Palladio

1 A town called Ulster in central New York--west of the Hudson, but still closer to Albany than to Syracuse or Buffalo--prospered briefly in the 1960s and '70s when IBM opened a regional sales division on the site of an old dairy two towns away. Ten minutes off the thruway, the abruptly thriving area wasn't long removed from its earlier life as farm country; most of the old sagging barns were bought up and knocked down to make way for new construction, but a few of the better-preserved ones were left on the vistas to go about the picturesque business of their own slow decline. They stand there today, swaybacked, holes punched in their steep roofs by years of snowfall; and the regional sales division has shut down. Roger Howe was offered a job there, a job that effectively represented the promotion which had not been forthcoming in his four years at the office in Westchester. He and his wife, Kay, with a small relocation allowance from the company and what remained of her inheritance from her father, moved upstate in the fall of 1970, when their son Richard was three years old, and Kay, though she didn't know it at the time, was pregnant with Molly. The older homes in Ulster were well separated from one another, built for the most part on the apexes of the rolling, stony hills that had led its earliest settlers to hit upon livestock farming as their path of least resistance. A number of the IBM families, though, including the Howes, bought into a new development called Bull's Head, laid out at the wide end of a valley which narrowed toward the bald mountain that gave the venture its name. Roger and Kay, who were both twenty-eight and had never owned a home before, first saw Bull's Head on a Saturday in June, at an open house their realtor had scheduled from the hours of eleven to one. By the end of their first winter, when they had seen how the sunlight disappeared behind the mountain at around two in the afternoon, how the open end of the valley funneled perfectly the noisy, persistent winds that rattled the windows and leaked freely through all the casings, the house itself had become something of a sore subject, any mention of which seemed freighted with recriminations. Kay turned up the thermostat the moment Roger left for work in the morning; if she forgot to turn it down again before he came home, as she sometimes did, there were words. Downtown Ulster was an unplanned bloom of small enterprises--the gas station next to the drugstore next to the bank next to the IGA--which grew out of the town's main intersection but tapered off quickly to open land in every direction. In the evenings, a few minutes before each hour, the television antennas turned silently together like slow propellers atop the roofs in the valley. A new building had to be erected one summer to hold the lower four grades of the burgeoning elementary school. From her first-grade classroom Molly could watch her brother Richard for forty-five minutes every day through the windows that faced onto the playground, unless the weather was too severe for recess outdoors. Her teacher noticed her staring out the window from time to time, though she didn't guess what the girl was staring at, and when it got too nettlesome she would make Molly bring her desk up to the front of the room for the rest of the day. It was a more effective punishment than she knew, for Molly was not a child who courted attention. She did not like her teacher, who seemed to feel so sorry for herself. The people Molly admired then were the members of her family, and her admiration often took the form of a kind of watchful daydream that she was one of them. At home she could sometimes be found, if Kay was on the phone or otherwise not to be disturbed, staring sleepily into the mirror above her mother's dressing table, or standing in the walk-in closet with her feet in a pair of her father's impossibly wide leather shoes. Her room was painted white, with white blindsDee, Jonathan is the author of 'Palladio' with ISBN 9780385501798 and ISBN 038550179X.