Famous Builder

In a deep socket of an empty acre lot in South Jersey, a wiry boy with dark eyebrows, burnished blond hair, and thick lenses in his glasses is clearing pathways through the milkweeds, trying to preserve as many of the leafy, muscular stalks as he can. He's working harder than he's worked in weeks, so hard that he doesn't even hear his father's car engine in the distance, or his mother ringing the cowbell for him to come inside for dinner. This is Telegraph Hill. This is the first community he's built that he's genuinely proud of, from the curving of the cul-de-sacs as they wind through the woods, to the discrete street names he's penned in meticulous, Early American script on scraps of faux-antique wood he's pilfered from his father's workshop: Saybrook Road, Weston Drive, Lavenham Court, Henfield Road. No wonder his fingers are cracked and cut, his toes sore from using the front end of his sneaker as a tool.

The wind rustles the weeds. He's about to back up the slope, to look out over his first fully-wooded community, his belief so deep that he can practically see the lanterns trembling on, the hushed couples stepping up the sidewalks toward The Northfield, the most recent two-story model (vertical rough-hewn siding, copper-hooded bay window). Then Tommy Lennox, his neighbor, is walking toward him with a football tucked beneath his arm, the faintest suggestion of a smirk around the corners of his lips. "What's that?" Tommy says.

A ripple, a blush to his skin. The boy's pleasure's been so private, so intimate, that he might as well have been making love to the land. He can't even raise his eyes. "A development," he says finally.

He's heating up inside his shirt. The boy imagines Tommy stepping through the community casually, knocking street signs aside, crushing the tall can that stands for the silo at the entrance. Sweat runs cold across his back. But when the boy finally lifts his head, he's surprised to see the animation in Tommy's face, the quizzical expression that suggests he's waiting to be shown around.

In no time at all, Tommy's building his own development, Willow Wood, in the open land beside the single pine along the back of the lot. He's out there every day, just as the boy is, digging with his mother's garden shovel, replanting tablets of moss until the knees of his pants are soaked through. But why doesn't this feel right? The boy doesn't have the heart to tell Tommy that he simply doesn't have the gift for this, that straight streets intersecting at right angles went out with 1949. And what to make of the names Tommy's assigned to them: Motapiss Road, Vergent Court. They practically carry an aroma, suggesting all sorts of things no one likes to talk about: flesh, death, the mysteries of the body. At least Tommy's sister has the good sense to know that she should pay attention to what's attractive. Though Cathy Lennox's Green Baye is entirely misnamed (what bay? what water?), the boy cannot help but be impressed with the added e, and with the skillful way her streets meander down the slope.

Still, neither of their projects can stand beside the elegance and understated good taste of Telegraph Hill.

Today all the neighborhood children are roaming the field, some down on their knees, others carving out streets, all squinting, foreheads tightened in concentration.

The boy looks up at the houses across Circle Lane where he and his friends spend their time when they're not in school or out here. Of course it would be their misfortune not to live in a real development, but in a neighborhood in which all the houses are decidedly unlike each another, with no consistent theme: Dutch Colonial, French Provincial, California Contemporary. Though his mother tries to invoke the word "custom" as often as she can, he's not having it. Most of his fifth-grade classmates live in the newest developments, places where the wood-plank siding's coordinated with the trim (sage-green with aqua, barn-red with butter), always that pleasing sense of order and rhythm. How he frets about living in a place with no name. Oh, to say "Timberwyck" or "Fox Hollow East" or "Wexford Leas" and be entirely understood. His dilemma even seems to bewilder that substitute teacher with the kind face and the gray, washed-out hair in whom he confides one day.

"You don't live in a development?" she says. "How could you not live in a development?"

Flushed, he turns away.

"Have you talked to your parents?"

He shakes his head. He steps back from himself, watching: Silent boy, ghost, so weightless and emptied he barely has a body.

What would she say to the story The Philadelphia Bulletin's just written on him: Boy, 12, Longs to Be Famous Builder? He imagines her unfolding the newspaper at her kitchen table, spreading orange marmalade on a burnt piece of English muffin as her teakettle whistles on the stove. Would he be real to her now? Though it tells of the six hundred brochures he's collected from developments all over the country, and of the fan letters he's written to Bob Scarborough, whom he wants to work for someday, it frustrates him, if only because it's written in that cheerful, yet patronizing tone that suggests his work is mere play, that he'll come to his senses in a few years. Hard not to wince when he sees it tacked to his principal's green bulletin board. How he hates being on display like that, lying on his stomach in the photograph, marveling at that brochure in his hands (is it Charter Oak?) as if he'd never seen one before. He'd like to tell the substitute it's an ineptly written piece, a foolish piece, but he's as guilty of the lies as anyone. Why did he simplify himself when he talked to that reporter, why did he allow her to think there was something less than profound about the binders of street names he'd collected? Here he was, hiding the ferocious depths of his passion inside something harmless and benign, when all he really wanted was to move her, to show her he was in love.

When he looks up from his reverie, both Tommy and Cathy and all the others are wandering back toward their houses, the sky charcoal above the rooftops, the trees.

He gets down on his knees. He shivers inside his jacket, which he zips, chucking the skin of his throat, but he'll work long after the streetlamps have blinked on, defying his mother's cowbell, ignoring his long-division assignment, the piano scales-all those dull, grinding duties that suggest his life has nothing to do with pleasure, the warmth of this soil in his hands.