by Paul Park
She wore a corset.
One night there was a thunderstorm, and for some reason there was no one home. She appeared at the top of the stairs, her hair undone. She was breathing hard, blowing her cheeks out as she came down, and then she stood in the open door, looking out at the pelting rain. “Come,” she said—I always obeyed her. She led me out onto the front lawn. We didn’t wear any coats, and in a moment we were soaked. Lightning struck nearby. She took hold of my arm and led me down the path toward the sea; we stood on the bluff as the storm raged. The waves were up the beach. Rain wiped clean the surface of the water. For some reason there was a lot of phosphorescence.
She had hold of my arm, which was not characteristic. Before, she’d never had a reason to touch me. Her other hand was clenched in a fist. The lenses of her glasses were streaked with rain. The wind blew her white hair around her head. She pulled me around in a circle, grinning the whole time. Her teeth were very crooked, very bad.
2. THE GLASS HOUSE
It occurs to me that every memoirist and every historian should begin by reminding their readers that the mere act of writing something down, of organizing something in a line of words, involves a clear betrayal of the truth. Without alternatives we resort to telling stories, coherent narratives involving chains of circumstance, causes and effects, climactic moments, introductions and denouements. We can’t help it.
This is even before we start to make things up. And it’s in spite of what we already know from our own experience: that our minds are like jumbled crates or suitcases or cluttered rooms, and that memory cannot be separated from ordinary thinking, which is constructed in layers rather than sequences. In the same way history cannot be separated from the present. Both memory and history consist not of stories but of single images, words, phrases, or motifs repeated to absurdity. Who could tolerate reading about such things? Who could even understand it?
So our betrayal of experience has a practical justification. But it also has a psychological one. How could we convince ourselves of progress, of momentum, if the past remained as formless or as pointless as the present? In our search for meaning, especially, we are like a man who looks for his vehicle access and ignition cards under a streetlamp regardless of where he lost them. What choice does he have? In the darkness, it’s there or nowhere.
But stories once they’re started are self-generating. Each image, once clarified, suggests the next. Form invents content, and so problems of falsehood cannot be limited entirely to form. A friend of mine once told me a story about visiting his father, sitting with him in the VA hospital the morning he died, trying to make conversation, although they had never been close. “Dad,” he said, “there’s one thing I’ve never forgotten. We were at the lake house the summer I was twelve, and you came downstairs with some army stuff, your old revolver that you’d rediscovered at the bottom of a drawer. You told Bobby and me to take it out into the woods and shoot it off, just for fun. But I said I didn’t want to, I wanted to watch Gilligan’s Island on TV, and you were okay with that. Bobby went out by himself. And I think that was a turning point for me, where I knew you would accept me whatever I did, even if it was, you know, intellectual things—books and literature. Bobby’s in jail, now, of course. But I just wanted you to know how grateful I was for that, because you didn’t force me to conform to some…”
Then my friend had to stop because the old man was staring at him and trying to talk, even though the tubes were down his throat. What kind of deranged psychotic asshole, he seemed to want to express, would give his teenage sons a loaded gun of any kind, let alone a God-damned .38? The lake house, as it happened, was not in Siberia or fucking Wyoming, but suburban Maryland; there were neighbors on both sides. The woods were only a hundred yards deep. You could waste some jerkoff as he sat on his own toilet in his own home. What the fuck? And don’t even talk to me about Bobby. He’s twice the man you are.
Previously, my friend had told variations of this childhood memory to his wife and his young sons, during moments of personal or family affirmation. He had thought of it as the defining moment of his youth, but now in the stark semiprivate hospital room it sounded ridiculous even to him. And of course, any hope of thoughtful tranquillity or reconciliation was impeded, as the old man passed away immediately afterward.
Everyone has had experiences like this. And yet what can we do, except pretend what we say is accurate? What can we do, except continue with our stories? Here is mine. It starts with a visit to my grandfather, my father’s father, sometime in the early 1960s.
His name was Edwin Avery Park, and he lived in Old Mystic in eastern Connecticut, not far from Preston, where his family had wasted much of the seventeenth, the entire eighteenth, and half of the nineteenth centuries on unprofitable farms. He had been trained as an architect, but had retired early to devote himself to painting—imitations, first, of John Marin’s landscapes, and then later of Georgio de Chirico’s surrealist canvases; he knew his work derived from theirs. Once he said, “I envy you. I know I’ll never have what you have. Now here I am at the end of my life, a fifth-rate painter.” His eyes got misty, wistful. “I could have been a third-rate painter.”
He showed no interest in my sisters. But I had been born in a caul, the afterbirth wrapped around my head, which made me exceptional in his eyes. According to my father, this was a notion he had gotten from his own mother, my father’s grandmother, president of the New Haven Theosopical Society in the 1880s and ’90s and a font of the kind of wisdom that was later to be called “new age,” in her case mixed with an amount of old Connecticut folklore.
When we visited, my grandfather was always waking me up early and taking me for rambles in old graveyards. Once he parked the car by the side of the road, and he—
No, wait. Something happened first. At dawn I had crept up to his studio in the top of the house and looked through a stack of paintings: Ghosts Doing the Orange Dance. The Waxed Intruder. Shrouds and Dirges, Disassembled.
This was when I was seven or eight years old. I found myself examining a pencil sketch of a woman riding a horned animal. I have it before me now, spread out on the surface of my desk. She wears a long robe, but in my recollection she is naked, and that was the reason I was embarrassed to hear the heavy sound of my grandfather’s cane on the stairs, why I pretended to be looking at something else when he appeared.
His mother, Lucy Cowell, had been no larger than a child, and he also was very small—five feet at most, and bald. Long, thin nose. Pale blue eyes. White mustache. He knew immediately what I’d been looking at. He barely had to stoop to peer into my face. Later, he parked the car beside the road, and we walked out though a long field toward an overgrown structure in the distance. The sky was low, and it was threatening to rain. We took a long time to reach the greenhouse through the wet, high grass.
Now, in my memory it is a magical place. Maybe it didn’t seem so at the time. I thought the panes were dirty and smudged, many of them cracked and broken. Vines and creepers had grown in through the lights. But now I see immediately why I was there. Standing inside the ruined skeleton, I look up to see the sun break through the clouds, catch at motes of drifting dust. And I was surrounded on all sides by ghostly images, faded portraits. The greenhouse had been built of large, old-fashioned photographic exposures on square sheets of glass.
A couple of years later, in Puerto Rico, I saw some of the actual images made from these plates. I didn’t know it then. Now, seated at my office desk, I can see the greenhouse in the long, low, morning light, and I can see with my imagination’s eye the bearded officers and judges, the city fathers with their families, the children with their black nannies. And then other, stranger images: my grandfather had to swipe away the grass to show me, lower down, the murky blurred exposure of the horned woman on the shaggy beast, taken by firelight, at midnight—surely she was naked there! “These were made by my great-uncle Benjamin Cowell,” he said. “He had a photography studio in Virginia. After the war he cam
e home and worked for his brother. This farm provided all the vegetables for Cowell’s Restaurant.”
Denounced as a Confederate sympathizer, Benjamin Cowell had had a difficult time back in Connecticut, and had ended up by taking his own life. But in Petersburg in the 1850s, his studio had been famous—Rockwell & Cowell. Robert E. Lee sat for him during the siege of the city in 1864. That’s a matter of record, and yet the greenhouse itself … how could my grandfather have walked that far across an unmowed field? The entire time I knew him he was very lame, the result of a car accident. For that matter, how could he have driven me anywhere when he didn’t, to my knowledge, drive? And Cowell’s Restaurant, the family business, was in New Haven, seventy miles away. My great-great-grandfather personally shot the venison and caught the fish. Was it likely he would have imported his vegetables over such a distance?
Middle-aged, I tried to find the greenhouse again, and failed. My father had no recollection. “He’d never have told him,” sniffed Winifred, my grandfather’s third wife. “He liked you. You were born in a caul. He liked that. It was quite an accomplishment, he always said.”
Toward the end of her life I used to visit her in Hanover, New Hampshire, where they’d moved in the 1970s when she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. It was her hometown. Abused by her father, a German professor at Dartmouth, she had escaped to marry my grandfather, himself more than thirty years older, whom she had met in a psychiatric art clinic in Boston, a program run by his second wife. It surprised everyone when Winifred wanted to move home, most of all my grandfather, who didn’t long survive the change. He had spent the 1930s in Bennington, Vermont, teaching in the college there, and had learned to loathe those mountains. In addition, I believe now, he had another, more complicated fear, which he associated with that general area.
Because of her illness, Winifred was unable to care for him, and he ended his life in a nursing home. He was convinced, the last time I saw him, that I was visiting him during halftime of the 1908 Yale-Harvard game. “This is the worst hotel I’ve ever stayed in,” he confided in a whisper, when I bent down to kiss his cheek. But then he turned and grabbed my arm. “You’ve seen her, haven’t you?”
I didn’t even ask him what he meant, he was so far gone. Later, when I used to visit Winifred in New Hampshire, she got in the habit of giving me things to take away—his paintings first of all. She’d never cared for them. Then old tools and odds and ends, and finally a leather suitcase, keyless and locked, which I broke open when I got home. There, in an envelope, was the drawing of the horned woman riding the horned beast.
There also were several packages tied up in brown paper and twine, each with my name in his quavering handwriting. I brought them to my office at Williams College and opened them. The one on top contained the first three volumes of something called The Parke Scrapbook, compiled by a woman named Ruby Parke Anderson: exhaustive genealogical notes, which were also full of errors, as Winifred subsequently pointed out. Folded into volume two was his own commentary, an autobiographical sketch, together with his annotated family tree. This was familiar to me, as he had made me memorize the list of names when I was still a child, starting with his immigrant ancestor in Massachusetts Bay—Robert, Thomas, Robert, Hezekiah, Paul, Elijah, Benjamin Franklin, Edwin Avery, Franklin Allen, Edwin Avery, David Allen, Paul Claiborne, Adrian Xhaferaj.…
But I saw immediately that some of the names were marked with asterisks: my grandfather’s cousin Theo, Benjamin Cowell, and the Reverend Paul Parke, an eighteenth-century Congregationalist minister. At the bottom of the page, next to another asterisk, my grandfather had printed CAUL.
3. THE BATTLE OF THE CRATER
Not everyone is interested in these things. Already in those years I had achieved a reputation in my family as someone with an unusual tolerance for detritus and memorabilia. Years before I had received a crate of stuff from Puerto Rico via my mother’s mother in Virginia. These were books and papers from my mother’s father, also addressed to me, though I hadn’t seen him since I was eleven years old, in 1964. They had included his disbarment records in a leather portfolio, a steel dispatch case without a key, and a bundle of love letters to and from my grandmother, wrapped in rubber bands. I’d scarcely looked at them. I’d filed them for later when I’d have more time.
That would be now. I sat back at my desk, looked out the open window in the September heat. There wasn’t any air-conditioning anymore, although someone was mowing the lawn over by the Congo church. And I will pretend that this was my Proustian moment, by which I mean the moment that introduces a long, false, coherent memory—close enough. I really hadn’t thought about Benjamin Cowell in the intervening years, or the greenhouse or the horned lady. My memories of Puerto Rico seemed of a different type, inverted, solid, untransparent. In this way they were like the block of pasteboard images my mother’s father showed me at his farm in Maricao, and then packed up for me later to be delivered after his death, photographs made, I now realized, by Rockwell & Cowell in Petersburg, where he was from.
I closed my eyes for a moment. Surely in the greenhouse I’d seen this one, and this one—images that joined my mother’s and my father’s families. Years before on my office wall I’d hung Ghosts Doing the Orange Dance in a simple wooden frame, and beside it the military medallion in gilt and ormolu: General Lee surrounded by his staff. Under them, amid some boxes of books, I now uncovered the old crate, still with its stickers from some Puerto Rican shipping line. I levered off the top. Now I possessed two miscellaneous repositories of words, objects, and pictures, one from each grandfather. And because of this sudden connection between them, I saw immediately a way to organize these things into a pattern that might conceivably make sense. Several ways, in fact—geographically, chronologically, thematically. I imagined I could find some meaning. Alternately from the leather satchel and the wooden crate, I started to lay out packages and manuscripts along the surface of my desk and the adjoining table. I picked up a copy of an ancient Spanish tile, inscribed with a stick figure riding a stag—it was my maternal grandfather in Puerto Rico who had shown me this. He had taken me behind the farmhouse to a cave in the forest, where someone had once seen an apparition of the devil. And he himself had found there, when he first bought the property, a Spanish gold doubloon. “You’ve seen her, haven’t you?” he said.
“Who?”
A lawyer, he had left his wife and children to resettle in the Caribbean, first in the Virgin Islands and then in San Juan. He’d won cases and concessions for the Garment and Handicrafts Union, until he was disbarred in the 1940s. Subsequently he’d planted citrus trees in a mountain ravine outside of Maricao. His name was Robert W. Claiborne.
In my office, I put my hand on the locked dispatch case, and then moved down the line. In 1904, his father, my great-grandfather, had published a memoir called Seventy-Five Years in Old Virginia. Now I picked up what looked like the original manuscript, red-lined by the editor at Neale Publishing, and with extensive marginal notes.
Years before I’d read the book, or parts of it. Dr. John Herbert Claiborne had been director of the military hospital in Petersburg during the siege, and subsequently the last surgeon-general of the Army of Northern Virginia, during the retreat to Appomattox. A little of his prose, I remembered, went a long way:
We would not rob the gallant Captain or his brave North Carolinians of one feather from their plume. Where there were North Carolinians, there were brave men always, and none who ever saw them in a fight, or noted the return of their casualties after a fight, will gainsay that; but there were other brave men, of the infantry and of the artillery,—men whom we have mentioned,—who rallied promptly, and who shared with our Captain and his game crew that generous rain of metal so abundantly poured out upon their devoted heads.
Or:
We were descendants of the cavalier elements that settled in that State and wrested it from the savage by their prowess, introducing a leaven in the body politic, which not only bred a high
order of civilization at home, but spread throughout the Southern and Western States, as the Virginian, moved by love of adventure or desire of preferment, migrated into the new and adjoining territories. And from this sneered-at stock was bred the six millions of Southrons who for four long years maintained unequal war with thirty millions of Northern hybrids, backed by a hireling soldiery brought from the whole world to put down constitutional liberty—an unequal war, in which the same Southron stock struck undaunted for honor and the right, until its cohorts of starved and ragged heroes perished in their own annihilation.…
Or even:
But how many of our little band, twenty years afterwards, rode with Fitz Lee, and with Stuart, and with Rosser—rode upon the serried squares of alien marauders on their homes and their country,—I know not. As the war waged I would meet one of them sometimes, with the same firm seat in the saddle, the same spirit of dash and deviltry—but how many were left to tell to their children the story of battle and of bivouac is not recorded. I only know that I can not recall a single living one to-day. As far as I can learn, every one has responded to the last Long Roll, and every one has answered adsum—here—to the black sergeant—Death.
In other words, what you might call an unreconstructed Southerner, gnawing at old bones from the Civil War. I glanced up at a copy of the finished book on the shelf above my desk. And I could guess immediately that the typescript underneath my hand was longer. Leafing through it, I could see whole chapters were crossed out.
For example, in the section that describes the siege of Petersburg, there is an odd addendum to an account of the Battle of the Crater, which took place on the night and early morning of July 30, 1864: