The History of Now Read online

  THE HISTORY OF NOW

  DANIEL KLEIN

  Copyright © 2009 Daniel Klein

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication, or parts thereof, may be reproduced in any form, except for the inclusion of brief quotes in a review, without the written permission of the publisher.

  For information, address:

  The Permanent Press

  4170 Noyac Road

  Sag Harbor, NY 11963

  www.thepermanentpress.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Klein, Daniel M.

  The history of now / Daniel Klein.

  p. cm.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-57962-181-0 (alk. paper)

  ISBN-10: 1-57962-181-3 (alk. paper)

  eISBN: 1-57962-241-0

  1. City and town life—Fiction. 2. Intergenerational relations—Fiction.

  3. Life change events—Fiction.

  4. Colombians—United States—Fiction. 5. Massachusetts—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3561.L344H57 2009

  813'.54—dc22

  2008039875

  Printed in the United States of America.

  For Freke

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  The characters in this novel are entirely a product of my imagination, but the town of Grandville itself—its geography, demography and, to a lesser extent, its history—are patterned after the town I call home: Great Barrington, Massachusetts. For some information I used about the town of Grandville/ Great Barrington, especially its old theater, I am indebted to our diligent local historian, Bernard Drew.

  I am also indebted to my friend, Pato Fornou, for telling me in dramatic detail about the lives and personal histories of Latinos living in New England towns.

  A number of friends and family members read various drafts of this book: Tom Cathcart, Liz Socolow, Hester Velmans, Denis Clifford, and Lee Kalcheim; my wife, Freke, and my daughter, Samara. They are patient, acute, and generous readers all, and I hope they know how much I appreciate their help.

  My agent and friend, Julia Lord, has once again gone far beyond professional duty in helping me with this book, knowing how important it is to me.

  As always, I am deeply appreciative of Beverly and Kim Kimball, known to us on the Third Floor of 292 Main Street as the Medicis of Main Street. Generously, if unwittingly, they have supported a fertile art colony in their old building here.

  Finally, I wish to thank Marty and Judy Shepard, co-publishers of The Permanent Press, for taking the risk of publishing a philosophically inclined novel in the early 21st century.

  —DMK

  “If we take eternity to mean not infinite

  temporal duration but timelessness,

  then eternal life belongs to those

  who live in the present.”

  —LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN

  PROLOGUE

  Although at the time there were no laws shielding the identities of juvenile offenders, the name of the teenager who set the Melville Block ablaze in 1892 is unrecorded and long forgotten. What is known is that the boy subsequently torched the McCauley Cigar Company on Railroad Street and a stable in Housatonic before finally being caught and sent off to reform school in Boston. Still, like the unknown soldier entombed in Arlington Cemetery, the unknown pyromaniac of Grandville, Massachusetts is invoked here with something akin to honor—a sort of nefarious patron saint, the boy who single-handedly ignited Grandville’s glorious renaissance.

  The names of the four men comprising the business syndicate that resurrected the Melville Block are known to anyone who inspects the granite cornerstone on the corner of Melville and Main streets today: Jay M. Cosgrove, a New York City industrialist who summered in his family’s ‘cottage’ in nearby Lenox; Isaiah Smith, a Yale friend of Cosgrove who was in banking; William W. Watts, an English-born land speculator; and Hans Quirinus deVries, the sole Grandville native in the mix and the former owner of DeVries Clothiers, which went up in flames with the rest of the original wooden building.

  The four met every Sunday afternoon (except Easter) from March through November of 1893 to discuss their vision for the new structure. Usually these meetings took place in Cosgrove’s stove-heated study in his twenty-room cottage known as ‘Sway Lodge,’ but at least three times they convened at deVries’s far more modest digs, his six-room Dutch colonial on Upper Mountain Road in Grandville. If that setting was less grand than Sway Lodge, the refreshments surpassed anything Cosgrove’s cook ever offered, with the possible exception of Cosgrove’s imported brandy. That is because Hans deVries’s wife, Françoise, set the table.

  French Canadian by birth and mother tongue, Françoise was a supremely talented and painstaking cook. The Melville group was welcomed with a tub of raw oysters, followed by a dish of fried smelts dabbed with aioli; next, sweetbread pâtés and rice croquettes. At their second meeting in the deVries home, although it took place in the middle of a winter afternoon hours before suppertime, Françoise presented the assembled planners with a half dozen quail with truffles.

  As it turned out, the petite, dark-eyed Françoise was a hostess with an agenda. She fervently wanted the new, fire-resistant, Pennsylvania pressed Roman brick and white marble building to include a theater. Not merely some social hallcum-proscenium, but a grand theater, one that would rival Le Monument National on the rue Saint-Laurent in Quebec, a theater she had only been inside once, but which had made an indelible impression on her. Of course, Françoise left it to her husband to offer this proposal, yet each time he brought it up, she would miraculously appear from the kitchen hoisting a plate of mouth-watering delicacies.

  At first, Cosgrove, Smith, and Watts would hear none of it; a theater was an investment sink hole. Grandville had fewer than six thousand citizens, at least half of whom could not afford a plate of oysters, let alone a theater ticket. Perhaps an especially popular theatrical could draw an audience from Stockbridge and Lenox, maybe even from Albany, but how often might that happen? Once a year? Twice? Shops, offices, taverns, a small hotel—cubic foot by cubic foot, that’s where the profit on our two hundred thousand dollar investment lies!

  Enter Françoise deVries with a plate of steaming asparagus blanketed with nutmeg-scented hollandaise. She is singing. No, not chanting some cheerful, housewifey ditty as she scoops the stalks onto the men’s plates, but singing full out, “La Pute Protestante,” from the operetta Nell Gwynne. She is a contralto with a silverware-jangling vibrato modeled after Lillian Russell. Not even Hans has ever heard her vocalize with such passion, and certainly not at such volume. She concludes on a thrilling high C (optional in the original score). Stunned silence follows, then a full minute of applause. Jay Cosgrove knocks his asparagus fork against his ale mug, calling for order. “I suggest we name the theater, the Phoenix,” he says.

  This is but one of several variations on the story. Another has Françoise entering the deVries salon warbling, “Master, master, do not leave me! Hear me, ere you go!” from The Pirates of Penzance, and Cosgrove (as Fredrick), crooning back, “Faithless woman, to deceive me, I who trusted so!” An unlikely scenario, considering how racy the Gilbert lyric was regarded at the time, especially as sung on a Sunday afternoon in a family salon in New England. But, singing or no, from the minutes of that meeting preserved at the Grandville Historical Society, it is clear that on that November Sunday a motion was passed to construct a theater at the high end of the Melville Block, contiguous with but separate from the main edifice. Further, for obvious reasons but without comment, this theater would be known as the Phoenix—a roundabout tip of the hat to the anonymous arsonist.

  For the project, Cosgrove selected a Pittsfield architect who previously had designed a cavernous bank in that city and a birdcage-like conser
vatory for Sway Lodge. His name was Karl Klopp and, much to the deVries’s dismay, he had never designed a theater in his life. Upon meeting Klopp, Françoise deVries even had her doubts that the clean-shaven young architect had ever been inside one. Surely, the deVrieses were in no position to protest Cosgrove’s choice. They had won Françoise’s major goal and would not have been about to risk that by objecting to the designated architect. Furthermore, though Hans deVries constituted one fourth of the Melville project’s board of directors, his actual monetary investment was one quarter of that quarter—just his $6,000 settlement from his Hartford Fire Insurance policy. Hans’s fellow directors were all gentlemen, so the relative size of his share was never mentioned—at least in his presence—but it must have put an unspoken limit on Hans’s options for disagreement.

  Hark! Once again, Françoise deVries flies in from the wings, but this time in lieu of tender morsels and treble warbles, she comes bearing train tickets. With money she had been saving scrupulously for a theater trip to New York City, she has purchased a roundtrip ticket from Bennington to Quebec on the Central Vermont and Canada Railroad. Her first thought was to accompany Klopp on the excursion, but even this freethinking woman recognizes the inappropriateness of that idea. Instead, she arranges for her maiden cousin, Camilla, of Quebec City, to serve as Mr. Klopp’s guide and translator on his tour of Le Monument National.

  Françoise’s scheme was exceeded by reality. Not only did young Karl Klopp create detailed drawings—many embellished with egg tempura wash—of the elegant French Renaissance theater, but on the spot he sketched a modestly scaleddown version of that theater that would serve as a template for the Phoenix of Grandville. Everyone—even Cosgrove—was impressed by Klopp’s diligence and surprised by the passion with which he undertook the project. That is, everyone but Françoise who, a few days after Klopp’s return, received a letter from Cousin Camilla describing in breathless, Gallic prose, her liaison erotique with the smooth-cheeked American architect at the newly-erected Château Frontenac.

  Cubic foot by cubic foot, the Phoenix cost more than twice the rest of the new building complex, but it was vividly clear to even the humblest Grandville farmer that the theatre was the jewel in the new Melville Block’s crown. The December 30th, 1899, Grandville Chronicle deemed it “as up-to-date as any playhouse in the country. In size, it ranks with many a so-called metropolitan theatre, while in equipment and decorative features, the structure has no superiors.” Opening its doors for public inspection eight years after the infamous blaze, the Phoenix was as much celebrated for its fire safety features—asbestos curtains, automatic fire extinguishers, exits galore—as for its Nile green, rococo appointments.

  Yet a melancholy shadow flickered across those asbestos curtains on opening night. Hans deVries had succumbed to pneumonia just weeks before that curtain—the final touch—was hung. After the orchestra had tuned up, but before the overture to the comic opera, Happyland, began, Jay Cosgrove took to center stage and asked for a minute of silence in honor of his beloved colleague. But the show, of course, went on. And Françoise deVries, in ink-black, crape cloth widow’s weeds patterned after Queen Victoria’s, sat front and center, flanked by Cousin Camilla and Karl Klopp.

  Every seat, numbered in brass plates from 1 to 1000, was occupied that evening, just two months into the exhilarating new century. Indeed, the audience came not only from Stockbridge, Lenox, and Albany, but from Boston, New York City, and, in the person of Camilla Carriere, from Quebec City. Featuring the flamboyant De Wolfe Hopper and a cast of one hundred—count them!—players, Happyland elicited more laughs, tears, and standing ovations than at any of its New York performances. It played to packed houses in the Phoenix for six consecutive days.

  Filling the office and shop spaces of the new Melville Block proved more difficult. The three-story structure, imposing and sun-filled as it was, remained at only one-third occupancy through Happyland and the All Star Vaudeville bill that followed one month later. But the latter show—again featuring Mr. Hopper, this time reciting “Casey at the Bat” (a tour de force that kept Hopper in work well into his sixties), plus the conjurer, J. Warren Keane; Pierce and Roslyn singing the one-act operetta, The Toreador; and the dancing comediennes, Misses Ranier and Gaudier—marked a turning point for the Melville investors.

  Sitting in the balcony of the All Star’s second-night audience was one Billy Cannon from Cork, Ireland, by way of Boston. A rosy-faced man with a handlebar moustache, Billy had risen from rag picker to barkeep to South Boston pub owner in his ten years on this side of the Atlantic. He had journeyed to Grandville by train and coach expressly to hear De Wolfe Hopper declaim the mighty Casey’s exploits. He was not disappointed. During the intermission, when Billy Cannon stepped out onto Melville Street to light up a cigar on that frigid March 1900 evening, he made a remarkable observation: there was nary a pub in sight. Yes, around the corner on Railroad Street there were pubs aplenty, pubs not unlike his own Bottle and Corker in South Boston—loud, dirty, awash in ale and stinking from it, and crowded with men in overalls whose ejected wads of tobacco failed, nine times out of ten, to reach the cuspidors. But, Cannon noted, the Phoenix crowd was a wholly different sort, more likely to sip port than swill ale, and entirely willing and able to fork over one half of a silver dollar apiece to dine on sweetbreads and lake trout. The following week, using the Bottle and Corker as collateral, Cannon borrowed a mid-three-figure sum from Boston’s First National Bank, and initiated plans for the Phoenix Café. It was up and running for opening night of George M. Cohan’s So This Is London! So overwhelming was his patrons’ response that first evening that Cannon ran out of trout by ten o’clock.

  An intimate and stately transit hotel followed only months after the café opened, then a dressmaker’s shop, a tobacconist, and a wine and spirits emporium, filling the remainder of the Melville Block’s street-level spaces. The upper floor offices, heretofore only occupied by a dentist, a doctor, two attorneys, and a real estate entrepreneur, quickly added a print shop, a barbershop, a telegraph office, and a good dozen other enterprises, some, like Fitzsimmons Iron Garments, of a mysterious and questionable nature. By January first, 1901, the Melville Block was at full capacity and turning an excellent profit for Messrs. Cosgrove, Smith, Watts, and the Widow deVries. No one doubted that the extraordinary success of the Phoenix Theatre was the font of their good fortune.

  We shall speed ahead here as one theatrical after another rolls into town and onto the Phoenix’s spacious stage—the operatic extravaganza, Sunny Italy; John Philip Sousa and his clamorous band; Eddie Foy in The Earl and the Girl; The Ed. Wynn Carnival, “A Frisky, Frivolous, Jazzy and Joyous Festival of Gaiety, Girls, Music, Scenery, Costumes, Dancing, and Mr. Ed. Wynn Himself!” As it dances by, we also observe that Primrose’s Minstrels, a black-face variety show, comes and goes without public comment by Grandville’s small Negro community which, at the time, includes a bright young woman descended from travelers on the Underground Railroad whose son will later become a dedicated educator and lifetime member of the NAACP.

  In time, the traveling theatricals become more expensive to produce, ticket costs soar, and the audience dwindles. A decade flies by, and then another. Like spectators in a dusky balcony, we watch as in fast motion the Widow deVries is courted and wed by Billy Cannon, then bears him a son, named Phillip, a half-brother to her son with Hans, Emile deVries. We applaud as, after his father dies, Phillip takes over the Phoenix Café, adding oysters and champagne, New York steak and fried onions to the menu. And we sigh wistfully as Emile closes and locks the six, capacious dressing rooms that flank the Phoenix stage before he dejectedly lugs a brand new Edison Vitascope up to a three-sided canvas tent he has erected at the front of the theater’s balcony.

  Ah, but how quickly those sighs abate as the Vitascope’s powerful lamp erupts in a blaze of light, the sprockets catch, the gears turn, and on the eggshell linen bedcover Emile has suspended from the flyloft, a small-framed, mustachioed young m
an appears in a mourning coat and bowler hat, at once dignified and absurd as he casually trips ice skaters with the crook of his cane. Doubled over with laughter, we have all but forgotten the hundred-man operetta casts in full period costume, the fanciful, New York sets that required two horse-drawn lorries to transport, and the pit orchestras comprised of New York violinists and local brass and drum players. And when, after a brief pause while Emile changes reels, there appears on the screen a pair of granite-faced horsemen astride white stallions that are galloping directly at us, we slink down in our seats, thrilled and astonished. This magic surpasses anything we have seen on this stage before. Karl Klopp’s meticulously hand-painted, Nile green curlicues spanning the Phoenix proscenium recede into the dark, vanishing like Karl himself, who left the area a decade earlier to take up a lonely residence in Montpelier, Vermont, halfway between Pittsfield and Quebec City—the home of a memory that only barely sustains him.

  Under Emile deVries’s stewardship, the Phoenix Motion Picture House, as it was renamed on the marquee constructed in 1926, once again became an entertainment Mecca, attracting patrons from as far as Schenectady and Springfield. They came to see The Thief of Bagdad, The Birth of a Nation, Buster Keaton in Sherlock, Jr., Chaplin in The Gold Rush. For those who had only heard or read stories about the trench war ‘over there,’ the Phoenix brought it home with their sold-out screenings of John Gilbert in The Big Parade.

  Emile married Sally Burton, one of the Burton twins from New Marlborough. He prospered. He and Sally bought twenty acres of farmland on the outskirts of Grandville and there built a fifteen-room, Greek revival estate that they proceeded to fill with children, nine in all, five girls and four boys. All of the girls married and remained in the county. Boys One through Three went to college at the University of Massachusetts in Worcester, became lawyers, and went on to live in either Boston or New York. But the fourth son and youngest of the entire brood, a big-boned, barrel-chested boy named Wendell, never left Grandville. He never wanted to.