L'America

by Martha McPhee

  The happy official plucked out presents wrapped for Beth. Cesare was afraid the man would open them, but he only asked what was in each package. The inspector drank an enormous coffee, twenty times the size of an espresso. More, more. The land of excess, of plenty, of dizzyingly big skies. "You're spoiling someone," the man said with a big grin, then carefully returned the presents to the bags. "I'm the last obstacle between the two of you," he added with an over-familiarity Cesare noted as another small American truth. "Free to go," he said, and pointed to the sliding doors of the main terminal. They opened and closed like a mouth, revealing as they did an abundance of chaos, noise, and a sea of expectant people upon which Beth floated like a raft. Free to go: a ticket to anywhere.

  Five

  Claire

  In May of 1968 Claire died on that small Turkish road. She stood on one side of the road, Jackson on the other. Behind her was a stone wall that she had just climbed in order to see if something spectacular lay hidden beyond it. She lost her grip and fell to the ground, nothing serious, just a scrape, stood up, looked at Jackson, smiled, and wiped her hands on her jeans. The day was warm. They had been hiking in the hills above the Sea of Marmara, which spread out vast and blue beneath them. A few flowers struggled here and there to emerge from the dry earth. Claire had wanted Jackson to see a shepherd with his flock meandering across a field toward the sea. Just then a car cut between them, the only car to pass all morning. It screeched and skidded to a halt, sliding into Claire, scooping her up, rag-doll-like, and heaving her against the stone wall. Jackson reached his arms out toward her, started grabbing for her as if to stop this freak and absolutely unacceptable occurrence. Time froze, then accelerated out of control. Her body dented the fender. Her skull smashed into the wall and cracked like an egg. The driver was a small man with dark hair, a mustache, his face stricken with panic (he could see the situation was not good). He indicated with his hands, because it was clear that Jackson did not understand Turkish, that the sun had momentarily blinded him. Claire was twenty-five years old—a gorgeous woman with thick dark hair and big green eyes and dimples and a mole adorning her sweet round face, a face that could fracture light.

  She was not alone, of course; many people died that year, as we all well know: Martin Luther King Jr. was shot; Robert Kennedy was shot. Steinbeck died; Helen Keller died; Tallulah Bankhead died. Sergio Leone, king of the spaghetti Western, made Once Upon a Time in the West, casting Henry Fonda, the quintessential American hero, as a merciless villain capable of shooting down a child point-blank—blowing away our notions of the good and the wholesome. Lieutenant Calley and his men were doing just that in a small Vietnamese hamlet called My Lai. And all the regular souls, all the yous and all the mes, died their ordinary deaths—their lives perhaps not effecting history like a King or a Kennedy, but affecting history just the same: private histories, yours and mine.

  Claire's damaged head bled into her husband's lap, her blood warming his legs, and as the car that killed her drove to the nearest hospital, Jackson spoke to her about their dreams, and about their daughter (just three years old in New York City with her grandmother, doing all the naughty things that three-year-olds do, blissfully unaware in her self-centered cocoon of "no" and "mine"). Claire's black hair (tresses of curls that her mother used to tame with rags by tying each lock up tightly at night—it had hurt to move her head against the pillows—so that in the morning Claire would have perfect sausages bobbing about her face) turned blue with all the blood. Slowly, the color in her cheeks drained, and her body lost its heat. But Jackson kept talking. He talked to her all the way back to America. He didn't stop talking to her. He vowed he never would. And indeed he never did.

  In April, the month before, they had gone to Pennsylvania to look at a college that had wanted to hire Jackson to teach philosophy. He had his PhD from Harvard and was in the job market for the first time that spring. He took one look at the school, with its quaint campus with all its oak trees and its tidy chapel and its homogenous student body reacting against nothing in a time when there was so much to react against, and he knew he could not spend any portion of his life teaching there. Instead of going to the interview, he went with Claire on a drive through the hills of Snyder County, and then they flew off to Turkey to a philosophy conference in Istanbul (something about the influence of East on West in modern times, a conference they knew from the start they would not attend much of). And thus he delayed the search for a job, postponing the task until they could understand something meaningful to do with their lives. They were dreamers, believers, optimists, visionaries—typical of their generation. They believed in better and more, in not giving up, in not settling. Claire had been a senior at Radcliffe when they met, a philosophy student herself. Jackson, who was just beginning his dissertation, taught undergraduate philosophy classes. He was not one of her teachers, but she saw him around. He was older and dangerous-seeming, with his loose clothes and his thick sideburns. He was not at all like the other men, neatly put together in their oxford shirts. Claire devised routes that allowed her to bump into him and she kept bumping into him until he took notice, and then she invited him for coffee, almost commanding him to join her, using her sweet bright smile to temper the imperative.

  Whereas Jackson's work involved a little-known twentieth-century French priest, Abel Jeanniere, with radical ideas about sex and celibacy and the church (for a short while in his youth Jackson had considered converting to Catholicism), Claire was studying the sixteenth century's relationship to antiquity, focusing on Thomas More's Utopia. Her senior thesis concerned Plato's depiction of Atlantis, More's Utopia, and the role of women in both. Had she lived, she might have devoted her life to the study of feminism and More. When she died, however, she was at work on something more contemporary: she was writing a book with a group of classmates from Radcliffe on the subject of sexism in children's readers. Entitled Dick and Jane as Victims, the book took apart the Dick and Jane series in order to address sex stereotyping and its influence on children. Claire had a baby daughter, and she was determined that Beth have many options. Naive, yes; an idealist, yes—Claire was a girl herself, really, still fresh from childhood with an old-world order crumbling before her, a new one forming. Claire: her name means "bright," "famous," "clear."

  On the drive through Snyder County, Amish and Mennonite country populated by the simple black-clad folk riding by in their buggies, on their horses, on bikes, plowing their fields by hand and horse, Claire and Jackson happened upon an apple farm that was soon to be auctioned. Flyers for the taking were stacked in a clear plastic box attached to a wood pole at the mysterious yet undistinguished entrance to a long, meandering driveway that seemed to rise to nowhere. They stopped because of the plastic box and because of the driveway, which Jackson thought might lead to an adventure. Already they had had an adventure with a Mennonite man while stopped at a roadside stand to buy honey from a little old woman with crumbling teeth and tattered black clothes and a very kind smile, her curly hair so thin you could see her scalp. The man appeared on the road in a black buggy pulled by a horse. He stepped out at the honey stand and acknowledged the woman, who smiled her broken-toothed smile, and then he turned his attention to Jackson and said, "We need to talk," as if he had known Jackson all his life. "The world is coming to an end," he said. "There is a meeting tonight at my farm and we would like you to attend." He scribbled down the name of his farm, gave directions, indicated that it was for menfolk alone, stepped back into his buggy, and drove off into the dales and hills. The sound of clopping horse feet trailed in his wake.

  "I'll dress as a man," Claire said.

  "I'd rather you not," Jackson said, without a hint of irony. "I'd rather protect my woman from news of the Apocalypse." And he scooped her up and carried her to the car like a bride. And though she knew he was playing with expectations and roles, she loved being carried and protected in his arms. She allowed her head to fall against his chest and somewhere she wished she were a heroine
in a Trollope novel.

  "Always carrying gracefully the burden," she said. And the old woman smiled curiously after them as if she were looking at two exotic creatures roaming the Serengeti.

  At the mysterious entrance to the apple farm, Jackson looked at Claire and she curled her lips and everything at once was said between them: Should we go? Absolutely. Onward, then. Claire popped out of the car and grabbed one of the white sheets from the box and read Jackson the details as he maneuvered the Lincoln up the steep, rain-rutted road. (They had borrowed Claire's mother's car—always a Lincoln—a big boat but with power that easily negotiated the hazards of this road.) "Two thousand acres and one hundred of them are apple orchards holding about eight thousand trees," Claire read. "Each tree produces twenty boxes of apples and each box weighs forty-two pounds." Indeed, as they rose, terraced groves of apple trees spread out before them. The trees were just green with April warmth and the rains, and only on closer inspection could you see buds, even blossoms just beginning to open. Claire had never much thought about apples before. In five weeks the entire farm would be auctioned. She read that to Jackson and then looked at him and he looked at her and once again everything was said between them with the use of no words: Let's come to the auction. Good idea. Maybe we'll even make an offer. But we don't have any money. So what? They were living in a dark one-bedroom on Manhattan's Lower East Side. Jackson loved Claire for her desire to devour life.

  The road kept rising, circling around a cone-shaped hill, cutting through the orchards then woods, moving up and up and up, seemingly into the clouds, which were thick that day, swollen with the promise of rain. On top of the hill were vast fields of long grasses blowing this way and that in a gentle breeze. The car bounced, got stuck, freed itself, then bounced some more until they pulled to a stop and got out and ran across the fields. "Think of apples," Claire said. "Do you ever really stop to think about apples?" There were no apple trees in sight anymore, but still she was high on apples. From up here you could see all across the world it seemed, far out over Pennsylvania anyway: hills rolling into more hills, and many farms in the distance like miniatures.

  "John Chapman," Jackson said, "who spread apple seeds all across America."

  "You would know Johnny Appleseed's real name."

  "Apples float because they're 25 percent air. They're related to the rose family. Oh, and something about an apple a day." He began listing all the names of all the apples he knew: Jonagold, Red Delicious, Macintosh, Winesap, the dry red Ben Davis, Braeburn. "Shall I go on?" and he looked at her with his blue eyes and his half smile, and she loved him absolutely and felt delirious with desire for the two of them and for the things they would do together. He was a big tall man with those sideburns, the fashion of the day, slicing across his cheeks handsomely. He came from a good Christian family in Virginia (a hint of southern accent hid in his speech). Though his family had little, they encouraged him to apply for scholarships to the best schools in the Northeast; he had been a boy who liked to study and to think and to know, and he was generous with his knowledge—not one of those who like to make others feel stupid for what they don't know. His apple knowledge, of course, was just a lark. He had gone apple picking once in college and remembered some information. He continued, "They say three apples a day keeps three doctors away." Claire hit him playfully and he grabbed her and kissed her and she spun away from him so that he would continue to chase her across the fields.

  His family was still in Virginia. His father was a retired mechanic and car salesman, and his mama, who attended church regularly and was upstanding in her community, had the defining characteristic of being obese. Claire's mother did not approve, never did and never would, of this union.

  "He does not come from good stock," she had said to her daughter after meeting the parents.

  (To Jackson's mother she had said, "I know of a good diet.")

  "And your stock?" Claire had asked sharply. She had grown up in New York City in the rent-controlled apartment, attending the best schools, unaware of how intricately her mother balanced the finances in order to give the appearance that they had so much more than they actually had. Indeed, it wasn't until Claire was in college that she understood her family had nowhere near as much money as the girls she had gone to grade school with. "Never decline an invitation by saying that we cannot afford to do something," she once heard her mother admonish her father. "Simply say we are busy."

  Stock: her mother chuckled a little as she would when her airs, those airs, were identified. But for her mother, anyway, it was as if she, and her daughter, were somehow exempt from the reality that they were not Rockefellers or Carnegies or Kennedys.

  "At least I'm not obese. With fat like that, carrying all that weight around, she will not last the decade. And that man, that Johnson"—she enjoyed pretending that she could not remember Jackson's name—"he will never be rich. You need a lawyer or a banker or a doctor," her mother informed her. Her own good husband had been an engineer. When he died two years ago of lung cancer (caused by pipe smoking according to Claire's mother, who always had to have an explanation), he left her with an inheritance and a solid pension that would take care of her for life—not in grand style, but comfortably all the same if she were wise. She lived in the sprawling rent-controlled apartment overlooking the Hudson River, after all.

  "All unworthy professions in classic literature. Doctors were scorned—life's gatekeepers," Claire said. Of course, Jackson knew of his future mother-in-law's feelings, but he was too confident to care much and too kind to take offense. Rather, he humored her and flirted with her and made her smile and laugh. What he didn't fully appreciate, because he was not vain or conceited, was that the thing that bothered her most about him was how sexual she found him to be. He oozed sexuality through his sheer strength and size and confidence. Try as she might, she could not stop herself from imagining her daughter in a variety of compromising positions of ecstasy.

  "With him you will never be rich," her mother said, sharp eyes piercing, "and if you struggle your entire life you will not age well and that's a fact." At all this, Claire simply laughed and married Jackson and had a daughter soon thereafter and with Beth the dreams began in earnest, and now Claire danced across a field with her husband racing after her ready to tackle her. She wore an orange tweed suit that her mother had bought at Best's so that she would look the part of wife for the search committee at the college. At this moment they were supposed to be there eating lunch with faculty inspecting Jackson (and Claire) to see if they would be a "fit" for the community.

  "Just think of Beth in these fields. They'd seem endless for her. So much to explore," Claire said. And she wished her daughter were with them now, her pudgy little body in her arms as she ran across the field. "We'd build right here. The house should be right here to take advantage of the view." Claire showed him the flyer and the map it contained of the farm. On the map, a farmhouse from 1846 was indicated, but they had not yet passed it, as it was hidden in a grove of sycamores at the bottom of the other side of the hill. Upon seeing it later, they would declare it far too dark and depressing though they would decide it could be useful, if properly restored, as a store from which they could sell the farm's products. The old house had been lived in for many years by the old apple farmer and his son and was in a catastrophic state of disrepair with dog feces smelling up the place.

  "We'd build it here—big and filled with rooms so that anyone who wants can come and stay and stay and stay, as long as they help the farm to thrive, as long as they contribute talent and ideas. My gosh it's big enough at two thousand acres." And even if this was, as it most likely was, just one of many idealistic notions that Claire would have had across the span of her younger years, Jackson took it as gospel after her death—talked to her of it as they drove to the hospital, as he flew her body home, as he stood tall and elegant and pained along with her mother at the funeral before the cremation. Where anyone who wants can come and stay and stay and stay. Talked t
o Claire of it as he held their tiny Beth in his big arms, comforting her as she cried for mama, Jackson not understanding, perhaps never understanding, how to tell Beth where her mama was. "She's inside of you," he would say later when Beth was a bit older but not yet old enough to understand metaphor. She would want to turn herself inside out like a shirt.

  But that day, up there, everything was right and thus began the dream, with those few words and the rain clouds streaking by and the sun on distant hills. Claire took off her coat and she took off her shirt and she took off her bra. She did a little seductive dance for Jackson. And she took off her skirt and she took off her slip and she took off her shoes and she took off her stockings and her underwear and she looked at him with teasing eyes, pursed lips, and did another little dance with her slip as a prop, tossing it and then even her earrings (pearl studs) into the field, and once and yet again everything was said between them with the use of no words and the warmth of April and a lacy mist on their backs.

  The whole drive back to New York City they built their house on top of that hill.

  Five weeks later, an urn of ashes in his arms, Claire's mother and Beth at his side, Beth in a ridiculous tailored coat with velvet and fur purchased for the occasion by Claire's mother, Jackson bought the apple farm at auction, using a portion of Claire's mother's inheritance from her husband. There were only a few other bidders: an Amish man and a few locals with not enough cash. For collateral, the mother (her name, by the way, was Eunice, but no one really called her that—she was Mother, the grandmother, Grammy, or to her friends Uni or Nice, pronounced like the city in France) took out a life insurance policy on Jackson for $500,000, she being the sole beneficiary. (He outlived her by many years, but long before she died he had been able to repay her with interest, which she refused, from Claire's earnings and from investments gone well.)