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Автор Ричард Руссо
Richard Russo
Nobody's Fool
About the Author
Richard Russo lives in coastal Maine with his wife and their two daughters. He has written five novels:
Nobody's Fool
FOR JEAN LEVARN FINDLAY
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author gratefully acknowledges generous support from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. Thanks also to Linda Stuart and Alan Rancourt for advice on technical matters. Gratitude as well for coffee and understanding to the staffs of Cristaudos and Denny’s in Carbondale and The Open Hearth in Waterville. And, for priceless faith and encouragement, my dearest thanks to Nat Sobel, Judith Weber, Craig Holden, David Rosenthal and, always, my wife, Barbara.
PART ONE
WEDNESDAY
Upper Main Street in the village of North Bath, just above the town’s two-block-long business district, was quietly residential for three more blocks, then became even more quietly rural along old Route 27A, a serpentine two-lane blacktop that snaked its way through the Adirondacks of northern New York, with their tiny, down-at-the-heels resort towns, all the way to Montreal and prosperity. The houses that bordered Upper Main, as the locals referred to it — although Main, from its “lower” end by the IGA and Tastee Freez through its upper end at the Sans Souci, was less than a quarter mile — were mostly dinosaurs, big, aging clapboard Victorians and sprawling Greek Revivals that would have been worth some money if they were across the border in Vermont and if they had not been built as, or converted into, two- and occasionally three-family dwellings and rented out, over several decades, as slowly deteriorating flats.
The most impressive feature of Upper Main was not its houses, however, but the regiment of ancient elms, whose upper limbs arched over the steeply pitched roofs of these elderly houses, as well as the street below, to green cathedral effect, bathing the street in breeze-blown shadows that masked the peeling paint and rendered the sloping porches and crooked eaves of the houses quaint in their decay. City people on their way north, getting off the interstate in search of food and fuel, often slowed as they drove through the village and peered nostalgically out their windows at the old houses, wondering idly what they cost and what they must be like inside and what it would be like to live in them and walk to the village in the shade. Surely this would be a better life. On their way back to the city after the long weekend, some of the most powerfully affected briefly considered getting off the interstate again to repeat the experience, perhaps even look into the real estate market. But then they remembered how the exit had been tricky, how North Bath hadn’t been all that close to the highway, how they were getting back to the city later than they planned as it was, and how difficult it would be to articulate to the kids in the backseat why they would even want to make such a detour for the privilege of driving up a tree-lined street for all of three blocks, before turning around and heading back to the interstate. Such towns were pretty, green graves, they knew, and so the impulse to take a second look died unarticulated and the cars flew by the North Bath exit without slowing down.
