The rooms farther in are dark, the colors brown.
There’s a phantom in there, the daughter says, showing us into a room where everything is made of wood, walls, ceiling, like a sauna. Behind built-in glass cases various items are displayed, a diploma, a vase, a stone figure depicting a deer, old, framed black-and-white photographs of men in boots. The daughter guides us into a niche where, resting on a white cloth on a low dresser, lie three skulls carved from great hunks of crystal, one pink, one transparent, and, in the center, one coal black. A fourth is in her hand, in the same color as the smoke from a raging fire. How it appeared in her hand, I don’t know. His personality is really funny, she says. I picked him up, and I just started laughing. I have no idea what he said to me.
Anyway, he would like to come home with you. She looks at me. If you want him, she says.
The skull is the size of a small melon and must have cost a fortune.
My hesitation makes her nervous. You can say no, she says, but he really wants to go home with you. Something about her seems so fragile, as if she might fall apart at any moment, her voice on the cusp of bursting, her shifty eyes see both too little and too much. Pleading. In a flash I picture the man who sat on the curb in Austin shouting bitch at the cars. A precious gift, I say. A little overwhelming. Why does he want to—she calls the skull Smokey and refers to it as a he—why does he want to go home with me?
Long pause. The daughter sighs, then says the other side nudged her. Do you ever pay attention to your intuition?
Yes, I say.
Sure, my dad says.
Well, it’s the other side that’s nudging you, she says. And that’s what Smokey wants. He wants to nudge me and make sure I go in the right direction.
He will probably help you stay grou—h—nded, sorry. They push my head. She explains that when you maintain a connection to the earth, you make better decisions. And that’s what the skull, the one called Smokey, wants to help me do.
A protector, my dad says.
A big surprise, I say.
I know, she says. I know …
I walk around with the skull like a baby in my arms, admiring new rooms and chambers, three stages of a bathroom, dressing room after dressing room, cowboy boots patterned with Christmas trees, ornate shirts. At the very moment I agreed to take Smokey home with me, her nerves began to settle. By the time we reach the kitchen, relief still pours from her. She’s discovered that she’s no longer afraid of my dad. I was always so nervous around you, she tells him. Because you are so smart. And I’m rarely around brilliant people, you know. She laughs. And so we would sit there, like, what do we talk to this guy about?
My dad says she’s been around brilliant people all her life. I mean: In this family, he says. Really.
Anyway, she says. Nice being comfortable around you. It’s good being fifty-six. What do you do these days?
I do research.
Are you ever going to retire?
My dad says no, never. When I retire from physics, I’ll be dead—one way or another.
He recalls the kitchen clearly. A stove stood over there, he points, where your grandmother cooked for the dogs.
Really?
Yeah. Amazing.
We sail through a narrow corridor back to the reception office where the widow sits among heaps of stuff. We wave goodbye to the daughter, the door closes, and she disappears once more into the chambers of talking skulls. My dad sits on the chair next to the widow. I set the skull on the table with all the other stuff and sit down on the third empty chair. The widow looks at it. It said that it wanted to go home with me, I say. I guess you were lucky, she says.
See, I like the rocks, she says, with the implicit understanding that she doesn’t quite comprehend the talking skulls, but every once in a while she goes with her daughter to some exhibitions. The daughter is more interested in the spiritual part.
She tells us that she’s always collected rocks. She still calls her late father-in-law Mr. Ruby, her father worked for him, operated the rock crusher in the quarry. The explosions caused the entire ground to shake. Afterward they gathered the rattlesnake tails that were scattered everywhere; the men saved them for her. There were so many snakes, she says, coral snakes, moccasins, copperheads, and Miss Ruby wasn’t afraid of them at all. Aunt E, my dad says to me. She would find snakes in the house, the widow says. She was just such a brave person.
Brave. There was more to the sweet and bashful aunt my dad always talked about. All these adjectives, I think. They have so little to do with those they are pinned to, and so much more with those who are doing the pinning.
You know, the quarry is right out here, she says. She points, they hewed a great chunk off, and she got a concussion. I thought a car had crashed right into the office. So now she’s asked them to tell her next time they use dynamite.
The widow’s laughter emerges from deep within her. Why is laughter always greatest when it’s the most sorrowful? Again, my dad and I sit silently, listening, while a person shares their deepest emotions. My cardboard cutout smolders. The widow starts talking about her grandchild, who is gay and a former drug addict, and who suffers from anxiety. And it really sounds as if she loves him quite a bit more than she loves Sarah Palin. She’d do anything for him, anything to make him happy, so she took him on a monthlong trip to Germany. Because he loves all things Germany. Her two daughters are bi-polar, the second is an even more severe case than the one who gave us the tour. It had gotten to the point where she’d drive around in her car without shoes on, not knowing where she was going, the widow couldn’t get her to take her medicine. She was just trying to help, she says, but she shouldn’t have because now the daughter won’t have anything to do with her. The laughter again, heartfelt, deep, and pained. From within it comes a sound like from an animal caught in a steel trap.
She practices letting her daughter go, but it’s almost impossible. All she thinks about is that her daughter won’t have anything to do with her. She’d just tried to help. Should she go knock on her door? The daughter sends her away every time.
The widow has been depressed her entire adult life. But I don’t like to take medication, she says. The last doctor she visited, his name is Ian Crooks, she says, that laughter again, he used to be an opera singer, more laughter. I went there and I said: I do not want a pill. I wanna know what’s wrong with me. He said (this was in San Antonio): I will treat you for two years.
So he treated me for two years, and at the end of it, he said, Miss Ruby, you never learned to talk. That was my problem! I never said a word. I sincerely believed I wasn’t good enough to be part of the Ruby family. And that was the truth, she says. That was what was wrong with me.
She and Bubba moved into her parents-in-laws’ place at the ranch in the beginning of the 1990s, when Mr. Ruby was bedridden. In fact, he lay out here, she says, gesturing at the entire reception office. You know, in his bed.
•
He was the one, Mr. Ruby himself, who’d been driving the car the day Miss Ruby was killed, the widow says. At that point she and Bubba lived in one of their satellite offices, a subdivision in Sequoia. She had her little grandchild with her, Anthony is his name, the skull-daughter’s eldest son. And Miss Ruby simply loved to sit with him on the floor. Because he laughed all the time. Big laugh and sparkle, she says, beaming to show us just how much. Miss Ruby had loved it. So, maybe they’d been out driving that day, the widow speculates, and maybe Miss Ruby had told Mr. Ruby that she wanted to see Anthony. Because suddenly he’d driven off the road, she says, and right into a culvert. When he struck the culvert, Miss Ruby rammed the window.
She was dead on the spot, the doctor said. As a matter of fact, her eyeglasses were still stuck to the windshield.
Anyway, that’s what I think happened, she says.
Because Mr. Ruby just pulled off the road and hit a culvert, and to her, that’s the only possible explanation about how it could have happened.
◊
Wh
en we stand in the doorway, she says: I have to admit that I’m not very well read. But I’ve read some work by a Danish writer, Roald Dahl. He’s Norwegian, says my dad, who loves Tales of the Unexpected. A book with a lot of stories, the widow continues. And there was a story about a man. And he did such wonderful things. Just wonderful things. He was the most incredible person, she says. So incredible that she had to call her friend on her cell phone (even though she and Bubba were traveling on a cruise between Washington state and Canada) to ask her: Who was this person? And her friend told her: There was no such person.
It was just a story! she tells us and laughs.
But I couldn’t get over all this wonderful stuff that he did.
Before we climb into the tin can, she says, Johnny, Gussie was a very unusual person. There was no one like her. We then get into the car, me in the passenger seat with my skull and my dad behind the wheel. The widow stays put, and we see her getting smaller and smaller, until she’s so small we can no longer distinguish her from the shadowy darkness underneath the porch roof.
the sun shines on us, white and round in the middle of a blue sky, as we trace the same lines with our feet that we’d done two years earlier on my dad’s computer in his garage room in Belgium. Up along Clark Cove Road, down Humphreys Drive, looping around Walter Circle.
I often forget that my dad was married before he married my mother. The marriage lasted for a few years, a German woman, Brigitte, which he pronounces Bridget, and whom he never had children with. So he went from a German woman to a Danish woman, with whom he had a child, and then to a Dutch woman, with whom he had four additional children. My siblings aren’t especially interested in their Dutch roots. Only one of them, Jessica, has visited their mother since she moved to Belgium. The only one to visit me in Denmark is the eldest, Carissa. None have met—or so far as I know even tried to find—their other half-brother, André, Marcel’s brother, who was left behind in Germany before they were born.
It has taken some effort for us to get to this point, walking here, my dad and I. I won’t call it a great struggle and I won’t call it a long, difficult journey, but it has required effort on our part. It’s the result of a mutual act of will over forty-three years. There have been plenty of hindrances, linguistic, geographic, economic, human, moments when either of us could have given up. He could have stopped writing, quietly satisfied to send a check to my mom until I turned eighteen. I could have given up, continued my life back home, and not shown up to nourish my interest in the people buried here, people who have great meaning to him. His childhood and all that. We could have been indifferent, or pretended we were, and probably over time become exactly that. Now, instead, we have all this lived life. Ten days on the prairie, soon over, transformed to memory, and all these people, family, who are now alive and part of it. Ginger, Gay, Gloria. Celia, Layne, Bubba’s widow and her daughter, whom my dad calls Lady of the Skulls. Life, what more do you want?
We discuss Bubba who fell from the airplane that turned out not to be an airplane but a backpack with a propeller. My dad says he was a thoroughly decent man and it mattered that he’d had such a terrible dad as Cecil. The terrible dad stymied him, to be sure, but also sharpened his character, showing him, in a sense, the way. Bubba didn’t wanna be that way, my dad says.
Gay admired their dad, I say.
She did. That’s true. And there are things to admire about him, he says. ’Cause he built something. And he was very good to a lot of people. He was generous. When Preston had a stroke, for example, Gussie had just retired from teaching. Preston was admitted to a home where he stayed for two years before he died, leaving Gussie with the mortgage payments. That’s when Cecil stepped in and paid the entire mortgage off, just like that, without a second thought. Purchased the rest of the house for Gussie. So, he had some good qualities, too. And he was good, my dad says, at accomplishing his life goals. Constructing highways, airports, developing a business.
Now that I’ve seen the ranch, it puzzles me to think that my mother sunbathed there in a bikini the way Celia so distinctly recalls, even though it must have been more than forty years ago. It just doesn’t seem likely. I tell my dad that.
That couldn’t have been your mom, he says at once. Sunbathe in a bikini in Texas. It’s an absurd thought to him. She would never do that. It must have been Bridget.
I tell him that Celia seemed to think that her sunbathing had been a bit of a scandal. According to him, his relationship with Brigitte had been doomed to fail. She was very different than him, more into parties and living it up.
Did you bring Brigitte to Texas?
Once, yes. But as he recalls, she never met Cecil. The next time he visited the ranch he brought my mother.
We look at each other. Maybe Cecil thought my mother and Brigitte were the same person?
Your mother didn’t look in any way like ‘that kind of girl.’ At all. Which is to say, the kind of girl who sunbathes at the family ranch in a bikini.
My mother looked like a child, I say.
Your mother looked very young and innocent. You know, always very high class. Very classy, he says, and not anything vulgar at all. Just the complete opposite.
My point: You can’t blame him for not being able to keep up with all your European wives, I say. The scandal may have spread from the boys’ gossip about the sunbathing woman to the family patriarch, who saw it as his responsibility to crack down on such deviant behavior. When my dad appeared with my mother, she had to be put in her place at whatever cost. It seems plausible.
It wouldn’t have made it okay, he says. But it’s certainly something of an explanation. Certainly.
It quickly becomes evident that the skull will roll around the floor of the car, so I hold it in my hands like Hamlet, a smoke-colored, melon-sized cranium. I’ve traveled to Texas to speak with the dead and connect with my dad’s place of birth, and return home with a talking skull, a skull that has decided it wants to go home with me. Ostensibly to ground me to the earth. Literally. It’s heavy, in any case.
My dad’s hair glistens reddish-black in the sunlight beaming through the side widow. During the course of the nearly ten days we’ve been here, I’ve asked him all sorts of questions, and he has responded without reservation. Now that we’ve exited the kingdom of the dead, I sit ruminating on the ghost boy, André, my siblings’ half-brother. How old is he now? A few years older than me, I’d think. I cautiously ask the question that I’ve been dying to ask ever since I was little, when his name was the only thing we had to play with. André, our brother from Germany. How, I ask, did C and her German husband decide to divide their two boys between them?
The air grows thick, swells up between us like a heavy body. He’s uncomfortable responding, I know. I’m uncomfortable asking. But I do, and he replies. He hasn’t dodged any of my questions yet, and this question is no different. He doesn’t tell me that I shouldn’t write about this, even though he probably ought to. Or, less confrontationally, whether it’s something I’ve considered writing about. He simply replies. Says that his wife took both boys to the U.S. at first, Marcel and André. But there was something wrong with André, my dad adds without prompting. Not that Marcel didn’t also have his issues, but André was very, very difficult, his mother could not handle him. So he was sent back to his dad.
How?
He was put on a plane.
Alone?
There must have been someone with him, my dad says. But he can’t recall the details. We fall silent. He was difficult. His mother didn’t want him. He was sent back to Germany on a plane. It’s as if the thick air breathes of its own volition.
Now it’s coming back to me, my dad says, soon after. I remember now, he was accompanied by one of my students who was going to Germany.
How old was he?
My dad clears his throat. Let’s see. He must have been about four, maybe five.
I imagine him, Marcel’s little brother, alone on a plane with one of my dad’s students, o
n the way back to his dad because he was difficult, too difficult to have anything to do with, impossible to handle, and I think of C’s various pets, the pig, the geese, the overlarge dog in the basement. It was a disaster.
Then we’re back at the farm. The dogs run to meet us, Roy first, and Pearl trudging along behind, followed by the graying old Dozer.
early that morning i am overcome by the feeling that it’s over. The same old emotions as when we stand before a parting: that we’ll never see each other again. During lunch, which for my dad means the last, rock-hard leftovers from Smitty’s in the refrigerator, I lose all of my dignity. I hear myself choking back tears when I ask about his wife, why he may no longer visit me in Copenhagen. I’ve noticed, I say with a quivering voice, that it coincided with my stepfather’s death. Before he died, you could visit me. Afterward, you couldn’t visit me. When I visited you two in Belgium, and she heard that he was sick, she said: Then your möther and father can get back together! Is that the reason? Is she nervous that you and my mom will get back together again? Which is absurd. But is that what it is? Because I don’t understand. I just don’t.
My uncertainty makes him uncertain. He hates these kinds of confrontations even more than I do, but I can’t help myself. The emotions rattle off me. My dad mumbles, protests, searches for words, begins two or three different sentences, but finally collects himself to say: But you must know that she’s not right in the head.
I press him. When I turned forty, he was allowed to visit me, and last year he wasn’t. What has changed?
He looks me directly in the eyes, and again he says: You know she is not right in the head. There is no logic to it.
The reason, or the reason he gives me, is precisely what’s kept me from asking. That the answer is there is no answer.
Lone Star Page 36
