Cool's Ridge

By Ursula Perrin

When twenty-five-year-old Liz Stillwell arrives at Cool’s Ridge, a communal farm in the Kittatinny Mountains of rural northwest New Jersey, she believes she has found a safe and peaceful place. But despite the country setting, an air of tension that is political, as well as sexual, pervades the farm. It is June of 1972, there’s a war in Vietnam and all of the group members are anti-war activists.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jan 5, 2016
• ISBN: 9781504024860

Ursula Perrin

Ursula Perrin was born in Berlin, Germany, and grew up in Amsterdam, New York, and Ridgewood, Queens. After graduating from Smith College, she taught history at the Chapin School in New York City. Her other novels are Ghosts, The Looking-Glass Lover, Heart Failures, Old Devotions, and Unheard Music.  

Book preview

I

A Safe Place

1.

The reason Skip and I didn’t have the talk we needed to have was this: all hell had broken loose. That first night as soon as dinner was over, my father called.

He said: Liz? Are you there? in that indomitably brave and cheerful voice that by some reflexive genetic mechanism makes me square my jaw and grit my teeth.

Of course I’m here. Can’t you tell it’s me?

It’s awfully noisy. Sounds as if there are ten people in the room with you.

Seven, Daddy. Hold on, I’ll go upstairs … Hi, it’s me again from upstairs. Is there a problem?

Liz …

Yes?

I don’t know how to tell you this …

Yes? Is it Johnny?

No, no. Not this time. It’s … ah … you see, I was going to write but I found I kept stalling. You know how I hate to write, and besides, it seemed so cold. Your mother and I, Liz, as you know, have been through so many difficulties …

I was silent waiting for him to get it out: we’re getting divorced.

We’re getting divorced.

Mmm.

I’m sorry.

Daddy, look, it’s your divorce and that’s my line. I’m supposed to say it.

Yes. Well … you see … I don’t know how to explain.

So don’t.

It’s just … he blurted, time is getting short and I, ah, selfishly, I suppose, after all these years want—a little happiness.

It’s okay. Daddy, I understand. It’s been really awful.

And your mother, too. She wants it, too. It seems the only way either one of us can have any life at all is to separate.

I know. Except …

What?

Mom is so sort of fragile.

She makes more money than I do!

I didn’t mean that. Who’s talking about money? My father grew up during the Depression and he has this fix on money—a primitive part of him thinks it can cure things, while another part of him knows better.

She wanted it. She brought it up first.

Didn’t surprise me. She always brought things up first. She loved trying out food, places, people, ideas as much as my father, your generic conservative, hated it. She’d take on anything new as a challenge and then discard it whereas my father would be reluctant, hesitate, but would finally seize hold just about the time my mother had dropped the whole enterprise for something else. Oh I could hear her voice brighten as she said it: Let’s get divorced! But with my father it had sunk in.

After we hung up I waited nervously all evening for my mother to call, so Skip and I didn’t get to talk after dinner either. Instead, we played bridge with May and Leonard. Alice made mint iced tea and served it with slices of chocolate rum cake. We played at the long trestle table on the dining porch and the sunset splashed down on the lily pond, and Alice brought out candles in hurricane lamps. Wayne played his grandfather’s mandolin—the very same one he’d had at Princeton in 1908—and Shauna McKeown played her guitar. It was odd, my first night at Cool’s Ridge Farm. I felt like a kid at camp. I had the same strange mixture of curiosity and defensiveness I used to take to camp with me. And then there were the bullfrogs and the crickets, and past the porch screens the falling darkness and the moon rising over its twin which lay in the pond, a calm, silvery globe—as self-satisfied as a baby in its bassinet. I asked about mosquitoes.

Not so bad, May said, frowning at her hand of cards. She had beautiful rose and white skin, long dark brown hair, dark brown eyes. When she frowned her smooth, perfectly symmetrical eyebrows drew together. She looked up. We have tons of birds here, they eat the mosquitoes. Watch out you guys, I’m going for it—six no trump. She had a sweet husky voice. Already I’d pegged her as the nicest one of the group.

Skip and I lost the rubber, my mother did not call. At eleven (Skip swinging a giant flashlight), we went down to the sandy side of the pond for a swim. I said, Are you positive there are no snakes? Everybody else came down, too. They had a certain ritual: bathing attire was worn only to the water’s edge. Leonard was the only one who wouldn’t skinny. All that summer he wore bathing trunks out of the pond and in.

Christ, Len, Sal Victoria complained, treading water and tossing back his long seaweed hair, you can take it off, brother. I’m the only man here who’s got it all.

Sez you, Wayne said and laughed. We only skinny-dipped in the dark, never in the daytime. But it was aphrodisiacal, and later Skip and I ran up to the third floor wrapped in our wet towels and unwrapped each other in his room, and made love on his narrow jingling bed. It was delicious the way we felt, clasped together, cool, clammy skin and the fetid sex-smelling whiff of the pond in his hair and mine. The bed jiggled and squeaked and I giggled and said, Shh, shh.

So we never had the talk we needed to have. Afterward, I got up and sleepily went to my room next door. In the 1920’s, the place had been run as a funny farm, and so there were these boxlike hospital rooms up and down the long corridor. There was a bathroom at each end of the corridor and as I was closing Skip’s door, Len came out of his room and headed toward the john. He had a white towel wrapped around his waist and looked as if he were sleepwalking. He passed within a foot of me, squinted his gray eyes and without acknowledging me went into the bathroom. I heard the hook slip into the lock.

That’s right, Bud, I thought to myself, lock yourself in. I went to the bathroom door and mischievously scrabbled my nails against the wood, and then I thought, Now why did I do that?

The beds were narrow and the bedrooms small, and all summer long, Skip and I only slept the whole night together once, when we took sleeping bags up to the top of the ridge.

It was a strange time. I was twenty-five years old. It was the summer that Watergate broke and we said to each other, This is it, man. This is the end of all that crummy bullshit. People just won’t stand for it anymore. It was like camp at the Farm, but there weren’t any counselors. We all did jobs and worked hard, but sometimes it felt as if we were little kids playing together. So much of it was fun, and although at the end I couldn’t stand it there anymore, at the beginning, the very beginning, that first night, I lay on my bed like a patient in for the cure. I felt safe there. Hallelujah, safe at last! I felt hopeful. Maybe after all I would be happy, or have a life. Since John had gotten sick I had had no life, no life at all, but that first night, I was happier than I’d ever been anywhere.

2.

I had driven up to the Farm from Washington, D.C. For the past two years I’d taught English at a girls’ boarding school in Massachusetts and when the school year ended, I quit my job and drove down to Chevy Chase to get in touch with Skip. I hadn’t heard from him since April but that’s the way he was—it was. We were always on the move. Sometimes he turned up in my life just when I’d started with someone else, and then he’d disappear and I would start stalking him again. We were hunter and hare, but at different points on the same spinning circle, so that who was hunter and who was hare I did not know.

When I drove into the Loomis’ long curving gravel driveway, with its strictly manicured boxwood hedge and sweeps of lawn on either side, there were two delivery vans parked at the back door. A black woman in a beige uniform and white hospital shoes stood on the back stoop arguing with a small black delivery man who patiently held propped on his knee an entire wooden crate of raw shrimp. Inside, barefoot and in a tennis dress, Mrs. Loomis was directing the placement of the flower arrangements—But ah specifically a-yast foah yellah foah the lahbury. The-ah is no yellah, not one bit!

When she saw me she raised her lightly pencilled reddish brows, twiddled her fingers, and said she’d be with me in a sec, hon, go get a coke or somethin’ from the pantry fridge. After a while she came into the kitchen with both arms extended. I guess my first instinct was to leap back, there was something dangerous and praying mantis-like about the movement, but I succumbed and she patted me between the shoulder blades and said I looked mahvelous—had I gained weight? Skip wasn’t home, didn’ I know where he was? He’d moved up to this crazy ol’ place in New Jersey … she frowned and beckoned for me to follow her into the kitchen, where every flat surface had a glossy plate or platter upon it and where two black women in beige uniforms stood peeling shrimp at the stainless steel sink.

Well foo! Mrs. Loomis said. She was standing at the desk that was built into a nook of the kitchen and that was always littered with letters and invitations. Her thin red-nailed hands skittered across the heaped paper mess like sand crabs. Here ’tis, she said at last. She put a little pair of black-framed half glasses on the end of her thin perfect nose. Cool’s Ridge Farm, R.D. 3 Box 3, Ridge Road, Homer Township, New Jersey. She gave me the telephone number as well, and then politely left the room, walking on red-painted tippy-toes, not, I guessed, to reduce the noise level, but to avoid pressing the soles of her delicate white feet against the possibly food-spotted white vinyl floor.

I thought how she had very good manners, but not so good that I felt she liked me. Did she like anyone? She was from Mississippi and claimed that she’d married a rich man socially beneath her. She’d told me this once while her husband stood grinning beside her. She was always at the top of the tennis ladder at the Chevy Chase Country Club. She was your basic tough and slightly crooked competitor, only she covered it all over with that sweet southern lady stuff, the way coconut cake is slathered with icky white frosting. She hadn’t asked me to stay overnight, so I called a college classmate in Silver Springs, Maryland, and left from Rhonda’s house the next morning.

It was June and hot. I took Route 95 and the Jersey Turnpike and then I took Route 31 north, through the hills and dales of the New Jersey countryside. I was driving a 1968 Volvo painted a comforting spruce green color. The car had a standard shift and more lives than an alley cat. Somewhere I know that car’s heart is beating still, although maybe now its chassis is painted canary yellow and a pair of fuzzy dice bob over the dashboard. I had nothing like that. I didn’t believe in God or luck and the dashboard was as dusty and uncluttered as my life.

I was driving the car in a black tee-shirt with a white peace sign on the bosom, jeans cut-off at the thigh, leather sandals. My hair was long and straight, and a folded red bandana kept it out of my eyes as I drove. It was plain hair, ash gold or brown, depending upon the light. I wore an old wristwatch, a black-strapped Bulova that had been my grandfather’s, and on my right hand, a diamond ring that my Grandmother Stillwell had left me in her will.

Although it was June (there were roses in bloom everywhere, tea roses in the front yards of village houses, and wild white roses climbing the trees and stone walls of farmers’ fields) I had a pair of Hart skis in the car, my ski boot, ski poles, ice skates. I had as well a blue dog collar that had belonged to my dog Jesse; my saddle, boots, crop, a bridle with a snaffle bit, a six-cup electric percolator, a small electric frying pan. One box of books went everywhere with me and included a paperback copy of Rilke’s poetry, a paperback copy of Akhmatova’s poetry, a small Russian grammar, a paperback copy of Lolita (in Russian), Chekhov’s short stories, the King James Version of the Bible, and the Social Register. The Social Register had arrived in the mail the day I was packing and I just threw it in. In fact, I had no money, no social position and whatever place I had in the world I felt was largely illusory. All I really had was what it takes most people a lifetime to find out they have, and since I already knew what that was, I figured myself to be ahead of the game—I had myself. I was not coming into money, I was smart but had no major talents. True, I was in love with a man who might someday be rich, but this someday seemed an iffy proposition and somehow his money didn’t really figure prominently in my plans. We had met four years before—not at a peace march—and had fallen in love.

Driving north that day on Route 31, I looked out the window at the countryside passing me by. Northwestern New Jersey was then still largely rural, and I thought how benign it looked, those green, rolling Jersey hills, the well-kept white farmhouses, the red barns and silver-capped silos, the cows grazing in the pastures. In the meadows they were already making hay and I thought how over and over again, summer after summer, this very scene was played out, the hay cut and bundled, and thrown onto the long flat hay wagons that were drawn by tractor to the hay barn. How peaceful it all seemed, in time immemorial, but there was a falsity, a deviousness to all this peace and prosperity, something was very wrong with the world, even here in America, maybe most of all here in America where in 1972 life was untouched by the bombs, grenades and napalm, the death and destruction we seemed so bent on inflicting elsewhere. As if Vietnam didn’t count, the Vietnamese didn’t count.

But even at home in safe America, within my immediate family, life had taken on a peculiar mocking uncertainty. The year before, my father’s brother Hawley had died of a heart attack, aged forty-two. Five years before, my Grandmother Stillwell’s Buick had been hit head-on by a drunk in a pickup truck five miles north of the cocktail party she was going to in Palm Beach, Florida. In 1967, my Grandfather Stillwell had been shot to death by a burglar in his country farmhouse near Far Hills, New Jersey. I was twenty then, in 1967, a senior at Smith. I hadn’t yet met Skip, John hadn’t gotten sick.

So what I was thinking about on the drive up was not just how dangerous modern life was—life has always been dangerous—but the ways in which our family—the Chandlers, the Stillwells—had dwindled. I wasn’t sure why. Not enough drive? Too much booze and too much style and too much longing? For many years now the Stillwells had been living on borrowed money and time. We were, as a family, well-educated, and we were mildly talented in various unimportant ways, but none of us was any good at making money. We all knew it, we used to joke about it—The Family Inability—but on the other hand, we cared deeply about living in a certain way: in the country, if possible, with dogs and a couple of horses, and skiing in the winter, and enough scotch whiskey in the liquor cabinet. A country ham and a cedar fire on Christmas Eve, champagne and oranges on Christmas morning.

But we were sinking down in the world and my father, whose grandfather had been rich, took it personally. How was it, he wondered, that he worked all the time, and still couldn’t pay the bills? My mother, on the other hand, who was fatally realistic, would just wave her hand and say, Oh who cares, and then she’d tell you right off the bat that while her father had risen from law clerk to judge, her grandfather had been a millhand. And who cares, anyhow? she’d ask the air. We’re here, and then … she’d snap her fingers gone! She was, herself, the total democrat and her desk was as wrist-deep in liberal mail as Amelia Loomis’s desk was littered with cocktail party invitations. I always thought that my mother, more than anyone else I knew, lived in the present tense. It was as if she’d long ago recognized the tangible quality of modern life and determined—every moment—money or not, to make the absolute best of it.

And anyway, we all knew where the money had gone. It had gone on John.

By early afternoon, I’d gotten close to the dot I’d circled in red marker on the road map—Cool’s Ridge Farm was outside the decrepit little white village of Dix Mills. There I stopped at a Texaco station to get gas and directions. The attendant counted out my change—it was before the first oil crisis and gasoline was cheap.

Cool’s Ridge? he said. Hoo! The funny farm! Now what do you want to go up there for? He was red-faced and grinned at me out of three days worth of rainbow-colored whiskers. He turned his head and whistled, piercingly, at a colleague. Hey Drew? This gal wants to know where Cool’s Ridge is at! He put his meaty sun-burned arm on my rolled-down window and leaned upon it. You ain’t one of those, are yuh?

I don’t know, I said. Maybe I am. Are you going to give me directions or shall I go ask someone else?

Oh, say, you’re pretty hot for a little gal, ain’t ya? His blue eyes narrowed hostilely and slid over my thighs. Well, okay, if you’re set on goin’ up there—myself I don’t care for atheists nor draft-dodgers. You take this road, see, that’s the main street? An’ at the old mill you bear left. Make a left again at the top of the rise. Continue on about five miles. On the right you’ll see a real old farmhouse with its roof stove in—take the dirt road opposite. You gonna be stayin’ there long?

I don’t know.

Bunch of crackpots, atheists, draft dodgers. I unnerstand they all live together, regardless.

Regardless of what? I asked.

Regardless of matrimony, he said. He took off his cap and wiped the sweat off his beaded forehead with an oily rag and then jerked his cap back on again. This country, he said in disgust. It’s goin’ to the dawgs.

I backed up the Volvo. He turned his head and a thick brown glob of spit arcked out of his mouth, flew past the gas pumps and onto the cracked asphalt of the side parking lot where a couple of trunks, a school bus, an orange Volkswagen van and a gold Mustang convertible sat awaiting the Judgment. Yuk. Chewing tobacco. I drove off feeling him watch after me as he leaned against the Hi-test pump with a knee cocked and a thumb in one tight pants pocket. He had a beer belly and something else I’d missed—a hook for a hand that gleamed in the afternoon sun where he rested it against the thigh of his khaki pants.

Once out of the white wooden village, I drove on feeling amazed. The countryside here was rougher, steeper, less benign entirely, with rocky tree-covered hills and far off in the distance, the scalloped profiles of various blue mountain ranges. It reminded me of the North Country, that part of New York State my mother’s family comes from, only here the trees were different, hardwood, cedar, hemlock, not the pine and spruce and fir of the near Adirondacks.

I had gone up to the Adirondacks once or twice to see what it looked like. Mostly, it was poor, but on certain humid summer days the air is so astringent the pine scent sears your lungs. My other grandparents—my father’s people, the Stillwells—had had a summer place at Pleasant Point, Maine. When we were kids, Johnny and I would be shipped up to Maine every summer for a couple of weeks. My father would come up to get us and stay a day. We would spend the time sailing Muscongus Bay with my father and grandfather, and they would drink beer and argue without interruption. My memory of these sailing expeditions always does a fast-forward to the day’s end, coming up off the mooring, the dinghy bobbing, my father carrying the sail bags, my grandfather carrying the cooler, John carrying sweaters and towels and me carrying the old-fashioned picnic hamper, with its neat elastic bands stapled into the wood cover to hold plastic knives and forks. We would all be sunburned and cranky and thirsty and no one spoke and John and I would feel embarrassed and glad after all to be going home.

I came to the old farmhouse with the roof bashed in and made the left turn onto the dirt road. You had to drive slowly to navigate past the outcropping rocks and potholes and even so, you raised a cloud of dust. The road went on and on. They were certainly way back in there. I had said to him on the telephone, Well, shall I come or not?

If you want, he said. He seemed amused by my asking.

Tell me what you want, I said.

He countered. What is it you want?

What was the point, I had thought, of lying? So I told him the truth. I want to see you, I said.

He laughed. Well then come, he said.

How do I get there? I asked.

One, get a map. Two, find Dix Mills. Three, at the village ask directions to Cool’s Ridge Farm.

That simple?

Sure, he said. No use making things more complicated than they are.

Can I stay up there?

Why not? he said.

I mean, is there room? I don’t know the set-up.

Well, he said, there isn’t any.

But you see, that was his way of dealing with life, pretending not to see the set-up, the way things were arranged. It was part of his charm. He would steer past or through structures as if they didn’t exist. It was a simple and generally successful approach to life, a way of getting to the heart of things, or maybe bypassing the heart of things. He was a year older than me. I’d met him my senior year in college and we’d been lovers off and on for four years. It seemed a long time to me. I wanted to see him now because I needed to know some things about us—where were we going? What were we? It was clear to me how I felt, but I had no idea how he felt and I had tracked him to the Farm mostly to find this out.

I drove slowly on. The dense gloom of forest primeval gave way to scattered light and then a growing widening whiteness as if a tunnel had silently exploded. I heard shouts and water splashing. Off to the left, I saw a wide, gracefully leaning willow, and under its pendant green boughs, a glinting pond with swimmers. Light glanced off a lifted arm, a spume of silver water shot upward, there was a gabble of noise and a shriek. Beyond the pond, a brown barn-like structure rose up from a stone foundation. Beyond that was a tall, tree-covered ridge, as steep as a wall.

I followed the dirt road around the barn into a grassy lot and parked next to a Volkswagen beetle colored a pumpkin orange. Well. Here I was. I needed a drink of water, I needed to pee, I’d been driving for hours. I felt stuck to the seat of the car, and sitting there tired and stiff, with a faint headache and a mouth full of glue, I squinted ahead into a post and chicken-wire fence, trying to focus. Inside the fence, someone was hunched among the leafy plants of a vegetable garden. I got out of the car and walked over. Looking down, I saw a head of hair, the kind of pure, impossibly blond hair they manufacture in Iceland or northern Sweden. The head moved—she had bent to pull rhubarb, and her face tilted up, and her mouth wrenched in what I felt was not surprise so much as dislike. But why? Did she know who I was?

She stood up. She, too, had on jeans cut off at the thigh, and a white cotton halter and sneakers. Her legs were pretty, but not as long as mine. Her eyes were a bright blue, the color they call cornflower. She was lightly tanned and she wore large gold hoop earrings. A delicate gold chain lay upon her neck and a small cross hung from it, between her breasts. She was really quite pretty, you might say beautiful. There was even the requisite imperfection, a deep scar-like frown-line between the bright blue eyes. I felt my heart contract in a spasm of jealousy.

Are you looking for someone? she asked me. Her tone was cold. Who did she think I was? Or did she know who I was?

I said, Yes, I am, and then impulsively asked, What’s your name?

She said, flatly, Alice, and then repeated her question. Are you looking for someone?

Even before I said his name I knew how her face would change.

3.

They called the community the Farm because for almost two hundred years a family named Cool had owned and farmed the hundred and fifty acres. Indeed, the Cools had made out of the property two farms. At the very top of the ridge, on its wide, grassy, wind-swept crest was the new farm, a farmhouse, barn and outbuildings erected in the 1850’s. The lower acreage, with its pond and marsh and pastures now grown into woods, was the old place, and we lived in what had been the original barn, a bank barn whose north foundation wall lay up against the hillside and one of whose massive walnut beams bore the carved out legend Cool—1780. The old farmhouse had burned to the ground before World War I.

Because our barn was banked, it had entrances on different levels. A door in the stone foundation led to the old dairy, a whitewashed space that smelled still of hay and that we used mainly for storage. Outside the dairy door, a wooden staircase led up to the sliding glass doors of the dining porch, although our front door, on this same floor but on the building’s north side, was at ground level. This entrance faced the wooded ridge. A small porch protected the doorway, and flagstones made the space into a shady terrace. Late in the hot afternoons, I used to drag a wicker rocker out there, put my feet up on a milk can, and read until the mosquitoes came. The pond side had gnats and flies, the ridge side mosquitoes.

Hanging near this entrance in the dim seldom-used front hall was a photograph in a black frame taken of the old farmhouse at the turn of the century: you saw a handsome house of white clapboard with black shutters and a long porch. In the picture, a woman stood leaning tensely over the porch railing, her hands gripping rather than resting upon it. She wore a dark full skirt and a high-collared white blouse and she stared stonily out at the picture-taker. You had to look hard to see that a child was half-hidden in the dark shadows of the skirt’s folds.

Whenever I looked at this photograph, I felt an acute alarm, as if something terrible were about to happen. The woman’s stony face, rigid arms and pitched stance seemed completely detached from the blurred little mite clinging to her skirts.

In 1919, Dr. Emil Gerstner of Brooklyn, New York, bought the entire Cool acreage for two thousand dollars. He remodeled the barn and made of it what the locals long referred to