Free The Facades: A Novel by Eric Lundgren Page B

a thin woman called Miss Herring whose dark clothes accentuated
     her nearly chalk-white pallor. Her glasses, sadly out of fashion now, were an enormous face-sized contraption of thick glass
     and plastic: it was hard to believe that theyenhanced her vision. Miss Herring described Mayor Trudenhauser’s publicity campaign and the long preparations of the fair
     builders. She told us moving stories of clockmakers and artisans who had brought their life’s work to the arcades for display.
     The great arch was erected, the fountain that would gush water in all the colors of the rainbow, the set of commissioned sculptures
     depicting the Ages of Man. Two hotels were built for the fair and hopefully christened the President and the Ambassador. Macrocephalic
     babies and two-headed frogs arrived from obscure corners of the Midwest and were later immortalized as grainy murk in Miss
     Herring’s slideshow. She showed us marvels: corn cob churches and enormous pigs. We sat glued to our chairs as she took a
     brief detour into meteorology, clapping two chalkboard erasers together to evoke the collision of fronts that week in 1898.
     The yellow dust settled on the studious heads in the front row. Miss Herring’s two day account of the fair, lasting as long
     as the fair itself did, was a tour de force. She glossed the mechanical failure of the streetcar system. She recounted the
     collapse of the arcades, pummeled by hail and tornadic winds, then concluded her presentation with washed-out film of the
     devastated fairgrounds, which had been recorded on an obsolete Edison cinematograph. As the film surveyed the broken glass
     and scattered violin pieces, Miss Herring led us in a recitation of Lermann’s “Ode to Trude”:
    Oh placid city, your souvenirs
    Of weathered brick and broken stone
    Remind us of the rubble of the years
    And failure written in the bone
    We pledge to stay and make repairs
    Until a million lights are on
    Until our illness disappears
    And all impediments are gone
    The cross-eyed boy who sat to my left either had not memorized, or could not utter, these terrifying and oblique verses. Miss
     Herring pulled him aside and dismissed the rest of us. We applauded her wildly, and she responded with a single, modest bow,
     her left hand still clutched on the delinquent’s shoulder. Feeling much older than our twelve years, we filed out of the sixth-grade
     classroom and into the falling leaves.
    C ADDYING FOR B OGGS at the country club was one of my more humbling duties. It was a duty I performed on foot, because Boggs was a purist who
     thought golf was exercise. This ethos was perhaps best appreciated in the abstract, not with Boggs’s clubs on one shoulder
     and J. B. Aabner’s clubs on the other. The three of us passed from the thirteenth hole to the fourteenth tee. The wrecked
     arcades were no more than a pleasant shimmer in the distance. The trunk of the Great Arch was a dark blur. Trailing slightly
     behind, with the two sets of clubs clanking in stereo, I noted the contrast between the two aging legal playboys. Aabner,
     wearing a loose Hawaiian shirt and sagging elastic-waisted khakis, looked swollen from decades of sensual indulgence, like
     a debauched aristocrat in an Edwardian woodcut. The meaty back of his neck cooked in the late September sun. Boggs, on the
     other hand, looked spry and elegant in his golf duds. His tailored tweed pants fit perfectly. He wore a thin buttercup-yellowvest over a light blue silk shirt. I’d often wondered what it felt like to wear Boggs’s clothes, the warp and weft of such
     fine fabrics against the skin.
    He rested his hand on Aabner’s back, unfazed by the rivulet of sweat that had formed along Aabner’s spine, staining the palm
     tree on his shirt.
    “Got a little of the old habeas corpus last night,” Aabner said.
    “That right?” Boggs replied. He’d lately grown weary of Aabner’s Latinate kissing and telling. Sometimes, when Aabner called
     the office to