The Englishman

The Englishman - By Nina Lewis

Chapter 1

I KNEW FROM STUDYING THE MAP that at some point after turning off I-95 I would catch a glimpse of it across a long bend of the river. So I was expecting this view, and after all, I have been here once before. But I have never seen it from the road, never from this angle, and it takes my breath away. The place looks like the film set for a pastiche of Dracula and Sleeping Beauty. Spine-chilling and romantic at the same time.

Ardrossan University, familiarly known as “The Folly,” is architecturally disadvantaged in that it cannot present itself to the world in the form of the stern elegance to which venerable academic institutions aspire. Its multi-colored brickwork sparkles and shimmers red, black, blue, and green in the glaring sun of the June afternoon, as if a giant baby had turned over its box of Lego bricks and built a castle. Its gables are over-long, its pinnacles and turrets and cornices too ornate, its arches too pointy, its glazed bricks too shiny—a hideously neo-gothic extravaganza of such silliness that it has its very own and unique grandeur.

This is where I am going to work.

But not yet. Today my destination lies due east of the campus, past the halls, the dormitories, the library, and the sprawling four-story building that houses the English department and where, come August, one little office will be mine. Today my cue is a big wooden board on the roadside, advertising Calderbrook Farm: Organic Fruit Orchard.

I turn left into a lane bordered with woods on the right and on the left, seemingly endless rows of dark green bushes, about chest-high, hung with bright green billiard balls. The farm at the end of the lane is unmistakably the one that Mr. Larsen, the Shaftsboro Realtor, described to me on the phone. Apart from several low-roofed steel barns, garages, and a canopied farm stand, there are two white clapboard farmhouses, connected by a sort of one-story conservatory. I am just pulling up next to the silver-metallic BMW convertible in front of the gate when my phone rings.

“Are we there yet?”

“Listen, Irene, I got here literally this second, and I’m late as it is! I’ll call you afterward.”

“You listen! Are you homesick yet? Are you regretting it yet? It’s not too late to come back home! We’ll slaughter a bottle of Moët & Chandon for the prodigal, um, friend!”

“Be quiet! Some friend you are. You’re supposed to support me in this, not undermine me!”

“I am totally your friend when I say that moving to the South is a huge mistake, Anna.” Her voice is serious now; she means every word she says.

Casting a hurried look at the dashboard clock, I sit back in my seat. “Look, we’ve been through this, like, twenty-seven times. An assistant professorship at Ardrossan University is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I can’t turn it down, and I don’t want to turn it down!”

“But it’s in the boonies!” she wails.

“Don’t be ridiculous. Shaftsboro is practically on the outskirts of D.C.”

“Ha!”

An ambitious junior associate in the reputable Manhattan legal firm of Barton, Scherer and Nussbaum, she should be the first to urge me to go where my career takes me. But for Irene, a career worthy of the name can only happen north of the Mason-Dixon line. Virginia, to her, is the deepest South, beyond the pale of civilization.

“Look, I am moving down here, and I am late for my appointment with a tomato farmer who I hope will be my new landlord. I’ll talk to you when I’m done, okay?”

“Oh, says she who’s only ever lived in New York and London! You have no idea what you’re letting yourself in for! You should live somewhere where you feel at home!”

“Then just be glad I didn’t stay in London. Reenie, I gotta go. Further bulletins as events warrant.”

I leave the phone on the passenger seat, check my hair in the rearview mirror, and get out of the car. Wary of letting any free-roaming animals escape, I carefully latch the gate behind me, turn toward the main house, and freeze. Something that looks like the Hound of the Baskervilles comes tearing toward me, skids to a halt about two yards away, and challenges me at the top of its lungs.

“Dude! If I move here, we gotta work on our relationship!”

My words make no impression at all, but the sharp whistle from the direction of the house does. The shaggy black beast briefly weighs up the pros and cons of obedience versus vigilance and trots off. Three people have appeared from the newer of the two houses: a man in beige pants and a yellow polo-neck shirt, a woman in a light summer dress, and an older man in baggy jeans, a checkered shirt and a baseball cap. He seems to be in charge of the dog, because it bounds up to him and he pets it and tells it to sit by the house.

While the men loiter by the door, the woman comes forward, and for a crazy moment I feel like a European explorer making contact with a delegation of natives.

“Sorry ’bout that!” she shouts. And when she is in speaking distance she adds, “She’s only seven months old. We’re still training her.”

“That’s okay. No harm done. Hi, I’m Anna Lieberman.”

Up close she is a little older than I first guessed, in her mid-thirties and very lean, almost wiry. The flowery dress looks completely wrong on her. Why is she wearing clothes that suit her so little? Social convention? A concession to the prospective tenant? She introduces herself as Karen Walsh and takes me across the yard to meet the men.

Mr. Larsen, the Shaftsboro Realtor, has a muddy, paw-shaped smudge on his linen thigh and appears uncomfortable and out of place on a working farm. Howard Walsh, Sr., whose paunch is as substantial as Mr. Larsen’s but who looks strong as an ox, takes hardly any notice of me from under his cap but cannot very well avoid shaking my hand. I make a point of this, gripping his big, calloused hand for a fraction longer than he wants, and he briefly glances at me and actually takes off his cap. He has Paul Newman eyes and a handsome weather-beaten face.

“Well, ma’am, you better not get your hopes up too high,” he says. “Reckon our cabin ain’t what you’re looking for.”

“I’m very much looking forward to seeing it, sir.”

Seeing as I drove down from New York City today with that specific purpose.

“Go on in for a drink,” Karen Walsh says, and the men immediately turn and go back into the house.

Right. Drink and interview first. We sit around the massive kitchen table and Karen Walsh pours a dark golden-brown liquid from a big glass pitcher for all of us. It is so cold that the walls of my glass mist up, and a cautious sip reveals it to be extremely sweet black tea. Of course. Silly me. Welcome to the South. Unsure of protocol, I sip my tea, which is delicious in this hot weather, and answer the ritual questions about my trip down, the traffic around Washington, and whether I have ever visited these parts before. If this is an exam, I fail at least the last of these questions.

“Dr. Lieberman, if you’d like a cookie or a muffin?” Karen Walsh piles jugs and plates onto the table and finally sits down.

“Anna, please, if—if that’s okay.”

“What kind of a doctor are you, ma’am, if you don’t mind me asking?” The Paul Newman eyes look straight at me.

“Dr. Lieberman works at the Folly, Pop. Didn’t you hear Mr. Larsen say? These are blueberry and whole grain and these are chocolate chip.”

“Beats me why they wanna call their own business foolish,” Mr. Walsh observes deliberately. “I wouldn’t.”

“Thank you, they look delicious.” I smile up at Karen. “Actually, it’s a reference to an architectural—never mind. I’m in English literature.”

“So you’re a doctor in English literature from New York City, and now you want to live on a Piedmont tomato farm.” Mr. Walsh leans back in his chair and crosses his arms.

“Y-Yes, sir, that about sums it up.”

He is much too reserved to ask why—let alone, as my big-city friends and relations did, why the hell?—I want to live on a tomato farm.

Why do I? I can’t really say, except that I knew right away that I am not interested in the Shaftsboro riverside lofts (“real popular with folk from your part of the country”) that Mr. Larsen made me look at on his website.

“And how long would you be planning on staying in the South, ma’am?”

I lean back in my chair and nerve myself to brave his subtle antagonism. “Three years at least, maybe six, maybe longer, if I get tenure.”

“What’s that thing my old father used to say?” Mr. Larsen turns to Mr. Walsh as if for information. “‘Yankees is like hemorrhoids—a pain when they come down and a relief when they go back up again.’”

“Dr. Lieberman!” Karen jumps up, and so does the dog under the table, yelping. “Would you like to see the cabin now?”

I half hope that it will turn out to be a derelict pile, but it’s a city girl’s dream in light-blue clapboard, with white window frames and a white porch. Situated almost a hundred yards away from the main house, it stands on its own in splendid isolation on the edge of the woods, and I have an unnerving vision of myself as Connie Chatterley, engaged in amorous trysts with my illicit lover in our quiet, leafy retreat.

“You don’t need me for this, right?” Mr. Larsen fingers the cigarettes in his breast pocket. Mr. Walsh wanders off into the direction of the garage. Showing people round is evidently woman’s work again.

We enter an L-shaped living room with kitchen; a bedroom is tucked into the inner right angle of the L and looks out toward the woods. All the rooms have dark hardwood floorboards, even the bathroom and the tiny utility room.

Karen Walsh breaks the silence. “My husband’s grandfather used to have pickers sleep in here during the summer, but—well, it’s much too small now.”

“How many people do you employ?” I ask, making conversation to cover my delight at what I’m seeing.

“Up to forty once picking starts. It’s mostly students from schools and colleges around here. And backpackers, from Europe and Australia. They have a camp site over there.” She cocks her head toward the forest.

“And who lived in here before? I mean, before now?”

She tucks her short, light brown hair behind her ears in a nervous little gesture. “Our previous tenants—they moved out three months ago—well, it was a very unsuccessful arrangement. They kept complaining about everything—the dogs, the dirt, the dial-up Internet access, of course, and in the end they left one weekend when we were all away on a family visit, without ever paying the rent that was due.”

She gazes at me as if she was going to say more, but then she decides against it. With her long, sinewy arm she reaches up the banister. “Will you come and see upstairs?”

The upstairs bedroom is larger than the downstairs one, and it has two dormer windows that look away from the farmhouse toward the woods. It’s the perfect place for a study. I have to bite my lips not to burst out laughing.

“It would be very different from what you’re used to,” Karen Walsh says tactfully.

“But I don’t want what I’m used to! I want to get away from what I’m used to! I want a change, a real change! May I?”

My vehemence seems to take her aback a little but she nods, and I open the bedroom window.

“Smell that?”

“N-No—”

“That’s what I mean. This would feel like a vacation in the country, not like work at all!”

We laugh together, and she lays a quick hand on my arm. “Leave it to me.”

When we come back into the living room, Mr. Walsh is fiddling with one of the doorknobs.

“Pop? Dr. Lieberman says it’s exactly what she is looking for.”

“You reckon?”

I try to look resolute but keep my mouth shut.

“We don’t rent out for longer than a year at a time.” He straightens up, his fists propped against his hips.

“That’s fine with me, sir.”

I’m not sure why I want this place at all, given that my prospective landlord seems convinced that I will be a pain in his neck. The only answer I can come up with is that I am in love with the idea of living on a farm, and that I have fallen in love at first sight with the blue cabin.

Mr. Walsh gives his daughter-in-law the curtest of nods and leaves the house.

“So you don’t wanna look at the lofts in town?” Mr. Larsen throws away his cigarette and squints into the late afternoon sun.

The Paul Newman eyes and mine meet in similar stupefaction on their way from the cigarette butt on the porch back to the Realtor’s face. I half expect Mr. Walsh to take Mr. Larsen by the scruff of his polo shirt and shake him till he picks up the offending piece of garbage, but he just walks off toward the main house.

“No, thank you,” I say.

The signing of the lease goes without a hitch. I thank Karen Walsh for her hospitality, feeling that we have established a tentative kind of rapport. When I offer to shake Mr. Walsh’s hand, he indicates by an abrupt little jerk of his head that he intends to accompany the Realtor and me to our cars.

“That your’n?” He points his thumb at my battered ol’ Subaru.

I shrug. “Sorry that I’m not driving my VW Beetle Cabrio today. Or some other fancy European car—you know, a Peugeot or an Audi—like all the other snooty Yankee women.”

The verbal slap does not even make him flinch.

“No, ma’am,” he says slowly and scrapes something off the hood with his fingernail. “I was hoping you came in a Mini Cooper.”





At home in Queens, my report about house-hunting in Virginia produces mixed reactions.

Mom and Nathan stare at me as if I had announced I was going to live under a bridge. Dad gives an incredulous little snort, but Jessica, Nat’s wife, beams at me.

“I love that! A cottage! Cottage, or cabin? Is it in the mountains, this place?”

“No, not quite. Shaftsboro is sort of halfway between the coast and the mountains. But it’s on the river. The college, that is. Not the farm.”

“Like Brandeis,” Mom informs nobody in particular.

I shouldn’t have told my mother that I withdrew from the shortlist for a job that would have been half as far away as Ardrossan.

“What do they farm?” Nat wants to know. “Tobacco? Pigs? Chickens? I thought you were a vegetarian!”

“No, not like Brandeis. It’s directly on the river. There’s a sort of…promenade, esplanade, a riverside walk, and the campus is right next to it. It’s beautiful. Come and visit!”

“So you fork out eight hundred bucks a month to share a cramped little apartment in Manhattan because the ’burbs make you heave,” Nathan scoffs, “but move away four hundred miles, and the suburbs are, like, the green belt of heaven?”

“Listen, bub, I’m not moving to the suburbs, I’m moving into the country, and the farmer grows tomatoes and all sorts of berries. Totally vegetarian.”

I know why Nat is giving me a hard time, though. With me out of reach, Mom will turn her maternal searchlight onto Nat and his family, and he hates that.

“Six months, and you’ll be a Bible-thumping Republican,” he predicts with brotherly brutality.

“Have you been talking to Irene, or what? Anyway, on the farm I’ll have lots of space, a forest to walk in, and peace and quiet to do my writing. And that’s all I want, Mom.”

My mother turns to the lunchbox she is packing for me and does that thing where she raises her eyebrows and purses her lips. An allegory of doubt, with a bit of don’t-say-I-didn’t-tell-you-so-when-this-goes-wrong thrown in.

“You may not like living on your own,” she tells my sandwich. “You think you will, because Sheena has been getting on your nerves, but you may find you don’t actually like it.”

“Only one way to find out.” I shrug.

“I’m just worried you will turn into a recluse if you live at the back of beyond all alone in a cabin!”

“Mom, what you’re really worried about is that I might find that I do like living at the back of beyond all alone in a cabin.”

“You should be worried, too. How will you ever find a man down there?”

“Not my problem right now. I want a job, not a man.”

“I don’t see why you can’t have both!”

“I’m a one-trick pony, Mom. One trick is all this horse can do.”