by Jane Rule
I could not face Sunday, some kind of brunch at a hotel with the boys we’d seen the night before. I took a train back to Palo Alto the next morning, still ill, but what my mother saw was the sunny overlay of my ride on the beach. I had at last had a taste of her own glamorous girlhood in San Francisco, among the cultured and the rich. I hadn’t the heart or courage to contradict her, confirmed instead the details of her fantasy. I was not able to eat so much as a rum-flavoured Life Saver for years afterward.
I ENTERTAINED MY MOTHER EVERY DAY when I came home to lunch with what went on at school. My own misbehaviour, whatever I organized—piling desks on top of each other, or wisecracking, or leaving comic messages on the blackboard—was always in response to some authoritarian silliness to which I didn’t think any student should be victim. I did not trouble her with anything that really troubled me. Libby was still often sick. Arthur not only routinely stole Mother’s car but had been picked up by the police for truancy and vandalizing property and was threatened with reform school. Mother Packer and the Colonel, who might earlier have been some help, were having difficulty taking care of themselves without the domestic help they were accustomed to. Mother Packer, suffering a range of physical ailments and nervous disorders, was irritably demanding. I bicycled over to their house to do what errands I could, but Mother was the centre of their need as well as ours.
Tired and discouraged about how little her nagging or threatening Arthur reached him, Mother tried for a time to give him positive, generous attention. She asked him what he’d particularly like to do on his birthday. He asked for tickets to a concert in San Francisco and suggested the menu for his birthday dinner. But he left the day before and didn’t come home for the concert or the meal.
Mother went to a therapist and tried to get Arthur to go, but he wouldn’t. Mother continued with her sessions, and, though her relationship with Arthur continued to deteriorate, she at least had somewhere to go to find adult help.
“He says Arthur’s not my problem, Mother is,” Mother responded. “I wish the police agreed with him.”
My relationship with Arthur was an on-again, off-again thing. Because he made no real friends of his own of the sort he could bring home, he increasingly depended on mine. At fifteen, he’d reached his full height of six feet and five inches and looked older than he was. His good looks, old-fashioned manners and taste for extravagant gestures made him much in demand, not only with girls our own age, but with young women.
“I’m a war substitute,” he commented wryly.
Though he sometimes dated my friends, he preferred the less-formal arrangement of gang parties. A good many of the day students at Castilleja came from wealthy, indulgent, bewildered parents who offered up their houses to Saturday night parties for their teenagers, leaving them to do pretty much what they wanted to. There was always as much beer to drink as anyone wanted, and hard liquor wasn’t difficult to come by. They were not the orgies some people suspected. We played cards, danced and some few got drunk and sick and probably pregnant. What was frightening was the dangerous ride home over the narrow winding roads of Woodside, boys driving as fast as they could bumper to bumper, when they shouldn’t have been driving at all.
Arthur wasn’t yet a heavy drinker, and he didn’t want me to drink at all. Though we only occasionally danced together, he was always around at the end of the evening to see that our ride back to Palo Alto was among the safer choices. Nearly an ideal public brother, he was indifferent or hostile at home, unwilling to accept any kind of responsibility.
We gave a few parties ourselves, but, since it wouldn’t have occurred to Mother either to serve beer or disappear, we worried about the rowdier elements of our loosely related group as well as crashers since we lived at a busy intersection and all teenaged parties were considered open houses. We could enjoy ourselves more easily away from home.
We also took up bowling together. We could set pins for the earlier part of the evening and earn enough to bowl ourselves when the alley was less crowded. Some of the newly blinded servicemen were sent to the alley, for bowling was excellent therapy for restoring a sense of balance. Arthur and I both graduated from pin setting to teaching. Arthur was particularly good with those who didn’t want to participate. He never bullied them, but he had a way of sitting quietly with them until they trusted him enough to try.
One of the most sullenly reluctant who finally took his turn and pitched angry gutter ball after gutter ball would not believe us when he finally made a strike. He started to walk down the alley, his hands defensively before him, his balance increasingly uncertain until to keep going he had to crouch and then crawl to the place of toppled and scattered pins.
But such experiences made no sure bond between my brother and me. They could not even be referred to later. Arthur wouldn’t be lured into any kind of real conversation. He could tell jokes and pay compliments. Beyond those limits he refused to go. He would not give himself away. His favourite Steig cartoon was captioned, “Whenever I’m a good guy, people walk all over me.”
Miss Espinosa offered me a job in the summer to assist the swimming teacher of the Castilleja day camp for younger children. How much more comfortable I was, at fourteen, being a member of the staff. The only other person near my age was a tall, conventionally pretty girl of sixteen called Mac who taught music and played the piano. She was a student from Palo Alto High School in whom Arthur took some real interest. I was much better friends with the swimming teacher with whom I worked very happily, pulling overconfident six-year-olds out of deep water, encouraging the timid to put their faces in water. Being good with those children made me sharply guilty at how impatiently and badly I taught my own sister. It was my first insight into ego investment, which made me doubt that I’d ever be a good mother.
I very much liked Ann Smith, the art teacher who supplemented her teaching salary by doing charcoal portraits. She lived in one room behind a garage across the street from the school, saving money for the time her young husband would come from the war and want to go back to school. Ann also sang and paid Mac to accompany her for a couple of hours a week by doing her portrait. In the late afternoon, when the school day was over, I liked to go to the gym to listen to Ann sing or to her studio to watch her work on Mac’s portrait, where Arthur occasionally also dropped by.
My pleasant leisure time lasted only a few weeks. The Colonel had a stroke, and Mother Packer had an attack of phlebitis. They were for a time in two different hospitals, Mother travelling between them. She tried to find a nurse or housekeeper to take care of them when they came home, but all such people were already employed in hospitals or at other war work. Finally, it was decided that I should move in with them. Mother Packer was well enough to do a little cooking. The Colonel was bedridden, one side partially paralyzed. He could no more than slowly get himself to the bathroom and back.
In the morning, Mother Packer needed help going down the stairs. She fixed breakfast while I made beds and helped the Colonel get settled for his day. I took his breakfast up to him, fetched the tray back down again, set up lunch and did whatever other domestic chores Mother Packer needed before I rode my bike the couple of miles to Castilleja to teach. I had to leave as soon as classes were over in order to help with dinner, clean up and get Mother Packer upstairs for the night. Then I went home to eat a late dinner with Mother, Libby usually already in bed, Arthur often not at home. Mother and I would plan the errands that needed to be done for each household. I rode my bike back to my grandparents by about ten o’clock at night and slept there.
No arduous duties, any of them, and the Colonel was pathetically grateful. He insisted on paying me a dollar a day, clumsily counting out the one-dollar bills I got him from the bank at the end of each week. I was acutely aware of how little he felt he deserved my help, how little kinship he had any right to claim. Yet, perhaps because of that, we made shy friends with each other during those weeks, I telling him about the friends I had made among the other teachers, about
my students, he sometimes telling me about his early life, his disappointment at not being allowed to go to West Point. His father had forced him to take a law degree before he could join the army. The Colonel was ashamed of his helplessness, asked me not to tell Mother Packer when he could no longer feed himself. He began to have hallucinations about dozens of flies in the room, clothespins on his fingers, snakes in his bed. Mother, who visited as often as she could, played along with his complaints, shaking out the bedclothes, rubbing his hands. I knew it was kind to humour him, but I had difficulty lying to him. His dependence created a trust I was reluctant to break.
Sometimes at night I woke afraid that, if anything happened, I wouldn’t know what to do.
When I raised a tentative question with the rushed and overworked doctor, he answered irritably, “There’s no emergency about death.”
One night I woke vomiting and had to wash out my sheets and blankets without letting Mother Packer know. To my great surprise, my brother offered to take my place for a night. He then told Mother a great deal about the care of Colonel, which I hadn’t. Half betrayed, half relieved, I admitted that he was often incontinent, couldn’t feed himself and was increasingly irrational. Mother confronted the doctor who did finally get him a place in an army hospital.
I don’t know whether Mother had been hoarding gas coupons or bought some on the black market, but the moment the Colonel was in the hospital and my summer job was over at the school, we left for South Fork, Mother, Arthur, Libby and I.
The day after we arrived, Arthur took off with the car and we were stranded ten miles from the nearest town, two miles from a telephone. For me, it was like a fulfilling of a childhood fantasy to be left behind there to live in isolation and peace. Libby, not knowing the place, was timid, excuse enough for me not to encourage her company. I went alone to the hot berry-scented meadows, through the deep woods to the creek, down through the orchard to the river, to my old nest among the willows. I had not known how tired I was until I stretched out on a great rock in the sun and felt the heat as a snake must beat out the deathly cold.
That night, when we turned on the radio, we heard about the bombs, which seemed no more than a technical detail to prepare us for the Japanese surrender. Mother wept, then made hot chocolate to celebrate and talked for the first time about Dad’s coming home. “It’s over. It’s over.”
After Lib went to bed, Mother said with tired energy, “Where is that damned brother of yours?”
It was another twenty-four hours before he turned up, a timeless sweetness for me, filled with the fragrances and tastes of my childhood. He had been delayed by celebrating, we had planned to stay only a few days and now Mother was anxious to be at home where there might be news of Dad. We needn’t have hurried. His ship, having attended the Japanese surrender, was ordered through the Panama Canal to the East Coast. It was three months before Dad rode a train across the continent to get home.
Arthur had been missing for three days and turned up just in time to drive with us to Oakland to meet Dad’s train, which was hours late. Arthur slept in the back of the car while we paced the platform. Mother watched a young woman with a fussy baby and nearly offered to hold it for a while. “But what if the train came in?” she asked and laughed.
Once Dad arrived, kissed us all, woke his son to say hello and got into the driver’s seat, Mother asked him what he would have done if she’d been holding an infant.
“I’d have gotten right back on the train,” he said, with confident amusement in his voice.
I sat studying the familiar back of his neck.
It was so obvious when we got home that our parents wanted time alone that Libby drifted off to play with a friend, Arthur to wherever he went and I back to school.
“I thought you had the day off,” Sugarfoot said. “Didn’t your dad get home?”
“Yeah,” I said, puzzled by the awful sense of anticlimax after years of waiting.
What could he fix after all?
I had not seen the Colonel since he was taken to the hospital. Mother said he recognized no one. His older sister, Aunt Gussie, had come west and was staying with Mother Packer, where she complained that he had no right to die and leave her with no one to bury her. She and Mother Packer discussed what they would wear to the eventual funeral, and Aunt Gussie reminded Mother Packer that the Colonel wanted to be buried by his first wife.
“It’s all right with me as long as she’s dead,” Mother Packer replied.
She had her own shelf in the family mausoleum in Eureka, designed by a father who didn’t imagine husbands or children for any of his daughters.
When Dad went to the hospital the day after he got home, the Colonel gave him a weak salute, and whispered, “Welcome home, sailor.”
However ineptly, he was the one male of the family who had felt a duty to Dad’s absence and honoured it, refusing to die until he came home.
Our first family event was his open-casket funeral. I did not recognize the corpse and was as dry eyed as my grandmother, for very different reasons. I had no blood-right to mourn him with the noisy possessiveness of his sister. But in that grotesque public occasion I did know I had loved him and done what I could to let him know. The flag draped over the coffin lid reminded me not of his service to his country or the victorious country itself but of the ritual he had taught us each summer morning and evening, the care he took to teach us care. I didn’t find that flag among Mother Packer’s possessions when she died. Perhaps Aunt Gussie took it for the repeat funeral she had back in New Jersey, a day of such a blizzard that nearly no one could attend.
MY FATHER HAD NO MILITARY FANTASIES about running his family when he got home. The war had not changed his genteel and reasoning nature. He did think he could take charge of his son. The man-to-man talks he had imagined left out the fact that Arthur didn’t talk. He listened only when he had to and evaded rather than defied authority. Dad was left to discover that the understandings about school attendance and use of the car he thought they had come to were his own wishful thinking. Reasoning with Arthur, shouting at Arthur, depriving him of privileges had no more effect practised by Dad than they had by Mother. Though Mother would have been glad of a reformed son, I suppose in some part of her she was relieved that it hadn’t been simply her ineptitude as a parent that had invited his delinquency.
I had always known Arthur was the more important though no more loved child for my father. It stung me when my father said to my brother, impatiently comparing our report cards, “With half the effort you could do twice as well.”
At sixteen his son was a fair beauty, vain about his clothes, entirely bored with school, secretive about where he went, what he thought or felt, if he did either. If I had presented such an adolescent to my father, he would have been amused and indulgent. At fourteen, shaped like a telephone pole, I was stiff and awkward socially, still inclined to stand up when adults came into the room. (School friends of mine thoroughly embarrassed my father by standing up for him. “You are young women,” he said. “Men should stand up for you.”) I had no notion of what to do about my pimpled face or my long, limp hair. Since very few clothes fit me, I was indifferent to them. The one mirror I couldn’t avoid was my father’s face. It was a cold surprise to recognize how much I disappointed him.
Mother had not only welcomed but come to depend on my willingness to discuss family problems. Now she quite naturally confided in Dad, and he didn’t take kindly to my observations.
After one failure or another with Art, Dad would say, “Well what should I have done, if you’re so smart?”
I didn’t know, but I could have told him that his beating us both roundly at bowling the first time he took him might have been tolerable if he hadn’t added, “What’s to this game anyway?” And I had a notion that Arthur had done so little work for so long that he couldn’t simply “turn over a new leaf” with so many blanks behind him, no matter how impressive his IQ. I was in no mood to side with my brother against my father,
but I often felt caught between them as I never did between Mother and Arthur.
My mother felt caught between my father and me, wanting to shield me from his disappointment, wanting me to be less disappointing. Since she had no more notion than I did what to do about how I looked except to trust I’d outgrow the embarrassment of it, she tried to show me how to soften my independence. “Ask your father instead of telling him where you’re going. Get him to help you sometimes.” She also explained his moodiness, first when he was looking for a job, then when he had taken one he disliked.
Dad was encountering all the men his age who had stayed home and made their fortunes from the war. Now he was asked to force people to buy leftover surplus goods in order to have their share of materials still scarce. The fair business practices he had been accustomed to were a thing of the past. If he’d had any illusions about the usefulness of his own service, it might have been less painful for him. He spoke very little of the war, but he did say, more than once, “If I ever get an idea like that again, lock me in a closet until I get over it.”
For Mother there was no ambivalence about having Dad home. Her adult life was restored to her. Their love for and delight in each other had deepened through their long waiting. Only I was surprised that, rather than solving family problems, he added to their complexity.
All the veterans did, returning not only to families and the workforce, but to colleges and even high schools. The young ones with a couple of years’ instruction in how to solve problems by violence were a glamorous menace. School for Arthur was now not only dull but terrifying, and our social world was invaded by a competitive sexuality we didn’t know how to handle.
We were being asked, on the one hand, to become children again. On the other, we were being pressed into an adulthood we weren’t ready for.
Ann Smith, who had finished portraits of both Arthur and Libby before Dad came home, postponed one of me now that her husband, Henry, had come home and started at Stanford. Her room across from school, which had been a haven, was now a private, intensely sexual place. She and Henry came to the house for dinner, as much our parents’ friends as ours. Sugarfoot came, too, to be introduced to one of Dad’s young officers, Walter Lord, who was now working with Dad. Walter took me to the movies once or twice which impressed my friends, but for me he was simply another of my childish duties.