“Lucy, what happened?”
“I have no idea.” But it was a really spooky place. Not a coffee shop, not a dress store or a drugstore, there was absolutely nothing open in that town, and we drove back up Main Street again where there was not a car in sight, and then we left.
“This state is in trouble,” William said, but I could see that he was shaken. I was shaken myself.
“I’m really hungry,” I said. There was not even a gas station in sight.
“Let’s head to Presque Isle,” William said. I asked how far away it was and he said about eleven miles—but we were not on the turnpike—and I said I didn’t think I could wait that long to eat. “Well, keep your eyes open and we’ll stop if we see a place,” he said.
We drove along for a while, and I said, “Why did you want to see Fort Fairfield so badly?”
And William didn’t say anything for a moment, just kept looking through the windshield, biting on his mustache. Then he said, “I thought when I met Lois Bubar I could tell her that we had gone to Fort Fairfield to see where she had been Miss Potato Blossom Queen, that she would think it showed a real interest in her, that it would make her feel nice.”
Oh William, I thought.
Oh William.
* * *
And then William said, “Wait. Richard Baxter came from Maine.”
* * *
—
When I first met William, he told me about the work of Richard Baxter. Richard Baxter had been a parasitologist—he specialized in tropical diseases, as William did—and Baxter had found a way to diagnose Chagas disease; they already knew how to diagnose it, but by the time the diagnosis was made the person was often dead, and Richard Baxter had figured out a way to speed up the diagnosis. He had discovered—if I understand this correctly—that if you looked at the coagulated blood you could find the parasites. William had been working on Chagas disease when I first met him at that college outside Chicago, and Baxter had made his discovery about how to more quickly diagnose the disease about ten years earlier.
* * *
—
William pulled over and brought out his iPad, which he consulted for a few minutes, and then he said “Okay” and took a right and we were driving along a different road now. William said, “He was an unsung hero, that man. He saved lives, Lucy.”
“I know. You’ve told me that,” I said.
“He did his work at the University of New Hampshire, but he came from Maine. I just remembered that about him.”
I looked around at the fields we were passing, and up on a small hill was a horse-drawn wagon driven by a man wearing a big hat. “Look at that,” I said.
“It’s the Amish,” William said. “They’ve moved here from Pennsylvania to farm. I was reading about them.”
Then we passed by a farmhouse, and on the front porch were two children. There was a small boy who also had on a big hat, and there was a small girl who wore a long dress and a small bonnet thing over her hair. They waved to us vigorously. So vigorously they waved!
“Oh, it makes me sick,” I said, waving back at them.
William said, “Why? They’re just doing their thing.”
“Well, their thing is crazy. And the kids are forced to be a part of it.” As I said this, I realized that it reminded me of my own youth, coming from the family that I came from. And David had come from a different background, but the insularity was similar.
Recently—back in New York—I had been watching a documentary on people who had left the Hasidic community, I had been watching this because of my husband who had died, and I had to stop watching halfway through. It’s because it made me think so much about myself—not the world these people had left, that was not familiar to me at all, but how they were in the world once they had left. They knew nothing of popular culture at all, and this was true of David when he left, and it was true in my case as well—and it is still true in my case, because these deprivations never leave us.
“I mean I can’t stand it because those kids don’t have a chance,” I said, flicking a hand back toward the house we had just passed.
William didn’t answer. I could tell he was not thinking about the Amish. After a few minutes he said, “What a strange thing to come from this place and to end up specializing in tropical diseases.” I waited but he said no more.
So I said, “How is your work going, William?”
He glanced over at me. “It’s not going anywhere,” he said. “I’m done.”