Screening Room

by Alan Lightman

  “Oh, come on, honey,” my father pleaded.

  Lennie sometimes joined us at Kentucky Lake, a “welcome escape,” as she put it, from one of her husbands. Lennie’s preferred activity at Kentucky Lake was to sit in the hotel bar at all hours in full makeup and survey the clientele who walked by, especially the male clientele, her pockets slowly becoming stuffed with names and room numbers written on napkins. As the Kenlake Hotel was moderately priced, Lennie plowed through broad strata of social territory, from lawyers to insurance salesmen, all of them intéressant.

  Lennie didn’t like to sail any more than my mother did, and she was far too much of a southern flower for outdoor exertions, but she loved the romance of the sea, and she ventured onto the boat so that she could later tell tales to her friends. However, she would develop a headache or some other ailment while we were miles offshore and insist that we turn around immediately and take her back to the landing. She spoiled many outings. Nevertheless, on the drive back to Memphis, Lennie always happily babbled about the marvelous trip she’d had.

  As the years went by, my father became more and more vexed with Lennie’s behavior. Quietly, he took countermeasures. When she asked to return to the dock, he sailed in the wrong direction. On the next outing, Lennie brought a navigational chart and kept pointing her finger like a weathervane in the direction of the landing. My father remarked that we would have to sail “into the wind” to get back and took endless tacks, zigzagging for hours. Whereupon Lennie purchased a sailing book and learned the relation between wind direction and points of sail. My father then asked Lennie to pitch in and haul the jib sheets, which blistered her hands. She bought gloves. My father deliberately ran aground, stranding us all in the boat for a half day. Gradually, Lennie’s outings with us tapered off. But for a long time, she exhibited heroic photographs of herself on the boat wearing foul-weather gear and hiking straps.

  On the days that we didn’t eat lunch on the boat, we drove to a little family-run restaurant near Gilbertsville that made fried chicken. Looking out of the restaurant, which was really only three tables on a screened porch, you could see a dirt road and a tractor, meadows rolling off to the horizon, and a quiet pond. The family also kept bees, housed in two wooden boxes sitting on cement blocks in the backyard. While we ate on the screened porch, we could hear the buzzing of the bees, like a soft chorus of background music. Instead of salt and pepper, every table had two jars of fresh honey. We dipped our fried chicken in the honey, which had the flavor of oranges. There were plenty of serving hands. I recall that the family had seven children, including, to my surprise, an adopted African-American boy who was always licking a stick covered in the wonderful orange-blossom honey.

  At night, after dinner, the six of us watched television in my parents’ room or played gin rummy, a game my mother loved. Some evenings, we walked along a path by the lake. It was cool, and the opposite shore glinted with the lights of cabins in the woods. By nightfall, all the tensions of the day had evaporated with the mist on the water. Nothing needed to be organized or packed, there was no danger of unintended jibes or low bridges. We were just a family together.

  I recently saw a photograph of the large resort that has replaced what I remember of the Kenlake Hotel. I’ve not been back since 1962, when I was thirteen. Sometimes, I imagine those early mornings on the hotel balcony, my brothers dropping little parachutes of Kleenex and string over the rail, my parents sleepy with their coffee, the old man with suspenders turning on the sprinklers.

  Portrait of the Family at Home

  During my childhood, as my brothers and I remember it, my father disappeared to his reading chair when he came home from the office, joined the family briefly for dinner, and then disappeared again. The succession of one son after another, while my mother kept trying in vain for a daughter, left my father overwhelmed, and finally detached. We were four boys, born in the space of five years, and our house was chaos. But Dad was detached. Sitting in his chair in the living room, he could read through any amount of yelling and screaming around him, stirring only to turn a page. During the course of an evening, he might say a dozen words. He never knew what clothes hung in our closets or what sports we played after school or what girls we had taken a fancy to. He lived in his own world.

  There were exceptions to these vacancies. My father was an amateur flute player, and, for a few years in the early 1960s, a group of musicians came to our house every Tuesday night to play Bach and Handel with him. During intermissions, we could hear Dad in the next room talking to the other players. If we asked, my father would always help us with our school homework, especially when it involved the delicacies of literature. I remember one evening—I was thirteen or fourteen years old—when I came home with “The Raven” to dissect. Dad put down his newspaper and began reciting the verses from memory, then praised the rhythm and alliteration of the poem. After this we had a lively discussion about the meaning of the last lines: “And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor / Shall be lifted—nevermore!”

  Sometimes, the silences were enough. He and I once sailed around Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket for a week, just the two of us. One day during the trip, a thick New England fog rolled in, and the land disappeared. Looking out, we couldn’t see beyond twenty feet in any direction. We were most afraid of colliding with a ship, so we would ring a bell every minute or two and attempt to gauge our position by the compass heading and a continual estimation of the speed of our boat. We could have been in outer space. Although he said nothing to me, nor I to him, we were together, and I felt connected to him. But these few moments of communion were only scattered dim lights against a dark empty night. For many years I tried to talk to my father, tried to draw him out of that empty night, but I did not try very hard, and I came to accept his small and almost invisible existence as a part of the world.

  When it came to disciplining their children, my parents developed a system of demerits. On the kitchen wall hung a large blackboard, on which was chalked a column for each of the four boys. When one of us broke a standing rule, such as no fighting or no cursing or no lying, he would receive a predetermined number of demerits based on the particular crime, chalked neatly in the appropriate column. Demerits for nonstandard offenses were assigned in the heat of the moment by my mother, who often violated several rules herself in the course of engaging with the situation. One year, my brother John smoked all the cigarettes in M.A. and Celia’s house next door. Three demerits. Another year, my brother Ronnie managed to coax several twelve-year-old girls into taking off their clothes. Ten demerits. I myself ruined numerous carpets and rugs with chemical experiments gone awry. I once spilled a noxious brown mixture of sulfur and calcium carbonate. Five demerits.

  When Mother was particularly stressed by the bad behavior of one of her children, she would faint, falling in a crumpled heap on the floor. This happened at least once a month. Whereupon we would call Blanche to apply the smelling salts to revive her. “What happened?” my mother would always say when awakened, to great dramatic effect, as if this were the first time in her life she had collapsed. “You fainted, Mizz Lightman,” Blanche would reply. Mother would remain on her back for several minutes. With her boys hovering over her, she would hold Blanche’s hand and say, “What would I do without you, Blanche Lee? You are the only one who loves me.”

  But we knew that our mother loved us. Every week, she would ask each of us to come to her, one by one, sit on the edge of her bed, and tell her all that was happening in our lives. I craved her attention and came to depend on these weekly conversations with her. Years later, long after I had moved away and had a family of my own, Mother would call me up unexpectedly and say, “I just suddenly felt like I wanted to talk to you.”

  The most memorable misdemeanor of our childhood occurred in the early 1960s. My father kept the liquor of the house locked in a bar in the den. One day, he discovered a bottle missing. He was certain that one of his sons was the culprit and question
ed us on the subject. My brothers and I denied the accusations. Then my father interrogated each of us individually, his manner calm but penetrating. By this time, each of us suspected that another brother was lying, but everyone stuck to his story. An avid reader of murder mysteries, Dad announced that he was going to take fingerprints at the crime scene. Now was the last chance for a confession. He stared hard at each one of us, but no admissions of guilt were forthcoming. Then, to our horror, he proceeded to sprinkle some kind of dust on the counter of the bar and make numerous fingerprints with a kit he had purchased. After that, Dad made fingerprints of each of us with his inkpad and paper. While we fidgeted and shot one another frightened and suspicious glances, Dad cloistered himself in the living room with a magnifying glass and a book on the subject. After some time, he came out, defeated. Apparently the results were ambiguous. He couldn’t make a definitive match, but he couldn’t rule any of us out either. As I remember, a compromise was reached in which he divided the demerits for that particular offense among the four of us. To this day, none of us knows who stole that whiskey bottle.

  Ronnie consistently racked up the greatest number of demerits. As soon as he reached the age of puberty, Ronnie hauled a mattress out to the storage closet adjoining our garage and converted it into a mini love nest, where he would invite girls. Several times my parents removed the mattress and replaced it with a couple of lawn mowers, but Ronnie kept rebuilding his nest. Finally, my father had the closet boarded up entirely.

  Each night at dinner, while Blanche journeyed back and forth through the swinging door between the dining room and the kitchen, Mother would recite the day’s transgressions to my father, who listened without comment or reaction. At the end of the week, the demerits were tallied. It was my father’s job to mete out the punishments. He gave us licks with a paddle, wrapping a handkerchief around the handle so the violent blows wouldn’t hurt his hand. A mathematical formula determined the number of blows from the number of demerits. You were allowed three demerits without punishment. So, you subtracted three from the number of demerits and multiplied the remainder by two. That was the number of licks coming your way. By the time of judgment day each Sunday, we had often forgotten what we had done wrong the preceding week; all of our sins were summarized in a single number. We would line up for our punishment, walk into the torture chamber one by one, and pull down our trousers. When it was my turn, I studied my father’s face afterward, hoping to see some emotion—regret, distress, anger, satisfaction. Instead, there was nothing, the worst punishment of all.

  My parents may have believed that the demerit system increased their authority, but as far as I can remember, the system and its weekly punishments did not deter us from a single crime. Instead, we folded it all into the throbbing cosmos of youth, a space we must crawl through to attain adulthood.

  Salerno I

  I suspected that my father had hidden landscapes within him. Much of his life I learned from my mother. One cloudy fall afternoon, in the soft cave of her bedroom, she told me about one of Dad’s girlfriends before the war, a young woman named Ginny Tate. In the large box of jumbled old photos my parents kept, I found a photograph of my father and Ginny, dated 1941. Ginny has a high wave of hair, a round moon of a face, delicate eyebrows, and slanted eyes, almost Asian. She is not as pretty as my mother, but she is sweet and happy in the photograph. My father is handsome in a coat and tie, boyish. They hold hands, not just with the palms touching but with the fingers interlocking. According to my mother, Dad was terribly in love with Ginny, and she with him. They met at Vanderbilt, and they would go to the airport at night and watch the planes take off and land. Ginny wrote poetry. My father actually proposed to her, shortly before he joined the navy. She accepted. Then her mother became gravely ill with complications from diabetes. Ginny was an only child, and she decided that she needed to devote all of her energies to taking care of her mother. A few months later, she stopped answering Dad’s letters.

  It was my mother who told me of Dad’s dangerous work in the war. He was a commissioned officer in charge of a small fleet of landing craft. These craft were about fifty feet long, blue-gray, and they carried men and supplies from the transport ship to the beach under attack. During a landing, the transport ship would approach to within about ten miles of the enemy beach, just beyond the range of artillery, then anchor and dispatch the invading force to shore aboard the landing craft. The landing craft were good targets. Artillery shelled them. Enemy aircraft flew over and strafed them. It was easier and more efficient to kill men huddled together in a small boat than spread out on the beach after they had landed. Dad was constantly frightened, according to Mother. The most perilous invasion happened in September 1943, when the U.S. Fifth Army, borne on five hundred U.S. warships, attacked the coastal city of Salerno in an attempt to drive the Germans out of Italy. Dad’s orders were to deposit men and supplies at a particular point on the beach, to build a road for advancing American troops. German tanks on a ridge began bombarding them. “He could have died that day. Then where would you and your brothers be?”

  Phasma I

  I have been in Memphis for a week. At a grocery store yesterday, the clerk at the checkout counter gave me a smile and said in an unhurried and gracious manner, “How are you on this beautiful day?”

  “Very fine, thank you.” I said.

  “How lucky we are to be here on such a beautiful day,” he said.

  For the first time in decades, I am beginning to feel that I might be home again.

  One evening Nate takes me out for a drive, to show me new parts of the city. Unexpectedly, he unveils his theory about the ghost that haunts the Lightman family. “It’s all in the Kabbalah,” says Nate, whispering to me although he and I are the only people in the car. In Kabbalah, the mystical element of Judaism, there is a concept known as gilgul neshamot, which literally means “cycle of souls.” The Kabbalists believe that the spirit of a dead person can inhabit the body of another individual, and then another, forever. When the deceased is a benevolent patriarch of the family and the person inheriting his good soul is a blood descendant, the idea merges with another Hebrew expression, zechut avot, meaning “merit of our fathers.” But when the wandering ghost of the father not only creates further good deeds but also wreaks havoc and destruction, when that ghost can reach out with its shadowy hand over many generations, both visibly and invisibly, when that ghost is so powerful and big that it can control the joys and sorrows and even the destinies of sons and daughters and their sons and daughters like a wind blowing small boats at sea, then the idea has blossomed into some bigger thing without a name. But the phenomenon exists. According to Nate, M.A. Lightman, my grandfather, unleashed a gilgul neshamot and a zechut avot and a dybbuk, an evil spirit, all in one gasp. M.A.’s presence and power did not die with his body fifty years ago, says Nate. For good and for ill, his ghost has haunted my father, my uncles and aunts, me and my brothers and cousins and numerous other Lightman descendants. His ghost has even haunted innocent bystanders like Nate, who tripped into the family by marriage late in life.

  Phasma. That’s what Nate and I decide to call the thing. The phasma can spread sideways to brothers and sisters. The phasma does not necessarily obey the usual relations between time and space. It can act during the lifetime of the patriarch, and it can even reach backward in time to fasten its grip on family members who lived out their days long before the patriarch was born. In other words, the phasma can originate at one tick in time and then creep out from there in both directions of time, future and past. No one can control a phasma. Being aware that a phasma is at work offers no help, and being unaware also offers no help. “It’s a weird, weird thing,” Nate whispers to me as he drives carefully down dark streets. “But then everything is weird. We’ve got a problem, my friend.”

  Joseph Patrick Kennedy, the powerful and ruthless patriarch of the Kennedy family, undoubtedly created a phasma. It is easy to see the phasma’s ambitious hand in the shoving of Jos
eph’s son John to the presidency, although in this case the phasma pulled a trick and first murdered older brother Joe Junior, whom Joseph had been grooming for president. (Which illustrates another point about the phasma: it can deceive and mislead even the patriarch himself.) Not so obvious was the death of John’s son, JFK Jr. After his private plane crashed off Martha’s Vineyard in 1999, the National Transportation Safety Board called the cause of the crash “spatial disorientation.” “Not a chance,” says Nate. “It was the phasma.”

  According to Nate, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart created a phasma that sang. The phasma, drunk with Mozart’s genius, stumbled backward in time to over forty years before Wolfgang was born in order to sing an aria from Lucio Silla to his paternal grandmother, Anna Maria Sulzer. Certain documents attest to the fact that one day the girl clearly heard the melody in her head, sixty years before her grandson would write it. But the phasma was not satisfied. The next morning, sixteen-year-old Anna was walking in the woods when she found a box containing a hundred silver thalers, a gift from the phasma that made her ambitious and gracious and that completely changed her life.

  “Which all goes to show,” says Nate, as we creep up to a red light at Poplar and Perkins. “Keep your eyes open. You know what I’m saying?”

  You Ain’t Nothin’ but a Hound Dog

  (photo credit p3.1)

  Blanche

  On a rainy day in 1960, I got on a bus at the corner of Cherry and Poplar. I was eleven years old, and I was headed downtown. As usual, the white passengers occupied the front seats and the black passengers the rear. There were no empty seats in the front of the bus, so I took a seat in the back, where there were plenty of vacancies. After a few moments, the bus driver pulled over to the side of the road and stopped the bus. He walked back to where I was sitting and gently informed me that I was sitting in the “colored section” of the bus. “But there aren’t any seats up there,” I said, confused. The bus driver stood his ground, waiting patiently for God to make things right. Eventually, one of the white passengers in the front moved over and sat on the lap of another white passenger, creating an empty seat for me.