Nobody’s Fool

Начало книги

The author gratefully acknowledges generous support from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. Thanks also to Linda Stuart and Alan Rancourt for advice on technical matters. Gratitude as well for coffee and understanding to the staffs of Cristaudos and Denny’s in Carbondale and The Open Hearth in Waterville. And, for priceless faith and encouragement, my dearest thanks to Nat Sobel, Judith Weber, Craig Holden, David Rosenthal and, always, my wife, Barbara.

Upper Main Street in the village of North Bath, just above the town’s two-block-long business district, was quietly residential for three more blocks, then became even more quietly rural along old Route 27A, a serpentine two-lane blacktop that snaked its way through the Adirondacks of northern New York, with their tiny, down-at-the-heels resort towns, all the way to Montreal and prosperity. The houses that bordered Upper Main, as the locals referred to it — although Main, from its “lower” end by the IGA and Tastee Freez through its upper end at the Sans Souci, was less than a quarter mile — were mostly dinosaurs, big, aging clapboard Victorians and sprawling Greek Revivals that would have been worth some money if they were across the border in Vermont and if they had not been built as, or converted into, two- and occasionally three-family dwellings and rented out, over several decades, as slowly deteriorating flats.

Читать дальше →