By some sleight of grief, I thought at first only of my own long dallying in that smallest room, where I keep a stash of books above the cistern on a shelf and bring the papers on Saturday morning, to hide from the swell and clamour of my family rousing and breakfasting outside. Inside, the world crumples and spreads out at my unclipped toes. Outside, it chatters along without me. And I thought, He probably wanted a minute’s quiet to himself, retiring as he had without a particular urge in that direction, before I recalled the old house hushed and empty beyond that little room.
I decided to drive to the funeral, fixed for the Wednesday following; and set off the next morning, under a cloud of Susie’s sympathies and tender reproaches – for shrinking from her just when she wished to comfort me, and barring her company on what she called my ‘trip’. But this seemed to me a matter of family business; and the family business, as we know, was Islands – and they are not easy to … desert. Besides, I had other duties to attend to, as an only child; and expected to be gone several weeks, clearing up my boyhood home and keeping what I liked, and selling the rest. My children did not know their grandfather well; and perhaps I desired as much, from a cause split two ways. Partly, he shamed me, in his brisk, misplaced enthusiasms and well-meaning ill manners; there was something low class about him, I could not deny, and he brought it out in me as well. ‘Ask and you’ll get on; that’s what I do; always asking, me. But make a name for yourself, my boy – stick out a little, unlike your old man – a name that lasts is the only thing that counts.’ Partly, I desired some respite from the world I had joined – Susie’s world, it seemed, to which our children belonged. I desired a familiar refuge from the life I had made, out of reach of the life I had made, untouched and undiminished by it.
Hers was the only cloud I struck until New Mexico – a blissful scorching run of summer days. The sun stripped layer upon layer of blue from the shimmering skies, peeling the old paint to get to the first wash. The nights rang clear as a bell, and that bell was the moon – trembling in the heat and bright as brass. I stopped whenever I could off the highways. The towns, even those slight clusters around a church or a park or an outlet mall, in Pennsylvania, Indiana, Missouri, Oklahoma, oppressed me with a sense of lives lived. Only the solace of Nowhere, off the interstate, offered such suspension of accustomed laws as I desired. I swam in the lit pools before going to bed, and lay, it seemed, always in the same sheets, watching the same box, eating the same pancakes in the morning, and growing fat and spotty as a boy again.
In New Mexico the storms began. Lightning split, suggesting a run of cracks in the delicate, invisible shell of the sky – flaws briefly illuminated, before our eyes lost the trace of them again and thankfully forgot such evidence of the hollow, imperfect spheres in which we lived. God sifted sugar of light between cloudy hands. The heat thickened, grew heavy. Even the plants, such as they were, started to sweat. The land began to grow familiar as I entered the littered deserts of Arizona – scrub and dirt and nothing to look at except for the nothing to look at, mile after mile, and the glitter of low towns in the distance before the road passed them by. At last, the vistas grew green again, under the tireless sprinklers, as I turned on to the ‘happy highways’ of my youth on a low-muttering Tuesday afternoon. And drove through the hot dusk into San Diego – ‘land of my birth‚’ as I once wrote, ‘under that synthetic sky, a creation of God’s akin to an architect’s model, clean, unchipped, constructed for tiny men’ – coming home to bury my father.
The funeral itself passed easily enough. Time is wonderful in its persistence; and I knew at the Eternal Home Crematorium (EHC Ltd) it was only a matter of time before the service finished, and the few mourners, dressed in khaki (the Californian black) or flowered prints, muttered at me and departed. My father was the kind of man who had a friend at the garage, and a friend at the deli, and a friend at the library, and the hardware store, and – yes, even at the hospital where my mother lay dying, at the front desk, where he delayed his visits. At work, he boasted a number of buddies’, but no one by name. He used to know ‘a couple kids’ in reception, and acknowledged several ‘friends’ in the secretary pool at admin. Few of them survived his retirement. He thrived at … passing compliments; and so passed ordinary, enduring friendships by. There were always a few ‘gangs’ on the go, in my childhood, for evenings on the town, as he said – groups large enough, that is, to get by without intimacy. My father loved games – these also kept acquaintances at arm’s length. I believe he prompted several fads himself. But then the passion for the particular game – bowling, Scrabbling, charades – died out, and the gang died with it, and its members dispersed. A few were left over for the funeral, and I knew them vaguely, and they made things worse.
In the end, I took only Florinda for a cup of coffee afterwards, at a diner whose air conditioner proved to be on the fritz. A hot, fussy day about to break in clouds above us. We settled accounts, and she wept slightly and tenderly into a paper napkin unwrapped from an unused fork and knife as I paid the bill. Our bottoms sweated and stuck to the vinyl seats when we stood up to go.
I used to dream of his death, from time to time, before it happened, you see – sob in my sleep, sharp sucking breaths that woke Susie, who woke me, who woke weeping. And then a day or two might pass before the muddling misery dried up again, and the shadows of mourning faded into ordinary day. I was prepared, you see – that’s what I mean to say. And the great resource of dreams did not diminish after his death; and he died to me, again, again, years afterwards, only now I woke curiously comforted, by the freshness of his image in my heart. And there I consigned him, to these shadows, where I knew he would keep long and well, untouchable by time as well as me. The funeral itself mattered less; like my father, I have no stomach for the details of decay, the blood and ash. I prefer the leftovers – the letters, books, clutter our lives leave behind us – to the evidence and etiquette of death.
It took me two weeks to go through the house. ‘Have you ever’, I once asked, on a much happier occasion:
stood in the dust of a dead man’s house, opened creaking the closet of his clothes – racked neatly still, the jackets settled loosely over the thin shoulders of the wire hangers, the trousers pressed and dangling in even rows; explored the larder, the tins of uneaten soup, the packets of spaghetti, the undrunk wine; and then, slipped on the jacket, and eaten the soup, and drunk the wine, alone, in the quiet of his absence? Have you ever tracked a dead man’s thought down the gloomy corridors of the mind, your comprehension lit by the same shower of synapses that illuminated the passages of his brain … spark for spark? Have you ever done all this, and then tidied up what you found?
This, however, proved slow and mournful work; much of it unbearably finicky and tedious; all of it unmentionably … well, I would say ‘soul-destroying’, but it seemed simpler than that and less dramatic. ‘Defeatist’ is perhaps the better word, or ‘defeated’ – though neither seems quite right. (I had ample – I would not say, leisure, to choose the word for what was happening to me in those two weeks. I picked and pored over it, as I packed and unpacked and repacked; and sold and threw out. But having said it was unmentionable, I will not mention it any more.) Let me say only that he left a great many … worthless papers behind; and I recognized my inheritance.
Among them (and after this, I will let the matter … rest), I discovered a rather surprising collection of notes, photocopies and clippings, from the period leading up to my mother’s death. He used, as I said, to spend his Sunday evenings at the public library – shoulder to shoulder with the bums and the drunks and the kooks and the pill-poppers and the needle-pushers and the out of work and the washed-up pensioners in threadbare suits who frequent such honourable institutions – researching his great treatise on the history of falsework: ‘the temporary structure which enables the permanent structure to be constructed, and which must be retained until the permanent structure is self-supporting’. Only he wasn’t, you see. I found instead a noteb
ook, meticulously dated and annotated, carefully pasted over with newspaper accounts of miraculous recoveries.
From cancer – and there are countless such; it is a strange, proliferating disease that yields almost as many opportunities for new hope as for sudden despair. (Sure as blackthorn bursts with snow, the words echoed in the hollow of my thoughts, cancer in some of us will grow) Some of them dated as far back as the death of Syme’s own mother, after that terrible storm, so many summers ago. My finger paused over the crinkled, glued-on, yellowing paper, to find that father and son had, in their separate pursuits, stumbled across the same jumbled account:
Having heard rumour of that wonderful leaf, pipsissiway, in curing cancers; in the meantime, several tumours appeared and daily enlarged. Her physician, an eminent practitioner, advised a sudden use of the knife, but her friends dissuaded her from the operation, believing it would be undergoing severe pain without the smallest hope of relief. The herb being near at hand was immediately procured and used as directed, and I rejoice to add that the tumours have been completely removed, her general health much improved, and there is every prospect of her recovery. I have set this for publication, without waiting her perfect restoration, that others may avail themselves of the same means as early as possible. The plant is an evergreen, and sometimes called winter green; the mode of using it simply to drink of the tea, and wash the part frequently with a strong decoction. I hope your brother editors through the country will give this a place in their Gazettes.
Somehow, this hidden treasure of my father’s fears (and hopes) only saddened me. I could abide the fact that he neglected my mother from an absence of love – fled to the library in the evening while she suffered that ‘severe pain without the smallest hope of relief’. (Mother and son watched the Sunday Night Movie together; I dreaded school in the morning; she, chemotherapy.) Marriage teaches many things, among them indifference and its attendant desire – for honesty and the solitude necessary to its practice. It was, no doubt, foolish of God to invent a species of creature whose heart is corrupted by even the kindest dishonesties; and whose life cannot pass without them. Yet I did not mind the way he escaped her suffering, until I saw that he neglected her out of love. And such a strange, curious, burrowing love, that sought relief of fear in books and newspapers and his own crazy speculations – pipsissi-way, for God’s sake – and never in his wife or son. That leakage in all of us whose flow may only be staunched by a human touch had been plugged up in him, till I had no news within, to judge whether he rotted or dried up. ‘And I became conscious’, in Phidy’s words,
that some vital appetite had died, some necessary joy, leaving behind it, dried and choked, the most indispensable well-spring of the soul and source of continual replenishment – curiosity in the workings of the human heart.
You must remember that I was sleeping in my boyhood bed at this time, in a house emptied of father and mother; and Dad had changed little since she died and I left; only disorder and disrepair had accumulated since. I should be forgiven a certain indulgence in morbid thoughts. I thought to call Susie but could not and did not, shrunk into solitude till my voice squeaked at the touch of air. (Strange how quick we grow unaccustomed to company; how deep the current of loneliness runs within us, if we let it.) I sat up, sleepless, through the loud summer nights, going over the father’s old papers in the son’s old room, drinking up whatever he had left in the house: foul blackberry wines and flat beers; mini-bottles of gin and vodka, carried off a plane; an untouched bottle of Christmas port.
I discovered, before closing his affairs and turning home, one curious account, unlike the mass of miraculous recoveries he pasted in the book. It struck me at once – it was the only story that ended in the sufferer’s death. The article, which appeared in the San Diego Chronicle shortly after my mother’s diagnosis, described the slow and inexplicable decline of a ‘young man, newly married and the father of a baby-girl’ thirty years before. He had simply begun to ‘shut down’ – that was the phrase – in his late twenties, complaining at first of a slight nausea, general lethargy, tingling in the legs and hands. He grew fat, unpleasantly, awkwardly fat, despite a general loss of appetite; he was confined first to his armchair and then to his bed; in the end, he lacked the energy even to relieve himself, and a full-time nurse was installed to shift him periodically and induce the necessary evacuations. His wife moved into the spare room as she awaited his recovery. He never recovered; the doctors despaired; first, second, third opinions retired perplexed. The man hovered at last at the edge of coma, without slipping under – he could just about manage a grunt to acknowledge some passing relief from the tireless monotony of his life. In an almost equally astonishing triumph of lethargy (and love), the wife never shifted from her temporary sleeping accommodations; turned every night to the same small bed beside an office filing-cabinet; hoped her husband would ‘feel better’ in the morning. (A lesson in the subtlety of time.) Thirty years passed.
Then a new doctor, alerted perhaps by a gossiping nurse, desired to inspect the patient. By this time, the baby-girl had escaped to Seattle, as far away as she could drive up the coast of the Pacific; the wife was grey-haired, somewhat delicate. The trouble, the young man concluded, was that her husband’s metabolism – for whatever reason – had simply ‘switched off’ (this was the phrase). That’s why he just kind of slowed down‚’ he said. A new procedure, lately developed, might just ‘turn the switch back on again’. Mother and daughter didn’t know whether to hope or fear – what to hope for or what to fear. But they accepted the experiment, and watched astonished as the old man rose to life again, awkwardly, miserably, hungry and sharp. By the end of one month, he could walk about the house, resting each hand on a shoulder (the daughter had returned) – how he talked, gazed at the television, gobbled his grub again! By the end of two, he could venture into the front yard and stare at the passing traffic of the street – immeasurably saddened by such excess and exhaust of energy, endlessly repeated. By the end of three, he was dead – from cancer of the liver, which had been arrested by his general decline and lain dormant in him through his long dormancy. His body had sunk instinctively to such low ebb that the barest breath of life remained and the cancer starved. Now it revived again in his general revival, and killed him. The article did not say for better or worse – though clearly the body itself had sought to live, even at the lowest rate.
What made my father paste this terrible story into the book? What faith or doubt did it inspire? Of whom did it remind him? My mother, in her ageless skinniness, fearful of any change? My father himself, retreating for survival so deep into his own resources, and slowly freezing over? And yet to my mind it suggested nothing so clearly as Syme: happily buried in the ice of his obscurity, until my intemperate revival dragged him to the heat and light of day again, where he began to rot and stink, and required a second burial.
You may guess I turned from my home in some relief, and settled to the long road quite happily, despite the close air of hot old leather and the broken seat-springs in the family Cadillac.
*
I took the southern route home again. ‘Have I not said home already‚’ Phidy once asked, ‘and can I in the space of a few lines use the word for so distant and different a destination?’ Yes, is the only answer – and I drove six thousand miles, and forty years, as it were, from my childhood to my middle age. I passed through the dry breadth of Texas – along the shoulders of that great state, across the neck – and tinkered with the thought of turning south to Austin at its heart. Over the long, flat road I imagined several pithy conversations between myself and Bunyon, happily reunited, shall we say – in which through various feints and false lunges, misdirections mischievously applied, I managed to turn the talk (and tables) upon him at last, to utter a clinching comeuppance to the phrase I am sure he had forgotten long ago: ‘Pitt is a genial little goblin, and I wish him well.’ But such is the stubbornness of our fancy, composed as she is of a logic older than and indepen
dent of ourselves, that she baulked where I would bend her and refused – granting instead even in my mind’s ear the last word to Bunyon. ‘You’ll thank me, Pitt‚’ he said, almost whistling through the exposed brickwork of his grin, ‘in the end.’ Knowing, as I did, that he was right – I was better off going where I was going, and doing what I was doing, in a small way; so I did not stop at Lubbock, nor turn south‚ but headed straight to Dallas, thence to Arkansas, before nudging gently to the north.
Only coming through Virginia on a burning, stinking summer day, with a black cloud hanging over the road, which declined to budge or shake into rain at last, did I consider, A quick look couldn’t hurt. The air conditioner on the family car had broken down in 1973, and a sweet, hot handful of sweat ran down my spine, and stuck against the leather seat. So I stopped at a diner outside Richmond, ordered the home-brew ice-tea and asked the waitress, a round-faced high-school girl with a nose-ring and a summer cold, if they had a phonebook I could borrow? Pactaw itself I knew had long gone the way of all flesh (and wood). Union Pacific bought the land in the 1870s and tore down the village to lay a track (itself now defunct) from DC to Richmond, across a narrow pass of the Potomac. But the family Jenkyns, along with Syme himself, had moved to Richmond after Phidy’s disastrous departure in 1827.
The Syme Papers Page 64
