Barefoot to Avalon

by David Payne

  Yet I remember Sunday after Sunday in my childhood sitting with Letty around her kitchen table, the bowl of plastic apples and bananas she kept there, the copy of The Upper Room, the Methodist devotional, she read from, her pack of Raleighs, her sterling Zippo, I recall her playful sense of humor, her “zip” and personality, the way she twitted me and us around the fruit bowl. I recall loving Letty and liking her also.

  What happened?

  They were hurt by the divorce, which was acrimonious and public. Bill, the son in whom they once had had such hopes, left town virtually under the cover of dark with his possessions in a cardboard box in the backseat of his Mustang. He’d lost the Rose Oil Company job he sweated toward for fourteen years, received less than his fair share in the settlement. Naturally, they felt wounded on his behalf, so they withdrew and kept their distance. Since then, our sole contact has occurred in Henderson, when Margaret, there to place a poinsettia or an Easter lily on her parents’ graves—or to see the lawyer to slap a lis pendens on Bill’s property for nonpayment of support—marshals us to Letty’s house on Oxford Road. Margaret, no shrinking violet, always walks us to the door, and Letty, not to be out-charactered, always asks her in. They smile and chat as though in this reunion their fondest dreams have been fulfilled—Margaret, in accordance with the old requirement, still addresses Letty as “Mother Payne” without choking on the syllables. After Margaret leaves, though, Letty, however hard she tries, can’t forbear to let us know that they feel hurt by the infrequency of these visits—Your grandfather feels neglected, is how she puts it. Fourteen, eleven, three, when this begins, living two hours west, there’s not much we can do except feel in the wrong about it. Letty seems to grasp this.

  –Well, I’m sure if it were up to you, you’d come more often, she says, offering us forgiveness together with a buried criticism of who it’s up to. We just frown and stare down at our shoes and shove our hands deeper in our pockets and say, Yes, ma’am, and take our medicine. To me, though, back from Exeter with the drumbeat of insurrection in my ears—maybe not in the first year, but by the second, as the white-stringed tears lengthen in my Levi’s and my hair grows past my collar—I begin to chafe and want to answer, We’re here, aren’t we? If you miss us so much, why don’t you come see us occasionally? If Granddaddy Payne feels neglected, why doesn’t he show up when we make the effort? Why isn’t it a two-way street?

  I want to, but I don’t. Though it’s fading fast, there’s still that part of me that was raised to defer to elders and tradition. And though it’s been a few years now, I haven’t forgotten the time that Margaret challenged Letty on her father’s ownership of the first car in Henderson. For me, that story is becoming focal. I’ve tracked down Zeb’s Black Baby, a local history by attorney Sam Peace, and it confirms Margaret’s position. The first car in Vance County—a steam-powered 1899 “Mobile” two-seater steered not by wheel but by tiller, with a top speed of fifteen miles per hour—was owned by E. G. Davis, not by Letty’s father.

  Yet I recall the lightning flash in Letty’s eye that silenced Margaret, though Margaret is no shrinking violet, and Bill, with that booming baritone of his and his famous temper that terrified George A. and me, didn’t even dare to step into the ring against his mother and seemed to consider it a sacrilege to oppose her. There’s something wrong with this, I think, wrong with this whole system where a roomful of people must disavow a published truth, like Galileo on his knees in Rome before the Inquisition, recanting the Copernican system—I’m sorry, I was mistaken, it turns out the sun does revolve around the Earth. Why should the rest of us accept a fact as fiction and a fiction as fact to assuage the self-esteem of the one person who’s mistaken? Why should we—should I—accept a lie as truth and truth as a disloyalty? It’s wrong—wrong, I say! Such bullshit, such fucking bullshit! I’m spoiling for a fight. Only I haven’t forgotten the way Letty reduced my sometimes terrifying father to a smoking ruin the same way Bill our sometimes terrifying father reduces George A. and me, with those absinthe-colored neurotoxins he sprays like an octopus out of its ink-hole, the ones that make us hang our heads in shame and wonder what the hell is wrong with us. I’m not eager to take on Letty, who’s a pistol.

  And, too, there’s that other part of me, that little voice of doubt that says, How come no one else seems bothered, or only Margaret, who’s a Rose and therefore suspect? How come George A. isn’t, how come Dad and Uncle Allen and Granddaddy Payne, the Principal, noted for his probity and sternness, all just look toward the window or the ceiling and whistle “Dixie” when Letty pulls this? Is it just me? Who appointed me the Truth Police and when was I elected? And, after all, it’s such a little thing, isn’t it? Who cares who owned the first car! Maybe the problem’s me, not those who don’t seem bothered.

  And I begin to wonder if the bind this puts me in, the sense of being all tied up in knots and fuming underneath, is what made Bill what he is and why Prufrock was the central message he delivered to me in my childhood. To grow up in a house where the speaking of a simple truth is a betrayal of your mother, where she withdraws her love, and you, to get it back, must say, It’s okay, Mama, the truth can be a lie and a lie can be the truth for you, if you require it . . . I got a taste in Boston. When Bill put me on the phone with Letty, she tried to get me to hold him harmless, to consent, in effect, to my own violation. If I’d agreed, how different would I have been from those bank hostages in Stockholm, the ones who were held at gunpoint under a death threat for five days and then, when freed, testified at trial on behalf of their oppressors?

  And what happened to them, and me, happened also to George A., who, after Bill left him sobbing on the carpet, said, It’s okay, Daddy, when it really wasn’t. George A. consented to his abuse to preserve the love of his abuser. The answer seems so clear to me at twenty.

  In 1975, driving through the blood-tinged sunset out to Jack and Margaret’s house in Clemmons, what neither I nor anybody knows is that George A. has bipolar I disorder. It will be 1980, five more years, before we get the diagnosis, and years more before we grasp the day-to-day reality of the illness.

  Even now, the truth about bipolar disorder is gray and murky. It’s an “equifinal” and “multifinal” condition, meaning that multiple pathways lead to outcomes that resemble one another but differ in specifics, including severity and frequency of relapse. A first-degree relative with BD increases one’s likelihood of developing the disorder tenfold, but no one gene appears to be responsible. Childhood trauma and abuse? MRI studies indicate that early stress may affect brain development in ways that increase the risk of BD, or that lead to earlier onset and a more pernicious course of illness. However, no causal link between abuse and bipolar disorder has been established. A third to half of adults with BD report adversity in childhood; a half to two-thirds do not. Many people from happy, well-adjusted families develop the condition; many from first-family trainwrecks escape it.

  So Bill’s phone call from Underground Atlanta didn’t put George A. in the psych ward, and my twenty-year-old view has more blame than truth in it. If there’s any truth to be distilled, it’s that we who once believed that family love was stronger than time or death have come to blame and hate one another and will do so far longer and more fiercely than we ever loved one another.

  By the time George A. gets sick at Woodberry, war has long since broken out between the Paynes and Roses. Methodist vs. Episcopalian, Oxford Road vs. Woodland, public high school vs. Exeter and Woodberry—social and stylistic differences that Bill and Margaret, at twenty and eighteen, skipped as lightly over as schoolchildren over sidewalk cracks have yawned now into divergent worldviews, the sort over which dynastic and religious wars are fought. The Roses and the Paynes are like the houses of York and Lancaster, and though at twenty I want to be a Poet and seek the truth and tell whatever portion I can locate, though I style myself the detective who follows the clues impartially wherever they may lead me, though I believe I’m n
eutral, dispassionate, fair-minded, the truth is, I’ve been raised York in a York house by a York mistress. I’m not fair. There’s not a drop of fairness in me.

  And Bill on his side is no more fair than I am. In a letter he wrote me in 1991, more than twenty years after his divorce from Margaret, he gives his account of George A.’s mental illness:

  George A. was shipped off to Woodberry against his wishes and is still suffering from that breech birth separation . . . Margaret’s hatred, spite, revenge has led her to stain the very fabric of your existence and the stench of her menses lingers still. Your self-pity, ingratitude, incompleteness and unhappiness come from the environment she has provided, for she has had you two-score, and I less than one. Do you call the atmosphere she provided for you, George A. and Bennett a fine example of anything? Look at George A. and look at Bennett. Then look at yourself and maybe you will wake up and “smell the roses.”

  Now blame for George A.’s illness seems indeterminate and fruitless. At the time it was an all-consuming, full-time occupation we all engaged in. Blame was the currency we traded. The Roses blamed the Paynes, the Paynes the Roses, Margaret blamed Bill and Bill blamed Margaret. And I was Blamer-in-Chief and first blamer among equals. I blamed Bill not only for his dereliction, but in the way Ahab blames the whale, for the cruelty and irrationality of Nature, for the existence of bipolar I disorder, for our mortal state and our powerlessness to change it. I blamed him because I got to keep my mind and personality and George A. woke up at Woodberry one morning with a future and by nightfall had come to in the black room where the spotlight hits you and you’re in a play you don’t know the name of or the character you’re playing and the play’s your life and the character is your identity, and maybe George A. thought as I thought that we all have a God-given right to play it for whatever time we have here, but it turns out some do, some don’t, some get to keep it, from others it is taken, and what’s the reason? I don’t know, go ask your father. If he doesn’t know, maybe your mom does.

  At twenty, still, I never look at Margaret. Why not?

  Margaret’s here and Bill’s gone. That’s the simplest explanation. Margaret stayed and bought our Spiral notebooks, cooked our meals and did our laundry, rinsing the skid marks from our underwear. It’s Margaret who took us to the hospital when we broke our bones and comforted us when our girlfriends left us and we lost our ball games, who held our shoulders when we came home drunk for the first time and threw up in the toilet. It’s Margaret who’s here today at Mandala, when the sad battered dinghy makes landfall and we muster up and find out one of us is missing. And though in Boston she said, I have to go, and I said, I know, go, Mama, in accordance with an old agreement, and though I later come to believe that that abandonment reprised a hundred or a hundred thousand others forever lost to memory, still it’s Margaret who takes on George A.’s illness, the punishing campaign that’s starting here today and will last twenty-five long years and the rest of his short lifetime. Margaret alone—not me, I let go his hand like Bill did—tells George A., Hold on to me, baby, I’m here, I’ve got you, and keeps her promise.

  Yet the one certainty about bipolar disorder is the genetic tie-in, and on that Margaret and the Roses have to take the main hit. They make a ghastly cohort. There’s Genevieve, Margaret’s smart, beautiful big sister, who after St. Mary’s and UNC married into an old family in Bath, the cradle of precolonial North Carolina society, and had two sons, and went crazy one afternoon and set herself on fire on the Duke psych ward and survived her immolation . . . And Cousin Ruth in Richmond, Margaret and Genevieve’s first cousin, who came back from the hospital, wrote thank-you notes on her good stationery to the good friends who brought her family casseroles while she was off around the bend, and then drove downtown, parked across from the police station and blew her brains out. And after Ruth, Ruth’s mother, Millicent, an older sister of the first George A., a gray-haired matriarch who, from small-town Henderson, married into the Richmond tobacco aristocracy and killed herself the same way Ruth did. And after Ruth and Millicent, Ruth’s brother, Tom. And before Ruth and Millicent and Tom, years before in Henderson, Millie’s sister, Jane, the mother of twin sons, the first to make her quietus with a bullet.

  Something dark among the Roses, and maybe that was why the first George A., the baby of the clan, once or twice a year disappeared like Bête to the enchanted wing and roared and drank apocalyptically for five or six days running, and why Margaret, when the mood came over her, watched Beauty and the Beast on tape weeping into Kleenex. Among George A. Rose’s siblings, two of six, an attrition rate higher than American forces took on Omaha Beach; among his sister’s children, two of three. And now his namesake, George A. Payne, my brother, upstairs in the psych ward . . . But perhaps the cup will pass. Perhaps it’s just a bad reaction to some funky weed.

  Margaret’s watched all this since youth, when she came home in her bobby socks and saw the Seagram’s open on the sideboard in the midst of privilege and plenty, and was so desperate to escape that she married a boy as unlike George A. Rose as possible, one from a teetotaling family who turned into a drinker, too, and couldn’t hold his liquor either, and when their marriage blew to pieces, she plucked us by our roots and moved us to the Sans Souci Apartments, a place where we knew no one and no one knew us, and now here I am in the topless Sprite at nightfall on Fair Weather Drive in Clemmons, turning in to the driveway of a brick Georgian that resembles Margaret’s parents’ house on Woodland, a spec house version set down in an exurb twelve miles west of Winston in what wasn’t long ago a pasture. And it’s as if after all her wanderings Margaret has decided that maybe leaving Woodland wasn’t such a good idea in the first place and is now busy trying to re-create the place she fled from in the place she fled to to escape it. That’s why “home” is something I can’t give her. Once I believed in it the way I believed in the forgiveness of sins and the resurrection of the body. Now “home” stands for everything I’m determined to escape from. Our family is the car wreck in my dream, and if I’m the victim in the backseat, so is George A., so is Bennett, so are Bill and Margaret and Letty and Bill Sr., and George A. and Mary Rose, everybody’s sick and dying, and we have to winch it up and look at it; if we don’t, if we keep doing what got us here in the first place and sinking the evidence at the bottom of the slough and agreeing never to look at it or tell the truth or hold anyone responsible or do a single thing to change it, then we’re the murderers, aren’t we?

  We have to leave and find a different way. This is my message to George A. and to myself at twenty. What expertise do I bring to the task? None whatever. Still, I’m going, and if I can, I mean to take him with me. How? The same way Jung did.

  . . . from the beginning there was no doubt that I must find the meaning of what I was experiencing in these fantasies.

  That’s why, after George A.’s release from Mandala, you can find us out here every weekend, walking down the drive at Jack and Margaret’s past the lions at the entry, turning on Fair Weather Drive and heading down the little country lane, across the bridge, up toward the Jewish Home that sits there in the meadow. Sometimes we go the other way toward Tanglewood, and occasionally as far afield as Hanes Park in Winston where the power-walking moms—the pretty former debs who still push back their blunt-cut hair with velvet hairbands the way they did as schoolgirls and later on in their sororities—regard us doubtfully, steering a wide berth around us. There I am, unshaved, in faded Levi’s and a green flannel shirt from L.L. Bean, my cool-weather uniform. I have my hair pulled back in the disordered ponytail and my eyes are a bit too bright and when I talk I use my hands too liberally for emphasis. George A.—who went away in September wearing khakis, a pressed blue oxford and spit-shined loafers —now has on faded painter’s pants and a plaid flannel and over that a lumberjack’s black-and-red wool jacket. From the garbage truck last summer, he’s brought out his brogans and the Red Man hat with sweat stains. He’s six-foot-seven, me
a little under six-foot-four, talking loudly in the middle of the footpath, having stopped to pursue some point more singly. He’s frowning at his feet, deciding, shaking his head no, or nodding yes, and if you saw us, you might think we’re arguing, but we aren’t, not really.

  –Why Bill, George A.? In the parking lot at Woodberry, why do you think you saw Dad?

  –As opposed to polka-dotted snakes or leprechauns?

  –Okay, instead of those.

  –I don’t know, DP. You have a theory?

  –Well, were you hoping he was there, or afraid he was?

  –I wanted him to see me play. I can’t say I was keen for him to see me the way I was at the hotel.

  –What strikes me? The person you most wanted to be there, whose approval mattered more than anyone’s, whose disapproval you most feared, wasn’t there, but you believed he was. You not only believed it, you hallucinated his presence.

  –Okay . . . And?

  –What if that’s what your unconscious is telling you? You’re seeing Dad as there when he really isn’t, holding an absent thing as present, an illusion as a real thing. Maybe it’s oversimplifying, but to me your hallucination says, He isn’t there. This man’s a figment. What if the father you wanted and I wanted we just didn’t get and we have to accept it?

  George A.’s frowning at his feet, hands shoved in pockets, and beneath his eyes are smudges like the eye-black he wore on Friday nights to absorb the stadium glare at Woodberry.

  – I don’t know, DP.

  –If you don’t, I don’t either. Ready to head back?

  –No, let’s keep going.

  –Come on then.

  So we go, the two of us, out there on that little country lane in Clemmons, and at Tanglewood and in Hanes Park as autumn deepens toward Thanksgiving and Thanksgiving toward Christmas; the sky has turned the blue of Concord grapes, a few snowflakes are falling.