Generally, we studied our long-dead mother and father in terms of their contrasting personalities, but really the mystery was their divorce, since they had always gotten along so well. Why would they have gone their separate ways, ending as solitary as Emily and me? Visiting them one at a time during our college years really scrambled our late upbringing; but we got through it and never felt that either of them was anything but blameless. Nevertheless, on our long weekend vacations in Key West we always did our best to add another fragment to the puzzle. This year we hit on our aunt Ada’s visit to Montana as a clue, a vein of rich insight or non sequitur, we couldn’t say, but it seemed to lead somewhere, a sort of clicking on the Geiger counter we were training on the marriage.
Aunt Ada had never been out west. I’m not sure she’d ever been outside the state of Maine or far from Lewiston, where our family had immigrated back when the place had big textile mills on the Androscoggin River and the families lived in ethnic enclaves that hardly exist anymore. Aunt Ada had two siblings, not counting Eloise, who had died as an infant: my mother and my uncle Martin. Martin drank himself to death, though he’d had an interesting life as a tennis player and a decorated OSS officer in the Second World War. Ada stayed in Lewiston, taught art at St. Dominic’s, and cared for my grandparents until they died, sacrificing her own life and happiness without complaint. She was a homely old maid. If she was bitter, we couldn’t tell, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t. It comes with disguises, and there was the feeling that it lay hidden in her energetic dowdiness.
My mother was a beauty and had modeled seasonal fashions at department stores in Maine while still a teenager. Ada, much older, had practically raised her, doted on my mother as though she were her own child, while my mother felt guilty all her life, as if her good looks and luck were to blame for Ada’s want of either. I do know that when my mother went off into marriage there was some pain, for both of them. They wrote each other, Ada sending “news from home” years after Montana was our mother’s home, and the latest from Lewiston, Maine, was painfully uneventful; though in retrospect our mother might not have felt that way at all.
My father was from Billings, Montana. My mother met him at a college dance in Boston, where both were students, she at a sort of finishing school that no longer exists, and he at MIT. My mother and her friends thought that since he was from Montana he must be a cowboy, and in fact he acted like one with many swaggering habits he had picked up from westerns. But he was a business-minded heir to a small scrap-iron fortune, anxious to strike out on his own and escape his social isolation as a Jew in Montana. He never gave up either his rakish cowboy habits or the clothing styles he had learned in Boston, remaining a tweedy Jewish cowboy, a horseman, a hunter, and a very keen businessman. My mother was a little too crazy about him and stood out in her own way with her imperishable Maine accent. Locals with defensive and shallow regional identity were quick to notice such things. By “a little too crazy about him” I mean there was an invisible wall of intimacy around them as a couple, which nobody, not even we children, ever quite broke through.
We revered our aunt Ada, my sister and I, when we visited her in Maine and from afar when we were home in Billings. She seemed to be a part of the place where she had lived her entire life, a keeper of ancestral graves and teacher of children. I remember thinking that she even dressed according to a Maine color scheme: brown, green, and a blue cloche, not a merry blue but a blue as dark as the local sea. Lobster-pot buoys hung around the doorway of the family home, a rusty old cottage, cozy enough in its day but too big for Aunt Ada, who rattled around inside its vacancies. The house was scantily decorated, with two formal photographs of our grandparents, Ada’s own oil painting of a fleet of catboats with multicolored sails, and plates hung, for some reason, as though they were pictures—lots of stuff referring to an idealized nautical past, though my grandfather had worked for the B&M Railroad, a greasy denizen of the switching yards.
Our home in Billings was so antic with my father’s high spirits, my mother’s follies, and my sister Emily’s cartoon addiction that I found something romantic, as well, about the solitary condition of Ada’s life. Until I reached the eighth grade I’d planned to be a commercial fisherman! My mother said, “Stick to lobster rolls and call it a day.” By the time of Ada’s only visit to Montana I no longer dreamed of being a man of the sea and had moved on to carrier-based fighter pilot. The TV always showed a war, and I gloated over all catastrophes befalling the enemy, particularly those produced by airpower.
We met Ada at the Billings airport back when passengers still descended from the plane on a kind of stairway—all of us, my father, whom she both admired and suspected, dapper in summer business wear; my mother in clothes so up to date they were misunderstood; my sister and me, annoying teenagers in fad-driven regalia.
Ada descended lugging a huge needlepoint valise, the everlasting cloche seized in one hand. We had never seen anything like it in this context, the spraddled gait, the oddly challenging gaze. My sister, Emily, later said with understandable but inappropriate precision that Ada looked like a Martian. Her face was mottled with excitement as she threw back her head to inhale the mountain air, of which there was very little, and replaced the cloche.
This year in Key West we revisited that scene, starting with Ada’s descent from the plane like—what?—something strange; but we loved her, didn’t we? Surely we did. I had a tattered little cabana deployed on the beach by the range light. My sister and I sat inside it furrowing our brows, with swimmers, families, dogs, wandering past. We felt pressured to pursue our suspicion.
We watched Ada cross the runway in the heat of a High Plains summer. We rushed to her in the terminal and embraced her, dislodging the cloche while my father made a swooping bow to help with the needlepoint valise. “I thought I’d never get here! The crowds at the airport in Chicago, everyone pushing and shoving. The gate agent, why she was a big, rude hog! I asked her a simple question and she snatched my ticket, answered me as though I was retarded, then shoved it back at me. I considered giving her big snout a twist!”
“Air travel is not what it used to be,” my mother offered with tense blandness.
“What’s in here, B?” my father asked, hoisting the valise with a self-effacing grin. We were a little startled by Ada’s vehemence about her travel experience, and my father was trying to lower the temperature. “Rocks?” was the wrong question, meant in good humor, but she merely looked at him. We knew what that look, well below our father’s altitude, meant: our mother had married the wrong guy. He still called her A, having long ago mistakenly called her Anna. “Ada’s m’handle,” Aunt Ada had said icily. So “A” it was, not to immortalize the correction, but out of my father’s fear of making the same mistake again. I’d once overheard him mutter, “Lots of names start with A.”
By now Ada was leading us through the terminal, my father, usually in command, bringing up the rear with the big purse. My little sister, Emily, ever intuitive, whispered, “Man the parapets.”
Looking back, I wonder if we should have ever pried Ada out of Maine with our persistent invitations. A gentle feature of the landscape by the currents of the Androscoggin, she was a guided missile in the desiccated atmosphere of Montana. An elaborate welcome dinner, two days away, was when she would show her stuff, a last and most vivid illustration of how nobody in my mother’s family could hold their liquor, with Ada laughing gaily at interior jokes only she could hear and which we worried were directed at us. We were pretty sure we were the targets. We could only gaze at her crinkled eyes streaming tears of merriment as she reviewed some private comedy, forgotten by morning, alongside our alarm.
In the first days of Ada’s visit we entertained her, driving her around the countryside, which she did her best to appreciate; but soon we realized that what we relished as open space Ada saw as vacancy. She was very nice about our mountains, rivers, and prairie; she complimented them formally but somehow conveyed that they were beside the po
int, gaping at them as though they didn’t make sense or remarking that the trees seemed too far apart. Before we knew it, my sister and I were rhapsodizing on the smell of the sea, the winding lanes and weathered shingles. It was the beginning of the dissonance we felt at having Ada in the house. My mother ate up the hometown anecdotes while we—my sister, father, and I—sat through them; though still in thrall to my lobster-ridden future, I was well on my way to the ambivalence which is, as they say at Tiffany’s, the house style.
“I hope you will come to see me in Maine,” said Ada firmly.
“For sure, Aunt Ada,” said my sister, Emily. She said “Ont,” not “Ant.” I took it as a ridiculous attempt to bond with her Maine relative. Ada grasped Emily’s shoulders, approving this ersatz moment, and said she would skip lunch and thought a nap would do her good. My mother had put her in the guest room on the north end of the house, with its own bathroom and a nice view of my father’s tomato garden. The rest of us dined together, a rarity at midday, when we were usually scattered. My father said, “Ada looks a bit out of place.”
“What exactly do you mean by that?” said my mother.
“Only that, really. We usually see Ada on home ground.”
“I would think this was home ground,” said my mother. “We are her family.”
You could cut it with a knife. My sister and I hardly ate and were soon off to preferable activities—my sister with her friends or on the phone, me playing pickup baseball—before it got any worse, but we were trailed by my poor father’s forlorn gaze. We left him alone at the table, palms up, as we fled.
On the beach at Key West that day, Emily said, “Mom still hung on to that Maine thing. She was a modern girl. She wasn’t going to give it up just because she got married.”
“And moved out west?”
“So what? It’s still America.” I didn’t take that up. I had no intention of arguing with my own sister. “Remember when Mrs. Halstead said Mom was ‘not from here,’ and Mom said, ‘Who the hell would want to be from here?’ ”
My sister and I had a few small jobs around the property. I was big enough to mow the lawn and clean the eave troughs; she took care of the marigolds that surrounded my father’s tomato patch. My father’s concern about my mother’s complete lack of interest in country things occasioned these small tasks around dirt. The marigolds planted to deter cutworms failed to do so. We had to go through the rows and pick the weirdly active slugs off the plants and drop them into a coffee can full of water. They horrified and fascinated Emily, especially since, on removal from the tomato plants, they twisted themselves into anguished Cs, which my sister imitated covering her face. The progress of the tomatoes through the summer until their apogee, when they lay heavy in the palm, broad and fragrant under my father’s slicing knife (a special one for tomatoes), was a rhythm that ended with frost-burned hanging leaves heralding long winter days of confinement. We hated school. Emily did well; I did poorly. I loved my teachers; she despised hers. They loved her. Mine hated me. During our long winters they prepared us behind darkened windows for life, and that’s what we were in now, one end of it, by the sea, whatever.
When we showed the worms to Ada, she said, “Mm-mm-mm. We don’t have those.” And when I mentioned to my father that back in Maine they didn’t have cutworms like that, he responded with startling vehemence. “Do they not? Well, I will tell you what they do have. They have big red-horned tomato worms that would give your poor sister nightmares.” I didn’t see the point of this, given that my sister was unlikely to ever see a Maine tomato worm. I already understood that my father took a dim view of my mother’s native state; but I didn’t see why he would impugn their tomato worms in comparison with ours, not then.
* * *
—
My father was taking me to baseball practice on his way to work. Ada stood next to the driver’s window and said, on a perfectly clear morning, that it would rain by afternoon. “She’s an old soul,” said my father sourly, turning on the radio. “She’s been here before.” And drove off.
It rained.
Ada had brought with her a videocassette of a silent movie, Down to the Sea in Ships, and we watched it in the dining room, twilit by the long day of northern summer. She was fascinated by Clara Bow, who played a rambunctious gamine in New Bedford, hoping to grow up to be a whaler. “A whaler?” asked my father, and my mother cut her eyes at him. He crossed his arms, hunched his shoulders, and continued watching. None of us could figure out how Clara Bow was also rumored to be on a wagon train heading up the Oregon Trail, as though turning her back on the whaling dream. It was just a ruse. We really were lost, but Ada had seen it many times and was able to mouth along with the silent actors while the rest of us drowsily took in the captions. We were startled into wakefulness when Ada cried out, “That’s the Apponegansett Meeting House!” One of the actors harpooned a whale and converted to the Quaker faith. When I asked Emily how she got through it, she said she pretended to be at the dentist’s. During the show, my father moved to the kitchen, stranded there, really, pulling things out of his briefcase and looking at them in a perfunctory way. When the lights came up, my mother went into the kitchen, and we heard her ask him why he hadn’t paid attention to the movie. My sister and I listened and didn’t move. If my father replied, I didn’t hear it.
My mother crossed the living room on her way to bed and said good night to us, noting that my sister was gazing at her with her mouth open. “I’m at the dentist’s,” said Emily. Then my father came through, dutifully following the same trail.
“ ’Night kids, ’night A. Thanks for sharing that very historic cinema. Sorry that I was tied up getting ready for my meetings tomorrow. Were you able to bring any other movies?”
Ada didn’t reply. This was war. There was another movie, Wake of the Red Witch, which she would leave behind on the guest dresser. I don’t think that was a mistake.
From then on my father made less of an effort to conceal his annoyance when Ada said that people around here seemed to have no expressions on their faces. “Do they have an interior life?” she asked no one in particular.
“That’s an excellent question, Ada,” my mother replied.
Ada stayed the short time of her original plan. I think we mostly enjoyed the visit, though we had to adjust to the rising formality that assured us of comfort while putting paid to the idea of any further visits to the West.
By the years of my Key West weekends, Emily and I were more than up to date on life’s accounts, and if the pleasures of this beach, the merry clouds, the misty blue sky, the children and dogs standing in the rollers, are any indication, we are well suited to approaching old age.
RIDDLE
I must have been renting a place on H Street in Livingston at the time so that I could meet clients in town. (My home was several miles up the valley toward Gardiner.) I had a model of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater I’d built in school on a library table in the front room. Most of my clients thought it was my own design. The H Street house was on an elevated lot facing the old sewing-machine store. I never went in there, but I recall that they sold machines with a foreign name that were said to hem, darn, baste, and stitch—back when people did those things instead of just throwing stuff away. Eventually, the place went out of business. I had only the ground floor of the house; the upstairs was occupied by a schoolteacher, who entered her apartment by way of a very unsafe-looking exterior staircase that undulated and squealed with her steps.
After drinking at The Wrangler until closing time one cold November night, I wandered around to Main Street, which was empty at that hour except for a crippled old cowboy who was making his way toward the railroad yards. There weren’t many of these fellows left, the ones whom horses had broken so often in accidents far from help, their hands still hard as lariats. They kept their worn-out Stetsons so you wouldn’t confuse them with railroaders. I had stopped to watch the old man, perhaps wondering how far he’d make it in his condition, whe
n a young boy, an urchin, appeared from an alley and called out to him, “Jack! Hey, Jack!,” and the old man turned toward the voice. I don’t know if I can put my finger on it after all this time, but the excitement or joy, or whatever it was that these two experienced when they saw each other has never left me. That’s all I can say about it. It was late at night on an empty street. Any euphoria I may have accumulated at the bar was gone. The pair met up and spoke in an animated way, though I couldn’t hear them from that distance. It doesn’t matter. I moved on before they did, and the boy is probably middle-aged by now, the old cowboy surely dead. Somebody later told me that he was born on the Cherokee Strip and had worked for Benny Binion. I’m not sure if that makes any sense.
We don’t remember everything, but I’d love to know who’s in charge of what we forget. If there’s a system, it escapes me. I still remember that old cowboy and the boy’s enchantment when I walk down Main, because heading home I was in a kind of trance that made me wonder later if I had dreamed the rest of the evening. I had not, of course, but it had that quality and it’s hardly certain where dreams leave off.
My head was clear as I drove home, out Old 89 under the stars. My home was some miles south toward Gardiner, a two-story frame house, built in 1905, with a still incorporated into the fireplace, in which the owner had made bottles of hooch to sell at country dances during Prohibition. My ears were still ringing from various Doobie Brothers covers by locals who’d learned rock and roll at an air force base in Spain. The earliest houses in the valley were set close along the road for easy access in deep snow. Their lights were off at that hour, and I could just make out their shapes as I drove; up on the ridges, new homes glowed with yard lights and long driveways, their owners indifferent to weather. I turned on the radio, in case my post-Wrangler Bar attention wavered. Walking in the door by myself at three in the morning would make me long for someone to live with—anyone—but I’d soon be asleep, and in the morning I’d be glad to be alone again and would remind myself that I had to keep better hours if I was going to get any work done.
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