Barefoot to Avalon

by David Payne

  –I’ll try, okay?

  –Okay.

  –I gotta run.

  –Me, too.

  The September sky outside my window is the same blue I remember over Boston.

  It’s 1969. I’m fourteen, in the backseat of the Country Squire with Bill driving and Margaret riding shotgun.

  We’ve spent two days heading north up 81, so Bill, who’s planned the trip with fanfare, can “smell the mountains” up there in the Shenandoah, where his father and his father’s people come from. Somewhere near Lexington one morning, where the clouds hang on the road, he stops the Country Squire, gets out and affects to wash his face and hands in them. He climbs back in, beaming. His mood suggests a victory march, a Second Honeymoon, a new beginning. Margaret—in dark glasses in the shotgun seat—studies him like a riddle she invested years in solving but that holds no further interest.

  She’s done, only here to see me in the lifeboat. As I look back, her silence hangs over that trip like a kind of doom as we cross the Susquehanna, where Lee passed with his troops in July of 1863, proceeding north through rich Pennsylvania farmland, past stone barns the Amish built to last forever. And this is the same route George A. and I will take thirty-one years later in the opposite direction.

  We arrive in Boston Saturday afternoon and throw our bags into the single room we’ve booked. Tired and later than we’ve planned, we set out on the walking tour, following the redbrick path along the Freedom Trail, through the Common to the State House, past the Old North Church, and finally across the river to the Constitution at her mooring, with her tarry rigging and her piles of antique cannonballs like black grapes. We’re somewhere in north Boston, lost, as dusk is falling. It’s time to start back to the hotel, and Margaret, still in her dark glasses, is walking half a block behind. When Bill calls, she won’t respond. He looks like he may scream or weep, that look that makes me want to comfort him, or else retreat into a bunker.

  Back at the hotel, Margaret heads into the bath and locks the door. Bill tears the water glass out of its wrap and fills it to the brim with J&B. We’re late for our dinner reservation, he tells her, knocking. No answer. Tossing his Scotch down with a wince, he refills the glass and regards me somberly, his eyes a charged void like the sky before a lightning storm.

  –Talk to her, okay?

  I wonder what it must have cost him to have to ask me and, when I knock, to hear her answer.

  At Anthony’s Pier 4, where Bill’s research has led us, Bill drinks harder till he’s slurring words and fumbling the Lucky Strikes he’s lighting. He’s making toasts, grand, purple ones—to us, to me, to my future—working us the way he worked those men around the tobacco barns in Vance and Warren Counties, confident his charms will win us. At adjoining tables, people have begun to stare, and I’m both mortified and angry at these strangers for regarding him with such expressions.

  Across from him, Margaret sits up straighter in her chair. She’s like an envoy at a parley who, before settling at the table, has carefully scoped out the location of the exits. Bill has planned this with such fanfare, though; he’s found the restaurant and ordered the expensive wine the sommelier’s suggested. All he wants is for us to join him in the artificial Happy Land he’s made, the one he’s generating on magician’s fingertips right now—see it like a snow globe, like a hologram, dancing amid crackles of cobalt-blue lightning. Because we can’t, the celebration’s turning dangerous, and Bill, who’s creating all the danger, wants our gratitude—expects it—and is starting to feel victimized when we withhold it. I know you so well, don’t I, Daddy, because I, who loved you more than anyone or anything in childhood, who took a blood oath never to be like you, became so anyway. Under the toasts, I hear the old theme: Go, Godspeed, goddamn you, go and have the victory that eluded me, the victory I thought I’d have but stepped aside to give you. And may your labors bring you the same happy fruits that mine brought me, the very same, my boy, tooth for tooth and eye for eye.

  When we return to the hotel, he steers Margaret through the lobby toward the bar and sends me upstairs to the room. There, I shine my loafers—they’re black with tassels—and lay out the new blazer Margaret bought for me last week in Raleigh. We took a special trip to Nowell’s and had lunch in Cameron Village the way that she did once upon a time with her father, the first George A., before she went off to St. Mary’s. She encouraged me to buy a winter coat as well, and I picked the most beautiful one they had there, a knee-length herringbone with a tapered waist and a black velvet half collar. Thinking of it now, that coat strikes me as the sort you’d buy if you imagined New England winters as Currier and Ives affairs of horse-drawn sleighs with tinkling harness bells and Exonians as little investment bankers disporting on the Upper East Side or East Egg. What I find curious now is how much I loved it, the careless and un-self-critical entitlement with which I picked it out, the same way I picked Exeter. I wanted both with unreserved longing and asked straight-out, the way George A. asked for and got the Gibson and so many things before and after, and look what happened to me, little bro, which is how I know.

  Asleep on the rollaway, I wake up to the sound of breaking glass. Margaret’s crying in the bathroom. When I knock, Bill roars, Go away! in that voice that rang the crystal in the cupboard. When I don’t, he opens the door in nothing but a towel that does little to conceal the state he’s in.

  –Get back in bed or else I’m going to kill you, he says, and it’s as if our life together is a swath of decorative wallpaper that suddenly tears and shows the black depths of outer space.

  One of Bill’s eyes is bright, avid, fixed, a bird of prey’s, the other has a drooping lid. I sense that he’s been awaiting this encounter for some time. Let us go then, you and I . . .

  –Bill? Bill!

  Margaret’s cry breaks his fixed attention. Eventually they emerge and climb into the big bed. For a moment, things grow quiet. On the rollaway, I turn my back and lie there with a pounding heart, wondering if it’s over, and if it isn’t, what then? The bedsprings start to creak now. When I turn, Margaret’s up and running toward the window, and Bill, staggering after her with arms extended like Frankenstein’s monster, corners her against the bank of windows that looks out from a high floor north and east across the Harbor. There’s a bed lamp on the table. Am I going to have to pick it up and hit him? I’m paralyzed, and just before he reaches her, Bill trips and crashes facedown like a tree felled in the forest. Margaret’s hands are at her mouth. We wait for him to stir. He doesn’t.

  The next thing I remember, the lights are on, and Margaret’s pacing up and down the room, shaking her hands as though to force blood into them. As she dresses and swabs away her makeup, she sends me off to find his wallet, which I retrieve from his pants pocket, strewn in the entry. When I hand it to her, she takes my cheeks between her hands and stares at me.

  –I’m sorry, baby, she says, I’m so sorry, I have to go, I have to.

  –I know. Go, Mama.

  And go she does, downstairs to a taxi to the airport.

  Left alone with him, I sit there all night in a chair posted like a guard. What do I feel? Looking back, that seems the all-important important question, but this sector of the drive is hopelessly corrupt now. Applying such forensics as I can, through the noise and static, I think I hear the fourteen-year-old I was then saying, What about those summer mornings in the oil truck, Daddy? What about when we rolled the windows down and sang “The Wabash Cannonball” and “The Big Rock Candy Mountain”? What about Holy Innocents on Sundays, when we stood and sat and knelt on cue and pledged ourselves to the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins and the resurrection of the body? Was all of it a dream, a bullshit dream, an artificial Happy Land you generated like a snow globe on magician’s fingertips? And if this isn’t so, if I’ll feel better in the morning or next year, then tell me how we got here.

  It’s Bill I charge, not Margaret. It’s
as if her leaving happens in accordance with an old agreement we’re both party to and understand our parts in. Where did we solemnize that contract?

  That night after her departure, I stare north toward the Mystic River Bridge in the distance, and off the other way, east, across the black sweep of the Harbor, toward the runway lights at Logan, where occasionally a plane takes off, one of them carrying Margaret. As the shock recedes, I feel like Brother A gazing through the porthole of my spaceship at the blue orb growing small beneath me, floating amidst pinprick stars and twinkling galaxies, and around me the room is like a crime scene—this is the hotel room I flash to at Avery five years later when I wake up in my clothes with Springsteen turning on the platter.

  As the light comes up over East Boston, Bill, lying facedown on the carpet, stirs and sees me at my post there. His first impulse is to smile, and then, as he notes his nakedness, his position in the room, the calculations chalk themselves across the blank slate of his expression. One thousand one, one thousand two . . . And maybe to him now the room is like a crime scene.

  –Where’s your mom? he asks me, covering up.

  He remembers nothing, so I have to tell him. My tone, as I set out, is furious and petulant. Before long, I’m sobbing.

  He listens with a vacant look, his mouth open slightly.

  Then he calls his mother. He puts me on the phone with Letty down in Henderson.

  –He raped her, I say as Bill sits listening.

  –No, no, your daddy would never do that, Letty says. You must never say or even think such a thing. Things go on between men and women in a marriage that you can’t understand and won’t until you’re older. You misunderstood.

  She’s right, isn’t she? “Rape” is a primitive word. Whatever happened, Bill didn’t consummate his action, and maybe he blacked out because he didn’t really want to, or perhaps that’s only wishful thinking. In any case, Letty’s right, he didn’t rape her, but at the time I can’t let Letty have this. Because whatever Bill did or didn’t do to Margaret, I feel violated by his action. At the time, my underlying sense is, If I let her, let them take this from me, if I let Letty attribute the injury I feel to a failure in my maturity and understanding, I’m lost, I won’t survive it.

  When Letty tries, when she pits her formidable will against my will, I feel it as a pressure in my chest and lungs. It’s like a burning coal I’ve swallowed somewhere long ago, and Letty’s message is, You must never spit it out. To spit it out is a betrayal of your father, your people. This is what it means to be a member of a family.

  And I recall a Sunday afternoon at her house on Oxford Road when Letty told the story of her father, Edwin Finch, owning the first car in Henderson. As she reminisced, she went into a brightness, an artificial Happy Land. Letty, too, wanted—expected—us, her audience, to share the happiness this story gave her, whose point boiled down to her family’s priority over all the other families in the town. And one day Margaret said, I thought that belonged to Mr. E. G. Davis. Margaret said this with disingenuous innocence, and Letty’s smile flashed.

  –No, dear, you’re mistaken.

  Margaret has the burning coal inside her now, and Letty’s flashing smile says, Go ahead, I dare you.

  –I always heard that it was Mr. E. G. Davis, Margaret repeats, with less conviction.

  –No, dear, you’re incorrect. Whoever told you that was misinformed or telling you a fib.

  Letty is too much for Margaret finally. When I turn to Bill, wondering whether he’ll weigh in and how, he’s beside the window. I recall him sitting straighter in his chair, I recall the way his Adam’s apple bobs, I see the expression of concern and hypervigilance on his handsome, expressive face, before he turns away and gazes out across the lawn, where a shadow falls as though there is a rheostat behind the sun and only Letty Payne controls it.

  And would it have been worth it, after all . . .?

  Somewhere Bill apparently decided that it wasn’t, and when he puts me on the phone with Letty I think it’s to refresh the lesson Letty taught him, that to be a member of a family means to keep the coal inside and live with it and call the damage loyalty. And because I can’t bring myself to challenge him, I challenge Letty.

  –Don’t tell me what I understand! I was there, you weren’t. I didn’t misunderstand, you did. You.

  And I’m screaming as I say it.

  That afternoon, bleary-eyed and suffering, Bill drops me at Main Street, my dorm at Exeter, and pulls away up Water Street in the old Country Squire, and in a way that’s my last glimpse of him, my father—ours—whose next stop will be Atlanta, where in order to avoid the possibility of prison for the theft of Mary Rose’s timber, he goes without his pension and retirement, with no job, no money and a lis pendens on his property, and after that those washouts in the Shenandoah, where he disappears like Eric Robert Rudolph after the bombing in Atlanta, vanishing into the mists along the ridgelines and river bottoms up there in his father’s father’s country.

  That night Margaret calls the dorm and the housemaster comes to get me. The moment I see the black receiver on his desk, I start to sob, and he looks at me with the expression people wear at funerals and shuts the door behind him.

  –I want to come home.

  –I know, baby, I know how upset you are, and I’m so sorry about what happened, David. But you’ll feel better in a day or two. Believe me.

  –I won’t.

  –This is the start of a wonderful opportunity for you. I have every confidence in you. We all do. Every confidence.

  –I want to come home, Mama. Please.

  –I’m sorry, baby, there’s no home left to come back to.

  And there’s the beginning of an answer to the coach’s question . . .

  What happened to your heart, Payne?

  I guess my family broke it.

  Boo hoo, son, whose family didn’t?

  You’re right, Coach, I know you are. Put me back in the game, okay?

  Thataboy . . .

  So I get up in the morning and put on my blazer and a new shirt; I have eight—four white, four blue, one for each day of the week, plus an extra for Phillips Church on Sundays. I knot my tie the way Bill taught me, smiling at me in the bathroom mirror, his hand on my shoulder as I wrapped it.

  On my way to class I pass the substantial Georgian buildings. Two hundred years of New England weather have washed the brick to a soft patina. The old elms and maples on the path cast pools of black and ample shadow that contrast with the slant gold of northern sun on the lawn of the Academy Building. Above the entry door is chiseled: Huc Venite, Pueri, Ut Viri Sitis. Enter Here, Boys . . . something . . . something . . . In the dorm at night, I cry for hours.

  In the early going what most disturbs me are the older boys with their long hair and wire-rims. They look disreputable and sallow, like Bolsheviks plotting the overthrow of something. And their clothes resemble sackcloth sewn by prison labor—not the sort you’d find at Nowell’s. And while we’re at it, what’s this music?

  In Henderson, at my farewell party, we listened to the Supremes and the Temptations, the boys in khakis, tassel loafers, V-necks, the girls in pleated skirts and soft angora sweaters, wearing strings of junior pearls they borrowed from their sisters. Now, blasting from an upper floor of Dunbar Hall, I hear

  God said to Abraham kill me a son . . .

  And . . .

  . . . talking ’bout my guh-guh-generation . . .

  A third-floor window rattles up and a flag unfurls—blood-red with a yellow star: the flag of the People’s Democratic Republic of North Vietnam.

  I appear to have touched down on another planet.

  It’s the fall of 1969, the Days of Rage. As the Weathermen plot to take down the Drake Hotel in Chicago, the dean speaks to us in assembly about Exeter’s “institutional policies.” An older boy stands up in back.

 
; –That’s right, he shouts through cupped hands, Mother Exeter’s an institution, and when they screw you here, they screw you institutionally.

  Half the room erupts in cheers, the other half in hisses. I gaze around the elegant hall—with its chandeliers and columns, its portraits of old headmasters in regalia—uncertain whether I want to join these boys and burn down something or beat the disrespectful fuckers senseless.

  My first night in Main Street, mad guitar licks boom from the floor below me and I go out to listen in the stairwell. Descending to the landing, I take three big running strides, launch myself into the air and slap the header, stretching for the highest line of cinder blocks and landing on the offender’s threshold in a backward cat crouch. Over and over, I hurl myself, making my presence as difficult to ignore as his is. Subtext: Whoever you are, get out here and let’s settle this.

  And sure enough, the door cracks and a fellow looks out with dark, slightly widened eyes whose depth reminds me of George A.’s and my mother’s. A handsome Jewish kid with a head full of loose, dark curls—a “Jew-fro,” he calls it ­presently—Eric Rosen has a city pallor that strikes me as both glamorous and sickly. I invite him out to have a jumping contest; he invites me in to have a schnecken and listen to Led Zeppelin.

  –What’s a snecken?

  –Schnecken, he corrects me.

  –Snecken?

  Eric’s laugh is like a whinny, high and nasal, so incontinent that it infects me, too, and I crack up with him. What intrigues me in the early going is the way Eric lobs non sequiturs into conversation, whoopee cushions of wit that either stop discussion cold or wrench it in some new direction. Fruit flies like a banana . . . Time wounds all heels . . . Eric has an endless stock, he’s like a scholar, and he also mints his own and sometimes his mintings are so good—or bad—that I can’t tell what’s original, what facsimile. Something about this reminds me of my father. For the way Bill charmed those tobacco farmers around the barns was with verbal brio, too. Bill, for instance, would never simply tell them it was cold, he’d say it was so cold the squirrels were stacking cordwood and putting bounties on their relatives to procure additional fur coats. And when I say such things to Eric, he laughs that whinnying laugh, and whether he’s laughing with me or at me I can never be quite certain. In lieu of jumping, words become our contest and collaboration. It begins that first night as I sit on his bed eating schnecken and hamantaschen Eric’s mother has sent up from a bakery on lower Fifth Avenue. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a pastry box before—the paper doily’s fancy! As I eat, I study the album jacket Eric hands me—white, with the ominous silhouette of an airship, the Hindenburg aflame and passing over. This is a new band, Eric tells me, the guitarist is Jimmy Page from the Yardbirds, and though I’ve never heard of Jimmy Page or the Yardbirds, after the music’s initial shock-and-awe assault, I begin to note the strangeness of Robert Plant’s voice, like a mad crone shrieking prophesies in the stone tower of a medieval castle that isn’t even medieval, and as “Good Times, Bad Times” segues into “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You,” I begin to get what’s happening among the Bolsheviks in wire-rims.