Joanne didn’t take the bait. She said, ‘Whatever you think of me, I have a job, and I intend to go on doing it. I just want you to know I have more feeling than you give me credit for.’ She pointed in the direction of Norman’s office. ‘That board is not my life!’
Norman acknowledged it. ‘It was a mistake. I’m sorry.’
Joanne’s eyes were glossy. Clearly, she had other things on her mind. ‘Last week, I looked up the college where Peter’s working. Somehow, you suspect the life others are leading is better than yours. I thought Peter had found happiness. The college out in Oklahoma where he works, it’s like that Columbine High School where those awful killings happened... He would never have dreamt of settling for it in a million years.’
She kept talking, something about Peter having been hired to teach Composition to students, farmers’ daughters aspiring to be nurses’ aids, medical transcriptionists and bank tellers.
Her voice was suddenly faint with a rising misgiving. She was emerging from a great shock of self-awareness. She looked at Norman. ‘Looking Peter up doesn’t constitute a betrayal, does it?’ She had misgivings about having revealed it by the time she had it said.
Norman paved it over. ‘So what were you saying about Peter?’ There was within his saying it a pandering sense that all might yet be navigated.
Joanne said as much. ‘You want to hear it, really?’
She didn’t await his answer.
‘When I first met Peter, he talked a lot about New England. There were liberal colleges tucked away in Vermont. He was trying for one of those jobs. I think what he was doing at the time was coming to terms with his lack of real talent. He talked a lot about chickens and white fences. I was the alternative to his life as a famous poet, or Peter thought that greatness might be snuck up upon, that in not seeking it, in our retreat, he might find it there in the quiet of a life simply lived. We hoped for it, both of us, without ever saying it.’
Joanne looked at Norman. Her eyes were set beyond a beseech that Norman should hear this, or that it mattered what he thought. It had to be simply announced.
She raised her voice. ‘Fast forward five years. We dressed in a shabby bohemian way, as if we were decided on being that way. We were pretty much broke. And then I got a call about my father being sick. Nobody had bothered to tell me before.’
Joanne’s eyes widened again with emotion.
Norman looked down because he felt it was the decent thing.
The heart of the matter lay in a sisterly rivalry between Joanne and her sister Sheryl, a complicated and entangled story that involved Sheryl and her husband Dave, and a marriage a week out of high school, whereafter Sheryl had got busy pumping out four children in quick succession, while Dave had been hired, fired, hired and fired again, so he ended up signing with the National Guard, which apparently had increased in Sheryl an emerging patriotism that got her talking a lot about Communism and American values.
It was a hell of a lot of detail. Norman listened as best he could. He suppressed the urge to yawn. He could see there was reproach in how Joanne described it all, the venial quality of a small life and small details, and yet it mattered greatly to her. That much he was willing to acknowledge. It was complicated, as were most family relationships. Some of it didn’t make sense, what Joanne really had against Sheryl.
Then Joanne got to the heart of the matter. Her father had come down sick and nobody had called her. He was sick a long time, suffering from dementia.
Joanne hugged herself against the settling memory of it. ‘Sheryl was so cold on the phone when she called. It was right on the eve of Thanksgiving. Then she got to the reason she was calling really. Dad and Mom were selling their house and moving in with Sheryl. There were papers that needed to be signed and witnessed. There had always been an agreement that the house would be split between us, but then suddenly there wasn’t. They wouldn’t let me speak to Dad. I didn’t know what papers they were talking about. When I asked about what papers needed signing, Sheryl slammed the phone down.’
Joanne’s voice trailed off for a moment. ‘Sheryl has always had a way of making me out to be the bad guy.’ She made quotation marks with her fingers to signify the inconsequentiality and triviality of it. She was suddenly self-conscious. She looked at Norman. ‘Why is it the lives of others, or even our own, can mean nothing when we speak about them?’
Norman said softly, ‘I don’t believe that’s the case.’ In doing so, he advanced her right to continue.
Joanne nodded in a rallying sense of needing to tell it. ‘I wouldn’t have gone. I knew Sheryl, but Peter insisted. He hadn’t earned more than $12,000 a year adjunct teaching, and I could see he was seeking to find in Sheryl and Dave’s life a reason to feel more sure about his choices, when Sheryl and Dave weren’t to be messed with like that.’
Norman advanced the story by degrees. ‘So you went?’
Joanne nodded. ‘We went. Dave answered the door in a camouflage jacket. Sheryl had turned huge. She was in a church lady’s floral dress and pink slippers and busy in the kitchen. She didn’t say hi or anything. I saw Dad in a chair by the TV. He was already adrift of everything. He didn’t recognize me, and then he did recognize me, then didn’t again. He was sitting forward, watching a Bills game in a Bills sweater. Mom hardly said a word to me.
‘Dave started talking about Gulf War Syndrome. He and Sheryl were patriotic still, but in that rabidly anti-government way conservatives can get. Peter thought he saw an inroad when we had been there a half-hour and Dave hadn’t even bothered to take our coats. Peter had worked with veterans. He told Dave how he had used poetry to help with their PTSD, while Dave just wanted to talk about the NRA and protecting the Second Amendment. I could feel a disaster coming. Dave was talking to Dad and to Sheryl like we weren’t there. Then Peter said something about a constitutional democracy and the power of the ballot box, while just then Dave saw a doe and a fawn in the yard outside and pointed it out. Something about it struck Peter. I saw it then. It was a Thoreau moment he tried to write a poem about later, and then he denied it was about that Thanksgiving, when the poem, for Christ’s sake, was called “A Deer Comes to Thanksgiving”.
‘Peter asked Dave if he thought the deer had any concept of Thanksgiving. This was how Peter started his classes, asking open-ended, inane questions, while Dave just looked at Sheryl like they were sharing the funniest joke. Dave said, “First off, deer didn’t come over on the Mayflower, Professor!” That’s what they called Peter, Professor, like the Professor on Gilligan’s Island.
‘Meanwhile, Dad wanted a round of root beer floats for the kids. Sheryl said it would spoil dinner, but Dad got his way. I went down to the basement for the ice cream just to escape. Dave followed. He came up to me and said, “You know the problem with you? You need to get laid by a real man.” I had my head in the freezer. When I turned, I said, “I’d just as soon have you keep your opinions to yourself,” and he said, “You want to know something? Your sister is twice the woman you’ll ever be. What are you doing with that fruitcake?” Then he reached into his pocket and presented me with a card. It turned out Dave was a card-carrying member of Promise Keepers. He explained it as a pact between God and men.
‘Upstairs, Sheryl’s middle daughter, Misty, was giving a command performance for Peter. I’d heard about Misty’s exploits, the phrase Junior Olympics bandied around for years, suggesting in reality nothing more than you could pay the entrance fee to a regional tournament. I hated Dave at that moment, and yet, the truth was, Sheryl and Dave deserved credit to a certain extent. I wasn’t beyond acknowledging it. Sheryl had sat through all the practices, Sheryl holding to certain family values like this was a Tea Party political battle she’d understood was always coming and had now. I might have said something, but I didn’t.
‘There was maybe a point of reconciliation. I was willing to concede to my own shortcomings, but weakness never played with Sheryl, so in just standing there, I kept thinking this was it, this was the
extent of all our lives. I kept staring at Dave staring at Misty, and knowing that it didn’t get better than this for most everybody, and that what I was witnessing was the contained dream of all those tramps who lived with the ever-lasting hope that they might make it onto a Wheaties box. All you needed was one tramp to make it onto a cereal box to keep it all within reach.
‘I thought Peter must have been thinking the same. This was all grist for the mill. Dave was standing with a Genesee beer in his hand, watching me out of the corner of his eye. They had a signed autograph of Mary Lou Retton alongside Bela Karolyi. Sheryl made Misty go get it, like it was a testament to her talent. It said something like, “Keep reaching for your dreams!”– something vague and inspirational, but not specific to Misty’s actual talents, or lack thereof. It was never established if they’d met either Mary Lou or Karolyi.
‘At dinner, Peter got talking to Sheryl about an idea for a cookbook, some potential collaborative project they had been discussing while I had been downstairs with Dave, when Dave reached for Sheryl and said, “I have a marriage license that, among other things, entitles me to exclusive rights to Sheryl’s cooking, and, anyway, we’d have to ask Sheryl’s campaign manager.” And that’s how it came to light Sheryl was considering running for the State Assembly in Albany.
‘I nearly shit myself. Even Dad looked up. He had gravy all over his lips, Dad, who couldn’t stand Dave at one point, and now it was all changed. There was already talk of building an extension onto the house for the two boys that was a vague cover for anticipating the long-term care of Dad and Mom. I was a cast-out. It was like I didn’t know these people sitting around me. A trial and jury had been convened in my absence, and I was found guilty.’
Joanne looked up, so Norman could see her life was there before her, in the way life can sometimes make itself known.
‘When I got back, I looked into the Peace Corps as a way out. But, you know, it’s not easy to give yourself up to the prospect of cholera or typhoid or malaria. There are waiting lists of people ready to sign up. Nobody ever says, “I’m going to lose myself in Cleveland!” That same year, I got pregnant a second time. I didn’t tell Peter. He was lost in another round of national academic job searches and had come up empty again. I knew he was cheating on me. We were maxed out on credit cards. I saw a receipt from the John Hancock, a revolving restaurant we had gone to early in our relationship. I was aware of him telling the same stories, but to a different girl, like we were all interchangeable characters on this merry-go-round. He asked me, not long after I saw the John Hancock receipt, if I had ever been with another woman, or if it had any appeal, so, for the life of me, I thought he was trying to shore up all his options, that perhaps the burden of life was better shared with more than one person, in the way certain religions make the allowance for the taking of more than one wife. I told him I wasn’t interested. It wasn’t the answer he was looking for.
‘That Christmas, we got a postcard of Misty in a plaster cast, a family Christmas portrait. Dave was holding Misty like Karolyi did that little girl who won gold. Misty had broken her femur. It ended her career, the capstone of what might have been, and never would have, but it set Misty on the path of gracious acceptance of what the Lord ordained, like the Lord had time to look down on Misty, but that’s how she thought about it, and that’s what counted in the end. They had all these trophies behind her, like the spoils of Tutankhamun’s tomb.
‘In the end, Sheryl was beaten in a primary for the State Assembly, but she ended up getting Dad to enter into some ungodly tax shelter so he got on Medicare. They got the extension built with government money. Dad put his house into a Revocable Living Trust, so I don’t know what I’m entitled to. When I’ve tried to speak with Sheryl, she tells me, “Ask a lawyer to explain it!” It’s a war of attrition, and I’ve been shut out. I’m just coming to terms with that reality.’
Joanne used the heel of her hand against her nose, blinked and blinked again. ‘This is just heartbreak talking, right?’
Norman didn’t disagree. He said, ‘I think you understand life in a way most will never fully realize. It’s part of the process of reassessing and finding peace.’
Joanne seemed appeased, when Norman wasn’t sure he wasn’t just lying, or lying was the wrong word. He just didn’t believe in enlightenment and reform in the way others believed something could be come upon and overcome. The reality was, Joanne had, in fact, talked too long and too candidly, so the essential mystery of her life was settled. Ordinarily, talks like this ended in the payoff of an entanglement of sheets, in a succor and commitment.
In the stalemate of words, Joanne seemed to understand it. She offered an alternative: ‘I could make eggs and toast if you’re hungry?’
Norman put his hand to his stomach for exaggerated effect and said, ‘Starving!’, paving the way to recommencing a normal routine.
Joanne, in her genuine honesty, had set her finger on an essential fault within his work, and, in so doing, Norman felt a deepening understanding of how the drift of days should intersect with the fears and joys of others, and how the megalomania of his life had destroyed a crucial sense of perspective and balance.
6.
IN THE WINTRY light of mid-morning, at the entrance to Lake Forest Cemetery, what Nate Feldman noted was not the solemnity of the cemetery, but the large number of rules there were for a place where only the dead resided.
It took time to find his father’s grave. The newer part of the cemetery stood on a rolling tongue of hill. The grave markers were recessed into the grass. Flowers and wreaths could not be left. It said so on a sign, an ordinance that facilitated the living – namely, the grounds crew – in the expedient sweep of their commercial grade lawnmowers.
When Nate eventually found the grave, he scuffed the snow away with the toe of his shoe and read the marker:
THEODORE L. FELDMAN
SGT
US NAVY WWII
SEPT 16 1922
OCT 19 1987
BELOVED HUSBAND & FATHER
Anyone walking through the graveyard would know that here lay a man who had served bravely and faced the line of fire when it was most demanded. But in this regard, Nate thought, his father’s individuality, his exact service, the nature of his personal history, was erased, so he was as faceless and anonymous as the heaps of corpses who had been bulldozed into mass graves.
His father had found no valor in survival, or, for that matter, in the act of service. He had avoided the fetish of the dead, avoided the rousing sentiment of Veterans Day, when a nation’s thoughts were obliged to settle on the collective heroism of all those who had passed, when history and truth were always far more complex.
He said it to Nate in as many words one evening, his father coming out to the perch of the carriage house out back of the main house to call Nate in for supper. A panel on a TV show was debating the constitutionality of the draft. Nate had been engrossed.
In listening to the show, his father was decided that too much life had been lost in what Eisenhower had called the Industrial Military Complex. If the time came, there was the National Guard as a measure of last resort. His father had connections. It was the best of both worlds. Nate might save face, serve and never see action.
In the interim, there was life to be lived.
*
Nate used the carriage house out back of the main house as his domestic quarters. His father had been liberal and generous and impressed on Nate that he felt that trying to dissuade men from their natural desires, as he put it, was a perversion of the natural order of things, implying a salaciousness in Nate that was never the case. At times, Nate felt he was being absolved for sins he hadn’t actually committed.
His father communicated his tolerance not in so many words but in the way he announced his arrival at the carriage house, his noisy footsteps across the flagstone crossway, ostentatiously sniffing the scent of someone who, he imagined, had just gone scrambling through the back egress. In reality, few g
irls ever visited Nate in the carriage house, and those who did were acquaintances or study partners.
And yet, his father swore he knew all Nate’s girlfriends by their perfume. He called them Duchess and he called Nate Swank. It was just one of his foibles.
When his draft number came up in the fall of 1970, Nate was attending Northwestern but living at home. He decided that he would not seek a college deferment. He told no one, least of all his father. Nate would not be pressured. He kept his father at bay, while in the back of his mind he was advancing on the idea of seeking his place in the world in the act of serving. It was the unpopular choice, no doubt, but it carried with it, for men like him – college men who did not defer – a noble and gratifying significance.
At the time, he was in a platonic situation with a junior in high school whom he was tutoring in Math – Janice Marsh, the kid sister of his best friend. He eventually told his mother of his decision and begged she say nothing to his father.
A week later his mother betrayed him.
His father arrived at the top of the carriage house stairs while Janice was sitting at a table beside Nate. A book was open between them. The fire threw shadows on the exposed red brick. It could have been a scene from a hundred years before.
Nate had grown. His hair was long. He had the beginnings of a goatee beard. He was wearing bell-bottomed pants with a hip-hugger waist and a paisley shirt.
It was one of the few times that Nate had ever seen Helen Price. Below, he saw her leave in the crescent arc of the circular drive in his father’s car. His father was that loaded he hadn’t been able to drive.
His father insisted on being introduced to the duchess. He was aggressive and lurching in his advance.
Janice Marsh hardly understood what he was saying. She looked for her coat.
Nate’s father had a bottle of Scotch in his hand. Nate reached out to steady him. His father swung wildly. He would not be handled, not by his goddamn son! It was the most awful Nate had ever seen him.
The Death of All Things Seen Page 6
