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Chapter One
New Englanders have always had a close relationship with death.
When the Plymouth colonists landed on hostile, unfamiliar shores in 1620, they were faced with starvation, disease, and unforgiving winter. They were saved by the Wampanoag natives, who showed them how to plant and harvest and store food. The natives were rewarded with devastating European diseases like smallpox, typhus, and "bad blood"—syphilis. But the colonists survived and prospered.
So did death, in many forms.
Free to own land, the New Englanders fought the Native Americans and each other to possess it. Free to worship, they killed those who chose heretical paths. Free to create militias, they fought proxy wars for European powers and started new ones. Weathered gravestones commemorating these sacrifices are far more plentiful than the covered bridges, taverns, and forests for which New England is popularly known.
Yet death is manifest in more than just the ancient cemeteries, those odd-shaped geometries that occupy an acre or two behind rusting iron fences, defying the lopsided roads that grew around them. Death pervades daily life. Modern families celebrate their ancestors' sacrifices in countless wars and skirmishes, honoring them in portraits and busts, on memorial streets and buildings, and with weathered ivory tombs. Dead leaders of government and industry are celebrated with post offices, official buildings, and schools.
Martyrdom is pictured and revered in houses of worship.
Along the coast of New England, death rides every breath. The salty sea air is rich with the odor of dead fish and flora. Inland, in places like Delwood, Connecticut, predators of all sizes and species move through the low hills and forests. Schoolchildren learn that the word "fall" signifies falling leaves but adults know better. Like the vespers church bell tolling day's end, it is the echo of our fall from grace. Yet those with the will to persevere and a bright slant of mind wait for hope to be renewed, stronger and more precious, on the other side of winter.
Only briefly, of course, for fall returns. Death always has the last word.
Outsiders embrace New England's autumnal beauty but the locals resent it. The creeping chill closes windows that remained cheerfully open during the summer. It wraps people in jackets and cardigans, in defiantly colorful and branded sweatshirts. It turns them inward. Grasses wither to brown, leaves burn red, and skies go pale. Spirits fade and die too, locked inside walls and garments.
There was nothing anyone could do about that. But Sara Jacqueline Lynch did everything she could to keep the skulls of Delwood from growing too dark and dreary.
The psychotherapist always saw more faces in September and October than at any other time of year. Some of those faces were familiar, like Delwood Deli owner Billy Roche. The middle-aged butcher seemed to fall for a new summer transplant every year, a New York sophisticate he fancied more than his wife. The emaciated urbanites talked to him and listened to what he had to say. It didn't matter that the only thing he had to say was about meat and barbecues. He got to look into their eyes. Roche's attractions usually died in mid-October, along with the rest of Delwood. Then there was Barri Neville who could not stand having her children come back inside and wanted to know if it was wrong to wish that she had never had kids.
"No. It's good you did," the psychotherapist told her.
Sara said it was natural to feel frustrated and that Mrs. Neville should find private time away from the house and family. She suggested the woman join a reading club at the library or do yoga at the gym of the nearby community college.
Instead, Mrs. Neville opted for two therapy sessions a week. That changed to none after a month or so, when the bills started backing up and Mrs. Neville had to increase her hours at the supermarket checkout counter.
For some patients fall marked a chilly end to cautious optimism. Computer repairman Chun Park grew drearier about the prospects of gaining his parents' approval to marry a non-Korean. Claudia Cole felt that it would be a mistake to come out of the closet. Like the trees, people shed their leaves, deprived themselves of sunlight to conserve water.
The fall invariably brought new faces at Sara's family practice as well, mostly disconnected kids who had matriculated from area junior high schools to Litchfield County High School. Sara treated adults to pay the bills, but her main interest was in adolescent problems. She felt a special connection with teenagers who felt like they didn't belong—with their families, in their communities, among their peers.
Sara listened closely and made suggestions designed to involve the parents, but only when the kids were somewhat surefooted about themselves. That tended to happen naturally when parents backed off a little. With some kids, the process was ongoing. She had written about this in her doctoral thesis at Yale. Although the larger subject was the relationship of gifted children with one or more narcissistically deprived parents—resulting in jealousy and criticism—she wrote about what she called the Fall Phenomenon. People crawled into their heads the way they withdrew to their homes in autumn. Threatened by strangers—in this case children, who bring not only their own personalities but also the ideas of other families into the home—adults often hold more tightly to their own values. They overenforce their own ideals on children in order to maintain control in a suddenly hostile environment. Many children break under the dual stresses of external and familial pressure.
Preserving families was important to Sara and getting parents to respect their children was the heart of that. She had enjoyed great success in that area, rebuilding families from the smallest members outward.
With one sad exception.
Her own.
There was no Mr. Del.
It was generally assumed that Delwood got its name from "dell" since the town of 2,499 people was located in a small, secluded section of the Housatonic Valley in middle-western Connecticut. Some old-timers suggested that it was actually short for "Devil's Wood." That idea was rooted in rituals that refugees from the Massachusetts witch trials were said to have performed on the far side of the river.
A number of Sara's younger patients suggested it was just the Yankee pronunciation of "dull."
The valley was on the very edge of western New England just a few miles from the New York State border. Because it was an average two-hour drive to New York, Hartford, or New Haven, without convenient highway access, Delwood was not a bedroom community. Everyone who lived there full-time was either retired or worked in the county, some of them on the local dairy farms that spotted the region, most in shops that catered to regulars, weekenders, hunters, and day-trippers. In addition to the nearby high school, "Delac," the Delwood Academy, was located off Route 6, the county's main road. The coeducational Delac was an elite private school that had been the breeding ground for two presidents, three New England governors, and nearly a dozen ambassadors. It was a pipeline to Yale, which was where Sara Lynch had met many Delacians. She herself was not one of them. She went to Nathaniel Lyon Free School, named for the first Union general killed in the war. Lyon was not from Delwood but from Eastwood. A winter storm had pinned him at the local Graham Inn for several days on his way to West Point and he became a borrowed hero.
The Housatonic River slashed through the valley from Massachusetts on its 130-mile journey to the Long Island Sound. The river had powered the early metalworking mills that caused the growth of the region, which included the manufacture of bullets and artillery shells. The munitions were shipped down the river to the navy yards in New York and Groton. It was the only time Delwood exported rather than hosted death.
The Lynch family were latecomers to Delwood. They had arrived in the late 1940s, when Sara's father Robert was mustered out of the navy. He had spent three years in the Pacific Theater and unlike his fellow sailors who settled in post-war communities across western Long Island, Robert took his new Savannah-raised bride, Martha, to Connecticut where he had it in mind to build and sell his own handmade furniture. Using funds from the G.I. Bill they bought a large fixer-upper on the river, which Robert restored while thinking about, then talking about, then taking a few steps toward setting up his business. Martha opened a small shop in town to sell antiques, which she thought would be a perfect adjunct to her husband's trade. Robert could restore the furniture they sold. He did a little of that, and it ended up being the family's sole source of income as Robert Lynch spent more time drinking, smoking, and fishing with his young son Darrell than he did working.
The way Martha later described his symptoms, Robert was suffering from what would now be described as post-traumatic stress disorder, with a list of medical and psychological ways of treating it. He would have had more at his disposal than just the self-prescribed booze and cigarettes. Because of it, Robert's business, like his life, never went much farther than ambition.
Copyright © 2007 by Jeff Rovin. All rights reserved
