Sourland

by Joyce Carol Oates

  He lived! He did live, he survived.

  He died. “Passed away.” There was nothing to be done.

  Yet at this time, I was safe from such knowledge. At this time, my father, Harvey Fleet, was still alive.

  “Madelyn?”

  Vaguely I had been aware of someone approaching my table, coming up behind me, as frequently individuals were making their way past in this crowded space, and I had been aware of someone pausing, looming over me. I looked up in expectation of seeing one of my male relatives but instead I saw a man whom I didn’t recognize at first, with a two days’ growth of beard on his jaws, amber-tinted sunglasses, and thick disheveled graying hair that seemed to rise like a geyser at the crown of his head. “Madelyn Fleet. It is you.” The surprise was that this man was my seventh-grade math teacher, Mr. Carmichael, whom I had not seen in more than two years and then only in our school building. The way in which Mr. Carmichael had intoned Madelyn Fleet was his teacherly teasing way, which I remembered. I had to remember too, with a quick stab of emotion, that I’d been in love with Mr. Carmichael, in secret, when I was twelve years old.

  Now I was fourteen, and much changed. In my former teacher’s eyes this change was being registered.

  Smiling down at me, Mr. Carmichael was smoking a cigarette for in 1959 it was not forbidden to smoke cigarettes in a hospital, even in most hospital rooms. How strange it was to see my seventh-grade math teacher unshaven as none of his students had ever seen him, and his hair that had always been trimmed short now grown long, curling languidly behind his ears, and threaded with silvery gray wires. It was a warmly humid midsummer and so Mr. Carmichael had rolled up his shirtsleeves to his elbows; the cuffs hung free, at a rakish angle. The front of Mr. Carmichael’s shirt was damp with perspiration and looked as if it hadn’t been changed in days. From such signs I understood that Mr. Carmichael too was an anxious visitor to Sparta Memorial Hospital, yet even in his state of distraction and dread he was smiling at me, and his eyes behind the tinted lenses of his glasses were alert and intense in a way I did not remember from when I’d been his student. When he inquired what I was reading I had no choice but to show him the cover of the book, which was a novel by H. G. Wells that elicited from Mr. Carmichael a remark meant to be clever and knowing, for at our school Mr. Carmichael—whose first name we giggled to see was Luther—had a reputation for being clever and knowing if also, at times, sarcastic, sardonic, and inscrutable; a teacher who graded harshly, at times; for which reason, while some girl students admired Mr. Carmichael and strove to please him, most of our classmates were uncomfortable in his classes, and disliked him. Even boys who laughed at Mr. Carmichael’s jokes did not wholly trust him, for he could turn on you, if you were not cautious. There were rumors about Mr. Carmichael being complained of by the parents of certain students and perhaps by certain of his fellow teachers and vaguely last year I’d heard that Mr. Carmichael no longer taught at the school…. As if he could hear my thoughts and wished to commandeer them, Mr. Carmichael leaned over me, saying, in a lowered voice, that he thought he’d recognized me as I crossed the lobby and came here to sit, he’d thought it might be me—“Or some older sister of little Madelyn Fleet”—but he wasn’t sure that he could trust his eyes—“You’ve gotten taller, Madelyn. And you carry yourself—differently.” In embarrassed confusion I laughed, leaning away from him; my face throbbed with blood; I was overwhelmed by such attention, and did not know how to reply. There was nowhere to look except at Mr. Carmichael’s flushed and roughened face, and his eyes so warmly intent upon me beyond the smudged lenses of his sunglasses. Mr. Carmichael’s breath smelled of—was it whiskey?—a sweetish-sour odor with which I was long familiar, for all my male relatives drank whiskey at times, and certainly my father drank whiskey. It had not been the case during my year of seventh-grade math that Mr. Carmichael had singled me out for any particular attention, or praise; I could not have claimed that Mr. Carmichael had ever really looked at me, as an individual; though I’d been one of five or six reliable students who’d usually received high grades, I hadn’t been an outstanding math student, only a doggedly diligent good-girl student. Nor had I been one of the popular and flirtatious girls in our class who’d had no trouble attracting Mr. Carmichael’s attention. Yet now he was asking, “Why are you here in this depressing place, Madelyn? I hope it isn’t a family emergency….” He did not seem to be teasing but spoke sincerely, with sympathy; lightly his hand rested on my shoulder, to comfort. I was frightened now for such sympathy left me weak, defenseless; I did not want to cry; in my bedroom I’d cried until my eyes were reddened and swollen like blisters but I had not cried in front of anyone except my mother. It would be held against Harvey Fleet’s daughter that she was “cold”—“snotty”—stiffening in her relatives’ embraces and shrinking from their kisses with a look of disdain. Yet how could I bring myself to say to Mr. Carmichael, My father is upstairs in the intensive care unit, he had surgery this morning to reduce swelling in his brain, he has not regained consciousness after a terrible beating…. Quickly I told Mr. Carmichael that my mother had come to see a friend in the hospital who’d had minor surgery and I’d been with them for a while then became restless, couldn’t breathe, came downstairs to read my novel but couldn’t concentrate, and now I was thinking of going home. (For suddenly it came to me; I could leave this hateful place, I could go home without my mother.) Mr. Carmichael said he’d had enough of the hospital too. More than enough. He’d drive me home, Mr. Carmichael said now, nudging my ponytail, and I laughed, saying thank you but I could take a city bus, or I could walk. (In the heat, the three-mile walk would be punishing. My mother would be astonished and would not know if she should be apologetic or disgusted with me.) Mr. Carmichael squinted down at me through his sunglasses, saying in his brisk-bemused-teacher voice that his car was out back: “C’mon, Madelyn. I’ll drive you home.”

  How was it possible to say no?

  “This is a little detour, kid. Our secret.”

  It was dusk. We were late returning home. Yet we were driving east along the river, back toward Sparta. If we’d been headed home, as we were expected, my father would have been driving us west. The air at dusk was humid and porous as gauze and through the Cadillac’s lowered windows warm air rushed that smelled of something overripe like rotted fruit and beneath, a fainter, sour smell of rotted fish.

  It was a festive time of evening! I was very happy. On the river there were ghostly white sailboats and power-driven boats that glittered with lights against the darkening, choppy water and on shore, in the park where the blues festival was being held, there were steadier lights like flames.

  A detour. Our secret. These mysterious pronouncements of my father’s were usually made in a playful voice that carried an unmistakable warning: do as I say, without acknowledging that I have said it.

  By these words I was given to understand that my father didn’t want my mother to know we’d gone back into the city. I liked it that there were such understandings between my father and me, which excluded my mother.

  On the evening of the beating that was never to be explained, for which no “assailant” or “assailants” would ever be charged, my father was distracted and appeared to be in a hurry. We’d left the blues festival abruptly for he’d said that we had to get home and now, not ten minutes later, he was headed for downtown Sparta and his office on East Capitol Street. Gripped between his legs was a bottle of ale he’d brought with him from the festival. The dashboard of the car gleamed and glittered with so many dials, switches, controls you’d have thought you were in the cockpit of a fighter plane.

  The car was my father’s newest: a showy 1959 cream-colored Cadillac Eldorado with Spanish red leather interior, a chrome grille like shark’s teeth, swooping tail fins and flaring taillights. A massive vehicle twenty feet in length, like a yacht it glided past ordinary traffic seemingly without effort. Within the family it was believed that Harvey Fleet had acquired this car from one of his gambler fr
iends in Sparta in need of quick cash but my father typically offered no explanations, he’d only just driven the Cadillac home: “Look out in the driveway. Anybody want a ride?”

  My father was like that: impulsive, unpredictable. He was a man of secrets and he was generous when he wanted to be generous and not so generous when he didn’t want to be. He owned properties in Sparta and vicinity, mostly rentals, and recently he’d become a developer, with partners, of a new shopping center north of the city. Business was the center of my father’s life. Yet you could not gain entry into that life by asking him about his work, for when relatives asked him such questions he would say, with a disarming smile, “Can’t complain.” Or, “Holding my own.” He would not elaborate. He had as little interest in boasting of successes as he had in acknowledging failures. If a question was too personal or pointed he would say, “Hell, that’s business”—as if his business affairs were too trivial to speak of. Yet you knew that what Harvey Fleet meant was None of your damned business.

  We had stayed at the blues festival for less than an hour and during that time I’d seen how my father, in his trademark white cotton shirt (no tie, open at the collar) and seersucker trousers (melon colored, for summer), and canvas shoes (white), moved easily among the crowd shaking hands with people who were strangers to me; being greeted by the musicians, most of whom were black men (young, middle-aged, elderly) eager to shake Harvey Fleet’s hand for Harvey Fleet was one of the sponsors of the festival—“A friend to blues and jazz music.” (Was this so? At home, my father never listened to music of any kind, never even watched television.) In Sparta, my father had many friends: local politicians, the chief of police, the district attorney, county officials. On a wall of his office were framed caricatures of Sparta personalities, including Harvey Fleet, crude but clever line drawings by a cartoonist for the Sparta Herald who’d exaggerated my father’s vulpine good looks, his thick dark hair springing from a low forehead, his fistlike jaw and his trademark smile so wide and emphatic it looked riveted in place. Years later I would see on TV the 1946 film The Postman Always Rings Twice with flawlessly blond Lana Turner and darkly handsome John Garfield and it would be a shock to me, how closely my father had resembled Garfield when he’d been young. At the blues festival to the sexy-seductive strains of “Stormy Weather”—“Mood Indigo”—“Sleepy Time Gal”—I’d seen how my father was acquainted with women who were strangers to me, some of them very attractive, and I thought, My father has his secret life, which none of us can know.

  I wondered if it was better that way, our not knowing.

  Though you couldn’t question him about his past, my father sometimes spoke of his youthful nomadic adventures: he’d quit school at fifteen and gone to work on a Great Lakes freighter bearing iron ore from Duluth to Buffalo; he’d hitchhiked out west, worked in Washington State, and in Alaska, where he’d worked on salmon fishing boats. His own father, Jonas Fleet, who’d died before I was born, had been exhausted and broken by the age of fifty, having worked in a Lackawanna steel mill; my father was determined not to emulate him; he said, “There’s better use for a man’s lungs than to be coated with steel filings.” In the army, in World War II, he’d been stationed in Italy, and the names of Italian regions and towns—Tuscany, Brescia, Vicenza, Parma—rolled off his tongue like an exotic sort of music, which meant little to his listeners. Of these long-ago adventures he’d had before he returned home to Sparta he spoke in a tone of wistfulness and pride; he’d made it through the war without being seriously wounded or “drove crazy” and of ugly memories he did not speak, at least not to us.

  He laughed often. He liked to laugh. There were some in our family who distrusted my father’s laughter, which made them uneasy. Why is Harv laughing? Is Harv laughing at us? You understood that there was a prevailing joke to which my father’s joking alluded, but it was a private joke not accessible to others. “The only laugh that matters is the last laugh,” my father said. “And that isn’t guaranteed.”

  “Wait here in the car. Read your book. I’ll be a few minutes. Don’t come looking for me.”

  My father had parked at the rear of the Brewer Building, on a back street not far from the river. Buildings on the other side of this street had been razed and lay in heaps of rubble behind a ten-foot fence posted NO TRESPASSING: DANGER and a half block beyond was a wharf at which battered-looking fishing boats were docked. This was not the Sparta Yacht Club marina several miles to the east on the Black River, where my father kept his Chris-Craft powerboat; this was the old Sparta waterfront downtown. On Sundays the area was nearly deserted except for a few taverns and riverside restaurants; except for East Capitol, there was little traffic. Seagulls flew overhead and the air was pierced by their sharp cries; river smells—briny water, rotted pilings, dead fish—made my nostrils pinch. These were mostly pleasurable smells, and I liked being here. From time to time my father brought me with him to his office where his secretary Charlotte smiled to see me: “Madelyn, hello. Come to help us out today?”

  The Brewer Building, owned by a real estate broker friend of my father, was the tallest building in the neighborhood and impressive with a smooth-shiny facade like polished marble. Inside was a foyer with a barbershop, a smoke shop, and a newsstand, all of which would be closed on Sunday. Only dimly could you see the stately mosaic figures on the foyer ceiling meant to suggest Egyptian pyramids, ancient hieroglyphics. There was an elevator with an elaborate grillwork door. Yet at the rear and sides of the Brewer Building you saw only weatherworn dark brick; the facade was what a facade meant—just a showy front. Especially from the rear, the building looked shabby. On each floor were ugly fire escapes. Some of the windows were cracked and opaque with grime. My father’s office on the eighth floor overlooking East Capitol Street and in the near distance the gleaming spire of St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Church was nothing like these. Years ago when my father had told me to wait in the car for him I’d disobeyed him, gone inside, and dared to take the elevator to the tenth, top floor of the building; on the tenth floor, I’d dared to climb a brief flight of steps and pushed open a door marked NO ADMITTANCE: ROOF and stepped outside on a shimmering-hot tar roof. So high! A sensation of vertigo overcame me, a sense of being physically drawn to the edge of the roof where the parapet was no more than two feet high; in halting steps I made my way to the edge; my eyes blinked in amazement, at this height I could see the S-curve of the Black River, boats on the river, more tall buildings than I would have imagined in Sparta, rooftops, church spires, chimneys. Airplanes droning high overhead, pigeons and seagulls. Everywhere were bird droppings, white crusted like concrete. How exhausting the wind, and hypnotizing. It was both exhilarating to me and frightening that no one knew where I was. If someone were to glimpse me from a window in another tall building, he would not know who I was; he would not care. When I turned back to the heavy door a chilling thought struck me—Now the door will be shut and locked against you.

  The door wasn’t locked. I’d been eleven at the time. I did not tell my father that I’d dared to walk on the roof of the Brewer Building that day and I never walked on the roof again.

  Don’t come looking for me, my father had said. I would wait for him in the car, reading my book. I’d opened the passenger’s door so that I could sit sideways, with my legs dangling. Close by the river where there were no buildings obscuring the setting sun it was still light enough for me to read and I had only the vaguest awareness of my surroundings. In the near distance waves lapped against the wharf and from farther away came muffled sounds of music. At the periphery of my vision I might have been aware of another car turning onto the street behind the Brewer Building and parking a short distance away but this awareness was scarcely conscious and failed to register. Did you see—anyone? Must’ve seen! Try to remember. I was captivated by H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine, which was the first of Wells’s Seven Scientific Romances that I’d discovered in the public library. I was captivated by the brashness of the Time Traveller—flin
ging himself onto the “saddle” of his home made time machine into not the near future but the distant future, with none of the provisions you would take on an overnight camping trip. You could foresee that the unnamed Time Traveller would return from his journey to the year 802,701, since he was telling his one story, but the way would not be easy for he’d discovered that humankind had evolved into two distinct subspecies: the “graceful children” of the Upper World and the “obscene, nocturnal Things” that dwelled like humanoid spiders underground. In much of my reading at this time in my early adolescence there was a terrible logic: something virulent and vengeful prepared to rise up in the night, beneath us as we slept, like an animated earthquake, to punish us. Why we were to be punished was not explained. Punishment was something that happened, and could not be averted. Punishment suggests a crime: but what is the crime? Born bad, it was said of some people. Born bad, it was said even of some individuals in Sparta. Yet I could not understand how an infant could be born bad, for no infant in my experience could plausibly be described in such a way.

  Out on the river, men’s voices lifted in shouts of laughter, muffled by a motor’s roar. The sun was starting to set; I was losing the light at last. I left the car and took up a position nearer the river, leaning against a great cracked slab of concrete. If at this time the vehicle that might—or might not—have been parked behind the Brewer Building was driven away—if someone had hurriedly exited the building, gone to the car, and driven away—I had no awareness of it. I was in no position to see. Didn’t see. Don’t know. Leave me alone!