The Widower's Tale Read Online Free PDF Page A

held out my hands. Lo and behold, the people who'd bought the Weisses' house (people who lived a quarter mile from me but on whom I had never laid eyes in their year-plus of residence) had installed an in-lawn sprinkler system. Where did they think they were living, Grosse Point? Yet I had seen no complaints about this--or about the architectural ravaging of the Harris Homestead--in the pages of the Grange . Was I the only citizen who regarded these developments as vulgar and outlandish, a sign that the end of Matlock as I knew it was surely at hand? Perhaps the absence of outrage in the letters column was in itself another sign of the end.
    I began to hunt for further aesthetic offenses--and therefore saw one nearly every day that summer, from the faux Williamsburg streetlamps planted in front of our nineteenth-century meetinghouse to the sudden, stunning absence of the magnificent alluvial boulder that had rested literally forever at the bottom of Cold Pond Way. (Who in the world had removed it? Where in the world had it gone?) Yet what convinced me we had crossed a line was something far less monumental: my sighting in July of two Bernese mountain dogs, a pair of opulently pampered creatures as black and shiny as limousines--and good Lord, nearly as big--fancy-pantsing along my road with their nymphet owner, her derriere barely the size of a grapefruit, her mane a cunningly gilded fleece, her T-shirt flecked with rhinestones .
    Clover had mentioned the dogs earlier that month, gushing on about what gorgeous animals they were, but my gut response on seeing them in the flesh was not so admiring. I looked at their collars--green bands printed with rows of red lobsters--and at their owner's cantaloupe-colored loafers and in a synaptic flash recalled what old Ben Stewart had whispered to me at the candlelight service two Christmases past, just before his final heart attack. "Percy, mark my words: our lovely village has become, alas, an enclave." I had humored him with agreement, though at the time I thought he was merely bitter about his sons' insistence on selling his house, the surefire real estate bonanza outstripping all fondness for their childhood home, with its wide lazy porch and its pocket orchard of eight wizened apple trees that bore fruit without any coddling.
    As soon as I got home that day, the day of the dogs, I went straight to my OED (which Robert irreverently calls my "big dic"). I did not even pause to shower; sweat dripped from my bushy eyebrows onto the magnifying glass as I scowled down at the page. Enclave: a portion of territory entirely surrounded by foreign dominions . Ben was an English teacher at our top-notch elementary school, so he used words like surgical instruments.
    I sat down and began to take a mental tour of Matlock's sinuous roads. Our one gas station, manned for decades by Vince Kaliski, a veteran of Okinawa whose wife ran the Girl Scout troop, had closed ten years before. Even the nearby house where Vince and Mary brought up their boys had been razed. More recently, Coiffure Cottage, a beauty salon dating to Cretaceous times, had morphed into a modern art gallery. Buck and Calvin, the plumber and the electrician I engaged to keep my house in working order, had sold their own houses and retired to Florida, none of their numerous sons willing to succeed them--or able to afford our rapidly bloating taxes. Since their departure, I had been forced to employ tradesmen from several towns away, fellows I would never encounter with pleasure at the P.O. or the deli counter at Wally's. Some might have referred to Vince, Buck, and Calvin as "ordinary fellows" or "salt of the earth." Such terms are merely code for men who've led lives in which boyhood dreams become a luxury, a whim, before boyhood even comes to an end.
    Where were these men now? Were they still alive? Even our elementary-school teachers, the Bens, could no longer afford to live among us.
    When I e-mailed Robert about the dogs, I typed