“I’m very impressed by your diction. It’s like Shakespeare.”
“Too bad it doesn’t have California plates. I’ve never seen California plates.”
“The car I keep in California has California plates, naturally.”
“Naturally.”
“Maybe—and I just thought of this—maybe you’ve been low on cash and couldn’t afford a decent haircut. Maybe that hairdo’s the result of financial constrictions around this house in my absence. I send your mother money, you know. She’s got money I send her for house expenses. Come to think of it, I could give you a haircut right now, in the kitchen here. Just with a scissors.”
“No thanks.”
“I’ve had the same haircut since I was in the air force, flying over Europe. The Italian campaign. When a haircut suits you, it suits you no matter how the world changes.”
The ice cubes were melting out of the towel.
“Speaking of license plates,” he said. He adjusted the towel and his face cringed.
“What about them?”
“Let’s reverse the situation here, shall we?”
“What do you mean?”
“Let’s reverse the situation. Say you dropped by my place of residence and said you were temporarily not flush. Do you think for one minute I’d hesitate to reach directly into my pocket, snap out my wallet, and hand you a roll of five-dollar bills, or tens, or twenties, you being my son in need? Peel off a few fifties for you? Right on the spot to help out my son?”
“I’m fifteen, Dad. I work in a bookmobile. Maybe you didn’t know that. Maybe that news didn’t reach you in California. I’m never flush.”
“Speaking of license plates, you’re pretty flush now, aren’t you?”
“Were you listening to WGRD, maybe? Like Mom says, miracles never cease.”
“Your mother and I don’t agree on that. I think miracles cease the minute you’re born.”
“Mom’s life is not easy. I don’t know what yours is.”
“Imagine how proud I felt—just dropped in to have a cup of coffee at a counter on Division Street, on comes the radio, and on comes my own son’s name spoken by WGRD. If that’s not good news first thing in the morning, I don’t know what is.”
“It was to me. I’m giving half to Mom.”
“Hey, know what? I could give you a lift over to Old Kent Bank, you could cash your check, and I’d be right there with you.”
“Where’ve you mainly been this past year?”
“Mostly California.”
“Oh, sure.”
“Mostly. Not always. Mostly.”
“Well, I think some of that money you say you sent didn’t get here. Mom’s not exactly flush.”
“Whoa, now, son. Hold on. Just hold on. The adult finances—no, that’s not your business.”
“I’ll give you a hundred dollars.”
“How about a three-way split. Me. You. Your mother. Just like a family. Of course, it’d be a short-term loan, mind you.”
“We could stop at Blodgett Hospital. They could look at your thumb.”
“No, no—life’s generally an emergency, but this thumb’s not.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Let’s drop it. How’s your job in the bookmobile? What’s your wages?”
“I’m paid six hundred sixty-six dollars an hour, Dad. Since you’re all of a sudden so interested. I file cards in the card catalogue. You once told me you used to read books. You should drop by, find a book to read. When it becomes overdue, I’ll send you a notice. Give me your address, just in case.”
We drove in the Studebaker to Old Kent Bank. The teller had heard the WGRD lottery on the radio and commented on my luck. “You don’t need to deposit it,” the teller said, “because we’ll hold the amount against your mother’s account overnight. But it’s WGRD’s check. It’s going to be fine. Congratulations.” He counted out the cash and pushed it toward me.
In the parking lot I handed my father ten ten-dollar bills. No more bargaining. No further discussion. It felt as if I’d compensated him for his rare visit. I told him that I wanted to take a bus back, and he said, “A nice summer’s day to be young with cash in your pocket.” He got into the Studebaker. The windows were rolled down. “The money I gave you would buy maybe two hundred cups of coffee in Dykstra’s,” I said. I turned away, not wanting to see the expression on his face. I’d rather have imagined it. I heard the Studebaker drive off.
I’d gotten only a block or two away from the bank when my father pulled the car up alongside the curb about ten feet from where I was walking. He honked the horn in a snippet of Morse code. I looked over. “Men shake hands when they part company after a business arrangement,” he said. I walked up to the car and we shook hands.
When my mother dragged herself in from work, she said, “I’m beat.” I’d already cleaned up the kitchen. She liked a clean kitchen when she got home. I handed her a wad of cash and told her that I’d won $666 in a contest on WGRD. I told her I had just given her $566. She was flabbergasted and had to sit down. “Oh, my,” she said. “I had no idea. No idea at all. Miracles never cease.” She set the money down on the kitchen table and got a glass from the cabinet. She filled the glass with water and drank it. “So, you kept a hundred dollars for yourself, sweetheart. That’s good. That’s a lot of gas money—when you turn sixteen and start to drive, for instance. But why not splurge a little now? Why not take a friend to see Zorba the Greek? It’s still playing at the Majestic. I hear it’s wonderful. You should see it, honey.”
“I’ll think about it, Mom.”
“All right. I’m going to have a cup of coffee, then go meet your brothers at the bus. Want to come with?”
Four days after the incident with the swan, Pinnie Oler did something unprecedented, which was to say, “How about lunch with me today?” Right away I knew something was wrong. I soon discovered that he’d put some advance thought into this because he’d brought along a checkered tablecloth. He parked the bookmobile near a small park full of big sycamore trees, carried the tablecloth and his lunch pail along with two bottles of Nehi orange over to one of the sycamores, spread out the cloth, and sat down.
I stood by the bookmobile with my lunch in a paper bag, watching, postponing what I felt was going to be a bad moment. I had no choice, however, but to go over and sit under the tree. I had taken only one bite of my peanut butter and jelly sandwich when Pinnie unfolded the Grand Rapids Press, flipped through it, found the page he wanted, and laid it flat on the tablecloth. I saw he had circled a small article in pencil.
“What’s that?” I asked.
It is remarkable how long you can suspend a peanut butter sandwich in midair and stop time, hoping perhaps to turn back the clock, return to the life you led before, say, you stole a book. I noticed Pinnie staring at my levitated sandwich, so I set it down on the bag. “There’s an interesting article in the paper today,” he said. And he read the three-paragraph article about the police going out to investigate the death of a swan. Apparently two young women walking home from playing tennis had discovered the swan washed up on the shore of Reeds Lake. I recall this sentence: “Police say the swan died from the malicious handiwork of a cruel person.” The investigation was ongoing, the article said; swans fell under the jurisdiction of the Parks Department, and the perpetrator would, if identified, be fined and possibly serve jail time.
“Sad about the swan,” I said.
“You know who my favorite author is?” Pinnie asked.
“You never told me.”
“Arthur Conan Doyle. You know, the Sherlock Holmes mysteries.”
“I’d like to read one someday.”
“As you know, my bookmobile’s got quite a few.”
“If I don’t know that, who does?”
“Right. Well, I mention Sherlock Holmes because it’s interesting to see how clues come together in those stories. I know they’re made-up stories, of course. But that’s what good fiction can do, isn’t i
t, give you a different way of looking at real life.”
“I’d need to think about that. Maybe tonight I’ll think about it.”
“Hey, take out any Sherlock Holmes you want. I’ll personally cover it if you’re delinquent in returning it on time. No problem in the least.”
“That’s nice of you.”
“You get peanut butter and jelly every damn day, don’t you? I don’t think I could do that. I have to vary lunch a little. Today, for instance, I’ve got ham and cheese with mustard. Yesterday it was meat loaf with mustard.”
It was blessedly cool in the shade, and would’ve been a serene picnic had it not been for the conversation.
“You wouldn’t happen to remember, from last week, a fellow came in and returned a book,” Pinnie said. “The Union High School stop. His book was out on interlibrary loan. It had North American Indian in the title. I’ve got a record of it, of course, me being professional, everything neat and clean and in its own place. This fellow got a notice from the main library that the book was still overdue. He wasn’t too happy about this and telephoned the library to lodge a complaint. The downtown library can’t seem to locate the book. And I’ve looked high and low in the bookmobile—no luck. Now, I’ve given this some thought, and here’s the conclusion I’ve come to. I can either hire Sherlock Holmes to solve this mystery or just get it over with and pay full price for the book out of pocket, seeing its disappearance happened on my watch. How would you advise me here?”
Basically, I confessed all my crimes by indirection—that is, by trying to blame someone else. “Now I remember the book,” I said. “It was about how to trap wild birds. So, what I think is that the man from the Union High stop is the one who killed the swan in the newspaper.”
“Interesting theory, Sherlock.”
“Which Sherlock Holmes should I start with, do you think?”
“Hound of the Baskervilles. Without a moment’s hesitation, Hound of the Baskervilles.”
“Okay, I’ll start with that one, then.”
“How many interlibrary return forms do you think you’ve filled out so far this summer, give or take?”
“I don’t know.”
“Take a wild guess.”
“Maybe a hundred.”
“Say, in theory, you were to screw up just one time out of that hundred. I’d bet most anyone would chalk that up to normal human error, don’t you think? I mean, I’ve fallen asleep in church more times out of a hundred than that. Nobody’s perfect.”
“I’ll try and think of it that way from now on.”
“Look, I don’t mean to sound like I’m giving fatherly advice, mind you. You already have a father. But return that goddamn book, okay?” He cuffed the top of my head hard and said, “What expression do you see on my face right now?”
“I can’t read it.”
“Disappointment, that’s what.”
The next day during lunch, I put North American Indian Waterfowl Traps, Weirs, and Snares on top of the card catalogue, filled out the proper interlibrary return form, and placed it like a bookmark in the book.
I hadn’t meant to kill the swan. It was a beautiful, mean bird, and spent nights in my secret haunt. Nearly fifty years later, I can still hear its strange guttural exhalation; fifty years of hapless guilt and remorse. So often I close my eyes and picture the water closing over.
My fifteenth summer was ending. My older brother started to talk about enlisting in the army. This didn’t go down well with Paris. “If Michael joins the army,” she said, “I’ll move to my namesake city and never speak to him again.” But before he could make any decision, Michael first had to serve time in the Kent County Correctional Facility for car theft. His starting date was August 30.
The evening of August 29, he drove with Paris to Reeds Lake. How did I know this? Because I had driven to the lake myself, parked my car under a willow tree, and walked to the area where the love cars parked. Right away I heard my brother’s inimitable fusillades of laughter. Then I heard “Sherry” by the Four Seasons—Paris half singing, half screaming, “Sher-er-ee, Sher-ee bay-yay-bee!” in a duet with Frankie Valli, whose every falsetto surge was like a shot of adrenaline administered to the radio. I saw a bottle of whiskey float the length of the back seat, as if levitating sideways. It was a very hot night, still around eighty degrees at nine P.M., which wasn’t unusual that summer. Reeds Lake was famous for being one of the best make-out spots in the city. The police left the love cars alone. Nightly rendezvous there were necessary and beautiful—at least that’s what I was led to understand, and I was led to understand it by Paris. “Now that you own a car,” she once told me, “see how much you have to look forward to?”
I saw Paris’s car. I saw her feet, with her favorite red high heels on; she wore those shoes no matter what the occasion, sometimes even first thing in the morning, going to the diner for breakfast. I could see her legs, wide apart, resting on the base of the open rear window, those red high heels somehow still balanced on her feet, suspended in the night air.
I stripped down to my swimsuit and slipped into the lake to cool off. At one point, when I looked up and saw dozens of gulls perched on the paddle wheeler, I clapped my hands loudly four or five times, and they flew off as though I’d rudely interrupted a conference of ghosts. They scattered every which way, out over the moon-in-a-mirror dark water, gone into stars.
“No more unscheduled stops necessary,” Pinnie Oler said by way of announcing that Martha was pregnant. I had only two more days left to work in the bookmobile. I’d asked if I could keep after-school hours, but Pinnie said there was no money in the library budget for that. “Maybe next summer, huh?”
When the bookmobile stopped across from Dykstra’s, I looked out and saw quite a commotion. There was a police car out front. I saw two policemen inside the apothecary, along with my father, Mr. Dykstra, his employee Marcelline, and Robert Boxer. One policeman waved the others to one side of the room. Then he put handcuffs on my father’s wrists and led him out to the cruiser. My father got into the back seat. One policeman got in behind the wheel, the other rode shotgun. Pinnie said, “I’m going in and find out what happened.” I watched through the bookmobile window. A few minutes later, when Pinnie returned, he said, “Looks like that fellow Larry reached into the cash register. Marcelline Vanderhook called the cops.”
I slumped onto one of the benches. “But you know what Peter Dykstra said just now?” Pinnie continued. “He said, ‘I’m not about to press charges on a war hero, fellow I’ve been talking and drinking coffee with every day for months who just got overcome by a desperate notion. Besides, I think this heat’s made everyone go haywire. You’d almost have to have gone haywire to reach into a cash register like that.’”
So, I thought, my father had told everyone in the apothecary that he was a war hero.
And here is the last remembered truth of that summer. The next day, when we parked the bookmobile across from Dykstra’s, my father was inside having coffee, as usual. I decided now was the time to walk in the door and set the record straight. Marcelline was there, and of course Mr. Dykstra. So was Robert Boxer, who was packaging up this and that item for delivery. WGRD was on the radio. I ordered a root beer. Robert introduced me to his dad. Peter Dykstra and I shook hands. I said, “Larry here is my father.” Everyone but my father looked incredulous. “You let my father drive your Studebaker. That was nice of you.”
Perhaps I should not admit this, but at the end of that summer I found it compelling and not peculiar to talk to ducks, gulls, even swans at a distance. After school started up again, I continued to go to Reeds Lake—through much of that unseasonably hot September, if memory serves. I’d swim around under the steamboat’s paddle wheel. By talking to the birds I meant to reinstate each night an unthreatening familiarity. I could scarcely sleep because of my relentless sorrow over the dead swan. Simply put, it wasn’t so much that I felt things any more deeply than anyone else, but that this was the thing I’d chosen to fee
l most deeply about. How unhinged this seems to me now, my murmuring and cooing and stuttering and imitating nighttime birds like that. What was wrong with me? And I had an inkling that my soul was off-kilter, askew, and that I was in a phase of moving away from people. I wasn’t exactly afraid of this, only curious, and wanted to chronicle it. In late October, when the lake got too cold to swim in, and the ducks and swans had jettisoned my useless presence and apologies, migrating south in their formations, I remember feeling bereft.
Grey Geese Descending
MY CANADIAN UNCLE, Isador, knew the actor Peter Lorre. In fact, Lorre had arranged for a bit part in a movie, The Cross of Lorraine, for Isador. And Isador insisted on calling Lorre, a Hungarian Jew, by his original name. “If Laszlo Lowenstein doesn’t wish to acknowledge he’s Jewish, that’s his professional choice,” Isador said.
In September of 1969 I moved to Nova Scotia, because a friend of mine was going to live in Amsterdam for a year and said I could sublet his room in the Lord Nelson Hotel in Halifax for thirty-five dollars a month. I had no prospects but this cheap room. And that was enough to get me there.
I was adrift. Between graduating from high school in 1967 and moving to Halifax in 1969, I had lived in Toronto, Ottawa, Berkeley, and Vancouver. As for employment, for eighteen months I wrote pop music reviews for the Interpreter, an alternative newspaper based in Grand Rapids. One of my assignments was to cover a concert in Vancouver by Donovan, an immensely popular Scottish singer and songwriter. The next assignment was to write an article—my idea—about the Institute for the Study of Nonviolence, in Palo Alto, California. To get from Vancouver to the institute, I purchased a jeep for $350 and began to drive south. It was my first time on the West Coast. I stopped in Inverness and Point Reyes Station, California, where I stayed for a dollar a night in a kind of fisherman’s shack at the end of a dock jutting into Bodega Bay. Under the dock, ducks found shelter from the rain. Pelicans were a constant presence. By the time I had walked three trails at the Point Reyes National Seashore, I had planned to return there.
I Hate to Leave This Beautiful Place Page 4
