The Old Mermaid Inn is gone.
I cannot convey in those six words the depth of my sadness in writing them. Why I think it should be here after all these years, I don’t know—except that there was a timelessness about The Old Mermaid Inn which ignited my imagination and set my life aflame.
Part One
August 1960 - August 1963-Chapter 1-
In 1960 my hero was a sixteen-year old chess player named Bobby Fischer, not a sports figure of high regard in the coffee shops and bar rooms of Plainview, Ohio. That summer every radio in Plainview was turned to KDKA-Pittsburgh listening to Bob “Voice of the Pirates” Prince. Things were looking good for the Buckos and the names repeated with respect around town were Vernon Law and Dick Groat. Once in awhile some stranger passing through would comment that Roger Maris was having quite a year only to find himself the object of cold stares from faces fired hard and brown by sun glinting off of John Deere tractors in Plainview’s miles of alfalfa fields. The Yankees were the enemy, second only to communists, and there were no communists in Plainview.
In 1960 the Queen of England had a baby and her sister married a photographer. An Australian ran a three and a half-minute mile during the summer Olympics in Rome.
In 1960 Howie Goetz celebrated Floyd Patterson’s knock-out victory over Ingemar Johanssen by backing me up against the fiberglass tool shed behind the Grange building and shoving his hand inside my bra. I bit his lip hard enough to draw blood. During the summer of 1960, while my friends sunned themselves on the banks of Silver Trout Creek to the lyrics of Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weenie Yellow Polka-Dot Bikini, I plotted my escape from Plainview.
That summer, blowing out the candles on my eighteenth birthday cake, white angel food with marshmallow frosting, I closed my eyes and wished for adventure. How could I know that I was as green as the tender shoots breaking free of the earth in my father’s cornfields? All I knew of adventure was from books and dreams and the pictures on the feed store calendar hanging on the back of the door in my mother’s kitchen. I was restless, aching to my bones for any experience that was not steeped in rural sobriety. I was sick of quiet pastures, squawking chickens, and hulking farm boys who spat out dank, sodden lumps of tobacco before mashing their mouths against mine.
When the time came to choose a college I disregarded academic merits in favor of my fantasy of sun-swept aquamarine waters scenting air filled with seagull calls and the seductive worldliness of handsome sailors with the constellations of the northern seas in their eyes. During my freshman year in high school, a current events teacher showed a film on the construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway that captured my imagination like nothing in Plainview could. I followed the progress of the great engineering marvel with fascination and when the royal yacht Brittania carried the Queen of England and President Eisenhower through the Seaway on April 25, 1959, I was thrilled. Something momentous had happened in all our lives, I thought. Suddenly the far away worlds of Europe and Africa were as near as Lake Erie and I longed for access to those worlds and all their enticing mysteries. I was a romantic girl, my mother chided, a dreamer who would have to grow up one of these days. But the inner life of a young girl is not so easily dismissed. In my daydreams I formed a place into which I could slip and find succor like the familiar sweater you put on the first cold autumn morning when the world turns serious and you believe that something is beginning.
My parents preferred the assurance of proximity. They pointed out the convenience and reputations of local teacher and agricultural colleges. I wanted mystery. I spent hours in the high school library searching for schools in towns bordering the Great Lakes. If I could be close to those legendary inland waters I knew my fantasies would be fulfilled.
“It’s just so far away,” my mother said as she stiffened bread in a blue plastic dishpan. “Honestly, Clair, why can’t you go somewhere nearby? You know how your father worries about you.”
“I wish he wouldn’t. I’m a big girl and I’ve always been reliable. I don’t know why he thinks I can’t be on my own.”
“You’re his only girl.” She sprinkled flour from the canister shaped like a Guernsey cow. The cow was for flour, sugar came from a pink pig. The rooster held coffee, and the hen had tea bags. I looked at the pair of salt and pepper shakers on the table in front of me, a pair of brooding hens. Everything in our house said farm—screamed farm. When I was little my father would hide navy beans under the salt shaker and when one of my brothers or I lifted it he would act surprised and say “Godfrey Daniel, Louise, the chickens are laying again.”
“I have to be on my own sometime.”
She shook her head. “I don’t want you going to a big city. I’d never get a night’s sleep for worrying.”
“You don’t have to worry. Look. Chesterton College.” I picked up the brochure on top of the pile in front of me. “Doesn’t this look beautiful? It’s on an old estate out in the country so it’s very private. You have to take a bus into the city and Port Presque Isle isn’t really a city, Mom, more of a big town. It’s not like I’m going to Cleveland or Chicago.”
“It looks hoitey-toitey,” she sniffed with a sideways glance. “I wonder what kind of people send their children to places like that. If you went to the teachers college over in Robinsonville you could live at home and save money.”
“Aw, Mom,” I groaned, the last thing I could imagine was living at home to save money. “I can get a job. See, they have a work-study program that I can enroll in. I could work in the library or the cafeteria. It would be good experience for me.”
She punched down hard on the dough and I could tell from the way her jaw was working that she was trying not to say what I knew she wanted to say. Girls who go off to the city get “reputations”. And in Plainview a reputation is a disgrace to the entire family. Never mind that half the girls in Plainview are waltzing down the aisle in the months after high school graduation, and being rushed to the maternity ward a few months after that. Married girls don’t have reputations, they have husbands. And husbands make everything all right.
“Mom,” I grasped for my trump card, “Do you think I’m a good girl or not?”
She turned and regarded me with her soft brown eyes. There was a dusting of flour along her right cheekbone. My mother had been a beauty in her day. In her wedding pictures on the sideboard in the dining room she has a charm that makes it easy to understand why the big, bashful looking guy standing next to her seems so amazed that they are there in their wedding clothes.
“Clair, yes, I think you are a good girl but I also think you have a dangerous imagination. You get these crazy notions in your head about things that aren’t normal.”
I stared at her. “Normal?”
She shook her head and turned back to her bread. “Normal for people like us.” She sighed, gave the bread another punch and then turned back to me looking down as she picked sticky bits of dough from her fingers. “There are all kinds of people in the world and I’m not saying that they’re bad people but they don’t have our values. Your father and I want our children to have happy, healthy, normal lives. It doesn’t make sense to take chances with people who aren’t like us. Can you understand that?”
“Come on, Mom, that sounds so elitist!”
“Elitist?” She looked up stunned. “How can you say that? We’re normal. Normal, regular, down-to-earth people, Clair. That’s not elitist, that’s sensible. You think we’re trying to keep you from having fun but we’re not. You can have all the fun you want but please do it in a sensible way.”
Sometimes I think my mother wasn’t prepared for a child like me. Both of my brothers were like my parents, solid, sensible, content with life as they found it. Gordon, Jr. wanted nothing more than to follow in my father’s footsteps and work the family farm. My younger brother Errol liked working with wood. He was always out in the barn building things. Daddy said he had a “good future ahead”. I was their only problem child.
“It’s that red hair of yours. Your Grandmother Wagner told me not to have any redheaded children.” She sounded serious but I could tell she was smiling.
Mine was not a family that raised its children to be foolhardy. My parents were kind people, funny in their own way but, above all, sensible, a quality in which my mother took great pride.
“You know what my problem is?” she would say to the ladies of her church Sodality as they piled homemade cookies on styrofoam trays covered with aluminum foil and wrapped them in cellophane for the weekly Sunday morning bake sale, “I’m too darn sensible. I mean you read all these stories about women who go off to the city and meet some good looking guy who wines them and dines them and then takes advantage and I think, now how am I supposed to feel sorry for that kind of foolishness? I’m too practical, that’s the way I am. Why take chances?”
In the end they relented, of course. Climbing the stone steps from the basement carrying my Grandfather Wagner’s battered leather trunk, the one that had come on the train with him from New England as he searched for fertile farmland, I considered my mother’s words. The stairwell smelled of century-old must and parsley that hung in fat bunches from pegs on the wall. A ray of sunshine pierced through dusty basement windows and illuminated jars of preserves lining the shelves my father had built along the steps. Patterns of colored light tinted by carefully put up plums, peaches, tomatoes, and blackberries washed over my arms and I thought then that I would break this family curse. I would do nothing sensible, nothing practical.
I remembered my mother’s ultimate nightmare and that became my goal—to do something I would regret for the rest of my life.
I was too young then to know how common a lifetime of regrets is.© 2007 Kathleen Valentine • All rights reserved.
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