Chapter 4: The Schoolhouse Regulator

The schoolhouse regulator was oak, golden oak, the kind of clock that hung in every American schoolroom and post office and train station from 1880 to 1950, the kind of clock that taught a nation to be on time, to punch in and punch out, to synchronize their lives with the lives of others, to agree that ten o'clock was ten o'clock in Portland and in Peoria and in Montpelier, and Henry lifted it from the shelf and felt the weight of it, not just the physical weight — oak and brass and glass — but the civic weight, the institutional weight, the weight of a thing that had been made not for a person but for a room, a public thing, a shared thing, and now it belonged to no one because the Weatherbees were gone and the estate was dissolved and the house on County Road had been sold to people who did not know this clock existed.

Broken suspension spring. Handle with care — sentimental.

Henry set it on the bench and opened the case. The movement was a Seth Thomas No. 2, a workhorse movement, rugged and reliable, the kind of movement that could take a beating and keep ticking, the kind of movement that was designed for rooms where children threw erasers and doors slammed and the building shook when the furnace kicked on, and the movement was in good shape — the wheels clean, the pivots bright, the mainspring sound — except for the suspension spring, which was broken.

The suspension spring is a thin strip of steel, no thicker than a fingernail, that connects the pendulum to the movement. It is the bridge between the two halves of the clock — the movement, which provides the energy, and the pendulum, which regulates the energy — and it must be flexible enough to let the pendulum swing and strong enough to hold the pendulum's weight and precise enough to maintain the pendulum's arc, and when it breaks the pendulum falls and the clock stops and there is a small sound, a click, a snap, the sound of a thing giving way, and then silence.

Henry held the broken spring. It had snapped cleanly, about a third of the way from the top, and the break was old, the edges oxidized, and he could see that it had not broken from a single impact — not from a dropped clock or a slammed door — but from fatigue, from the millions of oscillations, the back-and-forth, the endless flexing, the way a paperclip breaks if you bend it back and forth enough times, which is the way everything breaks if you use it long enough, which is the way bodies break and marriages break and the spirit breaks, not from a single blow but from the accumulation of ordinary stress applied over time.

He had suspension springs in stock. Alistair had kept a drawer of them, sorted by width and thickness, because suspension springs were the most common repair — every clockmaker keeps suspension springs the way a doctor keeps bandages, because the suspension spring is the part that fails most often, the part that absorbs the most stress, the part that stands between the energy and the regulation and takes the punishment of both — and Henry found the right size, a strip of blued steel, 0.004 inches thick, and he cut it to length with the spring cutters and filed the ends smooth and bent the tiny hooks at top and bottom that would connect it to the movement and the pendulum.

The installation took five minutes. The suspension spring went in, the pendulum hung from it, and Henry gave the pendulum a push and it swung, left, right, left, right, and the escapement engaged and the clock began to tick.

He regulated it. The schoolhouse regulator had a long pendulum — twenty-six inches, wood rod, brass bob — and the regulation was done by moving the bob up or down on the rod, shortening or lengthening the effective pendulum, speeding or slowing the clock, and Henry adjusted the nut at the bottom of the bob and timed it against his watch and adjusted again and timed again and after an hour the clock was keeping time, accurate to within a second per day, which was good, which was what a Seth Thomas No. 2 could do when it was properly set up, which was remarkable for a movement that cost twelve dollars in 1920 and was designed to be hung on a schoolroom wall and forgotten.

He wrote on the ticket: Repaired 10/16. New suspension spring. Regulated. Movement in good condition. Timekeeping: +/- 1 sec/day.

Then he sat and looked at the clock and thought about the Weatherbees.

He knew the name. Everyone in Montpelier knew the name, or had known it, the way small towns know the names of their old families the way cities do not, because in a small town the families are the landscape, they are the hills and the rivers, they are the things that were there before you and will be there after you, except when they are not, except when the last one dies and the house is sold and the name becomes a word that only old people remember.

Florence Weatherbee. Ninety-one when she died. The house on County Road. A white farmhouse with green shutters and a barn that had not held animals since the 1970s. Henry had driven past it a hundred times, a thousand times, on the way to the quarries in East Montpelier or the swimming hole on the Winooski, and the house had always been there, white and green, the way certain houses are always there, the way certain trees are always there, the way certain facts about your town are so stable that you stop noticing them until they change.

Handle with care — sentimental.

Who had said this? Florence? Her son? Her daughter? Someone had stood at this counter and told Alistair that the clock was sentimental, and Alistair had written the word down because the word mattered, because the word changed the nature of the repair, not technically but spiritually, because a sentimental clock is not just a machine with a broken spring, it is a vessel, a container for feelings that have no other place to go, and the clockmaker who repairs it is handling not just brass and steel but memory and attachment and love and loss and whatever else the owner has poured into the mechanism over the years, the way you pour tea into a cup, the way you pour years into a marriage, the way you pour your life into a shop on Main Street in a small town in Vermont.

Henry hung the schoolhouse regulator on the wall. Not on the shelf with the others — on the wall, because a schoolhouse regulator is meant to hang, is meant to be seen from across a room, is meant to be the thing you look up at when you want to know what time it is, and he hung it on the nail where Alistair had hung a calendar, next to the connecting door, and the clock hung there and ticked and the pendulum swung and the weight of it — the physical weight, the civic weight, the sentimental weight — was carried by the wall and by the nail and by the shop itself.

Three down. Eleven to go.

---

On Sunday Henry drove to Elm Street for dinner.

The house was a Cape Cod, white clapboard, black shutters, built in 1948 by a man named Fortin who had sold it to Alistair and Frances in 1975 for twenty-two thousand dollars, a price that Alistair mentioned at least once a year for the rest of his life, not because it was a good price — though it was — but because it was the price, the fact, the number that anchored the transaction in memory, the way a date anchors an event, the way a ticket anchors a repair.

Frances was in the kitchen. She was eighty, small, thin, her hair white and cut short, her hands — Henry's hands, the long fingers, the narrow palms — moving efficiently over the counter, the cutting board, the stove. The kitchen smelled of pot roast, which meant it was Sunday, because Frances made pot roast on Sunday the way the sun rose in the east, not out of habit but out of conviction, the conviction that certain things should be reliable, that a person should be able to count on pot roast on Sunday the way a person should be able to count on the sun in the east, and if you could not count on these things then what could you count on.

"Henry," she said. She did not look up. She was slicing carrots.

"Mom."

He sat at the kitchen table. The table was pine, painted white, the paint worn through at the corners where fifty years of elbows had rubbed it down to the wood, and the chairs were Windsor chairs, the kind with the spindle backs, and they creaked when you sat in them, a comfortable sound, the sound of furniture that has been sat in so many times that the joints have loosened just enough to speak.

"How's the shop?" Frances said. She always asked this. She had not entered the shop since Alistair's death, had not crossed the threshold, had not passed through the door on Main Street or looked at the pegboard or sat in the chair by the window, and Henry did not know why and had not asked because asking would require a conversation about Alistair and about the shop and about the six years when Henry had been Alistair's hands and Frances had been — what? The wife who watched? The wife who waited? The wife who brought a clock from her own mantel and left it with her husband as if he were any clockmaker and she were any customer?

"The shop is fine," Henry said. "I'm working through the repairs."

"The old ones?"

"Yes."

"How many have you done?"

"Three."

"That's good."

She put the carrots in the pot. She put the pot in the oven. She wiped her hands on her apron and sat down across from Henry and looked at him and he looked at her and they were in the kitchen and the pot roast was in the oven and the house was quiet in the way that a house is quiet when one of the people who used to fill it is no longer there, the way a clock is quiet when the pendulum has stopped, the way a sentence is quiet when the verb has been removed.

"I found your clock," Henry said. He had not planned to say this. It came out the way a suspension spring snaps — not from a single impulse but from the accumulated pressure of all the Sundays when he had not said it.

Frances looked at him. Her face did not change. Her hands, resting on the table, did not move. She was still in the way that Marion had described D.K. — not sad but past sad, the place past sad where you are very still.

"On the shelf," Henry said. "With the others. Dad wrote a ticket."

"I know he wrote a ticket."

"Why did you bring it to the shop? You could have just asked him to fix it."

"I did ask him. I asked him at home. I said the clock isn't keeping time and he said bring it to the shop."

"So you brought it to the shop."

"Yes."

"And he wrote a ticket."

"Yes."

"And you never asked about it again?"

Frances looked at the table. She traced a line in the grain of the wood with her fingertip, the way you trace a line on a map, following a road to see where it goes.

"He needed the tickets," she said. "He needed them. The writing. The system. It was how he — it was how he managed. After the stroke. Everything had to go through the system. If it wasn't on a ticket, it wasn't real. If it was on a ticket, he could handle it. He could look at it and think about it and plan the repair even if he couldn't do the repair, and that was — that was how he stayed. That was how he stayed himself."

Henry understood this. He had seen it. The tickets were Alistair's way of maintaining order, of imposing structure on a situation that was fundamentally disordered — a clockmaker who could not use his hands, a craftsman who could not practice his craft, a man whose identity was built on precision and control watching that precision and control dissolve in the tremor of his fingers — and the tickets were the last thing he could do precisely, the last thing he could control, the small yellow rectangles on which he could still write clearly, still describe the problem, still promise the repair, even if the promise was a lie, even if the repair was impossible, even if the tickets accumulated on the shelf like unpaid debts.

"I'll fix it," Henry said.

"I know you will."

"Do you want it back? When it's fixed?"

Frances looked at the space on the mantel where the clock had been. The space was still there, still visible, a rectangle of slightly lighter paint where the Ansonia had sat for forty-five years, blocking the sun, preventing the paint from fading, and the rectangle was the shape of the clock the way a shadow is the shape of the thing that casts it, a negative image, an absence with dimensions.

"Yes," she said. "When it's fixed."

They ate dinner. Pot roast, mashed potatoes, green beans. Frances had made gravy from the drippings, the way she always made gravy, the way Alistair liked it, thick and dark, and Henry poured it over everything and ate and the food was good and it tasted like Sunday, which is to say it tasted like the past, like the kitchen, like the house on Elm Street, like childhood, like the time before Henry left and before Alistair's hands shook and before everything became a repair ticket waiting to be resolved.

After dinner they sat in the living room. Frances in her chair, Henry on the sofa. The television was off. The mantel was empty — not just of the clock but of most of the things that had been there when Henry was a child: the candlesticks, the photograph of Alistair and Frances on their wedding day, the small wooden box where Alistair kept his cufflinks. Frances had cleared it all away after the funeral, had put everything in boxes, had stored the boxes in the attic, and the mantel was bare, white, the rectangle of lighter paint the only mark.

"Mom."

"Yes."

"Why haven't you come to the shop?"

Frances picked up her knitting. She was making a scarf, blue wool, and her needles clicked and the yarn moved through her fingers and she did not look up.

"Because he's still there," she said.

Henry waited.

"The oil," she said. "The smell. The bench. The stool. The lamp. The way the light comes through the window in the morning. The bell. The tickets. He's still there, Henry. In everything. In the wood and the brass and the oil and the light. And I can't — I can't go in and have him be there and not be there at the same time. I can't do that."

Henry nodded. He understood. The shop was Alistair in the way that the house was Frances, in the way that a place can absorb a person so completely that the place becomes the person, that to enter the place is to be in the person's presence, and for Frances this was too much, was more than she could bear, was the one proximity she could not manage, and so she stayed away, and the clock stayed on the shelf, and the lighter rectangle stayed on the mantel, and the absence had dimensions, had weight, had the particular gravity of a thing that is there by not being there.

"I'll bring the clock when it's ready," Henry said.

"Thank you."

He drove home. Elm Street to Main Street, a five-minute drive, the town dark, the streetlights on, the capitol dome glowing, and he parked behind the shop and went in through the back door and stood in the dark and smelled the oil and the brass and the Darjeeling and the wood and his mother was right, Alistair was here, was in the smell and the surfaces and the silence, was in the stool and the lamp and the loupe, was in the fourteen tickets and the ten unfinished clocks and the three finished clocks ticking on the shelf and the wall, and Henry stood in the dark and breathed and the shop breathed with him, in and out, and the clocks ticked, and the night passed.

---

On Monday morning Henry started the cuckoo clock.

He did not want to start the cuckoo clock. Cuckoo clocks are the clocks that clockmakers like least, because they are fussy and theatrical and their mechanisms are more whimsical than precise, more entertainment than timekeeping, the clock equivalent of a vaudeville act — the little door opens, the bird pops out, the bellows wheeze, the bird says cuckoo and retreats, the door closes, and none of this has anything to do with telling time, all of it is spectacle, is performance, is a clock pretending to be an animal pretending to be a clock — and Henry had never liked them and Alistair had never liked them and they had bonded over this dislike the way fathers and sons bond over shared dislikes, which is easier than bonding over shared loves because shared dislikes require only agreement while shared loves require vulnerability.

But the cuckoo clock was fifth on the list and the list was chronological and Henry was proceeding chronologically because the order mattered, because the order was the system, because the system was the discipline, because the discipline was the thing that kept him at the bench, that kept him working, that kept the days structured and the hours accounted for, and without the order he would — what? Drift? Stop? Unwind?

He did not want to find out.

Agnes Firth. November 30, 2010. Bellows collapsed. Bird does not emerge.

The cuckoo clock was from the Black Forest, which is where cuckoo clocks come from, which is the one thing everyone knows about the Black Forest, a region of Germany defined in the popular imagination not by its trees or its rivers or its people but by its clocks, the way Switzerland is defined by its watches, the way Montpelier is defined by — what? The capitol? The smallest state capital? The town where there is a clock shop on Main Street that may or may not be open?

Henry opened the case. The cuckoo clock's mechanism was simpler than the other clocks he had worked on — a basic thirty-hour movement, chain-driven, with a count wheel for the striking and a separate mechanism for the cuckoo, the bellows and the pipes and the linkages that opened the little door and pushed the bird forward and pulled it back — and the problem was obvious: the bellows, two small leather-covered wooden frames, had collapsed. The leather had dried and cracked and come unglued from the frames, and the bellows could not pump air and the pipes could not sound and the bird could not cuckoo.

He would need new bellows. He could make them — the frames were simple, the leather could be sourced from a craft store — but the making would take time, and Henry decided to order them instead, from Kuckucksuhrenshop in Germany, a supplier that Alistair had used, a company whose name Henry could not pronounce but whose parts were correct and whose shipping was reliable, and he placed the order online — he did this online, unlike the phone book, because even Henry recognized that ordering cuckoo clock bellows from Germany was a task better suited to the internet than to the postal service.

While he waited for the bellows, he cleaned the movement. He oiled the chain. He checked the pipes — the two small wooden pipes that produced the cuckoo's two-note call, one higher, one lower, the interval of a minor third, which is the interval of the cuckoo's call in nature, which means that the cuckoo clock is not an imitation of a bird but a translation of a bird, the bird's call rendered in wood and air the way a poem translates an experience into words, not the same thing but the same shape, the same emotional content, the same two notes descending.

He checked the bird. It was carved from linden wood, painted, its beak open, its wings folded, its eyes two small black dots that stared at nothing, and it sat on its perch inside the door, waiting, patient, ready to emerge when the bellows pumped and the linkage pushed and the door opened and the hour came, and Henry looked at the bird and thought about Agnes Firth, who was dead, and about Agnes Firth's son Leonard in Portland and daughter Mary in Charlotte, and about the bird that had not emerged for sixteen years, that had sat in its dark box behind the closed door waiting for a cuckoo that never came, and he thought that there was something unbearable about this, about the patience of a mechanical bird, about the readiness of a thing that does not know it has been forgotten.

He set the cuckoo clock aside and turned to the next one on the bench.

Martin Leveque. February 14, 2012. Desk clock, Swiss. Gains four minutes a day.

A clock that gains four minutes a day is a clock that is running fast, which means the balance wheel is oscillating too quickly, which means the hairspring is either too short or too stiff or the regulator has been misadjusted, and four minutes a day is a lot — it is not a subtle error, not a clock that drifts slowly, but a clock that runs away, that outraces time, that arrives at three o'clock while the rest of the world is still at two fifty-six, and Henry thought about the metaphor and then stopped thinking about it because he had decided, at some point during the grandmother clock, that he would not use the clocks as metaphors, that he would repair them as clocks, that the repair was the thing and not the meaning, that meaning was what happened when you were not looking, the way a clock gains time when you are not checking it, gradually, steadily, without your knowledge or consent.

But four minutes a day. Someone was in a hurry.

He opened the desk clock. It was a small Swiss movement, jeweled, well-made, and the hairspring was fine — no distortion, no kink, no magnetism — but the regulator was set all the way to the fast end, pushed as far as it would go toward the F, and Henry moved it to center and timed the clock and it was accurate, dead accurate, not gaining, not losing, keeping time the way time wants to be kept, which is steadily, faithfully, without drama.

Someone had adjusted the regulator to fast. Not the maker, not the factory, but someone, perhaps the owner, perhaps a previous repairer, someone who had pushed the little lever all the way to F and left it there, and the clock had obediently run fast because that is what clocks do — they do what their mechanism tells them to do, they do not argue, they do not resist, they do not say this is too fast, this is not correct, I know what time it is and this is not it — they simply run at the rate their regulator determines, and if the regulator says fast, they are fast, and if the regulator says slow, they are slow, and they have no opinion about it.

Henry wrote on the ticket: Repaired 10/18. Regulator adjusted to center. Timekeeping accurate. No mechanical fault — regulator was set to fast. Full clean and oil.

The fix had taken twenty minutes. He felt cheated, the way you feel cheated when a problem that has been worrying you turns out to have a simple solution, when the answer was not deep but shallow, not hidden but obvious, not a mystery but a mistake, and he set the desk clock on the shelf — four clocks now, four ticking, the grandmother and the carriage clock and the desk clock on the shelf, the schoolhouse regulator on the wall — and the shop was filling with sound, with ticking, with the overlapping rhythms of four clocks keeping time at four different rates, none of them synchronized, all of them correct, a small chorus of mechanisms doing what they were built to do.

He sat at the bench. It was two-thirty. In thirty minutes Marion would come through the door. In thirty minutes he would have tea. In thirty minutes the day would pivot around the three o'clock ritual the way a clock pivots around its escapement, the energy flowing through the mechanism until it reaches the point of regulation, the point where the pallet fork catches the escape wheel and says not yet, not yet, now — tick — not yet, not yet, now — tick — and the day advanced and the tea came and the cup sat on Alistair's bench and the afternoon continued and the clocks ticked and the bellows were on their way from Germany and the bird waited in its box and Henry waited at the bench and outside the window Montpelier went about its business, indifferent to the clocks and the tickets and the man who was finishing what his father had started, or what his father had failed to finish, or what his father had left for him to finish, which were three different things or possibly the same thing, depending on how you looked at it, depending on which direction you were facing, depending on whether you were the clock or the clockmaker or the time.