An American Tune: A Novel

Prologue. “Deja Vu”

1 “Deja Vu” July, 2002 Nora Quillen sat on a bench in People’s Park, considering what was lost. The Book Nook was gone and, with it, long, rainy afternoons browsing the cluttered shelves, breathing in the smell of paper and ink. The Oxford Shop, Redwood and Ross, the Peddler were gone, and all the beautiful blue and yellow oxford shirts, the matching Villager skirts and sweaters. Knee socks, the warmth of them on bitter winter mornings. The SAE house was gone, its big lawn, where you could always count on seeing at least a few cute guys throwing a football, was now a parking lot; the old stadium, the spinning silver spokes of Little 500 bicycle wheels on its cinder track had vanished into green space. There was a Burger King in the Commons, and the Gables, where a young Hoagy Carmichael once sat in a back booth dreaming music, had been gutted and transformed into a Roly Poly Sandwich Shop. People’s Park itself was nothing like it had been in 1970, when students claimed the site after the storefront buildings that once stood therewererazedinafire.InthespiritofBerkeley’sPeople’sPark,they brought shovels, lumber, paint, flats of vegetables and flowers, and set out to shape the half-block of mud. Anyone could plant anything, Prologue 2 An American Tune they said. There’d be benches and tables, a playground for children, kiosks announcing every kind of happening. It would be a friendly place, where you could listen to music, fly kites, blow bubbles. Get high. That same spring, Nora remembered–the night Nixon announced he was sending troops into Cambodia–some of the protestors marching from Dunn Meadow toward the courthouse downtown had picked up rocks unearthed from the digging and thrown them, breaking windows in some of the shops on Kirkwood Street. Thewarmspringnightcamebacktoher,thesmellofnewlyturned earth mingling with sweat and patchouli and marijuana. Chanting overlaid by shouts and laughter, the sound of glass shattering–Tom grabbing a drunk fraternity boy and wrestling a rock from his hand. But she wasn’t going to think about Tom. There was no use in it–and, besides, it was Claire’s turn now. Soon her daughter would step into a whole new life here, as she herself had done so many years before. Theparkwassotastefullylandscapednow,sheobserved,withneat brick paths dividing the grassy areas into triangles whose points met at the abstract sculpture in its center–a smooth scoop of limestone reminiscent of an open hand. There was a drinking fountain with a brass bowl. Green benches lined the paths, and tables surrounded colorful mosaics that had been set into concrete near the front of the park: fingers on piano keys, cyclists, an eye. There were trees, with commemorative plaques set into the soil beneath them–one dedicated to former chancellor Herman B. Wells: “A Friend of Bloomington ’s Urban Forest.” Had the chancellor been a friend of People’s Park? Nora didn’t remember, but she was pretty sure that, at the time, he was as much against the students’ occupation of university property as most everyoneelse .WhenhaditbecometheUrbanForest,anyway?Astupid name, she thought. If people were bound and determined to rewrite history, they ought to be able to do a better job than that. Thatothertimesimmeredinsideher,unsettlingher,asithaddone all too often since the towers came down in New York and the President ’s intention to hijack the horrific event to further his own political agenda became more and more obvious. Just this morning, there had been another news story about weapons of mass destruction, 3 Prologue citing the testimony of a former Iraqi nuclear engineer who claimed that Saddam Hussein would have enough weapons-grade uranium for three nuclear bombs by 2005. God. Couldn’t people see through the “Chutes and Ladders” maneuver that had so neatly made Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein the same person in their minds and how Bush was using it to justify the buildup toward a war in Iraq that was only vaguely connected to what had happened in New York? One that was likely to be as disastrous, as unwinnable and costly of innocent lives as the war in Vietnam had been? She could not talk about it, even with her own husband, Charlie , who’d put all that had happened to him in Vietnam, whatever it had been, in a closed-off place and would not even allow himself to consider that anything like it...