Quabbin - 2. Chapter 2

Who was Drew Kohler? Andrew John Kohler, 6’-4”, 190, brown eyes, black hair, 42, bright, good looking, and athletic in ways that made other guys wanna belt him. He saw what he wanted and got it. He knew what he had and used it. While I was growing up, he was the tallest man I knew.

He gave us things. Not just Carrie and me and the kids on our block. He donated stuff to our schools. There were never little plaques, shouting his name. But we all knew those things were from the Kohlers.

His wife was something, too. I must’ve been nine years old when something about Eileen Kohler made me want to learn something about sex. She would have been around thirty then, but was like no other woman we knew. There was simply a grace.

Carrie has some of it, but it’s almost like she got all the ordinary genes. She’s not stupid, or ugly -- even weak Kohler genes are better than most people’s good ones. But she doesn’t come together like her mom.

Her brother Bob’s OK. Two years younger than Carrie, he’s almost as tall as his dad, nearly as good looking and bright. We used to take it out on him for that. In high school, everyone used to hang around the Kohlers’ pool, summers. It was hot. Their parents were busy at work. Bob was always having his shorts yanked off and being tossed in the pool.

Kohler had grown up rich, but only by Waldron’s standards. Now, mill towns are suburbs, and old factory spaces rent as overpriced lofts. But for a long time, they were just empty. Kohler could’ve left the business. His brother and sister did -- took their money and scrambled to Boston and New York. Kohler’s dad had inherited the factory, which Kohler’s great-granddad -- the Founder -- had built. But it looked like this generation would lose it. Then, even before he was out of college, Kohler started playing with the place. Seeing what he could do.

He tossed out everything but the name and the buildings and started creating jobs. Not thousands of ‘em, triple shift, like the old days. But hundreds. They still weren’t jobs I’d want to have, doing the same thing day after day. Maybe three people in the Mill actually thought for themselves, but one of them was Kohler. And he was having a great old time.

Of course, you can’t hire good people to do dumb work, especially at the wrong end of the state. City folks like western Mass. for weekends or the summer. Some academics think they’ve found heaven. But the rest of us have hit its walls too many times to wanna stay. And while you can sometimes get better people than brainless jobs deserve -- because they really like an area -- you can’t depend on that. Bill Grenon was a dumb one, but the other VP, Denny Parnell, was an old friend of Kohler’s. In high school, Denny was the sidekick: Shorter. Cute, rather than sexy. He got around, but mainly in Kohler’s wake.

Still, Denny married the prettiest girl in Waldron -- then got divorced. Couldn’t keep it in his pants, Cameron said, or to himself. Kohler married the prettiest girl at Smith -- not just Smith, but Amherst, Holyoke, Hampshire, and UMass. Kohler went to Amherst, and his son Bob followed. Eileen went to Smith, where’s Carrie’s going now. Dane went to UMass, where he met the slumlord, who, at that point, was an adjunct on the faculty. The business school wanted him full-time, but couldn’t keep him ‘cause he was grossing too much outside. We all know where I would’ve gone to college, but that’s a story for late at night, facing down drunks in mirrors.

No one expected Kohler to come back to Waldron. He did it as a challenge, then stayed. He had other offers. A half-dozen corporations. But he wasn’t interested. He did take the Mill public, which paid off his brother and sister, and permanently moved his parents into a condo on a Myrtle Beach golf course. But Kohler didn’t like the Founder’s House, either. It was cold and dark. He and Eileen built a new home in Amherst.

You can’t underestimate Eileen. She grew up on Long Island, but wasn’t exactly middle class. Still, the kids of a radiologist and an art teacher have no status, just a little extra cash. Eileen went to Smith ‘cause it was the best she could do, though her folks earned too much to get her scholarships. She hung out at UMass ‘cause that’s where all the interesting guys were.

Kohler hung out at UMass, too, with Denny and his old high school pals. He met Eileen there, passing. They cracked up when they both discovered where they really went to school and pretty soon knew that they wanted to be together. In early pictures, there’s a way that Kohler looks just like Eileen. Dark. Tall. Athletic. Maybe it was wishing on stars.

They got married junior year, against everyone’s screaming, both families, all the time. And they stayed together, lived together, worked together -- Eileen was president of the Mill, supervising all its designs. They built a family, and a community, and soon no one could imagine them apart.

But what if Eileen had said, “No,” that first night in an Amherst bar? What if there’d been no two dozen years? No family. No love. That was Dane and me.

I could picture our lives together. We weren’t going to be like our parents, not have my slightly disconnected family or his unambitious one. I didn’t need some cracked fairy tale to tell me that. All my life, I’d lived down the block from the Kohlers.

At least, Drew Kohler died after I came back -- “came home” my father put it, though I didn’t feel challenged to stay the way Kohler had. My great-grandparents came from Poland to Springfield. My grandparents moved to nearby Chicopee, my parents to Amherst. Working class to middle class to something not really above that, then sticking. Always predictable -- well, maybe not my mom. She had a bit more… what? Imagination? And maybe she died for it. Way too young, like Kohler.

“Son of a bitch slipped in the tub.” Word flew around the Mill even before Mary Foti got back to her desk. The police cars, ambulance, fire engines -- you’d think the Founder’s House was on fire. All there to see a dead man. Tall dead man. Real dead man. Real dead.