HIS WAS THE DAY of the funeral of the Big Tinker.  The morning was gray, as it ought to be for a funeral.  Clouds lay heavy over Babbington across the bay, lowering clouds, the dense livid ones that oppress, that make it seem that the heavens are collapsing on us, slowly, pressing us for an answer.  Everything was still, dead.  Lou and Elaine rode across the bay with us.  Elaine had to catch a train to the city, but Lou had said that he wanted to come to the funeral. The bay was flat, barely rippling.  The one catboat that we still had riding at its mooring was not even rocking, just lying there immobile and upright. 
   At the church, people stood awkwardly outside, in groups, heads down, mumbling.  The leaves were turning.  In the still air, the autumn leaves drooped from the branches, exhausted, but hanging on. 
   There were three great surprises at the funeral. 
   First, there was the Big Tinker’s family.  They were half a dozen large but handsome people—his wife, his brother, two daughters, and a son—sober, but not sad.  When the eldest child, a daughter, gave the eulogy, she smiled throughout it, though she had to keep dabbing at her tears, and she concluded by saying that she spoke for all of them when she said how glad they were that all of us had come, how proud they were that her father had so many friends.  While she spoke, she wore her father’s derby.  The hats had been part of the tinkers’gimmick, a way of putting some ironic distance between themselves and their work, I thought, but in this setting, on this occasion, on the head of his daughter, Big Tink’s derby had been cleansed of all its irony.  She wore it as a keepsake, a genuine token of her affection for her father. 
   Second, there were the Big Tinker’s paintings.  I had had no idea that he painted, and from my conversations with people after the funeral, it seemed that no one outside his family had known it either.  He painted the marshes and islands in the bay, a common enough subject for Sunday painters in the area, but he avoided the obvious choice and didn’t paint them bathed in sunlight, with the sand and grasses glowing, but in the gray, flat light that is more common here, the everyday gray of Bolotomy Bay, and he succeeded, at least to my eye, in revealing the simple, sturdy, modest beauty of the bay and its shores, a beauty that goes almost unnoticed and hardly seems worth saving.  I wished that I could own one of the paintings, but it would have been unseemly to ask if they were for sale, and I couldn’t afford one if they were. 
   Third, the Big Tinker’s ashes fit in an urn the size of a bottle of gin. 

JUST INSIDE THE DOOR of the Babbington Diner there was a stack of giveaway papers and advertising brochures.  We picked up a copy of House and Home, a booklet full of real estate ads.  The hotel was advertised in it.  It would be fair to say that it was featured, since it had been given half a page.  There was a handsome photograph, from the front, that made it look like something worth owning.  The copy began, “Do you have a dream?  Do you dream of running your own luxury hotel?”  Albertine read it aloud and burst out laughing.  “Do you have nightmares?” she asked.  “Do you wake up screaming?  Do you worry about leaking plumbing, exploding boilers, and skyrocketing taxes?”  I laughed with her, and I didn’t ask her what she meant by “skyrocketing taxes.” 

THERE WERE SIX in my audience for the reading of the ninth episode from Dead Air, “The Wall of Happy Diners.”  Elaine had returned, and she had brought with her a gray and cuddly couple, Alice and Clark, longtime friends of Lou’s. 

I WAS READING, already under the quilt, when Albertine came running out of the bathroom naked and shivering, threw herself under the covers and snuggled against me. 
   “The taxes?” I asked. 
   “Skyrocketing,” she said. 
   “How rapid a rise is that, technically speaking?” 
   “Thirty-seven percent.” 
   “Thirty-seven percent?” 
   “Most of it is going into the schools,” she said.  She paused, and then she added, in a version of Baldy’s voice, “It’s an investment in Babbington’s future, right, Bob?” 
   “Yeah,” I said. 

A wonderful matryoshka of a novel, with at least five stories nested one inside the other

Leaving Small’s Hotel is published in paperback by Picador, a division of St. Martin's Press, at $14.00. 

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Leaving Small’s Hotel is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, dialogues, settings, and businesses portrayed in it are products of the author's imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. 

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