Prodigals

by Greg Jackson

  So stop shortchanging poetry. Stop shortchanging art. Seriously. We’re sick of it. Art has nothing to apologize for.

  It is sick of apologizing.

  * * *

  A comedy ends in a wedding, they say. A tragedy in death. An epic comes full circle to end where it began, but—oh, endings!—take your time, I say. Come late!

  Back on the island, my grandfather is living. I am living. The woods are living. Bumblebees as big as a child’s thumb drift among living flowers. The harrumph of a lawn mower coming to life in the distance references the enveloping determination of growth. My aunts, lively in the morning, setting the coffee machine to burble, return from the garden with tomatoes, squash, parsley, chives, leeks, cabbage, zucchini, corn, thyme, rosemary, carrots, and beets, all of which, through the months of spring and early summer, feasting on the rot of soil, have slowly swelled. And if we are to believe Greimasian semiotics, bound up in any sense of dying must be living, along with the not-living, not-dying rock of the coast, oil-black here and grained like a pompadour, the roll of seawater, the nescient wind that laps the flag with its fanciful coat of arms, stretches the cupped palms of canvas sails, splits on bird wings, and touches off the texture of the bay.

  I sit with my grandfather in the morning. The day is chilly, with dark gray clouds portending to the southwest. My grandfather wears a baseball cap and a windbreaker over his sweater. There is no discerning a body beneath the clothes.

  “When we sailed…” It takes him time to get his sentences out. “Sometimes the propeller got … tangled … on seaweed, you know … and I’d—I’d dive down with a knife…”

  “Yes,” I say, “and you’d cut the propeller free.”

  He nods. “That’s right.”

  I’ve heard these stories many times before. He had an Aqua-Lung aboard the boat, which he used for difficult jobs. Often, though, he just went in in his underwear with a snorkel and mask, a six-inch pilot knife, down into the frigid waters of a strange harbor while his family roused themselves in the morning haze off the ocean. At least once he got tangled up, unable to break free beneath the boat, and had to dive back down to find the line gripping him and cut it before he drowned. He had nearly died thinking of his family just above him, humming as they prepared breakfast, so close and yet unable to hear him on the far side of that insuperable medium. Things must not be so different for him now. But he hadn’t died that morning, of course, and he hasn’t died still. And I take his choice of topic, in its elliptical way, to mean he understands my foolish plan to go after the anchor, the impulse to pit one’s vitality against death, our heedless pursuit of what is always slipping beneath the surface. The first examples of writing, we are told, are inventories and accounts, records of the stores in granaries, the numbers in herds, trades, payments. Bookkeeping. A desire to keep track of things, to not forget.

  I find Ruth in the study staring at an old computer, the monitor of which alone could flatten a corgi, and I knock on the doorframe.

  “How do I turn a JPEG into an MP3?” she says.

  “Hmm. I don’t think you do.”

  “Francesca and Malcolm are coming tonight, you know.”

  “Yes.” They are Ruth’s children, my cousins; soon the house will be teeming with the full extant family. Bill, Ruth’s husband, is flying in tomorrow from a work trip in Ireland. All these atoms of diverse energy, divergent lives and convergent genes, called together in these walls to confront the breadth of our mutual and utter incomprehension.

  “I need you to take Denise to the ferry,” Ruth says.

  “I know, I talked to Denise. For the record, I’m not a big fan of the whole ‘I need you to’ formulation.”

  I expect Ruth to give me one of her lead-eyed looks, but her eyes are wide open and her face younger than I can remember it being in a long time. “It’s all just really hard,” she says.

  “Do you want to tell me why you guys are still fighting?”

  She shakes her head. “We forgot.”

  I am stubborn. I have lived long enough to know that. My aunts are stubborn. My grandfather is stubborn. We are a stubborn family; we don’t agree, we disapprove, our esteem is hard to win, our affection hard to lose; our grudges linger even when we say they don’t. And yet, if on the surface the dispute between my aunts and their father drew on those stock issues of family and age, of control and the disposition of things, the deeper grievance, I have to believe, was what it always is—that our children are us and yet not us, that parents turn from gods to men and women at last to children, that in describing our nearest boundary with the world our families also measure the distance, the gulf, and that love always comes with conditions, even if these are only the limits of love.

  We can’t forgive one another. To forgive our family would be to forgive the very strangeness of our being.

  The sky has darkened and threatens rain as Denise and I wait at the ferry terminal. “You really going out there?” she says.

  “I guess so.”

  “Jesus. Well, easiest twenty bucks I’ll ever make.”

  I ask if she’s going to see her husband and she says, Yup. How is he? Not good, she says, and because there’s nothing else to do she laughs. It looks like he only has weeks left, a month or two at the outside, and she moved here initially for him, for his work and to be near his family. She doesn’t know what’s next for her, where she’ll go. But then it’s the kids she’s really worried about. They’ve run off, disappeared into their young lives. They’re at the age when they’d be leaving anyway, but now they’re crashing cars, taking up with guys too old for them, fleeing to the far coast. It’s too depressing at home, and she’s not around.

  “They don’t know what to do. I don’t either.”

  What to say? Kids are always running away from home.

  “Don’t ever think you’ve run too far to be welcomed back,” she says. “That’s what I’d say to them if I could.”

  On our way out to the island the salt water swept up by the wind might as well be incipient rain. I watch Misty’s hair and jacket billow and blow around her, and it reminds me of a concert she and I once saw, the opening act for the band we’d come to see. It was some minor band I’d never heard of. The lead singer, a man with expressive lips and strawberry-blond hair, wore a full white-lace wedding gown and pallid makeup while he performed. The train of the dress swished around him as he danced and sang. He was in no way cool. This was what Misty and I had loved. Somehow you could tell he wasn’t just laughing at himself. It could have been a gimmick and it wasn’t. It was instead a kind of craziness, a kind of love. It was this or nothing—for him it was this or nothing, you could tell. And to writhe in a wedding dress and makeup before a sparse crowd there to see another band, to do this as a grown man, neither an idiot nor a clown, and to do it night after night without rising out of obscurity is the purest sort of conviction and bravery, I believe.

  I am the one going in, we’ve decided. Misty and I trade places; she takes the wheel and steers the boat among the shallows by the rocks. I am already freezing in a thick sweatshirt.

  “Can you see anything?” she says.

  “No, it must be farther out.”

  The muddled seabed fades as the water deepens, the submerged rocks fade. The translucent olive water interposes itself like rippling screens bearing grains of light. After debating for a bit where I should go in we settle on a spot. I strip down to my bathing suit and for a second, standing in the boat, feel like the smallest pebble in an infinite pool, the bay waters in the distance seeming not to meet but to join the sky at some unbroken axis mundi in the smoldering gray.

  “I was in the park the other day and I heard these twelve-year-old girls calling each other ‘bro,’” Misty says. “They were like, ‘Chill out, bro.’ ‘Sweet, bro.’ ‘Let me see your phone, bro.’ It was hilarious.”

  “At the playground a few weeks ago, I heard this eight-year-old boy yelling, ‘I’m tripping balls!’ Just throwing it out there to no
one in particular.”

  “We tripped some pretty serious balls when we were kids,” Misty says.

  “True,” I say. It is true. “Watch me get hypothermia, bro.”

  I dive in.

  For the first minute the water grips me like a cryonic gel, glacial, faintly pinguid, then a numbness starts to fill me and bit by bit I lose track of the water and my body until we are one substance slipping through itself. I dive down five, eight feet and turn to see the surface above me as just a lighter shade in the impenetrable haze, the hull of the whaler as white and luminous as a belly, recalling to me, for the first time in years, how I used to look up at my grandfather and my mother as they swam laps above me in the pool, a small, spindly child, ducking below them when they went past, captivated by the currents, the bubbles and roil, at their bodies, the wild, horselike look in their eyes, the oxygenous contrails streaming from their noses, the primal mystery of my connection to them. We can overrate blood, surely, the stepped-up bases of our inheritance, the avarice of our genes, but I want to believe that we preserve the things we love, that we mustn’t glorify what is small, write our eulogies in the stars, or privilege any one scale to say that what befalls one of us befalls us all, or that we ever owe less than our attention.

  My grandfather wanted to be a physicist, an astronomer, and although I knew him as a secular man it doesn’t seem possible to me that someone turns his attention to the stars without a flicker of longing for the cosmos—the greater order of which our lives are a part—and the romantic’s intuition that passion lives in a ramshackle outpost on the banks of the unknown. I sometimes wonder whether his forebears, German-Jewish burghers who lived not far downriver from Johann Peter Hebel along the Rhine, consulted the compendium in which the writer’s Kalendergeschichten appeared, stories that alongside the almanac itself put forward the idea, and with it the mythology, of a world suited to the orderliness of the cosmos, a natural and social symmetry. I wonder whether this legacy then trickled down, for if Hebel’s genius lies, as one great rememberer has written, in taking the perspective of the stars themselves, so that they tell not the emblazoned story of our grandeur but of our insignificance, as the life of the planet, seen from a celestial distance, settles into a music of the spheres, a tectonic fidgeting, a not-living, not-dying ecology, a word that means, most literally, the study of a house, a bound order, a family—we must all still take the house into which we are born, our mother’s house, our father’s house, and from the inside out build our own.

  And if I asked Misty why she couldn’t find her place she might say, “I was waiting for love,” and then, laughing, “But don’t think I envy lovers. Lovers are idiots. Only someone in love would name a child Mirabella.” And if I saw my grandfather with Ruth or Cynthia in an unguarded moment, talking quietly in the study, I might know their grievance was no more than love, a wild rage at finity, at how we tell ourselves there will be time to mend our ruptures and know one another, and there never is. And if the intimacy Gaby and I share is more than one could hope for and still not enough, what then? What does this say? And if in eulogies we tell stories of the times we knew the deceased, hunting down the words to summon what they meant to us, is this remembering, a form of living, or is it only the sunyata of the dead, an unknown hollow we describe by the contours of a vacancy? For if true remembering were possible, would it not involve seeing the world through my grandfather’s eyes, a boy born during World War I who could recall the milkman’s horse lying dead on the cobblestones where it collapsed climbing their hill in the Bronx, who watched Murderers’ Row—Ruth, Gehrig, “Long Bob” Meusel, Earle Combs—from the platform of the el with his own grandfather on his way home from school, his grandfather’s hands, he would remember, perfumed with the oils he sold, bergamot, cedar, clove, and geranium, a man who as a widower lived with them on the steep and pastoral street at the end of which the shell-shocked veterans gathered at the hospital’s iron gates, taunting and enticing my grandfather as he passed, that dark metal fence looming over his youth, one spent in thrall to science and to his idol, Frank Oppenheimer, five forms ahead of him in school, a guiding light whom my grandfather and his best friend, Ithiel, revered as boys before growing up themselves, going off to college, traveling together to Mexico as young men out of school for the summer, climbing Popocatépetl and hearing Trotsky speak—Ithiel was a communist then—at a meeting hall where attendees put their revolvers on a table by the door, this just a few years before Trotsky was shot and killed, returning at the end of the summer, my grandfather, to the musty lecture halls of New England from which he would emerge two years later engaged to my grandmother, a woman he would stay married to until her death sixty years later and whose courtship had consisted of reading to each other on a riverbank from Ulysses, that great eddy in the onflowing tide of entropy, a tide soon to wreck the world again in bloodshed, a war my grandfather would spend at a research lab on Long Island developing radar and where, on that fateful August morning in 1945, he would do the math with a colleague to confirm the lunatic destruction of which we were indeed now capable, a datum central to reality henceforth, and so to the life of his newborn daughter, my mother, and those of his children to follow and his grandchildren, but then he had been the one to travel years before to identify his uncle’s body in the nowhere hills of western Pennsylvania, a salesman who had died on the train to Chicago the very day he and his wife adopted their first child, a cousin my grandfather would never know, and perhaps he knew from this first lesson, or should have known, the vicious derailments life has in store, things that would ultimately know nothing of his inner weighing of compromise and possibility and hope, what the quality of love he had for the people he loved was like—felt like—what pride or disappointment he felt in them or in himself, getting into bed at night thinking he might have spoken up more bravely or loved more fiercely, as we all do, or that he might have lived another life altogether, and why not; and if he had, would the white-capped waves in the bay look different to him now, what does he see when they catch the sun, can we know, or when he stood at the helm of his sailboat named for an old slave munity, or sailed into prewar Europe with his sister and caught that first glimpse of a foreign land, how did the words of Ulysses strike him on the tongue of the woman he would soon marry in secret two months before their wedding—as confronting a fundamental uncertainty? as an insistent affirmative?—and what did he see when he was left alone with the strange candlelit faces of his children and grandchildren, arguing and laughing at the dinner table, these people who were him and also not him and destined to live lives mysterious to his own, what did he hope the world might become as his life went on and finally extinguished, trying to make more right decisions than wrong, trying to balance the love we owe one another with the inevitable and proper love we must save for ourselves?

  And if I am to stay in the water of this skybound bay, looking for an anchor attached to nothing, I hope you will believe me that at a wedding by a pond, I was not a romantic or a sap to see in the consummatory kiss a flicker of the metanarrative’s grandeur, or a straining into the absence that suggests it could still have a place, the first lone voice that rises up to answer the dithyramb, the bondage of our curiosity, this, here, after a moment’s quiet for the life of the pond, the choral frogs and boatmen, the turtles and skimmers, the dragonflies that skitter, the vipers, the doves.

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you:

  Ann Beattie, Georges, Anne, and Valerie Borchardt, Rachel Brooke, Deborah Eisenberg, the Fine Arts Work Center, Nina Frieman, Laird Gallagher, Elizabeth Gordon, Debra Helfand, Yuka Igarashi, Jonathan Lippincott, the MacDowell Colony, Matthew Neill Null, Andrew Palmer, Jon Parrish Peede, Sigrid Rausing, Sarah Scire, Peng Shepherd, Lorin Stein, Christopher Tilgham, the University of Virginia MFA Program, VCCA, Allison Wright.

  This book owes a singular debt to the wisdom, labor, and encouragement of Eric Chinski, Bella Lacey, Alexis Schaitkin, Samantha Shea, and Deborah Treisman.


  It is my great fortune to count you as readers and friends.

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Greg Jackson’s work has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, and the Virginia Quarterly Review. He has been a fiction fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and a resident at the MacDowell Colony, and he holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Virginia. Prodigals is his first book. You can sign up for email updates here.

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Wagner in the Desert

  Serve-and-Volley, Near Vichy

  Epithalamium

  Dynamics in the Storm

  Amy’s Conversions

  Tanner’s Sisters

  Summer 1984