Dancing in the Kitchen

By Susan Sterling

Dancing in the Kitchen explores the unraveling of secrets in a New England family after the unexpected death of the father. The story is set in the fall of 1989 in a mill town in Maine, a New Hampshire village, and the Midlands of England. It is narrated alternately by the grown children—Annie, a minister's wife who has fallen into a troubled affair with her husband's best friend, and Rob, a labor historian who resists his sister's interpretations of their shared past even as his own relationships become complicated by emotional legacies and a mysterious stranger.

Returning to her childhood home in Three Rivers, Maine, two months after her father’s death, Annie struggles to understand the past, certain that in its mysteries lie the answers to her present dilemma. An artist and the mother of a four-year-old daughter, she finds herself caught between a faltering marriage and an affair that has rekindled her long dormant passion for painting.

The central dilemma for all the characters is whether they will follow their passions and actively seek out joy in their lives, or stay in honorable but at some level loveless relationships. Grief impels them into risky territory, and their choices are complicated. There is inevitably an emotional price to pay, as Annie has always known and Rob belatedly realizes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: May 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9780985050412

Book preview

Ellman

1. THE MAN IN THE BLOCK OF ICE

Annie Barrington was standing in the checkout line at Rainey’s Grocery Store when the headline of The Weekly Star caught her eye: MAN FROZEN IN 1936 REVIVED! A blurry photograph showed a huge rectangle of ice, within which a middle-aged man in black-rimmed glasses and a dark suit lay as if in a glass coffin. After glancing around the market to see if anyone was noticing, Annie plucked the tabloid off the rack and folded it to conceal the name, then set it in her cart behind a bag of carrots.

But the line was long, so she picked up the newspaper again and skimmed the article. The body had been discovered with several others in a vault in East Berlin. All the bodies had been thawed, but only the man in the suit could be revived. When he woke up, he talked as if it was still the Depression and F.D.R. was President.

Wouldn’t a man frozen in Germany be talking about Hitler instead of F.D.R? Annie wondered. Then, again, the location of the vault in East Berlin might explain, to readers of The Star, anyway, the curious fact that the ice chunks hadn’t been discovered until now. All those secrets buried in Communist countries, where people were now taking to the streets and demanding freedom.

She closed the newspaper again. It was unnecessary, even silly, to hide it. The other customers wouldn’t think twice about her purchase. Buying The Weekly Star would be like buying celery or cat food. The odd thing would be if she had The New York Times—which Rainey’s did not sell—in her cart.

The cashier was especially chatty, but she didn’t comment as she rang up the tabloid. (And why should she? Annie asked herself as she went through the door.) She passed a phone booth, pushing her cart into the November wind. A tall man in a black suit was talking into the phone, and Annie found herself imagining that he was making arrangements to meet his lover at the Three Rivers Motel down the road. That’s crazy, she reprimanded herself. It was as if, since the summer, she’d crossed a great divide and now saw the world in the light of her own infidelity. That telephone booth, for example, which she’d passed a hundred times when she lived here, now appeared to her as the scene of seedy trysts, or for the arrangements of them. A prop in a grade B movie. Possibly even murders had been plotted there.

The man in the phone booth turned and caught her gaze. Annie hastily pulled on her gloves, and bending her head against the brisk wind, pushed her grocery cart down a row of haphazardly parked cars. She was thinking of Tom, her husband Brian’s best friend. She’d been sleeping with him since the end of the summer. Brian didn’t know. Tom owned an antiques store in Harmony, New Hampshire, where Annie and Brian lived, and Annie was imagining him in the back room of the shop, restoring the antique rocking horses he’d picked up at an auction. She could picture him holding a paintbrush, his dark eyes picking up the light from the dangling overhead bulb. The hair on his forearms (she’d always liked men’s forearms) grew as far as his wrist, then stopped abruptly. Her friend Emily—who also didn’t know about her and Tom, thank God—wondered if Tom shaved there, but he didn’t.

Annie! What a wonderful surprise!

Oh, Miss Manter! I’m sorry. I nearly knocked you over!

And if you hadn’t, we’d have missed each other.

It was, amazingly, Rose Manter, her high school Latin teacher, whom she had been thinking about just this morning while driving through the mountains that separated New Hampshire from Maine. She thought Miss Manter had moved away, but apparently not. Annie smiled at her, then drew her cart back apologetically, embarrassed because she’d been dreaming about Tom and not watching where she was going. The wind whipped around the parking lot, rattling the grocery bags in the cart, and Annie edged in front of it. She didn’t want Miss Manter to notice The Weekly Star, which the clerk had stuffed into one bag, a bit of the headline showing.

Are you back in Three Rivers for long? Miss Manter asked.

Just a few days. My father died in September.

Miss Manter put her hand on Annie’s arm, giving it a slight, sympathetic pressure. I read about his death in the paper. I’m so sorry. It’s a terrible loss.

How long had it been since she’d seen her? At least fifteen years. Yet she didn’t look older. Probably because when Annie was in high school, anyone over thirty appeared ancient already. Miss Manter was wearing a black wool coat and a cream scarf with bunches of purple grapes printed on it. Her short hair was still auburn—she’d have to be dyeing it, wouldn’t she? She’s always been a woman out of synch with the seasons, Annie thought fondly.

I’ve come back to help Mother get things settled, she explained.

How is your mother doing? Miss Manter leaned forward with an anxious look that reminded Annie of Latin conferences. It suggested she intuited some danger but didn’t want to alarm. I’ve been meaning to write her. I would have gone to the memorial service, but the newspaper said there wouldn’t be one.

Mother didn’t feel it was necessary.

Miss Manter shook her head. Memento mori. It would have been a beautiful service. Why didn’t she want one?

Why hadn’t she indeed? Annie thought for a moment. No one wanted a service. It was cremation versus burial they argued about, she and her brother Rob anyway, with a fierceness that startled her, as if the ashes contained all their old feelings of rivalry.

Dad wasn’t much of one for ceremonies. This was true, but there was another reason she kept to herself. Her father had been something of a hermit. A misanthrope. He hadn’t had any friends in Three Rivers. She’d been afraid if they had a memorial service no one would come.

She leaned against the shopping cart, hoping that she was blocking The Star. In her imagination, the headlines shifted: MINISTER’S WIFE CAUGHT IN LOVE NEST. Then she straightened her shoulders. It was ridiculous. She hadn’t been Miss Manter’s student for years, yet she felt as uneasy as if she were sitting in the second row in Latin III, stumbling over a passage from Book IV of the Aeneid. Then again, she had rarely stumbled. She loved Latin, loved the praise she got. Annie does such beautiful translations, Miss Manter always wrote on her report cards. One didn’t enjoy disappointing such people.

I sometimes ran into your father downtown, Miss Manter was saying. Last summer I asked him if you were still painting, but he thought you’d given it up. I still remember those watercolors of yours that hung in the library.

You remember them?

They showed such a strong sense of color. They were remarkable landscapes.

Annie smiled. I stopped painting after my daughter was born. But I started again last August. Oils mostly, and sketches. I haven’t done watercolors since I was in art school. The paintings were rather chaotic, and she suspected Miss Manter would not approve of them. Most days they alarmed Annie herself.

The fierce wind burned her cheek. She watched the haphazard path of a market flyer skittering across the parking lot until it came to rest under the tire of a rusted blue pick-up truck. Then she pulled her jacket tighter and did a little skip to keep warm.

I hadn’t realized you were still living in Three Rivers, Annie said.

Miss Manter put her hand to her throat. Her eyes were watery from the wind. I bought a house on Walnut Street. I hope you’ll be able to stop in for a cup of tea before you go back…to New Hampshire? I can’t remember where your father said you are now.

Harmony. In the White Mountains. I’m going back there Thursday, but what if I come Wednesday afternoon? My brother is driving up tonight. He’s spending the year in England and is flying into Boston this evening.

Miss Manter took a step backwards. Annie feared she’d misunderstood. Possibly the invitation was not meant to be accepted, the sort of thing people toss off. We must get together sometime.

But then she touched Annie’s arm again. Her eyes brightened. Wednesday is perfect. Why don’t you come around three?

Annie watched her make her way toward Rainey’s, her unfashionable black coat flapping in the wind. If you’d like, bring Rob and your mother, Miss Manter called back, but Annie had the feeling that this part of the invitation, at least, wasn’t sincere.

Early morning, a thin, sad light coming into the kitchen. The uneasy, brooding feeling that pervaded her parents’ house all fall had intensified; the kitchen, in particular, evoked absence. Annie turned the radio to the classical music station, which was playing Ferde Grofés Grand Canyon Suite. Then she took two eggs from the refrigerator, filled a pot with water, and set it on the stove to boil. When she’d arrived yesterday afternoon—before going to Rainey’s—there was barely any food in the house: a few eggs in an outdated carton behind a wilted head of lettuce, a quart of milk, a box of crackers. Not that this was so unusual. Even when she and Rob were children, their family never had the laden cupboards other families seemed to have.

Setting the table, she remembered a dream she’d had just before waking. In the dream, she was about to move in with Tom, into a flat he shared with two women. But when she arrived, Tom wasn’t there so one of the women showed her the pullout sofa in the living room where she and Tom would sleep. Annie was sure there must be a misunderstanding—Tom had his own room. But when he finally returned and she stepped into his bedroom, she was startled to see a grand piano jutting out of a large jagged hole in the far wall, practically filling the space. The piano was painted bright green. There wasn’t even room for a narrow cot.

The dream made her uneasy. Tom wasn’t musical. It was her mother who was a pianist. And Brian played the piano in a jazz band during his years in divinity school. Once in a while he still tinkered on the old upright the previous minister had left behind in the parsonage.

Upstairs, the floorboards creaked. Annie retrieved her mother’s blue and white teapot from the dining room, and as she was putting in tea leaves, her mother appeared in the doorway, wearing a red plaid robe and carrying a square blue box that appeared heavy from the way she held it. She was a tall thin woman with white hair, clear blue eyes, and an often vague expression as if, Annie sometimes thought, she had stepped out of a nineteenth-century painting and found herself in the wrong century.

Did you sleep all right? Annie asked. I had the strangest dream… she stopped, because her mother appeared distracted. She wasn’t about to tell her mother about Tom, anyway. Her mother set the blue box next to the back door, then sat at the kitchen table and stared out the window at her garden, her thoughts perhaps on the dried stalks of phlox that hadn’t yet been cut down for winter, the still exposed iris rhizomes. Annie brought her a piece of toast and a soft-boiled egg.

We need to make an appointment to see the lawyer, Annie said. And we should stop by the YMCA. Mrs. Langtaine says they have excellent programs for Senior Citizens.

Her mother frowned. Mrs. Langtaine! When did you run into her? I have no desire to do ceramics at the Y. All those old people, complaining about their ailments.

They might have a winter gardening class. And Rob and I think you should get out and meet people now that Dad’s gone.

I know plenty of people in Three Rivers. Her mother waved her hand dismissively. Annie set the teapot down on the table, puzzled. She and Rob had always worried that their parents were too isolated. Annie believed their father’s solitary nature dictated this; their mother was a shade more social. Perhaps they’d made friends after she and Rob left home but never mentioned them.

Her mother poured tea into her cup, then set the pot back on the table.

Filling her own cup first! Annie thought with a disturbing bitterness. She believed she’d reconciled herself to her mother’s self-centeredness years ago, but apparently not. Or not enough. She loved the teapot, though, which belonged to her mother’s wedding china, the traditional Blue Willow pattern with the lovers transformed into birds.

You used to keep this teapot for special occasions, Annie said, pouring her own tea. What happened to your green teapot? I was looking for it this morning.

I gave it to the rummage sale at the library. I don’t want to end up like Shakespeare’s wife.

Shakespeare’s wife?

He left his wife the ‘second best bed’ in his will. I’d have thought you’d have remembered that from your English.

That doesn’t mean his wife always used the second best of everything! Annie said, wondering why she was harping on the teapot. She had, in fact, always loved this china. The escaping lovers added the promise of romance to a house that so often seemed without it.

Her mother poured a little milk into her own tea, then stirred it with her spoon.

I hope it’s not too strong for you.

Her mother smiled in that forced way Annie found disconcerting as a child. A formal smile that she still, occasionally, bestowed on Annie and Rob as if they were houseguests whom she didn’t remember inviting. I’m sure it’ll be fine. She lifted the creamer and poured a second dollop of milk into her teacup, then stirred it.

Didn’t you already put in milk?

Oh! Her mother shook her head, then took a sip of milky tea.

Outside the back window the bare branches of the oak tree moved against the morning sky. On the radio, the weatherman was predicting unseasonably cold temperatures, possibly snow in the north and the mountains.

Annie walked over to the sink to fill the kettle for a second pot of tea, then glanced down at the box and read the white label centered across the top: The remains of Edward C. Morris; Cemetery: Four Winds.

She stood still, letting the water run. Where the morning sun entered the window, dust motes appeared to be dancing crazily above the sink. It took her a moment to find her voice.

What are you doing, Mother?

What do you mean?

This box. Dad’s ashes.

Oh, that. The trash men come today.

The faucet jerked, a rush of water, like fury invading a heart. Annie filled the kettle and placed it on the stove. Then she walked to the kitchen door and looked out. Cold leaked in from around the edges of the glass. The Pines of Rome had replaced the Grand Canyon Suite on the radio.

I know—well, you said last night— you’ve been throwing away a lot of his papers. But his ashes, Mother! That’s too much!

What possible good are they to me now?

It’s not a matter of good!

Maybe not. But there’s no need to keep them. Her mother picked up her knife as if the matter were settled, then sliced off the top of the egg. As she raised her spoon, a bit of yolk dribbled onto the red plaid bathrobe. Annie’s father’s robe. Annie hated to see her wearing it.

You told us you were leaving them in the attic. They can’t be in the way up there.

Her mother dabbed absently at the bathrobe with her napkin. Last night after you went to bed, I went up to the attic to look for my old piano music. Then I came across that box, and I thought, why on earth am I keeping these? She gave Annie a look that anticipated reasonableness, assent.

But they’re Dad’s ashes!

He wouldn’t care. He wasn’t sentimental about such things.

The faint smell of sulfur from the eggs hovered in the chilly November air. At a loss for a moment how to get around this obvious fact—her father wouldn’t have cared one whit about the destination of his remains—Annie reached behind her chair to see if heat was coming out of the radiators. A faint warmth. Like the parsonage, her parents’ house was unbearably slow to heat up in the morning.

What about Rob and me? You told Rob we would do something with them next summer when he and Jessica get back from England.

The kettle whistled, shrill, insistent. Annie brought the teapot back to the table to steep.

Your father’s death was so unexpected, her mother said. Maybe that’s why I’ve been forgetting things.

Was this an appeal for sympathy or simply a statement of fact?

I’d forgotten I’d promised Rob, her mother said finally. We can talk to him about them when he gets up. Take the box back to the attic now if you want. Her tone was reluctant, but she gave Annie a thin smile, as if determined to appear agreeable. And when you go upstairs, would you bring down the silver coffee set? I need to polish it. I’m thinking about having a party.

A party? But who would you invite?

Oh, her mother said vaguely. Some friends.

After breakfast Annie carried the box of ashes (it was surprisingly heavy, as if it contained small weights) into the front hall. She stared at the label. Four Winds Cemetery. She didn’t think there was a Four Winds Cemetery in Three Rivers. Fairhaven… Resthaven … something like that. Rob had picked up the ashes.

Then she stood still. Oh, no, scattered to the four winds! Her knees buckled.

She dropped onto the bottom stair, willing herself into detachment. If you didn’t know what the box contained, you might mistake it for the sort of box winter boots came in. The pale blue color conveyed a stately old-fashioned feeling, as if it held typing paper, or a hat. But it didn’t contain boots or paper or a hat. It held her father.

She didn’t expect his things would be preserved forever, as if in a museum. But the bathrobe that her mother was now wearing evoked him so intimately. She closed her eyes, remembering how he used to come down the stairs in his old brown slippers, wearing that red plaid robe over his pajamas. He’d be singing Froggy Went a Courtin’ or Leather Wing Bat in his rich baritone. In the kitchen, he often sang songs from an old Burl Ives record, with the occasional Rogers and Hammerstein lyric thrown in if he were in an especially good mood. He sang even if he was feeling ornery, though, so you couldn’t count on his singing to reveal his true feelings. In the shower he turned to opera. His early morning singing grated on her when she was a child, struggling to make the school bus. She felt he sang to spite her. She hadn’t expected it would be one of the things about him she would most miss.

2. DESERT ISLAND DISCS

A shadowy figure stood on a chair in Rob’s closet. His sister Annie. She shoved a box toward the back of the shelf, then stepped down, walked slowly to the foot of the bed and waited there. Through half-closed eyes, he glimpsed her yellow Mexican shirt, the yoke embroidered with crimson thread. He remembered that shirt from ten years ago when she was teaching at that hippy school in northern California. He visited her there one spring, sleeping in her tent, looking out at the stars each night, waking mornings to the smell of bacon drifting across the ravine. He felt closer to her then than at any other time in their lives. But now he wished she wouldn’t wander into his bedroom without knocking. In the eight years he and Jess had been living together, he slept naked even in winter, but he’d just as soon not announce this fact to his family.

Why not? he wondered sleepily. He closed his eyes. When he opened them again, Annie was sitting crossed legged on the gray blanket at the foot of the bed, her long dark bangs falling across her hazel eyes. Wake up, Rob, she said. It’s almost noon. We need to talk!

It’s too early.

It’s late in the afternoon your time! Her voice agitated the air, banishing the comfortable feeling he had walking into the house late last night, the sense—though of course this was false—that little had changed in the twenty years since he left for college.

He turned his head toward the window. Under the shade, frost clung to the windowpanes. The radiator whistled away. Annie was saying something about their father, about his ashes.

She said they aren’t him. She’s right, of course. But she didn’t remember that we want to do something with them. If I hadn’t seen her…

There was a clanking and grinding from down the street. He sat up abruptly, his heart constricting with the image of his father’s ashes scattered among the orange peels and soggy newspapers, the detritus of other people’s lives.

Where are they?

Annie gestured toward the closet shelf. Even if she goes looking for them, she won’t think of your closet.

I can’t believe she’d throw them away. Even now he could hear his mother’s halting voice on the telephone: Dad died last night. He had a heart attack. And then his mother hadn’t been able to go on, and he had stood in his office at the university, holding the phone and staring at the desk, thinking, stupidly, I can give my lecture this afternoon and then fly back.

She doesn’t seem to be grieving, Rob.

Of course she’s grieving, Annie. They were married forty years!

His sister’s dark eyes went darker. She tugged the gray blanket around her feet. It’s an awfully long time to be married to the same person.

It’s an achievement. He ran his hand along his jaw where his beard was streaked with gray. He’d be thirty-eight in January. Too old to be drifting along the way he and Jess were. But he didn’t want to think about that now. What he mostly felt was grubby from travel. Desperate for a shower.

I’ll talk to her, Annie. The radiator under the window wasn’t giving out much heat. The bedroom air felt Arctic. But probably it’s smart to put them where she won’t come across them.

Do you know what she told me last night? She was over him. Her voice caught. How can that be true? Yesterday I was putting gas in the car, in Bethel, and I remembered those stupid weekly charts Dad made listing our chores. She dropped her head, then smiled faintly, her hazel eyes damp. I started to cry, right there in the bank.

He put his hand on hers and was startled to feel her wedding ring (though why should he be?) He’d been taken aback when she called him to say she was marrying Brian. He remembered their conversations in her tent, how certain they both were that they’d remain single. When she called with news of her engagement, he felt betrayed. But that was crazy because by then he was already living with Jess.

We couldn’t have had better parents, Annie. Unconventional but unique.

But something was missing between them. They never showed us how to be happy. We weren’t a happy family.

Happiness isn’t everything.

But isn’t the meaning of life to be happy?

I don’t know what the meaning of life is! He shrugged. Who does? But I’ll talk to Mother about the ashes.

When Annie left the room, he lay back on the pillow. Why did she have to be so critical? She was like an overzealous quality control worker, digging around in the factory of their family life, dredging up old grievances. Wasn’t it up to each of us to create happiness? And wasn’t happiness to be found in work you loved?

He wished he were still in England. Late Tuesday afternoon, he’d be at the Old Cat, talking politics with John and his other colleagues and drinking ale. Already he sensed his sabbatical year whirling toward its end. In ten months he’d be back at Huron College, facing another class of under-prepared freshman. That is if he didn’t remain in Stoke. There’d been talk about extending his lectureship another year, but he hadn’t mentioned that to Jessica, who still hadn’t settled into English life.

The prospect of this conversation, which he’d need to have soon, was too complicated to dwell on now. The day would disappear if he stayed in bed any longer. He threw back the covers and hopped over to his suitcase where he rummaged around for clean underwear. The floorboards were icy under his feet, and he jumped from one foot to the other. He was about to think Jessica had forgotten to pack his socks when he located six pairs neatly rolled up like little fists underneath Arnold Bennett’s The Grim Smile of the Five Towns and his map of Stoke-on-Trent. Sticking out of the map was a piece of paper. On the back Jessica had drawn a little smiling face. I LOVE YOU, she’d written in green ink underneath. He shook his head. She amazed him. Why had she thought he’d need a map of Stoke while in Maine?

When he came downstairs, his mother was seated at the kitchen table making cuttings from her African violets. Rob noticed—as he hadn’t last night—how hunched her shoulders had become. Her white hair was wild and uncombed, and in the late morning light she appeared attenuated, as if his father’s death had drawn something vital from her. On the other hand, there was a fierceness in her concentration that argued against grief. It was wrong of Annie to insist their mother wasn’t mourning, but he sensed it would be best to wait to talk about the ashes.

She looked up with a quick smile. Did you sleep well?

He was tempted to confess that he’d lain awake half the night, missing Jessica, wishing she were in Three Rivers with him. But his mother was uncomfortable around intimations of sex. Like the British, in fact. Fabulously, he lied. It’s great to be home.

Would you like a cup of tea?

"Later. I’m heading downtown to get the Times. After that I promised Annie we’d get cracking on your bank books."

Wouldn’t it be better to do that tomorrow? When you’re on American time? She smiled affectionately, confident in his acquiescence. Oh, she could be charming; he didn’t want to distress her. Working with her African violets was surely healing. As he bent to kiss her, he noticed three dark hairs hanging from her chin, giving her face a careless, mannish look he found disturbing. She smoothed a wayward strand of hair back off her forehead, leaving a thin streak of dirt. She was wearing a red chamois shirt that she often wore to garden outside. A woman without a man is like a garden without a fence, he thought. An old German proverb, if he remembered correctly.

I need to get these started. She gestured to one of the tiny clay pots set out on a layer of newspapers. This leaf is already damaged.

Annie reminded me we need to submit the insurance forms this week.

His mother sighed pointedly. Oh, Annie. She’s always worrying about something.

Actually, I’m worried about her. She seems troubled.

Your father’s death has been hard for her.

I’m wondering how things are between her and Brian.

His mother lifted a pink-flowered African violet and snipped off a bottom leaf. She dipped the stem into planting mixture. You never cared much for Brian, did you?

What gave you that impression?

You told me. After they moved back from California.

He didn’t remember this conversation, but it was possible he’d forgotten. His mother had a sharp memory, or did until his father’s death in September. Over the past few years he’d confided in her and then been startled when, months later, she referred to remarks he’d long forgotten.

Brian and I get along fine. I just didn’t think he was right for Annie. Still don’t.

Are you certain you wouldn’t like a cup of tea now? Or cocoa? Her voice was wistful.

When I return with the paper. We’ll have a cup of tea then.

He rested his hands on her thin shoulders. There was a musty fragrance from the red shirt that combined with the smell of dirt to evoke his most tender feelings. Perhaps he should stay and keep her company. She always said nothing made her as happy as his visits. But he needed to get out of the house, take a walk.

The wind assaulted him as he stepped off the back porch, as if it had been lying in wait. He buttoned his coat and walked down the driveway, then turned right toward Main Street. He didn’t remember Three Rivers being this cold in early November. This wind felt like January.

He walked quickly. A dog barked from a backyard. The barking was harsh, lonely, making Rob feel lonely himself. Only three months in England, and already his neighborhood had an air of foreignness, as if his memories came from a book he’d read as a child.

He thought about the BBC radio program Desert Island Discs that he and Jess listened to Friday mornings. Each week a prominent figure from contemporary British life, usually culture or politics, was interviewed on the show. The premise was that the guest was marooned on a desert island and would be allowed eight records, a favorite book and a luxury. (The Bible and a complete set of Shakespeare’s works were already provided—a particularly British gesture, Rob thought.)

Now, strolling through his old neighborhood, he allowed himself an indulgence that he’d never permit in England and imagined himself a guest on the program. Robert Morris, American historian and expatriate, expert on nineteenth-century labor practices. How would he describe Three Rivers to a British audience? A mill town, he’d say, a typical New England mill town. Textiles and paper had been the main industries, though the textile mills had moved to the southern states, leaving behind empty brick factory buildings that still lined the Maquoddy River. When was it you knew you had to leave Three Rivers, Mr. Morris? — As soon as I realized there was a world outside Maine. — A world with more culture? — Precisely. — And now let’s have your next choice, Appalachian Spring, in a performance conducted by the composer.

By the time he turned fourteen he was itching to leave, though he didn’t recognize his own restlessness until he’d gone off to college. His awareness was always slow to catch up with his feelings. In New Haven, he didn’t understand how his parents had been able to survive so far from the amenities of city life. Why did we leave Boston? he asked his father, who appeared amused by the question. He was a geologist, worked then for the state. You follow your opportunities, he said. There are great rocks in Maine.

And then at Yale, Rob took a surprising turn himself. He’d been an indifferent if intelligent student until his junior year when he took a course in labor history. Much later he surmised this history appealed to him precisely because he’d grown up in a working class town like Three Rivers. He hadn’t wanted to be a scientist like his father. His father kept his distance from the other families in the neighborhood, his energies focused on cataclysmic events millions of years ago. You might even say Rob’s work as a labor historian was a way of compensating for his father’s lack of awareness of the working families of Three Rivers. When he was growing up, most of the fathers in the neighborhood worked in middle-management jobs at the paper mill across the river. In the summer they were out together in their backyards, barbecuing hamburgers, drinking beers, exchanging jokes, while his own father would be inside the house, reading The New York Times. This difference bothered Rob when he was a kid—he hated the oddness of his family—but now he felt more sympathetic. Still, he was determined his own life wouldn’t be so isolated. He respected his father’s dedication, but he wanted his own work to keep him connected to ordinary life.

He turned the corner onto Main Street, toward the smoke shop where his father would pick up The New York Times every morning. He shoved his hands deeper into his coat pockets—he’d forgotten to bring gloves back from England. Stoke-on-Trent was damp, but never bitter cold like this. The temperature never fell below freezing. In older English houses, the drainage pipes ran down the exterior walls, a detail his father would have appreciated.

He crossed another street where the houses stood interspersed among small businesses. An oil truck turned into the driveway of a chiropractor’s office, and then he was walking past the Early Bird Market. He and his friend Andy Garnet used to filch candy bars from there, stuffing them into their pockets while the owner was preoccupied, then escaping down the street. Not the sort of detail you mentioned on Desert Island Discs.

Another half a block, and he paused opposite Gilcourt’s Dry Cleaning. Martha Gilcourt was his high school girlfriend. Her name still conjured the pervasive smell of chemicals and steam that had greeted him every Saturday evening as he walked through the door to pick her up. Martha would have been working the counter. Behind her, hundreds of garments hung on hangers, attached to a long mechanized loop that, rising and descending, circled back into the depths of the store. Rob had been the one to break off the relationship. A few months later, right after graduation, she married some guy who worked at the paper mill.

But when they were going out Martha liked to bake him chocolate chip cookies and leave them in his locker. Once or twice he thought he detected the faint aroma of dry cleaning fluid as he bit into the chocolate. She made him a pie from apples they picked the fall of their senior year. Nothin’ says lovin’ like somethin’ from the oven. His family scorned those old sayings, but they had an element of truth.

Still thinking of Martha—where was she now?—he crossed the railroad tracks, then passed the old railway depot. A little further on he came to the Three Rivers Bridal Shop. The mannequins—a bride, a groom and two bridesmaids—stared out of the large plate glass windows with glazed smiles.

He paused in front of the shop, thinking about the way the interviewer from Desert Island Discs probed into the hidden corners of people’s lives. She had a knack for eliciting the sort of personal details you normally