The Yellow Wood

by The Yellow Wood (v5. 0) (epub)

  Just after I had met Eva Marie, Roger showed up at the door of my rented room on Hudson Street. He was a salesman, of kitchenware if I remember correctly. He was just passing through. We spent a mildly pleasant hour. The fact that we had grown up together, in the same room in the same house if not really in the same family, supplied us with no more than an hour’s worth of things to talk about. I have not thought about him since. Now I am remembering him when he was ten years old.

  “Something I wrote,” I answered him, neither proud nor embarrassed, merely matter-of-fact. “Poems.”

  “Wrote?” Roger was never the most sophisticated youngster. “Poems?” He shuffled the papers, squinted. “You mean you made it up?”

  I was studying. Algebra or chemistry, something with formulae, and did not want to take the time to complain about him rifling through the drawer that had been designated for my use, especially since I had objected before and he could not seem to stop himself. He began to read aloud, my words in his flat voice. I kept my pencil working and my head bent over the symbols on the paper, but I listened intently to Roger’s halting, monotonic rendering of words that had come from the marrow of my bones. It was a poem about winter.

  It was terrible. Insipid and clumsy, not a flash of talent or originality in it. By the time he reached the last overwrought phrase, I was in despair. I finished the problem I was working on, laid my pencil on the desk, did not look up.

  Roger said, “Wow, Alex. You’re a genius.” And I knew then he could not be trusted.

  The mere act of reading aloud to my father moves me so that I can sometimes barely get the words out, and I’ve avoided content that would carry its own filial associations. No Frost or Dickens or Keats; no poetry of any kind. Not the Gettysburg Address, either; I can still recite every word (“Four score and seven years ago . . .”), and once it gets started it has the obsessive quality of a pop song stuck in my mind (“. . . our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation,”) or a spell he’s laid on me (“conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition . . .”). Maybe someday I’ll recite it for him (“. . . that all men are created equal.”). He might like that. I’d never know whether he did, but he might.

  Not yet. We’re not there yet. It cost me more than enough just to propose, “Shall I read to you, Daddy?”

  His pale grey gaze swung toward and past me, a balloon limp on a string. Was it “read” he didn’t understand, or “I” and “you” in the same phrase? Or had I said something wrong, something he couldn’t or wouldn’t tell me but would hold against me for the rest of our lives?

  Stubbornly, I insisted, “Daddy. Would you like me to read to you—”

  “Yes.” He answered without even a normal conversational beat.

  I ought to be used to this from him. Not being listened to, not being able even to influence the course of any interaction, was a basic theme of my childhood. The ancient rage feels very present, and necessary. For a man as conversant with the various realities in the world as my father purports to be, he’s remarkably disinterested in anything anybody else has to say, especially his family, especially me, expecting instead that he’ll impart and I’ll kowtow to his wisdom and instruction. What an asshole. What a charlatan.

  “Yes,” he repeated, even in his confusion seizing the upper hand. Primal rage, what a therapist once termed “fear of engulfment,” propelled me to my feet, typescript in hand, intending to stalk out of the room and just leave him there. Then the word skipped away from him like a wilful child, and his head kept up a pale nodding and “yes” got free of any semantic mooring and just kept going “yes yes yes yes yes.”

  I sat back down and took a breath. Was I capitulating or for once imposing my will? “This is something I’m working on. I thought you might find it interesting.”

  Up to then I’d been willing to risk nothing more personal than the newspaper, and only parts of that. This was the next increment. Either he didn’t know what was at stake or he didn’t care. He smiled with vague, insulting beneficence. I’d thought myself long past caring what he knows or what he cares about. Apparently not. Grimly, I began.

  “Alexandra, pay attention. Slow down. Alexandra. Slow down. Pay attention to each sound in each word. Articulate. Don’t miss anything.”

  I have been duped. I thought she was going to read to me something that mattered, something to show what she has done with this gift. The episode with my cousin Roger demonstrated once and for all that I had neither the talent nor the discipline to be a writer. So I gave it to her. And she has wasted it on personnel memos and newsletter articles about some kind of new floor covering her company is hawking.

  My own gift—from whom or what I could not say—is awareness of possibilities and obligations. Alexandra has that, too. My curse is being afraid of almost all of it. Alexandra was not to be afraid.

  “Lower your voice. It is too much in your head. Lower. Deeper. Slower. Now, read that paragraph to me again. Again.”

  What I read to him is a long memo to H.R. analyzing options for a new benefit package. When I pause to make a note in the margin, he says, “There’s a poem I’ve always liked. ‘Come live with me and be my Love.’ Do you know it?”

  “Yes.” He isn’t listening. Imagine that.

  “How does it go?”

  I won’t play. “I haven’t memorized it.”

  “ ‘Come live with me and be my love—’ ”

  “Did you recite that to Ma?” The question is decidedly truculent, not to mention impertinent. I don’t take it back, and he doesn’t answer it. I hear music. “What’s that?”

  Vaughn’s drum and then his flute sound from deep in the woods. Alexandra frowns. “What’s that?”

  “That is Vaughn’s music.”

  “Vaughn is more than a little eccentric, isn’t he? Was he always like that?”

  Daddy looks at me as if I’m speaking Martian, the way my kids do when I intrude on their important thoughts with questions about stupid things, like where they’re going and when they’ll be home. Ramon is particularly good at that blank look, and it never fails to piss me off.

  What is Vaughn? Is that a name of a person or of an object that has slipped my mind? Who is this person asking me this incomprehensible question? Why is she peering at me as if I am an alien? Perhaps I am an alien. Where am I?

  Alexandra, my daughter, is asking me about her brother my son Vaughn’s music. That makes perfect sense. “He showed an appreciation of music quite early on.”

  “You used to listen to classical music all the time. Ma made fun of it.”

  We will not speak of her mother. “Vaughn listens to those old records. He refurbished the eight-track tape player so he could listen to my tapes.”

  “So he got his love of music from you?”

  “Yes.”

  “How?”

  I allow myself not to understand what she means. It does not take much.

  “Did you give it to him? Did you force it on him? Inject it, or mix it into his food or something?”

  Her snort is both unattractive and disrespectful. I allow a silence after it, so as to highlight her misstep. Then I tell her, “I have always admired people who create music. You may recall that you used to sing.”

  “Not very well. And I hated the lessons. Does Vaughn enjoy making music?”

  “Enjoyment is irrelevant. He creates music because he must. Music is a valuable thing in the world, and I am not able to create it, so he must.” This is entirely too revealing. I will myself to retreat into confusion again, but do not.

  Something like horror niggles at the back of my mind. I don’t understand what’s going on here, and before I can think of what more to say to him about it, he’s asleep. I sit there with him for a while, for no good reason, and then I leave the room. I leave the house, going nowhere in particular, just getting away from my father without, of course, ever really ge
tting away.

  She is gone. I do not know how long she has been gone, but the sensation is of years. I do not know, have no way of gauging how long she will be gone. I count thirty seconds as if for the thunderclap, and then pry myself out of the chair and set myself in motion to the room that was once hers—temporarily, as it turned out—and is now temporarily hers again. At the T of the hallway I first turn the wrong way, going toward my room instead of hers, but righting myself requires only a small adjustment.

  The door opens readily, of course; it has never had a lock, though somehow I expected more resistance. I step inside, close the door behind me, then open it again so as to hear her re-enter the house. My own canniness excites me, and I disapprove of the excitement.

  Her presence is everywhere in here. The bed is unmade. On the dresser are toiletry items, a clock radio, two bottles of what I first think in some alarm are medications but on closer inspection turn out to be vitamins, and a framed 5” x 7” colour photograph of Alexandra, her husband, and the two children they adopted, all four of them strangers to me in this flat form.

  She has set up her computer on the desk, which strikes me as rather more presumptuous than an open notebook would have been. The black briefcase beside it contains papers having to do with her work, utterly prosaic and predictable. Various cords and plugs and arcane devices, presumably computer-related, jumble together on the desk and on the floor.

  When I open the bottom drawer, it nearly falls out and catching it wrenches my back. In it are packets of letters, bound with rubber bands and labelled. I recognize names of old friends I have not thought of in decades, couples with whom Eva Marie and I socialized, a former neighbour with whom I walked in the woods and talked politics. Other names mean nothing to me. The name on the thinnest packet is Bill Petrovsky, and after a long moment it comes to me that he was a childhood playmate.

  When Alexandra was in grade school, her best friend was a little crippled girl from town named Penny. I believe the name was Penny. The sight of the child sickened me. I insisted Alexandra invite Penny over to spend the night, and invite her again. I indoctrinated her in the importance of friendship—something in which I, a fundamentally lonely man, believe in with grim fervour. I instilled in her a need to reach out to the underdog in fiercely personal ways.

  The girls were close as long as Alexandra lived here. Penny, who stayed in town, mentions to my other children that she and Alexandra still carry on a lively epistolary relationship via letter and email. I take credit for that.

  But now I stare in something like horror at all these correspondences with people she would consider friends of mine, who are, of course, not my friends because I have never had the capacity for friendship. Worse even than that missive from the Old Country, they appal me, and I know I taught her wrong.

  The yellow woods don’t hold a goddamn thing for me. I can’t imagine why I ever thought it would. It’s full of him. It shuts me out while at the same time demanding that I go in. Every path either dead-ends or takes me back toward the house. Fuck this. Vowing to avoid anything that even remotely resembles a path, I strike out into brush and trees and undergrowth, across uneven ground, between and over rocks both deeply embedded and loose underfoot, through water running and stagnant that immediately seeps into my shoes. Simultaneously and ludicrously, I feel like a hopelessly defiant child and an intrepid explorer. To the narrow, herding slither ahead and beside and behind me and sometimes even over my head, I announce more than once, “Fuck you, Herpie,” inordinately gratified by the ridiculous name.

  The second drawer sticks. I tug it open. Inside is a box. I remove it, knowing full well that it will contain only more evidence of how she is wasting her life. The lid loosens easily. Yellow light through the window at my back illuminates page after page of typescript. Alexandra has written a novel.

  This is what I have been waiting for all her life. Now, faced with it, holding it in my hands, I am filled with equal parts dread and exhilaration, fury and shame and pride.

  I cannot read it now, although I will. I will re-enter this room repeatedly when she is gone (there is nothing shady about that; this is my house), carefully remove the manuscript box from the desk drawer where she has stored it as if preparing to show me or for me to find (this part—going through her personal effects—is inarguably dishonest, disrespectful, reprehensible), and read it page by page, chapter after chapter, by turns bearing in mind and putting out of my mind the fact that the author is my daughter Alexandra, who I thought had rejected this gift. “People can give you shit,” she used to say impudently, staring straight at me or ostentatiously looking away, “but you don’t have to take it,” as though my legacy were waste.

  I will read it. But now, at this first encounter, I regard the manuscript as artifact, and take inventory of its physical characteristics. Its heft and thickness; the number in the upper right-hand corner of the last page is 412. Its neatness. Its finished quality; no indication of being a work in progress. Its title, Fatherland, which gives me chills, and the author’s name, Alexandra Kove—not her married name or nickname but the name her mother and I gave her.

  Willing and able to take only so much of this at one time, I replace the lid on the manuscript box. I am an old man, and not well; strong emotion is more dangerous to me now than ever. I will require some time and effort to come to terms with the mere knowledge that this manuscript exists and has been brought into my house. I put it back. In the small drawer above it are tools of a trade that was never mine but that I claim in some sort of stubborn way that could be called metaphorical but is probably just irrational: computer discs, note cards, a new box of black razor-point pens. My daughter is more a writer than I have ever been.

  All this time, she has taken what I have given her and made it her own. This is what I intended. This is what I hoped for and thought would never happen.

  How dare she?

  By now I’d have expected to come across somebody’s house—if not Daddy’s then one of my siblings’, at least Vaughn’s cabin. These woods aren’t all that big. Aware of the first buzz of nervousness in my chest, I realize I could get lost here of all places. Where’s Vaughn’s fucking music when I need it? Where’s the snake?

  I stumble and bang my knee against a sharp stump. Nothing on any side of any tree looks like moss, but locating north wouldn’t do me any good anyway, since I don’t know what’s north of where I am. Weak sunlight through the tree canopy doesn’t seem to me to have changed at all since I’ve been out here, which makes sense when I check my watch and see that I’ve been gone from my father’s house less than forty-five minutes.

  Panting from this minimal physical exertion, and from disproportionate fear, I sit down on a swaying log to catch my breath and find myself at eye-level with a rocky overhang. Under it is a cave. Inside the cave are objects, most as grey as the rock itself but some of them bright white in the slanted and filtered sunlight.

  Hearing in my mind my husband’s frequent remonstrance, “Sandi, you’re going to get yourself hurt someday, the chances you take,” and ignoring it this time as he believes I always do, I slide off the log, snagging my pants. On my hands and knees, I inch forward. To the faint welcoming or warning hiss, I actually say aloud, “Oh, Herpie, go fuck yourself,” and chuckle at the image, a nasty variation on the snake with its tail in its mouth.

  The space under the rock is deeper than I’d have thought possible. Inside the lip of the overhang it widens into a tiny, close room in which I can sit cross-legged and not be grazing wall or ceiling. It’s no cooler in here than outside, humidity diffusing the heat everywhere. The entrance, which is also the only exit, is a horizontal gash halfway around the very close horizon. It’s like being inside a mouth. “Oh, please,” I deride myself, and my flat voice goes nowhere.

  On the dirt floor of the cave is a notebook. Filled with my father’s handwriting, harder to read than ever. Just looking at it makes me shiver as I
always did, makes me imagine secrets and spells. These appear to be something like lab notes, records of the same experiment conducted repeatedly, and from the dates on some of the entries, over a period of years. Some of the ingredients are vaguely familiar, at least by name—mothballs, fleabane, brown recluse venom, digitalis. Others seem to be in another language. “Slow poison,” says one notation, letters so minimally formed it’s virtually a straight line. Another: “Should take two or three weeks.” And, “Will resemble death from natural causes, old age, etc.”

  What is this? I flip through the pages again. On the inside front cover, where I hadn’t noticed it before, I now see a tiny printed title: SUICIDE PLAN.

  As quickly and carefully as I can, knowing I’m making mistakes, I replace everything I’ve disturbed except the yellow pad. This, my father’s suicide plan, I take with me as I scramble out of his hideout. Curses, Daddy. You’ve been foiled again.

  Chapter 4

  “Maybe he molested you when you were too young to remember it but it’s all in there and it’s ruined your life and that’s why you were always his favourite and that’s why you stayed away for so long.” My sister’s blue-grey eyes are gleaming, and when she leans cumbersomely toward me I can smell raspberry tea and eagerness on her breath.

  “You saw that on Oprah, right?”

  “And Sally Jessy and Jerry Springer.”

  “Must be true then.”

  “It doesn’t make it not true. Clichés have their roots in truth.”