Some years before she died, my mother confided to me that during the years of their courtship, both when she and my father were in high school, and after they’d gone to college — he in North Carolina, she in Florida — my grandmother Eliza, my father’s mother, a daughter of old Virginia, had counseled him against his choice, softly discouraging him on the grounds that my mother’s people were from Tennessee, and therefore not ideal. Quiet disapproval had been in the air, my mother told me, even after she and my father had married. It is easy for me to imagine that my mother felt unsure of her welcome in the Antrim family, not because I knew my grandmother to be a snob, though she may have been, but because my mother so often felt maligned in the world. What I mean to say is that her fears about her mother-in-law’s prejudices may or may not have been credible. Either way, they point to her anxiety over her desirability.
His, I suppose, was never much in question. Not too long ago, I began sorting through a collection of color transparencies, Ektachrome slides he took during the sixties and seventies. They’re pictures of our family for the most part, though a number show places we visited, interiors and exteriors of houses where we once lived, old acquaintances of my parents whose faces I recall but whom I cannot name, and cats and kittens we had as pets. I don’t own a projector or a movie screen, so, in order to get a good look at the pictures, I’ve been using a handheld viewer. Pushing a slide into the little black box turns on a hidden light that illuminates the image, which is magnified through the lens. Each slide is stamped with the month and year when it was developed. The slide’s white cardboard frames have faded since MAY 70 and APRIL 71 and JAN 73; they’re brown at the edges now, and beginning to look antique. It occurs to me that the process of loading and looking at them is, like the slides themselves, of another era: it’s entirely manual. Several times I’ve had the feeling, while holding a transparency in sunlight to check, before fitting it into the viewer, for shades and tints that show if it’s upside down or right-side up (a winter sky’s blue, a meadow in green, the sandy white of a Florida coastline) — I’ve had the feeling, dropping the correctly aligned slide into the aperture, easing it down to make the light go on, and staring into the black box, that I am not merely looking at pictures from another time; I am peering into the lost past.
It’s something about looking into a box. Children’s stories are rich with imagined devices that serve as passageways to other worlds. A passageway might be as simple as a mirror or a narrow door at the back of a wardrobe. It could be an abandoned well down which a character falls or, more famously, Alice’s rabbit hole. All that is asked of us, when reading about children who tumble down rabbit holes, is that we not judge too harshly the quality of their encounters with talking rabbits. Otherwise we’ll miss out on an adventure. Both rabbits and children are our guides, and we must follow where they take us. The images on my father’s slides, looked at through the lens of the battery-lit looking glass, might lie opposite a window on a faraway land. This impression is an ocular effect. The exterior perimeter of each slide is delineated by the dark interior perimeter of the box, making it appear as if only a small area (the image) within a larger realm (the unseen world beyond) is actually apparent to us. This effect can be resolved into a question. If we were able to perceive a bit more through the viewer, might this vaster realm, the world of which the slide is one small piece, also come into existence? Do other worlds radiate out into the room in which we sit staring into a box?
If only we could see. Inside the box, images float. Blackness lies around them. Landscapes, houses, animals, people — they all look as if they are meant to appear for a time, then vanish. Which is exactly what they do, the moment the slide is inserted and the light in the box goes on, the moment the slide is removed and the light shuts off. We’ve received a glimpse of something, or of someone: a visitation. Reds — there are in my father’s collection several pictures featuring roses — stand in a curiously forward position in relation to the viewer; they hover above their backgrounds in a way that evokes old 3-D images. People seem full-blooded and alive, yet their features are often hazy. The light around them glows.
A few slides show my uncle Eldridge, my father’s brother, reclining in the stern of a sailboat — my father, for a few years in the 1970s, had an affinity for sailing — drinking a beer on Biscayne Bay. Eldridge’s drinking has not yet overtaken him; he’s in his mid-thirties here, and looks fit and healthy. As always, he wears a beard — it’s tinted red from the sun and is trimmed close to his face, shaped by the razor in the manner in which I, when I wear a beard, trim and shape mine — and, also, as always, he sports a gold chain. He’s tanned and happy. In just a few years, though, he will begin in earnest his retreat from the world. He will disappear from our lives and exist increasingly in solitude, leaving his small Sarasota apartment only to drive across the Siesta Key bridge to his nighttime job as a prep cook at a restaurant on the Gulf of Mexico. Throughout the eighties, as his alcoholism intensifies, and as his weight drops and he becomes sicker, unable to eat, his solitude will turn to isolation, and, eventually, he will die.
But all that takes place later — it’s what’s to come. In the meantime, in the pictures shot by my father, Eldridge looks comfortable and content, stretched out in the back of a boat, beside a dark-haired woman wearing a head scarf, plastic sunglasses, and a yellow bikini. She has her hand in a bag of potato chips. I do not recognize her. Is she my uncle’s companion? Does she call him Eldridge or, as his friends did, Bob? In the distance behind her we see choppy water beneath a bright subtropical sky. This is the sky that I remember from that time, from that place. It is full of dampness and gray-green heat. Storms emerge from it. It appears to be lit from within.
Or has my memory been altered by an effect of the box? Remember that inside the viewer, things really are illuminated from within. That gray-tinted sky appears again and again. It’s there above the pines and in mottled reflections on the pool behind the Bauhaus-style house, and it is there in a picture of my father himself, standing before a palm tree whose green and brown fronds, spreading out to fill the frame behind him, suggest a hugely oversized headdress. Here is my father adorned as tropical potentate, youthful king of some island tribe that will one day disband and scatter to the four corners. He wears sideburns and, as he did through most of my childhood, a mustache. His hair is black. Turned away from the camera, he glares down and back over his shoulder at a photographer who might be crouched beside him — or kneeling, paparazzi-style, on one knee? — in order to capture a pose that will have the appearance of, well, a pose. In this picture, it is difficult to know who is “subject” to whom. My father looks into the camera lens, into the eye of the photographer, and, subsequently, back out of the lens of the black box, out of the light and into the eye, as they say, of the beholder. His expression is guarded, narrow-eyed, furtive; he looks, I think, as if he wants to see but not be seen, or as if, like Alice’s white rabbit, he is in a hurry to get somewhere. But where? The light in the box flickers on, and, just like that, he lets us see that there is something we can’t see. Then he’s gone. We have been warned of his departure — it’s in his eyes — yet it is unclear whether we are invited to chase after him. Who snapped this picture? Was it my mother? Did she kneel at his feet, peer up through the camera lens, and, seduced, ready to follow him, say, “Stop a minute. Stand in front of that palm tree. Come closer. Turn toward the camera. Now hold still”?
And what is it, exactly, that my father lets us see and not see? What is it that he knows?
A literature professor, he made his living thinking and talking about books. I was a teenager in Florida when I began asking him about the titles on our shelves at home. “What about this?” I would say, holding up a collection of Theodore Roethke’s poems or an English novel. Or I’d take down a volume on linguistics — at fifteen I developed a minor fascination with the nontechnical opening chapter of Thomas Pyles’s Origins and Development of the English Language—and say, “Dad?”
I remember that he might nod his head and utter a noncommittal word before turning away, as if my curiosity embarrassed him; and I wonder, now, looking back, whether to accept his reticence as part of a Virginia tradition of masculine taciturnity — I think of my father’s father and uncle and those roadside plaster birdbaths — though this likelihood leaves open the question of what my father, standing in our living room thirty years ago, might have been trying without words to tell me about books and their place in his life. Did I somehow know, did I feel, growing up in houses stocked with stories and poems and the correspondences of dead writers — and watching him go to a job that mandated enthusiasm (however guarded) for literature and its study — that books, whose contents could not easily be shared between us, might become the foundation of an intellectual inheritance that could be mine to take pride in, or ignore, or deride, or, years after I’d left home, and when that home was no more, stubbornly invent?
I bided my time. What can I accurately remember, today, about a boy who, in a long-ago time and faraway place, sat on the bottom of a swimming pool, breathing through a tank? What was in his mind?
When I was born, my father was an army lieutenant stationed at Fort Knox. Later he would transfer to Fort Bragg, in North Carolina, where he would have command of a tank battalion, and where my sister would be born. My mother told me that my father was not with her in Sarasota when she had me. She was alone, she said, except for her parents. Because I was crying, she told me, her mother came into the room and, I don’t know, snatched me up and carried me away from her, from my mother. She’d not been able to hold me when I’d been a newborn baby, because her own mother had wrested us apart. “We didn’t get to bond,” my mother told me when I was an adult, and added that she thought that my father, had he been present at my birth, might have intervened and stopped her mother from stealing me from her arms. But my father was in Kentucky. Because of his absence, my mother and I were unable to forge the attachment that a mother must make with her child in order for each not to wander through life longing for the other. That was what she believed, and told me, when I was about thirty years old.
It strikes me now that my mother, in telling that story, was exercising her failing power to ordain my future. In telling me what I couldn’t possibly remember, she hoped to tell me a truth about myself. She wanted me to see matters as she saw them, and stay close to her. There’s nothing unusual in this, I suppose. Our parents’ lives before we are born take place in a kind of mythic realm, a realm of the imagination, and our mothers’ and fathers’ power to shape and interpret our lives, to tell us who we are, even in our adulthood, requires our understanding that, because they inhabited mythic time, and because their existence has brought about our own, they remain for us immortal and all-seeing, just as they were when we were too young to survive without them. In telling me a story about a rift between us at my birth, my mother tells me that I will always search for her, because to me she will never die.
My search through other women began with a girl who took off her clothes and, her hand reaching up to hold mine, lay down on the floor beside my bed. She was eleven and had curly hair. I was twelve. My family was living in Virginia, in the main house on a farm called Fiddler’s Green, thirty minutes west of Charlottesville, where my father was a professor. The girl, G., had come for a sleepover party with me and my sister and my friend Peter. Peter was my junior high school classmate, and G. was the daughter of a colleague of my father’s, a man who, the year before we moved to Fiddler’s Green, had come in the middle of the night to our house on Lewis Mountain Road, in Charlottesville, carrying a loaded gun at his side. Anyway, that night at Fiddler’s Green, sometime after my parents had shut off the lights and the house had gone quiet, G. snuck through the door that led between Terry’s bedroom and mine. Peter was asleep in my room’s other bed. Earlier, G. had been forward during our kids’ game of strip poker, deliberately losing hands. Then it had been bedtime. When she came through the door, she got right under the covers with me, and we began kissing with our mouths closed. She was naked. She held her legs together. Her breasts had just begun to develop. I remember her on top of me. We hugged and kissed and tumbled around quietly. My erection was painful. I kept it hidden inside my pajamas. I recall the bright moonlight that came through the white curtains my mother had put up in my room. There were three windows. Two looked out over Fiddler’s Green’s small formal boxwood and rose gardens. Those roses that I mentioned earlier, the ones which, in pictures looked at through the slide viewer’s lens, seemed to detach from their branches and rise up to meet the eye, grew in the garden beneath my bedroom. In bed that night with G., I could see, in the moonlight, my desk and chair, and some toy racing cars and a strip of track on the floor, and my bongo drums, and the side of the bookshelf separating the two twin beds. I could see Peter, his shape, curled beneath a blanket on the other side of the shelf. It might have been Peter’s movements in bed that caused G. to slide down from the mattress to the floor, where she would not be seen by him if he woke. I gave her one of my pillows, and she reached up to hold my hand. How long did we manage to keep ourselves awake? It seems to me that we held hands even after we’d fallen asleep. By morning, she’d snuck back through the passageway leading to my sister’s room.
The next day, after she and Peter had been picked up and taken home by their parents, I got in the car and went somewhere with my mother. I remember our drive over rolling hills, on roads bordered by white fences. We drove toward, then alongside, the Blue Ridge Mountains. It was summertime, and the car windows were rolled down. Wind stormed around the interior of the car, and, every now and then, smoke and ashes from my mother’s cigarette scattered and flew into my eyes and nose. I began to feel nauseated from cigarette smoke and summer heat and the rising and falling of the car as it passed over the pastured hills.
Or did I feel sick from my adventure with G.? An anxiety came over me, sitting in the car with my mother. I had done something to divide us, and nothing would ever be the same again. We drove through the Virginia countryside, and I leaned partway out the passenger-side window and let the wind blow against my face.
I don’t know what happened to G. after that. She may have children of her own now. It wasn’t long before my family moved away to Florida, first to a house in a large subdivision on what was then the western edge of Miami, then farther south, to the Bauhaus-style house. Eventually I would return to Virginia for boarding school. I recall hearing, around the time that I graduated from Woodberry Forest, or shortly after I’d left home once again, for college in New England, that my old friend Peter had driven his car off the road and crashed into a tree and died. The accident happened, I believe, at night. I don’t know whether he’d been drinking.
But there is another story I want to get to, one that involves books. It takes place in Florida, in the Bauhaus-style house, the house surrounded by palms and tall pines. It was there that I began reading self-consciously, systematically, and acquisitively, which is to say that I began to take notice of myself in the act of reading, possibly because connections between books were becoming apparent and meaningful to me. J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy was enjoying its hippie-era popularity; you had to read it, and I did, in elegant volumes that came packaged as a boxed set. That led to other boxed sets. Many were available in 1972, released by publishers hoping, presumably, to profit from readers’ hunger for experiences that could replicate, or nearly replicate, the Tolkien trip, which was perceived by many people as a vast world-reordering — an end to unjust war and postindustrial tyranny — carried out by barefoot commune dwellers. It wasn’t Tolkien’s argument that sold me on The Lord of the Rings, however. I was attracted, I think, to what might be called the narrative’s spirit, which is expressed technically in the rules and laws that both create and govern Middle Earth’s complex network of societies, each with its own language and history, its codes of behavior and its embattled relationship to good or evil, even its own magic. The awaken
ing in adolescence to systems of social and psychological interdependence, magical and otherwise, was, for me, a quiet revelation. I wanted more multivolume flights into inner space. Books let me in on my own capacity for following connections — the peaceful farmers may live far from the shadows beneath the mountain of death, but they can reach that darkness if they listen to the talking trees; a reader may doubt the legitimacy of worlds not his own, but he can traverse those worlds nonetheless, if he keeps turning pages — and, before long, the connections that mattered were to other books.
One was H. G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau, the story of a mad scientist who uses a remote island as a kind of fortified preserve for his living creations, half human and half animal, the mutilated products of laboratory experiments in the nineteenth-century pseudoscience of vivisection who roam the jungle in states of agony and rage at their master. The Island of Dr. Moreau spoke to me. It came in a set of Wells’s sciencefiction novels, The Invisible Man, The War of the Worlds, The Time Machine, The Food of the Gods, and so on, each, as far as I was concerned, a fairly thorough rendering in metaphor of some aspect of the human condition. I had C. S. Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength, which, as it turns out, are about alternate worlds only to the extent that they are, like the epics of Tolkien, also about Christianity; and I remember, too, a set of truly strange works by E. R. Eddison, a mostly forgotten English writer of sometimes impenetrable medieval-style romances. Eddison’s The Worm Ouroboros—the title refers to a dragon swallowing its own tail, graphically illustrating circularity and never-endingness — prepared me for The Nibelungenlied, the “Song of the Nibelung,” a reading assignment set for me in the tenth grade by my German teacher as punishment for disrupting class and shirking on homework. Frau Webb thought she was going to stump me, but I was, by then, very conversant with the smiting of heads and quaffing of mead, the aura of celebrated death that can be found in northern European sagas.
The Afterlife: A Memoir Page 12