Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance

by Richard Powers

  —I’m fine, Mom.

  —You lost your job?

  —No, but I’m working on that. I didn’t tell my boss I was flying out here.

  —Do you think they’re going to like that? You know, Petje, most places don’t look kindly on employees leaving without saying anything. Come in the house. You can call them from here. I’ll pay the charges.

  —Mom, it doesn’t matter. Listen. You know how you always say, “What Ford might have done for my family”?

  —You need money and you say it doesn’t matter if you lose your job?

  —Forget it. What’s for lunch?

  And the two of them, arm in arm, sauntered up the flagstones, with Mrs. Mays explaining how she had just finished making several bologna sandwiches—his favorites—on the hunch that he might be flying the twelve hundred miles from Boston some time that day.

  Although it meant paying uncountable dues, Mays enjoyed being home. He enjoyed it partly out of pure hedonism, for the perpetually clean linen and hot food so lacking in his life in Boston. He enjoyed the scent of memory that clung to the place, the after-stink of tar pitch that sticks to freshly washed hands. The paint-and-putty jobs his mother continually administered to the walls—she did not work, and had nothing else for her time but “keeping the place up”—never completely masked the atlas of nicks and bruises that stood for the various accidental joys of Peter’s childhood: the place where he punched the door in a Christmas rage, the fat hutch’s mass-marks in declivities on the floor. The smells of eucalyptus and vanilla extract, the constant clack of radiators, the yellow, irremediable tape marks, random rectangles from a siege of postcards and mementos.

  Mostly he enjoyed returning home to sample the monastic sadness of the middle class that he loved. Mrs. Mays held down the fort in solitude. Her husband had died while Mays was still in his early teens. Of his father, Peter chose to remember only demonstrations of extreme emotion: anger, when loosening his belt in the threat of discipline; hope, when reminding his son privately how much depended on getting a solid, scientific training; or love, when administering maudlin, affectionate cuffs on the ear over three-handed pinochle.

  Of sustained scenes involving his father, Mays remembered only one: the last three hours of life, when, the color and texture of a steamed clam, the man lay in a canopied bed in the back bedroom in an anaesthetic, camphoric haze, regaining consciousness only long enough to say, “This pain in my chest is driving me crazy.” Since then, it had been just the two of them, and after Mays departed for the professional world, his mother took up permanently her solitary confinement.

  Mrs. Mays and her son agreed that the pleasure of monasticism surpassed the sensible commodities of the world. She cared for nothing better than to hover perpetually at the picture window, never more than a few steps away from the lunch meat in the eventuality that her lingering hunch concerning her son’s return should come true that day.

  For sustained solitude, no house beat this one, and no neighborhood beat Chicago’s near-southwest side. Although the houses were smaller, the lawns less spacious than on the affluent North Shore, a more profound gulf separated each living room. The residents here still lived in the shock of immigration. They came from Eastern Europe in the floodgates of the 1930s and ’40s: Latvians, Czechs, Slavs—“Loogans,” as the boy Mays generically lumped them, enjoying a one-generation edge of superiority.

  Whether they lived in fear of having their green cards revoked, or whether, in interpreting the events of the last half century, they unanimously concluded that the only valid national state extended just as far as the cellar steps, few neighbors ever ventured out on the streets except to trowel their lawns in the anonymity of Saturday. The only proofs that the endless, cramped two-deckers—each with widows’ walks and steep stone porch steps—had occupants were the clean doily curtains and plaster Holy Mothers haunting each window. Infrequently, sidewalk graffiti proclaimed that Lithuanians Are Rising, but if they rose they did so invisibly, perfidious as bread leaven.

  Mays liked to come home to this universal respect for isolation. He liked to spend summer evenings sleeping in the rocker on the screened front porch, or, awake, molding his mind to concord with the crickets. Arriving home and answering his mother’s questions, which ceased abruptly when she felt all was well, he could go out into the backyard, or up into the front loft overlooking the street and nurse the idea of total oblivion: the next best thing to being hopelessly lost. The more a person exercised nonfeeling, the more pleasant it felt. Mays, his mother, the Loogans, all loved this nothingness for the same reason: they had become used to it. It was what they knew.

  But for this visit and perhaps a good deal longer, the old charm of loneliness lay outside his reach. He’d have to put isolation away awhile. Several months back he had started to form, for want of a better word, a concern; and as an oyster trades off size for smoothness in converting sand to pearl, Mays had made larger and larger gyrations to live with that concern until he had finally shelled out the two hundred dollars and sacrificed his job to fly out and ask his mother, over breakfast, what she knew of the father of modern mass production.

  —“What Ford might have done”? I’ve been saying that for years. I got it from my mother, took it over as my birthright. You can use it if you want—no patent.

  —Right, Mom. But tell me how your mother got started saying it. And don’t say “thin air.” She had to get it someplace.

  —I forget. That’s ancient history, Petje.

  —Think. It’s important. Believe me.

  —What’s the matter? You need money? I’ll sell the furniture. What do I want for furniture?

  —That’s not the point, Mom.

  —You need a place to stay? You come live here.

  —It’s not healthy for a grown man to live with his mother.

  —What health? You’re going to give me tuberculosis? What do I need for health?

  Although devoutly Catholic and even an occasional Infant cultist, Mrs. Mays took a Yiddish syntax from the tutor who had taught her and her parents English. She was intelligent, but not highly educated. The other leading influence on her speech, the tabloid press, she scoured religiously each week, particularly for articles about the new advances of medical science. As such, her good, Anglo-Saxon word-hoard lapsed at times into purple, polysyllabic technobabble, a startling “piezoelectric” or “multivalence.” She wrote more than she spoke. She lived for mail, sending twenty letters to her son’s one.

  —Look, Mom. I need to know where this phrase comes from. I’ll explain it to you better when I understand it myself. Now as far as you know, your grandpa never worked for Ford. It wasn’t something silly like that?

  —Your great-grandpa never set foot in America.

  Mays saw the irrelevance of the answer, but took it as a solid no. Right out of the gate he discovered what every researcher comes to admit in time: tracing folklore is largely speculation, even from the source’s mouth. He began to suspect that the news photo was a coincidence. Perhaps his mother’s grandfather lost his farm in the hard years following the war for want of a Ford tractor. But Mays could not drop it there. Bernhardt had to be accounted for, Nijinsky, Armistice Day, Nurse Cavell, The Trading Floor.

  The time had come to roll out the big guns. Peter had avoided asking directly to the point, equally terrified of both yes and no. But he had nothing left to find out except what he was after.

  —Did any of my ancestors ever meet Ford?

  —Are you joking me?

  —Is that so impossible? The man wasn’t a god. He probably met several little men in his life. Rumor has it he was a little man himself, once.

  —Don’t get fresh with your mother. My father was a poor policeman. He only met one celebrity in his life, the town funnyman named Bauble. He had to stop the fellow from killing his wife.

  —So you’re absolutely sure?

  —“Sure” is for statesmen.

  —I’m looking over the old stuff anyway.
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  —It’s all yours. See if you can’t throw some of it out this time. It gives me the willies, all those old papers yellowing. I can hear them.

  Five hundred pounds of fire hazard in the house eaves made up the Mays family memorabilia. Mrs. Mays could not hear it yellowing because it had long ago yellowed. Nor did it give her the willies, and she did not really want any of it thrown out. Both she and her son shared a fondness for the old archival junk. The attic-treasure enforced their solitude. On those rare occasions when Mays mucked about in the memorabilia, he had liked not so much to look through it as to sit in and smell it—naphthalene and wood alcohol—and remind himself of how many people were already dead. Yet both mother and son felt obligated to denigrate the junk when speaking of it, ashamed to care for something so fully lost and useless.

  The keepsakes filled the apron made by the A-roof where it ran past the verticals of the second story—not the attic proper, but more like two unfinished closets running the length of both eaves. In houses of this design, such superfluous space normally gets filled with insulation. So was the old stuff for the Mayses a sort of accessible insulation. The mementos divided chronologically: in the west eave, the material covering the last two generations—Peter and his folks. The east eave held everything earlier.

  As a child, Peter was not allowed to enter either eave. When the constraint was lifted in adolescence, he satisfied the curiosity of the forbidden by spending an entire weekend there. After the initial orgy, his tastes settled and he grew to prefer the west. Peter liked his own records, photos of himself, not through any unusual narcissism but because he recognized what he was looking at. He liked to relive, this time consciously, those tiny triumphs of and over inconsequence: baby’s first tooth; first unassisted toileting (Kodak, 1957). These records lay nearest the cubbyhole entrance to the crawl space, the easiest to dip into and the easiest to leave.

  On more extended trips, he would crawl deeper into the west eave to visit his parents’ documents. He liked the pictures of his mother as a child, posed in Wild West outfit on a four-foot pony, or smiling, back to rail, as her family sailed into New York harbor. Looming behind her in this milky, Brownie camera exposure was not the expected Statue of Liberty but the Ellis Island detention camp. The composition always made Peter more aware of the taker, presumably his grandfather, than of the subject, his mother. But he did not linger long over the photos and reproductions of his mother’s life. He spent most of his time in the west eave getting to know his father.

  From keepsakes Peter learned that his father—also a first-generation immigrant, judging by the quantity of letters with foreign postmarks—had come to this country as an orphan (passport) and had attended grade school at a charity organization (six report cards from Waterloo Ohio Home for the Homeless, gentleman’s Cs, with some trouble in English, History, and Penmanship). He’d worked first for the railroads (medical record; insurance payment for tie dropped on and breaking his shin). Near the end of the Second War, as he came of age, he joined the service (volunteer, identification, regimental, and honorable-discharge papers). He served domestically with the Engineers (photo; insignia) after being rejected from the Air Corps as too short (personal letter).

  A box of unsold samples attested to his first failed business venture, a cheap brass souvenir ashtray stamped Welcome to Chicago, bearing several intaglio views of city highlights: the Water Tower, the Science and Industry Museum, the El and Loop. Meticulous sales records in his father’s hand attested that business had never been brisk. Chicago, as his father wrote sadly to a friend, never became the tourist mecca it should have been.

  Finally Peter’s father hit his stride as an actor on radio. A producer discovered him at a community Bingo game, calling out numbers in what could pass for a German accent. Once heard, his father was by all accounts easily remembered. Radio gave him a faceless notoriety. He became Herr Gustav, the Gentle German, who interrupted Mystery Tonight to beseech the home audience to “drinken op de bier dat is gut ver yoo.” In the late forties, the Germans went from being the most feared to the most comical national group, and Mays’s father capitalized on that change.

  On an old machine the size of a large suitcase, Peter had several times listened to two-minute samples of his father’s work. The distortion of radio and tape combined to make his father sound as far away as Sputnik, but close, too, as close and familiar as the crawl space, the west eave: the world’s most German non-German, talking on in tongues as if he had never died. With the waning of commercial radio, he gave up the accent and became a reader of weather reports, with no one in the home audience any the wiser.

  Beyond his father’s keepsakes lay the end of the eave and a stepladder. Three crouched steps and Mays penetrated the broad attic under the A-pitch of the house. Here resided nothing of interest: old furniture, a globe still showing Manchukuo and Siam, and a Victrola that reproduced nothing earthly. Mays headed for the far side, where another stepladder descended into the east eave. He did not so much as turn his head to sniff the mementos of the more recent Mays family. This time he crawled for antiquity.

  He went down the ladder and fumbled for the pull cord that lit the east eave. The light came on at a fraction of its original wattage, yet bright enough to show the material at hand as still too modern. No records of his father’s family existed; he had arrived in America orphaned, without documents. The boxes around Mays held materials contemporaneous with his mother’s earliest records in the west eave, only focused on her parents: identical boat-rail shot in front of Ellis Island, mother substituted for daughter. Mays had more hands and knees work before reaching relevant terrain.

  Mays kept to the attic side of the low, pitched ceiling, edging his body forward in the manner of a coal miner. He could smell the artifacts getting older. A tilt of the head to either direction showed a bridal veil, a swatch of funeral gown, an oval frame around a hunk of hair, a piano roll titled “Heerlijke Opa.” Warm and warmer. The molding holy host of printed material—the licenses, letters, certificates, lapsed insurance policies—multiplied into a babble of tongues.

  He stopped to open a cardboard box: ten pounds of stereoscopic views, once popular with the spending public. Two photos of nearly the same scene—usually the Eiffel Tower, an auto show, or the boardwalk in Antwerp—sat shoulder to shoulder on stiffened cardboard. Whoever saw fit to save the views did not preserve the hand-held viewer, so Peter could only hold up and gaze at a few of the slightly skewed scenes and imagine how parallax transformed the two views into three dimensions.

  A shade farther along, he opened a similar box filled with commercially reproduced cartes de visite, percursors of the modern postcard. He flipped through them randomly until hitting on one that made his blood go to zero: Madame Sarah lay supine on a sofa, not dead, but doing a convincing imitation. At once, he wondered how Brink, Bullock, Delaney, or even the silent partner Moseley could have broken into the east eave to plant this here. When the suspicion faded and he gazed on the rapturous, pliant face of the actress, he once again filled with desire, the urge to unmask, but not Bernhardt or the convincing Ms. Greene. He wanted to reveal the woman who had sat next to him, whose hand he half felt, half fabricated: Alison.

  He could still abandon the east eave, reverse his quick flight of this morning, show up on The Trading Floor, and put himself at the mercy of the lacy Edwardian. Only a yard and a half of keepsakes still faced Mays, mostly unpromising trinkets and bric-a-brac. The printed matter had produced nothing promising so far: no famous names, no mention of America. For a moment, Mays thought the last four feet could promise nothing that Alison couldn’t deliver in spades. She seemed to like him, even without knowing he was a tech writer. And she had cheekbones like you read about.

  Peter debated the matter in his head while flipping through the primitive postcards. Each showed a celebrity; many he did not recognize. He thought it strange that his ancestors had a hundred photos of celebrities and none of themselves. But then, one could buy twenty
Madame Curie prints for the price of an original gelatin. Mays thumbed through all the regulars—Edward VII, Victor Hugo, the Kaiser. Reaching Ford, he merely lifted his lip a fraction of an inch and started to pass on when he noticed that the identifying caption had been heavily scored in and underlined in fountain pen. Though circumstantial and insignificant, the detail forced Mays’s hand.

  Sometime later—he could not say how much later—he had turned over the entire east eave. He’d pored over print and private letters in four languages until he, who knew at best a smattering of Fortran, imagined he could almost understand them. Coming across an unassuming envelope marked Sparen, he knew that someone had posted the contents to an indesignate point in the future, had ordered subsequent generations to bring it intact through whatever public calamities the century served up.

  The envelope held only three items. As Mays opened it, the smallest dropped to the floor. He held up the scrap to the light but could not read it. Whatever had been written—apparently a single word—was rendered forever unreadable by the softness of the pencil, paper grease, and years of folding that rubbed it out. Mays carefully replaced it in the Sparen envelope.

  The second, much larger item lay folded in quarters. Mays opened it gingerly, revealing a photo badly beaten and defaced. He spread it flat. The rough handling did not obscure an image of three boys walking down a muddy road, nearing twilight. Mays withdrew the Greene clipping from his pocket and lined it up next to the large print. Even by attic light, Ford’s heir and the middle figure on the road were undeniably one and the same.

  Afraid of stroking out, Peter acted with deliberate slowness. He removed and unfolded the last article from the Sparen file, a doubled-over sheet of once-crisp heavyweight bond. Dated May 1, 1916, it began: “Dear Mr. Langerson.” Mays looked up and thought: his mother’s maiden name? But his mother’s name had been Mays; his father had taken hers when they married because his was the same as that of a notorious Nazi war criminal. Mays checked his memory of the Reich for a Langerson, but all he could recall was that either Hitler, Göring, or Goebbels had only one testicle. For the fifth time in as many weeks, he kicked himself for his historical ignorance.