Vermonter in Brooklyn

The scene: 5:30 a.m., Tuesday, February 24, 1976, pitch dark and blood-freezing, in a nameless maze of tract-house streets on the outskirts of Nashua, New Hampshire. I’m a twenty-two year old med school dropout, left off in the small hours of Primary Day to make the rounds of this moonscape with a big handful of Udall for President door hangers, trying not to stir the local dog population into alarums and excursions. I’ve had no coffee, nor anything else remotely warming, and I’ve forgotten my gloves. Someone’s supposed to pick me up sometime after noon.

How did I get here?  I could’ve stayed in the nice warm national campaign headquarters in Washington, DC, two blocks from my apartment. Since the campaign powers-that-be discovered that I can type (an Ivy League degree being otherwise worthless in the later 1970s), I’ve been promoted to administrative assistant on the second floor, away from all the envelope-stuffing and Xeroxing assigned to a typical walk-in volunteer.

But the action and excitement—and Mo himself, for the most part—are in the all-important New Hampshire primary. Our man, a one-eyed, six-foot-five Jack Mormon liberal environmentalist, is facing off against the upstart Jimmy Carter, and a few of us decide we want to experience it first-hand. So, needing all the hands they can get to counteract the disciplined busloads of Georgians blanketing the streets of New Hampshire, the campaign director decides he can dispense with my typing skills for a few days.

Which is how I find myself crammed into a faded blue Volkswagen Beetle of uncertain vintage and roadworthiness with four other front-lines wannabes, crawling up Route 95 towards Nashua like a bug towards the light, buoyed by the promise of a warm bed and a good dinner from one of the hospitable families who are turning over their spare bedrooms to campaign workers. We’re aiming for an address on Nashua’s Main Street, which sounds nice and convenient to downtown, where there will surely be good diners for candidate-spotting and blue-plate specials of hash and poached eggs, tomato soup and grilled cheese.

It starts going bad when our driver, a stringy stoner named Jim, finally admits about nine hours into an eight-hour trip that he’s gotten us lost,  not an easy thing to do on Route 95. Hannah, the other female passenger, and I have been trading turns on somebody’s lap, an arrangement that has rapidly grown tiresome for everyone. Stoner Jim has overshot the northern turnoff and is heading us straight for Providence. Once corrected, it takes us another four hours and around 1 a.m., tired and grungy and not quite satisfied by the junk-food stop we made at a rest area two hundred miles back, we end up at 100 Main Street in Nashua.

Instead of the motherly welcome, hot soup and soft beds we’ve been looking forward to, we find ourselves trudging up a wide, worn wooden staircase to the second floor and what turns out to be the local campaign headquarters. A lugubrious-looking beanpole with pale, freckled skin and rusty-red hair pulled back in a ponytail accosts us with a clipboard, an item from which, we soon learn, he never allows himself to be separated. A large, hairy dog rouses itself from sleep and toenails over to join him. A small white terrier trots after it.

“You the people from Washington?” he says it as if it were a disease or a federal prison.

“Yep. We got lost. Where’s the house we’re supposed to be sleeping at?”

He frowns, looks surprised and waves a hand around. “Here. Pick up a sleeping bag,” he says, jerking his thumb towards a pile in the corner, “unless you brought your own.” He writes something on his clipboard. “I’m Jeremiah,” he adds. “The Nashua volunteer director.” Of course he is.

We stare in dawning horror. On the floor of the large, darkened room behind us, about forty bodies are lined up on the floor, some in sleeping bags, some just covered with a blanket. Most are asleep, some snoring, but a few blink at us in sleep-disturbed annoyance. We lower our voices and look at each other.

“Um, where are the bathrooms?” I venture. First things first; it’s been a long ride.

“Bathroom,” he corrects. “Top of the stairs, where you came in.” Of course: the fluorescent interrogation-grade light, the door up a step from the landing. The bathroom does not, in fact, contain a bath, or even a shower. It has one leaky toilet and one sink on which the cold tap works and the hot one doesn’t, the sole facility for the forty-five-odd souls camped out on the floor of this former dance studio—the mirrors and barre are still in place—and two dogs who, as it turns out, are not altogether housebroken.

Hungry and grimed, I lie down between my travel companions, plump Dan, a merry prankster just out of law school, and Russ, an earnest bloke from blue-collar Milford, Connecticut. We each carve out a little space for ourselves, bundle up our coats for pillows and try to sleep, indignation at the deception practiced upon us vying with the exhaustion of too many hours on the road, the latter eventually winning.

In the morning there are doughnuts, and a species of coffee. Well, it could be worse. Campaigns, I’ve since come to learn, are fueled on Dunkin’ Donuts and Boxes o’ Joe. Dunkin’ in 1976 is a more regionally limited chain than it has since become, and the brand is new to me. They’re not as good as the Krispy Kremes at home, but they’re bigger, which compensates.

Clipboard, or Ponytail as our little gang alternates in calling him, is rounding people up and giving them orders. In the daylight it’s clear he can’t be older than eighteen. Our Washington crew averages twenty-three or so, ancient and jaded compared with the slew of college kids and recent high-school grads gathering around wide-eyed and eager for assignments.

Clipboard is assisted by a sloe-eyed, petite girl even younger than he who, we learn from earlier arrivals, is the girlfriend and ideological slave of the statewide volunteer coordinator, whose words she quotes as if he were Chairman Mao. Indeed, the core management group of this Nashua operation, average age eighteen and a half, all seems in thrall to this charismatic person: “Mark says we have to get two thousand of these out by tomorrow,” they intone with utter seriousness. “Mark says it’s vital to hit the suburban areas before the Carter people do.”

I wonder whether the as yet unseen Mark, based at the state headquarters in Manchester, derives his authority from being over twenty-one, or perhaps it’s just that these refugees from a communal soybean farm are used to being led around by some guru with burning, fervid eyes. Something about these people is bringing out the latent anarchist in me and my traveling companions. Or maybe we’re just immature.

The first day we’re assigned to phone canvassing. Sloe-eyes hands us a script and solemnly warns us not to deviate from a word of it. “It’s real important,” she says, as if talking to a class of third-graders, “to use the same words with everybody you call,” which instantly awakes the imp of the perverse. We personalize our pitches as much as possible; who wants to listen to a robot talking at them?

That’s when we start finding out that the people we’re calling to persuade to get out and vote for Mo have been barraged by campaign phone calls—live phone calls, this being the pre-robocall age. There are ten serious candidates running for the Democratic nomination, never mind an assortment of unfunded hardy-perennial wing-nuts and, in the days before Caller ID, you don’t know who’s on the other end of the ringing phone. When they find out, they often hang up instantly, or favor us with a few choice editorial comments before slamming down the phone. My worst encounter is with a woman who, with fury and grief barely contained, says, “I am here by myself trying to care for a dying woman, and you people keep calling and calling!” Come to think of it, my phone phobia may date from this point.

On our second evening on the dance-studio floor, a new group arrives just as we’ve all bedded down for the night. Reacting with better humor than we did, one curly-haired fellow about our age, with a roguish Dennis Quaid smile and a Southern accent, prances around in his underpants before diving into a sleeping-bag. Chided by Clipboard, he spreads his arms and explains, “Muh ex-wife got everythin’ else!”

Michael is his name, with something of the fallen seraph about him at that. We befriend him at first light, along with a cadaverous-looking, bespectacled geek he’s brought along whom Dan instantly dubs Ichabod, another Marylander whose accent reminds us that the state’s south of the Mason-Dixon Line.

We rapidly form an alliance against Clipboard and his humorless soybean refugees, dubbing ourselves the Rabble and popping their sanctimonious balloons with irreverent, annoying questions. All it takes is a mention of Mo’s primary opponent Fred Harris, the genial, down-home Senator from Oklahoma, for Dan to flop a lock of hair in his eyes and do a perfect Fred imitation: “Th’ isshah is privilege!” Clipboard glares and, after a couple of these, stops mentioning the importance of outpolling Fred in his morning exhortations.

A day or two later, we’re out in the streets doing “lit drops,” which in the days before recycling typically means adding to what the average New Hampshirite puts out for the trash man. Typically we’re on streets where the Carter people have gotten there first—not only are the crisp green-and-white brochures perfectly wedged in the cracks of storm doors, but each one bears a handwritten “Sorry I missed you—hoping for your support on Tuesday,” purportedly signed by Jimmy himself. As if, but people tend to take things at face value.

In a diner where we pause for lunch, an affable fat man in a winter version of a cowboy hat is sitting on a stool regaling the waitresses with stories. This, it turns out, is Billy Joe Clegg (“he won’t pull your leg,” is his slogan), one of the more out-there candidates, who seems to be running for President because it’s fun. He’s to be found in this diner at any given time, and seems content to hold court and to quote the Bible by way of a platform. Not even he is clear which party’s primary he’s running in.

“You think he’s weird,” Ichabod tells us as we move on. “Did you hear about Arthur Blessitt? He dragged a cross through the streets of Manchester the other day.”

“You’re making that up.”

“No, really, it was in the Union-Leader.” He’s right; the appropriately named born-again Christian candidate for President (before they all got that way and moved from lunatic fringe to mainstream) distinguishes himself by going nowhere without the true believer’s ultimate fashion accessory.

Stopping in an old Woolworth’s with dusty displays and plank floors gone gray and furry, we hit pay dirt in the can-you-spot-’em sweepstakes: Jimmy Carter himself. With his dazzling array of teeth and his “Ah’ll never lie to you” message, I’ve pegged him for a flash-in-the-pan fraud from the beginning, but this little guy who approaches us, looking dog-tired and a bit lonely, seems like a genuine, kindly human being, actually interested in who we are and not at all put off when we tell him we’re Udall workers. We all shake hands and part on friendly terms, and when in the end he wins the nomination I reflect that we could have done a lot worse.

Five blurred days of phone-dialing and tramping the streets of Nashua trying to move fast enough not to turn into a Popsicle culminate on the eve of the primary. The mythical Mark, guru of all youthful New Hampshire Udall volunteers, makes a cameo appearance. He is a dazzlingly good-looking guy, with deep brown eyes you could get lost in and long glossy hair, but with an air of solemn self-importance that the Rabble does not find contagious. However, we’re all jazzed up by now, ready to do whatever it takes to help Mo edge out the rest of the Dems. Anything can happen in a ten-way race. So when they tell us we’re all going out at four o’clock the following morning to hang a Udall leaflet on the door of every house in Nashua, I shrug and nod assent.

In the dark and silent morning, in which even molecular movement seems to have stopped dead in the cold, four of us pile into an old sedan with boxes of door hangers and individualized walking route maps.

About ten minutes later, the first cop turns on his lights and pulls us over. We’ve been driving slowly, looking for drop-off points, not violating any highway laws. He shines his flashlight in, scans for evidence of drinking or the red eyes of pot-smoking, and curtly waves us on.

Another five minutes or so and another member of Nashua’s Finest stops us, this one wanting to see the driver’s license and registration. We still haven’t broken any laws as far as we know, though evidently being out and about at four in the morning and being under thirty is presumptive evidence of criminal intent. We tell him what we’re doing out there, and we can almost see him make a mental note to vote Republican.

Incredibly, we’re stopped again in another five minutes, though this one backs off pretty fast when we chorus, “We’re Udall volunteers! The primary’s today! We’re just dropping literature! And all the others will be out soon doing the same thing!”

“Jeez,” the driver mutters after the cop withdraws, “I’d heard New Hampshire was a bit of a police state.”

I lurch out of the warm car and onto the sidewalk at my designated intersection. The car pulls away and I feel like an astronaut stranded on the moon. Under a dim streetlight I scan the map and set out down my first street, trying to cover the streets as efficiently as possible. When you do this kind of scut-work, you develop efficiencies after a while that would make W. Edwards Deming proud: tuck box under arm, hold sheaf of hangers in left hand, hook right index finger through hanger loop as you walk towards the next door, open and close gate (most of these yards are chain-link fenced), find the door the family uses most (inevitably not the front door in New England), drop hanger loop over door-handle, repeat. Gloves wouldn’t have worked, actually; not enough fine motor control. However, when your fingers freeze you’re going to lose that anyway.

There’s nothing but fenced cracker-boxes around for miles, it seems. No small commercial strip with a welcoming, aromatic little bakery, no back-ends of shopping malls, nothing. Not even a sewage treatment plant. An hour and a half to go before it gets light.

I open the gate to a square little Cape on a fenced corner lot with a big lawn. The short driveway is empty. The house is dark except for a light in an upstairs back room, so I tread quietly so as not to alert a wakeful occupant and hope there’s not a dog inside.

I reach the side door, clearly the one they’d use, and stop. My cold-fuzzed, sleep-and-caffeine-deprived brain registers that there’s something wrong with the storm door. The bottom panel is smashed, little pellets and shards of glass all over the top step, so I step carefully to avoid them. What a shame; their door’s broken and they haven’t had time to get it fixed. Next I notice the inside door is ajar. I loop a “Udall for President—please remember to vote today” hanger over the inside doorknob. Then, finally, the nickel drops.

Burglary in progress.

The empty driveway. The family, I realize, isn’t there. What do I do? Have to find a cop. Lord knows there were enough of them around on my way here. This is the pre-cellphone age, or I’d be able to hit 911 immediately and they’d catch the perp red-handed. Noiselessly I back down the driveway, taking great care when I lift the latch on the chain-link gate. I tiptoe down the street, scanning for cruisers. It didn’t occur to me to remove the Udall door hanger; I wonder what the burglar will think when he comes out and finds it. Maybe he’s a registered voter.

Between then and twelve-thirty in the afternoon, when someone from the campaign finally comes back to pick me up, I walk my assigned neighborhoods, dutifully dropping off door hangers. In seven hours I have seen not one single policeman or cop car.

Much later on that same day, we ride to Manchester and watch Mo—tall, handsome, funny, smart, decent Mo—give the first of many concession speeches, congratulating Jimmy Carter. “I’m not too worried about coming in second,” he says. “After all, George Washington, the Father of our Country, married a widow.”

Mo is long gone now, felled by disappointments, personal tragedies, and Parkinson’s disease. I worked in his Congressional office for a while after the campaign folded, wrote him a few speeches and one or two bills. On my bookshelf, its spine faded by the years, is his collected wit and wisdom in a volume entitled Too Funny to be President, which came out ten years after I left his staff and moved to Vermont. On the flyleaf he’s inscribed it “To Roberta Harold, a first-rate friend and staffer.” I’d forgotten that until today.

 

It’s hard to beat Vermont for an authentic small-town July 4 experience. I’m not talking about the great metropolitan celebrations on offer in Burlington and Montpelier on the 3rd, in which relative fortunes are spent on fireworks in hope of convincing us (successfully, I admit) that we’re getting something back for our property taxes.

I’m talking about parades with kids oohing and aahing over the town fire truck, sacred smoke rising from chickens being barbecued in the Volunteer Fire Department’s big meshed-over pits on the green, homemade rhubarb and blueberry pies, and the chance for a trip back into history.
You find these in places like East Corinth and Peacham, little settlements tucked away north of I-89 and west of I-93, on roads you’d normally never travel unless you knew somebody there or, as Robert Frost says, “let a guide direct you/Who only has at heart your getting lost.”
East Corinth (pronounced KrINTH, in case you go there and don’t want to sound like a flatlander) is the largest village in the Town of Corinth, chartered in 1764, population 1,367, which also includes the settlements of Corinth Corner, West Corinth, Corinth Center, South Corinth, Cookeville, and Goose Green, “so named,” says the Town’s website, “for the color painted on the feet of the geese being driven—as in, walked or herded—to markets in Boston.”
If you’re a Tim Burton fan you’ve probably seen East Corinth, the setting for his 1988 movie Beetlejuice. Vermont may be lily-white, demographically speaking, but Corinth was home to Alexander Twilight, the first African-American elected to a state legislature anywhere. And for all its small population, Corinth has two historical museums, entirely run by volunteers: the Academy Museum and the Agricultural and Trades Museum, which host musical “cafés” where you can attend the likes of a seminar on the Delta blues from a local resident who played with the old bluesmen on MacDougal Street.
On this sticky, sunny Fourth, we joined our good friend Lois Jackson, President of the Corinth Historical Society, for a chicken dinner from which we emerged replete if even stickier, and for an over-enthusiastic tour of the Society’s silent auction offerings. This netted us a foot-bath (a sort of portable, fully accessorized mini-Jacuzzi), two dishtowels depicting fuzzy Venetian palazzos and gondoliers, a pint of local Dark Amber maple syrup for half the store-bought price, and a CD of the day’s entertainers, the Wall-Stiles, four local rockabillies who write all their own stuff and make you want to dance and sing along. The youth softball team was selling sodas, kids were bouncing on an inflatable gym, and former farmers like my spouse were drooling over the vintage John Deeres.
North and west from Corinth to Peacham, we stopped in our tire-tracks at the edge of the town cemetery at the sight of a woman in nineteenth century costume, being followed by a crowd. She was leading the Peacham Historical Association’s twice-yearly Ghost Walk, which this year featured Civil War soldiers and their families. Locals in period costume read from the soldiers’ letters and memoirs.

We sat enthralled and horrified as the late Mark Wheeler of the First Vermont Cavalry, sitting in a cane-bottomed chair by his tombstone in a straw hat, collarless shirt and gold-rimmed glasses, told us of his time at the infamous Andersonville Prison. The original Mr. Wheeler survived the ordeal and wrote his memoirs in the 1880s, when he could at last bear to think about those days and the horrors he witnessed.
The tree-shaded Peacham cemetery, in the heart of the village, slopes gently northeast with stunning views of the surrounding hills. With all the rain we’ve been having and the season still early, the green almost hurt your eyes. It was nice to imagine that the ancestors of the present-day Peachamites were enjoying the Fourth too.
To cap the day off, we stopped at the Green Top Market on the Cady’s Falls Road in Morristown and picked up a quart of strawberries.
“Where are they from?” we asked the sales clerk.
“Not sure. An older gentleman from Eden. His name is Stub, or something like that.”
Could it be Ernest “Stub” Earle? By golly, it was.
Stub Earle, former State representative from the town of Eden, known to his colleagues as the Earl of Eden back in the late 1970s, had an Elvis pompadour, a Vermont accent you could cut with a knife, and sometimes carried his personal spittoon onto the House floor. He also had a knack for cutting through the fog of legislative rhetoric and saying, in words of one syllable, what everyone else was thinking but didn’t dare give voice to. He was probably a Republican, but back then such things didn’t matter much. In his old age, he’s taken to raising strawberries and vegetables and bottling his own brand of pickles.
It was heartening to know that Stub, like his pickles, has been remarkably well preserved. As have Vermont’s small-town July Fourth traditions.

Lately, newspaper mentioned cheap air fare

I gotta to fly to Saint Somewhere

Im close to bodily harm…

This mornin’

I shot six holes in my freezer

I think I got cabin fever

Somebody sound the alarm…

–Jimmy Buffett, “Boat Drinks”

 

I can relate. We’re at the tail-end of March and there are still a couple of feet of snow in my front yard. The good news, I suppose, is that the Flamingometer is mostly pink—the male’s body, though not his legs, is visible above the crusty white, and you can see the female’s neck and back feathers (if plastic versions can be called feathers). Our pet herd of deer is having an easier time getting to the bird feeder, which they systematically empty as soon as it’s refilled.

 

 

 

But, really, at this point we’re supposed to be solidly into Mud Season, that last purgatorial stage before true spring, which in these parts generally arrives in late April. Picture a kid trying to roll his tiny Matchbox car through a pan of uncooked brownie mix, and you have an idea of car travel on Vermont’s dirt roads this time of year. On the paved ones, it’s more like the Cyclone at Coney Island, bouncing you between yawning potholes and towering frost heaves that make you wonder if maybe we’re in an earthquake zone after all.

Mud Season reliably begins most years on or around the Ides of March. We slog and bounce and suffer through about a month of it before seeing the slightest fuzzy hint of green on the trees and shrubs. It’s the price we pay for maple syrup: cold nights, sunny days, the thermometer up and down like a yo-yo, getting a nice pumping action going in the tree trunks that gets the sap dripping with a pleasant “ping!” into the metal buckets still used by traditionalists. Daytime temperatures flirt with forty, and there’s enough sunshine to begin recharging the body’s Vitamin D supplies.

But this year the thermometer is just down, there are daily snow flurries, and Mud Season, demoralizing as it is, hasn’t even started. Everyone I know is grumpy, but there’s no point in complaining, because it’s happening to all of us. And, besides, compared to the poor folks in Japan whose world was literally swept out from under them, or the brave citizens of the Middle East rising up against their ruthless oppressors at last, we haven’t much to complain about, really.

That said, I could only shake my head when I stopped in at the local florist’s to buy some daffodils to add a little bright color to the surrounding monochrome. “My distributor hasn’t had them for a couple of weeks,” she said. We’re a month away from daffodils of our own, and you can’t even buy them in a store any more!

“April is the cruelest month,” T.S. Eliot famously began “The Waste Land,” his ode to the dissolution of Civilization as we Knew It. He’s commonly thought to have been writing about the trenches of the Somme. Northern New Englanders know better: he was holed up on some back road in Vermont, before the invention of Netflix or even the VCR. This year, it looks as if the cruelty is going to stretch into May.

 

The Valentine Phantom has struck again!

If you woke up grumpy in Montpelier on February 14, there’s no way the foul mood would have survived a trip downtown. Just about every storefront along State and Main, and even the City Hall clock in its tower, was plastered with red paper hearts.

The Phantom, or Phantoms, since from the sheer square footage of hearts, there must either be a crew of helpers or the Phantom is on speed—has been practicing his or her brand of benign, joyous vandalism in Montpelier since 2002. One suspects the Phantom’s identity must be known to the local authorities, but they aren’t talking, and neither is anyone else.

We like it that way, and so, apparently, does the Phantom, who seems to live by the Biblical injunction about doing one’s good works in secret, as well as that bumper sticker which tells you to “practice random acts of kindness and senseless beauty.”

There’s something magical in the notion of a ghostly, anonymous figure, perhaps wearing an old-fashioned burglar’s mask, flitting from one store window to another in the freezing dead of night for the sole purpose of bringing smiles to people’s faces. The Phantom does not seek fame or credit or thanks. She, or he, is Santa Claus without the commercial PR machine—the embodiment of love, as Santa is the spirit of giving.

A big part of the fun, of course, is the clandestine and mischievous nature of the enterprise. The sense of transgression, the thrill of not getting caught must have been part of the attraction for the incurably romantic perpetrator(s?) in the first year or so. This has long since become a cheerful fiction in which the Montpelier Police Department is happy to play its part, for surely any number of night patrols could have caught the Phantom, uh, red-handed if they had any inclination to do so.

As it is, the Phantom now has his/her/their/its own Facebook Phantom Phan page—put up with the prominent disclaimer that the creator is not the Phantom but a non-anonymous Montpelier resident who just wants to celebrate the Phantom’s work and give people a place to express gratitude—or wistful envy, which was prominently on display in the comments from people who don’t live here.

National as well as local media have been running the story: AP, Bloomberg News, USA Today, Fox News, even ABC7 in Chicago. There’s even a Wikipedia page labeled “Valentine Phantom,” which notes that the Phantom is sometimes referred to as the Valentine Bandit, though the only things stolen seem to be the hearts of those who enjoy the results of the Phantom’s work.

Montpelier doesn’t always feel like the ideal place to live, especially when you’re navigating icy sidewalks and paying property tax bills during its long, often dark winters. But on Valentine’s Day morning, we who know and love the place are reminded of our town’s prodigious store of social capital. More than one resident waiting to cross the State and Main intersection has been observed looking around at the sea of red hearts with a big goofy smile, saying, “God, I love this town!”

The first Dade Wyatt historical mystery, Heron Island, germinated in the spring of 2001, when my husband and I made a farewell visit to an island in Lake Champlain’s Inland Sea owned by a friend. She was about to sell the birch-shaded, thyme-turfed Eden, whose ten acres featured a bird sanctuary and a miniature Adirondack Great Camp built in 1902 by the heir to the International Paper fortune.

A largely unaltered slice of the past, the Vermont lodge boasted a gallery ringed with trophy heads, huge screened verandahs with white wicker furniture, and acres of Oriental rugs. In a curio cabinet sat an 1895 Mauser rifle—the service weapon, we learned, of Spanish troops in the Spanish-American War.

“They say a daughter of one of the early owners married a Rough Rider,” our friend said. Local folklore also had it that Teddy Roosevelt had visited the island for their wedding.

A few weeks later, the image of a handsome, mustachioed man with a brimmed hat came into my head, and my detective Dade Wyatt rowed an Adirondack boat into the story. A melancholy widower, former Shakespearean actor, Pinkerton agent, and Rough Rider,  he’s providing security for the island’s politically ambitious owner, who’s trying to lure Roosevelt for a summer visit in 1903. On a dry run for the event, somebody ends up dead. Suspicion falls on an Italian anarchist musician—perhaps from the granite works of nearby Barre, a hotbed of labor radicalism, or from the teeming immigrant slums of New York’s Lower East Side.  Wyatt sets off to track down a killer and gets mixed up in more than he bargained for.

I discovered some intriguing historical nuggets in the course of writing and revising Heron Island: Vice-President Roosevelt learned about the shooting of President McKinley in 1901 while attending a reception at the Isle La Motte, Vermont home of Lieutenant Governor Nelson Fisk; Roosevelt and his Cabinet members were frequent Vermont visitors (in some cases summer residents), and the leading Italian anarchist of his day, Luigi Galleani, who inspired the devotion of the more famous Sacco and Vanzetti as well as the “Red Scare” of 1919, hid out in Barre, Vermont from 1903 to 1912, publishing a radical underground newspaper called Cronaca Sovversiva.

There are two terribly sad things about the real-life roots of this story. The Adirondack lodge on the island burned to the ground in the fall of 2007. Our friend who’d owned the island died last year, much too young. Perhaps she’d be pleased that the place lives on in fictional form.

Cross-posted from Kingdom Books’ blog, http://kingdombks.blogspot.com/, with thanks to owners Beth and Dave Kannell.

The Barre Historical Society is hosting a reading by local author Robbie Harold from her first novel, Heron Island, at the Old Labor Hall on Granite Street in Barre, Vermont on Sunday, November 14, 2010 at 3 p.m. Book signing and refreshments will follow; all are invited.

Robbie Harold will read from her historical mystery Heron Island at Bear Pond Books in Montpelier, Vermont on Tuesday, January 18 at 7 p.m. Book signing and refreshments will follow; all are invited.

Those two syllables can mean anything from braving the freezing wastes of Antarctica, the airless heights of Everest or the massed rifles of an invading army to telling a friend he has halitosis. In my case, it recently manifested as driving all the way from Montpelier to our urban home in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn. In my own car. Into the corporate limits of New York City. By myself.

It could have been a lot worse. I chose a slack time of day, by New York standards, and didn’t cross the line into the borough of Manhattan, which in my fantasy would have resulted in being instantly crushed like a bug.  It wasn’t much different, and perhaps not even worse, than driving in Boston, where the highways are largely populated by escapees from the Danvers Asylum for the Criminally Insane. And I’ve been doing that without incident for a couple of decades now.

The only thing we country bumpkins really need to know about driving in the Big Apple is that New Yorkers are used to cramming themselves into really small spaces due to ridiculous real estate prices. This compacting skill and inclination extends to the interstices between other people’s cars on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. Also, being laconic by nature and fanatical about privacy, they see no reason to signal that they’re about to merge into the 18-inch space between your Prius, whose frontal dimensions you have never completely grasped, and the back of the Urban Assault Vehicle ahead of you (humongous SUV’s being the one exception to the cramming-self-into-small-spaces pattern of Gotham living. Where in God’s name do they park these things?).

I’ve always had something of a dodgy relationship to driving, if you’ll pardon the expression. Being raised in Scotland in a Council housing scheme where nobody could afford a car, I’d taken a series of buses to school every day and rarely had the privilege of riding in an actual automobile. When we emigrated to America, where cars were as much of a necessity as a roof over one’s head, the era of the four-wheeled dinosaur was still in full flower, and our family’s early autos were land yachts that would require two parking spaces by today’s standards.

I was in no hurry to learn to drive; we could only afford one car and my father needed it to get to work, so I wasn’t likely to get much time with it, and there just wasn’t the tradition in Scotland of equating a driver’s license with all the freedoms of adulthood.

I finally got my license when I was nineteen and, while trying to pick my way down a narrow street over sophomore-year Christmas vacation, plowed my dad’s giant beige Dodge Polara, Moby Dick, into a line of cars belonging to a group of partygoers at a nearby mansion. Thankfully, they were too liquored up to mind a great deal, and this being Virginia, were downright gracious about making sure I wasn’t too traumatized by the event. They even offered me some spiked eggnog to help me calm down , which I was wise enough to refuse in case the cops were eventually called in.

Moving to Vermont and living on a steep, windy hill produced a new kind of driving panic: dealing with winter. My first car, given to my spouse as a graduation present, was a rear-wheel-drive sedan with no traction to speak of. On one hideously memorable occasion I did a one-eighty on Route 2 coming into Waterbury; on another, only a miracle saved me from wiping out the Volkswagen bug ahead of me when I lost control on an icy hill.

I joined a vanpool and resolutely refused ever to take a turn driving the van (which was frequently piloted by a pool member we named “Mad Dog,” who enjoyed reading the morning paper as he drove).

Eventually, after one or two more black-ice incidents that caused my insurance carrier to cancel on me, I learned to deal with Vermont winters and moved on to cars that could handle them. Urban traffic is something else altogether, a Darwinian game of chicken in which polite deference can be fatal.

Add to the congestion the complications of New York City’s so-called “alternate-side parking” rules. On the streets that surround our Brooklyn aerie, there are red-and-white signs that tell you when you have to move your car from its hard-fought-for parking space for street sweeping. On our stretch, it’s 8:30 to 11:30 on Tuesdays. On the next block, it’s Thursdays.

The good news is that they suspend these rules, as duly reported on all the local radio stations, for practically any occasion you can think of. In the week of November 1, for instance, there are suspensions for All Saints’ Day, Election Day, and Diwali, which I learned is the Hindu festival of lights. So if you work it right, as I did recently by moving the car from the Thursday street to our Tuesday street, you can leave your car in a given spot indefinitely.

People in New York actually drive their cars to work and to stores and other things we use them for in Vermont. My hat is off to them. Maybe some day I’ll even venture out in between journeys to and from our two residences; the Brooklyn Bridge seems like the ultimate test to me. But then I’d have to find a parking space in Manhattan, and that would take a level of courage I’ve yet to attain.

Finding our home away from home in Brooklyn

The narrow, dim stairway, smelling faintly of roach spray, loomed straight up for three floors like a Hitchcock movie. Following Wayne and the landlord’s mother up the stairs, I caught my husband’s eye and gave him a thumbs-down. The prospect of humping groceries and laundry up that endless staircase was too daunting to contemplate.

One more flight led to the apartment we’d come to see, a one-bedroom on the top floor that Wayne had spotted on Craigslist. I’d given up on that site myself after a couple of phone calls with guys who sounded like Ukrainian pornographers, but even working with the ubiquitous local realtors, who also handled rentals, hadn’t got us far.

The first surprise was all the light flooding in from big southeast-facing windows. The appliances were new—not fancy models, but gleaming like the fresh paint on the walls. The rent was half again as much as our Montpelier mortgage, i.e., reasonable by New York standards.

Then there was the bedroom—unlike most of the glorified closets we’d seen, big enough to hold both our bed and a dresser and still leave room to walk around. From the roof you could see the skyscrapers of Manhattan, Lady Liberty, and the Coney Island parachute jump—a 360-degree view.

We told the landlord’s mom we’d get back to her. Back on the street, the sky, which had been darkening steadily, let loose in torrents. Caught without raingear, we ducked into the nearest storefront along with half of the neighborhood and were wafted off our feet on fumes of garlic, sesame, and lox. We’d stumbled upon Terrace Bagels, rated by the New York Times as one of the six best bagel bakeries in all of metro New York. That did it.

Windsor Terrace, unknown to us until two years ago, is a wedge of streets in northwest Brooklyn between Prospect Park and Green-Wood Cemetery, which is almost as big as the Park and arguably more decorative. (Green-Wood is the final home of such luminaries as Leonard Bernstein, Louis Comfort Tiffany, and Boss Tweed.)

With brick and frame rowhouses, modest by New York standards, and lines of four-story buildings with apartments above and shops below fronting its three-block-long commercial hub on Prospect Park West, the Terrace is one of the highest points in Brooklyn. That’s a bit like saying it’s one of the highest points in Amsterdam. Like neighboring Manhattan, Brooklyn was first settled by the Dutch; known as Brueckelen in those days, its low-lying swampiness must have seemed comfortably familiar.

We’d spent our first New York year sharing a huge co-op apartment overlooking the Brooklyn Museum and the Botanic Garden with its owner. It was a bit like living with your mom, except that Mom in this case was a lively African-American woman in her mid-70s who’d known everyone from Alvin Ailey to W.E.B. Du Bois and had been married to a Namibian freedom fighter. With a subway entrance close enough to swan-dive into, it was very convenient, but the trains rumbled beneath us 24/7, orange sodium lights burned on the Museum, and the yobs on their crotch rockets, zooming down the parkway at 2 a.m. like a bunch of angry hornets, got in the way of sleep. The rent was too high, especially for a place that never really felt like our own. Virginia Woolf is onto something.

We focused our search at first on Park Slope,  a neighborhood of large, genteel brownstones on tree-lined streets sloping gently down west of Prospect Park. However, we were daunted by stratospheric rents and the hordes of narcissists-by-proxy bowling pedestrians aside as they pushed their Harvard-bound progeny down the sidewalks in strollers which gave new meaning to the term Urban Assault Vehicle. Park Slope, we learned, is where Manhattan bond traders go to breed.

Nearby Windsor Terrace has a looser, slightly scruffier working-class vibe, with people of all shapes, ages and colors living over the Korean groceries and ethnic restaurants. Hispanic kids on trikes chase each other around the sidewalks on warm nights, watched over by groups of chatting parents. There’s a huge Catholic church painted pink inside, an Irish pub that only has Bud and Bud Light on draft, a New Zealand meat pie shop where the artsier young folks like to hang. Farrell’s, the pub, didn’t allow women until sometime in the 70s when Shirley MacLaine stopped by and nobody had the nerve to throw her out.

You can eat cheap in Windsor Terrace. Joe’s Pizza (whose else?) has huge pizza slices for three bucks, and you can get five killer garlic knots for a dollar. Or for a recovering Brit like myself, indulge in a steak-and-kidney pie from Dub Pies for five bucks and change.

Our own favorite watering-hole is tucked away down a side street. Rhythm ‘n’ Booze (I am not making that up) is the last refuge of the genial Italian and Irish geezers who used to own the neighborhood. “What can I get yese?” asks the slender, dark-haired waitress from Antrim. It’ll often be a perfectly done pair of pork chops or a generous slab of grilled salmon, for half of what you’d pay in Manhattan. Accompanied, of course, by a fresh pint of Brooklyn Lager, brewed in nearby Williamsburg by people who know what they’re doing.

On weekends when I’m in town, we go for walks in the Park, threading our way between softball games on the Great Lawn, watching the dogs chase ducks in their very own swimming pond. Sometimes we do takeout for dinner and go up on the roof to watch the green lights twinkle on the Verrazano Bridge.

Windsor Terrace isn’t a perfect neighborhood. Graffiti disfigure many of the rolling steel shutters that hide store and restaurant windows at night. On weekends before the Monday pickup, trash spills over the sidewalk bins and flies around in the street. Many of the stores and restaurants only take cash; the ATM charges mount up. And I do use the word “schlep” more often lately, especially when that three-story staircase looms and I have a full suitcase or a bulging laundry bag. But it’s friendly and quiet and real, and less than forty-five minutes from Broadway, and when I’m there, it feels like home.

People who think manufacturing or high technology drives Vermont’s economy are way off base. As anyone knows who has driven down Route 12 on Labor Day weekend, it’s yard sales. One runs a veritable gauntlet of them on every major roadway from the first nice weekend in April to the last one in early November—not just yards, but garages and barns and fire halls and churches too.

In addition to being a basic industry, the sale of unwanted junk is a major component of Vermont’s tourist economy: witness the annual Chelsea Flea Market, when the entire population of that shire town, along with associated out-of-town and flatland hustlers, lines Route 110 and both Town Greens with aluminum folding tables with wonky legs, and sets out to extract maximum revenue from whatever they are eager to be rid of: one-armed dolls, canning jars without lids, polyester doubleknit pants in lime green and burnt orange, those thick cheap vases in which you get arrangements from the florist when you’re in the hospital, crockpots, espresso makers missing a key valve, salad spinners in various stages of grunge, dolls in garish crochet dresses that fit over rolls of toilet-paper, Brady Bunch lunchboxes, and dot-matrix computer printers.

They’re getting more and more prevalent, and more desperate. Witness the pathetic and ubiquitous little piles at the corners of lawns all over the state, topped with a piece of corrugated cardboard sporting a big “Free” in Magic Marker capitals, without which they would be mistaken for items left out for the Casella pickup, which is where most of it will end up eventually.

A number of key demographic trends are driving this phenomenon and, by inference, the rise of eBay and the decline in America’s traditional retail economy over the last decade or so. Simply put: the majority of the population has reached an age at which we have too much stuff. Baby boomers have peaked in their “wealth-building” years (also known as their stuff-accumulating years). Many are looking to de-clutter and simplify their lives in a quest for spiritual purity. In this they are hampered by the determination and cunning of their aged relatives who are downsizing into assisted-living facilities and senior housing.

My mother, for example, routinely presents me when I visit with cardboard boxes, tied up with string and package-taped to withstand earthquakes, whose contents she refuses to divulge. “They’re just a few wee things I thought you’d like to have,” she says, all Scottish-American innocence. “I could always throw them away, but they belonged to your grandmother…” These I will open at home to find such heirlooms as a holey pair of my grandfather’s socks and a few of my grandmother’s Kleenexes, mostly unused. Well, that’s an exaggeration, but only a slight one.

I’d better confess right here that I have a hard time passing a yard sale by. Every now and then, there’s something amazing that you feel sick just to think of having missed—the ultimate score. A sleek black leather jacket that I wear on my forays to Brooklyn comes to mind. A barely-worn full-length mink which I presented to my mother on her 80th birthday, thereby fulfilling one of her life-long fantasies. A Balans chair knockoff that’s kept me from repeat back surgery. Worth every nickel, all of them.

Multiply my situation by a few score of millions, and you have the great American stuff surplus. It doesn’t help that dollar stores are now blighting the landscape with an unending supply of cheap Chinese-produced tchotchkes and enough plasticware to have solved the energy crisis had the oil from which they were made been used for fuel instead of feedstocks. The seductiveness of “look what you can get for only a buck!” has done its part to clutter the basements and garages of Vermont.

Apropos of which, I think I’ve got an answer to the problem of rising energy costs, diminishing fossil fuel supplies, and the imminent demise of the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant. I need to preface this by noting that I yield to no man in my bibliomania—my house is at structural risk from the groaning contents of its bookcases— and I was far more creeped out by the Nazi book-burning scene in “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” than even the infamous “Why did it have to be snakes?” from “Raiders of the Lost Ark.”

That said, I think the solution to Vermont’s energy shortages lies in the combustion of possessions which people have tried in vain to offload at yard sales. Chief among them: Reader’s Digest Condensed Books. Honestly, have you ever seen even the most fanatical yard-sale vulture buy one of these? Yet there they are, on the lawns of every participant in Montpelier’s annual Liberty Street Yard Sale—piles of them in cardboard boxes with the flaps torn off, or stacked on the shelf of a scratched and dangerously tipsy wooden bookcase with “$5.00” scrawled in Flair pen on a piece of masking tape. “I’ll throw in the books for free,” the owner says half-heartedly, knowing the attempt to delegate his trash-disposal dilemma will be in vain.

Could even the most devoted literacy crusader mourn the fiery demise of the condensed works of Frances Parkinson Keyes and Louis Bromfield, or even the archetypally Victorian poetical works of Felicia Hemans (she of “The boy stood on the burning deck”),  particularly if the binding is mildewed to blackness from years in a damp corner of the cow-barn? Come on—I’m waiting. I’m not hearing any shrieks of protest. There—I thought not.

Near-infinite as the supply of these blights on the literary landscape seems, they’d need supplementation to constitute a reliable energy supply, which brings me to National Geographics. As eerily well-preserved as the late Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, the Picture of Dorian Gray, or George Hamilton, they blind you with their taxicab-yellow glossiness in piles on a dusty old school-desk, glow in the web-thickened dark of barn shelves, and sit solid as brick walls in the aforementioned flapless cardboard boxes. No one wants them, but no one can bear to throw them out. There’s no question they have cool pictures, especially those that date from more innocent times when the only acceptable way to depict the naked human breast photographically was jiggling amid the beads and cowrie shells of African tribal dancers. This is also how most of us learned about the aesthetic and medical peril of Cooper’s Droop.

But if you really want them, you can get all the back issues of National Geographic on DVD—my husband has them, so I know this is true—so why not put all that slick biomass to some socially useful purpose? Burn ‘em, I say, along with the Reader’s Digest Condenseds and the cat-clawed cottage-square afghans in colors no one can stand to be around (purple, brown and mustard yellow—what was she thinking?) and the one, battered brown lace-up shoe, and whatever other combustibles are left over from yard sales and failed attempts at edge-of-the-lawn giveaways.

The economic development folks and the utilities should go for this too. There are jobs to be had, for roving fuel-gatherers with trucks and scales who’d pay the hapless yard-salers by the pound for such leftovers from their retailing efforts as can be made to yield up heat and motive power. Their trucks could carry a logo like “Shoes for Industry,” as the old Firesign Theater routine once proclaimed. And the state’s inventors could get busy developing chippers, shredders and pelletizers that can handle multiple materials, from mildewed book stock to polyester doubleknit.

Well, shoes might take a little gasoline for starter, but there’s heat and the promise of energy independence for our brave little state in them thar items, along with the afghans and the National Geographics and the Reader’s Digest Condensed Books and the back issues of U.S. News and World Report and AgriView and the stained polyester napkin-and-tablecloth set that’s seen one too many Thanksgivings and the bottomless cane-seated chairs so rickety and dried out there isn’t a hope they’ll ever again support a human tush.

And with all due respect to Central Vermont Public Service, they all smell a lot better than cow-poop.

Worker protests, unbridled capitalist greed and the specter of international terrorism shadow the sunlit summer of 1903 in an America still reeling from a President’s murder by an avowed anarchist.

Widowed Rough Rider and Shakespearean actor Dade Wyatt longs to cast off the shadows of his own past and retreat to a quiet life as a security operative for pulp and paper tycoon Warren Dodge. But when Dodge’s plans to host Wyatt’s old commander, President Teddy Roosevelt, on his idyllic Vermont estate are imperiled by a guest’s mysterious death, Wyatt must descend into a maelstrom of desperate poverty, anarchy and class war to safeguard the President and bring a killer to justice.

Chapter 1

The boat gliding southeast from Heron Island to the Vermont shore might have held a courting couple out for a Saturday excursion, the woman reclining under a lacy parasol in the stern, the man pulling steadily and evenly on the oars.

“But, Mr. Wyatt, surely I can persuade you to join us for the ceremony?” Mrs. Van Dorn’s tone was half entreaty, half protest.

The oarsman paused, the lines of his arm muscles softening. His dark eyes met her china-blue gaze.

“You’re very kind—but I promised Mr. Dodge a game of chess when I get back, and he is so rarely at leisure.” A slight, apologetic lift of one shoulder. “One wants to be a good guest.”

She leaned towards him, letting the shade of her hat-brim deepen the blue of her eyes. “I’m sure Warren would understand—don’t you want to see the new steamer?”

It was a perfect midsummer afternoon, the sky blue as a flag, dabbed with just enough cloud-fluff for decoration. Tiny wavelets danced on the surface of the lake’s darker blue. The Vermont III would be the largest steamer ever launched on Lake Champlain, and there was to be a band concert in Burlington afterwards.

Wyatt bent again to his oars.  “I’ll hope to have a ride on it before the summer’s out.  I’m sure you and Mr. Van Dorn will have a fine time.”

The rebuff stung, though gently delivered.  It almost spoiled the small victory of getting more than ten words out of him after a campaign of five days, an effort that must end with her husband’s imminent arrival.  She settled back among the silk cushions and let her gaze wander from the honey-colored ribs of the Adirondack boat, rolling slightly from her movement, to the play of muscle along Wyatt’s shoulders and arms.

A week’s sun had bronzed the cheekbones of his long face, and with the thick, dark mustache bracketing a wide, well-shaped mouth, he could pass for a pirate, or a lawman of the Wild West. Her mind’s eye pinned a sheriff’s star on his collarless white shirt, replaced the boater which shaded his eyes with a gray Stetson.

The Van Dorns often socialized with the Dodges back in the City, but this was their first invitation to Dodge’s private island with its newly built Camp. Her husband Gerald, a genial, portly merchant banker at Morgan’s, was to join her by train from New York. The company of Mr. Dade Wyatt, mannerly but laconic and thereby fascinating, had driven all thought of Gerald from her head. But the object of imagination and curiosity was not yet to be drawn out, and the shoreline was fast approaching.

“You will be here for Mr. Roosevelt’s visit, won’t you, Mr. Wyatt?”

The President had accepted an invitation to Heron Island for a few days in August, drawn by the promise of bird watching in the cool Vermont air and by a generational debt to his host, Warren Dodge, whose late father, a pulp and paper baron turned Congressman back in the eighties, had been a moderating influence in Roosevelt’s brash political youth. The Van Dorns, along with the Dodges’ Vermont friends, the Webbs and the Fisks, had been invited for a midsummer stay, and would later be guests for the great occasion.

Roosevelt’s visit was the last thing Wyatt wanted to talk about. A specialist in security and investigations, he had come to the island at the insistence of his friend Dodge to survey arrangements for the President’s stay.  He was joining the party for dinners as a fellow guest, but disappearing for much of the day to scout nearby islands and bays in the Adirondack boat.

Milly Van Dorn had done him a favor, Wyatt reflected, by requesting conveyance and presenting him with an opportunity for close observation. He watched her push back a strand of auburn hair and fan the faintest dew of moisture from the exquisite bow of her upper lip.  It occurred to him that, like many rich men’s wives he’d known these last few years, she might be inclined to other favors …

“I guess I’ll be back in August,” he said slowly.

“I suppose he’ll have to bring a lot of guards with him, won’t he? After that whole—debacle in Buffalo—I can’t imagine how they could have let that happen, can you? Hiding his gun-hand under a handkerchief! Shouldn’t someone have spotted that?”

It was Wyatt’s turn to be stung, and far worse. In the two years since the McKinley catastrophe, for which no one but himself had attached blame to him, he had stuck to such low-stakes assignments as nosing out labor organizers in Dodge’s paper factories and keeping watch on agitators in crowds for political speeches. Dull work compared with his prior life, but as much as his frame of mind could manage these days.

He’d failed once, and that failure had shattered a nation. And now Dodge wanted him back on the front line, this time to protect a man he revered as a reformer and as a commander. He could barely stand the thought of putting himself at such risk again.

He shook off the haunted vision and brought his gaze back to his companion’s. “And Mr. Van Dorn—he’ll be able to join you then too?”

“Unless Mr. Morgan has him off on one of his—acquisitions.” There was the faintest curl of the cupid’s-bow. “Though I dare say even he would have to excuse Gerald for a visit with the President.”

“Good for business, I should think.”

“I suppose so. I find business talk so tiresome, don’t you? But then I don’t even know what your business is. Perhaps it’s fascinating to you.”

“I don’t suppose anyone’s business is fascinating to anyone else,” Wyatt parried. “You’ve met the President before?”

“Well—no, not really. Gerald knows him, of course. But you must know him— Mr. Dodge told me you were in the Rough Riders! What is he like? I confess I’m dying to meet him. He sounds so bold. So manly. It’s all I could do not to tell my girl-friends about it. But they said we mustn’t, for security reasons and so forth.” She gave a little shrug and rolled her eyes. “As if anyone I knew would be a threat to him!”

“I guess you can’t always tell,” Wyatt said.

She frowned at him and pursed her lips. “Good heavens, you’re not suggesting…”

“Oh, not your girl-friends, of course, but—servants, for instance, overhearing things. We, ah, don’t always know what their outside interests are.”

Her eyes flickered away for an instant, but she cupped her chin in her hand and gave him the full strength of her blue gaze. “I dare say you’re right. What with being positively overrun with foreigners these days—I do love the new Camp, don’t you? It reminds me of the Webbs’ place in the Adirondacks—” Her backwards look brought into his line of vision a profile that could have graced a cameo.

The roofline of the shingled lodge was dropping out of sight now, the cliff-girdled island with its verdant lawns and copses of poplar and young maples receding with each stroke of the oars, the low hills of the Grand Isle peninsula blurring to gray-blue beyond.

“You’ve spent time with the Webbs?”

Dr. Seward Webb, an eccentric New York millionaire who had married a Vanderbilt heiress, had just built a railroad across Lake Champlain that joined the southern tip of Grand Isle to the mainland. Webb had hosted the President at Shelburne Farms, his hackney horse-breeding estate on Lake Champlain, the previous summer.

“We’ve known them for ages! Well—three or four years. I count Mrs. Webb as a friend—the doctor’s rather reclusive—oh, I don’t mean inhospitable, just quiet, he couldn’t be more gracious— Gerald had something to do with financing one of his railroads. And we met the Fisks last summer—such a delightful couple!”

Wyatt remembered that Roosevelt had been addressing a Republican gathering at the Grand Isle mansion of Nelson Fisk, the former Vermont lieutenant governor, when he’d received word that McKinley had been shot. Another sting of painful memory…

He watched the rosy color ebb from Milly Van Dorn’s cheeks as she lapsed into silence. In her flower-trimmed straw and dotted-swiss muslin, she was a picture for Sargent—no, it was far more personal than that.  She was having the same effect on him that the smell of bread wafting from a bakery has on a man who has not realized until then that he is hungry. Her cheerful prattle, which might in other circumstances have irritated him, seemed all of a piece with the sparkle and wink of the waves, the gossiping breeze bending the crowns of trees on the shore. He let it blow aside the veil of melancholy which had been closing in on him, felt in himself the desire to respond.

Through half-lowered lashes, Mrs. Van Dorn watched Wyatt’s arms keeping the boat’s pitch-and-roll barely perceptible as they drew towards the Vermont shore. He was too lean and muscular for a man of her class, where corpulence was a badge of success, and he didn’t seem much interested in the doings of society. Though his hair was still dark and thick, with barely a hint of gray at the temples, there was something in the set of his face—not lines, really, except for a few light crows’ feet she could see when the sun flashed beneath the brim of his boater— something that betokened the experiences of maturity, of one past some prime. Perhaps not even a physical prime, but a prime of the heart, of the affections…

The Webbs’ carriage would take Mrs. Van Dorn to Burlington, as they had arranged earlier in the week. She strained forward, wanting to have first sight of the boat-tunnel under the Sandbar causeway.

“Have you known the Dodges long, Mrs. Van Dorn?”

“Oh, indeed! About five or six years now.” She lit up with his renewed attention. “Shortly before I married Gerald, we were invited to their box at the Metropolitan—so that I could be inspected, you see, and—“

“—I dare say you passed!”

She felt his smile melt something in her core. “Are you fond of opera, Mr. Wyatt? I adore Puccini! Gerald thinks he’s sentimental—I can’t think how he’d know, he’s sound asleep halfway through the first act…” she wrinkled her nose and shrugged, trailing a diamond-dewed hand in the water.

“I’m told his Tosca was splendid—”

“Oh, it was!  So—grand, so passionate! But there’s something…terrifying about Tosca, don’t you think?”  She shuddered. “Killing for love. I could never do that.”

“What about dying for love?” Wyatt’s eyes were intent on her face. She looked quickly away with a little laugh.

“Good heavens! Not that either. All I meant was—I prefer La Bohème.  Poor Mimi! Have you seen—”

“No. I haven’t.”  She saw something in him shut down, shut her out. The causeway was drawing closer, and she couldn’t bear to let him slip away.

“Forgive my asking—is there a Mrs. Wyatt?”

“There was, once.”

He looked away, but she caught the shadow that passed over his face. He had paused in his rowing and she could hear the water drip from the oars.

“I’m sorry.”

“No need.” He forced a smile. “It’s been a long time.”

“How strange that a—such a cultured man as you should be alone.” She leaned forward, her face intent on his.

“Lot of that in the world.” He began to row again. “Wise to get used to it,”  he added, surprising himself with so disingenuous an addition.

“Oh, pray don’t say that!” She held up a hand in protest. “One mustn’t cut oneself off from life. One must turn to—to the comforts that friends can give.”

He looked over his shoulder. There were figures on the Sandbar causeway, waving at them, two black horses hitched to a yellow-wheeled wagonette behind them.

“It seems your friends are waiting for you already.”

“Do let us be friends, Mr. Wyatt!” She let a dimpled smile lighten the intensity of the plea.

Wyatt took a breath, returned the smile and plunged in his turn. “I should like that—naturally.”

“I could tell when we met that you were—a sympathetic person. How wonderful that we shall have a few more days on the island—to get to know each other better. And pray don’t worry about Gerald!” she waved a dismissive hand. They were closing in on the shore, where their voices could almost reach. “He’s not the jealous sort.”

She strained forward and shielded her eyes. “There’s Mrs. Webb, all in white—and those must be the Fisks.” She pointed to a slender, dark-haired man with a neat black beard and a tiny, plump currant-bun of a woman standing next to him, both smiling and waving at them. “Oh, look!  Dr. Webb came as well. They said they would all come, if it was a nice day, but I was afraid they might just send the carriage.”

“You’ll be in good company for the ride to Burlington, then. I’m glad.”

After the Burlington concert, the Van Dorns and Fisks would sail back to the island on the Webbs’ steam-yacht, Elfreida.  Dr. Webb, a compact, red-bearded man with gold-rimmed glasses, wore a yachting cap and a nautical blue blazer. He climbed down onto the rubbled causeway and shouted a welcome. His wife Lila hovered behind him with an anxious smile, the breeze ruffling the white silk flowers on her elaborate bonnet.

“Do be careful of your footing, Seward dear—be sure Milly’s got a good grip on your arm. How kind of you to bring Milly to us, Mr. Wyatt!”

Wyatt glided in along the bank of the Sandbar and threw Webb a line.  Mrs. Van Dorn rose, steadied against the boat’s rocking by Wyatt’s hand at her back. She gathered her skirts and, taking the doctor’s waiting hand, stepped gracefully out of the boat. She thanked her ferryman with a soft-eyed smile, wondered why she was left with the feeling that Mr. Wyatt had learned more about her on their little voyage than she had about him.

We’ll be posting new chapters of R.A. Harold’s Heron Island here about once a week. Download  Heron Island in full for the Kindle at http://www.amazon.com/Heron-Island-ebook/dp/B003Z0D29I/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&s=digital-text&qid=1282493050&sr=1-1. For other e-readers, download the full novel from Smashwords at http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/14659. Or order a print copy of Heron Island at http://www.wordclay.com/BookStore/BookStoreBookDetails.aspx?bookid=61329, on amazon.com at http://www.amazon.com/Heron-Island-R-Harold/dp/0983160902/ref=sr_1_2_title_1_p?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1291921860&sr=1-2 or from Powell’s Books at http://www.powells.com/biblio/61-9780578068626-1