Hello Darkness, My Old Friend

by Sanford D. Greenberg

  He is very generous.

  He is my dad and I love him to bits.

  And the one from a decade later, mailed to me on Father’s Day, not handed over in a homemade rococo envelope:

  Grow

  as a speck of dust would grow.

  Let me begin by being a better daughter

  Let me begin by understanding

  the silence of your life;

  by showing you the sounds of sight:

  How a peach (your favorite, I know, especially in France)

  full in the sun might be the sun,

  how a flock of starlings fanning the sky

  is like one large wing,

  by knowing your gentleness your quiet but deliberate way

  of speaking, so easily read by you. Let me begin with patience—

  that I need not shout, simply face you when I speak.

  There are also the moments she remembers that I would have liked to have protected her from. The big family trip to Florence, say—the one she took with her uncle and his son, and her two grandmothers, and all the rest of us. We all ate together in Sue’s and my room—a wonderful time! Afterward, Kathryn went off to sleep in a room with her two grandmothers. There is little else that a child could want in life than to be with her two grandmothers. Combined, they would have known everything about being a woman that she would ever need to know, and they would always be there for her to ask. All the questions about boys, if that came to pass, and questions about how to be a bride, a young lady, and manners, most important. Later there would be questions about her parents when they were young people—what they were like. That might happen when she was a teenager, but at the time I’m remembering, she was too young to know, to even ask.

  Except that’s not the way this memory turns out. Kathryn thinks she remembers her father’s mother talking to her mother’s mother in their bedroom but getting no response. She vaguely recalls her father’s mother racing out of the room but having to stay put herself. She supposes that she must have known by then that her mother’s mother was dead, but what she really remembers, she says, are the bricks under the Ponte Vecchio—it was as if the entire bridge might collapse. And her mother going to pieces. And how her brothers tried to help her even though they, too, were too young for this.

  And now Kathryn, like her brothers, is grown: lovely, charming, smart, competent beyond measure. But still the memories go on.

  16

  Road Tripping

  We decide to do a road trip—not Kak, she’s still too young for this, just the guys: Paul, Jimmy, me, and Artie, of course.

  In Los Angeles, we take the boys on a tour of Universal Studios. We walk on the back lot. The hills are green with round shrubbery and the land is brown. Paul has sprouted up. He is fourteen years old. Jimmy is shorter, twelve. Both boys have quiet ways about them. Arthur follows us around—black jeans and white knit shirt. We might both be their fathers. I have my hand on Jimmy’s shoulder. The boys wear cutoff jeans and knee-high socks. They are skinny.

  Arthur is skinny. We all look young and vibrant.

  We see the home where Psycho was filmed. The set of the New England town where Jaws was shot.

  We take a helicopter tour of Los Angeles. Jimmy sits in front. We see Dodger Stadium. Cars corkscrew around the highway like little toys on a child’s racetrack. We fly out toward the ocean. Over the beach. People walk into the waves; they all seem to be tanned.

  Thursday, August 19, 1982. I tell the camera that we were just checking out of the Bel-Air Hotel. Jimmy follows me. He is smiling a clever smile. We walk on a path under low tropical-looking trees. There is a pool. We stop. Paul is filming. I tell him to make sure he gets us all in the shot—that is the most important thing. Arthur leads us to the Lincoln Town Car we’re renting for the trip. He says, “Step right this way, to the American West.”

  We pass by the San Bernardino Mountains. Seventies music is on the tape machine. Arthur has planned all the music to correspond to the geography. In a little town, Arthur slows down. He says, “Maybe I can get a quick milk here. That’ll tide me over.”

  The ruddy hills are turning into steeper mountains, and the shrubs are becoming pines. We listen to a Quincy Jones song. Jimmy is discussing the drumming, but Arthur tells him to hold on. This is the prettiest scene yet, he thinks. “We’re twenty-six miles out of LA, just passed Big Bear,” he announces. He describes a lake. Flat and completely like glass. It is impossible to differentiate the actual terrain from its reflection—the real from the image of the real. “It reminds me,” I say, “of the time we were in Israel, and we looked out into Lebanon and Jordan. Just like that.” A place where the desert was so wide it all looked like water, like an oasis.

  When we listen to the song “The Boxer,” Arthur says it reminds him of baseball. “Whenever I get up there to sing it, that’s what I think about.”

  Paul is trying hard to hold the camera steady. All you can see now, near Barstow, are pink, rugged hills. We could be on Mars. “We are now fully aware that we exist,” Arthur says. “It’s our earth now.”

  Now we are on the road. Arthur wants Paul to film just the road, only the road. “Cecilia” comes on. Arthur says this is one of the hardest songs to do. Jimmy asks why. “Oh, it’s the groove, the rhythm of it.” Arthur sings along to “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” He blows it. He wants another take. We laugh at him. “It’s not funny, Jimmy,” he says sarcastically. Jimmy can’t stop laughing. His voice is still like a little kid’s.

  We are listening to classical music. The sunset is thin and bright. These are the types of skies in which one expects to see celestial events. I explain that the mountains are proud. They rise up like the pyramids. Arthur says we are 229 miles outside of Los Angeles and 100 miles short of Las Vegas. At one point, someone asks me if I can see the mountains. “It’s hard for me to say,” I reply. “I think I can sense the shadow.”

  We are in front of Tower Records in Las Vegas. Arthur is inside looking for Brandenburg Concertos, numbers four, five, and six. Paul tells me to sing. I sing “Chantilly Lace.” Arthur comes back without the Brandenburgs; instead, he got Crosby, Stills & Nash.

  Arthur is lost in Vegas. He cannot find his way out. He says he has never gone this way before. Later, he explains that when we laugh, we put the internal part of ourselves in the proper place. Then we begin to heal ourselves from the core on out.

  Arthur explains that straight ahead is a brownish lump, which is a mountain. A little to the left is a grayish lump. He says there is a satiny look to the bottom of it. “You know, I think Teddy Roosevelt is really our president on this trip,” Arthur says. “He was a great naturalist. A great traveler.”

  Jimmy says, “It’s an oven outside.”

  “That’s a simile,” Arthur says. He explains similes and metaphors. He says metaphors become more important the older one gets. “People who use metaphors well are a joy to listen to. There are not many.”

  On top of Hoover Dam, Paul makes sure to film me in my nearly invisible white shorts. I stand behind Jimmy. They think this is the funniest thing.

  “Clearly, this is the most enormous stretch of concrete you’ve ever seen,” Arthur says. The water is green near the edges and blue in the middle. We’re 487 miles outside of Los Angeles when we hit Arizona. We listen to Billy Joel. Arthur sings along. At the Utah state line, I get out with Jimmy and Arthur and stand in front of the mountain daylight time sign. If we go on, we will slip into the past.

  A motel room at night. Arthur reads to us from Independence, a Hollywood tell-all, in his room. He is sitting up on his bed, his head against a white concrete wall. “That book is delicious,” I say. “A very readable book,” Arthur agrees.

  The following morning, the mountains become giant and steep and orange. The space between them possesses a very specific, very tangible force that wafts up against the car as we make our way along the road cut into the mountains.

  In Zion National Park, it begins to rain. I ask what it
is like out. “Raining,” Arthur says. “When you get to the bottom, you get the earth that’s fed by the underwater wetness of the Colorado River.” He could be a geologist.

  We stop at the visitor’s center. We take an indoor tour. We look out on the canyons. There is no drop-off; it feels as if we are suspended above the opening. Clouds are hanging below the mountaintops. The ridgeline looks as if it is made out of paper. The tour guide, a plain-looking blonde woman, discusses glaciers. She explains that contrary to popular belief, glaciers would not have formed the canyons. She says we can throw out the idea of glaciers. It is just a theory, she says. Back in the car, I say that the drive through Zion was the best so far. Well, actually, Arthur says, I missed a great deal of it.

  “You were looking only a little bit left. If you were looking all the way to your left, you would have seen an amazing view.”

  Jimmy says that there is a sign that reads forty-five miles per hour. “Who would want to go forty-five?”

  “Chickens,” Arthur says. “Old people. Very cautious people. People who are so cautious, they’re actually a danger to other people.”

  It is five o’clock on Arthur’s watch. The sky is blue. It is hard to see his face. His lips have the silhouette of a woman’s lips. Tender.

  Arthur is worried about the air-conditioning. We lost it for nearly three minutes. He was timing, but he didn’t say anything until now.

  “It could be,” he says, “shades of things to come.” It’s so like Arthur to use a word like shade. “In Salt Lake, we may want to have the car checked,” he says, admitting that he has no clue when it comes to things mechanical.

  We listen to one of his concerts. He says it sounds fragile. I ask if we can listen to it again. “Do you like it?” he asks, turning to me.

  “Beautiful,” I say. He looks back at me again to see my expression. He wants to see whether I am telling the truth.

  Now we are driving through Salt Lake City. It is eighty-eight degrees. Artie likes it here. Very wide streets. Clean. He thinks the Mormon Tabernacle Choir is great. He complains that it is hard to be driving through the town and looking for the scenic spots and also looking for the Safeway. He says it is hard to remember the city as he saw it eleven years ago, the last time he was here. The memory has been replaced by this last half hour. “It’s bigger now,” he says.

  “You know what I’d like to do?” I say. “I’d like to find a Yellow Pages.” What I want to do is find a synagogue. It is my father’s yahrtzeit; I want to say Kaddish. There are no synagogues to be found in Salt Lake City. Instead, we stand beside a building, the four of us. We bow our heads. There are miles of grassland in front of us. I put a handkerchief on my head and do the prayer for the dead. It is the closest I can come.

  At 1,305 miles outside of Los Angeles, we are listening to the soundtrack from A Hard Day’s Night. Paul McCartney is singing “And I Love Her.” “His voice,” Arthur explains, “used to be tenor. It’s lower now. It’s hard to lock into that pitch.”

  Somewhere in Idaho we get out at a cemetery in a field. Arthur stands off at the edge of the small square of land, near a sprinkler, his arms crossed. “Shepherd,” one tombstone reads. Another says, “Dr. Richard F. Sutton.” The boys walk around, inspecting quietly, reverently. This is Arthur’s favorite part of the trip. Back in the car, we listen to synthesized music. Arthur says that if the ear tries to contain the pulsing and the breathing of the music, one gets a tremendous combination. Michael McDonald comes on. Arthur pats his hands in time against the steering wheel. I air-drum. Jimmy laughs at me. Arthur listens to a song of his. He says he is embarrassed. “I can sing better than that.” He does. He turns down the music and sings live.

  Thursday, August 26, 1982—1,497 miles outside of Los Angeles. We are in Teton country. Switchbacks. Rises to our left, rivers on the right, 204 miles driven today. The peaks of the Tetons are covered with snow. One of the youngest mountain ranges, according to Arthur. He climbed them once. The clouds in front of us look like downspouts, like funnels. Arthur says that Paul may have just shot a future album cover on our movie camera. “All you have to do is lift a frame,” he says. He opens the window. You can hear the trees whisk by. Later, the slope off the river beside the car is so steep that the tops of the trees rising up from the shore do not even reach the edge of the road.

  Yellowstone National Park. We get out to see Old Faithful. It’s steaming. Then it goes up. As it calms down, I say, foolishly, that I want to walk closer. “I mean, no one’s there. There’s nothing blocking us.”

  “Go for it, Dad,” Paul says. Arthur says he is exhausted. He wants to check into our room and take a nap. I take Jimmy and Paul, and we walk around the sulfur pools. They look like the inside of someone’s organ—a bile duct or kidney. The liquid in them is flat and clear, and the rock underneath is cream or green or aqua. I can feel heat from them as we walk along the concrete path. The vapor smells.

  That evening we eat in a giant lodge. People all around us. We are talking when Jimmy begins to cough. And then nothing. I realize that he is having an asthma attack. It was the vapor from the sulfur pools. If we do not get him a shot of adrenaline, he will die. Sue isn’t around to give him a shot. The waiter comes over and wants to know if everything is all right, although it is unclear to me whether he is asking about the food or Jimmy. “Listen,” I say. “My son is having an asthma attack. I need to get him a shot of adrenaline. Is there a doctor around here? A nurse?”

  “No,” he says impassively, “we don’t have anything like that here.” I remain calm. I do not think Arthur knows enough about Jimmy’s situation to act fast enough, and Paul’s still a kid. I am on my own.

  “Well, is there a park ranger or something? Somebody who can do something?”

  “Yeah,” he says, “we have a ranger. I’ll go get him.” I follow the waiter about halfway to the middle of the dining room. He takes off running. I am standing there. I cannot find my way to follow him, and I cannot find my way back to the table. Finally, the waiter returns with the park ranger. I explain the situation. Jimmy is hardly breathing.

  “There’s a station a ways out,” he says, “where we can get what you need. But it’s going to be tricky getting there.”

  I gather everyone. We rush into the ranger’s truck. The night is black. It is as if the trees and the mountains are conspiring against us. This ranger, he is not joking around. He is skilled in the art of emergencies. His truck bounces violently along trails that were not meant to be driven on. This is a new kind of danger. We make it to the outpost, though as we enter, I feel what I think are tent flaps. “My God,” I think. Jimmy is taking the thinnest, most desperate breaths. A shot is administered. His lungs open up like a balloon.

  The following day nobody mentions the episode.

  I say that in the spring we should take a drive down to see the Kentucky Derby. Arthur says he’ll be free; he’ll be doing a movie in Paris that starts afterward.

  “Who’s directing that?” I ask.

  “Volker Schlöndorff.”

  “Schlöndorff? No kidding! Volk’s doing that?” I say. Of course, I don’t know Volk.

  We enter Montana. We are listening to Copland. The hills are softer, lower, browner. Then we listen to a Gregorian chant. Paul is in a dead sleep. He is wearing an orange Baltimore Orioles shirt. “Can you feel the archaic quality to the harmonies?” Arthur wants to know. Jimmy tells me to sing it. “I don’t know this tune,” I say. But I do it anyway. Jimmy wants Paul to sing. He wakes him up. Paul gives Jimmy the finger. At the same time, Arthur is saying, “That’s what the nature of music is.”

  Alongside the rise of a mountain, Arthur asks, “Who do we know who’s had a peaceful, fulfilling latter part of life? Milton, perhaps.”

  “You can’t really take Milton seriously,” I say. “He was blind.”

  “Well, that’s true,” Arthur says. “Rousseau was one. Though he became disenchanted. He spent the last ten years of his life on a lake in Switzerland.
As a botanist.”

  Artie is alone in life. He doesn’t have a mate, but this is only partly true. When Paul was born, I knew very little about being a father, but what I did know was that I wanted my children to see beauty in this world. Arthur, more than I, more than Sue, would be able to provide that. He became a second father to my children. That evening we enjoy the Sabbath dinner. I want the boys to know that they can do this anywhere—being away from home does not mean the Sabbath does not matter. They still need to separate the secular from the sacred. I cannot find challah where we are, so instead I get some rolls and lay napkins over them. I get some wine. We order room service. Jimmy wants to know if Arthur reads dictionaries. “Sometimes,” he says. “I take them into the bathroom with me. When your mind is in a place to find a dictionary interesting, you’re in a very good place mentally.”

  At 1,988 miles outside of Los Angeles, I ask if there is a television around here. Arthur says no, not in these places. We are in the corner of America. We might as well be off the map.

  Great Falls, Montana. Farther north—Glacier Lake. We listen to Vaughan Williams’s “The Lark Ascending” as we ourselves rise. “It only gets prettier,” Arthur says. A giant rock formation, like an isosceles triangle, rises up to the west; its peak is flattened out. A washed-out lake appears at the side of the road. Its bed looks like pudding. Blond trees stand before it.

  We take a small road down level with the lake. Large old cabins line the small street. “We’re here, because we’re here, because we’re here,” Arthur says. We stay at a large inn called the War Bonnet. It looks like a ski lodge, very rustic. In front of the inn, water laps against the rocks on the shore. Then a blunt mountain, its shadow falling over the lake. It is real country.

  I take the boys on a hike. We circle half of Glacier Lake and enter the park. A sign reads: “Beware of Bears.” We go in anyhow. It is dead quiet. I can hear pine needles falling. Mist crawls between the upper layers of the trees, as if it is watching us. The boys understand the solemnity of the moment. We do not see any bears. But they might have seen us.