paved with tar and President Roosevelt’s New Deal restored good fortune to many, Albert and Christian Baxter opened Baxter’s to great fanfare. Red, white and blue bunting outlined the roof, the glass storefront squeaky clean and sparkling in the sun and nearly everyone in town turned out in fine clothing. Albert and Charles opened the doors wearing paper armbands on top of their high-collared dress shirts. Visors cast green tints on their spectacles and mustaches. Back then, in 1939, Henry’s hometown had a population of 6,053 and was considered quite bustling. Fancy. On the rise. And Baxter’s exemplified its wealth and promise. Breeding was what most of the townspeople took the greatest pride in. One third of the population could trace their roots back to at least one family member of great national significance. The remaining two-thirds, while not scruffy exactly, were left to cater to the needs of the wealthy. As the town grew, so did Baxter’s importance, and shops bloomed on either side of it.
It is hard to pinpoint the moment when Baxter’s went from fancy to frayed, but most likely it came after the war, after the nation had perfected frugality. The town (by then population 21,367) felt a collective sense of shame at its preening. Or guilt perhaps. Either way, it was as if a notice had been posted that from that point forward anything that hinted at opulence, anything that drew attention to one’s fortune, was tasteless.
Albert and Christian Baxter quickly and sensibly sold the property to a self-made millionaire who kept the name but lowered the standards. The nearby metropolis offered plenty of jobs— careers—but became too expensive and crowded and so Henry’s became a town of commuters. The population swelled to forty thousand. The town originals sniffed at the newcomers, thinking them ordinary: the workhorses of society who did not know the old Baxter’s. They inevitably overlooked the plain and traditional Northeastern wear and flocked instead to whatever was the style of the day. Thankfully, though, some of the quality merchandise remained, so stalwarts continued to shop there.
Strange that the swell of occupants did not translate into town growth. Henry’s was mostly a town of ones. One stationery store. One hardware store. One supermarket. One dry cleaner. And for many years a car dealership that by the 1980s had gone the way of the Woolworth’s—both moving like moths to the light that was and is Westtown, a growing community three miles away. Baxter’s was soon left hanging on to its spot on Main Street by its leather-tabbed, buttonholed suspenders.
Still, the town has a shabby elegance that Westtown cannot duplicate. Try though it might, Westtown has an altogether nouveau sheen to it that is distasteful to all in Henry’s community. If there were a town motto it would be quality not quantity. The families here take pride in the fact that the previous generation also had house accounts at the hardware store or the stationery store and, yes, for a time, even at Baxter’s.
Henry’s is a town where honking endures as a form of greeting, not an expression of anger. Where everyone in a certain circle knows their friends’ old cars and knows, therefore, all their friends’ movements.
It is a place in which thank-you notes are written immediately following dinner parties. Bloody Marys with celery stalks served every Sunday even without company. Cotillions co-exist with salad dressing from packets that promise—with the addition of oil—to produce genuine Italian dressing.
This, a town where children make eye contact and call their parents’ friends mister and missus and are taught to shake hands at very young ages.
“Do you know,” Henry’s mother once said to his father across the dinner table, after a bridge game at a friend’s Westtown home, “do you know I had to introduce myself to her children? She didn’t even blink. Not a word. They were little savages, those children. I’m so glad you all have manners. My children have manners.”
Henry, a boy then, sat up straighter at the compliment. He noticed Brad did, too. Even little David seemed to Henry to be politely sleeping upstairs.
From then on Henry thought of Westtown as inferior.
Henry imagines Blackie’s at ten. Blackie’s is one of the few bars in town (an exception to the rule of ones). But unlike the surly man at Mike’s tavern, the bartender at Blackie’s ignores the fact that some of his clientele are grossly underage. Most weekend nights his patrons are boys whose voices had only recently dropped a register and girls whose baby fat had yet to redistribute itself. Blackie’s is one step above sticky floors, two steps below the brass-and-fern decor slowly springing up in most bars in towns with eyes pointed optimistically to the future.
For a moment Henry is sure the door opened. Positively certain. He whips around to find it just as closed as it was three seconds ago. Maybe it jammed closed when that woman left, he thinks. He gets up and opens it and tries it from the outside. It is, in fact, just fine. No jamming after all.
Satisfied, he takes his seat again and sifts through the receipts in front of him, putting them in numerical order. He arranges himself over the papers so he looks studious. In case someone did come in, he would look engrossed. As if having a customer would be somewhat annoying, actually. You could come back later and I wouldn’t mind at all, he imagines his attitude to be.
He checks his watch again and pushes the receipts together, tapping them into alignment, and tries not to think of the sheer waste his existence is turning out to be. His movements feel clunky and self-conscious. As if he is being watched closely, the subject of a science experiment. An experiment some cosmic deity had cooked up, he thinks, to see just how deep a human being can sink into waking oblivion.
Or maybe it is a movie, he thinks. The Life Story of Henry Powell, starring (drumroll, please) Henry Powell, ladies and gentlemen. His heart sinks deeper into his chest, an imaginary screenwriter scribbles. He sifts through the shoe box under the counter marked Miscellaneous. Stage notes indicate the box is gray. The screenwriter uses words like pathetic and desolate in his description of the scene. Henry’s shoulders are slumped. The screenwriter in his sunny California office, so remote from Henry’s Northeastern existence. A gray existence. Like the shoe box. The screenwriter tilts back in the ergonomic desk chair all Californians seem to sit in and steeples his fingers together in supreme satisfaction at the metaphor.
Henry can envision Peterson in a pink T-shirt under his blazer (sleeves up) leaning against the bar at Blackie’s, swigging his beer—for if anyone swigs a beer it’s Peterson, he thinks. With, say, Bob Seger playing on the radio he’ll fling non sequiturs like pizza dough. Hoping to catch the interest of his audience: “Figger” Newton, Gaynor Mills and Chris “Smithereen” Smith, so called because in tenth grade he took a hammer and smashed the box he’d received a D on in Shop. Though his classmates were admiring of the gesture, deep down Chris Smith knew he’d exploded not because of the grade but because the night before his parents had told him of their plans to separate. They never did end up getting back together, as they’d promised him that night. And Smithereen never quite got over it. Henry knows that at some point “Against the Wind” will give way to something by the Eagles. Serpentine conversation will slither from junk bonds and Drexel Burnham and, inevitably, back in time to Bunsen burners and football games won and lost. Bored heads will be fixed on the game scores scrolling along the bottom of the TV hanging in the corner of the bar. Braves lose. Mets up by two. Henry decides then and there he will not be going to Blackie’s tonight.
The magnetic pull of his new answering machine is too much to resist. Not many people have these tape-recording devices attached to home phones. But Henry had his friend, the manager of Radio Shack, order one for him after reading about them in Esquire.
He picks up the phone and dials his own number. “This is Henry Powell,” his own voice greets him, “please leave a message when you hear the beep.” Though he knows what awaits him, he enters his code: 22849. He mouths the words as the robotic voice delivers the news: “You have—slight pause—no—slight pause—messages.”
He knew she wouldn’t call him. He’d met her in the birthday card section at the stationery store that morning. Janine. She had moved closer to him at the precise moment he had unknowingly reached for a card with a pornographic cartoon image. Horrified, Henry had held on to the one he had chosen, hoping she had not seen it, and then,