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May 9 - 16, 1 9 9 7
[Tales From Tritown]

Victory gardens

At last, Tritown is sprung from winter, plus a fascinating New England memoir

by Sally Cragin

After the clocks spring forward, sunlight lingers in Tritown, bathing bare branches with a golden glow and suggesting the pleasures of the warmer weather to come. During this time of year, one can start the day wearing jeans and a sweater, peel down to a T-shirt and shorts in the afternoon, and conclude the evening wearing a parka and mukluks. Of all the denizens of Tritown, only Hollis the Mountain Man, with his flannel shirt over long johns, canvas pants, and work boots is dressed for every season and activity (except water-skiing, he tells his friends).

One spring afternoon he and Delia Ellis Bell the Partial Yankee (there was a questionable great-great-grandmother) meet in the more settled purlieus of Tritown, at the home of Felix the Urban Naturalist. This is hardly a social call: Felix needs the oil and some belts on his car changed, and Hollis is the man to do it; in exchange for a couple of pies that Delia Ellis Bell is baking; in exchange for a pair of hiking boots Felix had in high school that are too small for him, but just right for Delia.

[Tritown] Hollis and Felix grunt and tinker with the engine. Delia announces that she's going to the variety store at the bottom of the hill for some Moxie and orange tonic. She wanders down the street and takes note of the congested neighborhood.

Most of the double- and triple-deckers date from the turn of the century and were built as cheap housing for the workers of the woolen mills on the other side of the hill. Yet some older houses remain. As she turns the corner, she comes across a marvelous building: a converted farmhouse, with an intact barn and hitching post on the lawn.

"Unbelievable," she marvels. "However did they resist the urge to put aluminum siding?" She admires an authentic 19th-century homestead with the classic New England add-on architecture: big house, little house, back house, barn. Even more lovely are the daffodils growing in the yard, hundreds of lemon and cream faces turned to face the sun. A side yard is mostly turned earth, but a closer look reveals small green shoots, marching in discreet rows all the way back to the barn.

Rose bushes swathed in burlap guard the front door, and at the corners of the house there is a pair of robust forsythia bushes pruned to present a brilliant amber waterfall of blossoms. The effect is charming, conscientious and from another century. After a few moments of appreciation, she resists the urge to pluck a broken daffodil stalk, and continues down the hill to the variety store.

On her return, she takes a different route and passes by a narrow Victorian house abutting the urban farmhouse barn. ("Never come back the way you went out," says Hollis the Mountain Man.) The gingerbread trim of the house has fallen off, leaving gaps that are barely visible through the lush pine trees growing too near the house. There are forsythia here, but they are overgrown, and flower-laden twigs dip almost to the ground. Maple seedlings cover the lawn and birdsong fills the air.

When she returns to Felix's apartment, she sees Felix and Hollis sitting on the front steps, hands begrimed with grease. The belts went on easily, but they've decided to leave the oil change for now. Felix goes inside for glasses and ice cubes, and when he returns Delia describes her wonder at the adjoining gardens.

"The first garden was so lush, so cultivated," she says. "I saw a guy with a beard who looked like the cousin of the Victory Garden guy on TV, wheeling a barrow and wearing overalls. I couldn't believe I was within walking distance of a bus stop."

Felix nods, and then explains that he doesn't know his neighbor's name ("City life," thinks Hollis disdainfully), but often sees him working in his garden right until dusk. "Last year, he grew squash, and he had some hefty specimens," Felix says.

"Don't want to eat anything you grow in the city," Hollis interrupts. "All that lead in the soil."

Delia laughs. "As if you can eat anything in your garden," she retorts, "with the Tarbox family dumping oil pans and dead batteries up the hill from your water table!" Hollis grunts, and then silently drinks his Moxie. It really is an acquired taste, he thinks. But Delia continues. "Around the corner on my way back I saw an even better garden, completely overgrown." She describes the oasis of seedlings and weeds, and asks, "Is there a cardinal there? I certainly heard his call."

Felix laughs. "The dueling Victory Gardens," he says. "The first gardener definitely looks like the Victory Garden guy, but he's really like his mean and bitter cousin, out in all weather at all hours, but constantly scowling. When his wife is out he's snapping at her. But the roses are more lush than any on the street.

"Now the other garden -- well, that's an elderly couple, who actually have a large, extended family. They're often at their son's house, or visiting a daughter, and when they're home, they might sit on the back porch, but not for long. They spend absolutely no time in their yard save picking up the trash. Yet I've definitely seen a cardinal, also chickadees, finches, bluejays, and the occasional nuthatch. There's definitely a moral to be drawn from the dueling Victory Gardens, but I've not been able to find it."

They sit in silence for a moment, and then Delia takes a sip of Hollis's Moxie. "Ugh," she winces. "Like drinking Quaker State."

Hollis takes his glass back and then rises. "Time to get on with that oil change."

THESE DAYS, the "Troubled Childhood" memoir has reached critical mass, out-numbered only by books about how to activate one's personal angel or fat-fighting gene. Yet one recent entrant into the field utterly uplifts and even transcends this genre. Area poet and teacher William Corbett's Furthering My Education (Zoland) is an enthralling memoir of New England boyhood blended with a brilliantly incisive biography of a family that appears to be empty at the center.

Corbett's story begins with a single, shocking episode. In 1965, his father, a doctor, disappears from the family home in Bridgeport, Connecticut, leaving only a note explaining he needed to "further my education." Corbett recreates his family and their freighted interaction in an unflinching backward glance. Dr. Corbett is a good doctor, but medicine is not enough: "He repeatedly vowed that he had no intention of working all his life." So the doctor invests in real estate, at first doing well, but then, catastrophically, bottoming out.

Set in the 1950s and '60s, Education sketches the affluence of Eisenhower's America, Dr. Corbett's ambitions and follies, and the author's own coming-of-age experiences as interleaved vignettes. Throughout, Corbett's prose is fluid, but firm -- neither j'accuse or mea culpa. He keeps the reader involved and offers a surprising, and oddly satisfying conclusion.

Furthering My Education is that rarity in the field of memoir: a balanced and unexpectedly uplifting saga.

Zoland Books, 384 Huron Avenue, Cambridge 02138. Call (617) 864-8252 for information.

Sally Cragin directs the Creative Writing Program at Fitchburg Art Museum.


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