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By Root 981 0

I had seen this minor league hockey game and taken Anne Marie and the kids to see that Greatest Show on Earth ― was closed for renovation, ringed by a ten-foot-high plywood fence, on which signs begged you to EXCUSE OUR MESS!! The grand old buildings lining Court Square ― the courthouse, Symphony Hall, the Unitarian church ― were still grand and illuminated by blindingly powerful spotlights, maybe to discourage looters. The barbershop next to the courthouse had clearly been closed for some time ― its pole was stock still, its reds and blues faded ― even though there was a sign in its window insisting it had been open since 1892. Kitty-corner to the barbershop, on the east side of Court Square, was an old storefront filled with dozens of discarded radiators, arranged in neat rows as though on display, as though to teach passersby something about the limitations of steam heat. I've never seen such a desolate place; there hadn't even been any snow to help cover it up. Clearly, even the snow had decided the place was beyond help.

The entrance to the Student Prince was in an alley, just off Court Square. The door was solid wood, so you couldn't see if there was light or darkness on the other side of it. There was no noise coming from inside, no music or human voices or clanging of dishes and glasses. I looked up, and there was Anne Marie's and my old apartment, where we'd rearranged our furniture and bred our children. The windows were dark, as were the windows in every other apartment in the building. The wind was up, and so cold, but it, too, was completely and eerily quiet, as though Springfield didn't deserve the wind's whoosh and roar. It was one of those moments when the whole world felt empty, as if you were the only one in it and you wished you weren't, wished you were in whatever world or antiworld all the people had fled to. It occurred to me that Anne Marie had lied to me about my mother's working there. Why she would lie to me about that, I had no idea, except that maybe I would open the door and see the Student Prince was empty, and that would be a metaphor for the rest of my life.

But the Student Prince wasn't empty. It was fire-code-violation full. Even though the Student Prince had three cavernous rooms with high shelves loaded down with German beer steins and coats of arms and Bavarian gewgaws from days gone by ― even so, the place was full. Every table was taken and there was a line of people waiting to sit at them. It seemed as though every Springfieldian, past and present, was in the place, drinking a dark beer and waiting for their schnitzel. The roar of happy human voices was incredible and sounded like the wind personified, and for the first time, I knew what my mother had meant when she talked about it in the books she'd made me read.

My mother ― I didn't see her at first. I walked through all three rooms: the barroom, to which I'll return in a moment; the largest dining room, filled with large families eating their large meals at large tables; and the newest of the three rooms, lined with mirrors and populated by men pretending to like the cigars they were smoking, and wearing Red Sox hats ― that regional symbol of self-love and self-hate and male-pattern baldness -and talking loudly about how good their business was or was not, and half-watching something reality-based on TV. In each room, there were waitresses, squads of them, dressed in formless, sacklike white dresses. They'd worn these dresses five years earlier, too, and I couldn't tell then and I couldn't tell now whether they were authentic German barmaid gear or a new German immigrant's idea of what Americans might want to think of as authentic German barmaid gear. In any case, they were still wearing the dresses. But my mother wasn't among them, not that I could see, and so I retreated to the barroom, the room to which men looking for a woman always retreat. I found an empty seat at the bar, sat on it, and waited for the bartenders to notice me so I could order a beer, a big one, even though I'd had so many big beers already that day that