The History of Now Read online

  Wendell started helping out his father at the Phoenix when he was seven, selling tickets and handing out Vitagraph giveaway cards with likenesses of motion picture stars like Helen Gardner or Leo Delaney on one side, and on the other, “Ode to Grandville,” a trio of iambic couplets composed by his grandmother, Françoise. By the time he was thirteen, he could thread the theater’s new, streamlined Brenkert BX-80 projector with one hand while rolling a cigarette with the other.

  Wendell reveled in it all: threading and projecting motion picture film, spotting the watermark-like circle in the upperright-hand corner of the screen that signaled a reel change and then doing so with undetectable precision, squinting through the six-inch window of the projection booth at the images on the glass-flecked screen below. He felt like a magician. A flick of the hand and he conjured up MacMurray and Stanwyck in Double Indemnity or Bogart and Bergman in Casablanca. His was the last commission in a process that had begun on a sound stage in Hollywood, and no less crucial than anything that had been done in California. Not that Wendell had any illusions about the artistry of his contribution—although there were times after, say, watching Casablanca eighteen times in a row, and mouthing every Bogart word and miming every Bogart gesture to perfection, when Wendell wondered just how much artistry it took to be a movie actor.

  There was no reason for Wendell to go off to college, no reason for him to leave Grandville. He knew his vocation and it was right here. And so was the girl he intended to marry.

  Her name was Beatrice Cosgrove. Yes, from the selfsame family as Jay M. Cosgrove, one of the original investors in the Melville Block along with Wendell’s grandfather, Hans—although this congruence would mean little to them and even less to their families, especially hers. Beatrice was Jay M’s grandniece, as well born by local standards as Jay Cosgrove’s direct line of descendents, and far prettier by any standards. She was raised in a house adjacent to and only slightly smaller than Sway Lodge. Unlike Wendell, who coasted through Grandville’s public schools, only distinguishing himself as a tackle on the high school football team, Beatrice attended Berkshire Normal School, and was then sent off to Abbot Academy in Andover. Like her mother and grandmother, she was destined for Wellesley College and undoubtedly would have gone there had not she sat in the next-to-last row of the Phoenix balcony for a Christmas Eve screening of An Affair to Remember.

  It is 1957. Beatrice is seated next to Gwendolyn Fayette, an Abbot friend from Palm Beach who is spending the winter holidays with the Cosgroves. Both young women sport the popular French pleat hairdos of the day, wear plaid kilts fastened with oversize, brass safety pins, and collarless, pleated blouses with gold circle pins fixed daringly close to the spot where the pleats begin to separate to accommodate their burgeoning breasts. Both believe that Cary Grant is absolutely dreamy.

  Directly behind them in the projection booth, Wendell deVries is smoking a Lucky Strike cigarette and reading a collection of sonnets by Edna St. Vincent Millay. The volume is his Christmas gift for his sister, Marie; he grabbed it, pre-wrapped, on his way out of the house, having already seen An Affair to Remember eleven times. To pass the time between reel changes, Wendell will read just about anything that is handy, including the copies of Silver Screen magazine that arrive, gratis, with every case of film, but also including the poetry books his sister lends him. Although he is, relatively speaking, uneducated, Wendell has a connoisseur’s ear for verse. He is reading the lines, “If I should learn, in some quite casual way/ That you were gone, not to return again—” when he hears a plaintive cry just outside the booth. Looking down at the movie screen, he sees that Deborah Kerr has just been hit by a car on her way to meet Cary Grant atop the Empire State Building.

  Wendell has heard such cries—invariably from women—eleven times before when the film reached this maudlin moment. So perhaps it is the confluence of the nearby whimper with those anguished Millay lines that compel him to rise from his padded chair, step to the projection booth door, open it, and search for the whimperer. He finds Beatrice immediately, for she is sobbing in earnest now, and embarrassedly has turned her head away from her friend to dab her eyes on her sleeve. Again, it may have been the Millay, but Wendell is overwhelmingly moved by the sight of this weeping girl, so much so that he descends to the row just behind her, leans down, and whispers, “It all works out in the end.”

  Beatrice is startled and now doubly embarrassed. For a mere fraction of a second, she looks angrily into Wendell’s eyes and then turns back to the screen. Wendell returns to the booth just in time to launch the final reel. He closes the book of sonnets. He feels like a blockhead. But only a half hour later, after the final credits have concluded and Wendell is lining up the reels to be rewound, there is a soft rap on the projection booth door. It is Beatrice. Her eyes are cast down at the small purse she is clutching in both hands in front of her.

  “That was kind of you,” she says softly. “I’m sorry if . . .”

  “I didn’t mean to ruin it for you,” Wendell replies. “It’s just that you seemed so—well—distraught.”

  “I was.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Thank you,” Beatrice says, now pulling on her camel hair coat and turning to join her friend.

  Wendell desperately wants to delay her. Without thinking, he calls out to her, “Really! It does work out in the end!” and she smiles beautifully, then leaves.

  Three nights later, the feature is Peyton Place, a racy exposé of the craven lives that lurk behind the gingham curtains of small-town New England. The press release accompanying the crate of reels states that the movie is thoroughly modern, an unflinchingly honest portrayal of real people. It even quotes a New York critic who declared that the film is “a rebuke of the Capra-esque romanticism that plagued Hollywood films of the previous decade.” Wendell thinks they are all full of baloney. He regards Peyton Place as a laughable soap opera, less honest in its own way than It’s a Wonderful Life, and far less entertaining. Tonight, after only one ungratifying viewing of the film, he is reading again, this time his Christmas gift from his brother, Seth, the bestseller, Kids Say The Darndest Things! by Art Linkletter. So far, Wendell finds the book only marginally more interesting than Peyton Place and he is wishing he still had the Millay sonnets with him for consolation. Below, Peyton Place doctor, Michael Rossi is intoning “I kissed you. You kissed me. That’s affection, not carnality. That’s affection, not lust. You ought to know the difference.”

  Wendell hears a derisive snicker just outside his window and recognizes its pitch and timbre instantly. It is Beatrice, again sitting in the next-to-last row of the Phoenix balcony, but this time alone. In a flash, Wendell is out of the booth and behind her.

  “It only gets worse,” he whispers.

  She turns and smiles.

  They fall in love.

  Her parents object for the traditional reasons, so they elope. Beatrice’s Wellesley career is forsaken. They rent a two-room apartment on Board Street to which, five years later, they take home their newborn daughter, Francis. Irma La Douce, blaring from newly-installed stereo speakers, is playing at the Phoenix.

  Wendell and Beatrice are a doomed match. Less than a decade passes before Beatrice declares to her husband that she has “finally come to her senses.” By this she means that being married to a film projectionist whose only ambition is to one day manage the local movie house is not fulfilling her. While raising Francis—first in the Board Street Apartment, then in half of a converted, two-family house on Mahaiwe Street—Beatrice has been reading hundreds of books, often one a day. In the year leading up to her devastating declaration to Wendell, most of those books were on the subject of the plight of women, including one volume that she bought through the mail and hid at night in her dressing table, entitled, The Second Sex. Beatrice moves back to her parents’ grand cottage in Lenox, taking Francis with her, but the child will take every opportunity she can to be with her father.

  It is the spring of 1968. After balle
t class at Mrs. Hampton’s studio, six-year-old Francis Cosgrove deVries walks down Main Street in her gauzy pink tutu and Keds. She waits for the light at Main and Melville, then crosses and makes her way to the Phoenix. Inside, she yells up to the projection booth, “I’m home, Dad,” and Wendell calls back, “Hey, Sweet Patootie, be right with you.” She skips down the center aisle of the theater and hoists herself up onto the stage. There, she balances on one leg, her beaming face turned toward the orchestra seats as she executes a wobbly arabesque. Here I am! Look at me!

  I

  ~ The Little World ~

  CHAPTER ONE

  Next to the Phoenix Theater on the century-old, brick-andmarble Melville Block, is a shop where no fewer than thirty-two tradesmen have run and subsequently closed their businesses since 1901. The store, Write Now, sells newspapers, magazines, greeting cards, cigarettes, cigars, and candy, and is owned and operated by one of Grandville’s most attractive natives, thirty-seven-year-old Francis deVries. Easily half of Franny’s patrons drop by the shop just to chat with her and each other, buying a pack of Wrigley’s gum or a cardboard cup of coffee by way of rent for their brief daily occupancy. And virtually every one of these visitors walks in the door telling Franny how lovely she looks today.

  As anyone in Grandville will tell you, the town has been blessed with a disproportionate number of good-looking women. A visiting Los Angeles film executive is rumored to have quipped that he spotted more knockouts passing by the corner of Melville and Main than on the corner of Hollywood and Vine. Some attribute this phenomenon to the recently-arrived colony of Rudolf Steiner devotees whose macrobiotic diet and eurhythmic exercises appear to promote glowing, unblemished cheeks. A better bet is the even more recently arrived group of blue-eyed, blonde Ukrainian girls who waitress in the new, toney restaurants that dot Main Street. But the older folks in town insist that the top beauties are homegrown, the result of the blend of old Berkshire people and the immigrants, by which they mean the cross-pollination of the original, moneyed, cream-skinned, Anglo-Saxon families with succeeding waves of strong-featured Polish, Irish, and Italian mill workers. Yet this genetic concoction hardly distinguishes Grandville from most towns in the Northeast, plus, in most cases, it is out of date by at least two generations—the local mixes have mixed and mixed again with all manner of stock.

  The theory both Franny and her dad jokingly subscribe to is that it is something in the water—all this Grandville pulchritude is generated by a rare, unidentified mineral that percolates into Great Pond Reservoir. “If either of us had a head for business, we’d bottle the stuff and sell it to all those New York harpies that come up here,” Wendell deVries likes to say.

  But even in this context, Franny deVries looks good—damned good, and not just for her age. She is long-limbed, smooth-skinned, and shapely, with wide-set, Delft-blue eyes from the deVries side, and pronounced, high-angled cheekbones from the Cosgrove line. Her face has always been lively and expressive, and became even more so after her three years studying drama at Ithaca College. Those years also contribute to Franny’s theatrical flair for dress. Often she selects the day’s outfit, hairdo, and make-up with an eye on a role, an aspect of her personality that she wants to bring to the fore for the day, usually just for her own amusement, though sometimes she has a few half-rehearsed lines in mind to go with her costume.

  On this cool, September morning, Franny is standing at the window of Write Now in a pair of snug-fitting, Calvin Klein jeans and a tie-dyed, ’60s vintage T-shirt that features the peace symbol. The prongs of the inverted ‘Y’ of the symbol seem to point straight to the tips of her breasts and Franny is well aware of that. It is just such touches that sell unorthodox ideas. Today, Franny is selling an end to the war in Iraq.

  She smiles as two early-morning regulars approach the shop door: Archie Morris, the soon-to-retire fire chief, and Michael Dowd, one of the half-dozen second-homers who moved up to Grandville to live full time after 9/11.

  “You’re too sexy for your shirt,” Morris says to her, holding the door open for Dowd. Although Morris is the same age as Franny’s father—they graduated together in Grandville High’s class of ’56—he likes to keep up with what he believes is current lingo, and no one, least of all Franny, would think of telling him that his ‘too sexy for your shirt’ line is a good ten years out of date.

  “Looks good to me,” Dowd says, flashing Franny a peace sign. Like most New York transplants, Dowd arrived here with a preconceived portrait of small town life and his role in it. Certainly some of this picture comes from his summer vacations and winter ski weekends in Grandville, but much of it is an amalgam of books he has read (Spoon River Anthology was a favorite of his in prep school) and films he has seen (he owns the DVD of It’s A Wonderful Life), plus a kaleidoscope of images torn from L.L.Bean catalogues. Spoon River accounts for the sepia-toned naiveté with which he imbues even the most wily Grandville natives, Bean for the red, clip-on suspenders that hold up his corduroy trousers this morning.

  “Car bomb in Baghdad,” Franny says, handing Dowd his reserved New York Times and Wall Street Journal. “Seven dead.”

  “How’s the coffee today?” Morris asks.

  “About the same as yesterday’s, only a day older,” Franny replies, sliding behind the counter to pour him a cup.

  “How many of them were American?” Michael Dowd asks.

  “None.”

  “Thank God for that,” Morris says.

  “Unless you happen to be Iraqi,” Franny says, handing the fire chief his coffee.

  Morris grins. “Too early in the day for politics, Franny,” he says.

  “It’s the middle of the afternoon in Baghdad,” Dowd says. Although Michael Dowd is in his mid-forties, he has never completely shed his earnest, smartest-boy-in-the-class manner.

  “Didn’t say it was too early in the day for them to talk politics,” Morris retorts.

  Franny cannot help but appreciate Archie Morris’s effortless one-upmanship, the wisest wise guy in the class. Still, she wishes he would consider this awfulness in Iraq more seriously. “I just hate to see innocent people die for no good reason,” she says.

  Morris sips his coffee, says nothing for a moment, then, “Wendell going to get that new Angelina Jolie movie?”

  “Hope not,” Franny says. “I hear it stinks.”

  “Not if it’s got close-ups of her lips,” Dowd pipes up. “Pillows. They look like silk pillows.” Dowd is clearly trying to regain some traction in the conversation with some man talk, and indeed, Archie Morris favors him with a knowing smirk. So much for the mayhem in Baghdad.

  Dowd selects a Triple Threat Caramel Peanut Fusion PowerBar, pays up, and heads back for the door. “Babs is really looking forward to tonight,” he calls to Franny before he leaves.

  Michael Dowd will now make his way to the third floor of the Melville Block, then down the corridor to his three-room office containing eight computers, two fax machines, and a specially-wired phone system with five separate numbers, including two with a Manhattan prefix that relays to Grandville via ‘call forwarding.’ Here, with the assistance of two locally born young women, he manages the mutual fund he founded in New York, but with an overhead of less than twenty percent of his former office there. For this reason alone, Dowd blesses the day that he and Babs decided to leave Manhattan’s Upper East Side for Grandville.

  Archie Morris leaves the shop moments after him, taking a second cup of Franny’s coffee with him. He will stroll past the Phoenix to the firehouse on its other side, the consequence of some curious, 1910 town planning that has pitted sirens and bells against singers and soundtracks for close to a century. There, as the only paid member of Grandville’s volunteer fire department, he will sit beside the phone watching soap operas and talk shows on teevee for the next nine hours.

  Only minutes later, a second pair enters Write Now: Franny’s father and his dog, Binx, a mongrel terrier who has been Wendell’s faithful sidekick for nine years. Wendel
l deVries is a big man, both in height and around the middle. His face is large and ruddy, capped with a full head of unruly white hair. That and the incipient grin that perpetually plays on his lips give him the appearance of an overgrown boy—say, a scruffy farm kid who is well known to the truant officer.

  Last night, Wendell did not return to the half of the two-family house on Mahaiwe Street that he shares with Franny and her daughter, his granddaughter, Lila. This is not an unusual occurrence. Two or three times a week, after the evening’s last screening and after he has perfunctorily cleaned up the theatre, shut off the popcorn machine, and locked the Phoenix’s doors, Wendell stops at the Railroad Car, the last of the original taverns on Railroad Street and the bar of choice for native-born Grandvillians. There, he downs two or three double Scotches before stumbling back to the Phoenix to sleep in a brass bed in the largest of the old dressing rooms. On some of those nights, Wendell’s lady friend, Maggie Bello, may join him. On those occasions, Binx sleeps fitfully in the theater wings, stage right. From the look of both Franny’s father and his dog, last night was not one of those occasions—Binx looks rested and Wendell has clearly slept in his clothes.

  “Hey, Monkey,” Wendell says as he comes in. “You’re the prettiest thing in the world.”

  “Runs in the family,” Franny replies.

  Wendell kisses her in the middle of her forehead, then scoots behind her to pour himself a cup of coffee.

  “There was another car bomb in Baghdad,” Franny says, pointing at the headline in the Boston Globe.

  “This country is run by a bunch of assholes.”

  “I’m glad somebody notices,” Franny says. She hands Binx half a bagel-with-peanut-butter sandwich left over from yesterday’s lunch.

  “Oh, people are starting to notice,” her father says. “It just takes time to sink in.”