I tore it into tiny pieces. I was ashamed. Not of the person who wrote it, of course. Of myself for having received it. I missed Westcliff and Mrs. Westbrook bad.
Next morning, November 4, the scene in chapel was hangdog. How on earth had Johnson won all but six states? Even Texas went for him. “For your information,” Fenton told me (he was big on beginning sentences that way), “Johnson stole this whole thing.” He had a very injured look on his face, which I wanted to wipe off. Had I been sixty-four and not twelve on that November morning, I’d have been armed with the wit to say: “Fenton, or Sammy, or whatever your name is, this election he did not steal.”
• • •
Seventh grade wore on. Doing my damnedest to fit in, I bought a copy of 101 Ways to Popularity, a manual for every teenage difficulty from acne to what to say to a friend whose father has gone to jail. I studied the gilded kids—how they walked and sat down and got up; how they cajoled and mocked and huddled; how they slightly modified the school uniform—in order to work out a style of my own. I needed loafers like Fritz’s and a wristwatch like Pete’s. But it was their attitudes I most longed to impersonate: their weary sarcasms, their humongous boredom, their pissed-off shrugs and merciless eye rolls. Oh, what was the point? I was neither sarcastic nor bored nor pissed off nor contemptuous. I was earnest, excited, eager to please. And explanatory.
Unbearably explanatory.
And a figure of fun, needless to say. I carried around—strictly for pretention—a copy of a book too rich for my blood or anybody’s: The Sound and the Fury. “You read dumb things,” said the prettiest girl in our grade, who went on to fame when she married the lead singer of the worst rock group of the seventies. (I assert this without fear of contradiction: The Eagles were the worst.) Still with me is that copy of Faulkner, defaced by a swastika some classmate drew on it. I attempted to make the insignia unrecognizable by turning it into four boxes.
Our physical education (and world history) teacher, Dennis Butz, a Dartmouth graduate and mouthy about it, had come under the spell of survivalism, recently popularized in the United States by favorable coverage of the Colorado Outward Bound School. In his mind we were not schoolboys but raw recruits. To please him we inched our way through corrugated tubes, rolled boulders uphill, climbed cargo nets and so on. Mr. Butz and Outward Bound were going to make men of us, and devil take the hindmost.
The hindmost was me. Butz packed his charges into the back of a pickup and drove into the wilderness due east of school. “Eat my dust!” he called out, raising a cloud of it as he abandoned us there. We ran hopefully west, I keeping up with the pack for a while. Then I found something too interesting not to examine, a horned frog and her babies in a nest. “Horny toads” had gotten scarce even then. The babies were perfect miniatures of their mother. I studied them awhile, then decided to catch up to the group. But there were brambles and stickers and now a fearsome itch began to migrate from my chin and neck and to fan out over my chest. The aura of an asthma attack. In no time I was fighting for air. I watched the rest of the boys vanish as a man overboard might watch his ship disappear.
My emergency pump—trade-named Medihaler in those days—was back in the locker room. Here I was, alone and suffocating and with no corticosteroid to inhale. The late-November air, crisp and sparkling, was all at once a mortal enemy. I tried to scream for help but as in a dream could not. Nor could I run. I was going to die. I was dying. I died.
And came to in the backseat of a strange car. In front were an elderly couple, Grant Wood’s American Gothic by the look of them. The woman turned and said: “You need the hospital, sonny boy.”
That there are angels afoot is not to be doubted. In the emergency room of All Saints, intravenous hydrocortisone saved me. Once I’d identified myself, my parents—my poor anguished parents, for it was by then eight or nine at night—were phoned. I do remember having been in the farmer’s arms when we arrived. And in my father’s arms next morning when I was discharged. My parents had spent the night with me. The farmer and his wife had slipped away without identifying themselves and we didn’t learn their names or how they came upon me after I lost consciousness. I am ashamed to say that decades go by without my thinking of them.
• • •
A weekday evening, not long after my close shave. Mom’s watchful eye is on me. We’ve finished dinner in the kitchen. I am starting to clear. The doorbell rings. Aunt Vera, my mother’s older sister, and her gargantuan and deranged husband, Isadore Wolchansky—Uncle Walnuts—come in silently. I make myself scarce, as always when that lunatic is in the house. Once, with nobody else in earshot, he said to me: “You’re too pretty.” I knew this was not seduction but insult.
Isadore’s self-pity can readily turn to rage, as it is about to this evening. All at once he’s beating on my father. My mother and Vera are screaming. As always when scared, I am under my desk, hands over my ears, though I hear Walnuts shout from the living room, “Come back and fight!” as Dad barrels down the hall and slams his bedroom door. I peek out from Peru and see a red hand smear on the wall. Isadore has bloodied Dad. The only bloodshed ever known under our roof. I hear my mother, in an unfamiliar voice, ordering Isadore and Vera out. For one terrible moment, I wonder if he’s going to hit her too. Then I hear the Wolchanskys slam the front door, slam their car doors, roar off.
You’d think after screams and fouled walls and slamming doors there would be some attempt to explain to the boy in the corner bedroom what has happened. Do Mom and Dad think I haven’t heard? Am I meant not to notice his ravaged nose and her red eyes?
Tommy gets home quite late. The rest of us are already asleep. Next morning at breakfast he looks at Dad and says: “What the hell happened to you?”
“Well, son, I was reaching for some files on a high shelf and—”
“You look like you’ve been in a fight.”
Dad went on telling people his feeble story about files on a high shelf till his nose healed.
This Uncle Walnuts drama can have been only about money. He had a gift for making it vanish. He and Aunt Vera and their three sons had come from Shreveport and moved in with my grandparents, ostensibly to care for my failing grandmother but in reality because they were destitute. The last thing my dying Bubbe needed was a houseful of Wolchanskys. I believe this was the reason she came to live with us briefly in the fall of 1960: a little respite from her obsessive, unpredictable son-in-law and his misbegotten attempts at helpfulness, which never failed to make things worse.
On the path of a new mania, Isadore set up a pair of aquariums in her and Grandpa’s bedroom. These were meant to spread enchantment. Listening to them gurgle in the night, Little Bubbe turned her face to the wall. In one of the spare rooms upstairs was a pair of bedsteads carved with swans above the scrollwork—the beds my mother and her younger sister, Sylvia, had slept in as girls. Walnuts sawed the swans off. When she saw what he’d done, Mom couldn’t hold back her tears. Other desecrations, billed by Walnuts as improvements, were to follow. With such people you have no idea what’s coming next.
Little Bubbe died in May of 1961, ravaged and spectral and a few months older than I am now. It was my first death. I watched Mom grieve wildly, for she and Bubbe had been something like the mother and grandmother in Proust, seeing each other every day, finding it difficult to part. We’d drop by Bubbe’s after school. After half an hour Mom would look at her watch and say we had to go. Bubbe would walk us out to the car, then remember something she needed to show Mom. We’d go back in. New topics would be broached. The telephone would ring and, after Bubbe’s lengthy conversation with cousin Becky, whose latest medical problem had to be thoroughly reported to Mom, along with cousin Becky’s update on the declining health of cousin Molly, Bubbe would accompany us back to Mom’s car, where fresh matters were introduced. I am told that this routine is familiar in Bengali clans and I have observed it for myself in Southern Italy. Brazilians
, too, are slow to part. Good-bye without leaving is a worldwide tradition, to which my mother and grandmother strongly adhered.
Little Bubbe and Grandpa with their children and grandchildren, early 1961.
When Little Bubbe died she took the family compass with her. Nothing was ever good again at 2225 Windsor Place. Grandpa declined quickly into dementia, first confused about recent events, later convinced he was back in Sielce, the Polish town northwest of Lublin that he’d left with his parents in 1904. When he could no longer manage the stairs a hospital bed was installed in the living room with round-the-clock nurses. Aunt Vera and Uncle Isadore now lived in what had been his and Bubbe’s bedroom. On the night of August 10, 1967, almost three years after the bloody altercation at our house, the phone rang and Nurse Baylis, Grandpa’s night attendant, told my mother she’d heard a single shot overhead. Mom made the fifteen-minute drive to Windsor Place to find that Uncle Isadore had blown his brains out in an upstairs bathroom.
My father refused to be a pallbearer though he offered Aunt Vera what help he could. I know I’d rejoice in the suicide of anyone who had hit me on the nose. But Dad declined to gloat and never again referred to Isadore as Uncle Walnuts.
| CHAPTER NINE |
A STATUTE OF LIMITATIONS
Most Saturdays I got the whole day for bookworming at our downtown library. Dad would drop me off and not return for hours. I only needed to be on the front steps by four. Whereas the atmosphere in Fort Worth’s suburban branch libraries tended to be lax, downtown it was strict because of the head librarian, Miss Longstreth, a righteous terror who stalked around on spindle shanks to reprimand talkers and even note-passers and who always looked as if she’d smelled something bad. One afternoon, tucked away in the stacks, I lost track of the time and Dad had to come in to find me. (Surely better than having to roust your boy from a pool hall.) I recall that I was seated on the floor, doing nothing more blameworthy than reading without proper light, when suddenly Miss Longstreth and Dad were telling me to be more aware of the hour and stop being so self-centered and act more like a big boy and so on.
Five minutes later, turning to me out on the street with manly confidentiality (and unaware that his hairpin turns from anger to mirth were what I dreaded most), Dad said Miss Longstreth would “die wondering,” which took some working out but I got it.
I hoped she wouldn’t die before recommending a few more good books. “This one is usually suggested to the girls,” she’d told me about My Ántonia, “which makes no sense since it’s mostly about a boy.” Here was something I really could read, unlike the Faulkner. In the weekday wasteland of Country Day I held fast to Cather’s masterwork, and failed to hand it back on the due date, incurring a fifty-cent fine and getting the full Longstreth treatment. In the novel an orphaned and displaced Virginia boy, Jim Burden, fetches up on the Nebraska plains. “There was nothing but land: not a country at all but the material out of which countries are made.” What amazed me, I recall, was the story of Peter and Pavel, immigrant farmhands from the Ukraine. Theirs is but one of the cultures and languages on the sparsely inhabited prairie—a babel like that in and around Cather’s childhood home of Red Cloud. Russians, Czechs, Poles, Swedes, Jews, Lapps, Mexicans, and other immigrant nationalities dotted the Nebraska landscape. They had been Cather’s first claim on cosmopolitanism, and she held this early exposure dearer than any she would gain later on.
Bad luck dogs Pavel and Peter: debts, illness. Misfortune has settled like an evil bird on the roof of their log house, flapping its wings there, warning people away. As Pavel lies dying, he imparts their atrocious secret to Jim Burden and Jim’s great friend, Ántonia Shimerda:
After wedding festivities in a neighboring Ukrainian village, Pavel and Peter led a bridal party home in an escort of sledges. A rout of wolves—famished, hundreds strong—descended upon them from a dark line of trees and drove one of the sledges aground. Screams of agony filled the night as the hungry beasts leapt to their prey. Then more wolves caused a second sledge to go over. More bloodcurdling cries. More wolves. A third sledge was attacked. The groom watched as his father, mother and sisters were set upon. Now only the first sledge, carrying the bride and groom—and Pavel and Peter—remained. Wolves were abreast of them. The horses shrieked in terror. Peter bluntly told the groom they must lighten, and pointed to the bride. “The young man cursed him and held her tighter. Pavel tried to drag her away. In the struggle, the groom rose. Pavel knocked him over the side of the sledge and threw the girl after him. . . . Peter, crouching in the front seat, saw nothing. The first thing either of them noticed was a new sound that broke into the clear air, louder than they had ever heard it before—the bell of the monastery of their own village, ringing for early prayers.”
Such is the shame that has harried Pavel and Peter to Nebraska.
For Jim and Ántonia the farmhands’ story—a glimpse into the worst life can do—has no end to it, for such glimpses grant, along with horror, a different emotion, “as if the wolves of the Ukraine had gathered that night long ago, and the wedding party been sacrificed, to give us a painful and peculiar pleasure.” In the end, every inspection of the worst becomes a durable story told by firelight to the warm and well-fed. Thus literature is born and reborn. No end to its pleasures. But what they start with is somebody’s hell.
These were not things I or any twelve-year-old could know. I received the book at my twelve-year-old level. But some seed of Cather’s must have fallen on fertile ground. My Ántonia has stayed with me in all its particulars, from Jim Burden’s arrival at the white frame house of his grandparents to his return, decades later, as a New Yorker and man of the world. The action of the novel is an unforgetting, with Jim’s remote prairie past, stored away for years while he forged a brilliant career, rising up to reclaim him: “Whenever my consciousness was quickened, all those early friends were quickened within it, and in some strange way they accompanied me through all my new experiences.”
• • •
The future is dark, the present a knife’s edge. It’s the past that is knowable, incandescent, real. Here is an instance, looming up from darkness the way involuntary memories do, untouched for years yet as fresh as when it happened:
One night that autumn of 1964, as I labored in vain over something called the New Math that Country Day was inflicting, our phone rang and I happened to pick up at the same moment as Dad in his office. A lady’s voice said, very casually, “You want to meet me?” Dad said he did indeed. A few minutes later he was putting on his hat and coat and telling Mom he had to see a businessman from out of town about a deal.
After several hours of terrible confusion in Peru, I decided he’d gone to see a businessman from out of town with a lady’s voice. I put this away, along with so much of the past, for half a century, and am taking it out only now. It cannot hurt anyone anymore, including me. Now it’s just a painful and peculiar pleasure. Dad admired women wildly—but gallantly, I believe. Oh, I am certain, and only when Mom wasn’t around. When she was, he kept custody of his eyes. In her presence the most he would say about another woman was, “She’s pretty well put-together.” Extramarital activity was the dark side of his moon. At the funeral were a couple of weeping women none of us recognized.
• • •
Something from August 1964. Let it stand here, a little out of sequence, as My Best Moment, My Ninety-five Theses, My Declaration of Independence, My Coming into My Own (loveliest phrase in the language), My Epitome:
I am just home from Indianola and we are promptly on our way to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota—which seems to me a poor excuse for a holiday, but Mom is in chronic pain and the Fort Worth doctors can’t seem to get to the bottom of it. We already have a good deal of history with the Clinic, admiration for which is among Dad’s cardinal tenets. “The Supreme Court of Medicine,” he never tires of saying. There Bubbe Bockstein’s nephritis had been diagnosed in the late fifties
and her poor prognosis given. There Grandpa Bockstein was treated at the onset of his dementia. “Let’s all get checkups while we’re there. You too, son.”
“But there’s nothing wrong with me.”
“You too.”
We’re traveling by car. “On a long car trip there’s time to talk everything over. Nothing better for a family than a thousand miles in the car,” says Dad. Another unshakable tenet. By the end of the arduous first day we’ve made it from Fort Worth to Excelsior Springs, Missouri. We check into The Elms, a broken-down spa where generations of Missourians once came to take the medicinal waters. The place has historic significance. On the evening of November 2, 1948, election night, President Harry Truman traveled with four Secret Servicemen from Independence to The Elms, checked in, borrowed a robe and slippers from the proprietor, got a steam bath and a rubdown, ate a ham-and-cheese sandwich, drank a glass of buttermilk and put himself to bed. The world assumed Governor Thomas E. Dewey of New York was about to unseat him, but Truman was awakened a little before dawn and told he’d carried twenty-eight states to Dewey’s sixteen. The President and his detail checked out early and drove home to Independence.
We check out early too. Rochester is six hours away. We grab breakfast at one Stuckey’s in Iowa, lunch at another, and arrive before nightfall. Early the next day Mom begins her round of examinations. Quickly enough, the doctors determine that she has a bleeding ulcer, exacerbated by months of the large doses of aspirin she’s been taking. It doesn’t speak well of her Fort Worth doctors that such a simple diagnosis has proved beyond their competence.
The doctors I am to see include an allergist, an otolaryngologist, a pulmonologist, an oncologist (the reason for whom has of course been kept from me), a psychiatrist, an orthopedist and a podiatric surgeon.
The Hue and Cry at Our House Page 9
