Norwich Connecticut - A Series of Obituaries
Douglas J Walters
What happened here?” I asked the bartender, assuming she would know.
I didn’t need to tell her of the city’s boarded-up windows, its garbaged alleys, the beautifuled and muraled exteriors on walls of nothing-inside buildings. But I thought she would at least appreciate the fact that I had walked around, looked and questioned and curioused, unable to keep from noticing FOR SALEd storefronts, lights no longer lighting behind windows where people once lived and homed, of liminal streets lined with empty-shell homes, their exhausted and doorless doorways stuck in mid-yawn. My city had become a to-do list with nothing to do.
I was in an Irish pub called Harp & Dragon, never quite full yet Harping and Dragoning since 2006. The trickster walls deceived me with the crack-and-crumble of its brick; old, yes, but the businesses inside such places rarely match the antiquity of the stone around them. The bartender, with long brown hair and a this question again? look on her taut face, told me about the old Norwich Insane Asylum (a term now unfavored), the monstrous, graffitied, and long-unpeopled skeleton of which lay crumbling in the woods just a few miles away. “When that place closed, they just let all the crazies out and then closed the doors. Kinda scared everyone in town off,” she said. Bullshit, I thought. That can’t be right. And I that-can’t-be-righted some more, yet I thought how this would explain the appearance and how-they-act of certain residents, homelessed and addicted, and whose presence would further explain the why-so-many of soup kitchens and mental health facilities in the wider area. Souped and mental healthed to a temporary sobriety until the this’ll-do-for-now treatments wore off, were the “crazies” really just let out to unsupervise for themselves?
Norwich State Hospital for the Insane—so it was originally monikered—opened in 1904, was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1988, before crumbling into retirement in 1996. A horror film, or so I’ve read, of mistreatment and neglect of patients. Understaffed, overcrowded with those geriatricked away into the forgotten and secluded realm of the too-sick-to-visit, sardine-canned with chemical dependents whose chemical dependence rendered them mad and useless. Now it’s falling apart, and its halls echo with illegal wanderers wandering where once wandered madness. The connecting tunnels beneath having long since given way to cave-ins or having been caved in by construction crews, the buildings are now condemned, the property future-riverwalked. So say the sunlight-faded signs with crumbling letters on them.
“What happened here?” I asked the server at La Stella Pizzeria. I took a bite of pizza on my severalth lunch break at the small, badly ventilated Italian eatery, relishing the oregano as the kitchen ventilated its way into my clothes. Short and stocky, with brown hair ponytailed into a hurried mess, she told me about a circus, and a famous ice cream stand. “It burned down, so people just stopped coming here. When it died, the city died.” Unlikely, I thought, as what I’d read about the city never mentioned the wellbeing and livelihood of the population depending on a circus, or for that matter, an ice cream stand. I didn’t want to contradict a woman whose restaurant had pizzeriad and quickly-filled-wine-glassed its way into my heart. Did Norwich, so uncircused, so unshackled from trapeze artists and ad hoc tents and ice cream stands, really die so swiftly?
I later prostrated before the almighty Google, entered my search query like an occasion-specific prayer. First picture—elephants marching down a path toward a non-erect tent, soon to be viagrad into the sky. Next picture—large big-tops poled above the trees, with crowds of people umbrellad in the shade beneath. Third picture—the nearby river, the Thames (pronounced like it looks), once full of steamships that loaded-with-freight their way down the river. They would stop at Chelsea Harbor, unloading goods, passengers, and, several years before that, enslaved Africans from the West Indies. The circus arrived starting in the 1930s, and its annual setup was announced by a parade brass-banding its way through the streets of downtown. Having circused and gooded and passengered itself as a tourist hotspot, it’s no wonder Norwich became known as “The Rose of New England”.
Mapped northwest is Hartford, once home to the famous Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. On July 6 1944, nearly 7,000 people had ticketed and crowded their way inside, bleachered away from the heat. Then one spark was all it took. It graduated into a flame, mastered into a blaze of fabric and wood and flesh, and several dozen people were killed in the how’d-it-happen inferno. “It was years before the circus ever came to Connecticut again,” explained one article I found, “and then it was not under the big top, but in the Connecticut State Armory [also in Hartford].” So, the server at La Stella, having well-meaned her historicals and musings was, to an ex-tent, correct. I walked to Chelsea Harbor, with its cordoned off walkways and DO NOT ENTER signs do-not-entering near the always-there construction equipment. Hard to imagine this place, duck-shitted and syringed, tenanted by the halfway-housed and methadoned, as a once-upon-a-time of pilgrimage for families and businesses, as well as residence to a circus. And yet, it once-upon-a-timed just that.
No word on the ice cream stand.
“What happened here?” I asked a bartender at Epicure Brewery. Barstooled and beered, I hoped for another chapter in the apparently well-thumbed history of the city. “Have you been to the casinos?” She answered with an unpracticed this-again tone; as if, like the bartender at Harp & Dragon, she had become this-agained to such interrogations. Foxwoods Resort Casino, not-so-quainting away on an unassuming bit of not-exactly-ours land, is not only the biggest casino in Connecticut, but one of the biggest in the world. Behemothed not far is its little sister, Mohegan Sun, which everyone-is-a-winners in over $1 billion annually, and was the setting for the 2019 Adam Sandler movie Uncut Gems. Movie-starring the skyline beneath a spotlight moon, they not only italicize against the liminal in-betweenness that somewhat defines Norwich, but ironically loudmouth the serious cash flow by which we are all but surrounded. In the mid-1800s, Norwich boasted of more millionaires than any other city in the country. My usual jogging back-and-forth takes me past several immense houses, dating from the room-to-stretch past. Now the present had been autopsied into apartments, compartmentalized into livestocked enclosures for the many and the go-forth-and-multiply of us.
“Only to shop. I’m not a gambler or anything, but the need for new pants or something might take me that way.” I sipped, nodding in approval of my beer’s bitterness. “Bitter, just like me.” She paused, said nothing, Ted Danson’d a hand towel over a shoulder. My autobiographical joke receiving neither acknowledgement nor stimulus, I added, “Hell, I don’t know how to play any card games or anything anyway.” She removed a tray of freshly washed glasses from the dishwasher, her own glasses clouding from the jailbreaking steam. She took them off, began wiping them clear, and storied me with a couple of real estate developers who had, if she remembered correctly, “won it big at the casinos. They then bought up several of the buildings around town with plans to develop and renovate them.” Makes sense, I thought. “Then, they basically disappeared. So the buildings, a lot of them, are owned, but empty. Sad, really. They bought them and never did anything with them. And then Covid came and killed the rest.”
I had empty-glassed. She noticed and refilled before tragicking the narrative. A local man, a sort of wunderkind business developer and consultant, had helped to breathe some much needed back-to-work into Norwich’s infrastructure. Then in December of 2020, he committed suicide. He left no note, so his death remains question-marked.
What a strange trinity of truth I had been bequeathed. Filtered through grounds of untruth, most likely. And each to do with death, I couldn’t help but notice. First a dying hospital, next a dying circus, and finally a dying man. All three had next-of-kinned Norwich into a sort of afterlife. I felt I had plunged the depths of the city, RIPing along with the deceased in nearby Oak Street Cemetery, my final stop.
There was no one here to ask. Well, there were, but they’d been tombstoned and top-soiled for years. Some, nearly centuries. Was Norwich really so past-tense? Ironic, how this silent latitude of the late, with its headstones Manhattan-skylining the hill above the city, was both the most crowded and the most silent of places I’d visited today. It was the years carved on their granite faces—anywhere from the late 1700s to the early 1900s—that told me these enviable dead wouldn’t know anything anyway. How nice, I thought, to have nothing expected of you; to have the excuse of death to remain silent. To simply lie there, and sleep.
Some had been broken. Kicked over, I assumed, as the breaks were too clean to have been the result of nature and time wear-and-tearing the stone down to a fall-over brittleness. There were three of them in a row, execution-styled into the unkempt grass. Others had been similarly damaged, discarded like defeated dominoes. But the six-feet-undered never noticed, thankfully, and they in-a-better-placed soundly as I trod upon them, down the inevitable lanes.
Cities, like the living, are but a menu, and time had nearly consumed the worn-pencil-stubbed headstones. On some you could still make out angels with silent trumpets, wings frozen in stone, little shawl-wrapped cherub shoulders. A group of trees, leafless and dead, triumvirated in mourning around one particular stone that offered eternal never-forgets to the passed-aways of the Armed Forces. Gone, but not forgotten….In our hearts forever. The usual platitudes that live on if only for won’t-let-us-move-on stones such as this one. Others sat faceless, voiceless, unvisited. Lonely, I thought. Then again, how do you pay respects and offer your in-memoriams to an illegible piece of stone? What if you had the wrong one, placed wreathes and flowers at the worm-eatens of a stranger?
Congregationed around me, the eternally-at-rest had been muffled, blank-faced by rain and maybe the pencil rubbings of family, history students, or perhaps amateur artists. I sat, feeling unprepared-speaker, having no more to say than they did. That made us equals, an odd climate of a posthumous-except-for-me democracy, for they were as much my audience as I was theatergoer to the sun. Yet I felt lost in a tangle of indecipherable narrative, outflanked by a population of preludes longing to awaken and engage in a bit of what’s-new. Sitting up, looking around at what they once knew, they would fix their what-used-to-be selves on me. What happened here, they would ask. I had become their bartender, their server.
I stood there, between the sun and the dead, with a poverty of words. These suburbs for the succumbed can fill one with a concentrated introspection, a sharpened focus on one’s own impending In-Loving-Memory-Of.
How do we communicate,
we disparate three,
I to the sunlight,
and the dead to me?
Well, we don’t;
instead we revelry—
though silently inquisitive—
in each other’s company.
In common with the no-longers, I had nothing to say. I gave up, next-timed them, and promised to return maybe-someday-I-don’t-know with a bit more to declare. Downhilling from the cemetery, lefting and righting my way home, I felt tired, mentally spent, like after a deep talk, an exhumation of surrounding. I had back-and-forthed with the bartenders and servers of the city, yet it was only among those who had given in to that most silent of silences that I felt as if I’d been heard.
The sun departed, and the city bruised into darkness. The wind blew against me, at times forcefully, holding me back to remind me there’s no rush…your home hasn’t gone anywhere. So I acquiesced, casually onwarded, hopscotching the stars in the previous day’s rain puddles.
Douglas J Walters
Douglas Walters lives in Norwich, Connecticut and teaches English. He has been published in The Auburn Circle, The Filibuster, Daedalus, Connecticut Bards Poetry Review, Manic World Magazine, Neon Origami, and the Write Launch. He is currently exploring New England with his wife Megan and his dogs Atlas and Eros.