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doing it day or night). And yet I considered this to be a bedrock, first-rate neighborhood and these souls its just and sovereign protectors.
    On my fourth trip around the block, naturally no one waved at me (two people in fact came to the top of their porch steps and frowned, and the boys with the basketballs glowered with their hands on their hips). However, I had seen two identical next-door houses—single-storey, American-vernacular frame structures in slightly run-down condition, with keyboard awnings, brick-veneer half-fronts, raised, roofed porches and a fenced alley in between, both with a Trenton realty company’s FOR SALE sign out front. I discreetly jotted down the phone number, then went straight to the office and put in a call to investigate price and the possibility of buying both places. I hadn’t been in the realty business long and was happy to think about diversifying my assets and stashing money away where it’d be hard to get at. And I thought that if I could buy both houses at a bargain, I could then rent them to whoever wanted to live there—black retirees on fixed incomes, or not-entirely-healthy elderlies still able to look after their affairs and not be a burden on their kids, or young-marrieds in need of a sensibly priced but sturdy leg up in life—people I could assure a comfortable existence in the face of housing costs going sky-high and until such time as they could move into a perpetual-care facility or buy a starter home of their own. All of which would bestow on me the satisfaction of reinvesting in my community, providing affordable housing options, maintaining a neighborhood integrity I admired, while covering my financial backside and establishing a greater sense of connectedness, something I’d lacked since before Ann moved to Deep River two years before.
    I would, I felt, be the perfect modern landlord: a man of superior sympathies and sound investments, with something to donate from years of accumulated life led thoughtfully if not always at complete peace. Everybody on the street would be happy to see my car come cruising by, because they’d know I was probably stopping in to install a new faucet kit in the kitchen, or to service the washer-dryer, or was just paying a visit to see if everybody was feeling good about things, which they always, I felt sure, would be. (Most people with an urge to diversify, I knew, would’ve checked with their accountant, bought beachfront condos on Marco Island, limited their loss exposure, set aside one unit for themselves, one for their grandchildren, put the others with a management company, then cleared the whole business out of their mind April to April.)
    What I thought I had to offer was a deep appreciation for the sense of belonging and permanence the citizens of these streets might totally lack in Haddam (through no fault of their own), yet might long for the way the rest of us long for paradise. When Ann and I—expecting the arrival of our son, Ralph—first came to Haddam from New York and moved into our Tudor-style house on Hoving Road, we landed with the uneasy immigrant sense that everybody but the two of us had been here since before Columbus and they all damn well wanted us to feel that way; that there was some secret insider knowledge we didn’t have simply because we’d shown up when we did—too late—yet unfortunately it was knowledge we could also never acquire, for more or less the same reasons. (This is total baloney, of course. Most people are late arrivals wherever they live, as selling real estate makes clear in fifteen minutes, though for Ann and me the uneasy feeling lasted a decade.)
    But the residents of Haddam’s black neighborhood, I concluded, had possibly never felt at home where they were either, even though they and their relatives might’ve been here a hundred years and had never done anything but make us white late-arrivers feel welcome at their own expense. And so what I thought I could do was at least