I didn’t sleep well. I kept having dreams and waking up and not remembering what I’d dreamed. I just waked up because the dream had scared me awake, and then my conscious mind swatted at the dream and it went away before I could catch on to what it was and what had frightened me.
In the morning I had a headache and I felt the way you do when you’re coming down with ’flu but I knew I wasn’t. I decided maybe you got chills and fever with growing up as well as with ’flu. I tried to act as though nothing were wrong, but everybody noticed I wasn’t talking as much as usual. But since I’d been acting more or less that way off and on for about a year they just left me alone, except for Maggy, who kept asking me what was wrong with me, until finally I had to snap at her.
When we went to bed that night Daddy put his hand against my cheek, and then he took my temperature, but I didn’t have any.
I went to bed and tossed. And why? What did I have to be unhappy about? Nothing had happened to me. But that didn’t seem to matter. That anybody could be betrayed and killed by her own fellow men, like Anne Frank. That anybody could die. Maybe somebody I knew. Maybe Zachary. That Zachary could say the things he did and feel the way he did. That he could feel that there wasn’t any sense to anything, and make me feel that way, too. That he could maybe be going to die, feeling that way. I’d never known a kid to die. I knew it happened, but I’d never come close to it. I didn’t want to come close to it. I didn’t want to be involved in Zachary’s dying, or in Anne Frank’s death.
And I felt guilty. Can you understand that? I felt guilty because I wasn’t fifteen yet and nothing had happened to me, while all over the world, in Asia and Africa and places, people my age had already had more than a lifetime’s worth of suffering and horror. A woman right in Utah could be so desperate that she tried to give her baby away. And I wasn’t doing anything about it at all. I was just going on a camping trip and letting it happen.
The next day everybody spent down at the beach, except Uncle Douglas, Aunt Elena and me. Daddy told me to stay home, sit around and take it easy. Aunt Elena said she had to practice. Uncle Douglas said he wanted to paint. After the others had put on their bathing suits and gone down to the beach Aunt Elena sat at the piano and worked on finger exercises, the same thing over and over again. When someone can play the way Aunt Elena does you never think about hours and hours on finger exercises.
Uncle Douglas came into the room where I was lying on the bed, not reading or anything, just lying there. Vicky’s moping again, Suzy would say. “How about letting me do a few sketches of you, Vicky? Come on into the studio.”
I sat with my arms on the back of a chair and my head down on my arms and Uncle Douglas began sketching me. I don’t know how long it was with me just sitting and Uncle Douglas working before he said, “What’s up, Vicky?”
I shrugged. When I shrug it infuriates the family, but Uncle Douglas doesn’t get enough of it to have it bother him. We don’t see him that often, and when we do I’m usually at my best instead of my worst. This was his first real dose of what I suppose you’d call my worst.
He asked, very gently, “Want to tell me about it, Vic?”
“I want to,” I said. “But I don’t think I can.”
“Try.”
“If I try it’ll just sound dopey. I mean, I know everybody thinks it’s something that happened with Zachary. But it isn’t that. It’s sort of everything. Uncle Douglas, why did Anne Frank have to die?”
“Because the Nazis put her in a concentration camp,” he answered in a reasonable way.
“But it wasn’t right.”
“No. It was terribly wrong. But it happened.”
“But it wasn’t fair!”
Uncle Douglas just nodded slowly, as though to himself, and went on sketching me. Finally he said, “It’s a bit of a shock, isn’t it, when you realize that things aren’t fair in life? It comes particularly hard to you, Vicky, because your parents are eminently fair. It comes hard because of your grandfather. But it was your grandfather who once recited a little poem to me. Want to hear it?”
“Sure,” I said without much enthusiasm. I expected something religious and comforting, and the whole point was that the comforting things were what scared me most, because Zachary was right; they didn’t make sense.
“The rain is raining all around,”
Uncle Douglas quoted,
“It rains on both the just and the unjust fellow.
But more, it seems on the just than on the unjust,
For the unjust hath the just’s umbrella.
All I’m trying to get at, Vicky, is that life isn’t fair, and your grandfather, who is one of the greatest human beings I’ve ever known, is quite aware of it. He doesn’t have anything to do with pie in the sky.” (Pie in the sky again. It almost sounded as though Uncle Douglas could read people’s minds.) “Your grandfather knows that the wicked flourish and the innocent suffer. But it doesn’t destroy him, Vicky. He still believes, with a wonderful and certain calm, that God is our kind and loving father.”
“But how can he!” I cried. “If God lets things be unfair, if He lets things like Anne Frank happen, then I don’t love Him, I hate Him!”
Uncle Douglas didn’t look shocked. He just looked thoughtful. “Tilt your head a little to the right, Vicky. That’s better. Hold it.” Then he said, “I guess you know I’m the heathen of the family.”
“You’re not a heathen.”
“Thanks, dear. Happily your grandfather doesn’t think so, either. Nor that I’m a heretic, bless him, though I have some pretty unorthodox ideas. I get mad at God, too, Vicky. I’ve gone out alone and bellowed in rage at God at the top of my lungs. But the fact that I bellow at him I suppose proves that I think he’s there, doesn’t it? Go ahead and be mad at God if you feel like it, Vicky. I happen to agree with your Grandfather that the greatest sin against God is indifference. But remember when you’re yelling at God, what you’re doing is saying, Do it MY way, God, not YOUR way, MY way.”
“How can things like Anne Frank be God’s way? I don’t want God if things like that are His way. It’s a cockeyed kind of way. Look at Maggy. Both her mother and father died and she was too young. And the most cockeyed part of it is that she’s probably turned out a much nicer kid than if they hadn’t died the way she was being brought up and everything. Does that make sense? It’s crazy. What kind of a God does things like that!”
“Do you mind if I give you a little lecture?” Uncle Douglas asked. “Your mother says that you’ve been very resistant to parental preaching lately. Do you mind a little avuncular philosophy?”
“Go ahead,” I said stiffly.
“As I told you, sweetheart, I’m the heathen of the family. This is nothing to be proud of. It’s just a fact we have to face. But if you go on the assumption—and I do—that man has freedom of choice, then you have to assume responsibility for your own actions. You can’t go on passing the buck to God.” I must have looked blank, because Uncle Douglas wriggled his eyebrows. “How can I explain it to you? Look, Vicky, you remember your bike accident, don’t you?”
“How could I forget it?”
“Why did you have the accident? Because you exercised freedom of choice to do something you knew perfectly well you oughtn’t to do. When you went on the back road in the dark you did wrong and you knew you were doing wrong, and when you were in the hospital afterwards you didn’t whine around saying, Why did God do this to me? You accepted the responsibility for your own actions.”
“But Anne Frank didn’t do anything wrong. She didn’t do anything to put her in a concentration camp.”
“When you had your bike accident do you think you were the only one who suffered? Everyone in your family was hurt. And what you had done was not so terribly wrong, after all. But when the Germans set up concentration camps that was a very big wrong, and certainly many millions of people suffered because of it. Man exercised the freedom of choice to do wrong, and innocent people paid for it, but I don’t t
hink you can go around blaming God for it.”
“He could have stopped it,” I said stubbornly.
“If he interferes every time we do wrong where’s our freedom of choice?”
“But it wasn’t fair. It wasn’t right,” I persisted.
Uncle Douglas sighed. For a while he worked on his sketch of me. Then he sighed and said, “One of the biggest facts you have to face, Vicky, is that if there is a God he’s infinite, and we’re finite, and therefore we can’t ever understand him. The minute anybody starts telling you what God thinks, or exactly why he does such and such, beware. People should never try to make God in man’s image, and that’s what they’re constantly doing. Not your grandfather. But he’s extraordinary. So in my heathen way, Vicky, when I wasn’t much older than you, I decided that God, a kind and loving God, could never be proved. In fact there are, as you’ve been seeing lately, a lot of arguments against him. But there isn’t any point to life without him. Without him we’re just a skin disease on the face of the earth, and I feel too strongly about the human spirit to be able to settle for that. So what I did for a long time was to live life as though I believed in God. And eventually I found out that the as though had turned into a reality. I think the thing that did it for me was a jigsaw puzzle.”
“A jigsaw puzzle?”
“A jigsaw puzzle. Hold still. Chin a little higher. You know those puzzles with hundreds of tiny pieces? You take one of those pieces all by itself and it doesn’t make sense, does it? You look at one piece and it doesn’t seem to be part of a picture. But you put all the pieces together and you see the meaning of it all. Well, what I, in my heathenish way, Vicky, feel about life, and unfairness, is that we find it hard to realize that there is a completed puzzle. We jump to conclusions and decide that the one little piece we have in our hand is all there is and that it doesn’t make sense. We find it almost impossible to think about infinity, much less comprehend it. But life only makes sense if you see it in infinite terms. If the one piece of the puzzle that is this life were all, then everything would be horrible and unfair and I wouldn’t want much to do with God, either. But there are all the other pieces, too, the pieces that make up the whole picture. Now I’m just going to slap some water color on this. Can you hold it a while longer? Maybe when I’m done I’ll cut it up into tiny pieces and put them in an envelope and give them to you to fit together. So you can find out what Vicky is. The jigsaw puzzle is a nice, stretchable metaphor. You can use it for almost anything. Now let’s stop talking abstractions and get down to specifics. Did Zachary do anything to you that he shouldn’t have done?”
I started to shake my head, then remembered that Uncle Douglas was painting me. “You mean did he make out too much and stuff?”
“And stuff,” Uncle Douglas said.
“No stuff,” I said. I don’t know why I wasn’t furious with Uncle Douglas. I would have been if it had been Mother or Daddy.
“Then … .” He left it up in the air.
“You guessed it,” I said. “It was all the stuff you were talking about. Did Daddy tell you about Zachary’s rheumatic fever and his heart and all?”
“Yes.”
“Does Daddy think Zachary’s going to die?”
“Why don’t you ask him? Your father hasn’t examined Zachary, so he can’t really tell. But he says, on a superficial guess, it looks more as though Zachary were trying to kill himself than as though he really had to die young. I don’t honestly think he’s a very healthy person for you to see, Vicky.”
“Nobody likes him,” I said bitterly. “Nobody’s even bothered to know him.”
“You like him?”
“I don’t know.”
“We’re not trying to interfere, Vicky. And we’re not trying to keep you from growing up. We’d just like to try to make it as easy as possible, because we love you.”
“But you said that nothing that was worth anything was easy.”
“Touché. But it doesn’t need to be quite as difficult as you can make it if you insist on going at it completely alone. After all, the only way man has gone as far as he has is by benefitting from other people’s experience.”
Aunt Elena’d finally switched from her finger exercises which had been sort of boring into our subconscious like a drill, and gone into a Bach fugue.
“It’s like a fugue, too,” Uncle Douglas said, as Aunt Elena started the fugue over again. “Elena and I are lucky ones. She has music and I have painting. They give form and shape to everything we do. It was music that kept Elena from being destroyed when Hal died. You’ll be better off when you know what you want to be, Vicky.”
“But I haven’t any talents,” I said, “the way John and Suzy do.”
“I think the trouble is that you have too many talents. There are all kinds of directions you could go. You’re an artist of some kind. That I’m sure of. It’s the roughest of all lives, and the most rewarding. There. That’s all I’m going to do today. Want to see it?”
I got up and looked at the painting. “I’d just as soon you didn’t cut it up into little pieces.”
“Like it? So do I. You’re on your way to being a real beauty, child, but it’s all in what’s behind your face. Right now everything’s promise. I’m not going to let you have this because I like it, too. As a matter of fact it’s one of the best darned things I’ve ever done. Let’s go show it to Elena.”
“But she’s practicing.”
“Right. And I never interrupt her except for something special. Bless you, Vicky, my darling!” His voice soared happily. “I’ve finally broken through to something I’ve been reaching for for weeks and was beginning to despair about. Come on! Hi, Elena! Vicky and I’ve done it!” He grabbed me by the hand and pulled me in to Aunt Elena, and he was so happy that I completely forgot that I was miserable.
Fifteen
I didn’t see Zachary again while we were at Laguna Beach. He came down with a bad cold, and he had to go to bed, though he wouldn’t see a doctor. But he called me and tried to get our itinerary.
“I don’t know what it is. That’s one of the whole points of this trip, for Daddy not to have to do anything on schedule or make any definite plans.”
“But you must have some vague, general idea where you’re going.”
“We’re going up the coast. All the way into Canada. We’re going to stay with friends in Victoria, and I think we’re going to Banff, and Glacier, and Yellowstone. Those are the only specific places Daddy’s mentioned.”
“That’s enough to go on,” Zachary said. “Give me your address in Victoria, so I can write you.” I did, and he said, “I won’t see you there, but later on I’ll find you.”
“But I thought you were going to Alaska.”
“I’ve changed my mind. We can’t leave things just up in the air like this. If I want to ask you to a school dance or something next year I’ll have to win your family over. Right now they view me about as kindly as they would a king cobra. Have you got a radio in your car?”
“Yes. Why?” A radio didn’t seem to have much to do with Zachary’s winning Mother and Daddy. And John. John took the dimmest view of Zachary of all.
“You’ll discover California radio stations are full of doom. They’ll remind you of me, and I don’t want them to remind you in the wrong way.”
“I’ve had enough doom lately,” I said. “I won’t listen.”
“You can’t help it. Keep your car full of gas at all times in case of an enemy attack. Where the bleeding blossoms do they think you can go? Keep refilling gallon jugs of water. Have a two weeks supply of canned food on hand at all times. Nobody ever bothers to say that if people ever get insane enough to start a nuclear war everything will get blown to bits and two weeks of canned corned beef won’t save anybody. The thing to go on about is not remembering to keep your car full of gas, but to keep a nuclear war from starting. That’s one reason I’m going to Choate next year. That’s one reason I’m going to be a lawyer. Not just what I said. That�
�s what I want you to remember when the radio starts talking doom and you think of me. With which untypical words I shall hang up. Here’s a kiss.” I heard the sound of a kiss and then he hung up with a clack.
Going up the coast, and knowing I wouldn’t see Zachary for a while, I began to un-tense. I managed not to listen to the doom parts of the radio. After all, there’s always been doom. What about teen-agers growing up during the Black Plague times when nine out of every ten people died? I mean we’re not the only ones to have it rough.
Pismo Beach in California we loved, because there were great enormous sand-dunes, and it seemed much more like a real beach than Laguna. Uncle Douglas had told us that some of the desert scenes for movies were shot there at Pismo, and you could very easily imagine a camel appearing over the crest of a dune. Most of the people there were settled down for a two weeks vacation, lots of them to go fishing. It was too cold for swimming, but we had a marvelous time being Arabs on the dunes with a whole gang of other kids. I really threw myself into it as though I were Rob’s age.
One thing we loved, especially Suzy, on the way up the coast, was the seals on the Seventeen Mile Drive, just beyond Carmel. We stood at the water’s edge and looked out at the offshore rocks, really not very far from us, and there, cavorting out in the water, or lying sunning on the rocks, were dozens and dozens of seals. One quite large rock was entirely covered with seals and cormorants. We’d never seen them out of a zoo before, and we could hardly tear Rob and Suzy away.
San Francisco; Humboldt State Park in the midst of the enormous redwoods; a big lumber mill in Scotia, Oregon; the Bumble Bee tuna and salmon factory in Astoria, Oregon, and John Jacob Astor’s tower; it was all fascinating, if not violently exciting. In Oregon we saw our first green hills since we hit desert country way back in Arizona, but in Oregon also was the worst devastation from forest fires. It was very frightening to see the great, gaunt, blackened bones of trees. We drove along a beautiful, wild, winding coast line, with sheep grazing right by the road. We passed lots of trucks carrying redwood logs. Occasionally there’d be a log so huge it would be an entire truckload. Just one log, imagine! The average load we figured was three. There were fishing boats out in the Pacific, and one night we had fresh salmon for dinner, the best we ever tasted.
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