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the residents of the once lucky, now tragically unlucky, community of
Bath sat back and waited for their luck to change again. It did not.
By 1900 Schuyler Springs had swept the field of its competitors. The
Sans Souci fire of 1903 was the symbolic finish, but of course the
battle had long been lost, and most everyone agreed that you couldn't
really count the Sans Souci fire as bad luck, since the blaze had
almost certainly been started by the hotel's owner in order to collect
the insurance. The man had died in the blaze, apparently trying to get
it started again after it became dear that the wind had shifted and
that only the -old original wooden structure, not the newer, grander
addition, was going to burn unless he did something creative. There is
always the problem of defining luck as it applies to humans and human
endeavors. The wind changing when you don't want it to could be
construed as bad luck, but what of a man frantically rolling a drum of
fuel too close to the flames he himself has set? Is he unlucky when a
spark sends him to eternity?
In any case, the town of North Bath, now, in the late autumn of 1984,
was still waiting for its luck to change. There were encouraging
signs. A restored Sans Souci, what was left of it, was scheduled to
reopen in the summer, and a new spring had been successfully drilled on
the hotel'sextensive grounds. And luck, so the conventional wisdom
went, ran in cycles. The morning of the day before Thanksgiving, five
winters after that first elm turned on the residents of Upper Main,
cleaving old Mrs. Mcrriweather's roof and reducing Mrs. Gruber's
birdbath to nibble. Miss Beryl, always an early riser, awoke even
earlier than usual, with a vague sense of unease. As she sat at the
edge other bed trying to trace its source, she had a nosebleed, a real
gusher. It came upon her quickly and was just as quickly finished.
She caught most of the blood with a swatch of tissue from the box she
kept on her bed stand, and as soon as her nose stopped bleeding she
flushed the tissue emphatically down the toilet. Was it the quick
disappearance of the evidence or the nosebleed itself that left her
feeling refreshed? She wasn't sure, but she felt even better after
she'd bathed and dressed, and when she went into her front room to
drink her tea, she was surprised and delighted to discover that it had
snowed during the night. Nobody had predicted snow, but there it was
anyway, the kind of heavy wet snow that sits up tall on railings and
tree branches, the whole street white. In the gray predawn, everything
outside looked otherworldly, and she watched the dark street and sipped
her tea until a car slalomed silently by, leaving its track in the
fresh snow, and the vague sense of unease she'd felt upon waking
file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruisw...enten/spaar/Richard%20Russo%20-%20Nobodys%20Fool.TXT (9 of 792)23-2-2006 22:46:02