by Nathan Hill
Faye came back and married Henry. They moved away. Left town.
She never really liked him, Henry. Poor guy. He never knew what hit him. There was a word for this in Norwegian: gift, which could mean either “marriage” or “poison,” and that probably seemed about right to Henry.
After Faye left, Frank became like Clyde Thompson after his daughter died: kept a straight face in public and nobody asked him about Faye and eventually it was like she’d never even existed.
No reminders at all, except for the boxes in the basement.
Homework assignments. Diaries. Letters. Those reports from the school counselor. About Faye’s issues. Her panic attacks. Nervous fits. Making up stories for attention. It was all documented. It was here, at Willow Glen. In storage. In the basement. Many years’ worth. Frank kept everything.
He hadn’t seen her now in so long. She’d disappeared, which of course Frank deserved.
Pretty soon, he hoped, he wouldn’t remember her at all.
His mind was falling away.
Soon he would be only Fridtjof again, blessedly. He’d remember only Norway. He’d remember only his expansive youth in the northernmost city in the world. The fires they kept going all through the winter. The gray midnight sky of summer. The green swirls of the northern lights. The splashing schools of blackfish he could spot from a mile away. And maybe if he were lucky the walls of his memory would enclose only this one moment, fishing from the back of the boat, pulling up some grand thing from the depths.
If he were lucky.
If not, he’d be stuck with the other memory. The terrible memory. He would watch himself watching that salmon-red house. Watch it shrinking in the distance. Feel himself growing older as it faded. He would live it out over and over again, his mistake, his disgrace. That would be his punishment, this waking nightmare: sailing away from his home, into the darkening night, and judgment.
6
SAMUEL HAD NEVER HEARD Grandpa Frank talk so much. It was a constant bewildering monologue with occasional moments of clarity, moments when Samuel managed to seize a few critical details: that his mother had gotten pregnant and left for Chicago in shame, and that all the records from Faye’s childhood were stored here, in boxes, at Willow Glen.
About the boxes, Samuel asked the nurse, who led him down into the basement, a long concrete tunnel with chain-link cages. A zoo of forgotten things. Samuel found his family’s heirlooms under a skin of dust: old tables and chairs and china hutches, old clocks no longer running, boxes stacked like crumbling pyramids, dark puddles on the dirty bare floor, the light a hazy green mist of overhead fluorescents, the sour smells of mold and damp cardboard. Amid all this he found several large boxes marked “Faye,” all of them heavy with paper: school projects, notes from teachers, medical records, diaries, old photographs, love letters from Henry. As he skimmed through them, a new version of his mother took shape—not the distant woman from his childhood but a shy and hopeful girl. The real person he’d always longed to know.
He lugged the boxes to his car and called his father.
“It’s a great day for frozen food,” his father said. “This is Henry Anderson. How can I help you?”
“It’s me,” Samuel said. “We have to talk.”
“Well, I would love to interface with you one-on-one,” he said in that polite, artificial, high-pitched lilt he used whenever he was at work. “I’d be happy to discuss this at your earliest convenience.”
“Stop talking like that.”
“Can I tell you about an upcoming webinar you might be interested in?”
“Is your boss, like, standing over your shoulder right now?”
“That’s an affirmative.”
“Okay, then just listen. I want you to know that I figured something out about Mom.”
“I think that’s outside my area of expertise, but I’d be happy to send you to someone who could help you with that.”
“Please stop talking that way.”
“Yes, I understand. Thank you so much for bringing this up.”
“I know that Mom went to Chicago. And I know why.”
“I think we should put in some face time on this. Shall I schedule an appointment?”
“She left Iowa because you got her pregnant. And her dad kicked her out. She had to leave town. I know this now.”
There was a pause on the other end of the line. Samuel waited. “Dad?” he said.
“That’s not true,” his father said, now much more quietly, and in his normal voice.
“It is true. I talked to Grandpa Frank. He told me all about it.”
“He told you?”
“Yes.”
“Where are you?”
“Iowa.”
“That man hasn’t spoken ten words to me since your mother left.”
“He’s sick now. He’s on some pretty heavy-hitting medication. One of the side effects is loss of inhibition. I don’t think he knows what he’s saying.”
“Good lord.”
“You need to tell me the truth. Starting now.”
“First of all, Frank is wrong. It was all a dumb misunderstanding. Your mother wasn’t pregnant. Not before you.”
“But Frank said—”
“I know why he’d think that. And he believes it’s true. But I’m telling you that’s not what happened.”
“Then what happened?”
“Are you sure you want to hear about this?”
“I need to.”
“There are things you might not want to know. Children don’t have to know everything about their parents.”
“This is important.”
“Please come home.”
“You’ll tell me?”
“Yes.”
“No more lying? The whole story?”
“Fine.”
“No matter how embarrassing it might be to you?”
“Yes. Just come home.”
On his drive back, Samuel tried to imagine himself in his mother’s shoes, making that first trip to Chicago, going to college, her future all precarious and full of mystery. He felt like they were both going through this at the same time. A new world was about to open up. Everything was about to change. He almost felt like she was there with him.
It was odd, but he had never felt closer to her than he did at that moment.
| PART FOUR |
THE HOUSE SPIRIT
Spring 1968
1
FAYE HEARS THE CRACK of metal and knows work is being done. Metal is moved and dropped, battered and bent; metal collides with metal and sings. She cannot see the ChemStar factory but she can see its glow, the coppery light beyond the backyard oaks. She pretends sometimes it’s not a factory over there but an army. An ancient army—the light from torches, the noise from brutal weapons at forge. This is what it sounds like to her, like war.
She thought maybe tonight—because of what happened, what is on television at this very moment—the works would go quiet. But no; ChemStar, even on this night, roars. She sits in the backyard and listens. She stares into the thick gloom. Her father is over there right now, working the night shift. She hopes he’s not watching the news, hopes he’s keeping his focus and concentration. For the ChemStar factory is a deadly place. She toured it once and was horrified at the masks and gloves and thorough safety demonstration, the emergency fountain for the washing of eyes, the way her breathing seemed interrupted, how her scalp itched. She’s heard stories of men spending months in the hospital after some stupid ChemStar mistake. Whenever she drives past the factory she sees that logo with the interlocking C and S, and the sign: CHEMSTAR—MAKING OUR DREAMS COME TRUE. Not even her uncles will work there. They prefer the steelworks, the nitrogen plant, the fertilizer plant, the corn plant, or they cross the river to Illinois to take shifts making Scotch tape. Not the tape itself but the glue that makes it sticky. In big vats of milky foam, stirred and shipped out in oil drums. How it appears on Scotch tape, no longer liquid but rather perfectly adhesive, is a mystery. How it ap
pears on shelves, packaged so pleasingly, sent to every store in America—that’s another factory’s job, another set of thick, itinerant men. No wonder her uncles never talk about what they make. Such is the way of commerce. Such is the way of this strange little river town. There’s something always eluding her. She can see the pieces but not the whole.
It is April, four months before her first college classes begin, and she sits in her backyard, and inside the house the television howls its news: Martin Luther King has been killed in Memphis. Chicago is a rage tonight—of rioters, looters, arsonists. Pittsburgh, too. And Detroit, Newark. Mayhem in San Francisco. Fires three blocks from the White House.
Faye had watched until she could no longer bear it, then came out here, into the backyard and the wide-open night and the sounds of ChemStar rumbling somewhere distant and loud, the whistles and cranes and crankshafts, the cascade of metal as a train abruptly lurches forward, how commerce keeps buzzing, even tonight. All these men who won’t know a thing about the riots, she wonders why they’re still working. Who needs chemicals this much? A factory is a terrifying, relentless thing.
She hears the patio door open, and footsteps—Faye’s mother, coming with another update.
“It’s anarchy,” she says, exasperated. She’s been glued to Cronkite all night long. “They’re tearing up their own neighborhood.”
The Chicago police have, apparently, sealed off the ghetto. Molotov cocktails are hurled into liquor stores. Snipers on the tops of buildings. Cars smashed on the street. Traffic lights wrenched down and twisted like tree branches. Bricks thrown through windows.
“What good will it do?” her mom says. “All this destruction? With everybody seeing on TV? Do these rioters really think this is going to make anyone sympathetic to their cause?”
Martin Luther King was shot in the neck while standing on his hotel balcony—every reporter and anchor on TV describes this exactly the same way, using the same words. Words that nobody’s ever thought about have popped out of ordinary language and become incantations. Lorraine Motel. Remington rifle. Mulberry Street. (And how could the shot have been fired across something as wonderful-sounding as Mulberry Street?) Police are on the lookout. Massive manhunt. Early thirties, slender build. White male. The man in room five.
“Probably just an excuse for these people to do whatever they want,” her mom says. “Running around with their shirts off looting stores like: Hey, let’s get a new stereo without having to pay for it.”
Faye knows her mom’s interest in the rioters is an incidental thing. Mostly what she’s out here to do is convince Faye not to go to college in Chicago. The riot has simply given her a delicious new angle. She wants Faye to stay home and go to the nice little two-year school the next town over, and she reminds Faye of this every chance she gets, a more or less constant needling attack that began when Faye was accepted, a few months ago, to Chicago Circle.
“Listen,” her mom says, “I’m all for civil rights, but you can’t be some kind of animal destroying innocent people’s private property.”
Chicago Circle is the catchy name for the brand-new university in downtown Chicago: the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle. The promotional brochures that came with Faye’s acceptance letter spoke of Circle as the UCLA of the Midwest. It was the world’s first thoroughly modern campus, the brochures said, built in just the last few years, conceptually groundbreaking, a campus unlike any other: created as a single vast system using the most fashionable principles of social design and engineering; buildings constructed from the most indestructible materials; a raised walkway, one story up, to get you from building to building with a bird’s-eye view, a kind of pedestrian expressway in the sky; innovative architecture that included field theory mathematics, which as far as Faye could tell involved overlaying squares on top of each other and rotating each square slightly to achieve a many-angled, multifaceted design that looked, from above, like a honeycomb. This was an advance at least as important as the flying buttress or the geodesic dome, the brochure said, and it was all part of the school’s overriding mission: to build the Campus of the Future.
Faye had applied to the school in secret.
“If these people weren’t so destructive and angry,” her mom says, “I think regular people would be more likely to support them. Why don’t they go out and organize voters? Propose some solutions instead of just smashing everything?”
Faye looks out across the backyard to ChemStar’s distant glow. Her father would be working now, probably ignoring the news of the world. The one time he spoke on the matter of college was when Faye showed him Circle’s acceptance letter and brochure. He was the first person she told. After a brief private celebration in her bedroom, she came to him in the living room, where he was reading the newspaper in his easy chair. She handed him the documents. He looked at her and then at the papers. Read through them silently, slowly accommodating this new information. Faye was ready to burst. She waited for him to praise this extraordinary thing she’d done. But when he finished reading, he simply handed back the papers and said, “Don’t be ridiculous, Faye.” Then he opened the newspaper and gave it a shake to snap out the wrinkles. “And don’t tell anyone,” he said. “They’ll think you’re bragging.”
“It’s chaos in the streets!” her mom says. She’s getting really roiled now. Sometimes lately it’s like she’s a top capable of spinning herself. “I don’t even know what they’re fighting for! These people. What do they want?”
“Probably, for starters, less murder,” Faye says. “That’s just a guess.”
Her mom gives her a long, measured look. “When John Kennedy was shot we didn’t riot.”
Faye laughs. “Yeah, because those things are exactly equivalent.”
“What’s gotten into you tonight?”
“Nothing, Mom. Sorry.”
“I’m worried about you.”
“Don’t be.”
“I’m worried about you going to Chicago,” she says, finally coming around to her point. “It’s just—it’s so far away. And so big. And so full of, you know, this urban element.”
By which she means Negroes.
“I don’t want to scare you,” she says, “but think about it. One night you’re coming home from class and they snatch you and take you into a dark alley and rape you and shove a gun in your mouth so hard you can’t even pray to God.”
“Okay!” Faye says, and she stands up. “Thanks, Mom. Great talking to you.”
“Plus, what if you have an episode while you’re away? What are you going to do if I’m not around?”
“I’m leaving now.”
“Where are you going?”
“Out.”
“Faye.”
“Nowhere, Mom. I just need to take a drive. Clear my head.”
Which is a lie. She’s going to Henry’s, of course. Good, gentle Henry. She will go to him tonight, before her mom can scare her even more with tales of violence and rape. She takes the car and drives out of her little neighborhood, a parcel of small bungalows called Vista Hills (but this is Iowa, and that name has always confused her, the Vista Hills sign showing a wide panorama atop mountains that nowhere in this state actually exist). Then out onto the main boulevard, past the Dairy-Sweet Good-Food, the Dollar General, Schwingle’s Pharmacy. She drives past the Quik Mart station, across the street from the Spotless Touchless, past the gray water tower that some of the old folks call the green tower because it was green many years ago, before the sun bleached it, and Faye wonders if she should pity those who live so narrowly inside their memories. Then past the VFW and the restaurant named Restaurant with its sign that never changes: ALL YOU CAN EAT WALLEYE. FRIDAY, SATURDAY, AND WEDNESDAY.
She turns onto the highway and sees in the distance, through a clearing in the trees, what she playfully calls the lighthouse: It’s really a tower at the nitrogen plant where gas is vented and burned, where one can see, at night, a blue flame. So it looks like a lighthouse, sure, but it’s also a j
oke about geography: Iowa, after all, is landlocked for a billion miles. This is the way to Henry’s. She drives the empty streets, the night like any other night except for what’s on TV. The catastrophe on the news means people won’t notice her—they won’t be on their porches, in open garages, won’t say: There goes Faye. I wonder where she’s heading. Faye is aware of the attention, the neighborly curiosity, the unyielding abstract gaze of the town, the way everything sort of shifted when word got out about Circle. People at church who previously had no outward opinion of Faye whatsoever suddenly began saying things that felt hostile and passive-aggressive: “I suppose you’ll forget about us when you’re off in the big city,” or “I guess you won’t be coming back to our boring little town,” or “I imagine when you’re a big shot you won’t have time for little old me,” and so on. Things that seemed to have an ugly edge to them, like: You think you’re better than us?
The answer being, in fact, Yes.
On her desk back home is a letter from Circle—so official-looking with its logo and heavy paper—informing her of her scholarship. The first girl from her high school to win a college scholarship. The first girl ever. How could she not feel better than everyone else? Being better than everyone else was the whole point!
Faye knows it is wrong to think this, for these thoughts are not humble; they are arrogant and vain and choked with pride, that most hazy of sins. Everyone proud of heart is an abomination, the pastor said one Sunday, and Faye in the pew nearly crying because she did not know how to be good. It seemed so hard to be good, and yet the punishments were so vast. “If you’re a sinner,” the pastor said, “not only will you be punished but your kids will be punished, and their kids will be punished, to the third and fourth generation.”
She hopes the pastor doesn’t find out she visited Henry without permission.
Or that she was so sneaky about it. That she drove without headlights while approaching his family’s farm. That she parked the car at a distance and walked the rest of the way. That she crouched on the gravel road, let her eyes adjust to the dark, watched for the dogs, spied on the house. That there was some sly maneuver to get his attention without stirring his parents: tossing pebbles at his window. Teenagers have their ways.
