Page 27

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A Neighborly Visit

An almost infinite series of half-hour television sitcoms have revealed much about American families and life in the suburbs. For example, Americans are extraordinarily funny, communicating in swift exchanges peppered with clever one-liners. Wives are smarter than their husbands, but the goofball guys mean well. Every illness has been eliminated in the suburbs. Judging by the evidence on TV, one must assume that deaths are rare, though once in a while someone disappears and is never spoken of again; stranger still, on rare occasion a child or neighbor is replaced by an entirely different person with the same name, and everyone conspires not to notice.

Having been a city dweller all his adult life, only one thing about contemporary suburban and small-town existence depicted on TV irritated Spencer: how seldom neighbors knock first, how boldly they show up in your house and join a conversation. Many cities were so crime-ridden and such hotbeds of mental illness that if someone entered Spencer’s Chicago home unannounced, he would assume the individual had violent intentions and would deal with him or her accordingly, even if it was a neighbor.

After all these years, he recognized the man at the foot of the stairs. Mr. Thornberry, a tall avuncular person known to everyone as Thorny. “What’re you doing here, Mr. Thornberry?”

“What are you doing here, Spencer? I saw you drive into the garage, and I said to myself, ‘By golly, he must be coming home to live.’ Are you coming home to live? That would be so grand. Everyone on the block would be so pleased. You belong here, Spencer. We all remember you with your cowboy hat and water pistol, riding around the yard on that stick with a pony’s head.”

Descending the stairs hesitantly, with his amigos close behind, Spencer said, “How’d you get in? I locked the door to the garage.”

“Got a key, of course. Back when the house became yours, you called the service company all the way from Chicago to have them maintain the place, but you forgot to tell them to give me a key.”

“I didn’t forget. I—”

“Why, sure you did, son. But I got one from them soon enough. They mow the lawn each week, do a walk-through twice a month, tend what needs fixing, but they can’t be here all the time. I’m their eyes and ears. No vagrant is going to break in and set up camp, not on my watch. Bless them, they need shelter, and maybe they don’t mean to ruin a place with their drugs and raggedy-looking unwashed dogs, man and dogs alike peeing wherever they want, but they for sure do some ruin. They come in from outside Maple Grove, but we make sure they don’t stay long.”

Spencer stepped off the stairs and into the foyer, one hand held out, intending to ask for the key. Thorny mistook this for an imminent handshake, reached out, bypassed the hand, and gathered Spencer into a bear hug.

The front door opened and two women entered, each bearing a casserole. The tall, bony one said, “Heavens to Betsy, it is you, spitting image of your daddy, God forgive him for all he’s done.”

The short, heavy one said, “You’ve turned out handsome enough to be a lounge singer, Skunky.”

Thorny laughed and let go of Spencer and said, “You remember that nickname, how it hung with you a couple of years?”

“No. I just—”

“You were five years old,” Thorny said, “cute as a button. It was July Fourth, and everyone was gathered for a barbecue in my backyard. You wandered on down by the woods, found this baby skunk. You thought it was a kitten, brought it to show everyone. Lord knows why it let you carry it across all that yard ’fore it saturated you.”

A bald man with a lush white beard followed the women. He carried a two-gallon chilled-drink dispenser that would later prove to be full of iced tea. “Welcome home, Skunky! You’re a sight for sore eyes.”

Bobby lost sight of Spencer, who was swallowed into the crowd with great affection. There were forty or fifty people in the house, and they were in high spirits. They wanted to know everything there was to know about Spencer now that he was all grown up. Had he ever married? Was he dating? Who was she? What did he do for a living? Art? What kind of art? Did he ever hear from Constanina?

Because Spencer had sold off most items in the house while he had been in high school, there weren’t many places for the visitors to sit. That was all right, because they were too excited to sit, and someone brought a dozen folding chairs to accommodate the older people who lacked the stamina for a lot of vertical socializing.

The big kitchen island was covered with enough food to feed a hundred, with an emphasis on baked goods. Stacks of paper plates. Plenty of disposable plastic cups, forks, and spoons. Paper napkins featured bluebirds in opposite corners with a ribbon stretched between their beaks on which the word friendship appeared in flowing script.

Spencer was the star of the show, but though Bobby had lived with the Pinchbecks in another neighborhood, the Nelsoneers—which is what they called themselves if they lived on the last block of Harriet Nelson Lane—were interested in him, too. Some of them knew he was an author, and a smaller number had read some of his books, but their greater interest was in Spencer because he’d once been a Nelsoneer and had come home from crazy, violent Chicago to this little piece of paradise.

People remembered Rebecca from those days when she dressed to appear unattractive. When they recalled the impression she had made on them, her look was described as like “a poor washerwoman out of Dickens, with nothing to wear but rags” and “the kind of nutty old woman who’d live in the woods and do witchcraft” and “a terribly sad, sad urchin.” They wanted to know if she was dating Spencer Truedove. No, they were just friends who remained close. Then was she dating Robert Shamrock? No, they were also just amigos.

Clearly, they knew that she was a famous actress, but none of them spoke of her long-running television show or her hit films. She wondered about their reticence until a woman named Ada Samples—late sixties, sweet-faced, in Ugg boots and a pale-blue Mother Hubbard, hair in a bun—sensed Rebecca’s puzzlement, drew her into a corner, and whispered an explanation.

“They know about your mom and all her Fernandos, how she had no idea who might’ve been your daddy, how you were brought up by your grandfolks, and how they were so nasty two-faced with each other. All that drama, the humiliation and shame, you had to become an actress to express your pain or otherwise kill yourself.”

“Exactly,” Rebecca said. In fact, she had worn those costumes because she’d been unable to cope with the early ripeness of her adolescent body and with the kind of swaggering boys who were drawn to her, boys who were all hands and greedy expectations. She didn’t say as much to Ada Samples, because all she wanted was to get out of this place.

“Just know,” Ada continued, “every Nelsoneer admires how you made something of yourself in spite of the bad hand you were dealt.”

“That’s sweet,” Rebecca said.

“Everyone expected you to be either a skanky disease-riddled junkie living in a gutter or at best a whore.”

“Well,” said Rebecca, “I lucked out when, you know, the acting thing worked for me.”

“Nobody will mention that here now,” Ada explained, “because they know how emotionally unstable actors are. They don’t want to inadvertently say something about your childhood that might trigger a mental collapse.”

“That’s so thoughtful.”

Ada smiled broadly and nodded with evident satisfaction. “Oh, these are very caring people here at the end of Harriet Nelson Lane. I just wanted to be sure you know they aren’t being standoffish. They’re proud you came from Maple Grove. They respect you and pity you and want only the best for you.”

“Am I blushing?”

“No, dear.”

“Good.”