at the steeple.

In his best Colonial manner, Von Aldo beseeches them to please return home to their loved ones; there is nothing more to see.

Thinking the crowd is waiting to hear more music, Effen approaches the steps to the front door, which remains open. He hears Von Aldo say, “Squire, if you will,” but doesn’t realize Von Aldo is speaking to him until Gustie plucks his sleeve. “I don’t like this,” she says through an immobile jaw.

Yes, something is definitely out of the ordinary. Electricity, not candles, brightens the windows of the general store and bakery. Electricity, too, reigns in the carpenter’s shop. The foreman’s tiny brick cottage shelters a fluorescent lantern.

Ahead, far off to the left, a cluster of fluorescent lamps held by park rangers in Colonial dress weaves between the trees. Effen and Gustie realize the rangers are heading for the giant round chimney rising from the bluff.

The chimney is all that’s left of the village’s original blast furnace. The foundation is at the base of the bluff, some fifty feet down. The chimney’s upper half rises through the trees between the blacksmith’s shop and the general store.

Most of the lights wriggle down the trail to the base of the chimney, propelled by legs blurred by motion. Some remain at the top of the bluff. The lamps bob close to the round, illuminating blackened bricks. Rangers pull two-way radios out of their frockcoats. The radio hidden within Von Aldo’s frockcoat crackles.

Effen veers toward the commotion. Von Aldo grabs him by the lapel of his overcoat. “France, no! Go home. Bring Gustie with you. Wait for me.”

Gustie seizes the front of Von Aldo’s coat. “What about the kids? Where are the kids? What’s going on?”

“They’re okay; they went with Doctor B’s wife. Now will you just go? Go and make sure the farm is still in one piece?”

“Tom, you’re speaking in tongues,” says Effen, annoyed more by the cryptic speech than the unusual assault upon his person. “What’s going on?”

“You didn’t hear it? You didn’t feel it?” Von Aldo’s voice was high with disbelief.

“Hear and feel what?”

“The plane. The boom. The vibrations damn near knocked our teeth out! Bill was leading a group outside and he said it looked like the chimney was being punched by a jackhammer. We had to clear everybody out before we were up to our ass in bricks and lawsuits. Now let me go, will you? I’ve got to get these people out of here.”

Suddenly, without any apparent effort, Von Aldo is free of Gustie, and Effen is free of Von Aldo.

The ranger scurries after the crowd, making little “shoo” noises and slapping his free hand against his coat like a bumpkin out of a Fielding novel.

Effen and Gustie stand and watch, struck dumb not by Tom’s performance, but by his news about the boom. They didn’t hear a thing, either in town or on the road. If the boom were dramatic enough to rock the blast furnace chimney, surely it would have been strong enough to sway trees and utility poles.

Two of the rangers leave the chimney for the blacksmith’s shop. They pass their lanterns, then their hands, along the veined stone foundation. The cracks are visible to Gustie and Effen.

Gustie trembles, close to tears. “The boom was so bad it split stone? Oh my God, what are we dealing with?”

Effen doesn’t know, but one thing is certain: They had better do as Tom said.