by John Irving
Those train rides—at least two hours from Gravesend—were the most concrete occasions I was given in which to imagine my mother riding the Boston & Maine in the other direction—south, to Boston, where I almost never went. But the passengers traveling north, I always believed, were very different types from the citybound travelers—skiers, hikers, mountain-lake swimmers: these were not men and women seeking trysts, or keeping assignations. The ritual of those train rides north is unforgettable to me, although I remember nothing of the equal number of rides back to Gravesend; return trips, to this day—from anywhere—are simply invitations to dull trances or leaden slumber.
But every time we rode the train to Sawyer Depot, my mother and I weighed the advantages of sitting on the left-hand side of the train, so that we could see Mt. Chocorua—or on the right-hand side, so that we could see Ossipee Lake. Chocorua was our first indication of how much snow there would be where we were going, but there’s more visible activity around a lake than there is on a mountain—and so we would sometimes “opt for Ossipee,” as Mother and I described our decision. We also played a game that involved guessing where everyone was going to get off, and I always ate too many of those little tea sandwiches that they served on board, the kind with the crusts cut off; this overeating served to justify my inevitable trip to that lurching pit with the railroad ties going by underneath me, in a blur, and the whoosh of rank air that blew upward on my bare bottom.
My mother would always say, “We’re almost at Sawyer Depot, Johnny. Wouldn’t you be more comfortable if you waited until we got to your Aunt Martha’s?”
Yes; and no. I could almost always have waited; yet it was not only necessary to empty my bladder and bowels before encountering my cousins—it was a needed test of courage to sit naked over that dangerous hole, imagining lumps of coal and loosened railroad spikes hurtling up at me at bruising speed. I needed the empty bladder and bowels because there was immediate, rough treatment ahead; my cousins always greeted me with instant acrobatics, if not actual violence, and I needed to brace myself for them, to frighten myself a little in order to be ready for all the future terrors that the vacation held in store for me.
I would never describe my cousins as bullies; they were good-natured, rambunctious roughnecks and daredevils who genuinely wanted me to have fun—but fun in the north country was not what I was used to in my life with the women at 80 Front Street, Gravesend. I did not wrestle with my grandmother or box with Lydia, not even when she had both her legs. I did play croquet with my mother, but croquet is not a contact sport. And given that my best friend was Owen Meany, I was not inclined to much in the way of athletic roughhousing.
My mother loved her sister and brother-in-law; they always made her feel special and welcome—they certainly made me feel that way—and my mother doubtless appreciated a little time away from my grandmother’s imperious wisdom.
Grandmother would come to Sawyer Depot for a few days at Christmas, and she would make a grand appearance for one weekend every summer, but the north country was not to Grandmother’s liking. And although Grandmother was perfectly tolerant of my solitary disruption of the adult life at 80 Front Street—and even moderately tolerant of the games I would play in that old house with Owen—she had scant patience for the disruption caused in any house by all her grandchildren. For Thanksgiving, the Eastmans came to 80 Front Street, a disturbance that my grandmother referred to in terms of “the casualties” for several months after their visit.
My cousins were active, combative athletes—my grandmother called them “the warriors”—and I lived a different life whenever I was with them. I was both crazy about them and terrified of them; I couldn’t contain my excitement as the time to see them drew near, but after several days, I couldn’t wait to get away from them—I missed the peace of my private games, and I missed Owen Meany; I even missed Grandmother’s constant but consistent criticism.
My cousins—Noah, Simon, and Hester (in order of their ages)—were all older than I: Hester was older by less than a year, although she would always be bigger; Simon was older by two years; Noah, by three. Those are not great differences in age, to be sure, but they were great enough in all those years before I was a teenager—when each of my cousins was better than I was, at everything.
Since they grew up in the north country, they were fabulous skiers. I was, at best, a cautious skier, modeling my slow, wide turns on my mother’s graceful but undaring stem Christie—she was a pretty skier of intermediate ability who was consistently in control; she did not think that the essence of the sport was speed, nor did she fight the mountain. My cousins raced each other down the slopes, cutting each other off, knocking each other down—and rarely restraining their routes of descent to the marked trails. They would lead me into the deep, unmanageable powder snow in the woods, and in my efforts to keep up with them, I would abandon the controlled, conservative skiing that my mother had taught me and end up straddling trees, embracing snow fences, losing my goggles in icy streams.
My cousins were sincere in their efforts to teach me to keep my skis parallel—and to hop on my skis—but a school-vacation skier is never the equal to a north-country native. They set such standards for recklessness that, eventually, I could no longer have fun skiing with my mother. I felt guilty that I made her ski alone; but my mother was rarely left alone for long. By the end of the day, some man—a would-be ski instructor, if not an actual ski instructor—would be coaching her at her side.
What I remember of skiing with my cousins is long, humiliating, and hurtling falls, followed by my cousins retrieving my ski poles, my mittens, and my hat—from which I became inevitably separated.
“Are you all right?” my eldest cousin, Noah, would ask me. “That looked rather harsh.”
“That looked neat!” my cousin Simon would say; Simon loved to fall—he skied to crash.
“You keep doing that, you’ll make yourself sterile,” said my cousin Hester, to whom every event of our shared childhood was either sexually exhilarating or sexually damaging.
In the summers, we went waterskiing on Loveless Lake, where the Eastmans kept a boathouse, the second floor of which was remodeled to resemble an English pub—Uncle Alfred was admiring of the English. My mother and Aunt Martha would go sailing, but Uncle Alfred drove the powerboat wildly and fast, a beer in his free hand. Because he did not water-ski himself, Uncle Alfred thought that the responsibility of the boat’s driver was to make the skier’s ride as harrowing as possible. He would double back in the middle of a turn so that the rope would go slack, or you could even catch up to the rope and ski over it. He drove a murderous figure 8; he appeared to relish surprising you, by putting you directly in the path of an oncoming boat or of another surprised water-skier on the busy lake. Regardless of the cause of your fall, Uncle Alfred took credit for it. When anyone racing behind the boat would send up a fabulous spray, skimming lengthwise across the water, skis ripped off, head under one second, up the next, and then under again—Uncle Alfred would shout, “Bingo!”
I am living proof that the waters of Loveless Lake are potable because I swallowed half the lake every summer while waterskiing with my cousins. Once I struck the surface of the lake with such force that my right eyelid was rolled up into my head in a funny way. My cousin Simon told me I had lost my eyelid—and my cousin Hester added that the lost eyelid would lead to blindness. But Uncle Alfred managed to locate the missing eyelid, after a few anxious minutes.
Indoor life with my cousins was no less vigorous. The savagery of pillow-fighting would leave me breathless, and there was a game that involved Noah and Simon tying me up and stuffing me in Hester’s laundry hamper, where Hester would always discover me; before she’d untie me, she’d accuse me of sniffing her underwear. I know that Hester especially looked forward to my visits because she suffered from being the constant inferior to her brothers—not that they abused her, or even teased her. Considering that they were boys, and older, and she was a girl, and younger, I though
t they treated her splendidly, but every activity my cousins engaged in was competitive, and it clearly irked Hester to lose. Naturally, her brothers could “best” her at everything. How she must have enjoyed having me around, for she could “best” me at anything—even, when we went to the Eastman lumberyard and the sawmill, at log-rolling. There was also a game that involved taking possession of a sawdust pile—those piles were often twenty or thirty feet high, and the sawdust nearer the bottom, in contact with the ground, was often frozen or at least hardened to a crusty consistency. The object was to be king of the mountain, to hurl all comers off the top of the pile—or to bury one’s attackers in the sawdust.
The worst part about being buried in the pile—up to your chin—was that the lumberyard dog, the Eastmans’ slobbering boxer, a mindlessly friendly beast with halitosis vile enough to give you visions of corpses uprooted from their graves … this dog with the mouth of death was then summoned to lick your face. And with the sawdust packed all around you—as armless as Watahantowet’s totem—you were powerless to fend the dog off.
But I loved being with my cousins; they were so vastly stimulating that I could rarely sleep in their house and would lie awake all night, waiting for them to pounce on me, or for them to let Firewater, the boxer, into my room, where he would lick me to death; or I would just lie awake imagining what exhausting contests I would encounter the next day.
For my mother, our trips to Sawyer Depot were serene occasions—fresh air and girl-talk with Aunt Martha, and some doubtless needed relief from what must have been the claustrophobia of her life with Grandmother and Lydia and the maids at 80 Front Street. Mother must have been dying to leave home. Almost everyone is dying to leave home, eventually; and almost everyone needs to. But, for me, Sawyer Depot was a training camp; yet the athleticism was not—all by itself—what was most thrilling to me about the time spent with my cousins. What made these contests thrilling was the presexual tension that I always associated with the competition—that I always associated with Hester in particular.
To this day, I still engage in debate with Noah and Simon regarding whether Hester was “created” by her environment, which was almost entirely created by Noah and Simon—which is my opinion—or whether she was born with an overdose of sexual aggression and family animosity—which is what Noah and Simon say. We all agree that my Aunt Martha, as a model of womanhood, was no match for the superior impression my Uncle Alfred made—as a man. Felling trees, clearing the land, milling lumber—what a male business was the Eastman Lumber Company!
The house in Sawyer Depot was spacious and pretty; for my Aunt Martha had acquired my grandmother’s good taste, and she’d brought money of her own to the marriage. But Uncle Alfred made more money than we Wheelwrights were simply sitting on. Uncle Alfred was a paragon of maleness, too, in that he was rich and he dressed like a lumberjack; that he spent most of the day behind a desk did not influence his appearance. Even if he only briefly visited the sawmill—and not more than twice a week did he actually venture into the forests where they were logging—he looked the part. Although he was fiercely strong, I never saw him do an ounce of physical labor. He radiated a burly good health, and despite how little time he spent “in the field,” there was always sawdust in his bushy hair, wood chips wedged between the laces of his boots, and a few fragrant pine needles ground into the knees of his blue jeans. Possibly he kept the pine needles, the wood chips, and the sawdust in his office desk drawer.
What does it matter? While wrestling with my cousins and me, Uncle Alfred was an ever-friendly bruiser; and the cologne of his rough-and-ready business, the veritable scent of the woods, was always upon him. I don’t know how my Aunt Martha tolerated it, but Firewater often slept in the king-size bed in my uncle and aunt’s room—and that was an even further manifestation of Uncle Alfred’s manliness: that when he wasn’t snuggling up to my lovely Aunt Martha, he was lolling in bed with a big dog.
I thought Uncle Alfred was terrific—a wonderful father; and, for boys, he was what today’s idiots would call a superior “role model.” He must have been a difficult “role model” for Hester, however, because I think her worshipful love of him—in addition to her constant losses in the daily competitions with her older brothers—simply overwhelmed her, and gave her an unwarranted contempt of my Aunt Martha.
But I know what Noah would say to that; he would say “bullshit,” that his mother was a model of sweetness and caring—and she was! I don’t argue with that!—and that Hester was born to her antagonism toward her mother, that she was born to challenge her parents’ love with hostility toward both of them, and that the only way she could repay her brothers for outskiing her (on water and on snow), and for hurling her off sawdust piles, and for cramming her cousin into a basket with her old underwear, was to intimidate every girlfriend either of them ever had and to fuck the brains out of every boy they ever knew. Which she appeared to do.
It’s a no-win argument—that business of what we’re born with and what our environment does to us. And it’s a boring argument, because it simplifies the mysteries that attend both our birth and our growth.
Privately, I continue to be more forgiving of Hester than her own family is. I think she was up against a stacked deck from the start, and that everything she would become began for her when Noah and Simon made me kiss her—because they made it clear that kissing Hester was punishment, the penalty part of the game; to have to kiss Hester meant you had lost.
I don’t remember exactly how old we were when we were first forced to kiss, Hester and I, but it was sometime after my mother had met Dan Needham—because Dan was spending Christmas vacation with us at the Eastmans’ in Sawyer Depot—and it was sometime before my mother and Dan Needham were married, because Mother and I were still living at 80 Front Street. Whenever it was, Hester and I were still in our preadolescent years—our presexual years, if that’s safe to say; perhaps that is never safe to say in regard to Hester, but I promise it is safe to say of me.
Anyway, there’d been a thaw in the north country, and some rain, and then an ice storm, which froze the slush in deep-grooved ruts. The snow was the texture of jagged glass, which made skiing all the more exciting for Noah and Simon but made it entirely out of the question for me. So Noah and Simon went up north to brave the elements, and I stayed in the Eastmans’ extremely comfortable house; I don’t remember why Hester stayed home, too. Perhaps she was in a cranky temper, or else she just wanted to sleep in. For whatever reason, we were there together, and by the end of the day, when Noah and Simon returned, Hester and I were in her room, playing Monopoly. I hate Monopoly, but even a capitalist board game was welcome relief from the more strenuous activities my cousins subjected me to—and Hester was either in a rare mood to be calm, or else I rarely saw her without the company of Noah and Simon, around whom it was impossible to remain calm.
We were lounging on the thick, soft rug in Hester’s room, with some of her old stuffed animals for pillows, when the boys—their hands and faces bitter cold from skiing—attacked us. They trod across the Monopoly game so effectively that there was no hope of recreating where our houses and hotels and tokens might have been.
“Whoa!” Noah yelled. “Look at this hanky-panky going on here!”
“There’s no hanky-panky going on!” Hester said angrily.
“Whoa!” Simon yelled. “Watch out for Hester the Molester!”
“Get out of my room!” Hester shouted.
“Last one through the house has to kiss Hester the Molester!” Noah said, and he and Simon were off running. In a panic, I looked at Hester and took off after them. “Through the house” was a racing game that meant we had to travel through the back bedrooms—Noah and Simon’s room and the back guest room, which was mine—down the back stairs, around the landing by the maid’s room, where May the maid was likely to shout at us, and into the kitchen by May’s usual entrance (she was also the cook). Then we chased each other through the kitchen and dining room, through the
living room and the sun room, and through Uncle Alfred’s study—provided he wasn’t in his study—and up the front stairs, past the front guest rooms, which were off the main hall, and through my aunt and uncle’s bedroom—provided they weren’t in their bedroom—and then into the back hall, the first room off of which was Hester’s bathroom. The next room that we came to was the finish line: Hester’s room itself.
Of course, May emerged from her room to shout at Noah and Simon for running on the stairs, but only I was there on the landing to be shouted at—and only I had to slow down and say “Excuse me” to May. And they closed the swinging door from the kitchen to the dining room after they ran through the doorway, so that only I had to pause long enough to open it. Uncle Alfred was not in his study, but Dan Needham was reading in there, and only I paused long enough to say “Hello” to Dan. At the top of the front stairs, Firewater blocked my way; he’d doubtless been asleep when Noah and Simon had raced by him, but now he was alert enough to play. He managed to get the heel of my sock in his mouth as I attempted to run around him, and I could not travel far down the main hall—dragging him after me—before I had to stop to give him my sock.
So I was the last one through the house—I was always the last one through the house—and therefore I was expected to pay the loser’s price, which was to kiss Hester. In order to bring this forced intercourse about, it had been necessary for Noah and Simon to prevent Hester from locking herself in her bathroom—which she attempted—and then it was necessary for them to tie her to her bed, which they managed to do after a violent struggle that included the decapitation of one of Hester’s more fragile stuffed animals, which she had futilely ruined by beating her brothers with it. At last she was strapped prone to her bed, where she threatened to bite the lips off anyone who dared to kiss her—the thought of which filled me with such dread that Noah and Simon needed to use more mountain-climbing rope to tie me on top of Hester. We were bound uncomfortably face-to-face—and chest-to-chest, hips-to-hips, to make our humiliation more complete—and we were told that we would not be untied until we did it.
