Back in the fantasy, however, my sister and I are riding in the car with our parents. Our father has driven down from Virginia for one of my parents’ hostile weekends, and we have been visiting grandparents in Sarasota. Before returning to Tallahassee, we stop in Clearwater. At an aunt’s house, Terry and I get a surprise. The aunt, who can’t keep a secret, asks us how we feel about our parents’ decision to remarry. Are we excited? Are we happy? This is wondrous news to us, and we jump up and down and run around our aunt’s kitchen table and tug on our parents’ clothes and shout up at their faces, “Are you? Are you getting married? Are you?”
It is not long before we are in the black Beetle again, driving westward into the land of truck stops, alligator-filled lakes, and horse farms. In Gainesville, we park in front of the Episcopal church that we attended before our parents ended their marriage. After our parents and the pastor meet privately in his office, we enact a brief rehearsal. Then we do the real thing. We walk as a family down the aisle of the empty church. My sister carries a bouquet, and I, wearing short pants, bear the rings. It is my job to hand over the gold band that my father will put on my mother’s hand.
I remember my anxiety, that day in the chapel. I was waiting for my cue. I knew that my parents’ rings were in my pocket, but was afraid nonetheless that I would fail in my mission. Would I reach into my pants pocket and find that I had lost the rings? Would I drop one on the floor? And might it roll away beneath a pew and disappear?
But wait. Were the rings in my pocket, or were they sitting on a pillow, a velvet pillow that I carried like a serving tray? Or were they in a box — a box in my pocket? Or was one ring in one pocket and one in another? Whose ring was in which pocket? I have a memory of a voice — my father’s? — saying to me, “Be careful not to lose those.” Where in the church could I have lost my parents’ rings, though, that they would not be found?
We packed up the little house in Tallahassee. A moving van carried away our things. Before leaving for Virginia, I walked across the street and, standing in the grass beside the church steeple, wept over the friends I would never see again. We put Zelda Fitzgerald, our cat, in a cage in the backseat of the car, then climbed in ourselves and drove across the state line into southern Georgia and on from there through the successive landscapes that marked the stages of the journey north. We went through the Georgia pine stands, around broad, man-made lakes, and across red hills. We continued through the Carolinas, through fields planted with corn and tobacco, past neglected, rotting barns whose painted roofs advertised pecans and fireworks. Whenever my sister or I saw, looking out the car windows into the distant west, a big range of hills, we imagined that we had come to the Blue Ridge Mountains. The Blue Ridge belonged to our father’s world.
In Charlottesville, we unloaded into a house on Lewis Mountain Road, down the way from Memorial Gym and the university tennis courts. The house was not big. It was painted white, with a front door that I want to remember as red but which was probably also white. We had a narrow yard that sloped uphill in back; there was room to throw a ball, but not enough space to play a game. In the basement were broken walls partitioning unlit places that smelled as if they might open onto passageways running beneath the streets and houses, down into the earth. Above the basement, the kitchen was off-white and cozy, smaller than the kitchen at Fiddler’s Green, where we would move the following year. Every time we relocated — and we did so every year or two, as if life were a steeplechase through rented houses — we would go into the new rooms and paint the walls and uncrate the books and dust off the flower vases and sort the silverware and hang the pictures and roll out the rugs in a matter of days, as if in a hurry to produce a home that might be an improvement on the one that had come before, and in which we could forget or at least put in the past the unhappiness that had come before, knowing that once the chairs were arranged in the new living room and the beds in the new bedrooms had been made, it would come again.
A number of years before she died, my mother told me that soon after her second marriage to my father, she realized that the woman with whom he’d had his affair was still a presence. She told me that after we moved from Tallahassee to Charlottesville, she, my mother, had sometimes been greeted, during social gatherings at the homes of my father’s Virginia colleagues and friends, with questioning looks, as if the people she met were uncertain about whether she was really his wife.
Her rival was a poet who lived in a distant state. Several times, after I’d finished college and moved to New York, I came across a poem or group of poems by her. Standing in a magazine shop or a bookstore, I searched the lines for images, for a voice, that might connect me, however tenuously, to my parents in their youth. One day, I discovered a letter she’d written to my father. The letter was from a time when I was little. It was pressed between the pages of a paperback copy of Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. I’d stolen the book from my father’s shelves before leaving home for boarding school, and I’d subsequently carried it to college and, from there, to New York. How had I never before seen this letter? Had I not read the play? I found the letter in the book in the 1980s, when I was living on the Upper East Side. I remember that I refused myself permission to open the envelope and look inside. The letter hadn’t been written to me; it didn’t belong to me; it wasn’t meant for me. Reading it would be unethical, maybe even immoral. Weeks went by — or months, it seems to me now — while I maintained a furtive attachment to its forbidden, unknown contents, which I absurdly hoped might offer me a bit of insight into my family’s history. I regarded the writer, who had played such a significant part in our troubles, as a kind of outcast relative. Could a piece of her lost mail help me understand what had happened to my mother and father?
I read the letter. I remember that it was nighttime. I was sitting on the sofa in my tiny apartment’s tiny living room. I opened Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, took out the envelope, extracted and unfolded the pages inside, and began. I recall a passage describing a new green dress that the writer had worn to a party. Both dress and party were described in teasing, playful, overtly erotic language, language that makes clear her desire for my father’s adoration and jealousy. I felt guilty and embarrassed. Maybe I had expected the letter to contain literary chat of a sort that I imagine my father wishing he could share with my mother, a reference to, say, French poetry or new directions in criticism. I folded the love letter, stowed it back between the pages of the book, and replaced the book with the other novels and plays stacked in crooked piles underneath the platform sleeping loft in my bedroom. Twenty years and a half-dozen apartments later, I don’t know where Rosencrantz and Guildenstern has got to.
Most all of my mother’s stories — the angry tales she told me, before and after she got sober — about her life with my father contained, I think, a notion of self-improvement as a process of gathering insights into other people: if we name the faults of those who have hurt us, we will be shielded from pain; if we can collect evidence to justify our anger, we will overcome shame; if we pity our betrayers, we will not have been betrayed, mishandled, misunderstood, or left abandoned. But what happens when the ordeal of abandonment is — as I think it was for my mother, and for me with her — life itself?
Near the very end, in the years immediately before she was diagnosed with cancer, and even after she’d begun radiation, my mother dreamed that she and I would go on a trip together, a journey of sorts, the two of us in a car, touring the countryside, stopping at inns. She proposed this many times. “Would that be nice, Don?” she might ask, after naming a region — the Florida Keys or some wild stretch of the Pacific Northwest — in which we might travel around, talk about art, and get to know each other better.
“That might be nice,” I would say to her. My mother wanted to go on a honeymoon with me.
“Will you think about it?”
“Sure.”
“We could go in the fall.”
“This fall?”
“I don’t know. Can we talk about it when the time is closer? It’s hard to see that far ahead.”
“Oh. Well, I know you have a lot to think about.”
“I guess I do.” Unhappily, I would imagine checking into a rural bed-and-breakfast or a surf-side cabana with my dying mother, who would humiliate me. She’d talk loudly at the dinner table, and treat the waiter poorly. I could picture myself glancing to the left and the right, wanting to hide or, failing that, apologize to everyone we met.
Whenever I imagine such a trip, I am inclined to remember one that we did take, in 1982 or 1983, when she was struggling to get sober. We’d met at her parents’ house in Black Mountain. At the end of our stay, I loaded her suitcase and mine into her station wagon, and we started the drive to Florida, where I would spend a few more days before returning to New York. We drove south through the mountains. Halfway home, in St. Augustine, we stopped for dinner. I remember that we parked the car in front of a white house, a Florida bungalow built, probably, in the 1930s or ‘40s. It featured louvered windows, a stone porch with a painted ceiling, and a flowering tree in the yard.
The sun was in the west. Sea smells were in the air. “Look at that pretty house, Don. I’ve always liked it here so much. I’d love to live in a house like that,” I remember her saying.
We stood and looked at the house. Then we walked down the street to a local restaurant, a fish house. After dinner, we walked past the little house again, got in the car, and drove south. The ocean was to the left. The sun had almost set. We passed a few hotels, then a long stretch of deserted beach. I stopped the car, got out, and walked across the sand. I left my mother in the car by the roadside. The surf was high, as I remember. I took off my shirt, rolled up my pants, and waded in. After my swim I dried off as well as I could, got back in the driver’s seat, and drove through the night.
But where was I? North Carolina? Georgia? Florida? New York? Or back in the house on Lewis Mountain Road in Charlottesville? Or the farmhouse we rented in 1968, after we left Lewis Mountain Road?
The farm’s grounds were surrounded by fields full of cows, and the front yard rolled downhill to a rocky creek. Out back, at the top of a hill, was a white barn filled with hay bales. If you walked up the drive past the barn, then down the other side of the hill, you came to a pond. On the pond’s far bank, beneath overhanging branches, stood the remains of a mill. The pond was brackish and not good for swimming. One afternoon, I watched a gang of boys from a family squatting in the ruins of an old house across the road march in a line up our driveway. There were five or six of them. They carried fishing poles made of sticks. I followed the line of boys, stopping to watch them from behind a fence at the top of the hill near the barn. They were gathered on the pond’s small, rotting dock. In a short time, they hauled in three or four dozen perch. A boy would bait his hook with kernels of canned yellow corn, drop his line, and immediately bring up a fish, which he would lower, flopping on the hook, to the planks of the dock. Another boy, an older brother, would stomp on the fish’s head. The dock was stained with blood, and the sun was setting behind the mountains, and I was twelve years old, and it occurred to me that God was feeding these children, but that He didn’t have to feed me, because my family could buy food. We had clothes, books, and a fire in the fireplace. Every night during the cold months I collected wood for our fire from the woodpile behind the garage.
One autumn night when my father was away on a trip, I went out back for logs and boards, and found a dying bird. I called to my mother, who came out and stood in her nightgown in the cold. The bird’s wings were broken, and its eyes looked terrified. Should I kill it? We owned a rifle, and I proposed to my mother that I might shoot the dying bird. I’d already shot and killed, on another chilly day, a snake that I’d found crossing the front yard. There’d been no reason to kill this snake, but I’d done it anyway, using a BB gun. I’d told myself that the snake was dangerous, and I’d chased it around trees and boxwood bushes and the elevated stepping-stone left from the days when Fiddler’s Green’s inhabitants kept horses. Later that night, the minister of the Episcopal church in Greenwood, a family friend, stopped by for a visit, and, when he got out of his car, I ran to him, crying, “Look! Look!” and he lowered his head and peered down at the snake’s body coiled inside a paper bag, and, as he looked, my pride turned to shame.
Should I now destroy the injured bird? Here was a chance to redeem myself, to kill humanely, in the spirit in which a farmer might, not pointlessly but with compassion. It was an opportunity to be a man in my mother’s eyes. She gave me permission to get the rifle from the upstairs closet. I made sure the rifle was loaded, then walked back down the stairs, through the kitchen, past the giant old Southern Coop freezer on the back porch, and out to the yard, where I shot the bird, I guess. I don’t remember shooting it. Maybe I waited in the dark for the bird to pass away on its own. Or maybe I never got the gun at all. Maybe my mother and I found a cardboard box and, using a folded towel as a cushion, made a bed for the bird, a bed like those we made for our cats to lie on when they gave birth to litters. Did my mother and I carry the bird inside the house full of cats and kittens? Or maybe the bird was gone when I returned to where it had lain on the ground. Had it hobbled away to die? I remember my mother’s face. She looked at me as if she understood that I was trying to understand something. She was willing to see me kill the bird. But did I? And if I did, was she standing beside me when I pulled the trigger?
In 1970, my father left the University of Virginia for a job in Miami. We packed up the farm and headed back to Florida. I was twelve, going on thirteen, and Terry was eleven, going on twelve, and the shift from old Virginia to new Miami was, for the two of us, even at our ages, especially at our ages, unsettling. What was this flat, hot, paved-over place, this place made, as it looked to me upon first arriving in the early 1970s, entirely of one-story houses, crowded freeways, and shopping centers?
In Miami, all our houses were different and the same. Two came with swimming pools. One was noisy from a nearby road, and another was surrounded by trees and bushes — that was the Bauhaus-style house — and another had a cathedral ceiling. These latter two were next door to each other, their properties joined by a path leading through the brambles and vines. When the lease on the Bauhaus-style house was up, we sorted the pots and the pans, rolled the rugs and folded the linens, boxed my mother’s fabrics and her sewing machines, my father’s library. Like four refugees ducking beneath branches and stepping over roots, we carried the lot, one armload per trip, from the old place to the new.
But what about the man with the gun? He sat down in the living room in Charlottesville, placed the gun, in its holster, on the coffee table around which he and my parents were gathered, and, in a steady voice, began to speak. He was a goodlooking man, I remember, a popular teacher and something of a power in the English department. His voice was deep. He had come to calm my mother and father. The gun, I should say, was there to calm them. The man did not know, and my parents did not know, that I was watching from the dark landing at the top of the stairs.
My sister watched with me. Didn’t she? We crouched together on the landing. And did she follow me down the stairs, across the front hallway, and through the open doorway to the living room? I remember hearing the man tell my parents that they could annihilate each other; though, if this was their choice, one or the other of them might as well pick up the gun — there it was in plain view on the table, next to their drinks — and complete their work of fighting to the death. I came down the stairs in my blue pajamas and stood among the adults. I can still hear, in my memory of that night, her voice, and I hear my father’s; I hear them speaking together:
“Don, go back to bed. It’s past your bedtime. Everything’s all right. Run to bed, Don. Off you go.”
Did I get a kiss goodnight? I retreated to my room and lay awake, trembling. Would she kill him? Would he kill her? If the killing took pl
ace after the man with the gun had gone home, how would it be done? With a knife taken from a drawer? Where would the killing take place? In the kitchen? In their bedroom? Would there be blood? Would there be screaming, then silence? And would silence feel like relief? Would she go to jail for murder? Would he go to jail for murder? Could I be called to testify in a court of law? How would I testify? Who would be guilty? Who would be innocent? Would my sister and I tell the same story? What story would we tell? Would I tell the truth? What might the truth look like? Would I know the difference between right and wrong? Would someone come and take my mother away? Would someone take my father away? Would my sister and I become orphans? Would we be alone forever after?
In 1981, the year I left college and moved to New York, twelve years after my father’s Virginia colleague had come to our house with a gun, my mother was taken to Mercy Hospital in South Miami. She was admitted, my father told me, for alcoholic hepatitis. She was held at Mercy for a few days, not many, until she was considered sufficiently detoxified, hydrated, rested, and nourished, and, after that, she was discharged, and a short time later my father had to drive her to the hospital again, and the process was repeated, and, a while after that, she went back again. Then, quite abruptly — or not at all abruptly, considering the long progress of decades — my parents’ marriage was over for good.
Over the next two years, my mother would be forced to attempt sobriety or die. These were the years when her father, then in his seventies, and I, in my early twenties, created our adult friendship. It was one of those friendships that are sometimes available between the nonconsecutive generations in broken, unhappy families.
The Afterlife: A Memoir Page 14