An Anecdotal Enclave of Village Ghosts

When I went home again to Hammondsport for a few days in June, one of the thoughts that struck me as I led my children and some of their children on a walking tour of that lovely upstate New York village was that the place was an anthology of anecdotes.

You don’t wonder that so many storytellers have come out of small towns, or out of ethnic enclaves within larger cities. A cynic might say that there is so little else to do it’s natural and even inevitable to spin moments into anecdotes and embroider anecdotes into tales.

I think it’s probably true. Those long, slow winter afternoons around the stove at the gas station or at the pool tables in the rear of the barber shop, or around the bridge tables and over the manicures, make for the transformation of reality into narratives that have all the shaped impact of drama.

Hammondsport, and I’m sure any town where at least some of the inhabitants stay put for a time, has a rich oral history, not all of it reliable and some of it communicable only among consenting adults, but taken altogether it is as various in tone as life itself.

Sherwood Anderson could have found his Winesburg, Ohio, in Steuben County I have no doubt, and Edgar Lee Masters could have populated his “Spoon River Anthology” in New York state quite as easily as in Illinois.

My walking tour led by the corner where an abandoned house had stood when I was a boy. It was a gingerbread Victorian, imposing in its prime if not quite magnificent enough for the Ambersons.

You could get into it through an open window at the back and as boys we used to roam through it. Some of the rooms were strewn with canceled checks. On first sight we imagined they were valuable and we ran home with fistfuls of them. It was as if the family had fled, leaving paper clues as to what their lives had been.

There were tales about the family, of which a child caught only glimmerings from adult conversations: high living, riotous parties, easy morals and then sudden financial collapse, the vivid celebrities gone.

I have no idea how much if any of this was true, and how much the gossips’ amplifications. By now I suspect even the graybeards in town can’t say with any exactness. But the spooky house has always haunted me.

The excitement of wandering illicitly through its rooms was shaded by feelings of dread, not unlike being in a cemetery at night. It was as if something had died. Seeing again the other week that empty corner where the house had stood, I realized that the death could have been of hope.

Not all the memories are so dark. I think of the punch lines, toward which the many of the tales have been carefully built over the innumerable tellings.

“I ran into him right in front of the Park Inn and I said, ‘George, you may be my father-in-law but I’m not taking any more of your guff.’ I never spoke to him again as long as he lived. I had my pride.”

“So I just looked at him and I said, ‘Homer, why don’t you just take the damned rowboat and sail it right up your you-know-what.’ ”

“And she stares down at Willard and says, ‘Dearie, even if it was on the menu, you couldn’t afford it.’ ”

“So all of a sudden the tow-line snapped and that truck went shootin’ ahead like a gee-dee rocket and the line came whistling at me so fast I figured, ‘O Judas priest, it’s goodby Howard,’ but all it did was part my hair sideways.”

In the anecdotages, standoffs become victories, victimizers are turned into victims in the retellings and, above all, the parting shots that didn’t get fired in the heat of the moment get fired at last.

I’ve wondered what ever happened to the family in the Victorian house, as I wondered about many of the people who figured in the stories. It is six decades at least since the check-writers left town and they may all be gone to dust. But if they only knew it, they have earned a curious immortality in the village tales. It is possible, one way and another, that we all may.