I do have some rather good news. I’ll be visiting America in September. I’ll be spending a week of holiday with my sister and her husband in New York. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could somehow manage a sighting of each other? I am a dreamer, I know.
Well, darling, I must sign off now. It’s late and thinking of you is, frankly, a bittersweet exercise. Remember that I love you.
Yours forever,
Fiona
25 February
Dear Benjamin,
Rain. Rain. Rain. That’s all our skies have to offer lately. And so sight of your letter was a bit of sunshine. Then of course I opened it and discovered that you are expecting a third child. Certainly I am happy for you, but the sting is considerable.
My mother is again in the hospital. I’ve not made the trip to see her because of my new job. Finally, I am again a nurse. I’m afraid I must have romanticized our time in Korea, because now the work feels so much like work. I’ve been rethinking my suggestion that we get together in New York. With your family obligations, I’m sure you’re too busy anyway. And the whole matter is just too painful for me to consider.
Please know that I love you dearly and miss you, but I am afraid I cannot keep up this letter writing.
With love, forever,
Fiona
20 April
Dearest Ben,
I’ve not received a letter from you for a couple weeks now. I hope all is well. I have this fear with each letter posted that you might be suffering with a cold or flu and that another member of your family might collect the mail from your office. It fills me with such dread to imagine causing you such an embarrassment and problem.
My mother is doing worse I am afraid. She’s had a string of small strokes and she seems hardly herself. I’m quite sure she doesn’t recognize me. Writing this now seems to help me detach myself from the grief and so I thank you for this. My brother, who has been seeing to most of the business concerning my mother, is wearing away to nothing. He is running himself ragged and I feel I’ve done little to really help him. I wish you could meet Bobby, whom we affectionately call Booby. His heart is an impressive one. He has encouraged me to make the trip to the States in the fall. I believe he thinks mother will be dead by then. I cry a lot thinking about her death, and then I cry because I feel guilty for thinking death might be the best thing for her.
I’ve rattled on about myself for too long here. I hope that you and your family are well. Last night, I don’t know if it was a dream or a thought, but I saw the way we used to have to sneak around in Seoul. It was only when we had to sneak, when someone looked at us crossly, that I ever considered our difference.
Anyway, I love you.
Yours forever,
Fiona
A very small, leather-bound book. Silas Marner by George Eliot. An odd book to find, but pressed in its pages was a small flower, pink and white. The pages between which the little flower was pressed seemed to have no significance or bearing on anything.
Three more letters, the contents of which were not unlike previous letters, except that the mother died.
One round trip train ticket from Washington to Penn Station, dated 15 September 1955.
One receipt from the Algonquin Hotel, showing two nights’ stay and three room service visits.
A book of matches from the Vanguard.
18 September
Dearest Benjamin,
I never believed that I would really see you again. And who could have known how wonderfully thrilling such an impossibility could turn out to be. Do I sound giddy? Well, perhaps I am. Seeing you was so lovely, my darling. To be held by you once more would make life too much for me.
I am sorry for the reaction of my brother-in-law. I did not know—how could I—what a bigot he is. But it seems your country has no paucity of bigots. I had deluded myself into thinking that the stares and comments, mumbled and not, were the domain of those awful soldiers during the war, the territory of the uneducated and the uncultured, but I was wrong. I can only imagine how awful it is for you daily.
I can still clearly see your smile in the morning. And your dark hands on my near translucent breasts. You were so kind not to tease me. The contrast is striking and wonderful. I did so love being with you, my beautiful lover. Think of me at night, please.
With love undying,
Fiona
1 October
Dearest Benjamin,
I arrived at home to find your card waiting. Sadly, I also learned from my brother that my mother had died. I wonder how it is that knowing what is coming never abates the anguish. But still I feel, deep down, that my grief is somewhat artificial, that I believe her death is for the best, especially hers. I suppose it is normal to think such a thing, but still it is difficult to express it outwardly. I guess this then is further evidence to the closeness of spirit I feel with you.
I must run now. I miss and love you.
Yours through eternity,
Fiona
12 November
Dear Ben,
You mean more to me than you can ever know. I’m sorry I have not written for a while now. And in an odd way, I’m thankful that you haven’t either. What I have to tell you is both wonderful and terribly anxiety-making. Ben, darling, I am pregnant. I don’t want anything from you and I want you to know that I will not seek to complicate your life. I am moving from this address and my mail will not be forwarded. Please, let this be our last communication. I love you far too much to hurt the family you love so dearly. And I do not wish to hurt you, though I know that this does. So, do not write for your letter might reach someone other than myself.
Love forever,
Fiona
A postcard mailed from Chicago, dated 2 July 1956.
It is a girl. Her name is Gretchen.
[unsigned]
Dear Gretchen,
Your mother is a kind, sweet, dear woman, but she was wrong to remove you and herself from my life. You must know that she did so believing it was the right and moral thing to do. She has strength which I can only pretend to fathom.
I want you to have this letter, but I do not know where you are. Your mother’s sister in New York will not take my calls and so there is no help there. The card notifying me of your birth was postmarked Chicago, but tells me nothing.
Wherever you are, I love you and wish I could be a father to you. You have two brothers and a sister. They know nothing of you, but I dare say that you would love them. They are fine people. Your mother is so fine that you have no choice but to be the same. I wish that I could hear your voice, see your face, a photograph, a sketch. I hope that you have your mother’s eyes. How I love those eyes.
I suppose I could be ashamed of the relationship between your mother and myself, but I am not. It pains me that I could not be with her, that it all remained so secret and, therefore, dismissed. I was married with two children when I met her and, truth be told, I should have left with her then, but I did not. But because I didn’t, I have your nearest-in-age brother, my son, Thelonious. I dare say of the three I love him best.
I wish that I had someplace to send this letter. So that you could know how much your father loves you, how much he misses you and how sorry he is that he does not know whether you are left or right handed, what color your hair is, or whether you can forgive him.
The letter was unsigned. That was all that was in the box. I had read a voice of my father’s that I had not heard directly in life, a tender voice, an open voice. I couldn’t imagine the man who had run off to New York to have an affair. I knew my mother had read the letters, but I didn’t know when. I knew she wanted me to read the letters. Knowledge of the affair gave me, oddly, more compassion for my father, more interest in him. Even when I considered my mother and her feelings I did not find myself angry with him, though I worried about her pain.
I had another sister.
I grew up an Ellison. I had Ellison looks. I had an Ellison way of speaking, showed Ellison promise, would have
Ellison success. People I met on the street when I was a child would tell me that they had been delivered by my grandfather, that I looked like my father and his brother. Father’s older brother had also been a physician until he died at fifty. When very young I enjoyed being an Ellison, liked belonging to something larger than myself. As a teenager, I resented my family name and identification. Then I didn’t care. Then the world didn’t care. Washington got bigger and all the people my grandfather had delivered died. I knew Father’s father only through stories, but there were many. His nickname, one of them, was Superdoc, as he apparently had been able to start his battery-less car and drive it home from a house call.
My mother’s maiden name was Parker and they lived on the Chesapeake Bay, south of where we summered. A couple of Parkers were farmers, others worked in plants of one sort or another. Mother’s brothers and sisters were considerably older and were all dead before I was an adult, leaving me with a herd of cousins that I never saw, never heard anything about, but kind of knew existed out there somewhere with names like Janelle and Tyrell. Mother had become an Ellison. As a child, I saw some Parkers only once, visiting a farm house near the bay. They frightened me. Big-seeming people with big smells and big laughs. Had I known more of life then, I would have liked them, found them thriving and interesting, but as it was, I found them only startlingly different. Lisa, Bill and I stood around the house, which smelled of coal fire and stale quilts, like frozen carrots.
Mother seemed apologetic for her family. She seldom spoke of them, though I am sure that they did not summarily write her off. She was the only Parker to go to college and, as so often happens, education functioned as a wedge between them. Perhaps my mother understood better than I gave her credit my feelings of alienation and isolation. I believe that much of her life she felt self-conscious and somewhat inadequate. There was no particular event I recall that substantiates that belief, no habit or anything I heard her say that might serve as evidence. But maybe there was a look here or there, a physical attitude just this side of cowering that I noticed without knowing what I was noticing.
Mother and Father never seemed terribly close to me. They formed a unified front against which we kids collided and bounced off. They were not outwardly affectionate, though the three of us were evidence of some touching. Indeed, I thought they were decidedly distant, cool to one another. An attitude that would seriously impair my attempts at relationships later. I of course would be taking a convenient turn to have that alone cut as any kind of excuse for my interpersonal failures. My mother saw her life as a wife and mother as a service, a loving service, but a service nonetheless. My father saw his station rather as one defined by duty, and discharged said duty with military efficiency.
In the garage, I looked at my table that was now a stool, and not a very good stool, and considered my mother’s discovery that all those years of somehow feeling she was not quite enough were in a few minutes made valid. The wood of the piece of furniture I had mutilated to make safe was still beautiful, the touch of it, even the smell of it, but it was inadequate. I imagined that my mother discovered the letters just after Father’s death, when he’d asked her to burn and not read them. But he of course knew that she would read them. I found myself angry with him, a stupid enough feeling with a live person. Then I wondered which was more confidence-killing: believing that you should not have felt inadequate when in fact you were, or discovering that, all along, you were actually smart enough to see things clearly, that you were correct in your fears. This suddenly explained the newfound serenity and composure of Mother after Father’s death. Perhaps he knew that was what she needed. Now what she needed was to have her nerve fibers unlooped and her newly detected brain shrinkage stopped.
Yul was doing his level best to contain his glee, but doing a piss-poor job. He was paying lip service to my vexation and indignation at the completely nonironic acceptance of that so-called novel as literature, but I could hear him counting the money. I could also hear him telling me, without saying as much, to grow up. What he said was, “We’re talking about a lot of money here.”
“I appreciate that, Yul,” I said.
“The editor wants to discuss the manuscript with Mr. Leigh. What do I tell her?”
“Tell her I’ll call her.” After he said nothing, I went on. “Tell her Stagg R. Leigh lives alone in the nation’s capital. Tell her he’s just two years out of prison, say he said ‘joint,’ and that he still hasn’t adjusted to the outside. Tell her he’s afraid he might go off. Tell her that he will only talk about the book, that if she asks any personal questions, he’ll hang up.”
“You’re sure about this?”
“I’m sure.”
“Okay then. I don’t mind telling you this is weird.”
“Well, Mister Bossman, I’se so sorry dis seem so weird to ya’ll.”
“You’re a sick man, Monk.”
“Tell me about it.”
I was seven.
The drive to the beach took us along Route 50 which was the slowest straight shot on the planet. We would take two cars, my brother always riding with Father. My Mother drove slowly, Lorraine in the front seat with her, staring at the map, and so we always arrived twenty minutes later. Still, Father would wait for us all to be there before opening the house for the summer. He and Bill would have pulled the bags out of the Willys wagon my father loved so much and have them arranged neatly, ready to be taken inside.
It was June 16, a Saturday morning. I remember that so clearly. It was sunny, but not terribly hot. I was wearing long khaki trousers and a striped shirt that I always hated. It seemed no one had come to the beach yet. The only car parked in a drive was Professor Tilman’s. As soon as Howard let out, he was at the beach. He had no children and his wife had died years earlier, but still he seemed to be able to take or leave company. I couldn’t understand why he came at all since he never left his house except for groceries. Sometimes I would see him sitting at the corner of his porch taking in his sliver of a view of the bay.
“Get that box,” Father said, pointing.
I picked it up and carried it into the kitchen. Lorraine was already sweeping, Mother was putting away dishes and Bill was wiping dust and leaves from the sills of the breakfast porch.
“How do the leaves get in here?” Bill asked, as he always asked.
Father could be sudden. I thought of him as generally a kind man, perhaps because of the way his patients adored him, but living with him was like living on the crater of Vesuvius. Perhaps the comparison would be better made to some dormant or rather sleeping volcano. He wouldn’t exactly erupt, but rumble or hiss, and sometimes you’d miss the event altogether and find yourself detecting a burnt smell, sulfur or just seeing some vapor in the air. To Bill, upon his asking the question, he said, “No house is tight.”
It was not until Father had gone out the front door, to collect the last of the boxes, that we all exchanged fearful glances.
But, in part, that quality of my father’s was one reason I felt so close to him. I admired his intelligence, his sagacity and his convoluted message delivery system. Bill kept his secret that was no secret, Mother kept no secrets at all, Lisa kept secrets that remained with her and Father kept secrets and talked about them all the time. I am convinced of this. I am certain that he told all of us any number of times that he was married to the wrong woman and probably that he had another child someplace.
Later, after a meal of sandwiches, Father and I walked down to the beach. I had to skip every few steps to keep his pace. We waved to Professor Tilman.
“Why doesn’t Professor Tilman go anywhere?” I asked.
“Perhaps because he doesn’t want to,” Father said.
I thought about that and I suppose my silence was a bit loud.
“Is that hard to imagine?” Father asked. “Not wanting to go out?”
I said I guessed so.
We walked out the long pier and looked down at the water. A jellyfish swam by. A small boat moto
red by well away from us, a crabber checking his traps. I slapped a mosquito and flicked it from my arm.
Father laughed. “They take the blood and leave the itch. It’s a tradeoff. She gets to feed her eggs and you get to remember how good it feels to scratch an itch, how good it felt to not itch.”
“All I know is I hate them,” I said.
“The bluefish will be running in a few weeks,” he said. “That will be fun. Do you think you and your brother can get the boat into the water by yourselves?”
“No.”
He laughed. “I’ll help you in the morning before I go back.”
Rothko: I’m an old man.
Motherwell: You’re not so old.
Rothko: And I’m a sour old man. I’ve taken to this house painter’s brush I found. It makes the edges almost feathery. Funny, eh? A house painter’s brush. I’ll bet that devil Hitler used the very same thing when he was a nasty youth. And here I am with one. I have all these powdered paints and I mix and mix, but are my colors really so different? Are people sick of my panels? I like my early work. This stuff I’m doing now has me depressed.
Motherwell: Work depressed us all.
Rothko: A nice homily from a nice young man.
Motherwell: Not so young myself.
Rothko: And steady. I’ve noticed that about you. I’m planning to take my own life, but you’ve no doubt surmised this. And you fathom that you understand the feeling in some way. Yes, you’re a steady one. Of course, your paintings stink.
In considering my novels, not including the one frightening effort that brought in some money, I find myself sadly a stereotype of the radical, railing against something, calling it tradition perhaps, claiming to seek out new narrative territory, to knock at the boundaries of the very form that calls me and allows my artistic existence. It is the case, however, that not all radicalism is forward looking, and maybe I have misunderstood my experiments all along, propping up, as if propping up is needed, the artistic traditions that I have pretended to challenge. I reread the paper I claimed to dismiss summarily and realized that epiphanies are like spicy foods: coming back, coming back.
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