I seemed to do better in school in the city. I don’t know why. Heaven knows, by the time I was in high school my island ways had made me just as much an outsider in the city as my city ways, when I was younger, had made me an outcast on Shelter. There’s nothing much to say about thisperiod of my life, except that it was later repeated—in its odd absenceof reportable (this is a word?) experience—in my twenties. Boys I thought peculiar liked me, I think now looking back, for my own high peculiarities. Glands going, they figured me for an easy target, but were wrong. I don’t remember any of their names. I don’t recall what they looked like. They are all a bunch of random phantoms who’ve gone on, most likely, to lives that wouldn’t interest me. And, harder for me to admit, the girls didn’t reach me either. Maybe I was threatening, maybe plain odd. Among the most far-afield of outcasts I seemed to make no friends, not that I tried that hard.
Instead, Faw was my focus. Who was this man? What did he mean to me, what did he mean to himself and to the rest of the world, or rather—leaving the world, which hardly matters, aside—those in the world he touched? The older I got the more curious I got about the meaning of Mother’s note—the hoax she referred to in it, a hoax she had found intolerable; what could it have meant? I’d always considered my own fabrications, whatever their genesis, to be the most creative, the most viable and meaningful audacities I knew of in my life, but I was wrong. Audacity was my father’s forte. He was a wild force in his field of endeavor, I began to believe, more wild than religion, more wild than any sinner who nailed St. Peter upside down on a rood and spat into his upturned nostrils. Even before I knew whereof I spoke, the term “hoax” seemed too paltry for anything my father would do. Hoax was a lowly word, rhymed with coax, and he never stooped to coax anyone to do anything. He presented his case, you bought it or you didn’t, and that was that.
The first moment I identified this audacity and understood the sweep of the Sprawl, became interested in its form and developed a new awe for its erratic energies, was in the middle of the night, when I was watching an old movie on the box (a Western, a clutch of men firing flintlocks on a log cabin, in which only two desperados werefighting back—the two were killed, the cabin burned down, end of movie)—and on came a commercial for something called Vintage Library of Art Film Society. Now, the society, catering to late night aficionados of the so-called “art” film, about which I will have more to say later, offered, much the way Time-Life offers insomniacs the chance to collect a series of thin tomes about this subject or that, high-quality reel-to-reel copies of the finest “art classics” ever “exposed on film.” Was this legal?(Yes and no: law prohibits advertising porn videos and porn films on television or radio—but it doesn’t stand in the way of somebody putting together a good mailing list of those who’ve shown interest in the not-quite-X fare the Society was offering.) It intrigued me, and I even wrote the address and number down, knowing that I’d never want to become a member of the Society, but drawn to something about the way the man who was on the screen presented his case. Only later did I realize that the man was someone I had actually met, a long time before. I looked back in the almanac—something I seldom did, because the entries seemed more and more puerile to me, now that I was seventeen or eighteen—and, yes, I found what I was looking for. I had copied from Faw’s notes the names of the dinner guests that one night at Shelter, the night that Berg was invited to the table, and recognized that the man on the screen had been Stuart Neden. What was he doing on inexpensive, early-morning air time? Why wouldn’t he have gotten some peon to do the peddling?
Why shouldn’t I ask? I thought; and so I did.
Faw was absolutely disconcerting in his response. “So?” he said, after I told him that the Sprawl, if Neden was still a part of the Sprawl, was somehow tied up with an operation called VLAFS.
He was amenable to talking about it, whatever. But the one-word response stripped me of any questions. What was I supposed to ask? Was I supposed to change all of a sudden into some sullied angel, some goodie two shoes? I was sullied, I felt, but no angel—and Faw seemed so comfortable with whatever he had to do with all this, that I couldn’t even formulate the next question I would ask, let alone pose it to him. Given what I then asked, I imagine he’d have preferred it if I had engaged him in a discussion about pornography, the sociological pros and cons, the legalities, the negative impact of those real live angels who flapped their polyester wings around the shopping mall cinemas whenever any movie of a “provocative” kind came to ruin their neighborhoods … because I did it, I did what I thought I could never do, I asked him, “What hoax was it that Erin was talking about in that note?”
“What note?” he frowned; he was so easy a mark for me, just as I must have been an easy mark for him.
“The note Mother left you.”
He smiled at me a smile that said, What were you doing reading that note, that was for me, not you.
“Well, what did she mean, ‘hoax.’”
“Your mother, as much as I loved her, as much as I still love her, because you know I still love her—is limited, okay Grace?”
“Yes?” And I waited.
“It was irresponsible of her to have written that to me, and doubly so knowing that you were into everything, worse than a kitten, and that chances were ten to one you’d read that before I did.”
“Irresponsible in the sense that there was no hoax?”
“I don’t know anything about hoaxes. I can tell you I’ve never lied to you, or to your brothers, or your mother. It’s not how my life works, and I think you know by now, that’s not how I want your life to work, either. Hoax. Grace, I don’t know. She was bitter. I had my dream and was doing it.”
“She had hers too, you know.”
“I won’t deny that. I still wish her dream had worked out with my own.”
“Faw, that’s what I want to talk about.”
He was sitting with a pile of paper in front of him, and to me he seemed so fragile at that moment that I followed my instincts, and stood quiet. I was trying to figure out how a daughter speaks to her father. Since I didn’t know what precisely it was I was getting at, or hoping to get at, I couldn’t press any further than this. I decided the matter might best be laid aside. But while nothing revelatory came of our talk, something very concrete did come of it: Faw quite abruptly began to address me as an adult. He asked me what I wanted to eat for dinner. He asked me if I’d like to come with him to Portugal (I didn’t—I preferred to stay at home, thatwould be my job in the Sprawl, to maintain the edge on the stationary, to be there, as they say, to be therefor my father). I decided that, albeit his response to my questions about Neden and my mother’s note was obfuscatory, clearly fudging, I was going to side with him, no matter what he was up to, no matter who he was. He was my father. He had for whatever reasons stuck by me longer than my beloved flare man, than my dear Desmond fantasy, than my mother even, and he was my core.
I still feel this way, though the core threatens to melt down, like that at the blushing center of some insensate nuclear reactor.
I may as well tell you about my husband, since I was destined to have one. For me marriage was five weeks or so of bliss, followed by years of ballasting. Even now I don’t dislike my husband—as I say, we’ve never bothered to divorce, though we’ve agreed that if sometime one of us meets someone and would like to get married again, the other would not stand in the way of a divorce. Various of his friends have accused him of still being attached to me, or being lazy about things, and have told him that he ought to go ahead, given that we have been apart for so long, and get the matter legally finalized. I don’t know—I don’t reallycare—why it is that he’s reluctant to file the papers. He knows I wouldn’t fight him. For my part, I find that being married and not living with your husband makes for excellent defense on occasion. I still wear my wedding ring when I go out to parties, or to the movies with friends. It is antisocial as can be, but provides a distance. And while that chestnut abou
t certain men being even more attracted to a woman who has a wedding band on is true, the wedding band can serve nicely in its capacity as a collar with which all comers may be restrained.
The drawn-out process of our separation is more indicative of our relationship than any detailed history of how we met, and fell in love. In brief, though, we met after I dropped out of college. I had gone to New Haven to study Russian. Faw encouraged me, as he believed even then that the next World War was going to be economic rather than atomic, and that a knowledge of Russian would be useful, because Russia was to become our ally—a not unprophetic analysis. But it wasn’t in my fate to learn any language but English, and though I switched majors nothing seemed to work for me, and every class felt like an island class—I was the outsider, somehow, and couldn’t fathom protocol, couldn’t concentrate on lectures, so preoccupied was I with studying what the other students were doing, looking at what sort of pencils they wrote with, what clothes they wore, what quirks and oddities of character defined them. The most I could say for myself is that I became addicted to reading novels, mostly 19th Century, Austen, George Eliot, James; nothing assigned, of course—indeed to escape thinking about assignments.
I had determined to stay on in New Haven (actually East Haven, down near the sound) for a while, I didn’t know how long, rather than move back to New York and live with Faw, or back to Shelter Island, where Djuna and Webster held forth—Webster had moved into the main house, to help her with keeping up Scrub Farm, as Faw still had a habit of going out on weekends; it had become moreand more the place where he felt he could think most clearly. Often, I took the ferry over from New London to Orient, where Web picked me up, and spent Sunday with them, talking, eating and—when Faw went up to his bedroom to make phone calls—watching television. I loved those Sundays, but after I stopped going to classes altogether, after I made no pretense either to my professors or myself about my interest in continuing toward a degree, it became harder to go to the island and face him, to sit at the pine table in the kitchen and invent subjects that were discussed in classes I’d cut, talk about the Bulldogs and what sort of scores their teams were producing on ludicrous lawns in ludicrous stadiums, and all the rest.
My youthful adoration of Shahrazad, it became apparent those Sundays, was not misplaced. I loved her for the latticework of fictions she was able to invent in order to save her life and the life of her sister, but the more I tried to invent, to lie, the more I appreciated how easy it was to initiate, how difficult to sustain. Faw was no King Shahryar, either—neither so ruthless, nor so easily taken in, he remembered the slightest detail of anything I mentioned, and there was no statute of limitation on his memory. My stories had begun to entangle themselves, much the same way I have seen fishermen who are greedy and not content to be working one line but must have three or five going at once can get tangled while the surf keeps rolling in and the hooked fish begins to run one line over and under another.
I confessed. And was surprised, as ever, by the response. Faw, who professed to hating quitters, presented absolutely no resistance to my dropping out of school. “Fine by me,” he said, “what do you think, Djuna?” Djuna was still one to toe the middle course, but allowed that she had never got a degree. “And a fine lot of good that’s done you,” Webster said, but he was called down with laughter. It didn’t seem to matter. “And so what are you doing over there, for godsakes, why don’t you come back home?” Thiswas the question I had hoped to avoid, because in fact I didn’t know the answer to it, but did know that home was somewhere I wasn’t ready to come to yet.
I then told another Shahrazadesque lie. “I’ve met someone.” Djuna placed her fork down noisily in her plate. “Met someone,” Faw said. “Yes.”“Is it serious?” Djuna asked—it was a straight television line, and I appreciated it, because to that I could make a straight television answer, “I don’t know yet.”
Whether it was predestined or because I felt myself under the need to fulfill the expectations that were generated by my lie there is no saying, but on a Tuesday—a fall day crackling with dead leaves that tripped down Orange Street toward the red cliffs above the monument park where I had hoped to finish my walk—I met him, he was walking too, the man who was going to be my husband, and we talked, I can’t even say exactly why, and sat on a bench, and then later wound up drinking silly concoctions at Archie Moore’s bar, and Desmond, and the flare man, and all my childhood and adolescent furies were set free. True, I was a little drunk, but I remember vividly what it was like being with him, the streetlight glow coming down through the bay window in the huge old house where he rented a room. We were in that room for three days. We ate what food he had, but never went out, except for an hour or so in the evenings, to Archie Moore’s, which was right around the corner. And the bartender knew what was going on even before we did, he quipped, So when are you going to get married? We got our blood tests on the fourth morning, got our license. After that, of course, what could we do but get married, and so we did.
We drove north for our honeymoon, far up into Canada, because I had got it in my mind I wanted to see the Aurora Borealis. He went along with the scheme, though he told me that the chances we would actually see the auroral lights were slim. I knew we would. We slept in the back of the station wagon we had bought for the excursion, buriedunder blankets. The higher the latitude, the more my anticipation grew. We’d been two weeks out from New York when Warne (spelled self-consciously thus, pronounced like “warren” of rabbits, an animal we were destined not to emulate) became impatient with my quixoticism, and we had our first argument. “Don’t you think that we better put some kind of time limit on this thing?”“Why?”“Because enough is going to be enough is why, and why is it so important that we see the aurora anyway?”“I don’t know,” I admitted. “Well, I think we ought to go back. It’s ridiculous what we’re doing. It’s cold up here”—it was, too, that day, rain in sheets across the rich brown landscape—“and if something goes wrong with the car—”
I wondered, that night, whether in some implacable and immature way I was trying to emulate my father, the traveler, the quester, the Don Quixote. My poor husband had a reasonable point.
To keep the peace I agreed to three more days and nights, no more. Standing out with him along a desolate stretch of farm road that was the thinnest line on our map, hundreds of miles north of the border, and witnessing the green-yellow pulsing bundles of light, on the second night of the allotted three, was the high point of the marriage. I knew we’d see them, the lights, and we did. Discharges across the length of the sky arced at such great altitudes before us that none of it seemed real at all. Overhead, and back behind us to the south, the stars brightened the heavens, and the canopy before us winked and raced with magnetic flames. It was a huge, electrical curtain. The windows in the back of the wagon fogged with our sleeping breath that night, and the next morning we turned back.
When Warne took the offer of a job from my father, my adoration of him—which had been, as I say, so strong for a short period—took a blow. It wasn’t fair of me to think less of him for having taken Faw up on what was, after all, not such an unusual arrangement between fathers and sons-in-law, but I couldn’t help myself. There was something too subordinate in it for me(does this sound grossly selfish, grossly unpalliative?); here I was, someone who’d never looked on Faw as a presence, more an absence, and this agreement between the two of them brought him in as benevolent dictator, or so it felt. “He treats me just like anyone else in the company,” Warne sighed, not liking the platitude any more than I did.
I proposed several lame alternatives, one of which was to move up to Canada and become farmers. Of course, when Warne countered that I wouldn’t know “one end of a pitchfork from another” I couldn’t legitimately disagree. “We can learn,” I said, and I could see how frustrated he was with my moody idealism.
He stayed with Geiger, and the breach, having been opened, kept widening until I had to tell him, one morning before
he was about to leave our little apartment on the West Side for work, “I don’t love you anymore.” Perhaps it was the strength of Mother’s note to my father when she’d decided to leave him for Segredo, that I drew on—such irony, since part of me would always hate her for that note—because while I hardly knew what I was talking about, I was able to argue with some skill about my decision to leave. “We don’t have to be final about anything,” was what I said, avoiding, and consciously so, Erin’s pattern of finality. He went ahead to work. The subtleties of guilt have never troubled Warne much, and the vigilant work he has done for Geiger over the years probably never rubbed up against whatever ego he’s got hidden there somewhere inside his handsome head.
The Almanac Branch Page 13