Independence Day by Richard Ford

disgruntled Quaker merchants who split off from their more liberal Long Island neighbors, traveled south and set up things the right way, Haddam looks prosperous and confidently single-minded about its civic expectations. The housing stock boasts plenty of big 19th-century Second Empires and bracketed villas (now owned by high-priced lawyers and software CEOs) with cupolas and belvederes and oriels punctuating the basic architectural lingua , which is Greek with Federalist details, and post-Revolutionary stone houses fitted with fanlights, columned entries and Roman-y flutings. These houses were all big-ticket items the day the last door got hung in 1830, and hardly any turn up on the market except in vindictive divorces in which a spouse wants a big FOR SALE sign stuck out front of a former love nest to get the goat of the party of the second part. Even the few “village-in” Georgian row houses have in the last five years become prestige addresses and are all owned by rich widows, privacy-hungry gay husbands and surgeons from Philadelphia who keep them as country places they can hie off to with their nurse-anesthetists during the color season.
    Though looks, of course, can be deceiving and usually are. Asking prices have yet to reflect it, but banks have slowly begun rationing money and coming back to us realtors with “problems” about appraisals. Many sellers who’d nailed down early-retirement plans at Lake of the Ozarks or for a “more intimate” place in Snowmass, now that the kids are finished at UVA, are taking a wait-and-see attitude and deciding Haddam’s a lot better place to live than they’d imagined when they thought their houses were worth a fortune. (I didn’t get into the residential housing business at exactly the optimum moment; in fact, I got in at almost the worst possible moment—a year before the big gut-check of last October.)
    Yet like most people I remain optimistic, and feel the boom paid off no matter what things feel like at the moment. The Village of Haddam was able to annex the Township of Haddam, which deepened our tax base and gave us a chance to lift our building moratorium and reinvest in infrastructure (the excavation in front of my house is a good illustration). And because of the influx of stockbrokers and rich entertainment lawyers early in the decade, several village landmarks were spared, as well as some late-Victorian residences that were falling in because their owners had grown old, moved to Sun City or died. At the same time, in the moderate-to-low range, where I’ve shown house after house to the Markhams, prices have gone on rising slowly, as they have since the beginning of the century; so that most of our median-incomers, including our African Haddamites, can still sell out once they’re ready to quit paying high taxes, take a fistful of dollars along with a sense of accomplishment, and move back to Des Moines or Port-au-Prince, buy a house and live off their savings. Prosperity is not always bad news.
    At the end of King George Road, where sod farms open out wide like a green hayfield in Kansas, I make the turn onto once-countrified Quakertown Road, then a hard left back onto Route 1, then through the jug handle at Grangers Mill Road, which lets me work back to the Sleepy Hollow and avoid a half hour of pre-4th get-away traffic. Off on the right, Quakertown Mall sits desolated on its wide plain of parking lot, now mostly empty, a smattering of cars at either end, where the anchors—a Sears and a Goldbloom’s—are still hanging on, the original developers now doing business out of a federal lockup in Minnesota. Even the Cinema XII on the backside is down to one feature, showing on only two screens. The marquee says: B. Streisand: A Star Is Bored ** Return engagement ** Congradulations Bertie and Stash .
    My clients the Markhams, whom I’m meeting at nine-fifteen, are from tiny Island Pond, Vermont, in the far northeast corner, and their dilemma is now the