Russo Somebody's Fool

Main
ISBN: 978-1-83895-960-9
Verlag: Allen & Unwin
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 464 Seiten

'A wise and witty drama of small-town life . . . delivering the generous humour, keen ear for dialogue, and deep appreciation for humanity's foibles that have endeared the author to his readers for decades' Publishers Weekly Ten years after the death of the magnetic Donald 'Sully' Sullivan, the town of North Bath is going through a major transition as it is taken over by its much wealthier neighbour, Schuyler Springs. Peter, Sully's son, is still grappling with his father's tremendous legacy as well as his relationship to his own son, Thomas, wondering if he has been all that different a father than Sully was to him. Meanwhile, the towns' newly consolidated police department falls into the hands of Charice Bond following the resignation of Doug Raymer, the former North Bath police chief and Charice's ex-boyfriend. When a decomposing body turns up in the abandoned hotel situated between the two towns, Charice and Raymer are drawn together again and forced to address their complicated attraction to one another. Across town, Ruth, Sully's married ex-lover, struggles to understand her granddaughter, Tina, and her growing obsession with Peter's other son, Will. Amidst the turmoil, the town's residents speculate on the identity of the unidentified body and wonder who among their number could have disappeared unnoticed. Brimming with warmth, wisdom and Russo's signature wry humour, Somebody's Fool is another classic from a modern master of storytelling.

Richard Russo is the author of ten novels, most recently Chances Are; two collections of stories; and the memoir On Helwig Street. In 2002 he received the Pulitzer Prize for Empire Falls, which like Nobody's Fool was adapted to film, in a multiple-award-winning HBO miniseries; in 2016 he was given the Indie Champion Award by the American Booksellers Association; and in 2017 he received France's Grand Prix de Littérature Américaine. He lives in Portland, Maine.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Russo, Richard

Leseproben

Inheritance

THE CHANGES WOULD BE gradual, or that was how the idea had been sold all along. But no sooner did North Bath’s annexation to Schuyler Springs become official than rumors began circulating about “next steps.” North Bath High, the Beryl Peoples Middle School, and one of the town’s two elementary schools would close at the end of the school year, just a few months away. In the fall their students would be bused to schools in Schuyler. Okay, none of this was unexpected. The whole point of consolidation was to eliminate redundancies, so education, the most expensive of these, would naturally be at the top of that list. Still, those pushing for annexation had argued that such changes would be incremental, the result of natural attrition. Teachers wouldn’t be fired, merely encouraged, by means of incentives, to retire. Younger staff would apply for positions in the Schuyler Unified school district, which would make every effort to accommodate them. The school buildings themselves would be converted into county offices. Same deal with the police. The low-slung brick building that housed the police department and the jail would be repurposed, and Doug Raymer, who’d been making noises about retiring as chief of police for years, could probably get repurposed as well. His half-dozen or so officers could apply for positions within the Schuyler PD. Hell, they’d probably even keep their old uniforms; the left sleeve would just bear a different patch. Sure, other redundancies would follow. There’d be no further need for a town council (there being no town) or for a mayor (which in Bath wasn’t even a full-time position). The town already purchased its water from Schuyler Springs, whose sanitation department would now collect its trash, which everybody agreed was a significant upgrade. At present Bath citizens were responsible for hauling their crap to the dump, or hiring the Squeers Brothers and letting their fleet of decrepit dump trucks do it for them.

Naturally, not everyone had been in favor of this quantum shift. Some maintained there was really only one genuine redundancy that annexation would eliminate, and that was North Bath itself. By allowing itself to be subsumed by Schuyler Springs, its age-old rival, the town was basically committing suicide, voting for nonexistence over existence, and who in their right mind did that? This melodramatic argument was met with considerable derision. Was it even possible for an intubated patient on a ventilator to commit suicide? For the last decade about the only thing Bath had any control over was its morphine drip, because its debt had become so crushing that the town budget allowed for little beyond its interest payment.

How had all this come to pass? Well, the recession the whole damn country was still in the middle of was partly to blame, but many argued that the town had been circling the drain long before that. Most people blamed Gus Moynihan and the damned Democrats, who, when they took power, just spent and spent and spent. Before that, Bath had been a model of fiscal restraint, its unofficial motto being: If there was a pothole in the middle of the street, drive around the fucking thing. It wasn’t like potholes were invisible. The wider and deeper they grew, the easier they were to spot. Hell, it wasn’t long ago that the streets weren’t paved at all. No, the fiscal crisis was due to a curious combination of hubris and self-loathing, the anti-annexers maintained, the inevitable result of Bath’s attempts to emulate its rich neighbor. The Democrats, being Democrats, figured that if the town spent money like Schuyler Springs did, maybe it could have everything Schuyler had. You had to spend money to make money, right? Okay, sure, Republicans countered, but what the Democrats were conveniently ignoring was that Schuyler Springs, a lucky town if there ever was one, The city was flush. It was full of fancy restaurants and coffee shops and museums and art galleries. It had a thoroughbred racetrack, a performing arts center and writers’ colony and snooty liberal arts college, all of which generated a veritable shitstorm of revenue. How was Bath supposed to compete with all that? Moreover, why would they even want to? After all, there were other ways of measuring wealth, other sources of civic pride. Schuyler might be lucky—its mineral springs still percolating up out of the ground more than a century after Bath’s ran dry—but the historic drivers of its economy were gambling and horseracing and prostitution (a claim advanced by North Bath fundamentalist churches, though the only whorehouse of historical note had actually been located on their own outskirts), all of which explained why Schuyler was full of rich assholes and latte-drinking homosexuals and one-God-at-most Unitarian churches, a town where morally upright, God-fearing, hardworking people couldn’t afford to live. That it hadn’t gotten its comeuppance yet didn’t mean there wasn’t one coming. If potholes and second-rate schools kept taxes low and degenerates, atheists and Starbucks out, then let’s hear it for potholes.

That was the other thing: taxes. If Bath was subsumed by Schuyler, how much longer would they remain low? Those in favor of annexation conceded that, yes, if Schuyler Springs assumed North Bath’s debt, at some point all town property would have to be reassessed. Taxes might conceivably go up. Language like and and had the intended effect of rendering these outcomes as and as opposed to and Now, though, word on the street was that this reassessment of both residential and commercial properties would commence Just that quickly had become a synonym for So, yes, North Bath teachers and cops and other public servants could for their old jobs in Schuyler schools and the Schuyler PD, but if their property taxes doubled, how many of them could afford to keep living there? Sure, residents with the nicest houses in the better neighborhoods would make a killing and move away, but what about everybody else? Wouldn’t they just end up in some other town like Bath that couldn’t afford services like trash removal, except with a longer commute?

Birdie, who was the principal owner of Bath’s venerable roadhouse, the White Horse Tavern, had followed the civic debate with interest, despite not really having a dog in the fight. The way she saw it, she was pretty much screwed either way. If the tavern was reassessed and her taxes doubled, then she’d probably lose not just the business but her home, since she lived in the apartment upstairs. Theoretically the property would be worth more, but that would also make it even harder to sell. While the tavern wasn’t technically on the market, it was common knowledge that Birdie had been looking for an off-ramp for a while now. She’d recently turned sixty-three, and most mornings, including this one, she woke up feeling like she’d been rode hard and put up wet. She couldn’t afford to retire, but how many more years of hard labor did she have in her? A decade ago the bar had kept her afloat during the winter, but not anymore. Summers were still busy, of course. She opened the main dining room around Memorial Day, hired seasonal waitstaff and cooks who pushed steaks and prime rib out of the crowded kitchen and into the expansive dining room, but all of that went away after Labor Day. She kept the kitchen open as a service, but mostly for burgers and pizza. The whole place needed a good sprucing up, and not just a fresh coat of paint, either. Every stick of furniture in the joint needed replacing, and she’d been putting off purchasing new point-of-sales equipment for years. She wanted to update her software, too, something her ancient computer wouldn’t support. Face it. The Horse was, like the town itself, on a respirator. Maybe it was time to pull the plug. Put a merciful end to her misery. Before the recession she’d been hoping for—praying for, really—somebody from away to wander into the tavern and be both charmed by its historic vibe and blind to its present decrepitude. Someone capable of closing their eyes and seeing in the resulting darkness a bright future. A romantic fool, in other words. Unfortunately, people like that were more likely to invest in bookstores and B and Bs than roadhouse taverns.

Still, you never knew, which was why Birdie was paying particular attention to another rumor that was currently making the rounds: the one about the Sans Souci—the old hotel that sat in the middle of a large, wooded estate situated between Bath and Schuyler Springs. Of course the place had always been a rumor mill. Every few years there’d be talk that some downstate investor was interested, that the old hotel would be renovated yet again, a celebrity chef brought up from Manhattan to run its high-end restaurant, the extensive grounds converted into a golf course or maybe a music venue to rival Schuyler’s performing arts center. Others believed that the state of New York would eventually step in, purchase the land and make a public park out of it. This new scuttlebutt was strikingly different: somebody already bought the Sans Souci, and not some downstater, but a West Coast billionaire and movie studio owner who meant to tear the hotel down and build a soundstage in its place. That was last week’s scenario. This...