Mattie is the princess of the piece — poor but beautiful (that she was beautiful I could personally testify). Now enter the prince. In this case he’s a gangly stuttering redhead named Lance Devore.
The child of Max Devore’s sunset years. When Lance met Mattie, he was twenty-one. She had just turned seventeen. The meeting took place at Warrington’s, where Mattie had landed a summer job as a waitress.
Lance Devore was staying across the lake on the Upper Bay, but on Tuesday nights there were pickup softball games at Warrington’s, the townies against the summer folks, and he usually canoed across to play. Softball is a great thing for the Lance Devores of the world; when you’re standing at the plate with a bat in your hands, it doesn’t matter if you’re gangly. And it sure doesn’t matter if you stutter.
‘He confused em quite considerable over to Warrington’s,’ Bill said. ‘They didn’t know which team he belonged on — the Locals or the Aways. Lance didn’t care; either side was fine with him.
Some weeks he’d play for one, some weeks t’other. Either one was more than happy to have him, too, as he could hit a ton and field like an angel. They’d put him at first base a lot because he was tall, but he was really wasted there. At second or shortstop . . . my! He’d jump and twirl around like that guy Noriega.’
‘You might mean Nureyev,’ I said.
He shrugged. ‘Point is, he was somethin to see. And folks liked him. He fit in. It’s mostly young folks that play, you know, and to them it’s how you do, not who you are. Besides, a lot of em don’t know Max Devore from a hole in the ground.’
‘Unless they read The Wall Street Journal and the computer magazines,” I said. ‘In those, you run across the name Devore about as often as you run across the name of God in the Bible.’
‘No foolin?’
‘Well, I guess that in the computer magazines God is more often spelled Gates, but you know what I mean.’
‘I s’pose. But even so, it’s been sixty-five years since Max Devore spent any real time on the TR.
You know what happened when he left, don’t you?’
‘No, why would I?’
He looked at me, surprised. Then a kind of veil seemed to fall over his eyes. He blinked and it cleared. ‘Tell you another time — it ain’t no secret — but I need to be over to the Harrimans’ by eleven to check their sump-pump. Don’t want to get sidetracked. Point I was tryin to make is just this: Lance Devore was accepted as a nice young fella who could hit a softball three hundred and fifty feet into the trees if he struck it just right. There was no one old enough to hold his old man against him — not at Warrington’s on Tuesday nights, there wasn’t — and no one held it against him that his family had dough, either. Hell, there are lots of wealthy people here in the summer.
You know that. None worth as much as Max Devore, but being rich is only a matter of degree.’
That wasn’t true, and I had just enough money to know it. Wealth is like the Richter scale-once you pass a certain point, the jumps from one level to the next aren’t double or triple but some amazing and ruinous multiple you don’t even want to think about. Fitzgerald had it straight, although I guess he didn’t believe his own insight: the very rich are different from you and me. I thought of telling Bill that, and decided to keep my mouth shut. He had a sump-pump to fix.
Kyra’s parents met over a keg of beer stuck in a mudhole. Mattie was running the usual Tuesday-night keg out to the softball field from the main building on a handcart. She’d gotten it most of the way from the restaurant wing with no trouble, but there had been heavy rain earlier in the week, and the cart finally bogged down in a soft spot. Lance’s team was up, and Lance was sitting at the end of the bench, waiting his turn to hit. He saw the girl in the white shorts and blue Warrington’s polo shirt struggling with the bogged handcart, and got up to help her. Three weeks later they were inseparable and Mattie was pregnant; ten weeks later they were married; thirty-seven months later, Lance Devore was in a coffin, done with softball and cold beer on a summer evening, done with what he called ‘woodsing,’ done with fatherhood, done with love for the beautiful princess. Just another early finish, hold the happily-ever-after.
Bill Dean didn’t describe their meeting in any detail; he only said, ‘They met at the field — she was runnin out the beer and he helped her out of a boghole when she got her handcart stuck.’
Mattie never said much about that part of it, so I don’t know much. Except I do . . . and although some of the details might be wrong, I’d bet you a dollar to a hundred 1 got most of them right. That was my summer for knowing things I had no business knowing.
It’s hot, for one thing — ’94 is the hottest summer of the decade and July is the hottest month of the summer. President Clinton is being upstaged by Newt and the Republicans. Folks are saying old Slick Willie may not even run for a second term. Boris Yeltsin is reputed to be either dying of heart disease or in a dry-out clinic. The Red Sox are looking better than they have any right to. In Derry, Johanna Arlen Noonan is maybe starting to feel a little whoopsy in the morning. If so, she does not speak of it to her husband.
I see Mattie in her blue polo shirt with her name sewn in white script above her left breast. Her white shorts make a pleasing contrast to her tanned legs. I also see her wearing a blue gimme cap with the red W for Warrington’s above the long bill. Her pretty dark-blonde hair is pulled through the hole at the back of the cap and falls to the collar of her shirt. I see her trying to yank the handcart out of the mud without upsetting the keg of beer. Her head is down; the shadow thrown by the bill of the cap obscures all of her face but her mouth and small set chin.
‘Luh-let m-me h-h-help,’ Lance says, and she looks up. The shadow cast by the cap’s bill falls away, he sees her big blue eyes — the ones she’ll pass on to their daughter. One look into those eyes and the war is over without a single shot fired; he belongs to her as surely as any young man ever belonged to any young woman.
The rest, as they say around here, was just courtin.
The old man had three children, but Lance was the only one he seemed to care about.
(‘Daughter’s crazier’n a shithouse mouse,’ Bill said matter-of-factly. ‘In some laughin academy in California. Think I heard she caught her a cancer, too.’) The fact that Lance had no interest in computers and software actually seemed to please his father. He had another son who was capable of running the business. In another way, however, Lance Devore’s older half-brother wasn’t capable at all: there would be no grandchildren from that one.
‘Rump-wrangler,’ Bill said. ‘Understand there’s a lot of that going around out there in California.’
There was a fair amount of it going around on the TR, too, I imagined, but thought it not my place to offer sexual instruction to my caretaker.
Lance Devore had been attending Reed College in Oregon, majoring in forestry — the kind of guy who falls in love with green flannel pants, red suspenders, and the sight of condors at dawn. A Brothers Grimm woodcutter, in fact, once you got past the academic jargon. In the summer between his junior and senior years, his father had summoned him to the family compound in Palm
Springs, and had presented him with a boxy lawyer’s suitcase crammed with maps, aerial photos, and legal papers. These had little order that Lance could see, but I doubt that he cared. Imagine a comic-book collector given a crate crammed with rare old copies of Donald Duck. Imagine a movie collector given the rough cut of a never-released film starring Humphrey Bogart and Marilyn Monroe. Then imagine this avid young forester realizing that his father owned not just acres or square miles in the vast unincorporated forests of western Maine, but entire realms.
Although Max Devore had left the TR in 1933, he’d kept a lively interest in the area where he’d grown up, subscribing to area newspapers and getting magazines such as Down East and the Maine Times. In the early eighties, he had begun to buy long columns of land just east of the Maine-New Hampshire border. God knew there had been plenty for sale; the paper companies which owned most of it had fallen into a recessionary pit, and many had become convinced that their New England holdings and operations would be the best place to begin retrenching. So this land, stolen from the Indians and clear-cut ruthlessly in the twenties and fifties, came into Max Devore’s hands.