The conceit that certain people, especially female people, resemble certain flowers is not very original, but then, it’s not without its uses either. Especially if you can obtain enough significant information about the flower to gain at the same time significant information about the person. For instance, Noni Hubner was like a kind of orchid that grows in northern New England — the pink lady’s-slipper, Cypripedium acaule. It may surprise you that orchids actually appear in these latitudes, but they do. And the pink lady’s-slipper, as it happens, is one of the more common members of the orchid family to appear in New Hampshire, Vermont and Maine, so that you often discover it in open pine woods, or on the east-facing slopes of riverbanks. It blooms in June when the plant’s delicate throat swells and turns pink. Sometimes the orchid is white, but then you’ll go back the following June and discover that it has bloomed a deep shade of pink, as if it had suffered a wound in your absence. People who love the sight of these orchids know that regardless of how plentiful they seem, you must not pick them. Nor should you transplant them, as they seldom survive a change of habitat for longer than a few years. In fact, most people who know where you can find such a lovely, fragile flower will not tell you the location, because they are afraid you will go there, and in your affection and delight, will pick the beautiful pink lady’s-slipper or will try to transplant it nearer your home.
Comfort
LEON LAROCHE, THE BANK TELLER, tried to tell this story once to his friend and neighbor, Captain Dewey Knox (U.S. Army, ret.). Leon was in his late twenties when he made the attempt, and he had been drinking beer with the Captain in the Captain’s trailer for several hours, so he was slightly drunk, or he probably would not have tried to tell it at all. It’s not so much that you will say things when drunk that you’d never say when sober, as much as you will try to say things you’d ordinarily know simply could not be said. It’s your judgment about the sayable that goes, not your inhibitions.
The two men had been talking about a kid who used to live at the trailerpark, Buddy Smith, who had been a thief and a liar and whose father, Tom Smith, had finally thrown him out of the trailer he’d shared with his son for most of the kid’s life. Six months after the son had departed, the father shot himself, and nobody understood any of it. The son never showed up in Catamount again, not even for the funeral, and that had been the end of the matter, except when folks now and then wondered about what might have happened to Buddy Smith and wondered why his father, a sociable though utterly private man, had killed himself. Most people believed that by now the kid was locked up in jail somewhere out West, where his mother was supposed to live, and that Tom Smith had shot himself in the mouth with his shotgun because, since he had been living alone, his drinking had got out of hand, and you know how too much drinking alone can make you depressed. Nobody thought the two events, the son’s departure and the father’s suicide, were connected. At least not in such a way as to think the suicide could have been avoided, which is to say, at least not in such a way as you could blame the son for the death of the father.
“I liked Buddy,” Leon said, gazing into his glass. The two men were seated at the Captain’s kitchen table, the television set still rumbling behind them in the living room, for when Leon had knocked on the door and had offered to share a six-pack of beer with him, the Captain had been watching the evening news and in his pleasure had neglected to shut the machine off. The older man had been grateful for the interruption — it was a frosty November night, and people generally didn’t go calling on people on nights like this — and when the first six-pack had been drunk, the Captain had started offering beer from his refrigerator, until they had found themselves working their way through a third six-pack. The Captain said he didn’t mind, it was a Friday night anyhow, and he was restless and felt like having company, so what the hell, crack open another, Leon, and relax, for chrissakes, you’re too uptight, boy. You remind me of myself when I was your age, he told Leon. Some people have to learn to relax, have to force themselves to do it, and then after a while it comes naturally, he said laughing, as if to prove how finally it had come naturally to him.
“No, I really liked Buddy, although I can’t say I knew him very well. He was a chess player. I never knew that until one night after work I went into the Hawthorne House for a drink, because I was angry, pissed off, from having been yelled at once too often by Bob Fosse at the bank. You wouldn’t believe that man, I don’t believe that man. After what, seven years, and he still treats me like shit. Anyhow, I went into the Hawthorne House, which is unusual for me, because that place can be kind of rough, you know, and I hate the smell of it, like urine and old beer, but like I said, I was angry at Bob Fosse and needed a drink to calm down.
“Buddy was in a corner playing one of the pinball machines, alone, as usual. He never seemed to have any friends in town, even though there are plenty of kids his age in town, too many of them, who don’t seem to do anything except hang around drinking beer and flexing their muscles and getting themselves tattooed. Buddy was like that, or at least he seemed like that, but even so, he kept pretty much to himself. But then, too, Buddy didn’t exactly look like those guys, either. I mean, he was always clean-looking, and he wore his hair short, and he took good care of his clothes. He looked like a recruit in the army home on leave. Even so, he never seemed to do much except hang around the trailerpark or up at the Hawthorne House, as if waiting for someone supposed to pick him up there and take him to someplace far away and very different from this place. Those other guys his age were made in Catamount, New Hampshire, to stay in Catamount, New Hampshire, and eventually to die in Catamount, New Hampshire. It was stamped all over their faces, all over their bulky muscles, all over the way they talked and laughed and punched each other around.”
The Captain knew the type. He shoved his paw across his white crewcut and sighed. Bring back the draft, he intoned, and in a year the streets of America will be cleared of that type and safe to walk in again.
“Buddy had spent a year in the service, the Marines, I think he told me, and just as he was about to be shipped overseas to Germany or someplace, he was in an automobile accident that put a metal plate into his head and got him discharged. He told me that while we were sitting at the bar, but I don’t think I believed him, because while he was telling me all this, he kept smiling at me and watching my eyes, as if he was putting me on, just to see if I’d believe some lie.
“He was a chess player. He said he wasn’t very good, but he liked to play, which is true as well for me, so I said we should get together to play chess sometime, and he thought that was a great idea. He knew no one who played chess around here, and neither did I. He had a way of watching the point of his cigarette while he smoked that was unusual. I bought him a second beer, and we talked about how hard it was living in a small town in New Hampshire, how boring it was and how mean-minded the people were. He said he was leaving for the West Coast as soon as he got some money that was owed him by a guy in the Marines, and then he asked me why I stayed here, living in Catamount, going back and forth every day from the trailerpark to the bank. My mother lives in Concord, where I grew up, and this was the best job I could find when I got out of New Hampshire Commercial College, and I go to Boston sometimes on weekends, I told him. He was curious about that, about what I do in Boston on weekends, and I told him the truth, that I go around to the bars and maybe take a meal at a fancy restaurant and go to a movie. That’s all. He didn’t believe me, but he was very nice, very cheerful and friendly. He said I probably stayed home every weekend and watched TV.