The four had come in a big midnight-blue SUV belonging to the Langs. Marjorie"s silver hair flashed in the back seat; Sandra"s tidy profile sank into shadow beside her. Women still rode in the back here. Jeff Lang"s tail-lights led Kern down the long, hushed double row of horse chestnuts, over the mushy litter of fallen pods. At the highway, after a wait for all traffic to clear, the tail-lights turned left, away from the airport, then right at the restaurant in the limestone house. Almost immediately, they were moving down narrow city streets. He had been on the edge of Alton, all along. What was I doing way out at the airport? What was I doing way out at the airport? Kern asked himself. Kern asked himself.
This section of the city was strange to him. Lone pedestrians flitted warily across the rain-stained streets. The glowing windows of Laundromats, delicatessens, and corner taverns slid by like the unexpected illumined spectres and tableaux in the water ride at the Goose Lake Amus.e.m.e.nt Park. Many of the signs were in Spanish. The SUV, seeming almost to brush the parked cars on either side, led him first downhill, and then up. Continuing uphill, the street without transition became a strange bridge, high above the black river. It descended on the other side into blocks where tight-packed semi-detached houses were approached up long flights of concrete steps. The two-car caravan came to a traffic circle near a large parking lot, with a garish state-run liquor store on one side, and Kern at last knew where he was: in West Alton.
He and his mother used to transfer to the West Alton trolley from the stop in front of Blankenbiller"s for his piano lessons with-yes, of course-Miss Schiffner. Thin, wan, wistful Miss Schiffner, perhaps once beautiful in her way, had he been old enough to notice. Concrete steps covered by green outdoor carpeting led up to her front parlor, where the piano, an upright, waited amid doilies and porcelain figurines and dusty plush. Its white and black keys were cold to the touch of his nervous hands. The trolley car at its stop-there had been no traffic circle then-would unfold a step with a harsh clack, and David, leaping down, would jar the sour lump of antic.i.p.ation in his belly, knowing that he had not mastered his lesson. This was before their move to the country, the beginning of his exile. His mother was still a town dweller, still banking on civilization, handing over precious Depression dollars in gullible hopes of lifting her son up from the ruck. It was clear to him and must have been to Miss Schiffner that he was no little Mozart, standing on tiptoe to tap out his first minuet.
Jeff Lang"s smug ruby tail-lights continued halfway around the traffic circle, pa.s.sed the liquor store, and headed up Fourth Street, toward the old textile mills that had been reborn as discount outlets and then had gone empty again; the busloads of Baltimore bargain hunters now went instead to the newer outlets near Morgan"s Forge. It came to Kern that behind him, one block over from Fourth Street, there used to be an all-night diner where he, a teen-ager in no hurry to get back to the farm, would go alone after dropping off his date at her house. After an Olinger High dance, he would go with a gang of others, all the girls wearing strapless taffeta dresses if it had been a prom, their naked shoulders gleaming in the booths. Each booth had its own little jukebox, with "Stardust" and "Begin the Beguine" and Russ Morgan"s "So Tired" among the selections. If Kern went there now, he could get a piece of Dutch apple pie with a scoop of b.u.t.ter-pecan ice cream, to make up for the dessert he had missed.
He wanted to reverse his course, but the Langs" tail-lights inexorably receded, waiting at every intersection for him to catch up. He couldn"t believe it: they were going to lead him like some out-of-town moron right to the parking lot of the Alton Motor Inn. In his head he shouted furiously, I know where I am now! I"m here. I know where I am now! I"m here.
My Father"s Tears
I SAW MY FATHER CRY SAW MY FATHER CRY only once. It was at the Alton train station, back when the trains still ran. I was on my way to Philadelphia-an hour"s ride ending at the 30th Street terminal-to catch, at the Market Street station, the train that would return me to Boston and college. I was eager to go, for already my home and my parents had become somewhat unreal to me, and Harvard, with its courses and the hopes for my future they inspired and the girlfriend I had acquired in my soph.o.m.ore year, had become more real every semester; it shocked me-threw me off track, as it were-to see that my father"s eyes, as he shook my hand good-bye, glittered with tears. only once. It was at the Alton train station, back when the trains still ran. I was on my way to Philadelphia-an hour"s ride ending at the 30th Street terminal-to catch, at the Market Street station, the train that would return me to Boston and college. I was eager to go, for already my home and my parents had become somewhat unreal to me, and Harvard, with its courses and the hopes for my future they inspired and the girlfriend I had acquired in my soph.o.m.ore year, had become more real every semester; it shocked me-threw me off track, as it were-to see that my father"s eyes, as he shook my hand good-bye, glittered with tears.
I blamed it on our handshake: for eighteen years we had never had occasion for this social gesture, this manly contact, and we had groped our way into it only recently. He was taller than I, though I was not short, and I realized, his hand warm in mine while he tried to smile, that he had a different perspective than I. I was going somewhere, and he was seeing me go. I was growing in my own sense of myself, and to him I was getting smaller. He had loved me, it came to me as never before. It was something that had not needed to be said before, and now his tears were saying it. Before, in all the years and small adventures we had shared, there was the sensation, stemming from him, that life was a pickle, and he and I were, for a time, in the pickle together.
The old Alton station was his kind of place, savoring of transit and the furtive small pleasures of city life. I had bought my first pack of cigarettes here, with no protest from the man running the newsstand, though I was a young-looking fifteen. He simply gave me my change and a folder of matches advertising Sunshine Beer, from Alton"s own brewery. Alton was a middle-sized industrial city that had been depressed ever since the textile mills began to slide south. In the meantime, with its orderly street grid and its hearty cuisine, it still supplied its citizens with traditional comforts and an illusion of well-being. I lit up a block from the station, as I remember, and even though I didn"t know how to inhale my nerves took a hit; the sidewalk seemed to lift toward me and the whole world felt lighter. From that day forward I began to catch up, socially, with the more glamorous of my peers, who already smoked.
Even my stay-at-home mother, no traveller but a reader, had a connection to the station: it was the only place in the city where you could buy her favorite magazines, Harper"s Harper"s and and The New Yorker. The New Yorker. Like the stately Carnegie-endowed library two blocks down Franklin Street, it was a place you felt safe inside. Both had been built for eternity, when railroads and books looked to be with us forever. The station was a foursquare granite temple with marble floors, a high ceiling whose gilded coffers glinted through a coating of coal smoke. The tall-backed waiting benches were as dignified as church pews. The radiators clanked and the caramel-colored walls murmured as if giving back some of the human noise they absorbed day and night. The newsstand and coffee shop were usually busy, and the waiting room was always warm, as my father and I had discovered on more than one winter night. We had been commuters to the same high school, he as a teacher and I as student, in second-hand cars that on more than one occasion failed to start, or got stuck in a snowstorm. We would make our way to the one place sure to be open, the railroad station. Like the stately Carnegie-endowed library two blocks down Franklin Street, it was a place you felt safe inside. Both had been built for eternity, when railroads and books looked to be with us forever. The station was a foursquare granite temple with marble floors, a high ceiling whose gilded coffers glinted through a coating of coal smoke. The tall-backed waiting benches were as dignified as church pews. The radiators clanked and the caramel-colored walls murmured as if giving back some of the human noise they absorbed day and night. The newsstand and coffee shop were usually busy, and the waiting room was always warm, as my father and I had discovered on more than one winter night. We had been commuters to the same high school, he as a teacher and I as student, in second-hand cars that on more than one occasion failed to start, or got stuck in a snowstorm. We would make our way to the one place sure to be open, the railroad station.
We did not foresee, that moment on the platform as the signal bells a half-mile down the tracks warned of my train"s approach, that within a decade pa.s.senger service to Philadelphia would stop, and that eventually the station, like railroad stations all across the East, would be padlocked and boarded up. The fine old building stood on its empty acre of asphalt parking s.p.a.ce like an oversized mausoleum. All the life it had once contained was sealed into silence, and for the rest of the century it ignominiously waited, in this city where progress had halted, to be razed.
But my father did foresee, the glitter in his eyes told me, that time consumes us-that the boy I had been was dying if not already dead, and we would have less and less to do with each other. My life had come out of his, and now I was stealing away with it. The train appeared, its engine, with its high steel wheels and long connecting rods and immense cylindrical boiler, out of all proportion to the little soft bodies it dragged along. I boarded it. My parents looked smaller, fore-shortened. We waved sheepishly through the smirched gla.s.s. I opened my book-The Complete Poetical Works of John Milton-before Alton"s gritty outskirts had fallen away.
At the end of that long day of travel, getting off not at Boston"s South Station but at Back Bay, one stop earlier and closer to Cambridge, I was met by my girlfriend. How sw.a.n.ky that felt, to read Milton all day, the relatively colorless and hard-to-memorize pentameters of Paradise Regained, Paradise Regained, and, in sight of the other undergraduates disembarking, to be met and embraced on the platform by a girl-no, a woman-wearing a gray cloth coat, canvas tennis sneakers, and a ponytail. It must have been the spring break, because if Deb was greeting me the vacation had been too short for her to go back and forth to St. Louis, where her home was. Instead, she had been waiting a week for me to return. She tended to underdress in the long New England winter, while I wore the heavy winter coat, with buckled belt and fleecy lining, that my parents had bought me, to my embarra.s.sment, to keep me from catching pneumonia way up in New England. and, in sight of the other undergraduates disembarking, to be met and embraced on the platform by a girl-no, a woman-wearing a gray cloth coat, canvas tennis sneakers, and a ponytail. It must have been the spring break, because if Deb was greeting me the vacation had been too short for her to go back and forth to St. Louis, where her home was. Instead, she had been waiting a week for me to return. She tended to underdress in the long New England winter, while I wore the heavy winter coat, with buckled belt and fleecy lining, that my parents had bought me, to my embarra.s.sment, to keep me from catching pneumonia way up in New England.
She told me, as we rode first the Green Line and then the Red back to Harvard Square, what had happened to her that week. There had been an unpredicted snow squall, whose sullied traces were still around us, and, at the restaurant where she waited on tables some evenings, she had been given, because she was the only college student, the a.s.signment of adding up numbers in the bas.e.m.e.nt while the other waitresses pocketed all the tips. She was angry to the point of tears about it. I told her what I could recall of my week in Pennsylvania, already faded in memory except for the detail lodged there like a glittering splinter-my father"s tears. My own eyes itched and burned after a day of reading in a jiggling train; I had lifted them from my book only to marvel at the shining ocean as the train travelled the stretch of seaside track around New London.
In the years when we were newly married and still childless, Deb and I would spend a summer month with each set of parents. Her father was an eminent Unitarian minister, who preached in a gray neo-Gothic edifice built for eternity near the Washington University campus. Each June he moved his family from the roomy brick parsonage on Lindell Boulevard to an abandoned Vermont farmhouse he had bought in the Thirties for five hundred dollars. That June, Deb and I arrived before her father"s parish duties permitted him and the rest of his family, a wife and two other daughters, to be there. The chilly solitude of the place, with basic cold-water plumbing but no electricity, high on a curving dirt road whose only visible other house, a half-mile away, was occupied by another Unitarian minister, reinforced my sense of having moved up, thanks to my bride, into a new, more elevated and s.p.a.cious territory.
The lone bathroom was a long room, its plaster walls and wooden floor both bare, that was haunted by a small but intense rainbow, which moved around the walls as the sun in the course of the day glinted at a changing angle off the bevelled edge of the mirror on the medicine cabinet. When we troubled to heat up enough water on the kerosene stove for a daylight bath, the prismatically generated rainbow kept the bather company; it quivered and bobbed when footsteps or a breath of wind made the house tremble. To me this Ariel-like phenomenon was the magical child of Unitarian austerity, symbolic of the lofty att.i.tude that sought out a primitive farmhouse as a relief from well-furnished urban comfort. It had to do, I knew, drawing upon my freshly installed education, with idealism, with Emerson and Th.o.r.eau, with self-reliance and taking Nature on Nature"s own, exalted terms. A large side room in the house, well beyond the woodstove"s narrow sphere of warmth, held a big loom frame that had come with the house, and an obsolete encyclopedia, and a set, with faded spines, of aged but rarely touched books ent.i.tled The Master Works of World Philosophy. The Master Works of World Philosophy. When I broke precedent by taking one of the volumes down, its finely ridged cloth cover gave my fingers an unpleasant tingle. It was the volume containing selections from Emerson"s essays. "Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact," I read, and "Everything is made of one hidden stuff," and "Every hero becomes a bore at last," and "We boil at different degrees." When I broke precedent by taking one of the volumes down, its finely ridged cloth cover gave my fingers an unpleasant tingle. It was the volume containing selections from Emerson"s essays. "Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact," I read, and "Everything is made of one hidden stuff," and "Every hero becomes a bore at last," and "We boil at different degrees."
Deb used this large room, and the vine-shaded stone porch outside, to paint her careful oils and pale watercolors. When the day was sunny, and heating the tub water in a kettle on the kerosene stove seemed too much trouble, we bathed in the mountain creek an easy walk from the house, in a pond whose dam her father had designed and built. I wanted to photograph her nude with my Brownie Hawkeye, but she primly declined. One day I sneaked a few snapshots anyway, from the old bridge, while she, with exclamations that drowned out the noise of the shutter, waded in and took the icy plunge.
It was in Vermont, before the others arrived, that, by our retrospective calculations, we conceived our first child, unintentionally but with no regrets. This microscopic event deep within my bride became allied in my mind with the little rainbow low on the bathroom wall, our pet imp of refraction.
Her father, when he arrived, was a father I wasn"t used to. Mine, though he had sufficient survival skills, enacted the role of an underdog, a man whose every day, at school or elsewhere, proceeded through a series of sc.r.a.pes and embarra.s.sments. The car wouldn"t start, the students wouldn"t behave. He needed people, the aggravating rub of them, for stimulation. Reverend Whitworth liked Vermont because, compared with St. Louis, it had no people in it. He didn"t leave his hill for weeks at a time, letting the rest of us drive the two miles of dirt road to the nearest settlement, where the grocery store, the hardware store, and the post office all occupied one building, with one proprietor, who also managed the local sawmill. We would come back with local gossip and a day-old newspaper, and my father-in-law would listen to our excited tales of the greater world with a tilted head and a slant smile that let us guess he wasn"t hearing a word. He had things to do: he built stone walls, and refined the engineering of his dam, and took a daily nap, during which the rest of us were to be silent.
He was a handsome man, with a head of tightly wiry hair whose graying did not diminish its density, but he was frail inside from rheumatic fever in his Maine boyhood. Rural peace, the silence of woods, the sway and flicker of kerosene light as drafts blew on the flaming wick or as lamps were carried from room to room-these const.i.tuted his element, not city bustle and rub. During his hilltop vacation months, he moved among us-his wife, his three daughters, his son-inlaw, his wife"s spinster sister-like a planet exempt from the law of gravitational attraction.
His interactions came mostly with games, which he methodically tended to win-family croquet in the afternoons, family Hearts in the evening, in the merged auras of the woodstove and the mantle lamp on the table. This was a special lamp, which intensified and whitened the glow of a flame with a mantle, a kind of conical net of ash so delicate it could be broken by even a carelessly rough setting-down of the gla.s.s base on the table. Reverend Whitworth was ostentatiously careful in everything his hands did, and I resented this, with the implacable ressentiment ressentiment of youth. I resented his fussy pipe-smoker"s gestures as he tamped and lighted and puffed; I resented his strictly observed naps, his sterling blue eyes (which Deb had inherited), his untroubled Unitarianism. Somehow, in my part of Pennsylvania blue eyes were so rare as to be freakish-hazel was as far as irises ventured from the basic brown the immigrants from Wales and southern Germany had brought to the Schuylkill Valley. of youth. I resented his fussy pipe-smoker"s gestures as he tamped and lighted and puffed; I resented his strictly observed naps, his sterling blue eyes (which Deb had inherited), his untroubled Unitarianism. Somehow, in my part of Pennsylvania blue eyes were so rare as to be freakish-hazel was as far as irises ventured from the basic brown the immigrants from Wales and southern Germany had brought to the Schuylkill Valley.
As for Unitarianism, it seemed so milky, so smugly vague and evasive: an unimpeachably featureless dilution of the Christian religion as I had met it in its Lutheran form-the whole implausible, colorful, comforting tapestry of the Incarnation and the Magi, Christmas carols and Santa Claus, Adam and Eve, nakedness and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, the serpent and the Fall, betrayal in the garden and Redemption on the Cross, "Why has thou forsaken me?" and Pilate washing his hands and Resurrection on the third day, posthumous suppers in an upper room and doubting Thomas and angels haunting the shadier margins of Jerusalem, the instructions to the disciples and Paul"s being knocked from his donkey on the road to Damascus and the disciples talking in tongues, a practice at which the stolid churchgoers of Alton and its environs did draw the line. Our public-school day began with a Bible reading and the Lord"s Prayer; our teachers and bankers and undertakers and mailmen all professed to be conventional Christians, and what was good enough for them should have been, I think I thought, good enough for Unitarians. I had been conditioned to feel that there could be no joy in life without religious faith, and if such faith demanded an intellectual sacrifice, so be it. I had read enough Kierkegaard and Barth and Unamuno to know about the leap of faith, and Reverend Whitworth was not making that leap; he was taking naps and building stone walls instead. In his bedroom I spotted a paperback Tillich-The Courage to Be, most likely-but I never caught him reading it, or most likely-but I never caught him reading it, or The Master Works of World Philosophy The Master Works of World Philosophy either. The only time I felt him as a holy man was when, speaking with deliberate tenderness to one of his three daughters, he fell into a "thee" or "thou" from his Quaker boyhood. either. The only time I felt him as a holy man was when, speaking with deliberate tenderness to one of his three daughters, he fell into a "thee" or "thou" from his Quaker boyhood.
He was to be brought low, all dignity shed, before he died. Alzheimer"s didn"t so much invade his brain as deepen the benign fuzziness and preoccupation that had always been there. At the memorial service for his wife, dead of cancer, he turned to me before the service began and said, with a kindly though puzzled smile, "Well, James, I don"t quite know what"s up, but I guess it will all come clear." He didn"t realize that his wife of forty-five years was being memorialized.
With her gone, he deteriorated rapidly. At the nursing home where we finally took him, as he stood before the admission desk he began to whimper, and to jiggle up and down as if bouncing something in his pants, and I knew he needed to urinate, but I lacked the courage to lead him quickly to the lavatory and take his p.e.n.i.s out of his fly for him, so he wet himself and the floor. I was, in those years just before my separation from Deb, the eldest son-in-law, the first mate, as it were, of the extended family, and was failing in my role, though still taking a certain pride in it. My father-in-law had always, curiously, from those first summers in Vermont, trusted me-trusted me first with his daughter"s well-being, and then with helping him lift the stones into place on his wall, where I could have pinched one of his fingers or dropped a rock on his toes. For all of my ressentiment, ressentiment, I never did. I never did.
I loved him, in fact. As innocent of harm as my own father, he made fewer demands on those around him. A little silence during his nap does not seem, now, too much to ask, though at the time it irritated me. His theology, or lack of it, now seems one of the s.p.a.cious views I enjoyed thanks to him. His was a cosmos from which the mists of superst.i.tion had almost cleared. His parish, there in the Gateway to the West, included university existentialists, and some of their hip philosophy buffed up his old-fashioned transcendentalist sermons, which he delivered in a mellow, musing voice. Though Unitarian, he was of the theist branch, Deb would tell me in bed, hoping to mediate between us. I wasn"t, as I remember it, graceless enough to quarrel with him often, but he could not have been ignorant of my Harvard neo-orthodoxy, with its Eliotic undercurrent of panic.
In Vermont, my household task was to burn the day"s wastepaper, in a can up the slope behind the house, toward the spring that supplied our cold water. One could look across twenty miles of wooded valley to the next ridge of the Green Mountains. With Reverend Whitworth"s blessing, I had been admitted to a world of long views and icy swims and New England reticence. He was a transparently good man who took himself with a little Maine salt. It is easy to love people in memory; the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you.
Pennsylvania had its different tensions for Deb and me. We had gotten off to a bad start. The first time I brought her home to meet my parents, we disembarked at the wrong train station. The train from Philadelphia was a local. One of its stops was a hilly factory town seven miles from Alton, also along the Schuylkill and closer by a few miles to the country farmhouse to which we had moved, at my mother"s instigation, after the war. We were among a handful of pa.s.sengers to get off the train, and the platform in its tunnel of trees soon emptied. No one had come to meet us. My parents, in spite of arrangements clear in my own mind-I was trying to save them mileage-had gone to Alton.
Now I wonder how, in that era before cell phones, we managed to make contact. But in that same era even little railroad stations were still manned; perhaps the stationmaster telegraphed word of our plight to Alton and had my parents paged in the echoing great station. Or perhaps, by the mental telegraphy that used to operate in backward regions, they guessed the truth when we didn"t disembark and simply drove to where we were. I was a young swain, and Deb, so securely in her element in St. Louis or Cambridge, seemed lost in my home territory. I kept failing to protect her from our primitive ways. Blamelessly, she kept doing things wrong.
Though we were not yet married, she had put some dirty socks and underwear of mine through her own laundry, and packed them, clean, in her suitcase. When my mother, helpfully hovering in the guest bedroom, noticed this transposition, she let loose one of her silent bursts of anger, a merciless succession of waves that dyed an angry red V on her forehead, between the eyebrows, and filled the little sandstone house to its corners, upstairs and down. The house of my childhood, in the town of Olinger, a mere trolley-car ride from Alton, had been a long narrow brick one, with a long backyard, so there were places to escape to when my mother was, in my father"s tolerant phrase, "throwing an atmosphere." But in the new house we could all hear one another turn over in bed at night, and even the out-of-doors, buzzing with insects and seething with weeds, offered no escape from my mother"s psychological heat. I had grown up with her aggrieved moods, turned on usually by adult conflicts out of my sight and hearing. She could maintain one for days until, coming home from school or a friend"s house, I would find it miraculously lifted. Her temper was part of my growing up, like Pennsylvania mugginess and the hot spells that could kill old people in their stifling row houses and expand the steel tracks on the street enough to derail trolley cars.
Whispering, I tried to apologize for this climate to Deb, while my mother"s sulk, which had frozen all our tongues during dinner, continued to emanate from her bedroom down into the living room. The click of her latch had reverberated above us like a thunderclap. "You didn"t do anything wrong," I a.s.sured Deb, though in my heart I felt that offending my mother was wrong, a primal sin. I blamed Deb for mixing up my underwear with hers; she should have antic.i.p.ated the issue, the implications. "It"s the way she is."
"Well, she should wake up and get over it" was Deb"s response, so loud I feared it could be heard upstairs. Amazed, I realized that she wasn"t tuned as finely as I to the waves of my mother"s anger. She wasn"t built from birth to receive them.
Near the sofa where we sat, my father, dolefully correcting math papers in the rocking chair, said, "Mildred doesn"t mean anything by it. It"s her femininity acting up."
Femininity explained and justified everything for his s.e.xist generation, but not for mine. I was mortified by this tension. That same visit, perhaps, or later, Deb, thinking she was doing a good deed, on Sunday morning began to weed the patch of pansies my mother had planted near the back porch and then neglected. Deb stood uncomprehending, her feet sweetly bare in the soft soil, like Ingrid Bergman"s in Stromboli, Stromboli, when I explained that around here n.o.body worked on Sundays; everybody went to church. "How silly," Deb said. "My father all summer does his walls and things on Sundays." when I explained that around here n.o.body worked on Sundays; everybody went to church. "How silly," Deb said. "My father all summer does his walls and things on Sundays."
"He"s a different denomination."
"Jim, I can"t believe this. I really can"t."
"Sh-h-h. She"s inside, banging dishes around." She"s inside, banging dishes around."
"Well, let her. They"re her dishes."
"And we have to get ready for church."
"I didn"t bring church clothes."
"Just put on shoes and the dress you wore down on the train."
"s.h.i.t I will. I"d look ridiculous. I"d rather stay here and weed. Your grandparents will be staying, won"t they?"
"My grandmother. My grandfather goes. He reads the Bible every day on the sofa, haven"t you noticed?"
"I didn"t know there were places like this left in America."
"Well-"
My answer was going to be lame, she saw with those sterling blue eyes, so she interrupted. "I see now where you get your nonsense from, being so rude to Daddy."
I was scandalized but thrilled, perceiving that a defense against my mother was possible. In the event, Deb stayed with my grandmother, who was disabled and speechless with Parkinson"s disease. My rudeness to Reverend Whitworth was revenged when, baptizing our first child, his first grandchild, in a thoroughly negotiated Unitarian family service in the house of her Lutheran grandparents, he made a benign little joke about the "holy water"-water fetched from our own spring, which was down below the house instead of, as in Vermont, up above it. My mother sulked for the rest of the day about that, and always spoke of Catherine, our first child, as "the baby who didn"t get baptized." By the time the three other babies arrived, Deb and I had moved to Ma.s.sachusetts, where we had met and courted, and joined the Congregational Church as a reasonable compromise.
We are surrounded by holy water; all water, our chemical mother, is holy. Flying from Boston to New York, my habit is to take a seat on the right-hand side of the plane, but the other day I sat on the left, and was rewarded, at that hour of mid-morning, by the sun"s reflections on the waters of Connecticut-not just the rivers and the Sound, but little ponds and pools and glittering threads of water that for a few seconds hurled silver light skyward into my eyes. My father"s tears for a moment had caught the light; that is how I saw them. When he was dead, Deb and I divorced. Why? It"s hard to say. "We boil at different degrees," Emerson had said, and a woman came along who had my same boiling point. The snapshots I took of Deb naked, interestingly, Deb claimed as part of her just settlement. It seemed to me they were mine; I"d taken them. But she said her body was hers. It sounded like second-hand feminism, but I didn"t argue.
After our divorce, my mother told me, of my father, "He worried about you two from the first time you brought her home. He didn"t think she was feminine enough for you."
"He was big on femininity," I said, not knowing whether to believe her or not. The dead are so easy to misquote.
My reflex is always to come to Deb"s defense, even though it was I who wanted the divorce. It shocks me, at my high-school cla.s.s reunions, when my cla.s.smates bother to tell me how much they prefer my second wife. It is true, Sylvia really mixes it up with them, in a way that Deb shyly didn"t. But, then, Deb a.s.sumed that they were part of my past, something I had put behind me but reunited with every five years or so, whereas Sylvia, knowing me in my old age, recognizes that I have never really left Pennsylvania, that it is where the self I value is stored, however infrequently I check on its condition. The most recent reunion, the fifty-fifth, might have depressed Deb-all these people in their early seventies, most of them still living in the county within a short drive of where they had been born, even in the same semi-detached houses where they had been raised. Some came in wheel-chairs, and some were too sick to drive and were chauffeured to the reunion by their middle-aged children. The list of our deceased cla.s.smates on the back of the program grows longer; the cla.s.s beauties have gone to fat or bony crone-hood; the sports stars and non-athletes alike move about with the aid of pacemakers and plastic knees, retired and taking up s.p.a.ce at an age when most of our fathers were considerately dead.
But we don"t see ourselves that way, as lame and old. We see kindergarten children-the same round fresh faces, the same cup ears and long-lashed eyes. We hear the gleeful shrieking during elementary-school recess and the seductive saxophones and muted trumpets of the locally bred swing bands that serenaded the blue-lit gymnasium during high-school dances. We see in each other the enduring simplicities of a town rendered changeless by Depression and then by a world war whose bombs never reached us, though rationing and toy tanks and air-raid drills did. Old rivalries are rekindled and put aside; old romances flare for a moment and subside into the general warmth, the diffuse love. When the cla.s.s secretary, dear Joan Edison, her luxuriant head of chestnut curls now whiter than bleached laundry, takes the microphone and runs us through a quiz on the old days-teachers" nicknames, the names of vanished luncheonettes and ice-cream parlors, the t.i.tles of our junior and senior cla.s.s plays, the winner of the sc.r.a.p drive in third grade-the answers are shouted out on all sides. Not one piece of trivia stumps us: we were there, together, then, and the spouses, Sylvia among them, good-naturedly applaud so much long-h.o.a.rded treasure of useless knowing.
These were not just my cla.s.smates; they had been my father"s students, and they remembered him. He was several times the correct answer-"Mr. Werley!"-in Joan Edison"s quiz. Cookie Behn, who had been deposited in our cla.s.s by his failing grades and who, a year older than we, already had Alzheimer"s, kept coming up to me before and after dinner, squinting as if at a strong light and huskily, ardently asking, "Your father, Jimbo-is he still with us?" He had forgotten the facts but remembered that saying "still alive," like the single word "dead," was somehow tactless.
"No, Cookie," I said each time. "He died in 1972, of his second heart attack." Oddly, it did not feel absurd to be calling a seventy-four-year-old man on a p.r.o.nged cane "Cookie."
He nodded, his expression grave as well as, mildly, puzzled. "I"m sorry to hear that," he said.
"I"m sorry to tell you," I said, though my father would have been over a hundred and running up big bills in a nursing home. As it happened, his dying was less trouble to me than Reverend Whitworth"s.
"And your mother, Jimbo?" Cookie persisted.
"She outlived him by seventeen years," I told him, curtly, as if I resented the fact. "She was a happy widow."
"She was a very dignified lady," he said slowly, nodding as if to agree with himself. It touched me that he was attempting to remember my mother, and that what he said was, after all, true enough of her in her relations with the outside world. She had been outwardly dignified and, in her youth, beautiful or, as she once put it to me during her increasingly frank long widowhood, "not quite beautiful."
My father had died when Deb and I were in Italy. We had gone there, with another couple in trouble, to see if we couldn"t make the marriage "work." Our hotel in Florence was a small one with a peek at the Arno; returning from a bus trip to Fiesole-its little Roman stadium, its charming Etruscan museum built in the form of a first-century Ionic temple-we had impulsively decided, the four of us, to have an afternoon drink in the hotel"s upstairs cafe, rather than return to the confinement of our rooms. The place, with its angled view of the Arno, was empty except for some Germans drinking beer in a corner, and some Italians standing up with espressos at the bar. If I heard the telephone ring at all, I a.s.sumed it had nothing to do with me. But the bartender came from behind the bar and walked over to me and said, "Signor Wer-lei? Call for you." Who could know I was here?
It was my mother, sounding very small and scratchy. "Jimmy? Were you having fun? I"m sorry to disturb you."
"I"m impressed you could find me."
"The operators helped," she explained.
"What"s happened, Mother?"
"Your father"s in the hospital. With his second heart attack."
"How bad is it?"
"Well, he sat up in the car as I drove him into Alton."
"Well, then, it isn"t too bad."
There was a delay in her responses that I blamed on the transatlantic cable. She said at last, "I wouldn"t be too sure of that." Except when we talked on the telephone, I never noticed what a distinct Pennsylvania accent my mother had. When we were face to face, her voice sounded as transparent, as free of any accent, as my own. She explained, "He woke up with this pressing feeling on his chest, and usually he ignores it. He didn"t today. It"s noon here now."
"So you want me to come back," I accused her. I knew my father wouldn"t want me inconvenienced. The four of us had reservations for the Uffizi tomorrow.
She sighed; the cable under the ocean crackled. "Jimmy, I"m afraid you better. You and Deb, of course, unless she"d rather stay there and enjoy the art. Dr. Shirk doesn"t like what he"s hearing, and you know how hard to impress he usually is."
Open-heart surgery and angioplasty were not options then; there was little for doctors to do but listen with a stethoscope and prescribe nitroglycerin. The concierge told us when the next train to Rome was, and the other couple saw us to the Florence station-just beyond the Medici chapels, which Deb and I had always wanted to see, and were destined never to see together. In Rome, the taxi driver found us an airline office that was open. I will never forget the courtesy and patience with which that young airline clerk, in his schoolbook English, took our tickets to Boston the next week and converted them into tickets to Philadelphia the next day. More planes flew then, with more empty seats. We made an evening flight to London, and had to lay over for the night. On the side of Heathrow away from London there turned out to be a world of new, tall hotels for pa.s.sengers in transit. We got into our room around midnight. I called my mother-it was suppertime in Pennsylvania-and learned that my father was dead. To my mother, it was news a number of hours old, and she described in weary retrospect her afternoon of sitting in the Alton hospital and receiving increasingly dire reports. She said, "Doc Shirk said he fought real hard at the end. It was ugly."
I hung up, and shared the news with Deb. She put her arms around me in the bed and told me, "Cry." Though I saw the opportunity, and the rightness of seizing it, I don"t believe I did. My father"s tears had used up mine.
Kinderszenen
WINDOWS FRAME PICTURES of the world outside. A window overlooking the side porch shows the painted beaded porch boards and the curved backs of the wicker furniture and, beyond the porch edge, the bricks of the walk where it broadens beneath the grape arbor and the ragged gaps of sunlight and scenery between the grape leaves. Ants make mounds like coffee grounds between the bricks, and the grapevines attach themselves to the boards of the arbor with fine pale-green tendrils that spell letters of a sort: these are things Toby knows from being outside and looking directly. What he does not know and never thinks to ask is who built the arbor, whose idea was it, his grandparents" or that of the people who owned the house before them? He will never think to ask. He once began to collect tendril letters-A, B, C-to make the whole alphabet but never got through D. of the world outside. A window overlooking the side porch shows the painted beaded porch boards and the curved backs of the wicker furniture and, beyond the porch edge, the bricks of the walk where it broadens beneath the grape arbor and the ragged gaps of sunlight and scenery between the grape leaves. Ants make mounds like coffee grounds between the bricks, and the grapevines attach themselves to the boards of the arbor with fine pale-green tendrils that spell letters of a sort: these are things Toby knows from being outside and looking directly. What he does not know and never thinks to ask is who built the arbor, whose idea was it, his grandparents" or that of the people who owned the house before them? He will never think to ask. He once began to collect tendril letters-A, B, C-to make the whole alphabet but never got through D.
When Daddy flips a cigarette off the porch in the evening from sitting on a wicker chair with the other grown-ups in a row, its red star traces lopsided loops before shattering into sparks on the bricks. The grapes make a mess on the bricks in the fall; n.o.body ever thinks to pick them up when they fall. The panes in the window have bubbles in them, like hollow teardrops, that warp the edges of things when Toby slightly shifts his head, a little like the way that bad boys hold a magnifying gla.s.s above a scurrying brown ant until it stops moving and shrivels up with a snap you almost hear, feeling it within yourself.
The thin gla.s.s divides the world outside, which is ordinary, from inside the house, where something is out of the ordinary and feels sad and wrong. The a.s.sumption that the town is an ordinary one and just like many another is in the air, along with fireflies in summer and snowflakes in winter. Toby sees nothing ordinary about it. It is a tiny piece of the world but the piece nearest him. In his heart he knows that it is the best town in the world, and he the most important person, though he would never say that to the grown-ups he lives with. There are four-Mother, Daddy, Grandfather, and Grandmother-the same way the house has four sides.
On the side with the porch and the grape arbor, toward the alley that runs behind the square-trimmed hedge, where bigger boys walk along, talking loudly and rudely on the way to the school grounds and the baseball field, there is a side yard. Toby"s mother and grandmother preside above this fussy, complicated area, a showplace of flower beds and flowering bushes maintained for the neighbors in case they walk by and look in over the hedge. The bushes need to be clipped and to have their lower branches held up while Mother, red-faced and almost angry, pushes the lawnmower, with its noisy scissoring, underneath to get at the secret gra.s.s growing there. She calls this job "holding up the bushes" skirts," which has a naughty sound to it that nevertheless doesn"t make it fun. She calls Toby outdoors to do it, away from his toys and his children"s books and his pretending things to himself. The stiff branches poke his arms and face and some have little thorns that scratch, it seems on purpose. If he isn"t careful he could lose an eye. His mother doesn"t care about that; she is always working in the garden in pants with dirt-stained knees. Toby likes her better when she dresses up to go to the city on the trolley car, in a brown skirt and coat and a little hat tilted on her head, walking down not the alley but the street at the front of the house, along the sidewalk under the horse-chestnut trees, to the avenue where the trolley runs.
Across the alley is the vacant lot where the bigger children in summer have noisy games, with a lot of shouting and tumbling down into the gra.s.s, gra.s.s so tall it goes to seed at the top and at the bottom never loses the dampness of dew. Beyond this s.h.a.ggy lot, houses stretch one after the other to a farm where the pig pen smells terrible. Some of the houses are tucked back from the sidewalk, like Toby"s own-"out of harm"s way," as Grandfather likes to say, twiddling his cigar on the sofa and putting on that foxy sly look that irritates Mother so. She says he should smoke his cigars only outdoors. Most of the houses along the street have just a little piece of gra.s.s in front of their porches, and many are really two houses, with two different house numbers and shades of paint, joined in the middle, so each has windows only on three sides, unlike the nice long white house Toby lives in.
The other side yard is toward the Eichelbergers", an elderly couple of which Mr. always wears a creased gray hat and Mrs. has a goiter hanging under her chin. Toby is afraid of the narrow gloomy yard in their direction and hates even to see it out of a window. Mr. and Mrs. Eichelberger always seem to be creeping about together, murmuring together, poking at things. Mother says their tragedy is they never had any children. Toby is an only child and so is his mother, so he escaped into life by the narrowest of chances.
People call his house white but in fact it is yellowy-"cream," he has heard his mother say. Cream, with green wooden trim, including the windows. In crayoning at elementary school a picture of the house where he lives, he discovered that green and yellow go together in a way some colors don"t. Black and orange also go together, as at Halloween, and purple and gold at Easter, and red and green at Christmas. Red, white, and blue together in the American flag are like three notes on a bra.s.s trumpet. Discovering such harmonies excites him, more than it does other children.
His playmates, when he has them, come to him through the side yard toward the alley, by the little brick walk leading in past the pansy bed from the gap in the hedge. The gap used to have a heavy green-painted gate that creaked and clanged until eventually Grandfather gave it to the sc.r.a.p drive for the war. It was rotten with rust anyway, he said, and he was sick of painting it. Wilma Dobrinksi, who is a year ahead of Toby at school and tall for her age in any case, peeks in at the gap to see if he is in the yard or on the porch, so she doesn"t have to knock on the side door and face Grandmother in the kitchen. Grandmother makes her feel unwelcome. Yet Wilma is the best friend he has. The only friend, in a way. She takes all his suggestions for games and activities. Sometimes on the side porch they turn the wicker chairs upside down and pretend they are caves in which they are hiding from Indians or bandits. Or they cut out and color paper apples and pears and bananas and set them up in an empty orange crate to sell to imaginary customers.
Wilma likes his back yard, its lush lawn and abundance of trees compared to her own. Hers is beaten bare of gra.s.s by all her family and has a cross dog tied at the lower end. The dog lunged at Toby once, yanking his chain and his snarl showing horrible blue gums. Toby tries never to play at the Dobrinski house, which is small inside, and doesn"t have much plumbing. Mrs. Dobrinski gives Wilma a bath by standing her naked on a chair in the kitchen and wiping her all over with a washcloth wet in a soapy basin. Toby knows this because he once peeked through a crack where the kitchen door didn"t close completely, until Mrs. Dobrinski announced out loud that he wasn"t being very nice. How had she seen him peeking? Had his spying eye gleamed in the crack? Girls, he observed, had bottoms like he did but in front there was something different, hardly anything, a little dent.
For some odd reason there are no boys near his age in the neighborhood, this side of the street, which he is not allowed to cross by himself. A kind of tough boy, Warren Frye, in Wilma"s grade at school, lives in the other direction, down the alley, where it turns along the school grounds and becomes a street, with a row of houses on one side. He comes up to Toby"s yard from the lower end, past the chicken house beside the vegetable garden. Grandmother doesn"t like him. She doesn"t care for his "people." She has known the Fryes since she herself was a child, way before Toby was born. He doesn"t like to think about that strange deep empty period of time.
One day when Warren and Toby were wrestling on the linoleum kitchen floor-fighting because Warren had been treating Toby"s toys too roughly and then teasing Toby for being too fussy about it, as if the toys had feelings, which they don"t and which he said was sissy to imagine-Toby sneakily tripped him so his head went into the radiator spines and bled through his hair as if he might die. Toby was terrified. Grandmother made a nice tidy bandage for Warren out of a dust rag and sent him home still bleeding, and though Warren came back the next day already pretty much healed, he never did return the dust rag. To hear Grandmother tell it there had never been a dust rag like it for excellence. By not dying, Warren had cheated her.
Grandmother doesn"t like Wilma"s people either. What she doesn"t like has something to do with how many brothers and sisters Wilma has and with money, though from what Toby overhears in the house Grandfather doesn"t have his money any more; it was eaten up in the stock-market crash. What money they live on Daddy earns being a schoolteacher and is kept in a little red-and-white tin box saying Recipes on top of the icebox. The grown-ups dip into it when they go off shopping, Grandfather to Hen Geiger"s little front-room grocery store a few houses up from Wilma"s house, with floorboards so worn the nail heads shine, and Mother and Grandmother up the hill two blocks to Pep Sheaffer"s bigger store, which has more kinds of ice cream and meat so fresh it oozes blood onto the butcher block, all crisscrossed with marks of the cleaver. Pep has a refrigerator he walks into without bending over and comes out of breathing the smoke your breath makes in January. When Toby got big enough to move a kitchen chair to the icebox and stand on it he was allowed to dip into the Recipe box too and take out a nickel for a Tastykake or a jelly-filled doughnut at Hen Geiger"s on his way back to school after lunch. He loves eating while he is walking along instead of sitting down and being told to have good manners. Because there are five of them he sits at the corner of the little kitchen table and it pokes him in the stomach.
There is the alley, the street, and the avenue, where the trolley cars run and the elementary-school building stands on its asphalt lake. As he walks down the street toward the avenue the houses he pa.s.ses get smaller, their porches lower to the ground, without railings. Grandmother complains about "people" but it seems to Toby that these are the people his family lives among and they should make do with them. These are the people of his life.
The side yard is too crowded with bushes and flower beds to play in, except for hide-and-seek. But the back yard stretches all the way to the chicken house and the garage for the green Model A Ford in the days when Grandfather had a car. Toby remembers the car before they sold it, sitting squeezed in the back seat between his parents. His mother was somehow angry, giving off heat. Near the fenced-in chicken yard is the burning barrel where he is allowed to hold a match to the previous day"s newspaper and the other paper trash, including magazines that won"t burn up unless you poke them, separating the pages. The barrel has flaps cut near the bottom, because fire needs oxygen. Table sc.r.a.ps don"t burn, and go to the chickens.
Above the burning barrel, nearer the house, is the vegetable garden. Grandfather spades it in the spring, and all summer the rows that come up must be hoed and weeded. Daddy is exempted from such farmers" labor, but not Toby. The weeds between the rows of lima beans and beets and carrots and kohlrabi have to be pulled and carefully laid flat, otherwise they will take root again. Until it dries, the hoed earth is the same dark damp color it is when Grandfather turns the soil in the spring. In the fall Mother and Grandmother put up tomatoes and sliced peaches and rhubarb in Mason jars, filling the kitchen with clouds of steam. The jars are sealed with red rubber rings that are good to play indoor quoits with. Each ring has a little tab that just fits your finger to impart spin.
The way the weeds lie helpless in the sun and then shrivel seems cruel to Toby, but, then, he didn"t ask them to grow there. There is a plan and a purpose to things. At school Miss Kendall, who teaches third grade, told the cla.s.s that gra.s.s was green because green was the most soothing color for the eyes. G.o.d designed it that way. If everything was red or yellow, she explained, people would go crazy with there being too much of it. The same with the sky being blue, though even so sometimes when Toby looks straight up his eyes wince as if overwhelmed out of all that incandescent blue, and if he catches the sun in his glance a circular ghost stays throbbing in his vision for minutes. G.o.d made the world for Mankind, Miss Kendall says.
The back yard slopes from the brick walk along the porch and the wooden cellar door down to the vegetable gardens through a breadth of gra.s.s where Daddy, the sleeves of his white shirt rolled up past his elbows, pushes the lawnmower on Sat.u.r.days. After dinner they move porch chairs out to the top of the yard and sit as the fireflies come out, Grandfather smoking his cigar and Mother not complaining. It keeps the mosquitoes away, her father explains to her. He speaks to her in a rumbling, friendly way. She is his daughter. "Lois," he calls her. It is a strange name, two syllables, like "Toby," and the same number of letters, and enough like it so that it seems his came out of hers, as he is supposed to have come out of her. And as she came out of Grandmother, whose name is Elizabeth, which in a way has Lois in it. Picturing all this makes Toby sleepy.
After school Wilma and Warren Frye, before he stopped coming, and some others from the neighborhood, mostly girls, sometimes come to play in the back yard, climbing the trees or swinging on the swing Grandfather once hung on a low branch of the English-walnut tree for Toby when he was smaller. The swing gets quickly boring, the ropes being babyishly short for him now, but there are many trees-the peach trees with their long pointy deeply creased leaves, and the leaning cherry trees with their ringed bark like stacks of black coins, and the maples whose winged seeds you can split and stick on your nose, and the English walnut whose lowest branch is shiny from being climbed on. From tree to tree the children race, squealing in their versions of baseball and dodge ball, where when the person who has the ball yells "Freeze" everybody must stop, even off-balance in mid-step.
In his element, proud, Toby leads them to the stone birdbath that rocks a little on its pedestal, spilling some water onto the girls" shoes, and to the j.a.panese-beetle traps on their grape arbor, loudly buzzing with the beetles" angry dying, and the broad lilies-of-the-valley bed where it is against the rules to look for a lost ball, though what else can they do, treading on tiptoe to minimize the damage to flowers that they flatten as they search?