Don't like smoke, go somewhere else.
This remark I would pretend not to hear. Children are so resourcefully deaf, blind. We smile in the face of hostility, that hostility will turn into love. I was fascinated by my father's left hand that had been injured in what he called a work accident; the knuckles were grotesquely bunched as if they'd been squeezed together in a vise, and most of the nails were ridged and discolored; the smallest finger had been amputated to the first joint, and it was this hand he used to smoke with, bringing it repeatedly to his mouth.
I imagined this hand touching me. Caressing my small head.
My mother I knew didn't I? But not this man. Father.
He never kissed me. Never touched me (even with the disfigured hand) if he could avoid it. My brothers he might punch—lightly, yet hard enough to make them wince—on their biceps, in greeting or in farewell. ("O.K., kid. See ya.") For always our father was going away. His car was backing out of the driveway, more swiftly and purposefully than It had turned in. Cinders flew behind its spinning wheels, in rainy Weather the windshield wipers were already on. It came to seem only logical—I mean to a child's primitive, wishful way of thinking—that my father would have to return to the farm in Strykersville if he wanted to leave it. The zest in leaving it depended upon the reluctance in returning, didn't it? You could not have the one without the other, could you? It was something of a joke, the degree to which my father hated farm life. The dairy cows. Since the age of six he'd been made to milk their long rubbery udders. Not a task for a boy. Well, yes: it was a task for a farm boy. But my father didn't want to be a farm boy. Those slippery teats, tits. And the smell of the cow manure, so much stronger when fresh and liquidy, than it was after it had settled, solidified. My father had infuriated his father by hurting the cows, yanking the udders, causing these large placid beasts to bawl and kick; some of this would be preserved in family legend, for even families deprived of warm, happy times, mythic significance, cherish some legends, however threadbare. "Hurting the cows" as my father had done would be a way of indicating, decades later, that my father was "independent in his mind." For at the young age of seventeen he left the farm to work at Lackawanna Steel, a notorious mill that paid high wages for that time and place but was known to be dangerous, especially for unskilled workers. He'd driven a truck. He'd joined unions. He'd made money gambling and he'd spent money and he'd married a city girl who knew not a word of German. He had something of a reputation among men of his generation in the Strykersville area. He was a "fighter"—"a tough son of a bitch"—he "took no shit from anybody." By the time I was in high school my father was older, ravaged; he had "problems" of some ambiguous kind, no doubt associated with drinking and its consequences—tavern fights, vehicular accidents, arrests, brief stays in county jails. Hospitalizations in cities too far for any of us to visit. In a drawer I collected each of the postcards my father sent us: from California, a cartoon of loggers sawing down redwoods subtly shaped like women; a card from Anchorage, Alaska, depicting cartoon salmon leaping into a fishing boat; cards from British Columbia, Manitoba, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. (From Saskatoon my father sent six one-hundred-dollar bills in Canadian currency which my brother Dietrich took to a bank in Buffalo where, it turned out, they were worth 10 percent more than American dollars.) Yet there were times when my father called home after 11:00 p.m., collect. My grandmother whose heart was a dry root vegetable hardy as a turnip burst into tears when she spoke with my father at such times: he was her only son. My grandfather would snarl over the phone in elderly impotent fury Ja? What? What tricks of yours? If my brothers were home they would speak with my father one by one; Dietrich spoke for the longest time, in the most somber voice; Fritz was slow and inarticulate; Hendrick, the youngest, murmured in a dazed boyish way Geez Dad, you are? Gal-ves-ton? On the Gulf of Mexico? No kidding! Anxiously I would wait beside Hendrick for my turn to speak with my father but often it happened that my father "ran out of coins"—"was cut off by the operator"—before I could take the receiver.
I was saving up surprises for my father, though. Straight A's in school, shiny red stars after my name (which included his name) on the class bulletin board, even my picture now and then in the Strykersville weekly newspaper. He couldn't help but be impressed and proud of his daughter. Could he?
I'd become shrewd speaking of him. Never asked questions about him of my grandmother. A clumsy question could set the old woman clutching at her hair that was like wire filings, half-sobbing, grimacing and muttering in German—prayers or curses, who knew? Among the oldest snapshots in my grandmother's keeping was my father as a young man, dark, brawny, good-looking with thick tufted hair and a roguish smile, by degrees this young man aged into a sullen, slack-faced stranger with a perpetual two- or three-day growth of beard. The man who was my father. The red-veined eyes, the nose swollen as if stung by a bee. Teeth discolored like stained ivory. He gave off an odor associated in my mind with threat, dread, yet a kind of swaggering glamor—tobacco, whisky, stale sweat, agitation. My father spoke little to any of us but worked words in his mouth as if chewing a wad of tobacco he badly wanted to spit out, yet did not. Sometimes I caught him staring at me by lamplight, drinking a pungent, colorless liquid from a glass, smoking one of his Camels. The veil of smoke shielding his gaze. That's her, is it? The one to blame. There must have come a time in my father's life when he forgot what I was to be blamed for, but so ingrained was the habit of blaming the little one, so much was it part of my father's character as racial bigotry or left-handedness might be in others, he could not have wished to change. Just as Dietrich the eldest son was always his favorite son, no matter what.
I tried to imagine my father and my mother as lovers. How did a man and a woman love? What had brought them together, why had they married? Their lives were vanished from me almost with no trace like fossil remnants worn smooth and bleached in the sun. It made me feel faint to realize how I could have entered the world only through a conjunction of these strangers' bodies; no other pathway was possible; the great question that underlies all philosophical inquiry applied to the mystery of my conception and birth. Why is there something, and not rather nothing?
"How easy, never to have been born."
I spoke aloud in the wonder of it. In a mirror I saw, where my diminutive face might have been, a hazy glow like phosphorescence.
During my last two years of high school my father was away most of the time in the Midwest and I had a recurring nightmare of a cinder block prison wall and a stench of stopped-up drains, but probably this was my overwrought imagination, I didn't dare inquire of my grandparents or my brothers what it might mean. And there was a time my father was in a "drying out" hospital in Erie, Pennsylvania. Unexpectedly, he turned up for my high school graduation, my valedictory speech which was tremulous at the outset but gathered strength as I continued, my eyes misting over so that I was spared seeing individual faces in the audience, including my father's. He was there in a white shirt and pressed jacket to witness my receiving several awards and being named as the sole graduate of Strykersville High School that year to receive a New York State regents scholarship for college. My father, returned to me at last!—jaws stubbled and eyes gleaming bloodshot, his broad smile showing missing teeth like a jack-o'-lantern. His formerly thick, tangled dark hair had receded unevenly, exposing a dented-looking dome of a head; his jowls sagged, a collar of flesh. Yet his eyes shone fierce with pride. He'd been drinking (that was hardly a secret) hut he wasn't drunk. As others observed us, staring in wonderment, my classmates in their caps and gowns and their decent, sober parents, my lather strode up to hug me after the graduation ceremony, this man who hadn't touched me in years, and then only inadvertently, saying boastfully, "Helluva speech you gave, eh? I always knew you had it in you. Like her, you are. Smart as a whip. But you can do something with it. Don't let no fuckers out there sell you short."
A reporter for the Strykersville paper took several flash photos of us, without asking. In
the one that would appear in the paper my father was scowling, his right hand lifted toward the camera as if to block the view; I stood just beyond his arm, smiling uncertainly, my face overexposed in the camera's flash so that I looked like an ink drawing by Matisse.
Three days later, my father was gone.
Gone again from Strykersville, and the old farm. And would not return, this time.
He'd told my grandmother he was headed west—"Some place you can breathe." His work was construction of a kind involving heavy earth-moving equipment, and dynamite. He never wrote, or in any case I never heard he'd written. (After her death years later, I would discover among my grandmother's things two carelessly scrawled postcards, one sent from Colorado and the other from Utah, addressed to the family, undated by my father but postmarked at about this time.) And I was in my freshman residence at the university when, one evening in October, my brother Dietrich telephoned to inform me in a curt, dazed voice that "word had come" that our father was dead. He'd died, evidently, in a "work-related accident" involving one or two other men as well, in Utah. There would never be a death certificate mailed to us and if there'd been a body, or the remains of a body, it had been buried in Utah—"In the Uinta Mountains." Dietrich's voice was stunned yet embarrassed; there was no warmth in it, for me; no effort to console me, or even to acknowledge that there was extraordinary news here, only rather the kind of news, considering our father, we might have expected. Neither Dietrich nor I had heard of the Uinta Mountains. I looked the area up on a map, it was in northeastern Utah; not a single place but several, it seemed, scattered over hundreds of square, unpopulated miles.
And so—I yearned for sisters: I reasoned that I'd had the others: mother, father, brothers, grandparents. If Ida had left me a sister. Two sisters! I would be happy forever, I think.
In the Kappa Gamma Pi house where I had gone to live in search of sisterhood there were numerous acts that were "forbidden." Under the predator vigilance of Mrs. Agnes Thayer, these forbidden acts exerted a certain attraction.
It was forbidden, for instance, for any girl to slip into the kitchen when "help" was on the premises. A middle-aged female cook, several busboys (of whom one was a rare Negro undergraduate), occasional delivery men. It was forbidden to enter the dining room after the sonorous gong had sounded for the second time and Mrs. Thayer had taken her seat at the head of the head table, regal and watchful. Nothing less than "ladylike"—"gracious"—"well-bred" behavior was required of Kappa girls at all times in the public rooms. It was taboo to appear in the dining room in slacks or jeans for evening meals; on Sunday, a full-course, heavy dinner was served at 1 p.m., and for this "good" dresses and high heels were required, though many of the girls, especially the more popular girls, would have only just staggered from bed at the sound of the first gong, throwing on dresses with little or no underwear beneath, dragging a brush through matted hair and smearing on lipstick, shoving bare feet into high-heeled shoes and rushing downstairs with unwashed faces, reddened eyes, heads throbbing with hangover headaches—yet these canny girls managed to be seated at the favored table, farthest from Mrs. Thayer, while luckless girls like me invariably wound up at the head table where impeccable manners and stilted and stiff conversation were required. There, it was forbidden to lift your fork before Mrs. Thayer lifted hers, and it was much frowned upon, though not openly forbidden, to continue to eat beyond the point at which Mrs. Thayer crossed her fork and knife primly on her plate, for the busboy to clear. It was forbidden to speak of disturbing, scandalous, controversial, or "needlessly negative" subjects at mealtimes, at least in Mrs. Thayer's hearing; it was forbidden to address the busboys in any casual, let alone flirtatious manner—"The very worst of bad breeding," as Mrs. Thayer described, with a shudder, such behavior known to occur at other, less rigorously maintained sorority houses on campus. Except for emergencies, it was forbidden to rise from your seat at any time before
Mrs. Thayer, who lingered over coffee and dessert, rose from hers. It was forbidden to rush from the dining room when the meal finally ended though by that time you might have so gnawed at your lower lip as to have drawn blood. It was forbidden to weep, or to scream.
"Mary Alice, what is that" —Mrs. Thayer paused, with bemused perplexity, provoking others at the table to turn to me, to scrutinize my blushing face—"curious facial expression of yours?" Mrs. Thayer laughed easily. Her wide smile suggested only good humor, not fury at my seeming indifference to her conversation. "You are all frowns and creases like one whose head is being squeezed by a vise."
My Kappa sisters giggled appreciatively, as much at Mrs. Thayer's continued muddling of my name as by her wit.
Mine was not the sole name Mrs. Thayer muddled. New girls, sophomores, were somehow not quite real to her and must prove themselves, in some manner not known to us, and not to be revealed by our older sisters.
(Was I meant to apologize for my rudeness at the table? I lingered behind hoping to catch Mrs. Thayer's eye, and judge by her expression whether an apology was wished, or would only exacerbate her annoyance, but Mrs. Thayer did not so much as glance at me, as she left the dining room.)
Of course, it was forbidden to enter Mrs. Thayer's private quarters at any time, for any reason, unless Mrs. Thayer invited you inside. (As she did occasionally with her favored girls—ironically, these were girls who didn't especially like her.) It was forbidden to peer into Mrs. Thayer's private quarters from either the front entrance in the parlor, or the rear, near the side door. Even if the doors were invitingly open, and the Negro cleaning woman vacuuming inside.
It was forbidden to touch, still less examine or sniff Mrs. Thayer's "special dietary foods" in the pantry refrigerator or cupboard. These were often bulky, wrapped in aluminum foil, taped with adhesive. It was suspected that there might be a code in the fussy crisscrossings of the adhesive, or shrewd Mrs. Thayer had affixed a hair or thread in such a way that would signal intrusion if it were missing. The smells of these mysterious foods varied considerably, ranging from briny-sour to cinnamony-sweet.
Of course it was taboo to examine Mrs. Thayer's mail. As much of an affront as touching her person. You were not to have an early peek at her English publications, you were not to hold to the light her airmail letters from England in their tissue-thin blue envelopes adorned with exotic stamps. (Mrs. Thayer was known to have been a war bride whose American officer-husband had brought her back to the United States to live after the end of World War II, and who, after his eventual death, had decided pluckily to stay on in the States because she could support herself here; but clearly her heart was attached to England. Her sole correspondent was a sister who lived in Leeds and whose handwriting was elegantly spidery, as I imagined a ghost's handwriting might be, with three dramatic strokes of the pen beneath the letters USA.) However, if it happened that Mrs. Thayer was close by, in her sitting room for instance, you were allowed to bring her mail in a forthright fashion, holding it in such a way to indicate that you hadn't examined it except to ascertain that it was hers; knocking quietly on her door with the back of your hand (as Mrs. Thayer had demonstrated was the way in which ladies knocked on doors), even if the door was open and you could see her inside. "Yes, dear?" Mrs. Thayer would say, peering over her reading glasses, and you would say, "Mrs. Thayer, may I bring you your mail" and Mrs. Thayer would say, with an air of being pleasantly surprised, like a child offered candy, "Why, is the mail here already? Thank you, dear." Having delivered the mail to Mrs. Thayer's plump beringed fingers you were not to linger in her cozily cluttered sitting room with its myriad glints and glistens of old silver, china, gilt-threaded fabrics and reproductions of English landscapes and framed photographs of presumed family members; yet it was bad manners to back away too quickly as if eager to escape. Precisely how you should behave at this delicate social moment was a matter of the elder woman's discretion, whether out of housemotherly duty or personal whim or a surge of genuine emotion she might wish you to remain, or whether in fact she had other
things on her mind and wished you gone; yet it was bad manners to stare at her inscrutably pinkly smiling face in an effort to decipher her thoughts, still more was it unacceptable to blush, stammer and stare at your feet like "an American farm gurl."
I'll Take You There Page 3