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Phil Parker had the great good fortune—or great ill luck—to meet the Answer Man three times during his life. On the first of these occasions, in 1937, he was twenty-five, engaged to be married, and the possessor of a law degree on which the ink had almost dried. He was also caught on the horns of a dilemma so fierce that his eyes watered each time he thought of it.
Nonetheless, it had to be thought about, and resolved in one way or the other. To that end, he left his apartment in Boston and came up to the small New Hampshire town of Curry, where his parents owned a summer home. Here he planned to spend a decision-making weekend. He sat on the deck overlooking the lake with a sixpack of beer on Friday night. He thought about his dilemma, slept on it, woke up on Saturday morning with a hangover and no decision made.
On Saturday night he sat on the deck overlooking the lake with a quart bottle of Old Tyme ginger ale. He woke up on Sunday morning with no decision made, but with no hangover—a plus, but not enough. When he got back to Boston that evening, Sally Ann would be waiting to find out what he had decided.
So he climbed into his old Chevrolet after breakfast and went motoring along New Hampshire back roads on a gorgeous, sunshiny October day. The trees were in full autumn flame, and Phil pulled over several times to admire various vistas. He reflected that there was no beauty like New England beauty at the end of the cycle.
As morning drew on toward noon, he scolded himself for dillydallying. Getting drunk on beer hadn’t solved his problem, sipping ginger ale hadn’t solved it, and mooning over fall foliage wouldn’t do it, either. And yet he suspected that his absorption in the scenery was quite a bit more than communing with nature. It was either part of the solution or his mind’s effort to squirm away from a decision that would—one way or the other—set himself and his fiancée on a lifetime course.
It’s part of growing up, he told himself.
Yes, but the idea of choosing one single thing was abhorrent to him. He knew it had to be done, but that didn’t mean he had to like it. Wasn’t it a little like picking the prison cell you wanted to spend your sentence in? Your life sentence? That was silly and overblown… yet it wasn’t.
His dilemma was simple and clear-cut, as most of the real ballbreakers are: where was he to practice law? Each choice was full of ramifications.
Phil’s father was a senior partner in an old Boston law firm of the white shoe variety—Warwick, Lodge, Nestor, Parker, Allburton, and Frye. Sally Ann’s father was a senior partner in the same firm. John Parker and Ted Allburton had been best friends since college. They had married less than a year apart, each serving as the other’s best man. Phil Parker had been born in 1912, Sally Ann in 1914. They were playmates growing up, and maintained their liking for each other even during that difficult period in early adolescence when boys and girls tend to express a public disdain for the opposite sex, no matter what they may feel privately.
The parents on both sides might have been the least surprised people on earth when Phil and Sally Ann began to “keep company,” as the saying was in those days, but neither couple quite dared to hope that their children’s affection would survive four years of separation: Vassar for Sally Ann, Harvard for Phil. When it did, the parents were delighted, as were Phil and Sally Ann (of course). Love wasn’t the problem. At least not directly, although love played a part (as it almost always does).
Curry was the problem, that small town near the Maine–New Hampshire state line where the Parkers and Allburtons had summer homes on adjoining lakefront lots.
Phil had been in love with Curry at least as long as he had been in love with Sally Ann, and now it seemed he might have to choose between them. He wanted to hang out his shingle in Curry, although it boasted only two thousand year-round residents. The downtown area, where Route 23 crossed Route 111, consisted of a restaurant, two gas stations, a hardware store, the A&P, and the town hall. There was no bar and no movie theater. For those amenities you had to go to North Conway, quite some distance away. There was an elementary school (in those days called a grammar), but no high school. Curry teens made their glum bus ride to Patten High, ten miles away.
There was also no lawyer in town. Phil could be the first. The Parkers and Allburtons thought he was crazy to even consider Curry. John Parker was hurt and angry that his son was thinking of not joining the firm, where his grandfather had been a senior partner back in the horse-and-buggy days. He also found it difficult to believe, he said, that a young man who had graduated cum laude from Harvard Law School would even consider practicing in the wilds of New Hampshire… which he called the forgotten wilds of New Hampshire (sometimes, after a cocktail or two, the misbegotten wilds).
“Your clients will be farmers suing each other over cows breaking down fences,” John Parker said. “Your biggest cases will involve poaching or fender-benders on Route 23. You can’t be serious.” But the dismay on his face made it clear that he knew his son might be.
Ted Allburton was even angrier than his old friend. He had one special reason to be angry other than the ones John had already voiced to his son: Phil would not be committing a wanton act of destruction upon his future alone. He was planning to take a hostage, that hostage being his daughter.
When Phil persisted, Allburton had drawn a line in the dirt, one that was deep and harsh. “I’ll forbid the marriage.”
“Sir,” Phil had replied, keeping his voice level and (he hoped) polite, “I love Sally Ann. She says she loves me. And she’s of age.”
“You mean she could marry you without my consent.” Ted was a big, broad-shouldered man partial to suspenders (which he called braces). His blue eyes could be warm, but that day they’d been like flints. “That’s true, she could. And I like you, Phil. Always have. But if you were to do what you’re considering, any marriage would take place without my blessing. And that, I believe, would make her very unhappy. In fact, I rather doubt she’ll do it.”
Phil had looked into those flinty eyes and understood Ted Allburton was understating the case. He was sure Sally Ann wouldn’t do it.
Phil didn’t know if she would or not, especially if Mr. Allburton decided against a cash dowry. Phil knew Sal understood what he wanted more clearly than their elders, who either wouldn’t or couldn’t understand at all, and he knew part of her wanted it, too. After all, she’d also grown up spending her summers and the occasional snowy and magical Christmas in Curry.
She was willing to listen when Phil told her that he believed Curry, and all of southern New Hampshire, was going to grow. “It’ll be slow getting started,” he had told her that summer, when he still had hopes of bringing his parents onboard with his tentative plan, if not the Allburtons. “The depression’s not really going to end for another seven years or so… unless there really is a war. My dad thinks there will be, but I don’t. The growth is going to start in the North Conway area and spread from there. By 1950 there’ll be more highways. More highways mean more tourists, and more tourists mean more businesses. The new people will come from Massachusetts and New York, Sal, and they’ll come by the thousands. Tens of thousands! To swim in clean lakes in the summer, to watch the leaves change in the fall, to ski in the winter. Your father thinks I’ll live poor and die poor. I think he’s wrong.”
Unfortunately it wasn’t 1950, or even 1945. It was 1937, and he hadn’t been able to bring any of them around. He hadn’t—not yet, anyway—dared to ask Sally to commit, which might mean turning her back on her family… or having them turn their backs on her. It seemed horribly unfair, but to leave her dangling on the horns of his dilemma was unfair, too. And so he had told her he was going to come up here, spend the weekend, and come to a decision. Either the firm on Commonwealth Avenue or the little wooden office behind the Curry town hall and next to the Sunoco. Boston or Curry. The lady or the tiger. And so far he had decided…
“Absolutely nothing,” he muttered. “Gosh Almighty!”
He was on Route 111 now, and headed back toward the lake. His stomach was talking to him about lunch, but it was doing it in low and rather respectful tones, as if it was also abashed by his inability to decide.
His greatest wish was that he could make his father and mother understand that the firm was just not right for him, that he would be a square peg in a round hole. The fact that the firm had been right for his father and grandfather (not to mention the Hon. Theodore Allburton, Esq., and his father) did not make it right for him. He had tried in every way he could think of to express to them that he might be capable of doing perfectly adequate work at the double brownstone on Comm Ave and still feel desperately unhappy there. Would that unhappiness seep into his home life? It could, and probably would.
“Nonsense,” his father had replied. “Once you get broken in, you’ll love it. I did, and you will. A fresh challenge every day! No suits in small claims court over broken plows and stolen farm wagons!”
Broken in. What a phrase! It had haunted him through all this spring and summer. It was what you did with horses. Broke them in, worked them until they became nags, then shipped them off to the glue factory. He felt the metaphor, while melodramatic, was also realistic.
His mother, who at least sensed that his distress was real—a true thing—was kinder. “You won’t know if the firm is right for you until you’ve tried it,” she said, and that was the most reasonable and seductive reasoning put forward to him in favor of the firm. Because he knew himself.
He had been a very good student of the law. Not good enough to be brilliant, perhaps, but there was no shame in being very good. He wasn’t much of a rebel, though, and neither was Sally Ann. If they had been, they wouldn’t have been so deeply distressed at the idea of going against the wishes of their parents—they weren’t still teenagers, for gosh sake!
If he went to work for the firm, Phil suspected he would find aspects of it challenging, and he suspected even more strongly that he would, in time, become broken in. His idea of being the first lawyer in a sleepy little town that might someday grow into an affluent large town, possibly even a small city, would recede. Slowly at first, then, as the first strands of gray appeared at his temples, more quickly. In five years it would seem more dream than desire. There would be children and a house to take care of, more hostages to fortune, and each year—hell, each month, each week, each goshdarn day—it would be more difficult to turn back.
