One morning I found my grandfather already dressed in his windbreaker and Greek fisherman’s cap.
“Leave us go, Lucky Pierre,” he said.
“Where?”
“We are going to Mrs. Hale’s house,” he said. “She has a tall clock she wants looked at.” Whenever a customer had a grandfather’s, or tall, clock that needed repairing, my grandfather made a house call to see if he could fix the problem at the home, so the clock’s works would not have to be removed from the case and transported.
My grandfather and I drove to Mrs. Hale’s in his station wagon. We brought a stepladder and a tackle box and an old leather physician’s bag full of tools. As we came around the last turn in the driveway, the house rose and spread across the view in front of us. My grandfather whistled.
“I guess you know what she spends her time doing,” he said.
“What?”
“Counting her money.” I pulled the stepladder and tackle box out of the back of the car, and my grandfather took the physician’s bag. We walked to the main door and my grandfather lifted the brass knocker—a pheasant—and tapped the rhythm to “Shave and a Haircut.” One of the things of which my grandmother remained most proud her whole life was that my grandfather had never used the service entrance to any home where he did work. “He always used the front door,” she said many times.
Mrs. Hale, as slight and lean as I remembered, with her white hair pulled back, appeared in one of the sidelights. She did not acknowledge us and vanished from the window. A moment later, she appeared around a far corner of the house off to our left.
“Come through here,” she called.
She showed us into a hallway that seemed to connect two wings of the house. “Good morning, Mr. Crosby. Haven’t had that front door open in years. This one is closer to the clock anyway.”
Mrs. Hale led us into the main part of the house, past elegant, dimmed rooms and long hallways to a broad, uncarpeted wooden stairway. The clock stood on a landing halfway up the stairs. It was seven feet tall and wholly without ornament. Its hood was a simple, beautifully constructed box of wood and leaded glass. Its dial was ivory white with slender Arabic numerals painted around its circumference and nothing else, no illuminations, no decorations. Its case was narrow and plain, the wood seasoned and dull with age.
My grandfather whispered, “Well, I’ll be damned.” Mrs. Hale raised an eyebrow and looked at my grandfather for an instant and resumed her impassive demeanor.
“I guess you know this is one hell of a clock,” my grandfather said. “Simon Willard. If the works are what I think they are, this is the only one of these he ever made.”
“Mr. Willard made it for my grandfather,” Mrs. Hale said, by which she meant her great-great-great-great-great-grandfather. “There are some clockwork roasting jacks in the fireplace in one of the old kitchens, as well, that he made for Mr. Revere when they were in business together.”
The house enchanted me. I felt a mix of awe and longing and embarrassment at the awe and longing. I wondered how many kitchens there could be, whether the huge outer house contained several others, nested one inside another, like Russian dolls, each smaller and more primitive than the one immediately encapsulating it, until, arriving at the center, one would find a mud hut, and in the middle of its earth floor a charred depression in which sat ashes, dead to appearance, but from which the gentle breath from someone kneeling in the dirt and putting his face to them, close enough to whisper a confession, would arouse an orange ember, crystalline, nuclear, at the very heart of Enon’s greatest virtues and its innermost corruptions.
“And there is the orrery, of course,” Mrs. Hale said. “Mr. Willard made it for my grandfather, for Christmas 1799, the year there was so much snow.” She talked about and among the generations of her family and their acquaintances as if they were all alive and their doings recent or, if not recent, remote but personally recallable. “That is in my grandfather’s study. One of Mr. Willard’s brothers—I think it was Aaron—made several orreries, but Simon made just the one, for my grandfather, as a token of his affection.” Mrs. Hale stopped herself abruptly, as if catching herself in the sin of demonstrativeness, offering so much information. It occurred to me that she must be lonely. I looked from Mrs. Hale to my grandfather.
“What gives, Captain?” my grandfather asked.
“I don’t know what that is,” I said.
“An orrery is a mechanical model of the solar system,” Mrs. Hale said. She seemed pleased at the opportunity to instruct somebody.
“Oh. That sounds wonderful,” I said and smiled, at a loss for the correct response.
“Yes, it is quite wonderful. What do you think about the clock, Mr. Crosby?”
My grandfather said, “Well, let’s take a look and see what’s what. Set that ladder right in front there.” I opened the ladder and stood it in front of the clock. My grandfather climbed up and the two of us removed the hood together and I placed it on the floor at the bottom of the stairs. My grandfather looked at the clock’s works and whistled again. He said, “This is it, boy. Boy, is this ever it.”
“I’ll leave you two gentlemen to your work,” Mrs. Hale said. I smiled and nodded and she walked off into the reaches of the house.
“Open the case and take the weight off,” my grandfather said. He handed me an old-fashioned key he’d taken from the front ledge of the hood before we had removed it. I inserted the key into the keyhole and opened the door. The old air fell out of the clock, dry, held in the cubic shape of the case for who knows how many years until I opened the door and it collapsed out into the contemporary atmosphere, distinct and nearly colonial for a moment and then subsumed, and I wondered how old it was, if it contained any of Simon Willard’s breath. I lifted the lead weight and unhooked it from its pulley wheel. It felt like removing the heavy heart of the clock. I laid the weight on a rug at the foot of the stairs. It thudded onto the wool like an object from another, outsized planet with twice the gravity of our own. A heavy lead heart, I thought. That has to do, too, with the burning ember in the center of the house.
“Get that flashlight,” my grandfather said. “Shine it down right there and let’s see what’s what with this tricky little zon of a beetch.” I stood at the foot of the stepladder with the flashlight held above my head, pointing down at the works and the chains depending from them, while my grandfather fiddled around, pulling and poking and muttering and humming to himself. I looked at the furniture and the paintings and the rugs and the sconces. I tried to see through doorways into other rooms.
“Hey, who turn out da lights?” my grandfather said in the French-Canadian accent he used for jokes. I had aimed the flashlight beam away from the clock, looking at Mrs. Hale’s house. I pointed the beam back onto the dull, dusty mechanism, which, I noticed for the first time, was especially simple.
“I let go this bear’s ass, you find out who turn out da lights!” I said and pointed the light back at the clock.
“Now you hold that steady, Junior, right there, and leave us find out just what the hell …” My grandfather’s voice trailed off. He inserted a long, slim flathead screwdriver into the works and stuck an arm down into the case of the clock and tugged on the chains from which the weight had been hung. The works clicked for a second, but then the chains seized.
“Ooh, you tricky little bastard,” my grandfather said. He spoke to clocks like that when he fixed them—as intimates, as if they were both adversaries and patients against whom he had both pitted himself and to whose well-being he had sworn an oath. My attention wandered again. A window I could not see threw a crosshatched apron of light across the floor at the far end of the hallway through which we had come to reach the clock.
“Now you just wait one sweet, precious minute …”
“You got it, Gramp?”
“Jesus, Leviticus …”
“Is that it?”
“Julius, Augustus …” My grandfather used the screwdriver shaft as a fulcrum and be
nt some part of the works a little and pulled on the weight chains and they didn’t move and so he bent a little more and pulled again and the chains moved and kept moving. He stuck the screwdriver in his back pocket and pulled the chains with both hands like a deckhand hoisting a sail.
“Ha ha!” he barked. Mrs. Hale reappeared almost as if on cue.
“Have you met with success, Mr. Crosby?” she asked.
“I can’t say for sure,” my grandfather said. “But I think we are cop-a-cetic.” He patted his forehead with a folded tissue. “That clock is something else. I’d have hated like hell to take it apart.” In fact, he’d have loved nothing more than to have taken the works home and mounted them on one of the six-foot wooden frames he used for repairing tall clocks, for the sheer pleasure of having such a rare—in truth, unique—piece in his home for a month or six weeks. But he also knew that this was not an artifact with which to trifle, and the less fiddling with it, the better. “We’ll leave it for now and see how it does. If it stops, you just ring me and we’ll come back and take another look.”
I put the tools back in the physician’s bag and folded the stepladder and rehung the weight in the clock and replaced the key on the ledge of the hood.
“Between this clock and those jacks and that orrery, I suppose you know you’ve got a regular museum here,” he said to Mrs. Hale.
“You may see the orrery, if you like,” Mrs. Hale said. She and my grandfather looked at me.
“Oh, I’d love it,” I said.
The orrery stood on an oak dais in the middle of a room that had been the study of probably eight generations of Mrs. Hale’s forefathers. Four brass legs supported two horizontal brass dials connected by vertical posts, in between which was a series of coaxial shafts, stacked with telescoping gears, and a long brass hand crank with a wooden handle. A kettle-sized brass sphere, set above the middle of the upper dial, represented the sun. Its surface was so polished and reflective it not only threw the room’s light back out, as if generating the glow itself, but also seemed to possess depth, as if one might be able to plunge into its fish-eyed fathoms, into another brassy room. The planets and their moons were made of proportionally sized ivory balls. Each was fixed at the end of a brass arm. My grandfather and I stood looking at the marvelous machine in silence.
Mrs. Hale said, “Master Crosby, you may turn the handle once or twice if you’d care to.” I looked at my grandfather.
“That means you,” he said. I stepped forward and grasped the handle.
“Clockwise,” Mrs. Hale said. I turned the crank and there was a pleasing resistance against it and as I found the right amount of pressure to use, the wheels and gears began to revolve. The machine was nearly silent. Its precision was such that the planets tilted and turned on their axes and their moons spun around them and all of the arms revolved around the diameter of the disks with a fine, low whir so apt I thought I could hear it harmonizing with the roar of the real universe. The earth and moon turned on a third disk, into which had been etched the seasons and night and day and the moon’s phases. As the arms and disks and spheres turned, I looked at my reflection in the brass sun and thought, This is a part of it, too—the ember in the pit, the clock’s lead heart, the brass sun in its corona of wires and gears and ivory moons.
“I suppose Harvard or some such place would like this someday,” Mrs. Hale sighed. She seemed about to say something else but left off. “What do I owe you for the clock?”
Every time I hiked past the house I imagined the old clock and orrery and the fantastic rooms. With Kate or by myself, I imagined sun-drenched salons with open double casement windows of leaded glass, some panes stained to pale summer tints that took up the tendrils of light twirling through the draperies of the linden trees outside; walnut libraries with first fires lit more against the idea of autumn frosts than their actual nick, in order to please and add comfort to the contemplation of books; hibernal innermost parlors at the heart of the house, with deep chairs set before small, hot fires, the heave of winter winds and piling snow telegraphing through the timbers, pointing up the good fortune of well-being; bare, clean, cold, high white rooms filled with sun and wide views of crocus beds and back lawns greening in the rain; the massive orrery, oiled and polished and potent, ready to replicate the symphonic whirlings of the pale minor bodies around our pale minor star.
That was the thing about Mrs. Hale’s house. It loomed so suggestively in my imagination and my dreams that its essence changed almost every time I thought about it. It seemed as if its nature, its architecture, had been made to accommodate those very whims, as if its very construction in fact required that, for example, the notion of the jeweled orange ember at the center of the house be transformed into the brass and ivory orrery, and that in turn converted into the next dream, all somehow having to do with the heart of my home village.
Mrs. Hale’s house prompted my deepest desires to provide for Kate, as well as my deepest resentments about wanting such material wealth. There were evenings when, returning from an afternoon walking along the canal, tired, hot, sweaty, thirsty from our hike, Kate and I would cross Mrs. Hale’s cracked and weed-shot tennis court and sit in the grass on the side of a rise overlooking the estate, a copse of darkening fir trees looming at the top of another rise to the right, and the house half sunk behind another rise on the left, beautiful in the oncoming dusk—dim, solid, so white it glowed blue in the gloom, huge, one or two windows lit and glowing the color of the wood of the floors and walls, the colors of the Persian carpets, the colors of the glass lamps that lit them. We’d sit and recline next to each other and the shadows would advance over our heads like a canopy and clouds would spread out over the sky from the west and Kate would braid stalks of grass and I’d watch the sky and point out the evening star and the crescent moon as it arced up from behind the dark firs and the bats would begin fluttering after insects and we’d each take one last sip of the last of the water in the canteen, tepid and metallic, holding some of the day’s earlier heat in it, and we’d cool off and rest a little beneath the wide pavilion of night before setting out for home. And I’d tell her about the secret clock and the secret solar system deep in the house, the solar system elegant and outrageous almost, almost indecent in its elaborations, almost, I could hear Mrs. Hale saying to my grandfather and me, ornamental, and the secret clock, elegant and simple and enduring and itself also almost ornamental, or worse, but worse because it was secret, because it was hidden away from everyone, but preserved, too, because it was hidden away from everyone (almost secret, I thought, because I know about it, and my grandfather did, and Kate knows about it now, too, but hasn’t seen it, hasn’t been into the inner rooms, the sanctum of the temple, and seen the ark, seen the actual wooden case hung with the simple mechanism and fitted with the simple, clear dial painted with the simple, clear unadorned black Arabic numbers and nothing else) and not donated to some Harvard and degraded to being another anonymous plank in its hoard of bric-a-brac, stuck in a corner of a room where faculty members and committees meet in order to resolve on more meetings and committees and faculty members and so maddeningly exclusive and precious both and incurably so. And the incurable pull inside me that Mrs. Hale’s house and the clock and the orrery exerted was impossible and yet so and sometimes even made me want to sob and I felt ashamed to be taking my daughter back to our little house, which seemed those times dingier and more poorly kept than ever, its table-tops piled with newspapers and bills and shoes and laundry and crumbs on the counter, its cheap, hand-me-down furniture, more like a den for little animals than a house for humans, and hot and stuffy instead of cool in the summer, and freezing and drafty instead of warm in the winter. And sometimes on those nights I lay awake in bed haunted by Mrs. Hale’s house, there in what felt like the dead center of the village, almost Enon’s essence itself but not quite, more its trope, its idiom, its veil, prosperous and merciful, bland and trivial, wicked and fallen, and I across the way in my little shack, alien, native, inso
mniac, and enthralled.
3.
I USED TO WAKE UP BEFORE KATE AND SUSAN ON SUNDAY mornings. I’d get a pot of coffee going and fetch the Sunday paper from the end of the driveway, wondering each time why the delivery guy couldn’t just chuck it farther toward the back door. When it was warm, I’d pour a cup of strong coffee with some milk and sit outside at the table on the side deck, under the umbrella, in one of the cheapo, stackable green plastic chairs I’d bought on sale at a hardware store. I’d smoke a cigarette and flip through the paper, looking at the sports pages first, then the book section, then the real estate listings.
Kate would usually come down half an hour later, in sweat shorts and a three-quarter-sleeved baseball shirt, her hair snarled, her eyes a little puffed, with a sleepy half-smile. She’d plunk herself into the chair across from me and swivel sideways in the seat and dangle her legs over one armrest and lean her back against the other.
“Hey, Dad.”
“Hey, kid. How you doing?” She made little swimming kicks with her legs and yawned. I stopped myself from warning her about how tippy those crummy chairs were. She knew and I’d told her a hundred times and anyway she never once toppled in one.
“I’m good,” she said. She arched her back and stretched her arms behind her head and yawned again. I could never get really comfortable in those chairs and I wondered at how easy Kate seemed in hers. I realized that her comfort came not from the chair but from being young and limber and strong. Jesus, I thought, what a beautiful kid.
“Can I have a sip?” Kate said. She sat up and half-reached for my coffee. I didn’t like the idea of her drinking coffee but I liked the idea of her wanting to. I guess it seemed like a nice, safe sort of way for a kid to push a bit at the doors of adulthood. It was a little ritual we had.