Learning to See

by Elise Hooper

  IN THE FALL, Paul secured Dan a spot at Black Mountain College, a new liberal arts college in North Carolina. The school’s rural isolation, experimental nature, and commitment to the arts seemed to offer him the chance to start over. It would be a new setting, a way to do things differently. He had taken to spending much of his time lurking around our local library, where he cultivated a love for writing poetry. Perhaps a chance to study literature among some of the greatest artists of our time could be just the thing for him. I breathed a sigh of relief as he left Berkeley, but all sense of good fortune was short-lived.

  He returned home a month later full of complaints about everything from the food to the muggy weather to the uppity professors. A haunted wildness lurked in his eyes. One afternoon I was working in the garden, splitting patches of lumpy white iris bulbs, when I paused to wipe my brow and looked to the house to see him watching me from the window of his bedroom. As our eyes met, he stepped backward, vanishing, a sad expression on his face. That night he disappeared and didn’t come home for four days.

  In the middle of October, Stryker called to fire me again. This time there was a finality in his voice that had never existed before. Although he assured me the office would still supply photos for my book, he told me in no uncertain terms that I was too difficult. My work with the FSA was over. I felt devastated, but I didn’t have long to dwell on it. Dan was in crisis.

  Chapter 34

  I didn’t pick up my camera for the next two years. With us all home, we bought a house, a rambler that sprawled down a steeply wooded hill on Euclid Avenue in Berkeley. I received notice that I’d won a coveted Guggenheim Award, but doubted I could complete the project. Poor health had been nagging at me on and off for several years. To further complicate matters, Dan had been circling in and out of our lives, disappearing and then reappearing only to fight with us and have scrapes with the law, but in the fall of 1941, he landed in his most disastrous situation yet.

  I’d been in San Francisco with Imogen for an evening and missed the police delivering Dan to the house. By the time I’d gotten home, he was in bed. The next morning, he sat slumped in a chair at the kitchen table, his face drawn. He looked older than his sixteen years. Not knowing what to say, I set a small breakfast in front of us—a plate of sliced cantaloupe and two cups of coffee—then sat down. Dan reached for the coffee and pulled it close to his face as if he could use the cup to block himself from looking at me. His fingers, inflamed and bruised, wrapped around the handle. Scrapes etched his knuckles. I reached for his other hand resting at the edge of the table, but he flinched at my touch.

  “Tell me what happened.”

  His expression darkened and he pulled his hand out from under mine.

  I tried again. “Why did you take the car?”

  “Are you accusing me of stealing it? It belongs to our family. I didn’t steal anything.”

  At the aggression in his voice, all of the patience I’d been trying to keep close to my chest ebbed from me. “I own that station wagon. Paul and I earned the money for it. The automobile is not yours to use whenever you like. You must stop taking things that don’t belong to you.”

  “So now you’re going to bring up your old stupid camera and typewriter?” With this he sprang from his seat, tearing at his hair. “That was two years ago!”

  I shook my head. “Dan, what happened? Why did you drive to Nevada?”

  He started pacing the floor of the kitchen without looking at me. “Why are you making me repeat all of this? I told Paul. I know he told you.” He sneered this last part.

  I recrossed my legs, gathering myself to remain calm. “I’m trying to understand. I’m trying to see what happened.”

  Dan whirled around, jabbing his index finger at me. “You’re trying to see?” He started laughing, but it almost sounded like sobbing. It was a horrible, searing sound that left him holding on to the counter, his back hunched, head down. “You have a famous eye, right? That’s what everyone says. You can see people in all of their dignity, their humanity. Well then, why is it that you can’t see me?”

  I started to protest, but he cut me off.

  “You’ve never been able to see me. Never.” His voice was hoarse and raw. He stopped speaking, and bolted from the room.

  I managed to rise to my feet and stumble out of the kitchen door. Birds trilled from the leafy oak tree branches overhead. I slumped down onto a bench underneath my favorite oak and covered my eyes with my hands.

  Paul had told me what had happened when I arrived home the previous night. Dan had met a girl at a five-cent-a-dance joint in Oakland. After his pockets were empty from buying dances, he and the girl rode the bus to our house and took our car from the garage, telling no one. They drove to Reno and married, only hours after meeting. Then they returned to California. Back in Oakland, the girl asked Dan to stop at a building where she lived with her mother so she could get a few things. She never reappeared.

  “When the police brought him to the house, he was a wreck. His eyes were red and his hands bloody,” Paul had said to me as I sat on the edge of our bed in shock.

  I pictured Dan climbing the stairs in the building to look for the girl. Chipped paint in the stairwell, the burnt smell of frying oil hovering in the air. He would have started pounding on the doors, moving from one to the next, demanding to know where the girl was. Impatient neighbors wanted nothing to do with the lovers’ squabble and called the police. I could only imagine how Dan must have felt in the back of the police car on the ride to our house. When the police officer asked Paul if he wanted to press charges for the theft of the vehicle, he had said no and brought Dan inside. Dan confessed to Paul what had happened and fled upstairs.

  AT PAUL’S URGING, we took Dan to a psychiatrist later that afternoon. Before the appointment, I telephoned Maynard. When he answered the call, his voice sounded thin and raspy.

  After I recounted the details of Dan’s brief marriage, Maynard said, “Why can’t he get his act together? When I was his age, I was making my own living.”

  “I was too, but he’s different from us. He’s very sensitive.”

  Maynard snorted. “That damned boy needs to toughen up. The world has no patience for sensitive types.”

  This was not helpful. Despite my entreaties to try talking to Dan, Maynard begged off. “Dorrie, you’ve been handling all of this so far. I can’t get involved now.”

  “Well, clearly I’ve made a hash of raising him,” I admitted, leaning my forehead against the wall.

  A silence yawned between us and I thought our call had disconnected, but Maynard came back on the line, his voice softer. “You’ve done no such thing. None of this has been easy. Now I don’t know what this fancy doc will tell you, but at some point, Dan will come around.”

  I needed that point to come soon.

  Maynard’s reassurances evaporated when Dan vanished beyond the frosted window of the doctor’s office door a few hours later. I sat next to Paul, thumbing through the San Francisco Chronicle, a ball of worry coiling tighter and tighter in my stomach. After what felt like an interminable amount of time, Dan reemerged and slumped down on one of the wooden chairs. The doctor observed him for a moment before turning to us. A brief look of distaste flickered over his face, but it vanished before I could register what I’d seen with certainty. I frowned. I needed someone who could see my son with a clarity that I knew my own anger and fear were clouding. Despite my misgivings, Paul and I rose to speak with the psychiatrist. From behind his desk, the man pinched his nose and slid his glasses off his face, wiping them with a handkerchief he pulled from a pocket.

  After hemming and hawing for several minutes about what he observed during his interview with Dan, the doctor leaned his elbows onto his desk and said, “I believe he’s psychotic and should be institutionalized.”

  “Psychotic?” I repeated, incredulous. “What on earth makes you say that?”

  “The anger he expresses when he describes you and Paul leads me to be
lieve—”

  Disbelief filled me. I stared at the man’s lips moving as he spoke without hearing anything more. He finished talking and both Paul and Dr. Gilbert looked at me. I bent over to pull my pocketbook up off the floor and stood. “This appointment’s over.”

  “Now, Dor—”

  “No,” I said, shaking my finger at both of them. “I do not think Dan needs institutionalization and I certainly don’t believe him to be psychotic. Yes, he’s angry. In fact, he’s furious because he thinks I abandoned him when he was child. He needs someone to listen to him, to figure out what he needs to survive in the world, not institutionalization and medicine that will numb him to everything. Paul, we’re leaving.”

  I crossed the room and threw the door open. I stood for a moment, waiting for Paul to catch up, and looked over at Dan. Absorbed in a magazine, he sat with his shoulders hunched to his ears, his legs crossed tightly. Everything about him radiated tense energy. Standing there, my heart ached. Though he was sixteen years old, suddenly he was seven again, and we were in San Anselmo, and he was sitting in the backseat of the car at the Tinleys’, refusing to get out.

  WHILE PAUL DROVE us home, I looked out the window without seeing anything, my thoughts spinning. How could I have done things differently? Dan sat in the backseat, saying nothing. When we arrived home and parked the car in the driveway, Dan opened his car door before we stopped moving, sprinted toward the house, and disappeared.

  I followed. Inside our foyer, shirts, pants, and socks lay all over the living room floor, remnants of a pile of clean laundry I’d folded earlier that day. I pictured Dan kicking it apart before he climbed the stairs, but shook my head and left it all. I retreated to the garden and took my spot on my bench below my favorite oak.

  When I thought back to my father leaving, it always seemed obvious that he had chosen to go because I had not been worth staying for. My beloved father, the man who crawled into bed beside me and sang songs until I fell asleep, the man who lifted me onto his shoulders at A Midsummer’s Night Dream, the man who always had a shiny nickel for me in his pocket—that same man had left me without so much as a look over his shoulder. There had been nothing apologetic in his straight-spine posture, nothing that spoke of regret, nothing that spoke of shame. And I never saw him again. Mother remained silent about his absence, leaving Martin and me to piece together an explanation in our own minds. What had I missed? Did I misinterpret his actions the way Dan was misinterpreting mine? I rubbed at my eyes as if I could erase the image of my father’s swagger from my mind. I imagined Dan lying on his bed, believing I’d abandoned him when in fact I’d tried to save him. I’d tried to keep those boys safe, but all of my efforts had backfired.

  Then I heard the gasp of a window opening and glanced toward the house. Above me, framed within his window, John sat on his bed and lifted his clarinet to his mouth. The gentle melody of “Moonlight Serenade” floated from his window. Tears blurred my vision. He continued playing, unaware of my presence below. He faltered several times with the wrong notes, paused and then proceeded. Sweet, steady John. How was it that one brother suffered so much while the other appeared more resilient?

  Paul appeared in the kitchen doorway and stepped outside, clearing his throat. “Maybe you should get some rest. Did you even sleep last night?”

  “I’m going to try again with Dan first. I need to fix things with him.”

  “Maybe you can’t fix this. What if he needs to figure it out on his own?”

  Paul sank to the bench beside me. In his large hands, my foot disappeared and I was tempted to slide over into his lap and allow my whole body to vanish into his. The tangle of emotions inside me felt too much to bear. Instead I inhaled and exhaled deeply, eased my foot out of Paul’s grip, stood, and entered the house again, climbed the stairs, and knocked on Dan’s door. No answer. I knocked again, tilting my ear for any sound within. I twisted the doorknob and opened the door. The room was empty.

  I spun back into the hallway and hurried down the stairs. As I crossed the living room on my way to the garage to check on the cars, my gaze caught on a blank section of wall above the fireplace. Usually a painting of Maynard’s hung in that spot. I stared before turning to pull myself upstairs again. In my bedroom, next to the mirror hanging over my dresser, another strip of blank wall. Normally three of Maynard’s watercolors hung in that spot. With my body heavier and heavier with every passing step, I retraced my way down the stairs, across the living room, through the kitchen, and into my studio. I knew what I would find.

  Chapter 35

  I awoke the following morning and experienced a brief moment when everything that had happened with Dan felt like a bad dream, but then it all rushed back to me. Maynard’s paintings and Dan had disappeared. I squeezed my eyes shut, pulling the covers tight to my chin, and curled my body into a fetal position, willing myself to fall back asleep. Where was Dan? In his fragile state, the humiliation over the failed marriage, I feared for his safety. Next to me, Paul stirred and slid himself across the mattress so my back leaned against him. I tried to imagine that nothing would ever go wrong again.

  “Don’t worry,” he whispered, “I’ll find Maynard’s paintings.” He sat upright, placing his glasses on his face. “I’ll handle it.”

  What was I supposed to do? How would I find Dan? And once I found him, then what? The dull discomfort always lurking in my stomach sharpened into a tight metallic pain. When I closed my eyes and breathed, the pain brightened the darkness behind my eyelids until I opened them again. I winced and Paul urged me to stay in bed, saying one of the girls would bring me breakfast. Exhausted, I complied, but I couldn’t sleep. Instead I shut down into a strange state of inaction and unthinking for several more hours while Paul worked the telephone making inquiries into Dan’s whereabouts.

  Late in the afternoon, I opened my eyes to find Imogen sitting on the bed beside me. She stared out the nearby window, a private, solemn expression on her face. I stirred and she turned to me.

  “I’ve made so many mistakes,” I said.

  “No one blames you for a thing.”

  “Dan does.”

  “He isn’t thinking straight.”

  “I should call Maynard and tell him about his paintings.”

  “Paul already did. He needed ideas for where to find them. Oh boy, Maynard was blazing mad.”

  “At me?”

  “God, no. At Dan. Why do you keep thinking this is your fault?”

  I rolled to my back and stared at the ceiling. “I’ve failed him.”

  “Life is a complicated business. You’ve done the best you could.” She paused. “Of course, Dan carries some pain, we all do. Now he has to make some choices about how he’s going to move forward. So far, it’s been a little rocky, but he’ll figure it out.”

  “I’m going to postpone my Guggenheim Fellowship. My boy needs me.”

  Imogen nodded. “Now let’s get you out of bed.”

  “Paul said I should rest.”

  “Since when did you ever do what Paul said? Rondal drove me here and he’s downstairs with Kathy. She’s talking his head off about some dance at school. We need to go rescue him,” Imogen said, standing and pulling me gently from where I sat on the edge of the bed. She dressed me in a loose-fitting long skirt and blouse, smoothed down my short hair, and led me downstairs, my hand in hers.

  JUST AS WHEN my camera and typewriter went missing, Paul searched through the area’s local pawnshops. This time he was given leads to some dealers in illegal goods, and without providing me with many details about these meetings, he brought the paintings home. After hanging them back in their places, he came to find me in my studio, where I stood leaning against my worktable. “Do you have any idea where Dan is now?” I asked.

  Paul straightened his tie. “No.”

  “So now what?” I said. “We just wait to hear what trouble he gets into next?”

  “Dorothea.” Paul pulled me into an embrace. “I think we’ve reached the point w
here we must let Dan do whatever it is that he needs to do.”

  I hated the idea of doing nothing, but what else was there? I stared past Paul’s shoulder. He pulled away from me to look into my face, but I let my gaze drop. A crumpled brown bag sat on the floor next to the door.

  “What’s in there?” I asked, pointing at it.

  Paul shrugged unconvincingly and moved to stand between the bag and me.

  “No, really, what is it?”

  He bent over and picked up the bag, shifting its weight back and forth in his arms. “I found a few copies of American Exodus at the bookstore on Telegraph Hill.”

  I crossed the room to peer in the bag, even though Paul tried to draw back. “A few! Why, there are at least a dozen copies in there. Why did you buy these?”

  “They were marked down to one dollar each. I just couldn’t bear to see them all . . .” He stopped and concerned himself with fussing over one of his cuff links.

  I looked at the bag again. Of course it was disappointing that our book was so heavily discounted, but I didn’t feel the same shame written across Paul’s face. The process of making the book had saved me. The roads I’d driven, the fields I’d trod—I’d visited places I would never have gone to otherwise, seen things I’d never have known about, listened to people I would never have met. These experiences were no small thing. For me, the act of creation outweighed the final product. That our books sat in a dusty corner languishing unseen in a bookstore hurt, but I could understand how frustrating it felt for Paul. His activism, his message—his life’s work was falling upon deaf ears. The country wasn’t interested in the New Deal and agricultural reform anymore. Their time had passed. Our book had released to little fanfare two years earlier. Now all everyone spoke about was Hitler and his steady march across Europe. A new era was upon us.

  I pulled a book out of the bag and opened it to a photo of a woman shading her eyes with a tented hand while searching the distance as if she understood the country had already moved on to something else. I placed the book on the table and wrapped my arms around Paul. We had each other. Our partnership would have to be enough.