September 2010
Kate Maguire walked by the Whole Foods on Columbus on her way home from work and hesitated by the entrance. Had she promised Tom she’d pick up anything? As usual, he had called her that afternoon, this time on his way home from Oakdale, to discuss dinner. Yesterday he’d seared tuna with a hazelnut crust. The day before, he’d reminded her of a date they’d made to meet friends at a new nose-to-tail restaurant in Tribeca. What was his plan for tonight’s meal? She struggled to extract the insignificant detail from her day’s accumulation of information, but got sidetracked estimating how many hours she’d have to spend that evening reviewing the documents in her bag, and headed on home.
When she unlocked the apartment door, she smelled sautéed onions and peppers and remembered — Tom was making paella. She changed into comfortable clothes, joined him in the kitchen, accepted the glass of red wine he offered her, and set about assembling a green salad while he chopped the chorizo aggressively, as if he were competing on a cooking show. “How was your day?” he said.
“Busy. I brought work home that I have to start on right after dinner. How was yours?”
She half listened to his reply, finished making the salad, decided which file to work on first, and almost missed hearing about an invitation to join a dinner club.
He said, “It was rather awkward. I stopped in at the office of Drew Wacyk, the computer consultant, to talk about the new bakery tenant, and I was invited to attend a dinner club in Oakdale. A dinner club convened by Mary Ann Gray.”
“Who’s that?”
“She’s an influential local woman who works part-time for Drew.”
“You didn’t accept, did you?”
“I couldn’t extricate myself.”
Kate whisked the oil into the salad dressing. “Tell her you checked with me and I have another engagement that night.”
“As a matter of fact, the invitation was for me alone. And I ought to go for goodwill purposes, don’t you think? To build some local support for the development?”
“Lunch with the chamber of commerce is one thing. Since when is dinner at a suburban matron’s house necessary to maintain good relations with a community?”
“This project isn’t like the others, Kate. Oakdale is different.”
Kate turned her back on Tom to set the table, and rolled her eyes at the ceiling. “Go ahead and have dinner with the ladies. What do I care? It just seems a bit beyond the call of duty.” She laid out two place settings, each with a fork, a knife, a napkin, and a water glass, and stepped back to see if she’d forgotten anything. What kind of table would this Oakdale woman set for her dinner club? She’d use fussy antique gold-rimmed china that couldn’t go in the dishwasher, probably. And a heavy white brocade tablecloth that cost a fortune to have hand-laundered and pressed, with matching napkins set in sterling silver napkin rings polished by the help. “What’s the woman’s name again?” she said.
Tom was intent on the paella. “What woman?”
“The organizer of the dinner club. Martha Stewart, was it?”
Tom picked up some salt between his fingers from a small open dish on the counter, and sprinkled it over the pan from on high. “Her name is Mary Ann Gray. And dinner’s ready. Shall we?”
Kate had her college friend Hallie to thank for the introduction to Oakdale.
Kate and Hallie had become friends as undergrads at Cornell, back in the day, despite their differences — Kate was a dark-haired, serious, straight shooter from New York, and Hallie was an ambitious blonde looker from Fort Lauderdale. Assigned as dorm roommates in their freshmen year, they’d bonded over their shared preference to stand on the sidelines of any social gathering they attended and make sardonic comments to each other rather than join in. That and their shared drive to succeed, career-wise.
They’d gone their separate ways after graduation — Kate to NYU for law school, Hallie to Wharton for an MBA. But they’d kept in touch enough over the decades since that Hallie had called Kate to give her the news when she and her husband Sam decided, four years before the paella night, to move to the New York area.
On the phone, Hallie said that Sam had sold his Philadelphia-based food-manufacturing business for good money, and was trying to write a mystery novel, which was another way of saying, in her opinion, that he was having a midlife crisis. Either way, his new form of self-employment had left Hallie free to seek and snag a director of finance position at a magazine publisher with a head office in Manhattan.
“So we’re moving to Oakdale,” she said. “Near you.”
“Oakdale? Where’s that?” The phone was tucked under Kate’s ear. One eye was scrolling her email, and the other was on her desk clock, her mental calculator computing the dollar value of the billable minutes this phone call was taking up.
“It’s a suburb. Or maybe a small town. It’s a pretty community upstate, full of mature trees and old houses, and it’s only an hour and a half from the city. It’s New York’s best-kept secret, the real estate agent told me. And it’s not marked on most maps.”
Kate gave Hallie her full attention. Tom would love this story. “A modern day Shangri-La, is that what we’re talking about?”
“More like a budding Scarsdale. There’s a country club, some good public schools, peace and quiet for Sam and the girls, and I get to commute into Manhattan every day.”
“It sounds wonderful.” And to Kate, boring.
“You can see it for yourself when you come out and visit us. I’m calling to invite you to dinner at our new house. In six weeks. On August 15.”
Kate flipped the pages of her datebook. “Looks like we’re free. Why then?”
“We move in August 1. It’ll give me time to get the house set up. Write down the date. And tell me: Is Tom still a food nut?”
“He sure is. Only yesterday he was talking about the relative merits of duck fat over peanut oil for making frites.”
“You guys still eat French fries? I don’t think a fried potato has passed my lips for ten years.”
“I’m a firm believer in clinging to at least some of the extravagances of youth.”
“Christ, you sounded just like Tom there. Do you two look alike now, too?”
“How’d you guess? I’ve grown six inches in the last few years. Must be all the French fries.”
When Kate told Tom that night about Hallie’s news, he said, “What do you mean, it’s not marked on the map?”
“It isn’t. I looked up the address online, and there’s no Oakdale listed. The area seems to be part of a larger entity called Pembroke-Booth.”
“Perhaps Hallie has stumbled onto the lost city of Atlantis.”
“Or the lost town of Genoa City.”
Tom looked puzzled, as Kate had known he might be. She had a bad habit of puncturing his high-culture pretensions with pop culture references she knew he wouldn’t get.
“Genoa in Italy?” he said.
“No, the town in Wisconsin where The Young and the Restless is set. The Young and the Restless being a daytime soap.”
“Ah, I see. And I agree. Something suffocating and parochial is far more likely. I’m curious, nevertheless, to see this Oakdale. The prospect almost makes me look forward to dinner with Hallie and Sam.”
“They’re not so bad.”
“She never liked me.”
“Because you never liked her, and her irresistibility is an important part of her identity.”
Tom said, “Maybe we should go out a few hours early when we go for dinner, do some exploring. Mature trees, she said? And old houses? Did she say how old?”
First the highway, then a lesser road. A few miles down, a sign: WELCOME TO PEMBROKE-BOOTH. Followed by the usual fast-food outlets, a mini-mall containing a supermarket and a Sears, a couple of gas stations. Further on, a large school. “Oh, look,” Kate said. “Five Oaks High School. Home of the Huskies. Talk about wasting a perfectly good Sunday afternoon driving out to nowhere. It’s the next turnoff, I think. Oakdale Drive.”
They turned, drove by a few miles of farmland, and entered a leafy residential neighbourhood. Tom slowed down the car and they cruised along winding roads named after trees and flowers. The brick and stone houses they passed were mainly of well-kept nineteenth-century origin, Tom informed Kate, in a mix of styles — he had studied art and architectural history in college and liked to show off his knowledge.
He pointed out an Arts and Crafts era house studded with protruding Klinker brick on one street, and a row of 1880s Second Empire cottages with mansard roofs on the next. There were newer builds too, the odd one stuck in between two older specimens, infill on what had once been sprawling lawns. And at least one mid-century subdivision made up of blocks of generic ranch houses. When they’d driven through it, Tom said, “Let’s go back to the old part. It’s much more interesting.”
None of the houses in the older section of Oakdale were mansions, but they were all distinguished, in their way. They all had something to say.
“Who lives here?” Tom said, as they drove down a quiet street. “What kind of people?”
“Who do you think? Privileged white people.”
“Like us?”
“No, nothing like us. Golf-playing, scotch-swilling, country-clubbing bankers and brokers.”
“How are we different?”
“We live in the city. We read books. We go to the theatre. We care about things.” She rolled up her window. “Okay, we’ve seen Oakdale. What are we going to do till six o’clock?”
They turned out onto a Main Street that was not major at all — it was neither long nor wide. They trawled by some boarded-up old houses and a tired-looking row of stores. A hand-lettered sign in the window of a hairdressing salon read: LADIES’ WASH AND SET — $30.
Tom pulled to a stop at the end of the road, in front of a large, two-storey, multi-roofed building constructed of yellow brick decorated with intricate patterns of red brick insets. The roofs were crested with wrought-iron fencing, and a clock tower — bare of clock — rose fifty feet above their heads. An ugly rectangular lightbox sign bearing the words STATION BAKERY hung over the doorway.
“Now there’s an edifice,” Tom said. They gazed at it a minute. “Why station, I wonder?”
“Probably because the bus to Albany stops here.”
“Let’s take a closer look.”
They parked the car, crossed the quiet street, opened the door to the bakery, and stepped into a nondescript space that could have passed for any of the three doughnut shops they’d seen out on the state road.
A teenage girl with hair bleached an unbecoming platinum shade sat behind the counter, staring at nothing. An annoying strain of rock music seeped out of the wall speakers at low volume. The only other customer was a woman who sat in a back corner reading the Sunday Times. Beside her a baby slept in a stroller.
The teenager stood up. “Hi. Can I get you some coffee?”
“No, thank you,” Tom said. “We came in here hoping to glean some information about the history of Oakdale, and of this building in particular. Am I right to suppose it is late-nineteenth-century in origin?”
The girl’s expression was blank. “What?”
Kate nudged Tom quiet. “We’d love some coffee,” she said. “Two. And we’ll have a maple doughnut to share, please.”
The girl assembled their order while Tom prowled around the room. He checked corners, ran his hands across the wall surfaces, stared at the plate glass windows.
When it was time to pay, Kate said, “This building looks so old from the outside, and so new from the inside. It’s a little confusing. How old is it?”
“Old. Especially the upstairs part.”
The other customer came up to the counter, held out her mug to the teenager, said, “Another tea, please, Courtney, if you don’t mind.”
Courtney filled the woman’s mug with hot water from a spout, handed her a paper-wrapped tea bag, and said to Kate, “There’s a fridge up in the storeroom that’s so old the freezer fills up with ice every couple of months.”
“You don’t say?” Kate smiled politely. “Thank you.” She chose the table farthest away from the counter and she and Tom sat down.
“Excuse me,” the tea drinker said, and walked over to them, mug in hand. She was in her mid-to-late thirties, Kate thought, had long, dark hair and good cheekbones, and was part Asian, possibly.
“I heard you asking about the building,” she said. “I know a bit about it. I grew up in Oakdale, and I’m a kind of history buff. My name’s Alice. Alice Maeda.”
Tom jumped up, tried to pull out a chair for Alice, and would have if the seats hadn’t been attached to the table. “Won’t you join us? Provided your young charge can be left unattended.” He glanced back at the stroller.
Alice looked, too. “That’s okay. Lavinia’s asleep.”
“Lavinia?” Tom said. “An unusual choice of name.”
“It’s Roman.”
“I’m aware of its provenance. What surprises me is to find it here, in this place, attached to an infant.”
Alice grinned. “You have quite a way with the language.” She turned to Kate. “Do you talk like him, too?”
“No,” Kate said. “I’m normal. And we’d love to hear more about the building. This is our first time in Oakdale, and we’re curious.”
“This used to be a train station,” Alice said. “Circa 1875. A pretty fancy one, I imagine.” She gestured to the painted drywall surrounding them. “Difficult as it may be to visualize, the bones of the old building remain beneath this dreadful interior, forever obscured.”
There was a short silence during which Kate and Tom searched in vain for any sign of the bones, then Alice said, “Did I start lecturing there? Sorry. It’s a bad habit of mine. I’m a teacher.”
Kate said, “Where do you teach?”
“I’ve been teaching in England for the last twenty years, but I start at NYU this fall.”
“Not in architecture, by any chance?” That was Tom.
“No. Freshman Ancient History, heavy on the Greek and Roman.”
“May we ask what happened to the railroad line hereabouts?”
“It disappeared sometime in the nineteen forties, after the lines were consolidated and service to Oakdale was discontinued. Though you can still find some old railway ties around, tucked away in people’s yards.” Alice looked back at the stroller. “It’s not like Lavinia to sleep this long. I’ll go check on her.”
She stepped away, and Kate said to Tom, “I take it back. Coming here today is more interesting than it would have been to sit at home.”
Alice wheeled the stroller over beside them and sat down again. “She’s still breathing.”
Tom said, “So this building is a relic of Oakdale’s former glory?”
“The only relic remaining. You should see the photographs in the county archives of what Main Street used to look like, in its heyday. There was a big town hall and a fancy hotel — the locals used to dress up and promenade down the street on Sunday afternoons.”
“Until the decline.”
“Since then, Oakdale’s become not much more than a bedroom community for New York City.”
Tom said, “The building would be glorious, restored.”
“It would, but the local historical society can’t afford it,” Alice said. “Neither can the county. I’ve checked.”
Tom walked to the glass door, looked out at the street. “There are ways, of course.”
“Tom,” Kate said.
Alice looked at her. “What does he mean?”
“Tom develops real estate.”
“Is that why you’re here?”
“No. Friends of ours from Philadelphia have moved into the neighbourhood. We came out to visit them.”
“And how would building condos help restore the station?”
Tom turned around. “Not condos. Or only a few. In the existing houses on Main Street, the untenanted ones. We could save the façades, spruce them up, gut the insides, turn them into townhouses for young professionals who yearn for the simpler life and are willing to work from home, or commute. We could install a few small businesses along there too, and fix up the retail strip. A proper coffee shop would be a good addition, a bank branch, a business supply store with mailboxes and photocopying. The small grocery we passed could be converted into a gourmet fresh market. And there should be a real bakery.” He gave the untouched doughnut a dirty look. “A bakery that sells goods made from scratch, not from a food-service mix.
“We could divert a portion of the profits from the sale of the condos and the retail spaces to restore this building completely, right down to the tile floor. We’d get rid of that false ceiling and open up the space — it must have been twenty feet high originally. We’d find antique train station benches and fixtures, and bring in plasterers to rebuild the walls and recreate hand-carved mouldings. We’d install a new clock in the tower. And when the building was brought back to its former grandeur, we’d find a use for it. It wouldn’t be an empty museum, but a living thing. A bookstore, perhaps. Is there a bookstore hereabouts? Of course not. A library? No? Well then, a library.”
Kate spoke up. “The Tom Gagliardi Library?”
Tom said to Alice, “Kate is telling me, in her gracious way, that I am building castles in the air. I have that tendency. But I was merely trying to demonstrate that it can be done. There are ways.”
Lavinia started to stir in the stroller, and Alice bent down to untie her. Before she did, Lavinia began screaming, full blast. Zero to loud in two seconds. Alice picked her up, jiggled her up and down, and shouted over the din to Kate, “Could you hand me that receiving blanket there, in the diaper bag side pocket? Thanks. Oh, Lavinia, for god’s sake.”
Alice threw the blanket over her shoulder, adjusted her clothing underneath, and directed Lavinia’s wailing head to her breast, a move which silenced her cries and replaced them with sucking noises.
Kate stood up. “It was a pleasure to meet you, Alice. Thank you for telling us about Oakdale.”
“I liked meeting you guys, too. Not my everyday experience around here.”
“Happy to oblige,” Tom said.
“And let me know if your air castles turn into concrete ones, will you? Because if they do, I’d like to be involved.”
In the car on the way to Hallie’s house, Tom said, “That woman was laughing at me.”
Kate smiled. “I liked her.”
“Do you think all the inhabitants are of her ilk? Erudite university lecturers? Or are you sticking to your golf-playing, scotch-swilling theory?”
“If Alice belongs to a country club, I’m a religious Catholic.”
After a leisurely drive around the area, Kate and Tom came to Hallie and Sam’s stately Federal-style house, parked in front of the wide, expensively landscaped lot, and went inside. They had drinks, admired the two Orenstein girls until they were led away by a nanny, and sat down to eat in the dining room.
“I’m pleased to report,” Hallie said, from the head of the table, “that I cooked nothing you see before you. Sam grilled the fish and the vegetables, the nanny made the potatoes, and I bought the salad ready-made. I know Tom doesn’t approve, but we can’t all be master chefs, now can we, Kate?”
“It’s all delicious,” Kate said. “The snapper is cooked perfectly, Sam.”
“Thank you. I’ve rediscovered the satisfactions of cooking since I sold the business.”
Kate said to Hallie, “And the house looks fantastic, everything in its place and all settled in. How did you do it?”
“It’s amazing what can be accomplished when you’re willing to write a cheque. And having Sam here all day to take deliveries and deal with the tradesmen makes everything so much easier.” Hallie smiled prettily at Sam when she said this, and drank her wine, and Kate wondered if she was the only person present who heard the resentment in Hallie’s voice.
“How are you adjusting to being at home?” Tom asked Sam. “How’s the writing going?”
“I haven’t done any writing since a month before the move.”
“I’m sure you’ll establish a routine now that you’re settled,” Kate said.
“I hope so.”
Hallie was up refilling their wine glasses already, though Kate had hardly touched hers. “So what do you two think of Oakdale?” Hallie said. “Isn’t it charming?”
Kate exchanged a glance with Tom. “You might as well tell them.”
“Tell us what?”
“About my plan for Main Street,” Tom had said.
And so had Tom’s Oakdale involvement — what Kate was starting to think of as his own mid-life crisis — begun.