Chapter 1 #2
Bob Jansen had lived in Orchard all his life.
He was one of the Cemetery families, his Dutch ancestors having settled along the Hudson nearly two centuries ago.
He knew everyone and their children, the streets, the history.
He bought Betsy flowers and sang her Frank Sinatra songs when she was down.
He let Alice go for sundaes on Main Street, play in the sprinklers on Carly Gianotti’s lawn till after dark, roam around the neighbourhood on her bike, riding to the banks of the vast, silent Hudson River, where the mist rose like ghosts on the water, the pine trees fringing the pebbled edges.
The Hudson was the edge of everything. They said it was so deep in places that no one knew what was down there.
Rumour had it there were sharks older than the Declaration of Independence, invisible in the black, ice-cold depths; Diane Hendricks swore they had swum there from the Arctic millions of years ago.
She said they were growing larger and more dangerous, waiting till the day when they would glide into Manhattan and rise out of the water, snatching men and women from their cars on the George Washington Bridge, or from the river path, and eating them whole.
But, for now, Diane said, they were just lurking.
Waiting for the right time. Diane also claimed to have seen a skeleton’s hand poking out of a tomb in the cemetery in the churchyard where Cemetery Supper was held every year.
She said there were hidden messages in ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ if you played the 45 single at 33.
She had heard Mr Tucker, the Orchard High School caretaker, was really a warlock.
Diane and Alice had been friends since they were babies, but this was yet more evidence of how they had grown apart, for, while Alice believed in ghosts, and though she increasingly thought society was bogus and needed to change, she did not believe Mr Tucker was a warlock.
She could believe in the creatures lurking in the deepest fathoms of the river, though, just waiting.
Alice felt life was like that sometimes: waiting. Waiting for things to start. To begin.
‘Dad, you know how you want me to be happy and it’s my birthday tomorrow?
’ she began, once she and her father were seated at the table at Mackie’s, and Josie the waitress had taken the order.
They always sat at the same table – the booth by the window, where, on one side, was the pink marble counter and the different sundaes on a sign behind it, and, on the other, the great glass view of the corner that looked down Main Street, toward the train station and the river.
And they always ordered the same thing, ever since Alice was big enough to sit at a booth without sliding on to the floor.
Her dad had a Rita Hayworth – chocolate, almond paste and glacé cherries smothered in chocolate sauce, because he loved Rita Hayworth and glacé cherries – and Alice had a Cemetery Supper Surprise, brownies chopped up into chocolate ice cream in alternating layers with marshmallows, angel frosting and a red strawberry sauce, and a crumbling stick of chocolate on top.
When their order arrived, her dad would always taste her sundae and say he wished he’d ordered it.
Bob Jansen took a sip of water, then pushed the glass back to the right place. He didn’t answer.
‘Hey!’ she nudged him. ‘Dad?’
‘Yes, Allie?’ Her dad pushed his glasses up his nose. ‘I’m sorry. Sorry, honey. What did you say?’
Alice cleared her throat. ‘Can I go to the dance with Jack Maynard?’
‘What did your mother say?’
‘She said no.’
Her dad spread out his hands. ‘There you go.’
‘But I don’t think it’s fair, Dad. Jack Maynard’s a nice boy.’
‘Your mother knows best,’ Bob said, and he looked at her firmly but with the kind eyes that could never really be brought to anger. ‘He’s seventeen. You’re fifteen.’
‘Aw, come on, Dad. I’m sixteen tomorrow. I’m a sophomore.’
‘Don’t I know that?’
‘How should I know you know that? You’ve barely mentioned my birthday. Neither has Mom.’
‘Alice Jansen, shame on you for these untruths,’ he said. ‘What do you want me to do – have you go across to Valhalla and ask Mr Kynaston if he’s giving me the day off? Because of all the plans? The plans, Alice?’
‘Mr Kynaston gave you the day off?’
‘He sure did. And he wanted me to go up to the town hall to get some permit for the orchards, transferring it to my name for our new business, and I said, “I can’t go, sir. It’s my Allie’s sweet sixteenth tomorrow.
” And he said’ – and her father’s face creased into a smile – ‘he said – never mind what he said!’
‘What did he say?’
Her father put on a big, dramatic voice. ‘“You and that daughter – I’ll be revenged as I may!”’
‘Very good.’
‘Do you know what play that’s from, Allie?’
‘ Much Ado about Nothing , Dad.’
‘Well done, Allie. We’ll go to Stratford-upon-Avon some day and we’ll see it.’
‘Promise?’
He put his hand on Alice’s. ‘ I am all the daughters of my father’s house, and all the brothers too, and yet I know not. ’
‘Dad, stop,’ said Alice, sufficiently embarrassed by her father quoting Shakespeare to interject, though she was as gentle as he was, and hated doing it.
‘You want me to sing, instead? Loudly? You know there’s not a verse of “Sixteen Going on Seventeen” I don’t know, Allie –’
Her dad had had a bad time the previous year, what with missing the first payment on his loan from the bank to buy the orchards.
It had made him ill. So he’d had to go away that time, and when he came back to them he had acquired the LP of The Sound of Music .
It just cheered him up, he said, Julie Andrews and her voice and those mountains and those kids.
Alice knew he was in a bad way when The Sound of Music went on the record player.
Wilder Kynaston, routinely touted as America’s greatest living novelist, lived at Valhalla, a notable country house on the banks of the Hudson, a fairytale miniature castle with a tower, stepped gables, red roof tiles over creamy rendered walls and a finial-studded wooden porch that faced on to the Hudson.
Wilder was her father’s boss, and erstwhile schoolmate, since both had attended Parnell, the exclusive boys’ school upstate.
When Bob was a boy, the Jansens had lost their money in the Great Depression and sold their orchards to the Kynastons; their family farm was demolished, houses built over it.
Bob Jansen became a scholarship boy, taunted by his peers for his too-short blazer and the eagerness with which he studied, for he had to succeed now, to make some money for his defenestrated family.
The Kynastons had been on the banks of the Hudson for even longer than the Jansens, before the Civil War, around the time of the last of the Munsee tribe.
Most of the Munsee were long gone, of course, having died of fever or been slaughtered or moved on West. Always West.
Wilder’s first novel, Where Munsee Lived , was described as a quixotic masterpiece about one man travelling across America through different times and places.
His second, Garson Quayle , featured a quixotic hero trying to find his place in the world.
Alice had tried to read both, but couldn’t get past Chapter 4 of either.
On the basis of these two books was Wilder Kynaston hailed as the next great American novelist, but, though he wrote short stories that appeared in places like the New Yorker , it had been almost ten years since he had published a novel.
Some people said he wouldn’t ever publish again.
One afternoon, after Alice’s father had left school and qualified as an accountant (there was no money for him to go to Yale, as Jansen men before him had done), Bob had bumped into Wilder in a bookshop in Manhattan and though he, Wilder, was several years older than Bob, and though he, Bob, did not have money and Wilder did, Wilder remembered his old schoolmate and neighbour.
They’d fallen to talking about literature, which led to the great event of 1958, when Bob Jansen saved Wilder Kynaston from some trouble with the IRS.
What this trouble was Alice was never quite sure, but it must have been significant, because after the crisis had been resolved Bob and Betsy were offered the Valhalla gatehouse and moved in when Alice was eight.
In exchange for living there rent-free, Bob gave up his job at the accountancy firm and looked after the orchards, as well as Wilder’s business affairs – his tax, his finances, his deals with foreign publishers, the administration of family matters, and so on.
While it meant he was always around for Alice and her mother, it also obscured the fact that Bob was not at all suited to this role of meeting someone else’s whims and needs, firefighting, managing many diffuse, boring, unpredictable tasks.
The matter with the IRS had been extremely simple, easy for someone like him to solve.
He didn’t care about bookkeeping or accounts. He wanted something of his own.
Fifteen months earlier, Bob had borrowed the money to buy back the orchards, hoping to revive them and his family’s name, which had once been synonymous with apples and apple trees in that part of the world.
He would make apple sauce, juice, pies; have a stand at county fairs and Halloween and homecoming parades every fall.
‘Allie,’ he’d told her excitedly, ‘good times are coming our way.’