But Laura was the first of them, so Winifred hadn’t got her body-snatching routine perfected yet. I said, “She’s going home,” and that was that. I scattered the ashes over the ground, but kept the silver box. Lucky I didn’t bury it: some fan would have pinched it by now. They’ll nick anything, those people. A year ago I caught one of them with a jam jar and a trowel, scraping up dirt from the grave.
I wonder about Sabrina—where she’ll end up. She’s the last of us. I assume she’s still on this earth: I haven’t heard anything different. It remains to be seen which side of the family she’ll choose to be buried with, or whether she’ll put herself off in a corner, away from the lot of us. I wouldn’t blame her.
The first time she ran away, when she was thirteen, Winifred phoned in a cold rage, accusing me of aiding and abetting, although she didn’t go so far as to say kidnapping. She demanded to know if Sabrina had come to me.
“I don’t believe I’m obliged to tell you,” I said, to torment her. Fair is fair: most of the chances for tormenting had so far been hers. She used to send my cards and letters and birthday presents for Sabrina back to me, Return to Sender printed on them in her chunky tyrant’s handwriting. “Anyway I’m her grandmother. She can always come to me when she wants to. She’s always welcome.”
“I need hardly remind you that I am her legal guardian.”
“If you need hardly remind me, then why are you reminding me?”
Sabrina didn’t come to me, though. She never did. It’s not hard to guess why. God knows what she’d been told about me. Nothing good.
The Button Factory
The summer heat has come in earnest, settling down over the town like cream soup. Malarial weather, it would have been once; cholera weather. The trees I walk beneath are wilting umbrellas, the paper is damp under my fingers, the words I write feather at the edges like lipstick on an aging mouth. Just climbing the stairs I sprout a thin moustache of sweat.
I shouldn’t walk in such heat, it makes my heart beat harder. I notice this with malice. I shouldn’t put my heart to such tests, now that I’ve been informed of its imperfections; yet I take a perverse delight in doing this, as if I am a bully and it is a small whining child whose weaknesses I despise.
In the evenings there’s been thunder, a distant bumping and stumbling, like God on a sullen binge. I get up to pee, go back to bed, lie twisting in the damp sheets, listening to the monotonous whirring of the fan. Myra says I should get air conditioning, but I don’t want it. Also I can’t afford it. “Who would pay for such a thing?” I say to her. She must believe I have a diamond hidden in my forehead, like the toads in fairy tales.
The goal for my walk today was The Button Factory, where I intended to have morning coffee. The doctor has warned me about coffee, but he’s only fifty—he goes jogging in shorts, making a spectacle of his hairy legs. He doesn’t know everything, though that would be news to him. If coffee doesn’t kill me, something else will.
Erie Street was languid with tourists, middle-aged for the most part, poking their noses into the souvenir shops, finicking around in the bookstore, at loose ends before driving off after lunch to the nearby summer theatre festival for a few relaxing hours of treachery, sadism, adultery and murder. Some of them were heading in the same direction I was—to The Button Factory, to see what chintzy curios they might acquire in commemoration of their overnight vacation from the twentieth century. Dust-catchers, Reenie would have called such items. She would have applied the same term to the tourists themselves.
I walked along in their pastel company, to where Erie Street turns into Mill Street and runs along the Louveteau River. Port Ticonderoga has two rivers, the Jogues and the Louveteau—the names being relics of the French trading post situated once at their juncture, not that we go in for French around these parts: it’s the Jogs and the Lovetow for us. The Louveteau with its swift current was the attraction for the first mills, and then for the electricity plants. The Jogues on the other hand is deep and slow, navigable for thirty miles above Lake Erie. Down it they shipped the limestone that was the town’s first industry, thanks to the huge deposits of it left by the retreating inland seas. (Of the Permian, the Jurassic? I used to know.) Most of the houses in town are made from this limestone, mine included.
The abandoned quarries are still there on the outskirts, deep squares and oblongs cut down into the rock as if whole buildings had been lifted out of them, leaving the empty shapes of themselves behind. I sometimes picture the entire town rising out of the shallow prehistoric ocean, unfolding like a sea anemone or the fingers of a rubber glove when you blow into it—sprouting jerkily like those brown, grainy films of flowers opening up that used to be shown in movie theatres—when was that?—before the features. Fossil-hunters poke around out there, looking for extinct fish, ancient fronds, scrolls of coral; and if the teenage kids want to carouse, that’s where they do it. They make bonfires, and drink too much and smoke dope, and grope around in one another’s clothing as if they’ve just invented it, and smash their parents’ cars up on the way back to town.
My own back garden adjoins the Louveteau Gorge, where the river narrows and takes a plunge. The drop is steep enough to cause a mist, and a little awe. On summer weekends the tourists stroll along the cliffside path or stand on the very edge, taking pictures; I can see their innocuous, annoying white canvas hats going by. The cliff is crumbling and dangerous, but the town won’t spend the money for a fence, it being the opinion here, still, that if you do a damn fool thing you deserve whatever consequences. Cardboard cups from the doughnut shop collect in the eddies below, and once in a while there’s a corpse, whether fallen or pushed or jumped is hard to tell, unless of course there’s a note.
The Button Factory is on the east bank of the Louveteau, a quarter of a mile upriver from the Gorge. For several decades it stood derelict, its windows broken, its roof leaking, an abode of rats and drunks; then it was rescued from demolition by an energetic citizens’ committee, and converted to boutiques. The flower beds have been reconstituted, the exterior sandblasted, the ravages of time and vandalism repaired, though dark wings of soot are still visible around the lower windows, from the fire over sixty years ago.
The building is brownish-red brick, with the large many-paned windows they once used in factories in order to save on lighting. It’s quite graceful, as factories go: swag decorations, each with a stone rose in the centre, gabled windows, a mansard roof of green-and-purple slate. Beside it is a tidy parking lot. Welcome Button Factory Visitors, says the sign, in old-style circus type; and, in smaller lettering: Overnight Parking Prohibited. And under that, in scrawled, enraged black marker: You are not Fucking God and the Earth is not Your Fucking Driveway. The authentic local touch.
The front entrance has been widened, a wheelchair ramp installed, the original heavy doors replaced by plate-glass ones: In and Out, Push and Pull, the twentieth century’s bossy quadruplets. Inside there’s music playing, rural-route fiddles, the one-two-three of some sprightly, heartbroken waltz. There’s a skylight, over a central space floored in ersatz cobblestones, with freshly painted green park benches and planters containing a few disgruntled shrubs. The various boutiques are arranged around it: a mall effect.
The bare brick walls are decorated with giant blow-ups of old photos from the town archives. First there’s a quote from a newspaper—a Montreal newspaper, not ours—with the date, 1899: