L'America

by Martha McPhee

  By himself Jackson walked up the long drive, over the vast fields, and through the woods, scattering the chips and ash and even a screw or two (the remnants of a childhood operation involving her spine) that were his wife. In the beginning, because of necessity, Jackson left the farm. But once the house was built (he mortgaged the property to raise the necessary funds) and once his Beth was settled there, he did not leave again until 2017 when Valeria would take him to Washington to receive an honor from the White House for his "significant contributions to the advancement of hydrogen for fuel." Actually, Valeria would force him to come, taking a stand, saying to him what his wife had never had the chance to say and what his daughter had been helpless to ask: stop hiding. "For Mom, please. For Claire," Valeria would finally say, just as simply as that.

  Driving to Washington, out of the farmland and into sprawl that gave way to more sprawl until all gave way to city, was not as hard as Jackson had always feared, just as the shot is never as painful as the child imagines, and cold water becomes warm after the stab of entering it. It was in the ease of the journey that Jackson found the greatest sadness because that ease described just how possible it would have been for him to go to his daughter when she had needed him. He remembered her pleading with him to come to New York, stricken by the end of her relationship with Cesare; he remembered Preveena begging him to come search for Beth in the days following the calamity. How unyielding he had always been, how afraid he had been of what he would feel if he left. His allegiance to Claire had allowed him to believe he was honoring his grief, that he was giving Beth her mother by being faithful to his beautiful wife. At what cost, he asked himself now? Peaceful, oblivious, the world drifted by outside the window of the car, just as it always would have and always will. The cost was Beth, of course, denied a mother by chance but a father by will, his own will to refuse to look sorrow in the eye.

  In the beginning the people who came to Claire were friends. Jackson had no grand (or even grandiose) design. People came for the weekend and stayed and stayed and stayed. Of course, many left as well. The first person to come was Albarbar, a friend from Harvard, where he'd been a student of religion. He only visited for a week: having earned his PhD, he had a position at Columbia and quite enjoyed the city. Albarbar assumed that the idea of a community at Claire was a stage of mourning, a phase that Jackson would pass through, but in the meantime he would indulge his friend. In fact, Jackson might be able to help someone else he knew. Albarbar had been to Rishikesh in India and had met a woman there who wanted to come to America to see what it was all about and to escape a marriage she was not happy with. Her name was Preveena and she was eighteen years old. She had wide dark eyes and uncommonly short hair (for an Indian woman) and grand ambitions to be a scholar of English literature, which she studied in Delhi. Eventually she wanted to teach and write elaborate novels, long and windy like those the nineteenth century is famous for. But her subject, of course, would be India, the Indian family across religion and caste and occupation and time. (This dream of writing evaporated with her teenage years, but she never stopped loving to tell the stories of her large and crazy family.) Preveena came from money, married money, and arrived at Claire in a sari with her belly peeking through the folds and pleats. Gold trimmed the borders of the peacock blue silk from Benares and a red bindi shone on her brow. She came to Claire with a trunk of tattered, well-read novels and another trunk of silk and jewels, and she never left.

  Preveena had a friend in Madras who had a friend in Rome who had a friend in Milan who had a friend in New York who had a friend in Dallas who had a friend in London who had a friend in Paris and so it went. They came discreetly, one by one. Discreet in that it wasn't a big deal; Jackson would never have tolerated recruitment or proselytizing. No one was trying to convert anyone to anything. You helped, that was all. Some stayed for a day; some a week; some, like Preveena, never left. Albarbar visited from New York, amazed to witness the growing dream, his bald head sparkling in the afternoon sun, an astonished question mark of an expression on his face. The price each person paid to live at Claire was work and work alone. You could come with nothing, contribute only what you wished, but everyone was expected to work. At first the work consisted of developing and expanding the apple farm, making it as profitable as could be. Those who had the talent for such learned to splice branches onto root stock (apple trees, like citrus, don't grow true to their seeds: if you plant a Braeburn you don't necessarily get a Braeburn) or concoct formulas that would keep pests away without poisoning the trees (or people). Claire became like any community; expansion required a variety of definite talents. People either knew how to build or learned to build; people either knew how to manage money or they learned. No one profited individually from their work at Claire; while there you contributed according to your talents and abilities and were provided for according to your needs, but no one left Claire with more than they'd brought there. All went back to Claire. After taxes were paid, Claire's profits became part of the estate, and the estate of Claire was not owned by Jackson, would not be left to Beth (or later Rada) upon his death. Claire—the land and the community's investment—would be left to the people of Claire, and upon the dissolution of the community, Claire would be given in trust to the State of Pennsylvania for the people of Pennsylvania as a park, all two thousand acres preserved. (Lawyers, you see, were necessary, too.) On the few occasions that people left unhappily, their departure had to do with money and feeling that they weren't getting enough. The complaints always boiled down to a certain suspicion and vexing greed. Once Claire was sued. You learn from experience, or so the saying goes. After that, people who stayed had to sign a contract waiving the right to sue.

  Some people simply contributed thought: they thought of what else Claire could achieve. After apples the farm moved on to meats, bartering with Amish butchers for their services slaughtering cows and pigs and chickens and turkeys. Like the apples, the livestock was raised organically. The animals thrived without antibiotics and hormones, living as freely and naturally as possible. The community at Claire had the manpower and the time and the desire to do things naturally and well.

  There were plenty of skeptics, of course: writers and journalists from New York City and Philadelphia would come posing as newcomers then leave. Cynical pieces would appear in a variety of magazines and newspapers from Vanity Fair to the New Yorker, from the New York Times to the Philadelphia Inquirer, poking fun at the endeavor. Jackson didn't care. He read all the articles with pride. Indeed he loved the Times and had it delivered daily to the foot of that mysterious driveway, which would always remain unmarked. It was his daily ritual and pleasure to walk the long distance down the hill to fetch the paper. The news was his link to the world. (A ritual that would end with Beth's death.) And, of course, locals were suspicious, too, until they learned the economics of the place (Claire's money went to local banks after all), felt its contributions, and knew, from time and experience, that it wasn't a hippie enclave of free love and LSD. (It should be said, however, that Jackson and the lot did enjoy a good joint from time to time—Moroccan hash, Asian weed.)

  People came to Claire from all over America. One man came from China when it was still quite difficult to defect. They came from Africa. They came from Norway. They came and they came and they came. Even dogs and cats came; they came from neighboring farms. "They prefer life at Claire," Jackson would say. After meat came berries, after berries came vegetables, after vegetables came ideas: hydrogen for fuel, a passion ignited in Jackson by a Russian electrochemist, who was a brief member of Claire at the height of the 1973 oil crisis and was working on the idea of a hydrogen economy. He envisioned a world in which people's cars, homes—whole cities, entire countries—employed water as fuel. Unrealistic as this pursuit may have seemed at first, it sparked Jackson's imagination. He was never one to dismiss an idea for being impractical or unrealistic if it might lead to something new and marvelous.

  As more people came, children ar
rived or were born at Claire, and the school was started. It reached out into the local community, welcoming those who did not live at Claire, offering an alternative to the public schools, and a few local kids were even brave enough to attend. Educators joined the community and the children thrived.

  As Claire grew, the community's needs did as well, and new markets were found or created for Claire's products. Fancy restaurants and gourmet food stores in New York City and Philadelphia were tapped as a market for Claire's meats and berries and vegetables and apples. An Italian man at Claire made fresh ravioli and tagliatelle like no one had ever tasted before. The people of Claire decided to use those reporters and papers to advantage, parlaying publicity into a lure for tourists. Guests could stay at Claire for a night, all meals included, for one hundred dollars, and people came—though few of the tourists remained. Claire wasn't about shunning capitalism: if money was needed, money was made, and once made, extra money was used to grow more money. No shame in that.

  During these early years, Preveena fell in love with Jackson, and throughout their love affair he continued to talk to Claire. He told her about how good it felt to feel love, about what it was like to be alive, about how Beth accepted Preveena. And Beth did. Preveena taught Beth bits of Hindi, told her long convoluted stories about monkeys in banyan trees and bathers in the polluted Ganges. She described the funeral pyres and how babies and bodies floated by in the river, and she told her how the Ganges, long ago, came down from the heavens in a torrent on the back of Shiva's wild hair. And, of course, there were maharanis and maharajas riding bejeweled elephants on their way to shoot tigers. Preveena, in her sari with all her stories and her beautiful eyes, also had a talent for fly-fishing, which she shared with Beth. They haunted the raging spring streams together, a picturesque and unlikely pair.

  Jackson was weaving the dream, but he was not in charge. He didn't have that sort of ego or desire for power. Besides, he'd have been no good at it. He wasn't interested in leadership as a role. In fact, his penchant for bartering had to be kept in check—a job that fell first to Beth, then to Preveena, then to Sissy Three.

  People fell in love and then fell out of love and there was conflict over that. Some left as a result, since even two thousand acres isn't always enough to escape a love gone bad. Others endured. Shortly after Rada was born, the love between Jackson and Preveena went bad. The new mother became more and more jealous of Claire, of Jackson's conversations with her, of his inability to let her go. He spoke more to Claire about Rada (a very dark-skinned girl with his blond hair and her mother's big eyes—a most alluring contrast in lightness and dark) than he did to Preveena.

  But Preveena stayed. She taught everyone to appreciate elaborate Indian feasts. Beth loved her nine-curry meals eaten with your fingers—right hands only, please (the left was traditionally used for the toilet). Preveena conjured up pilaus and kormas and raitas and mango chutneys, spending days in the kitchen combining spices, toasting cardamom and coriander and mustard seed, crushing the spices into a dust with a pestle, teaching Beth the chemistry, answering the girl's endless questions.

  Meanwhile, Jackson continued to speak to Claire about the dissolution of love, about his role, her role, wondering for the first time if time would have dissolved their love, pondering that notion with her, but only for a moment before banishing the idea because his world was built upon the endurance of their love.

  As strong as Jackson may have been and seemed, his grief endured along with his love. Alone sometimes he would cry. Beth always knew what the long absences behind his office door meant. As a child she would sit outside the door and wait. She didn't care how long it took for him to emerge. It was her small attempt to defy her mother and claim her father for her own. She would sit there, legs crossed Indian-style (as they used to say), back straight, and stare hard at the door, so hard sometimes she imagined she could penetrate the door with her eyes and see her father sitting at his desk, head resting in hands, sobbing and trying to speak to someone who was not there. The inescapable ache paralyzed her father. When he finally did come out, she would curl up beside him and brush his hair with her fingers, feeling the great weight of his sorrow, feeling scared by it. She hated her mother for dying, for stealing her father as well.

  "Don't hate Claire," he would say. He knew his girl. He wanted to speak to Claire so that Beth could hear her mother answer. He wanted Beth to know that her voice was beside them, her wisdom with them, that she loved her girl. He wanted his daughter to be caught up in Claire's arms, smothered with Claire's kisses. "See your daughter, darling," he said. It seemed to Beth he really was speaking to someone, but Beth couldn't see that person. "See what a fine job we're doing here with her," he continued.

  "But I don't even know this woman," Beth said. "And she definitely does not know me."

  "Don't say that," he snapped. "She does know you. She knows exactly who you are. You have been the same since the moment you were born. She knows your fierce will. She knows your warmth and love. She knew exactly who you would become." He looked into the terrified eyes of his Beth.

  They continued to come. Mash arrived in the mid-1970s from New York City and before that Russia. He built teepees and yurts and small cabins in the woods so that privacy could be offered and respected. He instructed others on how to help and some people who wouldn't have thought of themselves as talented carpenters learned otherwise. In 1984, Hunter, the failed investment banker, came from New York City (a lot of people came from New York City). Somehow this one, with all his supply of champagne and his penny loafers (tucked with pennies), had been involved with Ivan Boesky and fallen for him quite some time before Boesky would fall. Hunter, adorable, dirty blond hair, relentlessly positive, knowledgeable about many things, great questioner, he would become Beth's husband—Valeria's father. But of course no one knew that yet.

  Sissy Three came with her mass of reddish curly hair and her bright energy and her bossy nature, bossing everyone with her big plans as if she had lived at Claire since its inception and knew what was best for the place. She wrote a constitution. (To this day it remains buried in a drawer in a basement somewhere at Claire.) In fact, she became obsessed with the real Claire, poring over pictures of the woman—some even say she was trying to compete with Claire, trying to trump her zest for life with even more. Sissy Three spoke as if she knew Claire and soon this interest brought Jackson and Sissy Three together, though Jackson had no idea of the depths of inquiry and research Sissy Three had engaged in: weekends in New York with Claire's mother, flipping through old photo albums and Claire's notebooks from college, reading her letters from home. "She was smart," the grandmother said to Sissy Three, enjoying her attention and her interest. "Far smarter than I could ever have been. She had grand notions, but she was too smart to have wasted her time at the farm. She'd have written books. She'd have been at the forefront of this women's movement like—like what's her name?" She tapped her forehead with the heel of her hand as if she could knock out the name.

  "Betty Friedan?" Sissy offered.

  "She knew Betty Friedan—Claire knew her. Indeed Betty's even been to Claire." Then noticing Sissy's hands, she changed the subject: "You have the most exquisite hands." She lifted them up to admire. Sissy Three's distinguishing feature, oddly enough, was her hands, very long and slender. In Paris she had been a hand model. A Japanese chemist she had briefly dated in Paris brought her to Claire on a bright spring day. The chemist was involved with the hydrogen economy project. Sissy Three never left.

  And always the grandmother came, arriving in her black Lincoln with a scarf around her white hair and a shawl upon her shoulders. She would sit on the deck overlooking the fields and forest and the distant farms. She would tell Beth about a better life in New York City, trying to convince her granddaughter to follow Claire's own path. She wanted Beth to attend a private school where she would learn Latin instead of Hindi, to come to New York and learn to appreciate French cuisine instead of Indian. (By 1979 the grandmo
ther had won this battle.) And she would sit with Jackson, pretending to sip her champagne (she was not a drinker), and tell him he was a dreamer; she would all but tell him his dream was sure to fail as these experiments in alternative living always do. "Too much sex, too much ego, too many people with too many destinies."

  "Now, Grammy," Jackson would say, offering her the "piping hot" tea that she had requested simply because she liked to ask him to do things for her. Jackson kept Claire alive for her, and though she would never admit it, she was drawn to the community, she came and she came and she came, sitting on that deck somewhere deeply enjoying the place and the views, and telling Jackson why it would never work. Irascible, she may have been, but she was not immune to the power of her daughter's myth. She sat there above the spot that Claire had declared as the site for the house, where Claire had danced a sweet striptease in an April mist. Rising on her forearms to look at Jackson, naked both of them in the grass, Claire had said, "The world can't possibly be coming to end if we can feel as good as this."

  By the time Cesare arrived at Claire in November of 1985, brought out for Thanksgiving from New York City by Beth, there were over one hundred people living and working at the farm. Claire was not what Cesare had imagined. He had imagined a chaotic place with people living on top of each other and somehow all getting along in spite of themselves. He had imagined everyone eating and cooking and sleeping together, lots of odd people from all over the world walking around dreamily dreaming up ideas, kids running around wild and unkempt, and everyone with jobs that somehow got done, Jackson presiding over it all with a soft hand that his daughter (and various women) tried to make more firm. That was not Claire. What he found was an ordered place with privacy, routine, discipline even. Odd yes, different yes, but more like a village, a town of sorts, than Cesare's idea of what a commune might be. Although in one detail, Cesare's imaginings were realized: the kitchen in the main house was open, it seemed, to anyone at anytime. People both familiar and strange to Cesare helped themselves to the food in the refrigerator and the cupboards all day long. ("A revolving door," Grammy would say. "Feeding all those people will be the ruin of Claire.")