AFTER THE VINEYARD, Barbara and I could feel the pendulum begin to swing, tragedy waning and comedy, at least in the Shakespearean sense, waxing. Kate and Tom had gotten married in London back in November, and we were now again in the nuptial mode, preparing for Emily"s in September. Caught up in the spirit of these proceedings, I started work on a wedding story. At least I thought it was a story. It turned out to be a novel, though, one that was cleaved right down the center, a wedding anchoring each half. Compared with the book that preceded it-my darkest, written and revised during my mother"s long, final descent-this new novel was a breezy tale that seemed to suggest I was finding my way back to the cautious, hard-won optimism that characterizes my fiction. Back on the Vineyard I"d feared that my nightmare-about carrying my mother through unfamiliar streets toward an unknown destination-might be a recurring one, but I hadn"t had it since, and I took this to mean that my mother was finally at rest, or perhaps that I was. It seems strange to admit it now, but just being alive was at some level surprising. In contrast to the remarkable longevity of the women on my mother"s side of the family, Russo males had a p.i.s.s-poor track record, and somewhere in the back of my mind I must"ve linked my mother"s chronological destiny with my own. Yet here I was, not only alive but, according to my doctor, in excellent health.
So Barbara and I started making plans. After all, our circ.u.mstances had changed dramatically. Suddenly we had neither ailing parents nor heart-stopping medical bills. Our daughters" educations were paid for. By autumn both girls would be married to the kind of young men we"d hardly dared to hope for, and all four young people were embarking on careers they were pa.s.sionate about. Which begged an obvious question: what in the world were Barbara and I going to do with ourselves? At long last we"d been left to our own devices, only to discover we couldn"t recollect precisely what those devices were. Perhaps we"d need all new ones.
One of the things we"d been unable to do while my mother was alive was to travel, at least not together. I could go off on a book tour, or to L.A. or New York for a script meeting, as long as Barbara remained behind to hold down the fort, and of course she could visit her family in Arizona if I stayed put. Now we could actually go places together. For years we"d longed for an apartment in Boston so we wouldn"t have to fly out of Portland, Maine, the preferred airport of hijackers and no one else. A place in the city would also give us somewhere to spend the darkest months of Maine"s interminable winters. All this was down the road, though. Meanwhile, the theme would be weddings, fictional and real. That felt both right and appropriate. Weddings are all about our hopes for and faith in the future, right? Right.
Except not entirely. As I knew all too well from recent experience, and was learning more about with every new page of my novel-in-progress, weddings are also about the past.
KATE"S WEDDING HAD BEEN HELD at the Royal Society for the Arts, a series of underground vaults, formerly wine cellars, just off the Strand. She and Tom, who"s English, would be living in London, so there"d been no question of having the ceremony in the States. The wedding was relatively small: Tom"s family; some friends from the Slade Art School, where they"d met; a few of Kate"s college friends. Understandably, given the distance and expense, not many family members from our side of the Atlantic made the trip. The exception was my cousin Greg and his wife, Carole, both of whom have always lived in Gloversville. "Quite a ways from Helwig Street," Greg said, taking in the venue. It wasn"t as grand as "Royal Society" might suggest, but the arching brick vaults, candlelit for the occasion, were impressive. There"s nothing remotely like it in an upstate mill town. The person who would"ve appreciated it the most, of course, was my mother.
While we waited for the bride and groom to finish having their photos taken, the how-far-we"d-all-come theme occupied the American contingent. Nat Sobel, my friend and literary agent, immediately took to my cousin, telling Greg that as a boy he, too, lived near a tannery that released its toxins into the local stream, the water running a different color each day depending on the dye batch. And so, flutes of Prosecco in hand, we began swapping stories about the worst jobs we"d ever had.
I recalled my brief nonunion construction job in Johnstown. Other summers I"d been able to get union work at an hourly rate nearly twice what men were making at the skin mills. That year, though, jobs were scarce, and I hadn"t gotten one. Nonunion construction was a different world. The first week we had to drill holes in a concrete abutment, not a difficult task if you have a drill. We didn"t. What we did have was a jackhammer and a foreman who was unconstrained by conventional thinking. The jackhammer guy and I formed a team that afternoon. Balancing his weapon on my shoulder, I held on for dear life as we jacked horizontally into the wall, sharp shards of concrete blasting back into our faces. Another thing we didn"t have was a spare set of goggles.
This story will win a lot of bad-job contests unless your compet.i.tor has worked in the beam house of a skin mill doing the wettest, foulest, lowest-paid, and most dangerous work in the whole tannery. Greg had worked in one for a couple months one summer, and his younger brother, Jim, for much longer. The first and probably nastiest job in the beaming operation was unloading the skins, which arrived at the loading dock on railroad cars, still reeking of the slaughterhouse. The word skin probably gives the wrong impression. Most people have never seen a hide-sheep, pig, calf, cow-unattached from its living owner. Stretched out flat it"s big and, especially with cows, surprisingly heavy. (Our grandfather gave himself a hernia tugging hides from one position to another over his cutting table.) When the skin arrived in the beam house, the top side was still covered with coa.r.s.e hair, the underside with patches of maggot-infested flesh and gristle. The stench? You don"t want to know, but imagine-if you can-what it must be like to spend an eight-hour shift unloading a railcar full of them in extreme temperatures.
Later, inside the beam house, Greg a.s.sured us, things got even worse. Here the skins were submerged in huge vats and soaked for days in a chemical bath that stripped off most of the hair and the last of the clinging flesh. Naturally, these chemicals could easily do the same to hair on the hands and forearms of men who hoisted the soaked skins out of the vats, so long rubber gloves were issued. You"d think the skins would be lighter minus the hair and flesh, but you"d be wrong, because untanned skins reabsorb the moisture lost during transport and this cleansing. The soaking also turns the heavy skins slippery. The rubber gloves make the slick skins harder to grab hold of, as does the fact that you"re bent over the vat and standing on a wet concrete floor.
At some point, like the men farther down the line who prod the tanned skins into staking machines and roller presses, you"ll do what you know you shouldn"t: you will take off the rubber gloves, because that immediately makes the job easier. At the end of your shift you"ll wash your hands and arms vigorously with the coa.r.s.est soap you can find, and when you get home you"ll do it again. You"ll gradually lose the hair on your hands and forearms, but otherwise, for a while, everything seems fine. Okay, sometimes your fingers itch. A little at first, then a lot. Your skin begins to feel odd, almost loose, as if moisture has somehow gotten beneath it and what you"re trying to scratch isn"t on the surface. Finally it itches so bad you can"t stand it anymore, and you grab your thumb or forefinger and give the skin a twist, then a pull. The skin, several layers of it, comes away in one piece, like the finger of a latex glove. (On the other side of the Atlantic, at the Royal Society for the Arts, my cousin demonstrated with his thumb, everybody wincing as he pulled off the imaginary prophylactic of skin.) Instantly, the itching becomes stinging pain as the air impinges on your raw flesh. Later, someone comes around with a jar of black goop and you plunge your raw thumb into it, the coolness offering at least some relief, and for a while you go back to wearing the rubber gloves.
This is only the beginning, though, just the beam house"s way of saying h.e.l.lo when all you want to say is good-bye-to the skins, the foul chemical air, even your coworkers, because let"s face it, the ones who"ve been at it for a while, many of them with fifth-grade educations, aren"t quite right. You all make the same s.h.i.tty pay, but at the end of the summer you get to go back to college, and for that the others hate you. Meanwhile, you can"t imagine getting used to work like this, or that the day will ever come when the lunch whistle sounds and instead of going outside into the fresh air you"ll decide it"s easier to just stay where you are, take a seat on a pallet of decomposing hides, wipe your hands on your pants, and eat your sandwich right there-because what the h.e.l.l, it"s been forever since you could really smell or taste anything anyway. Plus, in the beam house there"s entertainment. You can watch the rats chase the terrified cats that have been introduced to hunt them.
As my cousin related this story, which I was hearing for the first time, I became conscious of being in two places at once. I had one dry, wing-tipped foot in the candlelit world of a fancy arts society in London in 2007; the other work-booted foot was sloshing through the wet, slippery beam-house floor in Gloversville, New York, circa 1970. That younger me wasn"t a novelist, or even a husband or a father. He was just a twenty-year-old whose future could be stolen from him, who might indeed be complicit in the theft, because I remembered vividly how sometimes, late in August, working road construction with my father, my body lean and hard from the summer"s labor, I"d think about not going back to school. I could live with my grandparents on Helwig Street and do that hard, honest work my father and his friends did all year-round. The wing-tipped me, now holding an empty champagne flute, felt a sudden crushing guilt, as if to be where I was I must"ve cheated destiny or, worse, swapped destinies with some other poor sod. I felt my throat constrict dangerously, though I couldn"t tell if that was due to my cousin"s story or because the wedding party-with Kate absolutely radiant in the first hour of her marriage, and Emily laughing her throaty laugh and looping her arm through her fiance"s-had at this moment returned. Two smart, confident, beautiful young women, their feet planted squarely in the candlelit world before them, on this day-for them, at least-the only one that existed. The time might come when they, too, would feel haunted, guilty about what they"d been spared in life, keenly aware of how things, but for the grace of G.o.d, might have gone otherwise. But that day seemed a long way off.
"More Prosecco?" one of the waiters inquired.
"Yes, please," I told her, holding out my gla.s.s. Gloversville, I reminded myself, was on the other side of the world. "Absolutely. Lay it on me. Right to the brim."
UNTIL WE BEGAN PLANNING Emily"s wedding we didn"t fully comprehend how easily we"d gotten off with Kate"s. We"d feared a London wedding would be a logistical nightmare, but being on the other side of the Atlantic had the unintended consequence of lowering everyone"s expectations, at least of us. n.o.body a.s.sumed we would deal with day-to-day details and crises. Tom"s parents stepped up. Decisions got made without us. We showed up. We wrote the check.
By contrast, Emily"s wedding was larger and would take place in Camden, where a matrimonial cl.u.s.terf.u.c.k like the one I was gleefully imagining in my new novel would long be remembered. With no ocean to protect us, our very different families showed up en ma.s.se. Barbara"s Arizona contingent, none of them seasoned travelers, needed a.s.sistance at every juncture. My own Gloversville squad wasn"t much better, but at least they"d be arriving by car. And of course there was our future son-in-law"s family and friends to consider. Add to all this the normal wedding anxieties about who, for personal reasons, should be kept well clear of whom, and what would happen if the Red Staters were allowed too close proximity to the Blue. When the whole thing threatened to overwhelm us, we reminded ourselves that our tribulations would have been multiplied exponentially if my mother had been alive.
Truth be told, Barbara and Emily handled most of the wedding arrangements while I forged ahead with the book I hoped would pay for them. About this time I had a few odd dreams about my mother in which she telephoned from Europe, wanting to know why I"d abandoned her there and when I was coming to get her. These made me wary, but they were too comic-Europe? my dead mother was calling from Europe?-to be truly unsettling. Otherwise, I thought I was doing pretty well, certainly better than my novel"s protagonist, Jack Griffin. At the book"s outset he"d been heading to the first wedding on Cape Cod with an urn containing his father"s ashes in the right wheel well of his trunk; now, driving to the second wedding, this one in Maine, he"d added his mother"s urn to the left. Poor Jack, I thought. Scattering my own mother"s ashes hadn"t been easy, but my character seemed utterly unequal to this fairly straightforward task. Death had made his mother even more loquacious than she"d been in life, even more determined to insinuate herself into his life and marriage, both of which were coming apart. A terrible sn.o.b of an English professor, she was (to me, if not to him) wonderfully entertaining, in part because she was about as different as anyone could be from my own mother. Nor was Jack, despite superficial similarities of age and profession, all that temperamentally similar to me. And so far as I knew, my own marriage wasn"t failing. All of which allowed me to believe, as a writer must, that I was writing fiction, not thinly veiled autobiography.
IT WAS AROUND this time that a large padded envelope arrived in my mailbox bearing a Gloversville postmark, never a welcome sign. Inside were two books, the first a copy of my novel Bridge of Sighs. The man who sent it in hopes of an autograph was a judge named Vincent DeSantis, who, except for college and law school, had spent his life in Gloversville, and who, as he explained in the accompanying letter, had strongly identified with Lucy Lynch, the book"s protagonist, who"d done the same thing. Clearly he thought he was writing to Lucy"s friend Robert Noonan, an artist who in the novel flees their boyhood town, never to return. I couldn"t really blame him, given how infrequently I go back to Gloversville.
The other book in the padded envelope was Toward Civic Integrity: Re-establishing the Micropolis, written by, well, Vincent DeSantis, and seeing this my heart sank, as it always does when I"m sent books I haven"t asked for with a view toward my endors.e.m.e.nt. But Mr. DeSantis wasn"t looking for a blurb, and his book, despite its rather scholarly t.i.tle, wasn"t an esoteric work of nonfiction. It was about Gloversville, and the question he posed was whether it and similar communities had a future in the global twenty-first century or were in inevitable and irreversible decline. "All is not lost in your hometown," the author a.s.sured me. "A network of dedicated and talented individuals has lately been working to rea.s.semble the pieces of this fractured micropolis." My knee-jerk reaction to this Humpty Dumpty sentiment was Yeah, right. All the king"s horses and all the king"s men ... I tossed the book on a tall stack of volumes whose common denominator was that I was unlikely to read them in this or any other lifetime. Not interested.
Yet that wasn"t quite true. Since Kate"s wedding my cousin"s beam-house stories had been in my thoughts. I was also worried about Greg himself. A few years earlier he"d had open-heart surgery to replace a malfunctioning valve, but he still couldn"t sleep very well lying down and was getting by on a couple hours a night. Though I"d tried to keep in touch, when I inquired about his health he always put me off with his standard line, "Nah, I"m doing great for an old guy." Then we"d talk about what our kids were up to and what movies we"d seen and whether I was working on something new. And eventually the talk would turn to Gloversville: who"d been jailed or diagnosed, who"d gone into a nursing home or died. When I mentioned I couldn"t get his beam-house experiences out of my head, he launched into a litany of Gloversville woe with which I was all too familiar: men mangled by machines or slowly poisoned or killed in accidents. The three guys who worked the spray line in one mill all dying of the same exotic testicular cancer, a case so outrageous it made the New York Times. Then there was the r.e.t.a.r.ded boy hired to clean out the blues room, so named because the chrome used to tan the skins turned them blue. The world of leather is full of sc.r.a.ps-strips of worthless skin and hoof and tail-and every now and then these have to be disposed of and the whole lethal place, including its giant vats, swamped out. One evening, when this kid didn"t come home, his mother called the shop to see if he was still around. No, she was told, everybody from the day shift had left. The following morning her son was found lying on the blues room"s floor, asphyxiated by fumes. Another man, nearing retirement age, was working a press when his partner inadvertently stepped on the pedal that starts the rollers, catching the man"s hand-more like a fin, now-in the mechanism. Yet another day, when it was unseasonably cold on the floor, the foreman sent a man to fire up a boiler that hadn"t been inspected in twenty years, and it promptly blew up, killing him. Stories upon stories, each reminding my cousin of other men who died, their families uncompensated. Some dated back to my grandfather"s days, ones I"d heard so many times I knew them as well as Greg did, but I understood why he needed to repeat them. The guys who lived this life in this world are, like World War II veterans, mostly gone. Somebody should give a s.h.i.t.
But why me? Hanging up after such conversations with my cousin, I"d find I was roiling with rage I wasn"t at all sure I was ent.i.tled to. Obviously, I"d never spent a minute in the beam house. Unlike my cousin Jim, on hot summer days I don"t have to lance with a needle the hard pustules that still form on my hands, thirty years after the fact. What right does one who"d fled at the earliest opportunity have to speak for those who remained behind? If Vincent DeSantis isn"t p.i.s.sed, why should I be?
NOT LONG AFTER Emily was married, I finished my wedding novel, at the last minute pulling poor Jack Griffin back from the drain he"d been circling. His parents" ashes finally scattered, he was able to make a grudging peace with his past and live again in the present. The book came out and sold well enough for Barbara and me to consider getting that apartment in Boston, so when my book tour concluded we started scouting neighborhoods-the North End, which we both loved though it seemed not to offer what we were looking for; the South End, which was wonderful but not well served by the T; the Back Bay, which had little, at least in our view, to recommend it; and a small rectangle of blocks near South Station called the Leather District, which was convenient to both the train station and the Silver Line T that provided a straight shot out to Logan Airport. Emily and Steve were living in Amherst, Kate and Tom in London, and a place in Boston would make visiting both couples easier. Because, alas, we were entering a new world, one where we had to share our newly married daughters. Holidays would now have to be rotated-Christmas at one set of in-laws, Thanksgiving at the other.
That first year Christmas was ours, and we celebrated in Camden. Ten glorious days" worth of long dinners fueled by red wine, followed by card and board games that lasted into the wee hours and made zombies of us the following morning. Such festivities would have been impossible if my mother had been alive, which made for an odd mix of emotions, guilt chief among them. There were times when, to me, at least, she felt oddly present. Why, she seemed to be asking, had we never had such good times when I was alive to enjoy them? Had she ever had any idea that she was the one who"d been putting a damper on things? I doubted it. As a young woman she"d always been the life of the party, and she continued to think of herself in that role, even forty years after she could no longer play it. "Remember what fun we used to have at Christmas back on Helwig Street?" she liked to ask, genuinely bewildered that fun should elude us so completely now.
At the end of the holidays, though, came a surprise. Just before she and Tom were to return to England, Kate, partly at his insistence, confessed that she hadn"t been doing so well in London. When she began to explain what was troubling her, the symptoms she needed to confront, some things came into focus. At times during their visit she"d seemed strangely on edge, borderline manic. We"d noticed that when anyone used the small, communal laptop computer we kept in the kitchen, she"d leave the room and return only when it was unoccupied. Over the last nine months, she told us now, certain sounds-the clacking of a keyboard, for instance-had begun to inspire in her not just annoyance but also genuine terror. Boarding the Tube or a London bus, she had to scan the compartment for laptop users and stay as far away from them as possible. If somebody pulled out a computer after she was settled, she had to move. She"d hoped that being home, away from the cacophony of urban sounds that were driving her nuts, would help, but in Camden the problem actually seemed exacerbated. Having done some online research, she thought she"d identified the problem, and she meant to see somebody as soon as she returned to London. For Barbara and me that wasn"t soon enough, so with her permission we arranged for Kate to see a well-regarded anxiety specialist in Portland, and it took him about twenty minutes to confirm her self-diagnosis. She suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder. With appropriate treatment, she would be fine. Without it, he warned, it would eat her alive.
The next day she and Tom left for London with the names of several good therapists there, and we returned to Camden with a newly purchased book on the subject, which I began to read with foreboding that quickly escalated into full-blown horror and roiling nausea. Because right there in the introduction was the long parade of bizarre behaviors I"d been witnessing in my mother since I was a boy: how she always had to keep her possessions arranged "just so," her love of arbitrary rules for their own sake, her need to "even things up" (the same number of folds to the right and left of the middle on her curtain rods), her constant checking on things she"d already checked in order to "be sure," but then continuing to worry anyway. Worse, all this was here defined as mental illness. That, of course, had been my father"s amateur diagnosis: "You do know your mother"s nuts, right?"
But surely his observation wasn"t intended to be clinical. He"d only meant that for the sake of my own sanity I"d do well to accept that my mother was "batty," half a bubble off of plumb, one card shy of a deck, a few rungs short of a ladder. Supply your own comic metaphor. But the language of this book was neither comic nor euphemistic. Here my mother"s "nerves" were anxieties and panic attacks. Nor were such distinctions merely semantic. Crippling anxieties and incapacitating panics (unlike nerves) were serious conditions that demanded treatment. Mental illness, like physical illness, first required diagnosis, then appropriate therapy. Kate had already gotten the first and was embarking on the second. My mother had received neither, and the result had been precisely what the Portland anxiety specialist predicted. She"d gradually been eaten alive.
It wasn"t a long book, but I found I could read no more than a short chapter at a sitting. Even then I sometimes had to put the book aside for days or weeks before I returned to it. Description after description, case study after case study, and every single one pertinent. How many times, going as far back as Phoenix, had I asked her why she was obsessing over little things when important matters demanded our attention? Obsessing was the word I"d actually used, but I was still astonished to encounter it in a medical book about a condition my mother apparently suffered from. And of course it was beyond demoralizing to see that so many of her "idiosyncrasies" were in fact quite common in the literature of obsession, that they were linked in some fashion to a general, irrational fear of contamination, the same broad anxiety that led so many OCD sufferers to indulge in ritual, repet.i.tive hand washing. When I"d confronted my mother about obsessing over minutiae, I was merely recommending that she act rationally. It never occurred to me that, as this book suggested, she couldn"t, that something was preventing her and actually holding her reason hostage. In those afflicted by OCD, the book explained, the part of the brain responsible for decision making is thought to be impaired, which is why they have trouble with rational sequencing or, as I referred to it earlier, triage-this now, that later.
Also under constant attack is the obsessive"s sense of proportion. All her life my mother had a profound aversion to anything yellow, even to flowers that came in that color. Daffodils in particular provoked in her a visceral disgust. Of course healthy people have favorite and least favorite colors. M&M"S all taste the same, but many people irrationally prefer the red ones. Normal people, however, don"t fear the red ones. They wouldn"t cull the red ones or become ill if forced to eat some. Nor would a healthy person come totally unglued if one day her favorite brand of tissue was available only in yellow, as my mother once had in a supermarket. A normal person wouldn"t stand paralyzed in the middle of the aisle, quivering with rage and frustration. Yellow made my mother sick to her stomach. She knew it shouldn"t and that it didn"t do that to other people. But that"s what yellow did to her, and how do you argue with a sensation?
Indeed, it"s at the level of sensation that an obsessive"s anxieties often rule. From the time she was a girl, my mother claimed, she"d had an extraordinarily acute sense of smell. She regarded this as an a.s.set, like twenty-twenty vision, though its consequences were uniformly unpleasant. She considered olive oil a foul, corrupt substance, and no amount of evidence regarding its health benefits could shake that conviction. Back on Helwig Street, when we sat on the front porch on summer evenings, she"d be driven indoors by "vile" smells that only she could detect emanating from a house across the street, where an Italian American family lived. They cooked in oil, she explained, her face contorting in revulsion, not b.u.t.ter, like we did. Her obsession with food odors intensified after she left Helwig Street and started living in apartments, where her neighbors were closer to hand, their kitchens on the opposite side of a thin wall. "What"s with your mother and all the Air Wicks?" my wife wanted to know the first time we visited her in Phoenix. Even then there"d been air fresheners in every room, two in the bathroom, all opened to the max. Every apartment my mother ever lived in smelled like the inside of a can of Glade.
She was still relatively young when I first began wondering if the smells that tormented her might not have any basis in objective reality. Often the same odor that made her gag seemed to me quite pleasant, if sometimes redolent of spices and herbs she herself never used, such as c.u.min, coriander, tarragon, and cilantro. More tellingly, the offending aromas always emanated from the apartments of people she didn"t like anyway, as was the case with the Helwig Street Italians. In my own house garlic and olive oil came together in the early stages of a great many meals, and for a long time I thought only politeness had prevented my mother from remarking on the same smells there that elsewhere made her ill. Each time she recounted some new tale of oil or garlic wafting across the hall into her apartment, I wondered if this was a hint that I should refrain from using these ingredients whenever she came to dinner. Except in truth it was the exact opposite. Many of her favorite meals, the ones she most often asked for, were heavy with the very ingredients she claimed to loathe.
It also occurred to me that there might be a link between these odor aversions and her lifelong devotion to frozen dinners. Back in Gloversville they"d made sense. At the end of a long workday, why would she want to take the time and trouble to prepare a meal for just herself? Furthermore, as she was always quick to point out, cooking for one was expensive. American food manufacturers packaged their products for families, not single people. But at some point I began to suspect it was really all about the odors, which she maintained were magnified in the small kitchens that were part and parcel of apartment living. Residing as I did in a big house, she gave me to understand (as if I"d never lived in confined quarters), I"d have no way of knowing that. By the time she was middle-aged, though, even her frozen dinners had become problematic, and she often confessed to dreading meals, almost as if the necessity of eating were itself somehow shameful. In her apartment she ate quickly, then immediately rinsed the aluminum container the food came in before crushing it and putting it in the trash. Next she tied off the garbage bag, even if it was only a quarter full, and hurried it out to the Dumpster or the garbage room, because otherwise, she explained, by morning the stench would be unbearable. Where other obsessives feared contaminated fluids or dirt, my mother seemed particularly focused on airborne contagion. She lived in terror of common colds, and when she caught one she always claimed to know exactly who"d given it to her. Invariably, the culprit was someone she didn"t like.
As dispiriting as it was to recognize my mother on virtually every page of the OCD book, it was even more painful to recognize myself as her princ.i.p.al enabler. Because, like alcoholics and other addicts, obsessives can"t do it on their own. As they gradually lose the control they so desperately seek, they have little choice but to ensnare loved ones. My mother had begun that process back in Gloversville, by threatening on one hand that she might suffer a nervous breakdown if I wasn"t a good boy and on the other crediting me with helping to pull her back from the brink each time she melted down. As a kid, though, my enabling duties had been shared with my grandparents, who lived right downstairs, as well as, to a lesser extent, her sister, my aunt Phyllis. Moving to Arizona, of course, got me promoted to Chief Emotional Guardian.
One of the sadder truths of childhood is that children, lacking the necessary experience by which to gauge, are unlikely to know if something is abnormal or unnatural unless an adult tells them. Worse, once anything of the sort has been established as normal, it will likely be perceived as such well into adulthood, and this is particularly true for the only child, who has no one to compare notes with. As a boy-and later a young man-I"d often wished my mother wouldn"t enlist me in her personal, highly private struggles, but I never saw anything really wrong with her doing so. To me, this seemed a natural extension of our old Helwig Street accord, our mutually acknowledged special relationship-that I would always be able to depend on her and she on me. In one respect she and I were fortunate. Compared with others suffering from OCD, she exhibited relatively few time-consuming rituals (like hand washing). What she did require was lots of bolstering ("bucking up," she called it), especially when she suffered an actual or imagined setback. She constantly needed to be a.s.sured that everything was okay, that she was okay or at least would be once this or that obstacle to her emotional equilibrium had been removed. It never occurred to me, even as an adult, that such a.s.surances could be damaging, that in offering them over and over I was making her situation worse, not better. My failure, or so I concluded, was that I didn"t offer even more of them; imagining this lack of generosity, born of exasperation, was my biggest shortcoming.
What I couldn"t see was, however, clear to others. My father-in-law had immediately recognized that something was wrong, which was why he"d warned Barbara not to let my mother move in with us that first time. Over the years, as she wove herself more deeply into the fabric of our married lives, my wife also came to understand that I was aiding and abetting her demons. In fact, she warned me of this repeatedly, for all the good it did her. She and her father came by their wisdom rightly. Barbara"s mother was an alcoholic, and it was her father who, through willful ignorance and disregard of mounting evidence, had enabled her to appear normal to both outsiders and Barbara"s younger siblings. Of course Barbara had no more idea than I did that my mother had OCD. Even now she"s less certain of it than I am. But she"d witnessed firsthand what came of trying to reason with someone whose reason was compromised. And it was clear to her that by covering up for my mother when she came unglued, by giving her to understand that no matter what she said or did I"d never abandon her, by not insisting that she seek help, I was giving her what she wanted but not what she needed. She also understood that if my mother was trapped in repet.i.tive behaviors, so was I. Indeed, I must have reminded her of her father, whose inability to intervene when his wife"s drinking spiraled out of control had been rooted in love, yes, but also in fear, not just that something terrible could happen if he interfered, but that it would be his fault. He wasn"t going to confront his wife because he couldn"t, and I wasn"t going to challenge my mother for the same reason. Which meant that Barbara"s choice was simple and stark and diabolically unfair: she could stay or leave. What she couldn"t do was alter in the slightest our doomed trajectory.
NOT LONG AFTER Kate and Tom returned to London I got a letter from John Freeman, the editor of Granta, asking if I had any interest in writing about Gloversville-the real place, not one of my many fictional avatars. The magazine was planning a special "going home" issue, and a couple days earlier, on the New York State Thruway, he"d pa.s.sed the Gloversville exit and thought of me. If I were to take on the a.s.signment, Freeman reminded me, the article itself would be a kind of homecoming, as Granta had published an excerpt from one of my early novels back in the mid-Eighties. I hadn"t been in the magazine since, so the idea was appealing. I hesitated, though. Would I actually have to go to Gloversville? If so, what would I do there, exactly? Write about how things seemed there now compared with when I was a kid? See if Pedrick"s still existed and who was drinking there these days? Knock on the door at 36 Helwig Street and introduce myself to whoever lived there now? Because I emphatically wanted no part of any of this. For the family memorial service we"d held that summer, Barbara and I had gotten a motel room out on the arterial highway and reserved a private room at an old-line Johnstown inn, a favorite of my mother"s, for the dinner in her honor. I didn"t go into Gloversville at all. Had I read the OCD book at the time, I might have recognized that my sneaking in and out like a burglar fell quite comfortably within the spectrum of unnatural and unhealthy behaviors, but that would come later. The way I saw it then, I was like Bartleby. I could go to Gloversville; I just "preferred not to."
Now, a year later, I was even more adamant, so when I called John I told him that yes, I"d like to write for the special issue, perhaps using some of my cousin"s beam-house stories as a jumping-off point, my only stipulation being that my "going home" was strictly metaphorical. He quickly agreed, since, if I had everything I needed to write the piece, why make the physical journey? Perhaps, sensing just how strong my aversion was, he"d intuited that I had become the literal embodiment of Thomas Wolfe"s famous maxim and that maybe this was where the real story was. With a little luck, my inability to actually go home again might bring to the theme something interesting, off-kilter, and possibly insane.
Not long after our conversation, as I worked at putting some of my cousin"s experiences onto the page, my wandering eye happened to fall on Toward Civic Integrity: Re-establishing the Micropolis, that Gloversville book. It sat right where I"d tossed it so contemptuously months earlier, half buried now by a dozen other unwanted volumes on my personal literary slag heap. Recalling the vague boosterism of the accompanying letter and guessing the book probably had a shaky foundation of sentimentality and unguarded optimism, I doubted yet again whether there could be anything in it for me, though of course that was hardly fair. After all, I hadn"t read a word of it. Was it possible that beneath my mean-spirited, semieducated a.s.sumptions there lurked a revealing prejudice? How good could the book be? had been my unconscious logic. The author"s from Gloversville! And so, in a spirit of grudging fair play, I picked up the book and began to read.
To my surprise I discovered that Vincent DeSantis and I shared quite a few political and cultural convictions. It was clear to both of us, for instance, that the old manufacturing jobs that provided the economic lifeblood of towns like Gloversville were gone for good, no matter how much we might wish otherwise. We also agreed that an America that makes less is less. He was as profoundly interested in the new urban movement as I, and just as convinced that the time has come to start planning communities for people instead of their cars because the days of cheap energy are dwindling down to a precious few. A micropolis, as DeSantis defined it, had, like Gloversville, a population of ten to fifty thousand, and he argued persuasively that such communities might be well positioned to prosper in a less autocentric future. They had the kind of infrastructure-a downtown-that would be essential, a.s.suming it hadn"t been razed back in the Sixties. Ironically, the abandoned mills, rather than being a blight on the landscape, could become part of the solution once they"d been retrofitted to new purposes. What"s more, Mr. DeSantis argued, while their next incarnation was unlikely to have much in common with the original one, that didn"t mean it wouldn"t be just as valid. What he and I saw eye to eye on, strangely enough, was the future, or at least a possible future.
But what a nest of thorns the past can be. "The glove industry sustained Gloversville in fine style," he enthused. "Factories were full of glove cutters and glove makers, and the sound of sewing machines and the smell of finished leather ... were a part of everyday life in Gloversville." I, too, happen to love the smell of finished leather, but I"m able to appreciate it only because I never worked in a beam house (and my guess was that DeSantis hadn"t either). But weren"t there women in his family, as there were in mine, who"d sewn gloves for fifty years and, after they finally retired, earned pensions of less than fifty dollars a month? While his view of the Gloversville of our youth-it turned out he was just a year older than I-wasn"t false, it rested on a foundation of carefully selected facts and memories. For him, the old days when the skin mills were in full swing were good because of the wealth and prosperity they generated. He recalled his aunts and uncles lamenting the loss of jobs overseas, then generously concluded that "in fairness to the glove companies ... failure to take advantage ... of cheap labor would have been tantamount to corporate suicide." Well, okay, but if a dramatic phrase like "corporate suicide" fairly describes the tanneries" untenable options in 1950, by the same token didn"t their disregard for the health and welfare of the workers who created their fortunes qualify as "corporate murder"? Or, coupled with a bottom line mentality that led so many to flee the scene of the crime, "corporate rape"? Chrome tanning had never been anything but lethal, its byproducts including lime, chlorine, formaldehyde, sulfuric acid, chromium (III), glycol ether EB, toluene, xylol, magnesium sulfate, lead, copper, and zinc, to name just a few. Anyone who thinks the tanneries didn"t know they were releasing carcinogens into Gloversville"s air, water, and landfills probably also believes that tobacco companies had no idea their cigarettes might be hazardous to the health of smokers. In addition to chasing cheap labor overseas, the big glove shops had tried to escape-successfully, for the most part-their own day of reckoning. New environmental restrictions imposed by the Department of Labor, and later by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, had made the industry unprofitable, whereas on the other side of the world there were no such restrictions (and wouldn"t be for decades). When it became clear that Fulton County tanneries wouldn"t be allowed to keep dumping into the Cayadutta Creek, they up and left rather than pay the sewer taxes levied to support a new facility specifically designed and built to safely dispose of their waste. Off they blithely went to pollute rivers in India and the Philippines, leaving behind a veritable Love Ca.n.a.l of carcinogens, the cleanup bill to be paid by the poisoned.
Of course in its heyday, as DeSantis rightly pointed out, Gloversville was more than glove shops and tanneries. A community, even one dominated by a single industry that hated and feared compet.i.tion, still needed grocery stores, bakeries, restaurants, insurance agencies, clothing stores, and car dealerships, schools and teachers and libraries and a movie theater, but when that industry vanishes these other enterprises inevitably become endangered. It wasn"t just the mills that were abandoned when the good times-if that"s what they were-stopped rolling. What"s also lost, as he noted, is part of your ident.i.ty, your reason for being, a shared sense of purpose that"s hard to quantify. People who make things are often proud of what they produce, especially if it endures. One summer my father and I worked on exit 23 on the New York State Thruway, and thereafter we were never able to get on that cloverleaf without sharing a knowing look. But sometimes people are so proud of what they make that they willingly overlook its true cost. That Gloversville once had an ident.i.ty based on a common sense of purpose is a potent argument. It"s been used, for instance, to explain the construction of the great cathedrals of Europe, and what were they if not symbols of communal wealth and belief? Given the technology of the day, the Pyramids are even more awe inspiring, at least until one remembers they were built with slave labor. Closer to home, the Confederacy was a case study in shared values and cultural ident.i.ty, whose foundation, of course, was slavery; decades after the war that freed its victims, Margaret Mitch.e.l.l did precisely what Vincent DeSantis was now doing by inviting her readers to lament the pa.s.sing of those halcyon days that in her beloved South were now Gone With the Wind.
My mother"s favorite book.
WORKING ON the Granta piece, I once again began dreaming about her. Not nightmares like before-no more carrying her through Kafkaesque dreamscapes, no more crazy, middle-of-the-night phone calls wanting to know when I was going to come fetch her home from Europe. In this round she and I are back in Gloversville, in my grandfather"s house. I"m not visiting; I live there, and in fact have never lived anywhere except on Helwig Street. I"m a younger man, but not a kid. I"m neither married nor a parent. My life as a teacher and later as a writer never happened.
There"s something oddly sweet and comforting about all this, probably because, except for my grandfather, we"re all together again in a familiar and well-loved place. But it"s unsettling, too, since in these dreams the house is always in terrible decay, something my grandfather would never have allowed to happen. Gaping holes in the roof allow the weather to come in, and the walls have been invaded by rot. The porches slope, and the railings have detached from their posts. Sometimes all this is something we"re aware of, part of the dream"s dramatic structure and plot. More often, though, I alone discover it and then have to conceal this terrible knowledge from my mother and grandmother, because we have no money for repairs. Finally I have no choice but to take my mother up into the attic to show her the holes in the roof, then down into the cellar where a black lake has formed, and she shrieks with horror. She wants to know what we"re going to do. It"s the only home we"ve got.
Though she invariably appears in them and has a dramatic role, I realize these dreams aren"t really about her at all. They"re about Gloversville, about a ruined house that in the slightly out-of-plumb language of dreams stands in for the town Vincent DeSantis believes can be saved and I do not. Their inspiration wasn"t my mother"s illness and death so much as my grandfather"s. The central drama is located in the years immediately after his pa.s.sing, when my mother and my grandmother lived together and didn"t have enough money to keep the house in good repair. Not long afterward, once I"d brought her to southern Illinois to live near us, the house had to be sold. Later, after my grandmother"s death, when I visited my aunt and uncle and cousins, I always drove by 36 Helwig Street and saw all-too-evident signs of neglect-the peeling paint, the unmowed lawn-and felt at once the betrayed and the betrayer. One year the hazardously sloping back porches, up and down, had been amputated, and n.o.body had even bothered to paint over the scars. The back door I was in and out of a hundred times a day as a boy now opened into thin air, a four-foot drop to a rectangle of hard brown earth that the house"s new owner couldn"t be bothered to seed. After that I no longer had the heart, or maybe the stomach, to bear witness, so strong was my sense of personal failure. Now, more than a decade later, I couldn"t bear to return to Gloversville at all.
Maybe these new Helwig Street dreams didn"t originate in my mother"s death, but that didn"t mean her powerfully ambivalent feelings about Fulton County weren"t their ultimate source. From my childhood, her hatred of Gloversville was like the North Star, the one you navigate by, because otherwise you"re lost, completely untethered. That was precisely what happened to her every single time she left. No sooner was she elsewhere-anywhere else-than her loathing morphed seamlessly into loss. Once she was free of it, the house on Helwig Street, the cage she was forever trying to escape, became the central object of her longing. She wasn"t well, of course, but I don"t think paradoxes of this sort are unknown to healthy people, and I don"t blame her for being unable to resolve it. After all, I haven"t been able to either.
Rather than confront my own love-hate relationship with my hometown, I simply created other Gloversvilles in my imagination. Since they don"t exist outside my head, I"m free to love Mohawk and Empire Falls and Thomaston without inviting the sense of betrayal I felt when my mother and I returned from Martha"s Vineyard and I made the mistake of telling her I was glad to be home, an innocent remark that for all I know set in motion our foolhardy journey to Arizona years later, as well as everything else that was to follow. My fictional towns never trailed real-world consequences. Better yet, there"s no question of going back because, like the "me" of the new Helwig Street dreams, I never left. I click the heels of my ruby slippers and there I am with Sully and Miss Beryl and Sam Hall and Mather Grouse. Tessa and Big Lou Lynch are right around the corner, as are Miles Roby and his daughter, Tick. Ikey Lubin"s corner store is nearby, and a few blocks farther along, on lower Main Street, there"s Hattie"s Lunch. They"re not Mayberry, my stand-in Gloversvilles. Bad things happen there. Out behind the old Bijou, Three Mock, a black boy, gets beaten half to death for sitting next to a white girl in the theater; young, horrifically abused John Voss furnishes his wardrobe out of the Dumpster behind the Empire Grill and plots revenge; and on the outskirts of town another unfortunate boy hangs impaled atop a fence, an iron spike protruding from his open mouth like a black tongue. And the toxic stream, running blue one day, red the next, always meanders through town, touching everyone, linking everyone, poisoning everyone.
My fictional hometowns are no better or worse than the real one. They"re just mine, mostly because I"m free to see them with my own eyes, whereas the real Gloversville (as I"m coming to understand, thanks to Vincent DeSantis"s book) I still see with my mother"s. The paralyzing anxiety I feel at the thought of returning home is her legacy. She always maintained that her one claim to fame was getting me out of there, away from the shambling, self-satisfied, uncouth, monumentally stupid people who believed they were lucky to live where they did, lucky to have low-paying jobs in the skin mills that starved them and chopped off their fingers and gave them cancer before moving shop to the Third World. When I listen to my cousin"s stories about men diagnosed and maimed and poisoned and killed, part of what I feel is grim satisfaction that so little has in fact changed since he and I were boys. We share a profound sense of moral outrage that Mr. DeSantis has somehow escaped, but Greg, because he"s not only lived his whole life in the real Gloversville but also raised a fine family there, has resolved the paradox that eluded my mother and still eludes me. Gloversville is his home. It breaks his heart on a daily basis, but that doesn"t change the fact. His father"s buried in the cemetery there, along with both his paternal and maternal grandparents, their lives and deaths tied, directly or indirectly, to the skin mills. If there were a magic wand that could make the place all better, he"d wave it until his arm fell off, and that, I suspect, is the biggest difference between us. The shameful truth is that part of me doesn"t want Humpty Dumpty to be put back together again. I readily admit that"s neither fair nor just. Though I can"t justify doing so, it appears that on this topic I"ve taken my mother"s part. Gloversville got what it deserved. So what if this opinion isn"t really even mine? So what if it"s contradicted by all my novels? It"s still the oldest opinion I know. Surrender that one, and it would be like she was never here.
IT WILL PROBABLY COME as no surprise that the apartment my wife and I eventually settled on in Boston is located in the old Leather District. Just about every building there sports a plaque identifying the business that originally was plied there. We"re on the seventh floor of an eight-story building, high and dry, as the saying goes, which I think would have made my grandfather smile. Leather was always a vertical industry. It went from low and wet in the beam house to high and dry in the sewing and cutting rooms, where the work was slightly better paid and less hazardous. As a small boy I remember standing on the sidewalk below and sighting along my mother"s index finger up to the top floor of the glove shop where my grandfather worked and sensing her pride in him. Perhaps I understood the principle of verticality even then.
Though I"m sure he was grateful not to work in the beam house, I doubt my grandfather really thought of himself as privileged. His pay was never commensurate with his craft. The efficient new machines, together with the relentless drumbeat of piecework and the ever-shorter work season, ensured that he"d die poor. And he surely knew the work, even on the top floors, was far from safe. Sure, the tanned skins were dry by the time they got up there, but they were also full of hide dust that, breathed over a lifetime, could kill you. For years he didn"t worry about his shortness of breath. He"d come home from the Pacific with malaria, and maybe that explained it. But by the time he bought the house on Helwig Street he must"ve known his luck had run out. A decade later, when it was no longer possible to ignore his worsening symptoms, he was finally diagnosed with emphysema by doctors who had little doubt that his occupation was a contributing factor. But he was also an occasional smoker, and he never stopped, not entirely, even when he knew that each new cigarette reduced the time he had left. Even if he thought he could win, I doubt he would"ve sued his employers because, as he would"ve been the first to point out, the glove shops had put bread on his family"s table for all those years, and without them what would he have done? How would he have made a living otherwise? Bitterness and recrimination weren"t worth the little breath he still had. In his way my grandfather was a philosopher, and he would"ve wanted me to be suspicious of any bitterness I harbored on his behalf, just as he would"ve reminded me of the terrible possibility that what nourishes us in this life might be the very thing that steals that life away from us.