Chapter 3: The Carriage Clock

The French carriage clock was a thing of beauty and a thing of neglect, which are not opposites but companions, because beautiful things are neglected all the time and neglected things retain their beauty the way a house retains its architecture even after the windows are broken and the paint has peeled and the garden has gone to thistle — the bones remain, the proportions remain, the intention remains, and the carriage clock's intention was evident in every line of its brass case, every curve of its handle, every beveled edge of its glass panels, even though the brass was green with tarnish and the glass was clouded and the movement inside was frozen solid, seized, immobile, a mechanism that had stopped so long ago that the oil had turned to shellac and the pivots had bonded to their holes and the entire train was locked in a rigor that Henry had seen before in clocks that had not been serviced in decades and that always made him think of joints, of arthritis, of his father's hands.

He turned it over. On the base plate, engraved in a flowing script that the French used for such things: Duverdrey & Bloquel, Paris. A good maker. Not the best — not Breguet, not Jaeger — but good, the kind of maker that produced carriage clocks for the bourgeoisie, for lawyers' offices and doctors' waiting rooms and the mantels of the comfortably well-off, clocks that were meant to travel, that were designed to be carried from room to room or house to house, that had handles on top and protective cases and shock-resistant movements, because the carriage clock was invented for a world in motion, for people who went places and wanted to know what time it was when they got there.

This one had not gone anywhere in twenty-nine years.

Henry removed the back panel. The movement was visible now, compact and precise in the way that French movements are compact and precise, the plates closely spaced, the wheels small, the train tight, and he could see the problem immediately — or rather, he could see the symptoms, which were everywhere: the green oxidation on the brass, the dark varnish of old oil on every surface, the rust on the steel parts, the frozen balance wheel that should have been oscillating back and forth but instead sat motionless, seized on its pivot, a pendulum that had forgotten how to swing.

He would need to disassemble the entire movement. Every wheel, every pivot, every spring. He would need to soak the parts in cleaning solution — not the ultrasonic, not for a movement this far gone, but a chemical soak, naphtha or a proprietary clock cleaner, something that would dissolve the varnished oil and loosen the seized pivots without damaging the brass or the steel. It would take days. The cleaning alone would take days, and then the inspection, the assessment of each part — was the pivot worn, was the wheel true, was the spring sound — and then the repair, the replacement of whatever needed replacing, and then the assembly and the oiling and the regulation and the testing.

Days.

Henry had days. He had nothing but days. The shop was closed, the phone was silent, the bell above the door did not ring except when he came in each morning, and he had nowhere to be and nothing to do except this, the fourteen clocks, the sequential fulfillment of his father's promises, and so he began.

He removed the movement from the case. He removed the balance wheel assembly — or tried to, because the balance staff was seized in its jewel, the oil turned to cement, and he had to soak the entire cock-and-balance assembly in naphtha for an hour before the staff would turn, before the jewel released its grip, before the balance wheel was free and spinning on his fingertip, a tiny flywheel, the regulator, the thing that determined how fast or slow the clock ran, the way a heart determines how fast or slow a body runs, and the balance wheel was the heart of the clock and it had stopped and now it turned again, slowly, tentatively, the way a heart resumes after being shocked.

He laid out the parts. He numbered them with a pencil on a strip of masking tape — a habit Alistair had taught him, because a disassembled movement is a puzzle and a numbered puzzle is solvable and an unnumbered puzzle is chaos — and the parts covered the bench, sixty-one pieces in all, each one tagged, each one waiting for its bath.

He filled the cleaning tank. He lowered the parts in their baskets. He set the timer for four hours and he went to the front of the shop and sat behind the counter and opened the phone book — the actual phone book, the paper one, the one that Alistair had kept in the drawer because Alistair believed that knowledge stored in a book was more reliable than knowledge stored in a machine, a belief that Henry had mocked in his twenties and respected in his fifties — and he looked for D.K.

There was no D.K. in the phone book. There were Kramers and Kelleys and Klines and Ketchums but none with the first initial D, and even if there had been, the phone book was current and the ticket was from 2006 and people move, people die, people change their numbers the way they change their habits, gradually and then all at once.

He closed the phone book.

He thought about D.K. Who brings a clock to a repair shop and leaves only initials? A person in a hurry. A person who does not intend to return. A person who wants the clock fixed but does not want to be found, the way you might leave a baby on a doorstep with a note — take care of this, I cannot — and Henry did not know if this analogy was apt or grotesque but it sat in his mind and would not leave.

He thought about Alistair accepting the clock with only two letters. Alistair, who kept meticulous records, who wrote the customer's name and address and phone number on every ticket, who filed the tickets in a wooden box alphabetically, who could find any ticket from any year because his system was his system and it worked — Alistair had accepted this clock with two letters and no other information, and Henry wondered if Alistair had asked for more and been refused or if Alistair had seen something in D.K.'s face that made asking impossible, because Alistair was like that, Alistair could read people the way he read clocks, could see the mechanism behind the face, could tell when a person was wound too tight or running down or in need of service, and maybe D.K. had been in need of service and Alistair had provided the only service he could, which was to take the clock and write the ticket and promise to fix it.

The timer rang. Henry went to the back and lifted the baskets from the cleaning tank and the parts were bright, the brass gleaming, the steel clean, the varnish dissolved, the seizure broken, and each piece sat in its numbered position like a student in a classroom, ready to be examined, ready to be judged.

He examined them. The pivots were worn but not beyond use. The wheels were true. The mainspring — and here Henry paused, because the mainspring was the question he had not been able to answer from outside, the question of whether there was energy stored or not — the mainspring was fully wound. Fully wound. D.K. had wound the clock before bringing it to Alistair, or the clock had been wound when it stopped, and the mainspring had held its tension for twenty-nine years, coiled in its barrel, patient, waiting, a spiral of steel holding enough energy to run the clock for thirty-six hours if only the train were free, if only the pivots were clean, if only the balance wheel would oscillate, and the spring had been holding this energy since 1997, since Clinton was president, since Henry was twenty-three and living in New York and working at a brokerage on Wall Street and wearing shoes that cost two hundred dollars and drinking martinis at bars where the bartenders knew his name and the women were beautiful and the city was endless and he had not thought about clocks or fathers or Montpelier in years.

1997. Henry had been in New York for one year. He had left Montpelier at twenty-two, in 1996, the year Marion opened her bookshop, the year the connecting door was cut, the year Henry told Alistair he was not going to be a clockmaker, was not going to be the Son in Osgood & Son, was going to New York to make money and live a life that was not regulated by the tick of an escapement, and Alistair had said nothing, had stood at his bench, had looked at Henry with an expression that Henry had spent twenty-four years trying to read and had never successfully decoded, an expression that was not anger and not disappointment and not sadness but was perhaps all three layered on top of each other the way the gears in a train are layered, each one turning the next, each one connected, each one necessary for the whole to function.

Henry had left. He had driven south on I-89, the Green Mountains in his rearview mirror, Montpelier shrinking, the capitol dome getting smaller, and he had felt the exhilaration of escape, the weightlessness of a mainspring released from its barrel, all that coiled energy suddenly free, unwinding, unregulated, and it had felt like freedom and he had not understood until much later — until he was forty-six and his father's hands were shaking and he was driving north on I-89 with the Green Mountains in his windshield — that freedom without regulation is not freedom, it is chaos, it is a mainspring that unwinds all at once and spends its energy in a single violent release, and what you need is not freedom from the escapement but freedom through the escapement, the measured release, the tick by tick, the controlled unwinding that turns raw energy into useful time.

But that was later. In 1996, in 1997, Henry was in New York and the carriage clock was in Montpelier and D.K. was a person who had not yet brought it to Alistair and the mainspring was either wound or not wound and Henry did not know because he was not there, had chosen not to be there, had chosen the city over the shop, the money over the craft, the fast unwinding over the slow tick, and he could not go back and choose differently because time only moves in one direction, which is the one thing clocks tell us that we already know and keep forgetting.

He reassembled the movement.

The work took all afternoon. Each pivot into its hole, each wheel onto its arbor, each screw into its thread, and the movement came together the way movements do when the parts are clean and the clockmaker is patient — smoothly, logically, each piece finding its place the way a word finds its place in a sentence, the way a note finds its place in a chord. The balance wheel went in last. Henry set it on its staff and gave it a tiny push and it swung, left, right, left, right, the hairspring pulling it back each time, regulating its swing, determining its frequency, and the ticking began, not from the movement yet — the escapement was not engaged — but from the balance wheel itself, the faint whisper of steel on jewel, the murmur of a mechanism waking up.

He engaged the escapement. The pallet fork found the escape wheel teeth. The balance wheel swung and the pallet fork rocked and the escape wheel advanced one tooth and the next wheel turned a fraction and the next and the next and the energy from the mainspring — the energy that had been stored for twenty-nine years — began to flow through the train, regulated, measured, converted from raw force into ticking time, and the carriage clock ran.

Henry sat and watched it. The balance wheel oscillated. The escapement ticked. The hands — he had not yet reattached the hands, but the cannon pinion turned, the post where the minute hand would sit, and it turned steadily, imperceptibly, the way the earth turns, and the clock was keeping time, was making time, was doing the thing it had been built to do and had not done for twenty-nine years.

He timed it against his watch. After ten minutes, the carriage clock was two seconds fast. After an hour, it was twelve seconds fast. He adjusted the regulator — a small lever on the balance cock that lengthened or shortened the effective hairspring, slowing or speeding the balance wheel — and after another hour it was one second fast, and after another hour it was still one second fast, which was acceptable, which was within the tolerance of a clock of this age and type, and Henry wrote on the ticket: Full service. Cleaned, oiled, regulated. Mainspring sound (held tension 29 years). Running well. +1 sec/hr.

He put the movement back in the case. He polished the brass with a soft cloth and Brasso, not aggressively, not trying to make it new, just trying to remove the green and restore the honey color of old brass, the color of age without decay, the color of a thing that has been used and has survived the using. He cleaned the glass panels with ammonia and newspaper, the way his mother cleaned windows, the way all mothers clean windows, a technique older than Windex, older than glass cleaner, older than the idea that cleaning requires a product rather than a method.

The carriage clock sat on the bench, gleaming, ticking, keeping time. It was beautiful. It had always been beautiful, but now its beauty was audible, the tick a small clear sound in the quiet shop, a sound that joined the tick of the wall clock and created a polyrhythm, two clocks ticking at different rates, two heartbeats in the same room, and Henry listened to them and thought about D.K.

Who was D.K.? A man? A woman? Someone who had owned a French carriage clock and brought it to a shop in Vermont and left only initials and never returned. Someone who had wound the clock before bringing it in, which meant they cared about it, which meant the clock mattered to them, which meant the leaving was not casual, was not forgetful, was deliberate — a deliberate abandonment of a thing that mattered, and Henry did not know the word for this, this deliberate giving up of a thing you love, this placing of a valued object in someone else's care with no intention of reclaiming it, and he thought that maybe the word was trust and maybe the word was surrender and maybe the word was just leaving, the way Henry had left, the way everyone leaves, sooner or later, one way or another.

He set the carriage clock on the shelf where the finished repairs would go. Next to the grandmother clock. Two down. Twelve to go.

---

At three o'clock Marion came through the connecting door. Two cups. Darjeeling. She set one on Henry's bench and one on Alistair's bench and she sat in the chair by the window.

"The carriage clock is done," Henry said.

Marion looked at the shelf. The grandmother clock and the carriage clock sat side by side, ticking, keeping time, two clocks that had been silent for years now speaking again, their voices small but clear in the afternoon quiet.

"That's the one with no name," Marion said.

"D.K."

"I remember when they brought it in."

Henry looked at her. "You do?"

"A woman. Young. Thirties, maybe. Dark hair. She came in on a rainy day. I was in the shop — in the bookshop — and I heard the bell and I looked through the connecting door and she was standing at the counter with the clock in her hands. She looked — I don't know. Not sad. Past sad. The place past sad where you're just very still."

"Did she say anything? Did you hear?"

"I heard Alistair ask her name and she said just the initials would be fine. He asked for a phone number and she said she didn't have one. He asked for an address and she shook her head. He wrote the ticket and she set the clock on the counter and she left."

"She didn't ask about the price? The timeline?"

"No. She set it down and she left. The bell rang and she was gone."

Henry looked at the carriage clock. A woman. Dark hair. Past sad. A clock that had not run since 1997, wound tight, brought to a clockmaker on a rainy day in 2006, left with two letters and no return.

"Did you ever see her again?"

"No."

"Did Alistair mention her?"

"Once. Years later. He said he hoped she was all right. He said the clock was a good clock and that someone who owned a good clock was probably all right."

Henry did not know if this was true. He did not know if the quality of a person's clock was correlated with the quality of a person's life. He suspected not. He suspected that people with good clocks suffered as much as people with bad clocks, that the precision of your timekeeping was no defense against the imprecision of your living, that you could own a Duverdrey & Bloquel and still be past sad, still be beyond the reach of anyone who wanted to help, still be the kind of person who left a clock at a shop and walked out into the rain and did not come back.

But Alistair had hoped. Alistair had said probably all right, and the probably was the hope, the small space between certainty and ignorance where faith lives, and Henry thought that maybe this was why Alistair had kept the clock for twenty years without a name to call — because keeping it was a form of hope, was a way of saying I believe you will come back, and even though D.K. had not come back, the keeping was still the keeping, the hope was still the hope, and now the clock ran and D.K. was wherever D.K. was and the clock ticked on the shelf and kept time for no one in particular, which was, Henry thought, what clocks had always done, had done for centuries, keeping time for whoever was in the room and not caring who was in the room, democratic, indifferent, faithful.

"It runs well," Henry said.

"I can hear it," Marion said.

They sat and listened. Two clocks ticking. The tea cooling on Alistair's bench. The afternoon light coming through the window, falling on the bench, on the tools, on the empty stool, on the space where Alistair had sat.

Marion finished her tea. She picked up her cup and Alistair's cup and went to the door. She stopped.

"Henry."

"Yes."

"Your father was proud of you. For coming back. He didn't say it, but he was."

"I know."

"He said it to me. He said, 'The boy came back.' That's what he said. 'The boy came back.'"

She went through the door. It closed. Henry sat at the bench and looked at his hands and thought about the word boy, which was what Alistair had called him, not Henry, not son, but boy, the way the English do, the way Alistair's father had called Alistair, the way Somerset called its sons back across the generations, boy, and Henry was fifty-two and his father was dead and he was still the boy, was still the one who had left and come back, was still the one whose hands did what his father's hands could not, and the word sat in his chest the way a mainspring sits in its barrel — coiled, tight, full of energy that has nowhere to go except forward, tick by tick, regulated by the escapement, measured by the mechanism, released one tooth at a time.

He turned off the lamp. He covered the remaining clocks with their dust cloths. He locked the door.

Tomorrow he would start the schoolhouse regulator. The Weatherbee estate clock. The sentimental one. The one with no one to go home to.

He climbed the stairs. He ate dinner. He went to bed.

The carriage clock ticked below him in the dark shop, keeping time, wound with energy from 1997, running on force that was twenty-nine years old, and it would run for another thirty hours before it needed winding, and there was no one to wind it, no D.K., no Alistair, only Henry, and Henry set his alarm for six and closed his eyes and the ticking came up through the floor like a heartbeat, like a pulse, like the sound of something that had been still for a very long time finally moving again.