Well, they had to be delicate. No more plans out loud until Kesler moved out. He moved to an apartment in another suburb; for some reason, he dressed for the occasion. Like a Tyrolean peasant, his felt Alpine hat with a feather in it and his old white knees winking under his lederhosen, he stood in a soft spring rain by his ancient wooden trunks and let George and Kit hustle the furniture around for him.
"Won't you get out of the rain, Mr. Kesler?" Kit asked him, but he would not budge from the sidewalk in front of his former house until all his furniture was in the truck. He was watching the black walnut tree.
Herr Kesler put his hand frankly on Kit's behind, saying to her, "Do not let der pest Bardlong the tree down-chop, okay?"
"Okay," said Kit.
George Ronkers liked to lie in bed in the spring mornings and watch the sun filter through the new green leaves of his black walnut tree. The patterns the tree cast on the bed were almost mosaic. Kit had enlarged the window to accommodate more of the tree; her term for it was "inviting the tree in."
"Oh, Raunch," she whispered, "isn't it lovely?"
"It's a lovely tree."
"Well, I mean the room too. And the window, the elevated sleeping platform..."
"Platform? I thought it was a bed."
There was a squirrel who came along a branch very near the window -- in fact, it often brushed the screen with its tail; the squirrel liked to tug at the new nuts, as if it could anticipate autumn.
"Raunch?"
"Yup ..."
"Remember the girl with seventy-five warts?" "Remember her!"
"Well, Raunch ... where were the warts?"
And der pest Bardlong gave them no trouble. All that spring and hot summer, when workmen were removing walls and sculpting windows, the aloof Mr. and Mrs. Bardlong smiled at the confusion from their immaculate grounds, waved distantly from their terraces, made sudden appearances from behind a trellis -- but always they were neighborly, encouraging of the youthful bustle, prying into nothing.
Bardlong was retired. He was the Bardlong, if you're at all familiar with the shock-absorber and brake-systems magnate. In the Midwest, you maybe have seen the big trucks.
BARDLONG STOPS YOU SHORT!
BARDLONG TAKES THAT SHOCK!
Even in retirement, Bardlong appeared to be absorbing whatever shock his new neighbors and their renovations might have caused him. His own house was an old red-brick mansion, trimmed tastefully with dark green shutters and overcrawling with ivy. It imitated a Georgian version of architecture; the front of the house was square and centered with tall, thin downstairs windows. The depth of the house was considerable; it went back a long way, branching into terraces, trellises, rock gardens, manicured hedges, fussed-over flower beds, and a lawn as fine as a putting green.
The house took up a full corner of the shady, suburban street. Its only neighbor was the Ronkerses' house, and the Bardlongs' property was walled off from George and Kit by a low slatestone wall. From their second-floor windows, George and Kit looked down into the Bardlongs' perfect yard; their tangle of bushes and unkempt, matted grass was a full five feet above the apparent dike that kept their whole mess from crushing Bardlong as he raked and pruned. The houses themselves were queerly close together, the Ronkerses' having once been servant quarters to the Bardlongs', long before the property was divided.
Between them, rooted on the raised ground on the Ronkerses' side of the slatestone wall, was the black walnut tree. Ronkers could not imagine whatever had prodded old Herr Kesler to think that Bardlong wanted the demise of the tree. Perhaps it had been a language problem. The tree must have been a shared joy to Bardlong. It shaded his windows, too; its stately height towered over his roof. One veer of the V angled over George and Kit; the other part of the V leaned over Bardlong.
Did the man not care for unpruned beauty?
Possibly; but all summer long, Bardlong never complained. He was there in his faded straw hat, gardening, simply puttering, often accompanied by his wife. The two of them seemed more like guests in an elegant old resort hotel than actual residents. Their dress, for yard work, was absurdly formal -- as if Bardlong's many years as a brake-systems businessman had left him with no clothes other than business suits. He wore slightly out-of-style suit trousers, with suspenders, and slightly out-of-style dress shirts -- the wide-brimmed straw hat shading his pale, freckled forehead. He was complete with an excessively sporty selection of two-toned shoes.
His wife -- in a lawn-party dress and a cream-white Panama with a red silk ribbon around the bun at the back of her nail-gray hair -- tapped her cane at bricks in the terrace that might dare to be loose. Bardlong followed her with a tiny, toylike pull-cart of cement and a trowel.
They lunched every midafternoon under a large sun umbrella on their back terrace, the white iron lawn furniture gleaming from an era of hunt breakfasts and champagne brunches following a pampered daughter's wedding.
A visit of grown-up children and less grown-up grandchildren seemed to mark the only interruption to Bardlong's summer. Three days of a dog barking and of balls being tossed about the pool-table symmetry of that yard seemed to upset the Bardlongs for a week following. They anxiously trailed the children around the grounds, trying to mend broken stalks of flowers, spearing on some garden instrument the affront of a gum wrapper, replacing divots dug up by the wild-running dog who could, and had, cut like a halfback through the soft grass.
For a week after this family invasion, the Bardlongs were collapsed on the terrace under their sun umbrella, too tired to tap a single brick or repair a tiny torn arm of ivy ripped from a trellis by a passing child.
"Hey, Raunch," Kit whispered. "Bardlong takes that shock!"
"Bardlong stops you short!" Ronkers would read off the trucks around town. But never did one of those crude vehicles so much as approach the fresh-painted curb by Bardlong's house. Bardlong was, indeed, retired. And the Ronkerses found it impossible to imagine the man as ever having lived another way. Even when his daily fare had been brake systerns and shock absorbers, the Ronkerses couldn't conceive of Bardlong having taken part.
George once had a daydream of perverse exaggeration. He told Kit he had watched a huge BARDLONG STOPS YOU SHORT! truck dump its entire supply in Bardlong's yard: the truck with its big back-panel doors flung wide open, churning up the lawn and disgorging itself of clanking parts -- brake drums and brake shoes -- and great oily slicks of brake fluid, rubbery, springing shock absorbers mashing down the flower beds.