But then, just before we got to the border, for some time by then returned to silence, my father said, “If you could remember one thing and have that be your life, what would it be?”
“What would it be for you?” I asked.
“I asked you,” my father said. “It was a question for you.”
I felt suddenly tired. The effort of conversation was after all a very great one, and this was more than I had bargained for.
“I don’t know. That’s a difficult question,” I said. And we left it at that.
3
That first summer that my family spent at the lake with Henry, the summer I was six years old and Helen was eight, was the only summer my mother accompanied us. We spent the largest part of it on the water: in Henry’s boat, or on the dock, or swimming near there.
Mostly, my mother stayed on shore.
Tellingly, what I remember best of all, is the way my father and Henry were, together. To me, they seemed – even Henry in his chair – symbolic nearly of perfect health and joy. Henry, with his great arms that were big as the trunks of young trees. Who would let us climb them sometimes, leaning forward in his chair, and pressing his fists to the floor, so that Helen and I could take turns clambering up them and onto his back.
Sometimes, he would bellow out a laugh or a shout as we climbed, or lift out an arm when we were nearly to the top, in order to disrupt us, or otherwise fold us in, easily (our weight to him had little meaning) and tickle us, or hint at it, anyway, until we giggled, gasping, from his grasp.
My father, too, had once been a large man. In those first summers at the lake – especially then, because we were still so small – we called him Paul Bunyan, because he looked to us just like the giant statue of that imaginary man that we passed when we drove through Rumford, Maine.
He could carry both of us, jumbled on his back, and run with us from the dock so that for a moment we would be suspended all together: my sister, my father, and I, for a split second in the air.
Then there’d be the sudden hit of water and the tangle of our bodies. I, the weakest swimmer, would climb up, a little frantic like a kitten, to my father’s neck and shoulders.
Or he would throw us – alone and high – away from him, and from the dock. He was so strong that we could really fly, and in those two or three seconds could even think, and remember, truly, how it felt to be like that: moving up and out, and away from the dock, from my father’s arms. Anticipating the water, but not too much. Trying not to, anyway. Trying not to waste those moments. To stay in them as much and as long as possible.
In the evenings, my mother and father fought softly in their bedroom, retreating there when my mother, inevitably (each evening as I recall it) stood up, abruptly, from her chair and said, “Let’s continue this inside.”
Often I wouldn’t notice there’d been an argument until I heard those words. I was, by that time, so accustomed to the way they spoke: bitterly, to one another.
Is it possible that I didn’t really think of them at all?
Most of my memories of that summer are of Henry and my father. Of their bodies, of the lake. My mother, I remember differently. As though she inhabited a complete and separate world.
Eventually my father would bang out of the bedroom and return, jovially, to the porch from the continued conversation, with two beers. One for Henry, one for himself. And he and Henry would resume, happily, whatever conversation they’d been having.
What did they talk about so eagerly in those days?
Helen and I would be reading, or playing with the Lego blocks we’d brought along. We built an entire city that summer in the corner of the porch as I recall. Sometimes, we would be out on the lawn, playing in the near dark, and from there we could hear only the rise and fall of my mother’s voice, sharp and high. Then Henry and my father’s voices would start rumbling in, the sound broken with their barks and shouts of laughter.
We would have to be called in, those nights, by my mother. But we played late. She would remain in her room for an hour or so after my father banged the door to leave her. But when she emerged again, she was always more total, more in love with us than she had been before, and she spoke to us, in those evenings, so softly, and with so much tenderness, that we were afraid, nearly, for one another. We became, within her bursts of maternal caring, more fragile than we thought we were at other times.
We loved to feel that way again, come evening. Our bravado given over; laid aside. Our loud and brash behaviour of the day dissolved. And we didn’t worry about her. No, we didn’t think of her at all. She, who must have in those late evening hours been, in the extreme of her comfort to us, also been attempting some comfort for herself. Our ability to return to her, to fall under her spell each evening, must have been, for her, a great relief.
Away at a week-long sleep-away camp for the first time late in August of that same summer, I experienced a homesickness so acute that I can still remember the taste of it, cottony and sour on my tongue. Even then, it was Henry’s place that I longed for.
I had received, I suppose – in those first two weeks we spent at the lake with Henry – such a distinct notion of what home was, or could be, that I have been unable, to this day, to give it up entirely. So that even now, when I have become aware of the complex system in which we were all, even at that time (though we as children didn’t know it) involved, my longing for that home remains as strong as ever. The only difference being that the home is absent, now; that perhaps it never existed at all. Or at least not in the way I imagined. I long (I admit) for nothing but the knowing of it changes little, and – even after everything that’s happened since that first summer – there is something in me that expects that I will find it still.
4
When we returned from the hospital, we found that Henry had opened all the windows and the kitchen door that led out to the porch, so that the air, still cold though it was June, had located every corner of the government house. Any hint of the usual smell – the stale smoke and cats and grease, and another, partially sweet, partially antibiotic smell which I could never identify – was gone. It was very cold in that kitchen, but it did not smell.
I fixed a pot of coffee then picked up the half-finished crossword on the table and handed it to my father.
“You’ll have to help me,” he said, indicating his right arm.
Henry arrived, and inspected my father. “I thought they’d have you mummified by now,” he said. I poured them both a coffee. My father balanced his in his left hand and sipped it awkwardly, as though he had never held a mug of coffee in his life.
He tossed me a pen, and pointed again at the crossword.
“Help me out,” he said. “I’m stumped.” Then laughed uproariously.
That evening, after Henry gutted fish on the lawn, chucking the insides to the screaming cats, I fried the fillets with garlic and margarine, because there wasn’t any butter. When the windows, in late afternoon, had been closed, the stale smell of the kitchen returned quickly, so that the scent of fresh garlic and fish cooking was a welcome change. They were perch. Big ones. And Henry had caught four. I cooked all of them – and so perfectly even Henry acknowledged it.
“Well, I taught her right, I guess,” he said, when he found that the flesh pulled, as we dug into them, cleanly away from the bone.
After the meal, we were quiet. My father smoked a cigarette or two, inclined slightly toward the window by the kitchen table, which he had opened. As he exhaled, he seemed to become emptier – as if he pushed the smoke from his body just a little too hard.
The light from the porch illuminated only a small oblong shape on the lawn directly outside the door, and everything else fell away into darkness. In the distance, however, the lights from the houses on the far end of the lake, answering as though to our own, lit up the water enough that we could make out along its edges the poles which rose from the buried foundations on that side of the lake like the long bodies of ghosts.
One time
, years before, we had watched a documentary that some divers at a local scuba club had shot, with footage of the bottom of the lake, near where Henry’s house had been. There were no images of the house itself, but Henry had clearly identified the old dock that he and Owen had fished off and jumped from on hot summer days. I reminded Henry of that film then, because it seemed to me suddenly strange that those murky images of the bottom of the lake existed in that moment just as they had at any other time, just not illuminated by a light – equally small, and equally fleeting – as the ones that lit up the opposite shore.
“Yep,” Henry said, as though nearly swallowing the word. “It was still there, boy; I thought I would cry.”
I had never in my life seen Henry cry, and even as he said it, he did not look like he might. But it was strange to think that the sadnesses of Henry’s life had then, and at other times, too, necessarily existed among us – just without my noticing them, and I wished, fiercely, staring out at the dark lawn between the light of our own porch and the corresponding lights on the opposite shore, that I could return things somehow – to the way that they had been. That I could resurrect the old house. In substance, in fact. So that Henry and his family could live forever there and never now depart, in their various ways. And never now feel in their throats the catch that I detected then, for the first time, in Henry’s. But what – and here was the dilemma, even in metaphor – would have happened then? I mean, to everything else? To my father, for example? Or to me?
When I tried to say something of all of this to Henry and my father, though, I only stumbled on the words, and finally interrupted myself to exclaim out loud, “I hardly know what it is that I’m saying at all!”
In fact, I felt I did know. It was something very particular that I wanted to say; it was just that I had no way to say it.
Henry remained quiet, and only cleared his throat loudly once or twice as my father and I continued to speak for some time after that, arguing a little, but to no purpose, interrupting ourselves and one another, back and forth. He stared, first at my father, then at me, and the same expression crossed his face then as on certain occasions of my childhood, when the pastimes of Helen or I (a half-built tree fort that we had constructed in the yard, a rope swing slung into shallow water, or, later, an announcement of an intention to go for a ride on Bonehead Henderson’s ATV) provoked not so much a fear, but a general paternal apprehension – that it was the world that was dangerous and untrue and that we, in the face of it, were bound to be defeated, at least in small ways, because of it. At least lose the casual confidence with which we’d slung a rope over a low limb, or slid in behind the terrible Bonehead as he gunned the motor on his vehicle and took off as though into outer space.
So then, after some time had passed, and my father and I had wrapped our way around again to the beginning of our argument, Henry said, “Let me tell you a story.”
Casablanca
1959
from them blue depths nor choppering down skies
does Dr Present vault unto his task.
Henry is weft on his own.
Pluck Dr Present. Let his grievous wives
thrall lie to livey toads. May his chains bask.
lower him, Capt Owen, into the sun.
JOHN BERRYMAN
1
When he was a very small boy the moves they made dotted the pink of the map of the world, which was Canada and the United States. Once, they dipped down into the orange of Mexico, and he shoved his thumbtack firmly, there. Sometimes it was hard to do (his thumb smarted) and sometimes it was easy, the wall soft. Into the northern reaches of Alberta, and somewhere near the border between the Carolinas. Until the back of the pin touched the flat of the wall. Until no space showed there. When they again relocated and the tack was removed, there remained a small but permanent hole in the wall, which he left behind; above where his bed had been. Also, and this he took with him, there was the small dark point in the map where the page had been pierced, so that when Henry looked at the map of the world in Ontario, where finally they remained, he saw not only where they were, clinging precariously to the underside of the Canadian shield, but also where they were no longer.
We’re moving, Henry, his father would say. And, jostled aware as if from attempted sleep, Henry moved, following his father’s voice as though along a bouncing train corridor.
When they returned to Ontario, his father too sick to work, they lived again in the house of his earliest childhood, which Henry remembered as acutely as if it was he who had been pierced through with it, causing in him a deep but narrow hole, the shape of which corresponded directly to any mention of his grandfather’s place, and which, in its specificity, contrasted sharply against the abstract geographical dimensions which had been previous homes.
The house was old and had plenty of ghosts, or so his grandfather said, and all of them were the ghosts of Henry’s grandmother. Henry was taught to distinguish between them just as other boys are taught to distinguish between stones, or trees, or birds. He began to recognize them, as his grandfather and his father could do, to sense them as one after the other they came or went, busy with ordinary tasks. As they brushed by him, in and out of doors, reclined in the sitting room, or were found otherwise bent over the lawn where the garden used to be. One, young as when his father was a boy. One, shy, and always laughing. Another serious. One ill in the bed. Another hanging clothes on an absent line.
There was, his father told him, a ghost for every moment of a life, and some lingered, as the grandmother’s did; making themselves, for their own, very private, reasons, known. One day, Henry’s grandmother was at last sketched so precisely that Henry woke to find that he had begun to know her, not in the flickering stages that her ghosts described, but instead, at once – as herself – entire. When that happened, he realized that, like his father and grandfather, he had come to love her. And perhaps more, or anyway more simply, than he loved the living members of that house.
By the time he was again asked to move (this time by the power company in the year the Seaway came through, the year that Owen was twelve), Henry had lived so long in his grandfather’s house that he had forgotten that at one time he and his father had slipped from the map of the world like pins. And the thumbtack, which still pierced the wall in what was Owen’s room now, and which Owen observed nightly before drifting to sleep, had spread a chalky brown stain around itself, in a ring, obscuring not only the precise point where it pierced, but also all of Southern Ontario and most of New York.
Henry had married Jacqui in the summer after high school, and in early December, Owen had been born. They stayed with Henry’s father at the old house and Henry worked at the mill in town, saving his money in a coffee can for the house they planned to build.
There was a spot for it already. In the clearing behind the old house, where, as a boy, Henry’s father had often taken him, spreading his flat hand out in the direction of the far edge of the field and remarking, in a clear and unembellished phrase, the precise wording of which he never varied, that the land was to be Henry’s own one day.
Over the remaining years of Henry’s childhood, his father had kept the clearing trimmed of weeds and of the spruce that every spring returned, often reminding Henry of his efforts there, and thereby also of the field’s existence. When Henry visited the place on his own, even in later years when his father ceased to mention it, he would feel a sudden chill run through him, as though his father were again laying that heavy hand on his shoulder, and sending that unmistakable coldness up and down his spine.
Once they were married, Henry was eager to build Jacqui a house of her own there, but this had not been what his father had intended. He had wanted, instead, for the land to spring up in corn for Henry. In sweet beets, or cherries. In a way of life that would not, that is, be the life of the mines, which had turned his own lungs too black to work. Or of the mills, or of the factories, where men – Henry’s father said – equally and oppositely turned pale.
Factory work was not real work, Henry’s father said, when Henry got a job in town.
But there were many things, Henry thought, that his father didn’t know or understand. For example, there were things that you had to be born to. That it took more than to point across a field and say something out loud. More than six acres of cleared land. Also, Henry had promised Jacqui something. He wanted it too, and perhaps even more badly than she. To have a life of their own. One that would not be riddled with the confusion of the various and unpredictable departures and arrivals of his grandmother’s ghost, or of his father for that matter, who had begun to blow through the house sometimes as though he too were a ghost.
But when Owen was three, the mill closed down, and the money that Henry had saved inside the coffee can began to disappear far more quickly than it had risen there. He got a job fixing up houses in town, but it bothered him more than the factory work had. Some days it was like they, and their own house, were doing nothing but rattle around like they were their own last two dimes knocking into one another at the bottom of a can.
Then, in the year after the mill closed – Owen had been four – and after a short convalescence in which every day she insisted she was stronger – Jacqui died.
Henry drove his father’s Chevy into the brick wall of the closed up mill in town and wound up in the hospital with a fractured spine.
And so it was because Henry himself did not speak of the house that he would have built, or of Jacqui again, that it was Owen’s grandfather who told him of his mother, painting her picture alongside his own wife’s ghost, so that the two women came to live for Owen side by side. It was startling the way that things could, in the end, come to exist like that, within the same small space, when they had seemed in life, to need, necessarily, to exist for themselves alone.
The Sentimentalists Page 5