My mother was better at endings. They relieved her greatly, partly because, as she declared herself a dozen times a week, in exasperation that never quite lied its way into surprise: ‘I just don’t have any energy today, dear. I feel – awful – slow.’ There was always a check to her free stride. Whenever she got going, something made her … flinch; and such weariness these checks induce! Until her right foot never deserted the comfort of her left, and she stood still. (Her characteristic posture: back quite straight, arms limp at her sides, her shoes tucked in together, her eyes blinking. This, she said, was how Mrs Arthurworry, her ballet teacher, had taught her to stand, age seven; and she couldn’t unlearn it – the only thing she hadn’t unlearned! – since quitting, at seventeen.) Time, of which she used so little, had been kind to her in return; and into her forties she looked like a girl, preserved.
Dance, it seems, had been her only love. And she ‘attended’ (her word) any production of the San Diego Ballet, whenever ‘she got the chance’. ‘Going’ to the ballet seemed cheap to her. Ballet was a mark of class, she didn’t like to make a fuss of it, but the fact was she came from slightly different ‘people’ to her husband – had ‘different pleasures, expectations’, in consequence. (Few pleasures, it should be said; fewer expectations.) Yet she taught her son a love of ‘culture’ – he was greedy for it, heaped his plate regardless of proportion or appetite. This pleased her quietly; and Pitt did not surprise himself when he fell in love with Susie Wielengrad, daughter of the New York Jewish upper classes.
Making an end of something relieved my mother – partly, as I mentioned, for weariness’ sake, and partly for honesty’s. ‘I don’t know‚’ she often said, pursing her thin lips, on returning from an evening out with ‘Dad’ – dancing, or bowling, or playing Scrabble with ‘some people, your father knows them’ – ‘it just wasn’t me.’ Me, it should be said, proved a rather exclusive quality, rare in the extreme – few thoughts, or pleasures, or places, seemed to possess it. Every Friday she had supper with her mother across town, and Pitt and son fended for themselves (pizza and the television). She came back brimming with the ‘same old wrangles. I try to tell he – I’m not seventeen any more – I can make my own way’ – obscurely satisfied, for once, with being clearly in the right; and content to leave the matter at that. Wrangles over motherhood, wifehood, career – she worked as a secretary at UC-SD, in the English Department, for Dr Morgenthal, to whom an old professor at Davis had recommended her, ‘until she found her feet’. She had found them, and never left them.
Rooms grew in her presence. Her thin figure seemed like an outline of negative space – how vast ceiling and wall stretched around my mother, echoed like halls. She offered a wonderful evocation of exhaustion – so familiar to us that one fatal source of it was hidden in the general malaise, until too late. If she appeared dry of life as a parched ground, then ‘Dad’ on the other hand danced like rain, danced and danced, and never quite managed to – soften her. They developed a curious language to interrupt the silence between them; and I grew up speaking it like a native tongue. Talk ran backwards among us, away from conclusions. Every statement had its echo in a question. ‘Wet day‚’ Jinny might say, parting a curtain just around her nose to watch rain disappear into the winter-brown lawns. ‘I wonder what the weather is?’ Dad would answer, rubbing his hands in silly high spirits.
My father, I believe, despite lacking ‘class’, had the quicker brain and might have got on in life, but for a severe dyslexia (lately diagnosed) that made his love of Scrabble all the more amusing. I can think of no fitter emblem for Pitt Snr than the sight of him poring over an impossibility of letters, broad shoulders slumped, elbows rolled up, his fist in his nose, and that snuffing heavily – while endless combinations of non-words suggested themselves to his scrambled sight, and he leapt at each (half-rising from his seat and licking his finger), then paused, hesitant, abashed, dimly aware of what he called ‘his lack of judgement’ (spelling), and sat back sighing, before he turned with undiminished pleasure to even greater possibilities that consoled him for his earlier indecision. Crying at last, ‘The kid never thinks –the old man has it in him‚’ whenever he put down a word.
The old man had a great deal in him, Pitt has no doubt, with more proposals at his beck than he had thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in. He wished, he said, in his youth to be a writer, in the manner of such folks as Herman Wouk, a great inspiration; only he lacked imagination. ‘I tell you something‚’ he told me once. ‘Whatever I wrote, it all sounded like lies. All I need is – material.’ ‘Material’ was a great word with my father. It suggested to him something that might satisfy his hands – and he had clever hands. It suggested something of which there was a superfluity, spilling over and getting dirty in the overflow. (He liked dirt.) He often came home from work brimming with tales of ‘great material’ – and these ranged from the banter of his workmates to the buildings he worked upon (never repairing them, only setting the stage for such repairs). He spent his life preserving materials and considering uses.
There were the improvements, of course – those revolutions in the art of scaffolding that would yield lighter, stronger, simpler frames, if only he could solve the trouble of … Well, there was always some trouble: such as expense, distribution, spontaneous collapse, etc. Then came the history of scaffolding and scaffolders, for which he spent several months of Sunday nights at the San Diego Public Library, taking notes. He loved notes – beautiful materials of his own production. He relished the heft of a stack of papers, scribbled over in his own round, flowing hand, as large as a child’s. My earliest memories involve fisting crayon sketches on the back of discarded pages, notes towards some never-to-be-finished history or proposal. They lay, bound in rubber band, all over the house.
Young Pitt was a keen cartoonist, and might turn over his creation to discover:
Scaffolding up to quite recent years has been considered by builders and others concerned, with the exception of the actual workmen, to be a matter of small importance and consequently unworthy of study. Recent legislation (the Workman’s Compensation Act, 1967 and the Factory and Workshop Act, 1971), however, has brought it into greater prominence, with the result that more attention has lately been given to it.
The author, in the course of considerable experience in the building trade, has had opportunities of examining a large number of scaffolds throughout the country, affording him exceptional facilities for thoroughly studying the subject, and he has been led to prepare this history, in the belief …
The prose suggested to me a curiously adult world – a world, alas, I have come to learn too well – in which distinctions of some perplexity and no conceivable interest are debated in terms as familiar as the weather. For example (discovered lately on the flip-side of a giant tree, from Pitt’s purple period, between six and seven):
Scaffolding is the art of arranging and combining structures in order to enable workmen to proceed with their work, and from which, if required, to lift and carry the material necessary for their purpose. Many definitions of a scaffold have been given by authorities on building construction; some of the best known are as follows:
Mitchel (C.F.): ‘Temporary erections constructed to support a number of platforms at different heights, raised for the convenience of workmen to enable them to get at their work and to raise the necessary material for the same.’
Tredghold (Hurst): ‘A scaffold as used in building is a temporary structure supporting a platform by means of which the workmen and their materials are brought within reach of their work.’
Rivington: ‘Scaffolds are temporary erections of …’
My father was a meticulous man. He threw nothing away, including his own thoughts.
(Now the boys use the backs of my proofs for pictures. Turn over any bright, blotted drawing stuck against our fridge, and you will find some fragment of Pitt’s research upon them, some fragment of this, perhaps – the
bones of my words beneath the skin of their felt-tip colour. For Pitt, like his father, accumulates.)
‘Falsework’, Dad called his notes. ‘Everything you don’t end up wanting, afterwards, is only falsework‚’ he said, and quoted C.J. Wilshere’s seminal guide to Construction Practices:
Falsework is the temporary structure which enables the permanent structure to be constructed, and which must be retained until the permanent structure is self-supporting.
(I conned this by heart as a child.) If anyone dismissed something as ‘false’ in his presence, he lifted his stubby forefinger in stubborn pedantry. ‘Falsework‚’ he insisted. ‘I guess I should know‚’ he added. ‘I spent my life on it.’ (How rare it is, I sigh, that permanent structures grow self-supporting, free of their falsework – as Syme knew all too well.)
According to C.J. Wilshere, ‘There are a number of forces which the falsework must resist; it is necessary to consider combinations of these, to make sure all conditions are considered. But to consider all the worst conditions at the same time may be unrealistic.’ In the event, the combination of two forces proved sufficient to overload my father’s structures of support. The first was this: that Pitt’s blue-eyed boy was leaving for college (only as far as the University of California at San Diego, as it happens – happened). The second, it should be said, was less expected.
My father made a great beginning of my mother’s cancer. For one thing, he took the day off. He drove her to the clinic on Medical Arts Road, and waited, under the stippled ceilings of the lobby, by the bubbling water dispenser, among the etiolated plants and the bound magazines, for four hours, while my mother waited, in a paper nightie, at the edge of a table-bed a corridor away. My father read slowly, happily and indiscriminately – and worked his way through several back issues of Home Furnishings, before he noticed the day had almost gone, and the clouds of dusk had settled over a blue Californian November afternoon. If patience is a virtue, then another gift is its equal – the capacity for such casual, insignificant curiosity as passes the time. My father had both, and could always turn from the trouble at hand to the magazine at hand.
The doctors discovered a dot upon her breast and rang up the next morning with the news. (Nobody told me.) Jinny, having lately finished breakfast, took off her clothes again and went to bed – I remember her, as light as kindling, under the bony sheets. ‘She could scarce stand when she awoke, so we brought her a-bed again, and put her feet in bowls of water, for it is damnation hot‚’ Edward wrote to his travelling son. It was quite cold that day in fact; rags of clouds hung over the sky and dripped from time to time. We clicked on the heat, and dusty breaths coughed from the floor vents. My father took off his boots, his jeans, his turtle-neck, and joined Jinny in his Y-fronts and undershirt and socks, and together they watched TV deep into the afternoon. I ran to catch my schoolbus, suspicious, not for the first time, of the world of adults and their imaginary jobs. Your mother is feeling unwell, he said; I thought what he really meant was something to do with sex.
By the time she went in (and under), for a preliminary exploration, I knew the story. My father woke me at five that morning, breakfast set upon the table, the orange in my glass gleaming like a coloured-in photograph. Jinny was forbidden food, and Pitts, plump father and son, ate nothing; even the juice proved too bright and acid for my bitter stomach. I remember coming back at eight – between consultations – to see the light of morning spread over the tablecloth, and a fly sprawled splay-legged in the juice, drunk or drowned or dead at the orange rim against the glass. I picked it out then reconsidered and tipped the juice into the drain and listened to it run away. For once, I thought, according to the obscure logic of grief, I was permitted waste, and a fresh glass.
We drove back at ten to see how she was getting on. That’s when the trouble began, I believe. Jinny lay in the high bed too light, almost, to dent the pillow. So thin and dry my mother was, the nurse could find no flowing vein to prick and plug with the sugar drip hanging glossy and glutinous on the rack. She banged once, twice; pinched and slapped, and banged again. Jinny’s arm seemed desiccated, nothing but bone and rolls of skin, more likely to crumble like powder between fingers than flow with blood. But then the nurse struck red, and the plug took and the sugar eased into her arm. Father and son looked down, and saw vermilion spilled upon the tiles, her heart’s blood, bright as a fire-engine, shining sleekly.
My father lifted the knuckle of his thumb to his mouth and sucked it. Then he sat down. He was a gentle man, could not bear the sight of blood; he possessed too light a temper to support so great a weight.
We sat by her, then went away at noon, and came back at four and sat by her again. The next day I returned to school. Within a week, my father had taken a job in Marin County – we needed cash, he said, but he was gone two weeks and two weeks again, and I delivered and retrieved my mother to and from hospital. Sunday evenings, my father fled to the San Diego Public Library – he said a publisher was interested in the history of scaffolding; it needed only – a few touches. ‘A final – kick‚’ he said. Mostly, I believe, he read the newspapers and fell asleep, exhausted by the prospect of the grief to come.
In January, Pitt received news of his acceptance at the University of Harvard, under a full scholarship; in February, he declined. (This was his first – flinching.) By this point Jinny was in chemo. Her thin, mousy hair became thinner, hung upon her scalp in clumps like a swimmer’s bob, exposing the awful shadowless white of the skull. (How intimate a colour white is, untouched by the brown of sun! How strange that the common materials of Nature, skull and skin, appear like secrets exposed, secrets of which mystery I need not say.)
The other trouble, of course, was her digestion. ‘She do seem to suffer hard from her Digestion‚’ Edward wrote a hundred and sixty years before, ‘which is hardly to be wondered at, and she could not keep down the last real Food we pressed upon her, though the Doctor is convinced it is sheer wilfulness.’ Now, it was my father who believed in his wife’s wilfulness. ‘She never ate‚’ he said. ‘Say what you like – but she never ate. How do you think she got so thin? Swallow whatever you can, my dear, as the doctor said.’ My father had enormous faith in doctors; neglected and trusted them at once, as men treat gods. That summer – one of the hottest in years, burned till the blue sky grew almost black in the sun – I mowed lawns, two a day at fifteen dollars an hour, with Brad Finkelman, who owned the lawnmower and took 60 per cent. I was saving for a second-hand car, so I could live at home and drive to campus, twenty minutes away, at UC-SD.
In the fall of my freshman year, she had her second operation. She died over spring break in my junior year. (Pitt sums up, cuts short.) A studious reader may calculate the space between diagnosis and – my mother always hated words that muddled the clarity of – death. The studious reader may form some conception of years passed, if he measures out a teaspoonful of salt for each day, until a small white hill accumulates on the kitchen table. This should take some time. Death accrued in various amounts; there were shallow days, and heaped days. None were hopeful. By the end, the substance meted out appeared not only bitter, but basic and, in some incontrovertible fashion, necessary – not to mention, immensely desiccating. The sound of the spoon in the grains was intimate, hushed. The sift as they tipped over soft. How quickly time blent and lost itself in the past, obscuring enormous pain – lick your finger, touch the mound and dab your tongue, for a taste of it, slight and endless.
‘The first absence’, as Edward reminded me, ‘is always of our duties.’ She died just in time for me to get in on a house for senior year with some fellows majoring in G & G, as we called it – Geology and Geophysics. I had learned from my father’s absences – how to repeat them; and he saw little of me before I flew to Oxford. But lately he has enjoyed something of a modern revival in my estimation – I see less dishonour in turning away. Love matters less than the maps we change to put it in the centre. Pitt understands more than he once did about the right
s of solitude and the demands of solitary pursuits.
I never wept for Jinny – until lately at a meeting of the Bluestocking Society convened upon the question of ‘Flowers’ (over Pitt’s protests) at the home of Dr Edith Karpenhammer, a low-roofed dwelling set in a rank garden choked by last year’s leaves, the porch sagging, the screen door clawed by cats. The sitting room stank of old potted plants and new varnish. Pitt held his shirt-tails to his nose, breathing, as Peggy Liebowitz (Associate Professor of Comp. Lit., visiting from Sarah Lawrence) chirped prettily these terrible lines:
And sure as blackthorn bursts with snow
Cancer in some of us will grow.
And Pitt began to wheeze into the plaid hem of his L.L. Bean. That night he locked the bathroom door, and sat on the pot in his jeans, and blubbed pink and ugly, staring at his streaked face in the mirror. Then he washed his mug, and dried it; flushed; unlocked the door and stepped into the bedroom, bald head shining. Susie never guessed.
*
Pitt has never been ashamed of the fact that he lives his life from books. They are the only companions of the self-educated man who do not mock the accent he has acquired or the words he mispronounces. Books are the best of us, infinitely preferable to their flesh-and-blood creators. They allow, among other things, for revision. We live, as it were, in the scribe’s ink – every blot tells. We write on the snowy pixelated fields of a computer screen, where the least step – may be retraced – deleted. The touch of a finger accomplishes what oceans cannot – wipes slates clean. Each setting forth begins from an eternal, instantly renewable scratch. Small wonder Pitt prefers books to those breathing masses of indelible accretion, who compose them. Something sweetens us, as we escape time and dry up – into print.
The Syme Papers Page 48
