“When you had a wife.”
“Well, I’m not getting another wife at my age. Besides, Connor. I don’t mean to get corny, but he’s the answer to my prayers.”
“You’ve been praying for a baby?”
“No, you dingleberry, I haven’t been praying for a baby. But I’ve been thinking. We’re all gone now—all of us Manns. I’m the last one.”
“I know,” said Doctor Connor. “You tell me that every time I see you.”
“Well, now I’m not the last one anymore.”
“Now he is,” said Doctor Connor, pointing to me. “So what?”
Connor was a practical, scientific man who saw through most human vanity right away. People, to him, were merely biological organisms. They all had breakable bones and soft, vulnerable internal organs, and things went wrong with them that needed to be fixed from time to time—it made no difference to him what their last name was. He himself was married but had never had children. When asked why there were no little Connors, he would say, “There’s already almost a billion Chinese!” which was his way of explaining that the world was overpopulated as it was. He did not wish to contribute to the problem.
“I always thought it would be a damn shame if I was the last of the Manns,” said Grandpa.
“Is that so important?”
“I got stories to tell him,” said Grandpa. “I’m sick of talking to myself in that house. He needs to know everything.”
“What are you going to name him?”
And Grandpa, as he told me later, answered immediately and without thinking, “Connor, meet William Amos Mann IV. But I’m going to call him Billy.”
“Hello there, Billy,” said Connor.
At this point, Grandpa told me, I spit up formula all over myself.
“Little fella can’t even hold his liquor,” said Grandpa.
He had the doctor refresh him on the major points of baby-raising while he cleaned me up. Then Grandpa put me back in the Galaxie and drove us back out to the old farmhouse.
The farmhouse in which I was to be raised wasn’t really a farmhouse. It was more of a wood-and-brick mansion. A sweeping, curving driveway led up to it from the road, and the front porch, like those of the old Southern plantation manors, boasted two immense pillars, which flanked an oak door nearly eight feet high. Brass hitching posts, now covered with a patina of fine green, still stood at proud right angles to the ground just in front of the porch, though no horse had been hitched to them since before the Second World War. The farmhouse itself was three stories tall, not including the attic and basement. Each floor was a wilderness of bedrooms, closets, and parlors, some of which hadn’t had a human occupant in fifty years. It was a huge, dilapidated, spooky place, and since I was a Mann, it was now mine.
The house had been built in 1868 by my great-great-grandfather, Willie Mann, and once it had been filled with Manns, but they were all dead now, and the house was empty except for Grandpa and me. I learned to walk in the kitchen. It was mostly bare except for a table and chairs, with a wood stove for heat, a single gas ring for cooking, and an icebox instead of a refrigerator. The floor, like all others in the house, was of local hardwood, shiny and smooth and cool. It’s the first part of the house of which I have a clear memory:
I’m sprawled on my stomach, perhaps ten or eleven months old, and Grandpa is at the other end of the kitchen on his hands and knees. The floor is a gleaming expanse stretching away before me. I plant my hands on it and push myself up into a runner’s crouch. Grandpa is shouting encouragement as though he’s at a horse race and I’m the odds-on favorite. I work my way into a squat, and then, hanging onto a nearby chair for support, I’m standing. Grandpa erupts with joy. He picks me up and whirls me around. I remember the room spinning, and Grandpa’s hat.
Grandpa always wore a battered tweed fedora set far back on his mostly bald head. His breath smelled of whiskey and his eyes crinkled when he smiled. When I was old enough to walk unaided, he took me on guided tours of the entire house, from basement to attic, and told me stories about every room. He knew the history of the house by rote and could recite the whole biography of every person who’d lived in it from 1868 onward. There was the master bedroom, in which three generations of Manns had been conceived. Each of the other bedrooms had been the residence of some Mann child or teenager or adult at one time or another; Grandpa knew stories about every one of them, and I heard these stories again and again until I myself had them memorized, and my ancestors were living, breathing entities who loomed as large in my memory as though they’d just left yesterday.
The only room that really interested me, however, was my father’s. It was the one room in the house that Grandpa kept dusted and scrubbed. The walls were lined with pictures of Eddie in his Boy Scout uniform, his football uniform, and later in his Air Force uniform. I spent several hours a week in there, looking at his pictures, hoping that perhaps I would learn something of my father just by being there. All I gained, however, was the overwhelming sense that he was not home. The room, for me, was empty.
I was free to wander through the house at will. The other bedrooms were thick with dust but still made up, as though the occupants of the house had gotten up en masse one day and walked away. The closets were full of moth-eaten clothing that hadn’t been popular for decades. I became particularly attached to a top hat that came down over my eyes, and I carried a polished walking stick that had belonged to my great-great-grandfather Willie, the builder of the house. His monogram was engraved in the gold handle. They were the first letters I learned to recognize: W.A.M. III—William Amos Mann the Third, founder of the present town of Mannville, at one time the richest person in Erie County, and the man for whom I—William Amos Mann IV—had been unofficially christened by Grandpa. With—as he told me later—a drop of whiskey dabbed on my forehead, not in the shape of a cross but the letter M.
“To hell with the church,” Grandpa used to say. “Church never did me any damn good at all. When it comes right down to it, boy, you got your family and that’s it. Jesus isn’t going to come floating down out of the sky and save your ass. You have to do it yourself. Or I will, for as long as I’m alive.”
The dank basement was lined with shelves and stocked with hundreds of Mason jars. Inside each jar was a solution of grain alcohol that preserved a different kind of herb. I learned to read the handwritten labels—henbane, feverwort, basil, wormwood, fennel. These amused me, the wormwood because I thought it came from worms and the henbane because chickens have always seemed to me an innately humorous animal. The jars were dusty from disuse. Grandpa hadn’t practiced the art of herbal healing in many years. I wasn’t allowed to touch the jars, but I learned to read my first words from them. Pushing my top hat back from my eyes, I would strain to read the labels on the highest shelves. These jars were up high because they were the most deadly. Hemlock was there, the plant that had brought death to Socrates, and so was an herb that could make a woman abort her unborn baby. Grandpa warned me repeatedly not even to think about touching those in particular. Death was a thing that he kept in a Mason jar, a real thing, too far away to help yourself to unless you were big.
In the evenings Grandpa sat in his rocking chair and I sat in his lap. There was always a large glass of whiskey within comfortable reach, and he breathed it on me as we read the paper together. These are the smells of my childhood—whiskey, newsprint. We started by looking at the photographs—in those days still of soldiers in the jungles of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos—and Grandpa made me tell him a story about each one. I invented them as I went. They always had a common thread. They were always about my father.
“That’s my daddy,” I would say, pointing to the photograph of a complete stranger—a nineteen-year-old from Iowa, perhaps, trying to look brave for the photographer and clutching an M-16. “He’s got a gun and a pet chicken named Fred. And he’s coming in his plane tomorrow.”
“Your daddy didn’t have buck teeth like that,” Grandpa would say. He co
uldn’t bring himself to remind me that my father wasn’t coming in his plane tomorrow, or ever. “Turn the page.”
Then we would plod our way through sentences from the Associated Press, I reading them out loud and Grandpa correcting me. By the time I was six I could pronounce all the words in a three-paragraph article, though I understood few of them. I went around the house reading everything: detergent labels, whiskey bottles, instructions on how to dismantle the Galaxie out in the old carriage house. I was, Grandpa said, a prodigy. There were two rooms on the second floor devoted to Grandpa’s books, and I began to plow my way through them, following Grandpa around from room to room or out to the carriage house, reading them in a sportscaster’s voice. He would pause—while banging together a rack of shelves or changing the Galaxie’s oil filter—to correct my pronunciation and inflection or to define words for me. Despite his lack of education, there was nothing my grandfather didn’t know, and he was determined that I should be even smarter and more well read than he. In this way my education began, long before I went to school.
Our only visitor in those days was Doctor Connor. He was a kind, soft-spoken man with large warm hands and white hair, and he arrived in a green Volkswagen every few weeks with his little black bag full of medical instruments and lollipops. After he had stuck a popsicle stick down my throat and made me cough twice while holding my balls, he would give me a cherry lollipop, my favorite, and he and Grandpa would sit down at the kitchen table with a bottle of whiskey between them. Sometimes I would read to the two of them from whatever book I was working on at the time—something from Steinbeck, or Livy’s Early History of Rome, which for some reason was a favorite of mine when I was very young. Doctor Connor would sit and listen in openmouthed bemusement as I read.
“Well, I guess he just skipped right over those books you bought him at Gruber’s,” he said once to Grandpa, and the two of them laughed as though enjoying an immensely funny private joke. I laughed too, which made them laugh harder because I didn’t know what I was laughing at. I didn’t know what I was reading, either, of course. But I liked the way the words sounded rolling off my tongue—my love affair with words had already begun. And it made me feel good to make them laugh. I listened as Grandpa and Doctor Connor sat and talked for hours, the level of whiskey in the bottle going steadily down, telling jokes and stories and sometimes arguing.
When they argued, their voices got louder and they banged the table with their fists. Sometimes, I knew, the subject of their arguments was me. Doctor Connor kept trying to convince Grandpa of something, and Grandpa would sit with his arms folded, shaking his head ceaselessly from side to side while Doctor Connor gesticulated and shouted and pleaded. I didn’t know exactly what they were arguing about, so I listened from the living room with the hope of gleaning some clue.
“There’s nothing they can teach him in school that I can’t teach him at home,” said Grandpa. “Just because of the ostriches, everyone thinks I’m an idiot.”
“You’re not an idiot,” said Doctor Connor. “You’re the most well-read man in the county. And Billy—he’s incredible. I’ve never seen anything like it. But he needs to meet other children!”
“Time enough for that later,” said Grandpa. “The world is full of people. He’ll get his fill of them by and by.”
“No he won’t,” said Doctor Connor. His voice was low and vehement now. “Not if you keep him locked up like this.”
“He’s not locked up,” said Grandpa. “I’m not some lunatic like you read about in the paper.”
“That’s what people are saying.”
“Let ’em! Let the bastards say whatever they want. I don’t care!”
“Tom,” said the doctor, “how long are you going to sit and stew over something that happened almost thirty years ago? Why can’t you forget it and get on with things?”
“Why can’t they?” Grandpa countered. That, as far as I could tell, was the end of the argument for that day. I was always relieved when they stopped yelling.
Aside from Doctor Connor and our occasional trips into town to buy necessities from Harold and Emily Gruber, we saw nothing of other people. Our nearest neighbors were half a mile away at the top of the hill. They were the Simpsons of the muddy blue eyes, and Grandpa never spoke of them without bitterness, so I learned not to ask what they were like. When we went into town in the Galaxie, I was permitted to talk with the Grubers and nobody else. “Walk tall,” Grandpa instructed me. “Hold your head up and look straight in front of you. Remember you’re a Mann, and we used to own this whole damn town and everything around it for a ten-mile radius.”
The Grubers were a kindly old couple who always fussed over me. Mrs. Gruber smelled like perfume, and she used to pick me up and let me choose a piece of candy from the row of shining glass jars they kept—licorice, gobstoppers, chocolate kisses, peppermints, and lollipops of an infinitely greater variety than the ones Doctor Connor carried in his black bag. Grandpa tolerated this with a sort of injured pride.
“Just one, now,” he warned me.
“Just one,” Mrs. Gruber would echo, and then when Grandpa wasn’t looking she would stuff my pockets with handfuls of whatever was closest. I thought she was an angel. She was the first woman with whom I fell in love. Grandpa always took the candy from me later, but he didn’t throw it away; he kept it in a tin on top of the icebox and let me have it back—one piece at a time, so I wouldn’t get sick.
But Grandpa’s warnings about not speaking to anyone were unnecessary, because nobody ever spoke to us. We passed people on the street who must have known who we were, but they ignored Grandpa and he ignored them. Sometimes grown-ups would sneak a smile at me. Later, when I got to recognize certain faces, I would smile back. But this was always surreptitious, and if Grandpa saw me do it he would give my hand a quick tug to make me remember his instructions: Walk tall. Head up. Look straight. You’re a Mann, damn it.
So I spent my time wandering the house and grounds, which were reduced from their former size of three thousand acres to one. That was big enough for me to be satisfied with. I climbed trees and built forts in the hedges that lined our little brook, talking to imaginary friends and conducting elaborate rituals to conjure up the spirit of my father.
Talking to ghosts was a pastime I had learned from Grandpa. He sat in his rocking chair and muttered to himself continually, sipping his whiskey and carrying on an endless dialogue with the ghosts who shambled through the empty house. Only he could see them, but we both knew they were there. It was a source of continual vexation to Grandpa that nothing in the house ever stayed where he had left it for longer than an hour. A hammer he’d placed on the workbench in the carriage house would go missing for three days and then turn up in the attic, standing on its head. Various sets of keys were often discovered hanging from the same bar in the same second-floor closet, the spread-able metal ring always somehow wrapped firmly around it so that Grandpa had to take the bar down to slide them off and hide them somewhere else. It was useless, of course. He was being toyed with, and he knew it. He even enjoyed it, for the most part. Only once did he ever lose patience with the forces at work in our home. One afternoon when Grandpa was preparing to fry me some baloney for lunch, he turned to reach for a spatula, and when he turned around again the frying pan was gone.
“Goddamn it!” he shouted. I was startled—I thought he was yelling at me. “I’m sick of this! Show a little care for your own family, why don’t you!”
The frying pan fell to the floor with a clatter—from the counter behind him. “Petulant,” Grandpa said, of the spirit who had been chastised. But his warning had struck a chord in some ghostly conscience; nothing more happened after that, at least nothing of which I was aware. This sudden show of respect convinced me that the ghost was somehow related to us. I thought of him as a sort of transparent cousin, one with whom I could have played if I chose. But ghosts bored me, with their despondency and their hints of the grave, and I didn’t stay in the house much aft
er that.
As my seventh year came to a close, I took to wandering farther and farther from the farmhouse. I spent entire days walking in the remnants of the forests that had once spread over the countryside like a race of giants. The trees existed now only in sparse patches of growth, cut down to make way for fields, which in turn gave way to mobile home parks and suburban neighborhoods. It was still possible to walk from the farmhouse to the shore of Lake Erie, half a mile away, without leaving the cover of the trees, but if I wished to avoid being seen by suburbanites I had to be stealthy. “Stay away from the white trash,” Grandpa warned me continually. That was his term for everyone who wasn’t a Mann. “They’re living on what used to be our cornfields.” I made a game of it. I spied on pudgy white-legged fathers as they barbecued hot dogs and mowed their lawns, eavesdropped on the conversations of clattery-voiced women as they hung their laundry. I discovered the nearby Lake on my own, thinking, like a miniature Hudson or da Gama, that it was mine, and I went to it frequently to play on the sand and to torture minnows. I also took to spying on the Simpsons.
The hill on which the Simpson house sat was surrounded at its base by the original forest, and on one side the trees crept up the slope far enough to afford ample cover for my missions of espionage. I lay concealed behind their trunks and observed the goings-on of the Simpson family. I was deeply curious about them—Grandpa spoke of them with such contempt that I thought they must be fascinating, whoever they were and whatever they were about. As far as I could tell, they didn’t do very much. Their house was dilapidated, in far worse repair than ours. The yard was strewn with the wreckage of old cars and other machinery. A few mangy chickens scratched in the balding grass, growled at occasionally by a large and ferocious dog of indeterminate background who otherwise lay on the warped boards of the porch and stared at nothing. He wasn’t much of a dog. He never detected me, and I never saw anybody pet him.
The Simpsons themselves appeared to be a tribe of corpulent and unmotivated Neanderthals whose sole pursuit was to watch television. That is, they sat in the living room and stared at what looked to me like a blue flickering light—we didn’t have a television, and I’d never seen one before, so the light was a complete mystery to me. There were several girls, most of them teenagers. The father had an impressive belly that extended far over his belt. He was always home. The sight of him, which was rare, was terrifying. He had small beady eyes, a walrus mustache, and a flabby white body. His daughters mirrored him in appearance with stunning genetic accuracy, except for one of them.
Eddie's Bastard Page 2
