Horizon
Page 2
The boy can’t picture Australia, but he is transfixed by the idea that some trees are carried off from their first country and then grow happily in other places.
When he lies in bed at night, imagining the future he wants, a strategy he uses to probe the vague precincts of his dreams, the boy envisions the botanic garden and thinks about Dara, how gently Dara’s hands handle plants. By now, though, he has also learned about some things less comforting. More threatening. He circumspectly regards the lives of poisonous black widow spiders living in the garage alongside his house, red hourglasses gleaming on the females’ tummies. When he talks to adults about the rattlesnake that startled him and his friend Thair while they were walking in the Santa Monica Mountains one morning, hunting for alligator lizards, he enjoys the way adults attend closely to his story.
The snake had snapped at them when they teased it. He doesn’t tell his listeners that he and Thair beat it with a stick until it was dead.
One weekend at Zuma Beach the boy is stung by a wounded Portuguese man-of-war, a large jellyfish, foundering in the surf. An ambulance comes to take him, vomiting and shivering, to the hospital.
He trusts the shelter of the towering gum trees and wonders about the power of Portuguese man-of-wars. The two things are now entwined in his mind.
He is ashamed of having killed the snake and of his silence about it.
* * *
—
MOST EVERY SATURDAY the boy goes with his mother and brother to the Farmers Market in Los Angeles, at Third and Fairfax, driving over from the valley in his mother’s dark green Ford coupe. He loves the shine and heft of the fruit. He has to reach higher than his head in order to feel within the tilted boxes for greengage plums, for kumquats and nectarines. He likes to heft the Belgian endives, to feel the brush of wetted carrot tops across his forehead, to grip a cassava melon in both his hands. They’re like his first pets.
A friend of his mother owns an avocado ranch near Fallbrook. Her husband, a DC-6 pilot who flies every week to Honolulu and on to Tokyo for American Airlines, is not much interested in answering the boy, who wants to know how this actually occurs, Los Angeles to Honolulu, then to Tokyo. The boy has considered that he will one day have a ranch something like the one this couple operates. He’ll raise avocados and perhaps Asian pears, which break as sharply against his teeth as McIntosh apples. This life appeals to him. He’ll truck his produce and buckets of cut flowers—snapdragons, carnations, irises—to the market. He’ll keep bees to pollinate his flowers and fruit trees, possibly offer their honey for sale, along with fresh eggs, asparagus, and pomegranates at a stand by the side of the road, like the fruit and vegetable stands his mother shops at on the drive home from school every day.
Most nights the boy consoles himself as he falls asleep with the certainty of the destination he has chosen. He will operate a tractor, dragging a harrow to break up the clods of dirt left behind after he discs the field where he will grow annuals. He’ll determine exactly how to set out the sprinklers to irrigate the varieties of roses in his gardens. He’ll light smudge pots on cold winter nights to keep the orchards from freezing.
The more he imagines a truck farm, the less anxious he feels about the strange man who has come into his life, a man who is not like Dara.2
* * *
—
ONE WINTER AFTERNOON the boy follows his mother into the post office at Canoga Park. While she waits in line he studies a fourteen-by-seven-foot mural on the east wall, Palomino Ponies. He’s mesmerized. Years later he will misremember the image when he discovers more work by the same painter, Maynard Dixon. He will think of it, wrongly, as a tableau of American Indian faces in profile, high cheekbones, the burnt sienna and ocher tones of their skin. But there are no Indians in this mural of a California vaquero of the 1840s, racing across a golden grassland behind seven palomino horses. The boy will have conflated the image in the post office with the memory of a better-known painting by Dixon, Earth Knower, and he will have further confused the misremembered image with a childhood recollection of having once encountered Indians on a train platform in Needles, late one ninety-degree summer night in the eastern Mojave. He was eight. He and his brother had boarded an overnight train in Los Angeles with a friend of their mother, bound for the Grand Canyon. The boy had stepped out onto the platform in this small California town on the west bank of the Colorado River after midnight, later than he’d ever been up. He saw a dozen Mohaves milling around, or maybe they were Havasupais from the canyon, waiting for family members to board or disembark. Despite the heat, they’d all pulled shawls forward over their heads or they were peering out from the cowls of trade blankets. He couldn’t decipher the nearly inaudible sounds of the words they spoke.
He never forgets the austerity of this scene. The foreignness of these figures.
In the post office that day, after he takes in the poise of the rider, the fleet jeté of his mount, the muscular exuberance of the palominos, he remarks to his mother that one day he intends to become a painter.
In the moment, perhaps all he really wants is to become a dashing vaquero.
* * *
—
AND THEN SUDDENLY his mother is married again, to a businessman from New York. California is over. The boy moves with his new family to Manhattan. Louder, taller, faster country than his home ground. A different color to its winter sky. Colder weather, fall leaves turning pale yellow on London planetrees, which he initially confuses with California sycamores. When his stepfather points out “Indians,” dining across from them in a restaurant, he means people from another continent, not this one.
That first summer in New York he’s sent with his brother to Camp St. Regis on Long Island’s South Fork, near East Hampton. There he meets John, a boy he believes is from California. They share a cabin with four other eleven-year-olds. John’s father, the boy learns, has written some books about California, set in the Central Valley, a place much like the San Fernando Valley in the boy’s mind. He’s actually read one of these books, a collection of pieces called The Long Valley. On Parents’ Day, the California author arrives by cabin cruiser to visit his children. He anchors the boat just off the beach where he won’t have to encounter the other parents. He rows a pale green dinghy ashore to fetch his sons. They spend the afternoon together with their parents on the cabin cruiser. After his own parents leave, the boy sits on the beach and watches the boat.
He waits.
The boy who waded in Mamaroneck Harbor and then moved to Southern California, and once thought he wanted to grow avocados or become a painter, now lives in a brownstone in the Murray Hill neighborhood of Manhattan. In the fall he will enter the seventh grade at a private Jesuit school on East 83rd Street and begin serving Mass as an altar boy at the Church of Our Saviour on East 38th Street, around the corner from his home.
It will take him a while to fit himself to the place.
On that July afternoon at St. Regis he waits, staring at the white vessel. It seems mute to him, with its curtained windows and no one visible on the flying bridge or at the stern. Young John has informed him that his parents have motored over from their home in nearby Sag Harbor, an old whaling town. The boy remembers the name, Sag Harbor. An image of it anchors his growing awareness of the immensity and quietude of whales, and of the enormity and violence of their slaughter.
It bothers the boy, years later, that he cannot pry loose a single memorable detail from the opaqueness of the Steinbeck boat, even after having scrutinized it for an hour. Only the pale green dinghy, hanging crookedly from davits at the stern, stands out. The boat sits almost broadside to him that afternoon on a slowly rising tide. Nothing stirs. He wants to go on reminiscing with John about days in California, but just then, he wants to swim out to the boat and tell the older John that he has read “The Red Pony,” that he thinks it very good. He wants to be a part of the family having a conversation on th
at boat.
Suddenly the writer, with his large, balding head, is in the stern of the cabin cruiser, lowering the dinghy to bring the boys back to shore. In the diffused light that penetrates a late afternoon fog, the dinghy and its passengers appear wraith-like as they approach. The boy has yet to hear of the River Styx or of Charon, but in the years afterward, it is these images that will rise up in his memory when he recalls the moment.
That evening in their bunks the boy asks John how he thinks his father has been doing here, in New York City, having moved all the way across the country from California to East 72nd Street. He listens closely, hoping to hear what his bunkmate might have gleaned, having himself already made this adjustment. He hopes to make this same change successfully himself, but senses large undefined obstacles. He feels a potential for disappointment in his expectations.
He is unaware that his bunkmate John did not grow up in California.
In the years following, in the silence before sleep comes, the boy sometimes recalls the anonymous cabin cruiser and the afternoon mist obscuring the horizon beyond. He thinks about the California beaches, Zuma and Point Dume on Santa Monica Bay, west of Los Angeles, and about the man his mother decided not to marry, who told him about China, and about jacarandas and eucalypts. He believes there is something he must see one day in China. Or in Japan. Or somewhere far off. This repeated sensation elicits in him a now familiar yearning. Once it came from looking at avocados motionless in his hands, or from hearing the eucalypts on Calvert Street clattering in the wind. Now it comes more often from a desire simply to go away. To find what the skyline has cordoned off.
* * *
—
THE BOY IN Mamaroneck Harbor is myself, and I am the grandfather speaking with his grandson in Hawai‘i about catastrophe. I have been thinking for a while about the time between those two moments, wondering what transpired in the years in between, during which I saw senseless death and became a witness to the breaking of every commandment I’d learned as a boy, and during which I beheld things so beautiful I couldn’t breathe.
A few scenes like the ones I’ve recounted above, broken off from an early life—Mamaroneck Harbor, Zuma Beach, a railroad platform in Needles—are but one way to embark on a larger story about someone who afterward would go off repeatedly to look at the rest of the world. Only a sketch, then, this, but one I feel makes reasonably good sense. No life, of course, unfolds quite this neatly and comprehensibly around any such rosary of memories. A long life might be understood, however, as a kind of cataract of imperfectly recollected intentions. Some of one’s early intentions fade. Others endure through the inevitable detours of amnesia, betrayal, and loss of belief. Some persist over the years, slightly revised. Unanticipated trauma and other wounds certainly might force the car off the road at any moment, maybe forever, one’s final destination lost. But, too, the unfathomable sublimity of a random moment, like the touch of a beloved’s hand on one’s burning face, might revive the determination to carry on, and, at least for a time, rid one of life’s weight of self-doubt and regret. Or a moment of staggering beauty might reignite the intention one once had to lead a life of great meaning, to live up to one’s own expectations.
My driven life has been one of occasional ecstasy and occasional sorrow, little different, in that, from the lives of many others except perhaps for the compelling desire I’ve had to travel to far-off places, and for what acting on that yearning with such determination has meant for me and for those close to me.
I became, almost unintentionally, an international traveler, though not a true wanderer.3
* * *
—
MANY YEARS AFTER my adolescence in New York, embarking on this autobiography, I wrote to the manager of the Orienta Apartments in Mamaroneck. I wanted to know something more about where I came from and trusted that the building was still standing and that such a person might exist. I described how, as a three-year-old, I had walked a certain path from the elevator to our apartment on the second floor. Could he or she determine the apartment number, having only this information? The manager wrote back right away, including with his letter a few drawings of the building’s grounds and some photographs. On one of the drawings he’d marked out the small garden plot where, I’d told him, my mother had grown roses, tulips, and irises.
The apartment number, he said, was 2C.
2
To Go/To See
After the move east to New York in 1956, and after I’d graduated from a prep school on the Upper East Side, I went away to college in the Midwest. The boy who once thought he wanted to operate a truck farm had decided to major instead in aeronautical engineering, a career about which he knew next to nothing. The part of Southern California I’d grown up in, however, had been at that time, right after the end of the Second World War, a burgeoning center for aircraft design, and for the testing and assembly of airplanes. That way of being in the world was in the air I breathed as a child, and the nature of that work had been vividly represented for me by my mother’s first husband, Sidney van Sheck, whom I met for the first time in California, years after they divorced.4
Sidney was a Czech immigrant. He married my mother in Alabama in 1934, I believe, and shortly after they divorced he moved to Southern California. In the 1950s he was living only a few miles from us, in the Santa Monica Mountains above Malibu with his second wife, Grace. During the financially strained years when my mother was supporting us with several jobs, Sidney was employed as an aeronautical engineer at Hughes Aircraft in Culver City. He was designing satellites then, some of the earliest ones, after several years of work on planes like Howard Hughes’s Spruce Goose. He and Grace befriended the three of us in myriad ways. I’m sure he gave Mother money, and he would often invite me to sit quietly on a stool in his home workshop and watch while he fashioned metal and wood parts for the model aircraft he always seemed to be building.
I was attracted to Sidney’s intensity, to his confidence with hand tools, and I was fascinated by the improbability of “aeroplanes,” around which he was so at ease. Also, he drove a very quick-on-its-feet British sports car, an Austin-Healey convertible. A two-seater. When he drove me very fast along the Pacific Coast Highway with the top down, I heard the smooth clicking of the gearbox as he shifted flawlessly in the turns and accelerated out of them, the hood of the car rising slightly each time. A lunging animal. With the wind full in my hair, glancing at his nimble feet double-clutching as he shifted, I felt he was inviting me into the visceral experiences of his world.
Sidney, like Dara, was the image of the father I wanted. He finished a degree in painting in the 1920s at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Later he completed a master’s degree in aeronautical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Before divorcing my mother and moving to California with Grace, he was employed by Bechtel-McCone-Parsons, a construction company with a military aircraft division in Birmingham, Alabama. His work there included refining the wing designs of two bombers, the B-24 Liberator and the B-29 Superfortress, and designing the armament system for a fighter plane, the P-38 Lightning. (It was a P-38 that the legendary pilot and writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was flying when he disappeared over the Mediterranean in 1944, a fact I would learn much later, after I became enamored with the persona of Saint-Exupéry as it emerged for me, in particular, in Southern Mail and Night Flight.)
During the First World War, Sidney piloted a SPAD S.VII, an early fighter plane, for the French. He was shot down in 1919 over the French Alps (by the Red Baron, Baron von Richthofen, according to my mother). The crash left him with fused cervical vertebrae and other injuries, but he went on flying single-seat aircraft until he crashed again, this time in North Carolina in the 1920s, an accident he also managed to walk away from. After gaining American citizenship, finishing his engineering degree, and securing employment with Bechtel-McCone, Sidney engaged his second passion more fully by teaching art
at Auburn University. My mother, a junior at nearby Montevallo College, met him there in 1933 and soon began studying painting with him. They married shortly after she graduated. The following year, Sidney was commissioned by the Works Progress Administration in Washington to design what would become the largest WPA mural in the American South, a championing of the dignity of manual labor and a warning about the ruthlessness of corporate exploitation. It covered the legs and extensive lintel of a proscenium arch in the auditorium at Woodlawn High School in Birmingham.5
* * *
—
IT WAS WITH the unconscious idea of emulating the cosmopolitan artist and engineer Sidney van Sheck, probably, that I entered college believing I had a calling to become an aeronautical engineer. My enthusiasm for airborne flight, for the adventure of it—Mary S. Lovell’s Straight on Till Morning, about Beryl Markham; Markham’s own West with the Night; Amelia Earhart’s life, as reported in newspaper accounts; and magazine stories about Alaska’s bush pilots—had no doubt also canted me in that direction. In the middle of my freshman year, however, awakening from this misapprehension about a career in engineering, I embarked instead on a liberal arts curriculum—literature, philosophy, anthropology, history, theater—and quickly grew more comfortable there.