I have taken it as a challenge, to evoke that world in its myriad complexities. And—how to write a memoir of Fred Oates? How even to begin?
A LETTER TO MY MOTHER CAROLINA OATES ON HER SEVENTY-EIGHTH BIRTHDAY, NOVEMBER 8, 1994
Dear Mom,
I have always meant to tell you.
I have long rehearsed telling you.
I have meant so many times to tell you.
How the world divides, seemingly, into two: those who speak without hesitation saying I love you—and possibly not mean it; and those too shy or constrained by family custom or temperament to utter the words I love you—though they mean it.
HOW DIFFICULT IT HAS been to speak these simple words. To heave my heart into my throat—I love you.
WE CARRY OUR YOUNG parents inside us, so much more alive than any memory of ourselves as infants, children. We carry our young parents within us through our lives. No wonder is ever quite equal to that first, speechless wonder—gazing at the mysterious individuals leaning over us unable yet to say Who are you? Why do you care for me? What does it mean, that you care for me? What does it mean, we are here together? Only feed me, only love me forever.
“I GUESS WE WERE poor but it didn’t seem that way. Somehow, we managed.”
FROM MY PARENTS, A love of being busy, at work.
When we are not working, when we have nothing to do except entertain ourselves, we are restless and not so happy.
How many books dedicated To my parents Carolina and Fred Oates with love.
In memory of that landscape, now vanishing, that continues to nourish like an underground spring.
DAFFODILS, NARCISSI, TULIPS GROWING from bulbs you’d planted in the beds around the house. Scarlet peonies, pale pink peonies, bridal wreath, zinnias. Lilac bushes, azaleas.
Growing wild along the fence beyond the old hay barn, morning glories, sweet pea, and hollyhocks.
Wild and resilient as the tallest of weeds, sunflowers beyond the chicken yard.
Your favorite flower, roses. Your favorite rose, Double Delight.
Your favorite garden vegetable, tomatoes. Your favorite tomatoes, First Ladies.
AN INVENTORY OF OUR lives.
The lost world of (rural) laundry: clotheslines, clothespins, sheets, towels, trousers, dresses and underwear, socks flapping in the wind, a ceaseless wind it seemed, how crude by present standards, how primitive; yet there was pleasure in it, in the very repetition, familiarity. Each item of laundry lifted by hand, shook out, smoothed and affixed to the line by wooden pins. From my small narrow child’s room on the second floor, at the rear of the house, I could look out at any time when the laundry was hanging on the line and see a reflection of our household, our family, like ghost-figures glimpsed in water.
Take me, take me with you! Don’t let me go.
I am not a patient person but to the degree that I have been taught the virtues of patience, it is because of you. The consoling and comforting rituals of housekeeping. The very thought of keeping house: that there is a place, a home, that must be actively, ceaselessly kept. It cannot be neglected, or slighted.
For what is housekeeping but small simple finite tasks executed with attention, care, love. Pushing the carpet sweeper. “Vacuuming”—a thrilling task involving high-volume power. Clearing the kitchen table, helping you with the dishes—just the two of us in the kitchen after dinner.
You tried to teach me to knit, and to sew, without great success. For such (feminine) tasks I did not demonstrate much talent if, at the outset, energy and hope. You had more luck teaching me to cook, or at any rate to prepare meals. This is how you prepare a baking pan. This is how you frost a cake with a knife. This is how you make bread stuffing. This is how you peel an orange without making a mess and getting the rind in your fingernails. This is how you stir the spaghetti sauce—with a wooden spoon.
SO MANY BEAUTIFUL THINGS! Today here in Princeton I will lay them out on a bed, I will bring them out of closets to position in this room, and I will make an inventory.
•large knitted afghan of orange, brown, white wool
•large knitted afghan of white wool, with upraised floral designs
•smaller knitted quilt of many brightly colored wool squares, predominately red, yellow, green
•pale peach-colored coat sweater, belted
•crimson coat sweater, belted
•turquoise jacket and matching skirt (light fabric)
•dove-gray jacket and matching skirt (wool)
•dark red jacket and matching skirt (wool)
•fine-knit pale pink jacket-sweater with matching belt
•jacket of soft autumnal colors with a russet-red skirt (wool)
•camel’s hair skirt
•lilac silk dress with lace trim, long sleeved
•dark blue velour dress, long
•crimson velour dress
•crimson evening skirt
•purple velvet skirt, long
•dark blue floral checked cocktail dress (silk)
•white long-sleeved blouse (raw silk)
•dark orange long-sleeved blouse (silk)
•dark pink blouse with fine-stitched collar (silk)
•dove-gray long-sleeved blouse (silk)
•dark gold long-sleeved blouse (silk)
•black vest (rayon, wool)
•beige vest (velour)
•pink flaring skirt with matching top (cotton)
All these, and more, you’ve made for me. How many hours of effort, concentration, skill in those things so delicately fashioned, exquisitely sewed or knitted. What infinite patience in such creation. What love.
An inventory of our lives.
THE OLD FARMHOUSE WAS demolished years ago (in 1960) and the very site of its foundation filled with earth, all trace of its existence obliterated. You’d lived there for virtually your entire life—how strange it must be to you, that it has vanished, to be replaced with a large patch of seeded grass grown thick as a shag rug.
Yet the house remains vivid in my mind’s eye. And the small lilac tree that grew by the back door, a child-sized tree into which I climbed, in a crook of whose twisty limbs I sat, a dreamy child given to solitude in places near the house, near you.
Beneath this little tree chickens pecked in the dirt. Happy Chicken might be lifted onto a lower limb, to flutter his/her wings in sudden bird-panic.
For so many years, it seemed that I was rarely out of the range of your voice.
Joyce! Joy-ce!
In memory it is a misty-hazy summer day. That peculiar translucence to the light that means the air is heavy with moisture though the sky appears to be cloudless, a pure remote blue, and the sun dazzling overhead. In this place south of Lake Ontario and west of Lake Erie the sky is ever changing—this is the “lake effect”—so that a clear sky can be riddled with clouds within minutes; this too is deeply embedded in memory, a sudden crack of thunder, a dispirited darkening of the sky, pelting rain like bullets. Joyce! Where are you, come inside!
The houses of our earliest childhoods are houses of recurring dreams that are yet subtly altered, as if approximations of memory, or interpretations of memory, and not memory itself. In such dreams, the childhood houses are likely to be larger than the reality had been, with more rooms, mysterious doorways leading—where? Always there is the promise, alarming, yet tantalizing, of rooms not yet discovered, through a rear wall, in the attic perhaps, or in the earthen-floored cellar, places yet to be explored, beckoning. Your presence permeates the house, you are the house, its mysterious infinite rooms. You are the hazy light, the rich smell of damp earth, sunshine and grass, pears that are no sooner ripe than they are overripe, lightly bruised.
You are the humming buzzing not-quite-audible sounds of the orchard, and of the fields beyond the orchard. You are the uplifted cries of early-morning birds. I see you pushing me on the swing that Daddy built for me out of a six-foot pipe positioned between tall trees in the backyard, I see your hair reddish-brown, so
wonderfully curly; you are wearing a shirt and pale blue “pedal pushers” and sandals. I am a lanky child of eight or nine gripping the rope swing with both hands tight, my legs stretch upward straining higher, higher, squealing with childish excitement, flying into the sky. It is like my airplane trips with Daddy: except this is Mommy pushing me, and we are safe on the ground. So often wanting to tell you how in patches of sudden sunshine hundreds of miles and thousands of days from home I am pulled back into that world as into the most nourishing of dreams, I am filled with a sense of wonder, and awe, and fear, sadness for all that has already passed from us and for what must be surrendered, in time.
What we imagine as life but cannot explain, cannot “put into words” for all our vocabulary; cannot utter aloud, dare not utter aloud, this succession of small perfect moments like the movement of the red second hand on the sunburst General Electric clock in the kitchen, moments linked together as pearls are linked together to constitute a necklace, linked by touch, invisible string, the interior mystery. We were lucky, and we were happy, and I think we’ve always known.
“WHEN I WAS A LITTLE GIRL, AND MY MOTHER DIDN’T WANT ME”
My father was killed and I never knew why.
Then, I was given away. By my mother.
I was so little—not a year old.
There were too many of us, ten of us,
my mother had to give me away.
When I was old enough to know, I cried a lot.
My father was killed and I never knew why.
No one would tell me.
Now there is no one I can ask.
“Why? Why?”
It happened in a fight, in a tavern, he was only
forty-four years old.
Forty-four! Now, he could be my son.
I wasn’t always an old woman—this age that I am . . .
I was a girl for so long.
I was the youngest for so long.
I was nine months old when my father died
and there were too many of us to feed, and my mother
gave me away.
There were ten children. I was the baby.
I was born too late, I was the baby
that our mother could not keep.
My sisters and brothers did not miss me—I think.
They would have looked at me and tried to think why
I was the one to be given away, and not them.
They could not feel sorry for me for maybe then
they too would be given away by our mother.
My mother gave me to her sister-in-law Lena who
didn’t have children. This was in 1918.
It was a shameful thing then, not to have babies.
This was in the Black Rock section of Buffalo,
the waterfront on the Niagara River.
Germans, Poles, Hungarians—immigrants.
We were Hungarians. We were called “Hunkies.”
I don’t know why people hated us.
Uncle John and Aunt Lena were my “parents.”
We moved to a farm far away in the country.
And my real mother and my brothers and sisters
moved to a farm a few miles away.
I would learn one day that it happened often,
in immigrant families in those days.
In poor immigrant families.
My father was killed and I never knew why.
They said he was a “heavy drinker,” he liked to
get into fights.
The Hungarians are the worst, they said—the
drinking, and the fighting.
They said he was so handsome, my father.
My mother Elizabeth was so pretty.
Curly red-brown hair like mine.
They said he had a temper “like the devil.”
In the tavern there was a fight, and he died.
A man took up a poker and beat my father to death.
I never knew why, I never knew who it had been.
Yet this was how my life was decided.
There is the moment of conception—you don’t know.
There is the moment of birth—you don’t know.
There is the moment your life is decided—you don’t know.
Yet you say, “This is my life.”
You say, “This is me.”
When I was a little girl and my mother didn’t want me
I hid away to cry.
I felt so bad and so ashamed!
When I was old enough I would walk to the other farm.
There was a bridge over the creek a few miles away.
They didn’t really want me there I guess.
My name was Carolina, but they didn’t call me that.
They called me she, and her. They called me you.
They weren’t very nice to me I guess.
They didn’t want to see me, I was a reminder of—
something.
Elizabeth my mother never learned English.
She spoke Hungarian all her life.
She never learned to read. She never learned to drive
a car.
My Aunt Lena never learned to speak English well.
She never learned to drive so the two women didn’t see
much of each other
though they were from the same street in Budapest and
lived only a few miles apart.
That was how women were in those days.
But—I loved my mother Elizabeth!
She was a pretty, plump woman.
Curly red-brown hair like mine.
People would say, “Carolina you look just like your momma!”
Then they would be surprised, I would start to cry.
My mother was always busy, she scolded me in Hungarian—
“Go away, go home where you belong. You have a home.
Your home is not here.”
I did not know Hungarian but I understood these words
which I hear all the time, even now.
I loved my big brothers and sisters.
There was Leslie, he was the oldest.
He took over when our father died.
There was Mary, I never knew well.
They were born in Budapest.
There was Steve who’d been kicked and trampled
by a horse. His brain was injured, he would
never leave home.
There was Elsie who was my “big sister.”
There was Frank who was my “big brother.”
There was Johnny. There was Edith.
There was George, who went away in the army.
There was Joseph, I wasn’t too close with.
They are all gone now.
I loved them, but—I
am the only one remaining.
Sometimes I think: The soul is just a burning match!
It burns a while and then—
And then that’s all.
It’s a long time ago now but I remember hiding away to cry.
When I was a little girl and my mother didn’t want me.
(Written with permission from my mother Carolina Oates.)
III
EXCERPT, TELEPHONE CONVERSATION WITH MY FATHER FREDERIC OATES, MAY 1999
“THESE NIGHTS, I CAN’T read prose very well. I guess I won’t get through your new novel. It’s wonderful and I love it but my eyes . . . I read poetry. In the college anthologies. Frost, Dickinson, Whitman I already know by heart. That’s how I spend my nights, now.”
THE LONG ROMANCE
WE ARE YOUNG FOR so long, it seems. Entire lifetimes.
And when we’re young we can’t comprehend how personalities shift inexorably over time, as slowly, or nearly, as the wearing-away of granite by water or wind. Yet the wearing-away, invisible to the eye, is ceaseless and irrevocable. We can’t begin to comprehend how the body shifts, shrinking by degrees into its frame, becoming ever less certain, humble. As if the very shadows of the elderly begin to fade. There come to dwell in these diminished bodies,
if the bodies live long enough, unanticipated personalities as distinct from their predecessors as our child-selves are distinct and distant from our mature selves.
And one day, even those strangers are gone.
The long romance is ended, and we are alone.
MY DEAR FATHER FRED Oates passed away in May 2000. Daddy had been ill for several years with a variety of age-related illnesses, and he had long been losing his eyesight to macular degeneration—Daddy, who so loved to read; Fred Oates, whose signs had once been so prevalent in the countryside south of Lockport. In later years he’d even begun to paint, and to make stained-glass lamps which we have in our house here in Princeton. A portrait of me, modeled upon a photograph, hangs on a wall upstairs in our bedroom.
The last words Daddy spoke to me, over the telephone, in late April 2000, were to dissuade my husband Ray and me from driving up to see him just then. He’d seemed almost vehement, saying: “You don’t need to make a special trip to see me right now. Hell, I’m not bad.” It was the manly gesture, I realized afterward. Manly to dismiss his own mortality, and to insist that we shouldn’t fuss over him just yet.
Daddy had wanted to shield me from the truth. In this, he was like his mother Blanche: he’d wanted to shield me. He had been so persuasive, I had not visited him in time; two days after this phone conversation he died, in his eighty-seventh year, in a hospice in Getzville, New York, much sooner than his doctors had expected.
“Your father just closed his eyes. As soon as he knew that your mother was all right and would be taken care of, he closed his eyes and fell asleep. He was so tired. He never woke up.”
MY MOTHER’S LAST WORDS to me were spoken in person, in July 2002 in her nursing home in Getzville: “How could I forget Joyce?”
The Lost Landscape: A Writer's Coming of Age Page 29