The Farewell Symphony

by Edmund White

  “I don’t know why you two are so sensitive. I just call a spade a spade, but you’re always cringing and wincing.”

  Anne was miserable. She had been living in a small apartment on the Near North Side and driving up to a North Shore college where she was studying for her master’s in social work, but she’d become such a drinker that her ex-husband had insisted on taking back their children. Even though he’d loved my sister so deeply and suffered so much because of her, he quickly remarried and at last turned very cold toward her.

  “You can hardly blame him,” my mother said during one of our weekly phone calls. “I just don’t know what’s wrong with Anne. Here she had a nice-looking husband—”

  “Mother, he’s not nice looking.”

  “Well, maybe not by New York narcissistic standards, but he was a perfectly presentable—”

  “Randy boor.”

  “She should have been glad he was attentive, most men are unfaithful after a few years of marriage, look at your own father, when we were just a young couple living in a furnished room in Gary, Indiana, why, we had to share the bathroom with another couple, but I didn’t mind, we received a book once a month from the Book of the Month Club and we read it out loud to each other, we read Will and Ariel Durant’s The Story of Philosophy out loud, and then he dragged home a filthy disease, he gave me gonorrhea—”

  “Mother, you’ve told me all that a thousand times.”

  “Well, I’m just establishing what men, most men, are like and how Anne was wrong to reject her husband, so upstanding and devoted, this is just between us, I’d never tell her—”

  “Mother, Anne is a lesbian.”

  “She’s not, she’s just imitating you, she’s always been impressionable.”

  One night, very late, my mother called, sobbing, to say my sister had tried to commit suicide again. “The poor little thing, we’ve been frantic, we didn’t know where to look for her. She had another bout in the hospital, I didn’t tell you, I didn’t want to upset you, and when she was released she thought her shrink would be there, I guess she’s in love with him, well, he wasn’t and she never left the parking lot of the hospital, talk about acting out, she’d stashed some pills in the car, just in case, I guess, that girl is so unstable, though I always showered her with advantages—”

  “Mother, tell me about Anne.”

  “Well, don’t snap my head off” (she said “snap” instead of “bite”). “Although I can understand that you must be terribly upset. It seems that her shrink had gone on vacation. She must have felt terribly abandoned. Of course I would have been there upon discharge but she won’t take my calls. I’m the villain. Her doctor—oh, brother, you’ve never seen such a weak-chinned, limp-wristed, weasly little shrimp as this doctor, who’s not even an MD. He’s only a social worker who subscribes to some sort of barmy ‘contractual therapy’ where you sign a contract to do certain things and not others—”

  I felt threatened by my sister’s breakdown, especially since I’d grown up thinking she was our hostage to normality, the only one of us three who wasn’t weird. Ever since I’d been a child, my mother, my sister and I had formed a rag-tag tribe of three. We were like mice curled up inside a drawer in the attic who can recognize one another by the family smell. We fought, we complained, we had our shared jokes. Our mother kept up a perpetual litany of self-praise and some of it spilled over onto Anne and me. We were both “brilliant,” of course, although Anne was “practical” and I was “in the clouds.” We were the Three Musketeers. We took long car trips together, making five hundred miles a day as we drove across the Mississippi and on down to Texas to see our grandmother. We’d stop in roadside motor lodges where for five dollars our mother would rent a bungalow for the night (“Isn’t this exciting, kids?”), one that would smell of backed-up sewage and where nothing was clean but the water glasses in glassine envelopes and presumably the toilet seat, which when upright retracted into a machine that treated it with germ-killing ultraviolet rays. If there was a TV, as there only sporadically was and then only after the mid-1950s, we had to feed it with quarters. Often it had glued to it a translucent plastic sheet dyed blue at the top for the sky and green at the bottom for grass. Sometimes the bed would vibrate with “magic fingers” if it was fed quarters. The motel owner would roll down the hill a metal cot on wheels for me, which opened up with all the grace of an iron lung and was as comfortable as the rack. More than once we’d be awakened by bedbugs. Tiny red dots would appear around our ankles and across our tummies.

  When we’d get to Ranger, Texas, where our grandmother lived with her second husband, Anne and I felt like Yankees and city slickers. We settled down, slightly in awe of these very old country people. Our grandmother, Willie Lulu, had been one of twelve children. Her parents had been homesteaders who’d come in a covered wagon from Louisiana to Texas a couple of decades after the Civil War. We went out to their original farm, where one of my great-uncles still lived. My own mother had lived there as a girl after her real father had died and before her mother had remarried. There were pecan trees by a stream. There was a smokehouse behind the main house; the main house had started out as a log cabin that had gradually been engulfed by the rooms that were added on in every direction. My mother remembered her Grandmother Oakes, who’d sit in a leather chair reading the Bible and chewing tobacco. Her pale-eyed husband never said a word. The family picture of all twelve children and the parents on the porch looked like road kill caught in the headlights.

  Our grandmother, Willie Lulu, had ended up somehow in this nearly abandoned town of Ranger, which still flew a tattered banner over the main street that proclaimed, “Oil Capital of the World,” even though the wells had long since run dry. Folks had to drive fifty miles to the nearest movie theater. Willie had a little house on one level of just five rooms and a kitchen. There was the front parlor we never went into, as rarely visited as the front door that led into it. In that room were armchairs and a sofa of tufted velveteen and an empty cut-glass flower vase on a pale blue mirrored coffee table. In a bookcase, which was a separate piece of furniture covered with a doily and sheathed with clear glass doors that could be unlocked and swung open, were housed all the volumes of the Harvard Five-Foot Shelf of Classics, including the poems of John Greenleaf Whittier and James Whitcomb Riley, Charles Dana’s memoirs, Two Tears Before the Mast, Lowell’s Breakfast Chat, a rhymed verse translation of Dante and many other treasures. They must have belonged to my step-grandfather; Willie could read only by moving her lips. Then there were two bedrooms, each heated by a gas burner. There was a family room where everyone spent the whole day and finally a dining room next to the kitchen where we ate our fried chicken, collard greens, black-eyed peas and biscuits and gravy.

  She chopped all her hair way back so that it looked like a crewcut growing out. Her eyes were nearly white with cataracts and she could no longer see to sew though she could read and write letters. Willie wrote her letters in pencil and spelled phonetically. She and my mother corresponded every day they were apart. Willie was always smiling, a bit lopsidedly because her face was palsied on one side. She had three ripe, heavy wens on her face, one beside her mouth. Willie dressed up with a hat and black shoes and a store-bought dress with a belt of the same color to go around her broad waist when my mother would take her in the car to see other relatives in farflung Texas towns, but at home she wore a short-sleeved house dress and backless slippers. Her arms were heavy and crêpey and jiggled when she moved. She babied her husband and even bought him his clothes and cut his hair, but at the same time she respected him as an educated man. If she called him “Mr. Wentworth,” he called her just “Willie.”

  The back door was always open in the summer, night and day, though a screen door kept out the flies. A fan swept us all in its fugitive breeze. A grape arbor produced tangy, almost bitter dark blue grapes with cloudy, blue-grey skins. When Willie would call her chickens to feed them she’d produce a high wail as strange as a Bedouin’s ulula
tion.

  Work was minimal when we were there. Most of the time we sat around “visiting.” We’d go over every little thing, such as the weather or the mileage our car was getting or the immoral goings-on of the local high school coach, who was bedding several of the married women in town. My grandmother would stand on her porch and watch his progress from house to house, as though he were the rooster servicing all the chickens. My mother would talk a lot about her plans. I noticed she made them sound even more idealistic and humanitarian than when she was alone with us, although her tone was always somewhat exalted. If a joke was good, there was no reason it shouldn’t be repeated, and hours later a silence could still be filled with a reprise of the punchline (“And that, son, is the difference ’tween courtesy and tact”), which would trigger off a new chorus of laughter that would reduce my mother and grandmother to tears.

  Of course we couldn’t say anything strange or negative about our life up north, because my mother was so eager to shine in Willie’s eyes. I suppose we half-suspected, Anne and I, that we were deeply disturbed, and we were relieved to look like a happy, successful family for a moment in our grandmother’s eyes, even if she was an old woman whose face was scored with lines, as though the person tracing out portions with a knife on the soft icing had gone mad and continued to score it senselessly into ever smaller pieces. We wanted to be approved of by our grandmother, even if she said, “Why, ain’t that nice,” to almost anything upbeat and would shuffle back to her kitchen the instant the talk took an “ugly” turn. If she was forced to listen to something harsh, the most she would say was, “Well, I declare.”

  She had a certain reserve that worked as a reproach to her garrulous, self-dramatizing children. Just when everyone else was leaning into the conversation, Willie would step outdoors, pretending to chase a neighbor’s cat away. Or she’d head for the kitchen to dry her dishes and arrange them. Our mother turned to her stepfather, “Willie would never let me do chores. When I got married I didn’t even know how to boil an egg. If I so much as offered to dry a dish she’d say, ‘I want you to study. Anyone can do chores. You’ve got to make something of yourself so that you can be of service. You were put on this earth to help humanity.’ ” At that my mother would tear up and grab her stepfather’s hand. “You two have always believed in me. When I was going through the X-A” (our code word for my parents’ divorce) “it was your faith in me that kept me going.”

  Willie had a cat she liked but she kept it outdoors. As a farm woman she had no truck with household pets. Her favorite chicken was called Biddy. She was a good laying chicken and Willie stole Biddy’s egg every morning. I asked her if she’d ever kill Biddy and eat it, but all she would say was, “Eat that stringy old thing?” Typically she concealed her real affection under feigned disdain.

  Willie’s first husband, Jim, had died when my mother was just twelve. I confused the stories: sometimes it was said that Jim, who worked repairing or maybe laying train track, died of malaria, which he’d contracted when the railroad was being built through miasmal Houston. Other times it seemed he’d suffered a sunstroke. All that remains of him are a few beautifully penned postcards to my mother from a hospital in Colorado where he’d gone to “rest” (could he have had tuberculosis and they were afraid to name it?) and a tintype of a handsome young man—deep-set pale eyes, sensual mouth, unreadable brow, lots of hair—sitting on a porch beside a standing Willie, round-faced, hair up, her hat and traveling suit covered with jet-black embroidery. My mother and her defiant-looking brother in plus-fours and a newspaper boy’s cap are squeezed between them. What seems suggestive is that, contrary to a Victorian wedding photo, here the man is seated and the woman standing.

  As a railroad employee my grandfather had been lodged in a little house beside the tracks, but after he died my grandmother and her two children were ousted. They’d gone to the homestead farm—bliss for my mother, who’d run wild and played with dozens of cousins. And with one teenage uncle. “He used to rub me down there when I was just five or six. I liked it. It felt wonderful. Everyone makes too much of sex with children. After all, children have their sexual needs, too. As long as there’s no violence….” Willie, however, had to work terribly hard from dawn to dusk on the farm to earn their keep, although no one would have put it like that. She was just “doing chores.”

  She’d been released from servitude when she unexpectedly married Mr. Wentworth, a local high school math teacher. He took my mother’s education in hand and later, when she was eighteen, made sure she went to university. He went with her, since he was working on an advanced degree that would allow him to teach on the junior college level. Without him my mother would never have had a higher education.

  He was a good fifteen years younger than Willie and had always been fussed over by his mother and spinster sisters. He was almost an invalid since when, as a boy, he’d tattled to the schoolmarm on the other boys and they’d rewarded him after class by beating his leg to the bone with a thick stick. It became infected, then gangrenous, and finally had to be sawed off. Now he had a heavy wooden leg that was attached to his body by an elaborate harness. He walked with a rocking gait and had to lift the leg with both hands when he went upstairs. If he was resting he’d slump down in his chair and keep it stretched out in front of him. When Anne and I went to waken him in the morning, his leg would be standing in the corner like a totem garlanded with orthopedic straps.

  When I was very young—fourteen?—my grandmother put my mother and sister in one bedroom and my grandfather and me in the other. She slept on the couch. Mr. Wentworth was a randy old thing who’d hug us all to his big soft chest and belly with his surprisingly powerful arms. At such moments he cocked his head to one side and wore a big, fatuous smile as though he were transfixed by some private joke. My mother said, “Poor Mr. Wentworth, I’m sure Willie won’t—well, I’m sure he’s not getting much tenderness from her. Mother is as good as good gets but she doesn’t set much store by—well, I’m sure Mr. Wentworth is starved for affection. But he’s always been a terrible hugger and grabber. Maybe it started with his infirmity, but when I was sixteen and he became my stepdad, I can remember how he’d hug and hug me and I didn’t like it at all but Willie refused to see anything wrong, she’d just say, ‘Stop your fussin’, can’t you see he’s just being sweet?’”

  I wasn’t his favorite grandchild and I’m sure he preferred little girls to boys, but that night—in the big featherbed which smelled of the yellowing cake of tar soap that Willie kept out in the wash house next to the chicken coop—Mr. Wentworth and I squeezed each other for hours on end. I was interested in his penis but no matter how much I let my hand, seemingly innocently, trail or flop about, he kept shifting adroitly away to avoid its touch.

  He would, however, squeeze me and let me squeeze him, which was like squeezing a huge bolster loosely packed with feathers, but heavy feathers, as though they’d been dipped in mercury.

  I could scarcely sleep, but I must have drifted into and out of sleep. My grandfather seemed to be mostly awake as well, since nearly every time I looked at him he was smiling on the pillow beside me. He was dressed in big, baggy white undershorts and a loose white T-shirt. When he’d un-strapped his wooden leg he’d hopped on the other over to bed. I was fascinated by his stump and he was never shy about showing it. But I’d never touched it and now I kept trying to judge from the pressure against me whether there was a bone in it or not.

  My erection, pressed by my underpants against my stomach, throbbed, unrequited, and acted as the motor to my dreams. My dreams were at least half literary. My mother had given me a rhyming dictionary for Christmas that also explained all the traditional meters and forms. All through the holidays I’d been working on a paean to the seasons in Byron’s ottava rima. My pleasure in the writing was registered as a light strum of my whole body and as a sizzling behind the temples. Sometimes I felt as though I were in an elevator that had just fallen a foot. For the first time my life was no longer all st
accato notes. The idea that I had a big ongoing project had added to the score graceful, interlocking legato marks. The coal-tar smell of the clean sheets, smooth as wilting flower petals from hundreds of washings, the outrage of the cock’s strangled cry just on the other side of the window, the metronomic pulsing of my penis under the waistband of my underpants, the pillowy disarray of my grandfather and his shy, half-awake smile, the visceral certainty that I was writing a great poem—that even now, as dawn was painting layer upon thin, silvery layer of lacquer on the blinds, my poem was metastasizing somewhere inside me—these were the elements that as a young Buddhist I tried to separate out, to disentangle and card. I wanted to cut through the knot of self, but as a writer I was incurably self-centered. I mean that I watched my mind at work and tried to catch it in the act of thinking; I was like a fisherman who watches a still pool, looking for a tell-tale ripple, that second when a wave takes on the substance of a fin or tail.

  At last I fell asleep. When I awakened, my grandfather was already in harness and dressed and in the adjoining back parlor. Even through the closed door I could hear him saying to my grandmother, my mother and sister, “Ooh-ee! That little boy is just as sweet as he can be. We hugged and kissed all night long. He wouldn’t let me go one single minute. He just hugged and kissed me. I never did see such a sweet little boy.”

  “Wall, ain’t that just the sweetest thang you ever did hear?” I could just picture my grandmother’s faint smile, her clouded eyes and the way her palsy shook her head slightly left to right, right to left as though she were saying no when all she ever said was yes.

  My mother and sister were ominously silent. They, of course, knew exactly what sort of sickness and perversion I’d been up to. I wanted to rush out and shut my grandfather up, but it was too late, he was already saying it again, “Well, he’s just as sweet as sugar. I never knew he loved his grand-daddy so much. He just hugged and squeezed me all night long. He’s as loving as a little angel boy.”