“Of course it hurts,” she said.
The medical student left, and we talked about her illness, which was causing quite a sensation in the hospital. Specialists from several departments had been in to see her; she showed me the bruises on her forearms where they’d drawn vial after vial of blood. On the whole, she seemed pleased to be the object of so much attention. “If I’m lucky,” she said dryly, “they’ll publish me. I asked if there’s any chance they can use my real name.” My grandmother told me about the people who had been to visit: an aunt I hadn’t seen in years, cousins I barely knew. Charles had come several times to resupply her with the mystery novels she loved. My mothers came once. “For an hour,” my grandmother said. “It takes four hours to get here.”
“They should have stayed longer,” I said.
“I worry about them,” my grandmother said. “They want to live like they came out of a clamshell.” It took me a long moment to understand that she was referring to Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. “But everyone has a family, even in New York City.” She looked at me with alarming lucidity. “Do they ever talk to you about what happened?”
“In New York?”
“With Richard,” my grandmother said impatiently. She took my hand. She must have known that her own life would soon be over, and that whatever secrets she kept would then be known by no one at all. Her time to tell was limited. And she was selfish, as I imagine many people are at the end of their lives; my feelings mattered less to her than they had when she was well. “You poor boy,” she said, “do you even know Richard shot himself?”
So it came out. One night in the summer of 1970, a police detective called from Denver and told Oliver that Richard Ente was dead of a gunshot wound, in all likelihood self-inflicted. The detective wanted to know if Richard had any next of kin. The only reason he called Oliver was because he’d found a check from him in Richard’s wallet. “We couldn’t help the gentleman,” my grandmother said. “Richard never talked about his family.”
“They didn’t tell me,” I said numbly.
“Exactly,” my grandmother said.
This story flattened me, and it weakened my grandmother also: maybe she had come without knowing it to the age when her last few secrets were what kept her alive. She leaned back against the pillows of her hospital bed. Her eyes closed and her lips trembled, as though she wanted to say more, but when she did speak, finally, what she said was, “Ring for the nurse.” I did, and a minute later the nurse came in and chided my grandmother because she hadn’t eaten her vegetables. “These aren’t vegetables,” my grandmother said, “they’re,” and she shrugged, her face lit up with disgust.
I called my mothers that night from my motel room in Syracuse and had a bad conversation. Why hadn’t they told me? Why had Richard shot himself in Denver? The first question was easier to answer than the second. My mothers had been trying to protect me from having to feel what they still felt, a kind of baffled sadness, which made Richard Ente impossible either to dismiss or to forgive. They wanted me to have two parents and not be haunted by the ghost of a third. But why did he do it? My mothers didn’t know. Celeste believed Richard’s suicide had to do with things that had happened a long time ago, before he came to Thebes. “Any fifty-year-old man who falls in love with a sixteen-year-old girl has serious problems,” she said.
Marie sobbed into the phone; she didn’t know either.
“Let him go,” Celeste said. “Suicide is a mystery with no solution.”
“I’m so sorry,” Marie said. “I wish I could have done something to stop him.” She could have done something, but I wouldn’t know that until much later. Finally I got off the phone with my mothers, wiped my eyes and tried to take Celeste’s advice and put Richard out of my mind. Dead was dead. The fact that Richard had killed himself didn’t make him any more lost to me than he had been already. How could it matter if he died of a bullet or a heart attack? But I couldn’t let go of the question why?
When I came back from Syracuse, I looked for my father in the Bleak College (not its real name, but that’s another story) library, but nothing I found cast any light on his death. The membership directories of the New York State Bar Association told me that Richard Ente practiced law in New York from 1949 until 1970. He worked for Silberman & Mischeaux, a personal-injury firm, then in 1961 he went into private practice. His office was a few blocks from Times Square, in a building that has since been demolished. Lexis, which was just becoming available at the time, and which I got access to with the help of a friend in the law school, confirmed that my father was of counsel in Oliver Rowland et al. v. Snowbird Resort, Inc. The lawsuit, which my family had talked about only in vague terms, turned out to be stranger and more significant than I’d expected. According to Lexis, my grandfather sued for an injunction to prevent Joe Regenzeit from “interfering with the clouds and the natural condition of the air, sky, atmosphere and air space over plaintiffs’ lands and in the area of plaintiffs’ lands to in any manner, degree or way affect, control or modify the weather conditions on or about said lands,” which, reading farther down in the document, seems to have been a response to Joe Regenzeit’s “cloud-seeding devices and equipment generally used in a weather modification program,” the purpose of which was, in short, to make it snow. As if it didn’t snow enough in Thebes! Beginning sometime in the autumn of 1968, Joe Regenzeit was sprinkling the clouds with silver iodide, bringing further gloom to the gloomy mountain town, with the intention of turning it into a winter paradise. My grandfather objected. He, or rather his counsel, Richard Ente, Esq., argued that Regenzeit’s snow had encumbered the land, choked the roads, and clouded the minds of Thebes’s inhabitants, who were already unhappy enough come winter. He did not prevail. Having failed to demonstrate, in the first place, that Joe Regenzeit’s weather modification program was responsible for any particular snowfall, and, in the second, that the plaintiffs’ hardships were brought on by snow, specifically, as distinguished from cold, darkness, old age, excessive consumption of alcohol, rheumatoid arthritis, poor eyesight, poor diet, unusual devotion to their domestic animals, acts of God, or any other cause, the injunction was not granted, and Rowland v. Snowbird assumed its place in the history of weather-modification law, an important precedent, but one with few successors. According to an articled titled “Who Owns the Clouds Now?” 73 Mich. L. Rev. 129, Rowland v. Snowbird established, tacitly, a doctrine of “modified natural rights,” which is to say that if Regenzeit could make money off the clouds, and my grandfather didn’t lose any money thereby, then the clouds belonged to Regenzeit, which would have made him, my law-school friend said, the first person in American history ever to own a cloud. I took copious notes, and even thought of writing a science-fiction story that would take the case as its starting point, and project from it a world where not only the clouds but all natural phenomena, rain, wind, sunlight, fog, and even such intangibles as “clear skies” and “autumn chill,” were privately owned, so that the experience of the outdoors would involve an endless series of payments, and become in all likelihood a pastime for the rich.
Lexis had nothing to say on the subject of Richard Ente’s character. Since childhood, I had pictured my father as a handsome man, a distinguished lawyer in a dark suit and a blue-and-gold Bleak College necktie, because yes, he went to Bleak, just the same as my grandfather, the same as me, and I wonder if I didn’t go there in part because I hoped I’d find some trace of him. I imagined Richard Ente sitting at dinner with my grandfather, twirling a glass of wine between his fingers, like an old version of the young Sean Connery, if you see what I mean. Richard Ente offering his considered opinion on legal matters, then turning and catching Marie’s eye. Richard Ente pressing my mother’s hand as they said goodbye, and murmuring something in her ear. Richard Ente under cover of darkness climbing the roof of the garage, still in his dark suit, and slipping through my mothers’ open window. My love! said his love. Ssh, Richard Ente murmured, a cross now between James Bond and Humbert
Humbert, although I suppose Humbert Humbert is already that. We don’t want to wake them, do we? Marie’s hands at the knot of his tie. Richard’s hairy fingers—with a ring, perhaps, on the third left one?—undoing the top of Marie’s dress. Then an unclarity, willful, on my part. Then Richard Ente murmured, You mustn’t tell your father.—Damn my father, Marie said, rolling away from him and snugging her back to his chest. He’s a good man, Richard said softly. Not as good as you, Marie said. Hm, said Richard. He got up and dressed in the moonlight. Is my tie straight?—You look dashing, Marie said.—Then adieu.—No! But Richard Ente was gone; he had climbed out the window and down to the ground, and now he walked to where his car idled silently among the trees. None of this explained him taking his own life. I invented other scenes in which Richard Ente’s suicidal tendency would be manifest: Richard draining a flask before he gets into his car. Richard growling, I can’t go on with this charade! Richard speeding around a curve and closing his eyes. No. The story I’d made up about my father had petrified in my memory; adding the story of his death in Denver didn’t change him any more than the addition of paint to a rock would make it not a rock. My story was beyond contradiction, to the point where even now I think of it as being about my real father, even though I know for a fact that it is wrong in almost every particular.
Finally I stopped looking for the truth about Richard Ente. I was left with a mystery, a love of library research and a desire to get as far away from my family as I could: these last two came in handy when I went to Stanford to study American history.
LOST THINGS
The sun was already high over the mountains when I woke up, my neck and back frozen at bad angles from sleeping on the sofa. I washed my face and drank sulfurous water from the tap. By day, the house didn’t seem haunted, only cluttered. Four generations of Rowlands had lived there and as far as I could tell not one of them had ever thrown anything out. Cigar boxes and tobacco tins from the early twentieth century were heaped on a table in the hall, teapots, hatracks, mugs, pens, bowls full of buttons and pins, vases, stacks of old magazines, china statuettes of shepherds and milkmaids, candlesticks, bundles of letters, books, albums, records, telephone directories, ashtrays, bottle openers and pens given away by businesses that no longer existed, framed photographs of long-dead cousins, sewing kits, skeins of wool, coasters, place mats, watercolors of the Catskills that my grandmother had painted in her youth, road maps, paperweights, letter openers, seashells, lamps. Every horizontal surface in the house was heaped with stuff; every cabinet was full. There was no separation between the priceless things and the worthless ones: in the parlor, the silver inkwell which supposedly came over from France with Jean Roland was full of paper clips.
I went upstairs to my mothers’ bedroom, which looked just as it had when they ran away from Thebes in the spring of 1970. Embroidered bedspreads covered the twin beds; the trunks where Celeste kept her art things stood against the wall. There were two windows and two desks, and a poster tacked to the wall between them: Russian Folk Music, University Performing Arts Center, December 19, 1969. Their closet was a museum of fashion from the late sixties. Their bookshelf was the summum of thought from the same era: The Bell Jar, Being and Nothingness, Steppenwolf, The Stranger. The room had always seemed strange to me, and it was strange that my grandparents hadn’t done anything with it, the way they’d changed my uncle’s room into a study. It was as if they were still hoping my mothers would come back. But the room was creepy, and I could understand why the Celestes hadn’t wanted to come back. I felt like an idiot for agreeing to come in their place. I should have let them hire someone to get rid of everything. Without looking at my grandparents’ room, or the study, or the attic, my god, the attic, I got dressed and drove into town.
I parked in back of the Kountry Kitchen, took a booth by the window and looked blankly at the big sign outside the ski shop, which said
GOD BLESS AMERICA
WINTERS COMING
GET UR GEAR
There was almost no one in the restaurant, a couple of teenage girls in purple parkas smoking at the counter and a large party at the other end of the room, it looked like a business lunch, three men and a woman in suits, their jackets hung on the backs of their chairs, their cuff links gleaming. As I ate, I thought one of the men was trying to get my attention. He looked at me and raised his eyebrows inquisitively, and I wondered if it was because of my San Francisco clothes, my burgundy leather jacket and thrift-store shirt with the monkey Curious George depicted performing various activities against a yellow background. I nodded in what I hoped was a friendly, masculine way, as if to say yup, and went back to my lunch. Each time I looked up, he was watching me. I wondered if he was trying to pick me up, if he had come to the same conclusion about me that Charles had. A middle-aged businessman with curly gray hair and gold-rimmed eyeglasses, a dark-green suit a shade nattier than the suits around him, it was possible. My yup might have sent him the wrong signal; I didn’t know how grown-ups communicated in this part of the world. It was too bad, the woman sitting beside him was attractive. I would have liked to look at her wide mouth, her thick red lips and narrow chin. Even the faintly perceptible shadow of hairs on her upper lip was enticing. She would probably have fine brown hairs all down her back and arms. Instead I had to look at my lunch special, a breaded pork chop snuggled against the flank of a mountain of mashed potatoes and bathed in brown gravy. Then, suddenly, the man was standing in front of me, leaning toward me, eager, worried, saying my name. “Kerem,” he said, and held out his hand. “Do you remember me?” It was Joe Regenzeit’s son, grown and changed, thick where he used to be thin, shorter than me now. We embraced and his chin hit my shoulder.
“What are you doing here?” I asked. The last time I saw Kerem, he was fifteen years old, and bound, I thought, for fame in the world of professional soccer or notoriety in the underworld of punk rock.
“Running the family business,” Kerem said, grinning. He put his hand on my back. “Come say hello to my sister.”
He guided me to their table, where the woman, who had looked mysterious and attractive before I knew who she was, transformed herself into Yesim, Kerem’s younger sister, the way a certain shape beloved of psychologists changes from a rabbit into a duck. The hairs on her lip multiplied; her eyebrows grew closer to each other; her thick black hair became unruly. She stood up and shook my hand.
“We heard about your grandfather,” she said. “I’m sorry.” Meanwhile Kerem was introducing me to the other men, who were up from New York, “to give me a shot in the arm,” he said. They shook my hand and offered me truncated, almost furtive smiles, as though they could tell I was a negligible person, and regulations forbade them from associating with negligible persons while on duty. Still Kerem insisted on telling them who I was.
“We used to party together,” Kerem said, which wasn’t entirely true: we’d only gone to one party together. I kissed his girlfriend, but I don’t think he ever found out. Yesim looked at her brother anxiously.
“Are you in town long?” Kerem asked.
“A few days,” I said. “I’ve got to clean out my grandparents’ house.”
“Well, come have dinner with us. Come tonight!”
The city people glanced at each other. I wanted to warn Kerem that by talking to me he was reducing his importance in their eyes, but there was no way to do it and he wouldn’t have listened. Kerem had always been like that, generous when it would have been better to be selfish. I thanked him and paid my check. I looked back at Yesim, but she was talking to the city people, explaining that in a small town you were always running into people from the past.
REGENZEIT
That afternoon, instead of getting to work on the house, I picked up Progress in Flying Machines and read about M. Hureau de Villeneuve, the permanent secretary of the French Aeronautical Society, who built more than three hundred model flying machines, all of them with flapping wings. His experiments culminated with the construction of a g
iant steampowered bat, which was connected by a hose to a boiler on the ground. When M. de Villeneuve turned the machine on, it flapped its wings violently and did, in fact, rise into the air—at which point M. de Villeneuve became afraid that it would pull free of the hose, and switched it off. The bat fell to the ground and smashed one of its wings, and the story ended with M. de Villeneuve waiting for someone to invent a lighter motor so he could resume his experiments. I wondered what, if anything, the early-aviation community had learned from his failure. Don’t make any more giant bats? Hose-tethered flying machines not a good idea? The hard fact of it was that ornithop-ters, machines with flapping wings, were a digression from the path that led to the airplane. No matter what motor you used, none of them would ever really work. M. de Villeneuve had devoted his life to something, but I couldn’t think of exactly what it was: flight’s penumbra, maybe, the weird shadow of hopeless invention against which the Wrights’ brightness defined itself.
After a few pages of Progress in Flying Machines, my attention wandered, and I found myself thinking again about my grandfather. I remembered how he used to entertain me and my grandmother with stories from the Catskill Eagle: a police station was opening in Jewett, there was an art fair in Woodstock, the new pizzeria in Hunter was a big success. “Run by actual Italians, that’s their secret,” my grandfather said, as though we were the owners of a rival pizzeria wondering at our own sluggish business. “Apparently they import their flour from Italy.” My grandfather reflected on what he had just said, and frowned. “Not that there’s anything wrong with American flour. Mary, don’t you bake with American flour?” My grandmother affirmed that she did. “Perfectly good flour,” my grandfather said. He considered how much more he should say about it, or whether he ought to praise my grandmother’s baking. Instead he said, “It must be a question of technique. The Italians have been making pizza for a long time, you know.”
Luminous Airplanes: A Novel Page 4