"Richard Paul Russo - Nobodys Fool" - читать интересную книгу автора (Russo Richard Paul)

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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 Ran- court 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.

PART One 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
convened into, two and occasionally three-family dwellings and rented
out, over several decades, as slowly deteriorating flats. The most
impressive feature of Upper Main was not its houses, however, but the
regiment of ancient elms, whose upper limbs arched over the steeply
pitched roofs of these elderly houses, as well as the street below, to
green cathedral effect, bathing the street in breeze- blown shadows
that masked the peeling paint and rendered the sloping porches and
crooked eaves of the houses quaint in their decay. City people on
their way north, getting off the interstate in search of food and fuel,
often slowed as they drove through the village and peered nostalgically
out their windows at the old houses, wondering idly what they cost and
what O they must be like inside and what it would be like to live in
them and walk to the village in the shade. Surely this would be a
better life. On their way back to the city after the long weekend,
some of the most powerfully affected briefly considered getting off the
interstate again to repeat the experience, perhaps even look into the

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real estate market. But then they remembered how the exit had been
tricky, how North Bath hadn't been all that close to the highway, how
they were getting back to the city later than they planned as it was,
and how difficult it would be to articulate to the kids in the backseat