That time at school I just said your name to myself and I thought: Well, it will be interesting to be caned. All the most interesting boys in storybooks get caned. Snelby’s father got caned lots, and he’s in Parliament now. It will only hurt for a few minutes and afterwards Snelby and Dickinson will like me better and maybe they won’t tease me about my accent. And I held my head high and walked in. It hurt much worse than I thought and for longer, but they did stop teasing me afterwards.
And that’s what I did this time. I whispered to myself: Dave, stay with me; and I pulled back my shoulders the way headmasters like and I walked through the door.
But he wasn’t like a headmaster at all. He was just a little old man in an armchair and not the least bit frightening. So I went up to him and put my arms around his neck and kissed him and said: “Hello Grandpa, I’m Adam.”
I don’t know why I felt like crying but I did, and so did he. I sat on his knee and hugged him and we both cried. He kept saying my name softly as though it was one he’d never heard before.
And then he said: “So you’ve come home to America.’’
And I told him that I was a citizen of the world really, that America wasn’t exactly home because I was conceived in Montreal and born in Australia and was being educated in England.
I said: “I do love the Berkshires though, and I love your house, especially that birdcage thing in the garden.’’
Then his laughing and crying got all mixed up and so did mine.
XX Prelude
When the old man woke on Sunday morning, he felt first that there had been some fundamental change in the quality of the air. He was alone in the bed, something he usually enjoyed, but it was not that. And not the sun or the trees at the window, though these seemed to him strangely beautiful. He felt pervaded, that was it, by well-being. As though he had ingested a massive dose of beatitude.
The memory of Adam came to him as bits of dream come back after waking — first, only the most fleeting fragments, easily lost again; elusive hints, a tantalising glimpse of the whole; and gradually a coalescence of recalled parts.
Then, in a slow dawning of wonder, his mind turned over the knowledge that the child was still in the house. He sat up in bed and reached for his canes. Small marathon: lurching to his chair (damned legs!). And en route fresh astonishments assailed him: last night he had laughed with the boy. Laughed! He looked at the image of himself laughing as at an artefact of the Bronze Age. That such a possibility should have existed. That the vocal cords and facial muscles had remembered how to perform. How long, he wondered, since he had laughed? He did not think he had laughed in the lifetime of his daughter Emily. Perhaps briefly, at her birth, in a fond moment of hope.
He sank into his armchair, and breathed deeply, grampus-like, waiting for his muscles to have the decency to stop twitching like a beached flounder.
Last night. A dangling in the void, that was how it had been. He would add it to his scrapbook of pivotal moments: Marta’s arms extended in the gazebo; Emily s raised wine glass in New York; the slamming of car doors in his driveway last night.
“Here they are,” Bessie had said, and the pacemaker itself seemed to stop; everything, blood and breathing, pausing, waiting to see if it was worth continuing. He had been aware of a shadow, he knew someone was approaching him, he had been afraid to look up. And then the child was in his arms.
The smell, the touch of a grandchild, was like an armful of hyacinths.
He leaned forward, his forehead against the screen, and saw Bessie and Adam, hand in hand, by the gazebo. The nunc dimittis came to him: Now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace. Some shuddering of emotions long dormant began to buffet his body. He folded his arms on the windowsill and rested his head on them and began to weep. Not in decorous quietness, but with a guttural animal sound like demons escaping. Helpless, he grasped a cushion from the chair and held it over his mouth and sobbed into it. He could not stop. It had nothing to do with sorrow, it was quite beyond his control. He began to fear that he would use up more strength than he had, that the pacemaker would not support him. But there was nothing he could do.
Eventually — he had no idea how long it took — the hurricane passed. He felt ravaged and empty. He felt as people do who return to homes flattened by flood, fire, storm: one would simply begin again.
Pieces of memory came drifting by like confetti fluttering from an old wedding album: the bleating blue vein in Bessie’s neck; Tory on the stairs in her nightgown; Tory clinging to him on the Ferris wheel; Jason waving from a dormitory window at school; Emily in a white dress for her first public performance.
But something brackish, like a soiled rain perhaps, began to percolate through this drift of blessings; something dark; a cloud no bigger than a man’s hand.
Oh god, he moaned, remembering.
A telegram had been sent. It could not be unsent.
Suppose, though, that nothing came of it? It was entirely possible that nothing would come of it. In fact, to look squarely at the matter of probability, it was completely implausible that Marta would step out from the potent aureole of myth and incarnate herself on his front lawn.
He had thought the same, he realised now, about Adam.
There was this about fantasies: they did not always stay tidily inside their proper fences. They roamed like gorgons.
What had he done, what had he risked? Even if Marta did not come, even if she only sent a telegram, Bessie would surely realise. Perhaps she would not forgive. Perhaps they would deprive him of the child. Could he not, after all this time, have sustained the illusion for his wife a little longer? Bessie was so fragile, she had so few resources. He would have spared her this, if they had only told him Adam was coming. It was because he had not known, because he had been so afraid, that he had had to take protective action.
But of course Marta would very likely ignore the telegram entirely.
This was surely what he hoped?
He thought of her, the sheer impossibility of her, standing before him, flesh and blood. The world well lost. He thought of old Mrs Weston, immortal monster with her icebox of infant limbs. He thought of indelibility. He thought of Faust. It seemed to him that in the last twelve hours his heart had grown larger, hungrier.
He knew that he would not altogether object to a final act that was violent and bloody, his nerve ends crackling in a last orgasm of life, himself centre stage.
Jason sat on the front porch drinking coffee. He breathed deeply, consciously taking into his lungs great reserves of country-morning air. As though it could be stored, could leak forward into time, purifying and protecting him. He tried to remember other occasions when he had felt: I am content. He was not sure there had been any.
Certainly he savoured memories of certain moments with Nina, especially in the beginning. And with Natalie Jessica, Ruth. But it was in retrospect that these events had become tinged with a haunting quality. He did not think that at the time he had ever said to himself: Now I am happy.
Had he thought it as he walked beside the Thames with Emily? Almost. He remembered thinking: It’s good to be with her again. A great rush of gratitude that there was someone who didn’t require explanations for idiosyncratic behaviour, someone who took all that (Father, Tory) as a given.
But he could not go so far as to say he had been happy then, not with that sense of his own and Emily’s emptiness. (What are we to do with life?) He would have liked to say, as they sat looking at Westminster Bridge and seeing instead the impossible tangle of family: Look, let me sponge up your share — the angst, the futility, all painful adjustments past and future. It will hardly make any difference to me. Enter into a contract of sane familial commonweal with this man in Australia, the one Adam’s gilding with myth, the one you will scarcely speak about because he seems to mean so much. Be happy!
That, he realised, was what it took to redeem himself in his own eyes. One act of unambiguous benediction to set in the balance against the frightful wei
ght of his destructiveness. That was why, this morning, he could think: I feel contented — for his connivance, for his part in ensuring that Emily and Adam came to the reunion.
To have seen the old man laugh and cry!
Somehow, out of all their flawed histories, had come Adam.
He watched his mother and the boy wandering around the garden together. “This is a dogwood,” he heard her say; “you don’t have those in England.” Jason knew this could not last. He knew the most one was given in life were brief reprieves, intimations of paradise lost or only dreamed of. The art of happiness, perhaps, was simply to be conscious of such moments while they were happening.
He foresaw dangerous pressures on Adam — against losing that choirboy quality of translucence, that trusting innocence; so many people demanding of him the quintessence of purity, not wanting him embroiled in girls, cars, dubious opinions, possibly faulty career decisions, all the imperfections and wrong turnings of growing up.
He hoped they, collectively, would not stifle the boy. He hoped Adam would not come to resent them. But perhaps this was unavoidable between one generation and the next, perhaps even a biological necessity, as unremarkable as dead leaves in the fall and new buds in spring. Perhaps the point where you could forgive your father was only reached when you suddenly saw him frail and broken, his perverse pride in tatters: a lonely old man who could laugh and cry like a child, shamelessly, in public.
Was it simply this: the banal, almost ugly, realisation of powers reversed?
Jason sighed. No motives were pure, he consoled himself. Ever.
He thought that he would like to have his father sitting with him on the porch. They could smoke their pipes together. He could tell his father about the current exhibition at the Whitney Museum. No. Wrong topic. That would reek of cultural smugness. He cast about: the Royal Shakespeare Company on tour; he and Ruth had seen Twelfth Night. His father would reminisce about high school productions. This was the sort of thing fathers and sons were supposed to do. Normal. An intoxicating word.
But there was a dilemma. How should his father be brought downstairs? Last night it had not been an issue, the whole thing prearranged, a neighbour’s son arriving promptly at ten to carry the old man up to bed. Significance noted.
He felt now a physical craving, akin to lust, to cradle that gaunt figure in his arms. To say with his body: I am sorry for all the unanswered postcards, but who can fathom the animosities of childhood?
Yet was it improper, this desire? A crass flexing of Oedipal muscles? Did it matter? Should he — knowingly a compound of imperfections (the gloating son, ascendant), yet truly desiring communion and his father’s blessing — simply appear at the old man’s door? Father, bless me for I have sinned. I am Jason, your devious second-born. Or perhaps he could radiate a heartiness that would obliterate innuendo. Should he hoist his father over his shoulder with rough affection, like a knapsack, chattering busily to spare both of them embarrassment? Remember when you took me hiking in the Berkshires?
No.
An unethical victory.
Lack of choice would push his father past endurance.
He went inside to look for Emily and found her in the kitchen.
“Just taking a breakfast tray up to Father,” she said.
“Do something for me. Tell him I said I’d be very happy … I’d like him to have breakfast on the front porch. With me. Ask him … if he’d like us to send for the boy next door.”
Emily raised an eyebrow. She knew perfectly well what he wanted. “He won’t change miraculously. You always want fairy-tale endings.”
Jason shrugged. “I’ll sit with him either way.”
When she came back downstairs she stood with her hands behind her back. A childhood game: which fist is it in?
“Guess what he said.”
Jason waited.
“He said, and I quote: ‘Whats the matter with Jason? Doesn’t his woman feed him properly?’ ”
Jason grinned.
Ascending the stairs, he thought: Now I am happy.
He was in the room with his father. No acknowledgment, the face still pressed to the screen. Jason coughed. Edward did not move. Goddamn him, Jason thought, he’s still at it. The school principal, the boy on the mat.
Then he remembered the deafness.
He crossed the room, touched the old man on the shoulder. “Dad?”
“Took a hell of a long time,” his father said gruffly.
My whole life, Jason thought.
Though his father was light as a child, Jasons arms trembled. He might have been the curator of an art museum, the bearer of priceless treasures — porcelain perhaps, irreplaceable, uninsurable, impossibly frangible.
For the first time in his life, Jason craved for descendants of his own.
“Stop snivelling,” his father said testily. “Never could stand a boy who snivels.”
“Dad,” Jason said, a seismic tongue of laughter beginning to lick through his body like subversion, “I have to say that you are the most cantankerous, narrow-minded, rude, bullying, and pig-headed old man I have ever known”
Tory did not want to go out in the garden. Yes, she would like to walk with Emily to the Davisons’ farm where you could still buy fresh-churned butter and new-laid eggs, but she did not want to cross the front porch where Jason and her father sat talking.
“Come on, then, the back door,” Emily said.
“But he’ll see us when we cross the driveway.”
No point, Emily knew, in telling Tory that this didn’t matter. She switched tactics, dropped her voice to a conspiratorial whisper: “We’ll climb the side fence. Well creep along behind the bushes and no one will see us”
Tory’s face became animated with nervous complicity. Lumbering over the fence, shambling along on hands and knees in the grass, she chuckled and babbled to herself: “He’ll never find out. We don’t have to tell him everything. Emily won’t tell, she promised.”
It occurred to Emily, crawling behind the great bulk of her sister, that if she were seen from the neighbours’ windows she would not care. The realisation came with the force of absolution. Growing older, the mere fact of it, did carry at least a faint promise of wisdom gained. One wasn’t condemned to repeat every single mistake ad infinitum. For instance: she remembered doing this at the age of ten, when Tory was twenty-two. Enter mortification, of an absolute variety. The laughter of boys from her class at school, the mimicking, the long crocodile of bodies all crawling through the grass. We’re off to see the principal, they chanted. Follow the elephant, follow the elephant, follow the elephant’s ass. Tory thinking it was a nice game, laughing along with them, shaking her fleshy behind. And Emily, wretched coward, joining in the song (her lungs bursting, her eyes stinging) until the moment when no one was looking. Then she stood up and fled, abandoning Tory to the pack. At home she had crept under the bushes that throttled the gazebo and sobbed and twisted the flesh of her arms into savage peaks. Penance.
That was when she had made up her mind to leave home and never come back. Just as soon as she was old enough.
Yet here she was.
In the Davisons’ cow pasture she lay in the long grass while Tory collected dandelions, slit their stems with her thumbnail, and made a chain. Singing to herself. How should I my true love know …? Twisting the garland around her head, preening for the cows, an aging, slightly grotesque Queen of the May.
If a circle of townspeople were to rise out of the soil, Emily thought, all much too polite to chant cruelties, but nevertheless whispering to one another, she would take her sister by the hand and walk past them with head held high. Or perhaps she would start for home on her hands and knees, calling Tory to follow.
Was self-congratulation in order?
This came to her: her largesse was a product of distance. Of indifference, cultivated like a rare hot-house bloom for so many years. Sham courage. If she had defied those tormentors when she was ten, that would have meant something. Now
it was too easy to count, there was no cost, no one mattered, she did not care what anyone thought. Distance. It was what she loved about audiences — that space between the stage and the hall. If suddenly one day there should rain on her catcalls instead of applause, she would think merely: I’ve known all this before. It makes no difference. It doesn’t affect me.
No connections.
Except for Adam.
About Adam there was nothing she could do, she was connected by every nerve end. No choice there. Whatever grief or joy should come from that … well, that was her fate, she was committed to it. But beyond Adam was a moat. Perhaps she could afford to let down a drawbridge to the family once in a while — at Thanksgiving and Christmas, say. She thought that would be possible. Though this reunion, the very warmth of it, had the smell of risk to her.
No medals for courage then, or compassion. Her epitaph could read: She kept her distance. So be it. She was a survivor. Closing her eyes, she pictured herself on a crenellated turret overlooking a moat. Beyond the water a small army worked at her command, raising a system of earthworks and a great wall, stone by stone.
Lunch in the kitchen, which was large and sunny and smelled of cinnamon sticks and scrubbed pine floor. The six of them around an oak table older than Victoria, Edward wadded with cushions into his chair at the head of the table. Adam on his right, Jason on his left. At the foot of the table, Elizabeth ladled out a cold summer soup that gave off a soft fug of cucumbers and cumin. Every few seconds, though so calmly as to be unobtrusive, she paused, rested the ladle in the tureen, and stroked Tory’s arm — as though she were gentling the sweating flanks of a spooked colt. Twice Tory had risen and made to leave the table; Elizabeth had murmured to her, gentled her. Jason, sitting next to Tory, nodded imperceptibly to his mother, and held his sister’s hand.
Emily, sitting opposite, found it almost unbearable. It was like being trapped in a steam bath: a conventional current of love, anguish, anger sucking around her. (How can he ever be forgiven this? And yet how could one hold to account an old man frailer than paper? How could one not?) She felt faint from the miasma of feeling, as though the room had no air. Tory’s unease weakened her like an infection. It was one thing to defy hypothetical tormentors. Another thing entirely to enter Tory’s pain. (What would she do, if the shell cracked, if the fortifications crumbled, with all the anger and all the love?) She was desperate for coolness and distance.
The Tiger in the Tiger Pit Page 20
