Our lives confused us, as did our sins—though I did not term our sins sins at that time. That was too accusatory a term. We were not happy with our unhappiness when it erupted. We fought, which exhausted us. We were too, too busy. Rarely was there time for deep theological probing. Rarely, it seemed, was there time for anything at all except for the next frantic trip in the minivan to catch up with what ought to have been finished hours before.
Despite that, though, Channa was pregnant once more. We were no longer Godians, we were not quite yet Jews—but we certainly were repeatable Life-ians.
This time, the birth would be in March, so the need to buy winter boots would not be a problem. Having moved since Sam’s birth, we were closer to Hartford Hospital than before. The caretakers for the three children, when the moment came, would come to us, not the other way around. Lena and James were now old enough to understand (and to applaud) that for survival, really, all children actually need is peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches.
One day, while sitting on the living room couch, suddenly Channa said, “Dikkon, now.”
No rain, no rush hour, not even any lugging of children. What could possibly go wrong?
Oh! The Saint Patrick’s Day parade!
Half of the city of Hartford was marching across our route and inserting itself between us and the hospital.
I pressed forward into the throng anyway, honking my horn and getting the most astonished and furious looks from the people in my way. I kept pointing at Channa’s belly, but no one bothered to look at her, they just excoriated me.
“Hurry, Dikkon. They’re closer. Please hurry.”
I crawled.
“Dikkon . . .”
Now I was up against a solid wall of parade watchers, unable to move at all. I just leaned on the horn. Within a minute a livid cop bulled his way through the crowd toward me. “What the—” he was shouting.
I leaned out the window and bellowed back while stabbing my finger across the parade route. “My wife! Baby! Hospital!”
Then we had a wonderful experience. Suddenly, half a dozen policemen were there, urgently clearing the standers away, and then dashing out into the middle of the parade and bringing the entire extravaganza to a halt. Grinning from ear to ear, I drove across the parade route. Some people realized what was happening—now they noticed Channa as she smiled at them and groaned and smiled at them some more—and a cheer went up, and we were celebrated by Hartfordians as we broke free from the parade on its other side and dashed down the street to where we were presented with our next gift from God, a lovely girl, Rosalind—the only one of our children with Channa’s black-haired coloring.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
My mother and I shared the same sense of humor. She was always able to see the funny side of things.
This applied to the genuinely funny moments but also to the unhappy times of life. If she was in the middle of an unhappy time, when the burden was heavy, still she would have flashes of wit—partly, I think, because she was able to distance herself from the problem and to see in the problem what she would call the absurdity of man’s estate.
In her later years, the drugs my mother took to control her epilepsy wore her down. Physically, she became frailer. Mentally, she became less able—but her incapacity came and went. Sometimes it was hard for her to order a thought and to reproduce it in voice; sometimes not.
It distressed me and my family when we visited Mom and found her not herself. For me, it was a greater distress to find Mom not herself than to find Dad so. The self my mother had always expressed was intensely interactive, curious, responsive, insightful, and funny. When that self was absent, I experienced loss. On the other hand, when Dad’s mental light was dim, he at least showed himself familiarly as the silent, contemplative, poet father. I could sit with him for hours, saying nothing, knowing he was content, feeling content myself, while having no more complex experience of him than his physical presence.
Once, when Dad was ninety-five, he came out of one such silence and asked me a question Mom would never have thought to ask, its entire thought process being so unlike her: “Do you think I should live to be one hundred?”
“Do you want to?”
“I don’t know.”
I laughed. “Then I don’t either.”
“Everyone else here—” Dad was referring to his retirement community—“everyone else is dying of something, and I’m not.”
“I think you should do what you want to do.”
Then came a flash of my father’s humor. Looking me in the eye, he said, “I wonder what that is.”
My mother was a realist, involved intensely and gratefully in the midst of life. The greatest times in my mother’s life, as she told me, were when she and my father were young and doing something in the poetry world, and when Gretchen and I were young and she and my father were doing something to raise their children into decent adults.
Mom bustled and sang around the house and loved her life as Gretchen and I grew. Certainly, she and Dad fought mightily sometimes—as she attested, “All married fights are about money, sex, or children”—because she cared very much. After she became ill, she fought just as mightily to keep epilepsy from hobbling her or those around her. Mom would not allow herself to be a burden.
A curious thing attested to the affinity of awareness between Mom and me. Mom suffered from petit mal seizures at unexpected times. The seizures generally lasted about ninety seconds, during which, if she were standing, she might collapse or she might just brace herself upright by placing her hand on something solid—for example, dangerously, on a red-hot stove burner. She would come slowly out of the seizure, then, as though waking from a very deep unconsciousness, and she would be ashamed that she might have discomfited those around her.
The curious thing was this. If I was standing within about eight feet of my mother or closer, and if there was no other person between us, and if a seizure was about to start, in my head there would come a buzzing sensation that filled my being. Once I learned that this sensation presaged a seizure, I would have time to lead her to a seat before the seizure began. I do not know why this sensation occurred, and I have not experienced it in any other situation.
Dad and Gretchen bore the worst of Mom’s illness.
Dad was anguished for Mom that the condition should exist at all. But Dad thought both emotionally and legendarily. What did epilepsy mean? I can hear my mother saying, “Oh, Richie, it doesn’t mean anything. It’s just life. The only thing it means is that you have to drive me everywhere, and I can never drive myself. That’s more trouble for me than it is for you.” But Dad would not be satisfied with this dismissiveness, and he would press everyone to learn what epilepsy meant.
Further, Dad was both squeamish around illness and hypochondriacal at the same time. I think this is the deeper reason why Dad never visited Ezra Pound in prison in the early 1950s when many of his pals were urging him to do so. Frost, Eliot, Wilbur, Cummings, and many others in the literary establishment urgently solicited Dad’s support in their effort to get Pound released from prison. But Dad declined. Certainly, he hated Pound’s politics and considered him traitorous—the man had broadcast fascist polemics for the Mussolini government over Radio Rome during the middle years of World War II. Yet Dad might at least have gone to visit the man, for his poetry, if not to align his name with Pound’s. After all, the war was over.
One time when I was in college and mad at Dad, that’s how I attacked him. “At least for The Cantos! You could have gone to see Pound for The Cantos. You love The Cantos.”
“I just couldn’t.”
“But why not?”
“He was a fool.”
“Okay, I get it about his politics. But can’t you separate the man from his work?”
“What are you, a New Criticism man?”
“I just want to know why you couldn’t go see Pound.”
“We’re all of us of a piece, Dikkon. That’s what we are. I couldn’t go see
Pound because I couldn’t go see Pound.”
Something of the same happened when Frost was dying. I never met Pound, although—especially when I was a college guy—I should have liked to meet him (he and I share a birthday, October 30). But I knew and very much liked Frost.
Mom urged Dad to go, but Dad was scared. “He won’t be Robert.”
“But he is Robert. Oh, Richie, you must.”
“I just can’t.”
“You may never see him again.”
And Dad was flummoxed. I was sad about the whole event, sad that Frost was dying, and sad that Dad was unmanned. That about death which fascinated Dad also appalled him. He was like Lear sometimes on the heath.
Ah, life, how canst thou?
Gretchen had a hard time of Mom’s illness because it impacted her adolescence as it did not impact mine. During the years when I was at prep school and at college, I was out of the house. During those same years, Gretchen was the only child at home. These were her teen years, when a girl likes to have her mother available for advice and counsel (or to be ignored, as the mood may take her), but during this time, Gretchen needed to keep a watchful eye on her mother in case she should have a seizure. Gretchen has told me that hers was not a hovering sort of experience, exactly, but Mom’s illness did live in the house and needed to be attended to—like art.
Mom busied herself with political and community concerns, and now and then she would go niece-hopping, as she called it. She would take off from home and bounce by plane across the country, visiting nieces and godchildren and old college or poetry friends.
Mom was involved. She wrote thousands of letters by pencil in her upright script, and they went on and on—one could hear her voice in the sentences—even going sideways or upside down around the margins of the page. She bicycled around Hanover and knew everyone she met. If I was to drive her to the grocery store to buy milk and eggs—which shopping trip ought to have occupied thirty minutes—we returned two hours later because every person we met in the grocery aisle was a friend to be caught up on. She and our next-door neighbor Jean gardened next to each other, each in her own patch, and they solved the problems of the world as they weeded.
I am grateful for the last time I saw my mother alive. She and Dad were living in their retirement community. She had broken her hip and was recuperating from the break itself but deteriorating more in terms of her verbal articulation, and she used a wheelchair. Gretchen’s and my family and close friends threw a party for Mom and Dad at Gretchen’s lovely home about twenty miles from Hanover. The party went well, and there was much jollity, but I, and I think everyone else, was aware of what a struggle it was for my mother to rise above her physical ailments to participate.
When it was time to take Mom and Dad back to their retirement community, because Mom was unable to walk and the stairs were awkward with the wheelchair, I carried Mom out to the car. She was not heavy. I maneuvered her through doorways, down stairs, and onto the seat of the car. I got her settled and stood back, holding the door open. Her eyes met and held mine. Though she could scarcely speak, her eyes expressed profound intelligence and conscious humor at how absurd all this physical incapacity was. How silly, she seemed to be saying—how silly that she should be so isolated from her children and her grandchildren . . . and what a comedy was life!
I am grateful for that moment, my last sight of my mother alive. The moment left me with the comforting supposition that perhaps her spirit was exactly as it had always been, though we were all aware that the house in which her spirit lived was in poor repair.
Mom died at age eighty, in 1994. It’s been twenty years, yet hardly a month goes by when I don’t think, regarding something absurd, Mom would like that.
I wish I could tell her. She’d understand how funny it is. She’d laugh.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
In October 2000, Gretchen and I went to Austin, Minnesota, as the representatives of our father, Dreamy Dick Eberhart (as he had been known when a teenager, sometimes fondly and sometimes derisively), who, at ninety-six, was not a traveling man any longer.
We went to accept, in Dad’s name, the honor of his high school rebuilding and renaming its library and media center after him. (Later, in 2001, Austin High named Dad a Distinguished Alumnus of the Century.)
Austin treated Gretchen and me most delightfully warmly. We were three-day-wonder media stars. It was the only time I have felt like a celebrity.
For several days, Gretchen and I did newspaper, radio, and TV interviews. We gave talks at four or five grade schools that had studied Dad’s poems during the past several weeks. At the high school, we made a presentation that included showing a video of Dad reading a few poems and remembering old Austin. We ate Spamburgers and spent half a day canoeing on the Cedar River, and we made it almost all the way to the falls (of course, without going over them).
We drove in the open, lead car during the Austin High School homecoming day parade. We were introduced during halftime at the homecoming football game, along with the homecoming king and queen (the Austin Packers won the game, of course). We attended a skit on the life of our father, written by schoolchildren and performed by them, and thus we had the pleasure of shaking hands with our grandfather A.L. and with our grandmother Lena, whom we had not had the pleasure to meet in real life—and we had the pleasure of chatting with our father, an eleven-year-old actor who appeared to have stepped right off a page of a Mark Twain novel.
Our days in Austin were very moving. One TV interview was filmed next to the library in a park—the park that once was Dad’s front acreage at Burr Oaks. When the interview was over, I sat on a bench where Dad might have sat on a tree trunk, and I wondered what I should say during my big speech the next day at the official opening of the Richard Eberhart poetry library.
Why should students in the year 2000 care about this guy who was 1,500 miles and eighty years distant from them? And then it came to me why, and next day I told the assembled officials, townsfolk, and students why they should care.
“My father was an ordinary student, no scholar, but he tried everything. As a young man, he was a singer—who found his song. It doesn’t matter what your song is,” I told the audience. “What matters is this. It is your job, right now, to find your song. Right now. Right now in your lives; right now is the time for you to find it. And the reason why my father is important to you—to you who are the age he was when he was here in this very spot—the reason my father is important to you is that once, years ago, right here, he was one of you—and he found his.”
My speech was well received. This speech from the son of the poet, who loved his dad and believed deeply in the need we all have to find our “songs”—whatever is our tuneful and our deepest inspiration.
In Austin, at fourteen, Dad wrote his first poem. He persisted then. At ninety-six, he still wrote . . . when the occasion presented itself.
“Dad, people ask me if you still write poetry.”
He grinned. “I don’t go chasing after them anymore, but if one comes along, I’ll write it down.”
Me? I had not been able to finish my third novel; the song of that book had gone still. But at fifty-four, I was one half of a loving marriage, Channa and I were excited by our four compelling children, I was respected by my colleagues for carrying on a successful career, I was respected by my customers because I had never once pressured them or dissembled about my product, and I was beginning to wonder—with excitement, since what I was living now was my own life—if living one’s own life with success might not be another variety of song too.
After the public ceremony was over, Gretchen and I were driven to Oak Dale.
Now Oak Dale is prairie and nothing more. We disembarked from our car. By this time, my knees were weak, and my heart raced. Somewhere, close by, was the place. Addressing the crowds in Austin was one thing, but this was The Visionary Farms. The Visionary Farms is the verse drama Dad wrote in the early 1950s about “The Fall of the House of Eberhart,�
� as he once jokingly referred to A.L.’s business loss and Lena’s death when describing them to me. Dad was joking, but—by now you know Dad—he wasn’t joking.
I’ve mentioned before the portentous tone that Dad used when he told and retold the famous tale, making it seem a tragedy such as Hamlet might have soliloquized upon at Elsinore. And that afternoon, at that very moment, there we were, at Dad’s Elsinore.
Old battlefields have an eerie quality about them, and the more one has studied and lived within the memory of the battle, the more eerie the quality is. As Dad’s son, I had studied about him and his life with an intensity I had scarcely lavished on anything else except my marriage, my children, and my work. Oak Dale was central to what I knew about Dad—it was the Ur story. The story was the fulcrum on which all else balanced.
I was also an actor, susceptible to stage management. This was the place—this was the stage set—where, metaphorically, the bodies lay strewn. My knees were weak.
We sauntered across the open land. Still shaken by the feeling of walking in my father’s past, I veered away. I wandered in whatever direction my feet took me. No sound came there but the sound of a now-and-then wind.
I chanced upon the swimming pool. It is a big, empty, concrete-lined rectangular hole in the prairie. Over the years, dirt has sifted into the deep end of the pool, enough to support thin trees that scarcely reach above the rim. In places, the concrete apron of the pool has broken down. Time levels all things. The slow teeth of the land have their chew.
I stood on the lip of the pool, eighty years after Dad’s footprint. He was not present to make another cannonball leap.
Had he been—ah, the emotion that should have swollen the air!
Weeping, Dad might have knelt—should his knees have borne the strain—and stroked the earth with his fingers. Then he might well have struggled back to his feet and looked widely away. He might have murmured the final lines of “The Groundhog,” the most famous death poem of his youth.
The Time Mom Met Hitler, Frost Came to Dinner, and I Heard the Greatest Story Ever Told Page 17