The Vanishing Expert Read online

  Although Daniel had passed that lesson on to his son, he learned it from a less likely source, his own father, Earl Langston.

  It was in 1924 when Earl Langston, Peter Langston’s grandfather, sold the family’s dairy farm to a Philadelphia family by the name of Deacon. They referred to themselves, and preferred to be referred to by others, as being ‘of the Philadelphia Deacons,’ as if to suggest that a Deacon from Philadelphia was somehow superior to a Deacon from anywhere else. It seemed important to them, in a way that was foreign to Mainers, that they avoid being confused with any other Deacon who, though they might actually be kin, might not be of their considerable social stature.

  Wealthy aristocrats had been purchasing much of the best farmland on Mount Desert Island since the 1860s, when Bar Harbor began to spring into prominence, making its transition from a working class village of farmers, fishermen and shipbuilders to a summer retreat for the “rusticators”, and later, to a resort for some of the most affluent families in America— the Rockefellers, the Morgans and the Astors among them. It all transpired within a few short decades, and by the time the Philadelphia Deacons arrived— though they couldn’t have known it at the time— Bar Harbor’s “Golden Era” was drawing to a close. In the 1930s, the economy would wreak havoc on the fortunes of the aristocrats who populated the grand manors, which they referred to as 'cottages', but in 1926, that seemed unthinkable.

  As did many of these new landowners, the Philadelphia Deacons purchased the Langston farm for far more than it was worth, certainly far more than Earl Langston would ever have considered asking for it. But the Philadelphia Deacons offered the money, and Earl knew he’d be a fool not to take it. As if to make the deal even more amenable, the Deacons, who planned only to inhabit the cottage during the brief summer months, at the height of the Bar Harbor social season, hired Earl Langston as caretaker for their estate at a wage that allowed him to give up his cows for good and begin a life of relative leisure— relative, that is, in comparison to the years of hard labor that had filled his life up to that time.

  Earl Langston’s sole responsibility became the care of the grand Deacon estate during the long winter months when the Philadelphia Deacons were actually in Philadelphia and their cottage stood vacant and dark on the knoll of a hill where Earl Langston’s barn had once been. Every structure that once stood on that land, anything that even remotely suggested a working class, had been hastily removed. Replacing it was the luxurious Deacon home and the colorful gardens and meandering walkways that leant an aristocratic air to what had been a working dairy farm just a few short years earlier. Far out of view of the main house, the Deacons built a stable near the servants’ quarters. Every structure was built of stone and wood, and each was far prettier than the modest home in which six generations of Langstons had lived. (What has once been the Langston home was razed and replaced with what was now the east garden.)

  Earl, along with his wife, Margaret, and their young son, Daniel, were invited to live in the servants’ quarters, but Earl was a proud man, and he didn’t care for the word: servant. Instead, he referred to himself as an employee of the Deacon family, a difficult enough adjustment after having led the independent life of a dairy farmer for so long. He purchased a modest home two miles away so as to be as detached as possible from the new wealth that was infiltrating Bar Harbor. In the winter months, he trudged through the snow and ice and biting winds, the two miles often seeming to him like twenty, and he attended to his concerns at the Deacon estate.

  During those long winter months, his primary responsibility was to see to it that the furnace was kept lit in order to prevent the pipes from freezing. Each day during the winter, he left his wife in the morning about eight o’clock, which to a dairy farmer seemed like mid-day, and he returned home just as the last dim light of dusk faded away. How he managed to occupy himself in the hours that he was gone was a mystery to everyone. The Deacon cottage was a new structure with all the most modern conveniences of the day. It was designed by renowned architects from New York and constructed by craftsmen from six states. For Earl Langston, there was nothing to repair, nothing to paint or to build. In fact, there was nothing at all for Earl to do other than to see to it that the house was kept warm, which he did.

  He always entered the house through a back entrance— the main entry held far too much pretense for his taste— and he descended a narrow staircase into the basement, where he stoked the coal furnaces and then settled into a nearby chair, waiting for the heat to take hold. Once the fire had sufficiently thawed his frozen fingers and toes, he ascended the stairs and walked from room to room to make certain everything was in order, which it always was.

  He didn’t care much for the superficial prettiness of the Deacons’ lavish home. It stood in contrast with his own life, where everything was of use, and anything that wasn’t was discarded as frivolous and unnecessary. For the Philadelphia Deacons, the frivolous and unnecessary appeared to be absolutely essential to their existence, and for that reason, Earl Langston decided that he had no use for the Philadelphia Deacons, other than as his overly generous benefactors and providers of his current leisurely and blissfully cow-less life.

  He spent most of his days in the basement in the vicinity of the furnace, where he generally ate an early lunch, after which he would produce one of his corncob pipes from his coat pocket and puff on it until he began to grow drowsy. And then he would fill the remainder of his day as he did every day since he first began tending to the Philadelphia Deacons’ estate; he slept.

  What ultimately happened to Earl Langston wasn’t entirely his fault. At least, no one who witnessed his fate could honestly admit that they wouldn’t have succumbed to it as well given his circumstances. For Earl, who had once been an industrious farmer, the descent into what was to be a largely idle existence was both tragic and unavoidable.

  “It’s what happens when a tired farmer gets his hands on a chunk of money,” Peter Langston often remarked about his grandfather.

  But the truth was that there was little for Earl to do, and over time he gradually came to terms with the fact that he preferred to do as little as possible. His own home, neither as new nor as modern as the Deacon estate, was badly in need of repairs. His wife, Margaret, was always pointing out something that needed fixing, but Earl preferred the solitude of the Deacon estate, even if he confined himself to the basement, where he smoked and napped the day away, leaving even the simplest repairs at his own home unresolved, if not completely ignored. Worse, it seemed, were the projects he started but somehow never finished. There seemed to be always something in some sort of disrepair in the Langston house, some project Earl had begun with the best of intentions and then left unfinished. He never refused to do the work. There simply always seemed to be something more important at the Deacon cottage that more urgently required his attention.

  Earl’s son, Daniel— Peter’s father— came of age surrounded by creaking steps, sticking doors, leaking roofs and the seemingly endless clutter his father left in his wake. He began by fixing the easy things. He drove nails into the loose steps to silence their moans and complaints. He planed the doors so they would no longer stick. (He’d found the planer in his father’s toolbox, which Earl rarely took with him to the Deacon estate.) He patched and shingled the leaking roof, and he repaired the ceiling, which was stained yellow by the rain. In time, his skills improved, and he began to find himself repairing the things his father couldn’t, or chose not to. He seemed to be forever putting things back together that his father had left in pieces about the house.

  Daniel was already a large man, but he moved his big frame swiftly and smoothly, realizing early on that he needed to be fleet of foot to keep up with his father, who spent much of the time that he was actually at home dismantling things that didn't work well until they didn’t work at all. What energy Earl had left he expended on the two-mile hike to the Deacons’ estate where he could escape his messy, cluttered existence for a few ho
urs in the peaceful surroundings it offered him.

  By 1941, Earl Langston had become what he once would have observed as the worst of all things— a putterer, leaving nothing as complete or as functional as he found it. Yet it was Earl who, by leading such an idle and messy life, had instilled in Daniel a work ethic that was more common to Maine. Along with being a skilled craftsman, Daniel was diligent and dependable, and at age twenty-one, he was already in great demand throughout the community. Even the Deacons, whose glorious estate was finally beginning to require repairs, called on Daniel Langston when his father allowed them to go untended. To his credit, Daniel had the good sense to involve his father in the work.

  “Come on, Dad,” Daniel would say to his father. “Mr. Deacon wants us to take a look at the leak under the kitchen sink.”

  “I was just gonna do that,” Earl would always remark to his son. “Why don’t you give me a hand.”

  Daniel would just smile and allow his father to take charge, knowing the chore would have been ignored for weeks had he not pressed his father into action.

  During the war, while Daniel was serving in the infantry in Europe, he worried about his father and the chores that were piling up, the little tasks, both at home and at the Deacon estate, which would become big problems if they were ignored. Daniel had much more pressing issues in Europe, but in his letters home, he often took the time to add a reminder for his father to look into this or that for the Deacons. Even as he wrote those lines from halfway around the world he imagined his father’s typical response— 'I was just gonna do that'— and he would smile as he sealed the envelope.

  The fire that tore through Bar Harbor in October of 1947 had little regard for wealth and stature; it was unconcerned with such distinctions. It began in Hulls Cove and, carried by gale-force northwest winds, it swept toward Bar Harbor, consuming nearly everything in its path along the way. Many of the residents were evacuated. Those who didn’t make it off the island by car before the bridge was closed were taken to the pier, where they were ferried to the mainland by military ships. In the end more than two hundred houses and summer cottages were burned along with several of the large hotels. To Daniel, and to others who had seen action in Europe, it was reminiscent of some of the burned out villages they’d seen in France, Belgium and Italy. Entire streets were left in ashes, unrecognizable to those who had made their lives there.

  When it was over, it was obvious that this fire wasn’t influenced by the fact that the Deacons were ‘of the Philadelphia Deacons.’ Their grand estate lay in ruin, reduced to little more than a pair of brick chimneys rising out of a heap of smoldering rubble. The trees that lined the long gravel driveway were charred skeletons, and the lush gardens were nothing but dirt and ash.

  For the Philadelphia Deacons, everything was destroyed— everything, that is, except for the stable, which miraculously suffered only minor damage, and the servants’ quarters, which suffered none. In the end, the Deacons, who had made such a concerted effort to erase all evidence of the working class structures from their property two decades earlier, were left only with the two buildings that so clearly represented the class from which they hoped to distinguish themselves.

  The Deacons decided not to rebuild. Eventually they sold a portion of their property to another wealthy Philadelphian who built a hotel upon it. They donated the remainder of the land, which had once been pasture for Earl Langston’s cows, to Acadia National Park, where the building that had once been the servants’ quarters remains to this day.

  With the departure of the Philadelphia Deacons and the dispersal of their land went Earl Langston’s benefactor. Earl, at the age of sixty-one was suddenly without any means of supporting himself and his wife. What they were left with was a modest home in need of repair and a lifetime of accumulated belongings that were worth very little to anyone other than Earl and Margaret Langston; worth even less when considered that many of their remaining belongings were in some state of disrepair, if not entirely in pieces, scattered about the Langston home.

  In 1948, Earl sold the second, and last, home he would ever own, and he and Margaret moved in with his son Daniel, where he spent the remainder of his days sitting by the fire with his corncob pipe, when he wasn’t sleeping.

  Outside of an uncanny resemblance to the man, Daniel had little in common with his father. He’d only known his father as the idle man he’d become, and not the industrious dairy farmer he’d once been. His father had spent very little time with him while he was growing up. In fact, the only connection that Daniel could think of, other than the fact that they shared the same blood, was that he’d spent much of his youth cleaning up his father’s many messes.

  Daniel decided that he would simply not allow the same fate to befall him. He wanted to be a good father to his own son, Peter. But having no example to follow, he knew very little about developing a close bond with his boy. When he tried to draw upon his own childhood, to offer his son what he himself had so wanted from his own father, he came away frustrated. His most vivid childhood memory was of work, of the unending list of tasks that his father had neglected, leaving them for Daniel to complete. Despite all of Daniel’s efforts, he still managed to find only a strained relationship with his son.

  What Daniel did make an earnest effort to do was to instill in Peter a healthy Maine work ethic, and he warned his son endlessly of the dangers of laziness, often pointing to his own father— sometimes figuratively, often literally— to illustrate and punctuate his message. Young Peter Langston was raised with the often-repeated warning that an idle life was an insignificant one, and that sloth would only bring on the same fate suffered by his grandfather, Earl Langston, whose own laziness had left him destitute.

  The only connection that Daniel was able to find with Peter was through his work. Once Peter was of age, he often accompanied his father to his job sites when he wasn’t in school, and Daniel soon found that the boy seemed to enjoy working with his hands. It may have been the deeply instilled fear of winding up like his grandfather that drove him. More than likely it was something simpler; that when he worked at his father’s side, Peter found a bond with him that he found nowhere else. In searching for love, young Peter Langston found work instead. Ironically, they seemed to be the same thing to his father— love and work— and if that was the only thing he could teach his son, it was, he felt, a good lesson.

  The summer people in 1990 were a different breed from those of Earl Langston’s day. Many were doctors and lawyers and corporate executives with enough money to own a summer home in a place like Bar Harbor, but without the haughty superiority of the Philadelphia Deacons or any of the other aristocrats who dominated the island from the 1860s until the fire in 1947.

  Bar Harbor changed after the fire. Many of the wealthy summer people who lost their homes, including the Philadelphia Deacons, chose not to rebuild. Some built hotels instead. Some sold their property to others, who built businesses upon them to appeal to the new summer people. They built hotels and inns and shops and restaurants, all designed to cater to the summer tourists who traveled to Mount Desert Island for its beautiful rolling landscapes and vistas. What they inevitably found, tucked in among the hills and nestled on the edge of the sea, were busy New England villages whose rows of varied shops line narrow streets leading down to the water. In every town, the hustle of activity was accompanied by the sounds of working harbors, the whistling and blaring and clanging of boats of all sizes and the wailing of seagulls circling over the day’s catch.

  By 1990, many of Bar Harbor’s clapboard buildings that survived the big fire, and many others that were built in the boom that followed, were in need of repair. Their owners vied for Peter Langston’s time, not only for his skilled hands, but also for his honesty and his good old-fashioned work ethic.

  In September of that year, a few weeks after Mitch Blanchette had left him to return to college, Peter Langston hired James Perkins, a construction worker from Waterville. James had res
ponded to an ad that Peter Langston ran in the Bangor Daily News, having exhausted— literally— the pool of available and able-bodied young men on Mount Desert Island. In addition to his age— he was thirty-five, not likely to be returning to college any time soon— and his experience in construction, limited as it was, James Perkins said two things that led Peter to his decision to hire the man without ever having met him.

  “I’ve always loved Bar Harbor,” James Perkins told Peter over the phone. Peter detected a hint of an accent that wasn’t that of a native Mainer. “I’d really love to work there.”

  Love and work, Peter thought, reminded of his father. He was curious if James Perkins had a grandfather like Earl Langston. He wondered what else he and this stranger had in common.

  Faced with a list of projects that he couldn’t possibly complete on his own, and the ever-approaching chill of autumn, Peter trusted his instincts. He hired James Perkins over the phone.

  At the end of September, James Perkins packed up what few belongings he had and moved to Southwest Harbor, a quiet, unassuming little town on the western lobe of Mount Desert Island. The harbor itself is a working harbor, smaller than Bar Harbor, but in the good weather, it’s dotted with both the local fishing boats and the pleasure boats— mostly sailboats— moored there by the summer people. It’s a community that accommodates both well, and unlike Bar Harbor, which long ago gave way largely to catering to summer tourists, Southwest Harbor remains a natural commingling of the two cultures— working class and summer visitors.

  While Southwest Harbor may be overshadowed by the activity and the prestige of Bar Harbor, those who live and work there seem not to mind. It remains a working community by tradition and by nature, and long after the summer tourists have come and gone, it’s fishing and boat building that sustains many of its people. It’s a peaceful community whose pace is ultimately set by something as natural as the changing of the seasons, and as basic as the turning of the tides. That, more than anything, was what drew James Perkins to Southwest Harbor.