f r o m ___ O n c e _ A r c a d i a__________
by Mark Trainer__________
I once heard Walker Tillingham's father call my own father a traitor to his family name and a sorry excuse for a man. Needless to say, the comment was not meant for my ears. I was only ten at the time, in a barber's chair three down from Wyatt Tillingham, who went quiet as soon as my presence was pointed out to him. Without fully understanding what was behind Mr. Tillingham's words, I understood they had to do with the position my father had taken in a town controversy. I should make it clear that I never much held Mr. Tillingham's words on that day against him, except in as much as they provided me with an early example of the family's general lack of discretion. It was a turbulent time for Balsam, and people were likely to say just about anything.Dennis Mulrooney was a New York Irishman who swept into Balsam sometime in the early seventies. He picked Balsam as the ideal place to move into early retirement with his young wife and children, then tried to remake the place in conformity to some resort ideal he had carried into town with him. He was surprised to find the town resistant to his plans to revitalize our sleepy community. The first big contretemps was over his proposal for an outdoor skating rink. The zoning commission unanimously voted against Mulrooney, then again when he proposed a new movie theater for historic Dunston Street. Both times any appeal was denied, and after he petitioned to have the abandoned horse show grounds re-zoned for new homes construction, he was formally asked to cease and desist in his downtown business activities. He was denied membership in the Balsam Country Club, and the historic home they had bought upon their arrival was that year removed from the Junior League House Tour. Their exclusion from Balsam was entire, save for one letter in our local paper in the early spring of 1973. The letter praised the consistent efforts of those who had fought to defend the historic integrity of the downtown over the past years, but warned of an encroaching xenophobia and scapegoat mentality on the part of Balsam toward Mr. Mulrooney.
The author of the letter was my father. On the day it appeared, I remember his taking many phone calls from close friends whose names were pronounced by my mother in an anguished whisper as she stood with her hand clasped over the receiver's mouthpiece. More than his words, I remember the tone of my father's voice that day: patient and certain. He was not, nor had he ever been, any fan of Dennis Mulrooney and his projects, my father explained to each caller. He only felt that the personalized attacks overheard at any time of day at any gathering place in town showed Balsam at its worst, and were certainly beneath the dignity of such a venerable community. His point, he explained, was as simple as that.
So my father was surprised when Mulrooney himself appeared at our door late that afternoon. He had seen the letter and chosen to regard it as an unqualified endorsement. He pumped my father's hand and assured him that the support from such an established son of Balsam would be of great help to him and his family. I remember the pained expression on my father's face as he showed Mulrooney into the living room to sit down.
"Mr. Mulrooney," my father began, lighting a pipe, "I think we both need to understand each other."
At this point, my mother led me from the room. We did not return for more than half an hour. When we did, we found Dennis Mulrooney as effusive as he had been upon his arrival. Yet now my father was also smiling in his quiet way. My mother--no doubt with the exasperated telephone voices of respectable Balsam still in her ears--looked confused.
"I don't ask anyone to like me, Geoff," Mulrooney said on his way out, in what would be the only time I heard someone shorten my father's name in that way. "I only ask them to give me a fighting chance."
From that day on, a delicate friendship existed between my father and Mulrooney. It was built more on mutual respect than affection, and was played out only at those places in Balsam where they chanced to run into each other.
Like most excitement and trouble in Balsam, the flap over Dennis Mulrooney faded in the next few years. Instead of the downtown, he set his sights on the outlying parts of Balsam, where no one much cared who built what. By the end of that decade, his "retirement" included ownership of the properties for two car lots, a family steak house, and car wash and detailing center. According to my father, Tyler Dugan offered to sponsor the Mulrooneys for membership at the club a number of years later, but Mulrooney declined.
My first extended period away from Balsam was when I left that old Maryland town for Haverford in '78. Especially during those college years, I kept in close touch with Balsam, talking with my parents at least once a week. Through them I heard of the various goings on about town, and was able to feel still part of the life there.
Occasionally my parents would have news of the Tillinghams. Mrs. Tillingham, under the influence, had driven through the post and rail fence on the Keene property and injured a prize cow. Skipper, who had gone off to Hampden-Sydney the year before I left, was back in Balsam the following autumn to finish out his degree at the community college. And little Walker was just making a name for himself at the junior high.
When I spent the summer after graduation in Balsam before starting work in New York, the new generation of Tillinghams was as much a presence in town as their forebears had been. My parents would never have said as much to me directly, but for all the wildcatting the Tillingham children did, they had remained loyal to Balsam in a way Mom and Dad respected. Devon had already fallen from grace by then, but as if to compensate for her, Walker had come into his own. There was talk of his making all-state football during his senior year, and he was being courted by universities up and down the East Coast.
Without ever finishing his degree, Skipper went into business in Balsam. He tried his hand at real estate for a couple of years, quit that, and with the help of his family, started an auto-leasing concern out by Route 253. By this time I was hundreds of miles away from Balsam, so what follows is hearsay. But it is my parents' hearsay. And especially as regards my father, anything told to me by them I take to be absolutely true. It so happens that the property on which Skipper Tillingham's auto leasing business stood was owned by none other than Dennis Mulrooney. Keep in mind that this was nearly ten years after the uproar against Mulrooney. If Mulrooney remembered any of the harsh words Wyatt Tillingham had employed in the campaign against him, they had likely lost their sting with time. Or perhaps not. Different people will tell you different things. Mulrooney owned and managed at least fifteen properties at this time. When plans for a new bypass were announced and the location disclosed, Mulrooney must have thrilled to discover that four of his adjacent properties were located at that point where the bypass would rejoin 253. Skipper's business was on one of these properties. Now it is a generally accepted fact that Skipper Tillingham could have signed a new lease as early as June of that year, before the bypass plans were announced. The three neighboring businesses had. But he was of a mind to negotiate a lower rent with Mulrooney. With the lease up in September, Skipper had kept Mulrooney at bay until August. And on a humid afternoon in the middle of that month, Mulrooney paid a visit to Tillingham Leasing to discuss the rent. It was said at the time that when Mulrooney announced the increase, Skipper only looked out the window of his office onto the marshy bottom land behind his lot and said,
"That's a hell of a lot of money, Dennis."
I imagine, given his age and disposition, that Mulrooney would not have been able to keep a slightly paternal tone from his voice. He might have told Skipper that had the two of them come to some agreement earlier that summer, as Mr. Mulrooney had wished all along, they would not have been having this present conversation. And I imagine that Skipper Tillingham had received enough parental discipline through the twenty-five years he had accrued then to let him master himself to the extent of telling Mulrooney, "Don't ask me to like it, Dennis; but you do what you have to do." I imagine the two of them standing in that office with its faint mildew scent, each trying to see further into the other than the few words exchanged or their awkward gestures would allow. For Skipper's part, he likely knew that as slow as business had been, this exorbitant increase would put him under. Apparently Mulrooney extended a hand to Skipper and said, "I would like to think there are no hard feelings between us." Skipper Tillingham took the hand and answered him with the full force of that attractive Tillingham smile that could at once make you admire the beauty of their Saxon features and at the same time feel a little more beautiful yourself as you watched it. Skipper raised his eyebrows and sighed.
"If you'll excuse me, Dennis, I'd better crunch some numbers so I can tell you where we stand."
After nearly a week had passed, Mulrooney still had not heard anything from Skipper. Just before the Labor Day weekend, however, he got a call in the early evening after he had come in from turning on his lawn sprinklers. Skipper apologized for not getting back to him sooner about the lease, and asked, if Mulrooney did not mind mixing business with pleasure, that Mulrooney come out to the family's annual picnic that Saturday afternoon with the revised papers.
This was a morbid little joke on Skipper's part. Labor Day was never much marked in Balsam, and anyone of the town's old guard would have laughed at the idea of the Tillingham's hosting an annual picnic. But even after a decade in Balsam, this was not the kind of fact of which Dennis Mulrooney would have been aware. I imagine Skipper felt this proved something.
That Saturday, Mulrooney drove his Lincoln Continental over to Wickham Lane just after the noon hour. You'd think he'd have wondered why there were only two cars parked in the circle in front of the house when he reached the top of the driveway. I imagine him grimacing at the thought that he, the perpetual outsider, had misunderstood the time given for the invitation, and so found himself again entering into an awkward situation. He said later that he heard loud music from the back of the house. So with a respectable Pinot Noir tucked under his arm, and the lease in triplicate copies in the pocket of his seersucker jacket, he followed the fieldstone path around the side patio and past Connie Tillingham's small green house attached to the rear corner just off the kitchen.
But behind the house, there was only the music, and Mulrooney looked around, squinting into the sunlight cutting through the maples. When he saw Skipper emerge from the garage, he asked him where the party was.
"It's right here, Dennis," he said.
And in the frame of that little door at the side of the garage, Mulrooney saw two more fair heads of hair with tennis-court tans. Then Mulrooney saw that there was a third. Two of them were carrying baseball bats--one a full size Louisville slugger, the other a little league size probably last used by Walker. The third carried a croquet mallet. Mulrooney looked at the four young men with wonder, and even let out a nervous derisive laugh.
Maybe one of them was a hothead. More likely he filled his role that day so tenuously that Mulrooney's laugh set him about establishing the way things were going to go from here--proving it to himself as much as the others. In any case, one of them charged, and before Dennis Mulrooney could fully absorb the situation he found himself in, he felt the searing impact of a baseball bat just above his knee. He fell on his side, the bottle of wine popping out from beneath his arm and rolling away on the grass.
"These are my friends," Skipper said. "Welcome to the party."
Mulrooney would not be able to identify the three other young men with Skipper Tillingham that day, and those in Balsam who knew of the incident pretended uncertainty. They were probably Bobby Ernfield, Cubby Ogden, and Ted Dunleavy. His other friends all worked for him--people Mulrooney would have known on sight.
Ogden would have been the odd man out, left to carry the croquet mallet. So it would have been he that took a golf-stroke swing that--Mulrooney seeing it coming and instinctively turning on his side--connected with Mulrooney's kidneys.
"You stupid little bastard," Mulrooney said through a grimace to Skipper. And even in his pain, he must have been wondering how Skipper possibly could have been this dumb, dumb enough to perpetrate such a thing at his family's home, leaving no doubt of accountability. The fact is that Skipper was dumb. Everyone in Balsam knew it. But just as poor Mulrooney wouldn't know the Labor Day traditions of his adoptive town, he didn't know that Skipper, just like his father, had the flash temper unique to the truly stupid. Not having armed himself, he took up the bottle Mulrooney had brought with him, and broke it on one of the large maples that dotted the lawn. The wine exploded all over Skipper, and he was left holding only the neck. This he held to Dennis Mulrooney's face. Skipper probably only intended to scare Mulrooney with a dueling-scar style cut in his cheek. But his excited hand jabbed the bottle's neck forward, and gouged out a cube of flesh just under Mulrooney's left eye. One of the others--probably Dunleavy or Ernfield--noticed the papers in Mulrooney's breast pocket. He reached down between the older and younger man and pulled them out.
"You brought these for me?" Skipper said, now in a high rage.
He pulled them away from his friend and tore at them.
"You know what this is?" he shouted in Mulrooney's face, which was now bleeding profusely. "This is shit. This is fucking potato-digging, carpet-bagging shit." One of the others saw fit to emphasize Skipper's point with a blow that landed on Mulrooney's side.
"For the love of God," Mulrooney said, "I've got a fucking heart condition."
"Here's how this is going to work," Skipper said, drawing a fold of papers from the back pocket of his jeans. "We're going to sign ourselves a new lease here today."
Skipper unfolded the papers for Mulrooney, and Mulrooney could see that some of the wine from the broken bottle had stained the document. By this point, Mulrooney knew he was going to do whatever would get him away from these little bastards the quickest. This meant resisting the impulse to point out to Skipper how pathetically ill conceived his plan was. And there blossomed in Mulrooney a new rage at just how ill conceived it was. After all these years in Balsam, he, Mulrooney, still did not merit any more from the Tillingham family than their dull-headed child's brutal half-thought-through extortion. His parents might just as well have been watching from an upstairs window. Two of Skipper's goons pulled Mulrooney up to a sitting position, which caused a hot pain to bite into his side. (This would turn out to be two broken ribs.) They put a pen in his hand. Mulrooney noticed the rent figure he was signing in agreement to. It was the same amount Skipper had been paying for his lot each of the past three years. And that anger flared up in him again. Not some insanely low figure, just the old rent same as it ever was. This, he knew, was the Tillingham version of honor.
"Make sure he doesn't bleed on the lease," Skipper said, and one of his friends laughed. "I wasn't joking," he snapped.
Mulrooney signed quickly, without a word, letting himself be supported by the two young men. As soon as the papers were back in Skipper's hands, they let him drop, and his head hit the root of one of the large Tillingham maples.
"You might be thinking of telling someone about our little party," Skipper said. "Before you do, I'll advise you to think of your ugly wife and those two fat kids of yours. Now clean yourself up and get the fuck out of here."
The four of them ran back to the house, like schoolboys fleeing a prank. It took Mulrooney several minutes to get himself to his feet. Several times he tried and stumbled. He knew he was being watched from inside, and worried that if he could not make his way to his car soon, they might come back out.
Just past the greenhouse, he began to weep, and prayed he was out of their sight. He managed eventually to get to his car, back down the driveway and make it out to the highway. He drove himself to St. Jude's emergency room, and from there called the police. Skipper Tillingham was in custody within the hour.
This was the story as it was told to my father the following day. Mulrooney came to see him at the house, walking stiffly with the help of a cane. It must have been nearly as hard for him to make it to my family's house as it had been for him to escape the Tillingham's. He asked my father's advice, and I'm as certain as I am of anything in this world of the course my father advised. Mulrooney had already retained an attorney, and Skipper's arraignment was later in the week. My father would have told him to take care of himself, first and foremost, and let the wheels of justice turn as they would against Skipper Tillingham.
My mother tells me that my father had a difficult few days following the Skipper Tillingham incident. A number of times she found him looking out over our back lawn as if, she imagined, he were trying to recreate the incident over on Wickham Lane and superimpose it on our own, not-very-different, property. He called the Mulrooney household a number of times, and received calls from there. Skipper had been released on bond the day following the attack, and apparently was back at the lot the following Monday.
Sometime on Wednesday my father called over to the Mulrooney house. After a long wait, Mulrooney's wife told him in a tremulous voice that Dennis had gone out and would not be back for a few hours. My father asked that Mulrooney call him at his earliest possible convenience. He heard nothing that evening, and the following morning he tried Mulrooney again, only to be told once more that the man he wanted was not there. It aggravated my father not to be able to get a hold of him, especially as the reason for his call was to deliver legal information Mulrooney had asked my father to look into for him. The arraignment was Friday, and by Thursday afternoon when my father walked into town for his biweekly haircut, he still had not heard back from Mulrooney.
I don't believe my father thought harm had come to Mulrooney, he knew at least the older Tillinghams were too smart for that. Frankly, my father didn't know what to think as he made his way down Dunston Street. And if I knew my father as well as I think, he probably made every effort to push the subject to the back of his mind and make the usual small talk with Tony while he had the sparse growth of two weeks snipped away. But it was during that haircut that he saw Skipper Tillingham crossing at the corner light with Katherine Dugan under his arm. And with only the briefest glimpse at Skipper's face, my father knew all at once what had transpired. Because that face knew a supreme confidence, knew that so long as it stayed in Balsam it would not be harmed.
My father would hear the following day that the arraignment was canceled. Mulrooney had dropped the charges against Skipper and refused all testimony for any case the county would make. It had been, father would hear through the grapevine, a drunken party prank that had got out of hand. "I can only guess," my father told me, "that Dennis Mulrooney knows a lucrative deal when he sees one." My mother told me that Mulrooney could not bring himself to look at my father in the weeks that followed when chance brought them near one another. A number of years later when I visited for Christmas, Mulrooney stopped by our table at the Grafton Inn to wish us the spirit of the season. My father did his best to affect cordiality, but I could see in Mulrooney's eye--just above the scar that Skipper's bottle left behind--the wish that he hadn't made the effort, the knowledge that he had lost the closest thing he had to a friend in Balsam.
Mark Trainer's fiction has appeared in The Greensboro Review, Shenandoah, and the Blue Penny Quarterly, and has been cited in Best American Short Stories. He has held a Literature Fellowship from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.
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