My mother smiled a little, but she couldn’t agree outwardly because the town board members were the people who funded the library and in public she must always try to be on her best behavior.
When the motion carried Marv slowly clapped his enormous fleshy palms together, one loud clap after the next. My father’s work of seven years, for naught. He got up and we could see all at once that the meeting had drained him of his powers.
“Jim,” my mother murmured, even though he was not anywhere near her.
His chest was sunk in on itself, his back bent, the hump of an old person. That’s what I thought, an old person, my father. He looked like a man who through his life had not slept enough or eaten enough, a man who had no business being in a struggle with our community, or maybe with any community, with people who were coarse and mean, with people who could give up their farms for Florida.
“That was epic,” Philip said on the way out.
“That’s how it is around here,” Dolly said drily.
My father, I didn’t explain to them, would eventually win; he would win. He had to. He would win because he was right in principle. The whole world could not be built upon, the whole earth cement. It might take time but he would prevail. In fact, it wasn’t until the recession of 2008 that no new subdivisions were proposed. In that spring the building of prospective homes on those plats that had been approved was suspended. Every single plan on hold for lack of money. Even though my father had done nothing to cause the recession except privately hold to his convictions about farmland, nonetheless, Jim Lombard’s deepest dream, his dream for zero growth, of course had come true.
20.
The Fears of MF Lombard,
Part One
I was outwardly more or less perfectly well adjusted, as far as I could tell, although sullen when it was necessary, but MF Lombard—the name I now used—MF in her inner sanctum was generally, more or less, terrified. The towers had come down, for one, when we’d been in school, the entire day devoted to CNN, the planes piercing the buildings, the office workers, those specks, falling through the sky, the buildings collapsing, over and over again. But more frightening than the footage itself was the shock of our teachers, some of them weeping as they watched, and also how silent, at first, the bad students were, the troublemakers, some of them with their heads down on their desks, as if even they couldn’t find a prank like that useful to look at.
At lunch I found William, I needed to be with William. He now wore good-boy clothing, Oxford shirts tucked in, his oversize pants with pockets for guns a fashion statement of the past. I didn’t usually see him much during the school hours but I had the feeling he was waiting for me, sitting on a bench by himself outside the library. I sat next to him, the two of us not saying anything. We were embarrassed. We didn’t know where to start. Everyone would understand our sitting together and yet we ourselves, between the two of us, didn’t know what to say. After a minute, however, I began to think that I did have something to tell him. I couldn’t explain it even though the feeling was hard in me, the tough little ball gathering speed out in the distance, within the space of my mind, the light of reason: which was, I was right, MF Lombard had been correct that William should not go far away to college. Because, this is what happened, strangers evidently from the land of Stephen Lombard on the bluest, softest autumn day perpetrating evil. Best to stay put, stay close to what was near and dear.
Amanda was already preparing to go to Germany with AFS in the next year, Dolly so excited for that adventure. And Adam was applying to colleges in California, an agricultural state with no water.
“Do you think we could go home?” I finally said to William.
“I have a calc test.”
“We’re just going to be watching the news for the rest of the day.”
“We’ve been attacked,” he said, needlessly.
William’s saying so, though, made the event real.
“What if our school is next?” I had to wonder.
“They only hit symbols of power,” he muttered.
The bell rang and we were required to move.