Tourist Trap

By Paul Gray

LADY by THOMAS TRYON 341 pages. Knopf. $7.95.

Welcome to Pequot Landing, folks.

Another genuine New England town put up by that ex-movie-actor fella, Mr.

Tryon. We local extras like to think our little community is a far sight nicer place to live than those boom villages Mr. Try-on built for The Other and Harvest Home. No weird twins up to supernatural devilment here, nosir, and no mythical human sacrifices either. Oh, we've had our odd sexual fandangos, if you get my drift, but if that's all you're after, you'll want to head on over to Peyton Place. Lots more action there.

Not that we're completely dull, mind you. See that brick house yonder off the village green? That belonged to Mrs.

Adelaide Harleigh. She and Mr. Tryon demanded that all of us call her "Lady."

Her husband died not too long after being gassed in World War I, and Lady spent the rest of her days being a rich, eccentric widow. Late in her life she won the New England regional "forlorn cry" award, popular-novel division: "Oh, I am a vain and foolish woman. Yes, foolish. I have wanted the esteem of the world, and why? Tell me, for what?"

Little Nipper. We wouldn't have known much about Lady if it hadn't been for that little nipper "Woody" Woodhouse who lived across the green from Lady. Woody was eight when he first took a shine to her. But he was the one Mr. Tryon chose to tell Lady's secret story, and as time went by he sure was a burden on her and the rest of us. Always digging into her closets and chifforobes, eavesdropping and peeking into folks' windows. More than a few of us wanted to dump him in our picturesque river, but he had Mr. Tryon's license to snoop so we couldn't lay a hand on him.

Some of the townspeople think that Lady's secret cost more to get out than it's worth. It was, after all, only a case of the butler's doing it. Over the years, whenever Lady felt bad or Woody was hot on a new clue, you could count on the rest of us catching grief. To dramatize such things, Mr. Tryon scheduled a hurricane, a flood and the Dutch elm disease. Not to mention yearly blizzards of cliches. But the wisdom that Lady revealed to Woody strikes some people as priceless. "Man is made to suffer, they say," she once opined. On another of many "memorable" occasions, she tossed off one of her best remarks: "People are people wherever you go." No, they don't make 'em like Lady any more.

Haven't for a long time, in fact, and thanks for dropping by.

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