by Richard Ford
Though specifically where he is concerned, I dearly wish I could speak from some more established place—the way Charley would were he the father of the first part—rather than from this constellation of stars among which I smoothly orbit, traffic and glide. Indeed, if I could see myself as occupying a fixed point rather than being in a process (the quiddity of the Existence Period), things might grow better for us both—myself and barking son. And in this Ann may simply be right when she says children are a signature mark of self-discovery and that what’s wrong with Paul is nothing but what’s wrong with us. Though how to change it?
Spiriting on across the Hudson and past Albany—the “Capital Region”—I am on the lookout now for I-88, the blue Catskills rising abruptly into view to the south, hazy and softly solid, with smoky mares’ tails running across the range. Following his nap Paul has fished into his Paramount bag and produced a Walkman and a copy of The New Yorker. He’s inquired moodily about the availability of tapes, and I’ve offered my “collection” from the glove compartment: Crosby, Stills and Nash from 1970, which is broken; Laurence Olivier reading Rilke, also broken; Ol’ Blue Eyes Does the Standards, Parts I and II, which I bought one lonely night from an 800 number in Montana; two sales motivation speeches all agents were given in March and that I have yet to listen to; plus a tape of myself reading Doctor Zhivago (to the blind), given as a Christmas gift by the station manager who thought I’d done a bang-up job and ought to get some pleasure from my efforts. I’ve never put it on either, since I’m not that much for tapes. I still prefer books.
Paul tries the Doctor Zhivago, tunes it in on his Walkman for approximately two minutes, then begins looking at me with an expression of phony, wide-eyed astoundment and eventually says, his earphones still on, “This is very revealing: ‘Ruffina Onissimovna was a woman of advanced views, entirely unprejudiced and well disposed toward everything that she called positive and vital.’” He smiles a narrow, belittling smile, though I say nothing, since for some reason it embarrasses me. He clicks in the Sinatra then, and I can hear Frank’s tiny buzzy-bee voice deep inside his ear jacks. Paul picks up his New Yorker and begins reading in stony silence.
But almost the instant we’re south of Albany and out of sight of its unlovely civic skyscrapers, all vistas turn wondrous and swoopingly dramatic and as literary and history-soaked as anything in England or France. A sign by a turnout announces we have now entered the CENTRAL LEATHERSTOCKING AREA, and just beyond, as if on cue, the great corrugated glacial trough widens out for miles to the southwest as the highway climbs, and the butt ends of the Catskills cast swart afternoon shadows onto lower hills dotted by pocket quarries, tiny hamlets and pristine farmsteads with wind machines whirring to undetectable winds. Everything out ahead suddenly says, “A helluva massive continent lies this way, pal, so you better be mindful.” (It’s the perfect landscape for a not very good novel, and I’m sorry I didn’t bring my four-in-one Cooper to read aloud after dinner and once we’re staked out on the porch. It would beat being taunted about Doctor Zhivago.)
In my official view, absolutely nothing should be missed from here on, geography offering a natural corroboration to Emerson’s view that power resides in moments of transition, in “shooting the gulf, in darting to an aim.” Paul could do himself a heap of good to set aside his New Yorker and try contemplating his own status in these useful terms: transition, jettisoning the past. “Life only avails, not having lived.” I should’ve bought a tape of it and not a book.
But he’s locked down in a bit-lip sound cocoon of “Two sweethearts in the summer wind,” and reading “Talk of the Town” with his lips moving, and couldn’t give a sweet rat’s fart about what interesting movie’s playing outside his window. Traveling is finally a fool’s paradise.
I make a brief scenic turnout below Cobleskill to stretch my back (my coccyx has now begun aching). Leaving Paul in the seat, I climb out into the little breezy lot and walk to the sandstone parapet beyond which the luminous Pleistocene valley leaps out stark and vast and green and brown-peaked with the animal grandeur of an inland empire any bona fide pioneer would’ve quaked before trying to tame. I actually climb onto the wall and take several deep clean breaths, do several strenuous jumping jacks and squat thrusts, touch my toes, pop my fingers, rotate my neck as the sweet odors float in on the watery air. Beyond me hawks soar, martins dip, a tiny airplane buzzes, a distant hang glider like a dragonfly wheels and sways in the rising molecules. A door in a far-off, invisible house slams audibly shut, a car horn blows, a dog barks. And visible on the hillside opposite, where the sun paints a yellow square upon the western gradient, a tractor, tiny but detectably red, halts its progress in an emerald field; a tiny, hatted figure climbs down, pauses, then starts on foot back up the hill he’s tractored down. He moves for a long, slow ways above and away from his machine, turns and goes a distance along a curved rim top, then resolutely, undramatically goes over, disappears at his own pace to whatever world’s beyond. It is a fine moment to savor, even alone, though I wish my son could break loose and share it. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him sing opera.
I stand and stare a while at nothing in particular, my exercise ended, my back loosened, my son entombed in the car reading a magazine. The yellow square begins gradually to fade on the opposite hillside, then moves mysteriously left, darkens the green hayfield instead of lighting it, and I decide—satisfied and palpably enlivened—to pack it in.
Somebody has left a plastic bag of Styrofoam “popcorn” half out of the trash can—the pale-green kernels that Christmas wreaths or your repaired Orvis reel comes boxed in. A new warm afternoon breeze is shifting wispy kernels here and there around the lot. I stop before climbing in to jam the bag down farther and to police up what bits I can with two hands.
Paul looks up from his New Yorker and stares at me where I’m tidying up the asphalt around the car. I merely look back at him from my side of the window, my hands full of clingy green stuff. He fingers his cut ear under his Walkman, blinks, then slowly makes his fingers into a pistol, points it at his temple, produces a silent little “boom” sound with his lips, throws his head back in terrible mock death, then goes back to reading. It’s scary. Anyone would think so. Especially a father. But it’s also funny as hell. He is not so bad a boy.
Short-term destinations are by far the best.
Paul and I skirt the outskirts of Oneonta a little past five, turn north on Route 28 along the newly rose Susquehanna, and in truth are almost there. (Geography, while instructive, is also the Northeast’s soundest selling point and best-kept secret, since in three hours you can stand on the lapping shores of Long Island Sound, staring like Jay Gatz at a beacon light that lures you to, or away from, your fate; yet in three hours you can be heading for cocktails damn near where old Natty drew first blood—the two locales as unalike as Seattle is to Waco.)
Route 28 takes a pretty hickory-and-maple-shaded course straight upriver through tiny postcard villages, past farms, woodlots and single-family roadside split-levels and ranches. Here is a cut-ur-own Xmas tree lot, a pick-ur-own raspberry patch and apple orchard, a second-echelon B&B tucked into a hillside sugarbush; an attack-dog academy, an ugly clear-cut bordered by a low-yield hay meadow with Guernsey cows grazing to the edge of a gravel pit.
Here you’d expect to find no planning boards, PUDs, finicky building codes, septic standards, sidewalk ordinances or ridgetop laws; just an as yet unspoilt place to site your summer cabin or mobile home where and exactly how you want it, right down the road from a good Guinea restaurant, with its own marinara and Genesee on tap, and where a 10 a.m. night owl’s mass is still celebrated Sundays at St. Joe’s in Milford. It’s the perfect mix, in other words, of small-scale Vermont atmospherics with unpretentious, upstate hardscrabble, all an afternoon’s drive from the G.W. Bridge. (Dark rumors may now and then surface that it’s also a prime location for big-city muscle to off-load their mistakes, but no place is without a downside.)
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Meanwhile, my spirits have taken a strong upward turn and I’d now like to try hauling Paul into a planned off-the-cuff give-and-take squarely on the notion of Independence Day itself, and to point out that the holiday isn’t just a moth-bit old relic-joke with men dressed up like Uncle Sam and harem guards on hogs doing circles within circles in shopping-mall lots; but in fact it’s an observance of human possibility, which applies a canny pressure on each of us to contemplate what we’re dependent on (barking in honor of dead basset hounds, thinking we’re thinking, penis tingling, etc.) and after that to consider in what ways we’re independent or might be; and finally how we might decide—for the general good—not to worry about it much at all.
This may be the only way an as-needed parent can in good faith make contact with his son’s life problems; which is to say sidereally, by raising a canopy of useful postulates above him like stars and hoping he’ll connect them up to his own sightings and views like an astronomer. Anything more purely parental—wading in and doing some stern stable-cleaning about stealing rubbers, wrecking cars, kicking security personnel, braining stepfathers (who might even deserve it), torturing innocent birds, eventually hauling up his court appearance and how that might correlate inversely with coming to Haddam to live with me and after that with his chances of ever getting into Williams on a “need scholarship”—simply wouldn’t work. In the dizzyingly brief time we have together, he would only retreat into raucous barking, furtive smiles and sullener silences, ending up with me in a fury and in all likelihood ferrying him back to Deep River, feeling myself to be (and being) a ruinous failure. I don’t, after all, know what’s wrong him, am not even certain anything is, or that wrong isn’t just a metaphor for something else, which may itself already be a metaphor. Though probably what’s amiss, if anything, is not much different from what’s indistinctly amiss with all of us at one time or another—we’re not happy, we don’t know why, and we drive ourselves loony trying to get better.
Paul has stashed his Walkman back in his bag and set his New Yorker on the dash, where it reflects distractingly in the windshield, but he has also grabbed up the slender green-jacketed Emerson off the back seat, where it’s been on top of my red REALTOR windbreaker, and begun giving it a look. This is better than I could’ve planned, though it’s clear he hasn’t cracked the copy I mailed him.
“Do you think you’d rather have a child with Down’s syndrome or a child with just regular mental illness?” he says, leafing casually backward through Self-Reliance as if it were Time.
“I’m pretty pleased with how you and Clarissa turned out. So I guess I’d rather have neither one.” A mental mug shot of the little feral Mongoloid back in Friendly’s hours ago opens a cruel vein of awareness that Paul may think he’s that or heading that way.
“Choose,” Paul says, still leafing. “Then give me your reasons.”
On the right, outside pretty little Federalist Milford, we cruise by the Corvette Hall of Fame, a shrine Paul, if he saw it, would vigorously insist on touring since, for reasons of Charley’s Old Greenwich tastes, he’s claimed the Corvette as his favorite car. (He likes them, he says, because they’ll melt.) Only he doesn’t see it because he’s looking through Emerson! (Plus, I’m now headed for the barn and a tall, stiff drink and an evening in a big wicker rocker made by native artisans working with local materials.)
“Ordinary mental illness, then,” I say. “You can sometimes cure that. Down’s syndrome you’re pretty much stuck with.”
Paul’s eyes, his mother’s slate-gray ones, flicker at me astutely, acknowledging something—I’m not certain what. “Sometimes,” he says in a dark voice.
“Do you still want to be a mime?” We have passed out along the little Susquehanna again—more postcard corn patches, blue and white silos, more snowmobile repairs.
“I didn’t want to be a mime. That was a joke at camp. I want to be a cartoonist. I just can’t draw.” He scratches his scalp with the warty side of his hand and sniffs, then makes a seemingly involuntary little eeeck noise back in his throat, grimaces, then stations both hands in front of his face, palms out, doing the man-in-the-glass-box and, looking over at me, still grimacing, silently mouthing “Help me, help me.” He then quits and immediately begins flipping Emerson pages backward again. “What’s this supposed to be about?” He stares down at the page he happens to have opened. “Is it a novel?”
“It’s a terrific book,” I say, uncertain how to promote it. “It’s got—“
“You’ve got a lot of things underlined in it,” Paul says. “You must’ve had it in college.” (A rare reference to my having had a life prior to his. For a boy in the clench of the past, he has little interest in life before his own. My or his mother’s family history, for instance, lack novelty. Not that I entirely blame him.)
“You’re welcome to read it.”
“Wel-come, welcome,” he says to mock me. “And that’s the way it is, Frank,” he says, reverting to his Cronkite voice again, staring down at Self-Reliance on his lap as though it interested him.
Then almost surprisingly we are on the south fringes of Cooperstown, coming in past a fenced sale lot packed with used speedboats, another lot with “bigfoot” trucks, a prim white Methodist church with a VACATION BIBLE SCHOOL sign, right in line with a smattering of neat, overpriced, Forties-vintage mom and pop motels with their lots already full of luggage-crammed sedans and station wagons. At the actual village limits sign, a big new billboard demands the passerby “Vote Yes!” However, I see no signs for the Deerslayer or the Hall of Fame, which simply means to me that Cooperstown doesn’t put its trust in celebrity or glamour but prefers standing on its own civic feet.
“‘The great man,’” Paul reads in a pseudo-reverent Charlton Heston voice, “‘is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.’ Blah, blah, blah, blah-blah, blah, blah. Glub, glub, glub. ‘The objection to conforming to usages that have become dead to you is that it scatters your force. It loses your time and blurs the impression of your character.’ Quack, quack, quack, quack. I am the great man, the grape man, the grapefruit, I am the fish stick—“
“To be great is usually to be misunderstood,” I say, watching traffic and looking for signs. “That’s a good line for you to remember. There’re some other good ones.”
“I’ve got enough things I remember already,” he says. “I’m drowning. Glub, glub, glub.” He raises his hands and makes swimming-drowning motions, then makes a quick, confidential eeeck like an old gate needing oiling, then grimaces again.
“Reading it’s good enough, then. There’s not going to be a test.”
“Test. Tests make me really mad,” Paul says, and suddenly with his dirty fingers rips out the page he’s just read from.
“Don’t do that!” I make a grab for it, crunching the green cover so that I dent its shiny paper. “You have to be a complete nitwit asshole to do that!” I stuff the book between my legs, though Paul still has the torn page and is folding it carefully into quarters. This qualifies as oppositional.
“I’ll keep it instead of remembering it.” He maintains his poise, while mine’s all lost. He sticks the folded page into his shorts pocket and looks out his window the other way. I am glaring at him. “I just took a page from your book.” He says this in his Heston voice. “Do you by the way see yourself as a complete failure?”
“At what?” I say bitterly. “And get this fucking New Yorker off the dashboard.” I grab it and wing it in the back. We’re now encountering increased vehicular traffic, entering shady little bendy-narrow village streets. Two paperboys sit side by side on a street corner, folding from stacks of afternoon papers. Outside, the air—which of course I can’t feel—looks cool and moist and inviting, though I’m sure it’s hot.
“At anything.” He makes his little eeeck sound far down his throat, as if I’m not supposed to hear it.
My chest feels emptied with outrage and regret
(over a page in a book?), but I answer because I’m asked. “My marriage to your mother and your upbringing. These haven’t been the major accomplishments in my current term. Everything else is absolutely great, though.” I am gaunt with how little I want to be in the car alone with my son, only barely arrived upon the storied streets of our destination. My jaw has gone steely, my back aches again and the interior feels thick and airless, as if I’m being gassed by fearsome dread. I wish to a lonely, faraway and inattentive god that Sally Caldwell were in this car with us; or better yet, that Sally was here and Paul was back in Deep River, torturing birds, inflicting injuries and dispensing his smoky dread within the population there. (The Existence Period was patented to ward off such unwelcome feelings. Only it isn’t working.)
“Do you remember how old Mr. Toby would be if he hadn’t gotten run over?”
I’m just about to ask him if he’s been snuffing grackles for fun. “Thirteen, why?” My eyes are fast seeking any DEERSLAYER INN sign.
“That’s something I can’t quit thinking about,” he says for possibly the thirtieth time, as we come to the center-of-town intersection, where some kids dressed exactly like Paul are slouching delinquently on the corner curb, playing idiotic Hacky Sack right in among the passersby. Town seems to be a little brick and white-shuttered village, shaded by big scarlet oaks and hickories, all as charming and snappily tended to as a well-kept cemetery.
“Why do you think you think about that?” I say irritably.
“I don’t know. It seems like it ruined everything that was fixed back then.”
“It didn’t. Nothing’s fixed anyway. Why don’t you try writing some of it down.” For some reason I feel aggravated by the story of my mother and the nun on Horn Island and wanting (God knows why) more children.