Friend of My Youth

grandfather established it in all its glory. My father preserved it. And I lost it.”
    He doesn’t mind telling people. Not that he waylays them and unburdens himself immediately. Guests are used to seeing him always at work. Repairing the dock, painting the rowboat, hauling in groceries, digging up drains, he looks so competent and unfrazzled, so cheerfully committed to whatever job he’s doing, that they take him for a farmer turned to resort-keeping. He has the kind of patience and uninquisitive friendliness, the unathletic but toughened and serviceable body, the sunburned face, the graying boyishness that they might expect of a country man. But the same guests come back year after year, and sometimes they become friends who are invited on their last night to eat dinner at the family table. (It is considered an achievement, among the regulars, to become friends with stately Barbara. Some never manage it.) Then they may get to hear Murray’s story.
    “My grandfather used to go up on the roof of our building in Walley,” Murray says. “He went up on the roof and he threw down money. Every Saturday afternoon. Quarters, dimes, nickels—five-cent pieces, I guess you called them then. It drew the crowds. The men who started Walley were flashy fellows. They weren’t well educated. They weren’t genteel. They thought they were building Chicago.”
    Then something different happened, he says. In came the ladies and the rectors and the grammar school. Out with the saloons and in with the garden parties. Murray’s father was an elder of St. Andrew’s; he stood for the Conservative Party.
    “Funny—we used to say ‘stood for’ instead of ‘ran for.’ The store was an institution by that time. Nothing changed for decades. The old display cases with curved glass tops, and thechange zinging overhead in those metal cylinders. The whole town was like that, into the fifties. The elm trees weren’t dead yet. They’d started. In the summer there were the old cloth awnings all around the square.”
    When Murray decided to modernize, he went all out. It was 1965. He had the whole building covered in white stucco, the windows blocked in. Just little, classy, eye-level windows left along the street, as if intended to display the Crown jewels. The name Zeigler’s—just that—written across the stucco in flowing script, pink neon. He chucked the waist-high counters and carpeted the varnished floors and put in indirect lighting and lots of mirrors. A great skylight over the staircase. (It leaked, had to be repaired, was taken out before the second winter.) Indoor trees and bits of pools and a kind of fountain in the ladies’ room.
    Insanity.
    Meanwhile the mall had opened south of town. Should Murray have gone out there? He was too mired in debt to move. Also, he had become a downtown promoter. He had not only changed the image of Zeigler’s, he had changed himself, becoming a busy loudmouth on the municipal scene. He served on committees. He was on the building committee. That was how he discovered that a man from Logan, a dealer and developer, was getting government money for restoring old buildings when the fact of the matter was that he was tearing the old buildings down and preserving only a remnant of the foundation to incorporate into his new, ugly, badly built, profitable apartment blocks.
    “Aha—corruption,” says Murray when he recalls this. “Let the people know! I ranted to the newspaper. I practically ranted on the street corners. What did I think? Did I think the people
didn’t
know? It must have been a death wish. It was a death wish. I got to be such a ranter and public entertainment that I was turfed off the committee. I’d lost credibility. They said so. I’d also lost the store. I’d lost it to the bank. Plus the big house my grandfather built and the little house on the same lot, whereBarbara and I and the kids were living. The bank couldn’t get at them, but I sold them off, to get square—that was the way I wanted to do it. Lucky thing my mother died before the crash came.”
    Sometimes Barbara excuses herself while Murray is talking. She could be going to get more coffee, she might come back in a moment. Or she might take the dog, Sadie, and go for a walk down to the pond, in among the pale trunks of the birch and poplar trees and under the droopy hemlocks. Murray doesn’t bother explaining, though he listens, without appearing to do so, to hear her come back. Anybody who becomes