by Carole Maso
My father reads that Caroline has broken a few small bones in her wrist in a fall from her horse Macaroni, a gift from President Johnson.
I am frightened when my father reads me these things.
“There are questions about the assassination that have not been answered to my satisfaction,” he says to my mother over dinner one night. “I’m just not convinced.” He sits there without eating for a long time and draws something with his finger on the table.
“Maria,” my grandfather said one day long ago, “today your name is Mary. Today I change my own name from Angelo to Andy. Today we are real Americans.”
I am forever grateful that I was not there to witness the scowl that must have appeared on my grandmother’s face at this news. It must have been terrible. Of course, she never once called him Andy and the name, unused, faded. And when she refused to answer to Mary, my grandfather sadly returned to Maria, for he missed my grandmother too much. She would not look at him or say one word; he was addressing a stranger.
“I was given a name at birth and I will die with it, Angelo,” she said.
“We could call the baby Mike. What do you think?”
She frowned.
“Oh, Maria, your whole family wears that frown,” he said on the day he finally gave in. “Such stubbornness!” he cried. “I am sure it has ruined more than one good idea.”
The evening of their second day here, my grandfather registered both of them for English classes at the local school. Right from the start he was a model student, staying late, trying to improve his pronunciation, persevering.
“I leaf in New Hope, Pencil-bannia,” he said hesitantly, concentrating impossibly hard on every syllable. “I live, I live, I live in New Hope, Pencil, Pencil-vay-knee-a in the United State of America.” I’m sure mv grandfather smiled when he got to the America part, for he could sav it perfectly. He had been saying it his entire life.
“America begins and ends w ith the letter A. America. See you too-marr-ah, too-morr-row,” he said to the pretty young teacher, “American redhead. Thank you very much. Good-bye.”
“The accent must go,” he said each night before bed. “The accent must go,” he said in the morning to his small son, Michael. “An accent is no good in this new country.” Maria sighed, exhausted by so much enthusiasm. He was a teacher’s dream, not a wife’s. She felt lonely. The village where she was born and had lived her whole life welled in her stomach; she had to eat a lot of bread to keep it down; she had to sleep under heavy blankets.
“We need new clothes for a new country, Mary,” my grandfather said. She was not answering, especially to Mary. “If you’d like to come with me, I’m going into the downtown.” Still she did not answer. Meticulously my grandfather observed the dress of the people on the neighboring farms before going out to get his own blue jeans and work shirts and boots. He especially noted the dress of the Negroes whom he considered the most authentic Americans. They were new and exotic like America itself. And above all they were not Europeans. Europe became “for the birds.” “Oh, Mary,” he would say, “haláis for the birds. In America there is jazz music, Charlie has told me, in a place called Harem.” “Harlem,” Charlie would correct him. “Yes, Harlem,” my grandfather would repeat, “where women wear flowers behind their ears and the music is hot.
“I’d like to go there,” my grandfather said in his halting way, something I imagine he picked up from Charlie.
“That’s cool,” Charlie said.
Hot and cool, my grandfather thought. “This is some country, Mary,” he said, hugging her. “Hot and cool, at the same time,” he said to his small son, Michael. This wonderful place, America, beginning and ending with A.
He felt the wind against him on the mountaintop and praised it, praised the Great Spirit, the wonderful, incomprehensible one. He looked at the stones, knelt down and touched their smooth, flat heads. He knew the oldest gods lived there in stone. He lay on the sacred earth for a long time, and listened to the stones that spoke.
“Welcome to Savannah, that sleepy southern city, that city of azaleas, lilies, camellia, dogwood, and cherry, that langorous town of balconies and secret gardens, its avenues lined with gray-bearded oak. Spanish moss. That beautiful trader’s city where one can watch the oceangoing ships come up the river right beside the downtown. The City of Hope, founded in 1733 by the British general and idealist James Oglethorpe.”
“Read more,” the children whisper, “oh, please read more,” they say, growing sleepier and sleepier.
“Wisteria and pillars…mansions, verandas…and the sea, the smell of the sea.”
“The redwoods of California are the tallest living things on earth,” the fat man reads in the fading light. “They live from 400 to 2500 years and may be the descendants of trees standing thirty to forty million years ago.”
“I dreamed of you, of this place,” my grandfather said, and he told Two Bears what he had seen. “I am here to learn.”
Grandpa must have been exhausted after his bus trip. He still carried the lunch my father had packed for him days ago, uneaten.
“Speak the truth,” Two Bears demanded of this little white man, and my grandfather repeated the dream.
“It is very unusual,” Two Bears said, looking at him closely. “You are here from Pennsylvania because of your dream? Most white men have grown far away from the life in their sleep. They cannot remember their dreams and, if they do, they do not know what they mean.”
My grandfather nodded, mesmerized by Two Bears, the music of his speech, the language of his hands. I’m sure Two Bears did not know at first what to make of this little Italian man, come all the way across the ocean, then across the country to this place.
“This is the white man’s trick,” he said to himself, but he invited the Italian grandfather to sit down and smoke with him anyway. And they spoke in the language of hands, my grandfather fluent from the moment he raised them.
“Maria,” Grandpa said, “today your name is Wonderful Thunder.” The Indians not only taught my grandfather about the secret of rain, the dances of the sun, and the earth’s songs but also, after some discussion, the proper Indian name for my grandmother.
“A song from the Ohlone,” my grandfather said to us, smiling:
“I dream of you,
I dream of you jumping.
Rabbit,
Jackrabbit,
Quail.”
“All the trees,” Grandpa said, motioning to the horizon, “and all the grass and all the stones are talking.”
My grandfather, nearing seventy, was quite pleased with his version of the afterlife and took every opportunity to share it with us. As far as we children were concerned he could not tell a story too many times. We always heard something new in it or thought of something we hadn’t before.
“He’s better than television,” we would tell our friends with pride. “He’s better than ‘The Man from U.N.C.L.E.’” “That’s impossible,” they would say, and shake their heads wildly, “impossible.” We didn’t care. Despite their skepticism we hardly ever let any of them meet our grandfather. We kept him to ourselves, I do not think wholly out of selfish reasons. There was something delicate about him and the nature of his stories, and our first instinct was to protect him from the crassness and cruelty of children. We feared that with public exposure he might have been misinterpreted, or abused, or questioned too literally.
We especially guarded my grandfather’s story of the afterlife. We knew we could not just blurt it out any time. We had to wait until Grandmother had planned a trip into town or was going to visit friends on another farm before my grandfather would tell it. Consistent and brave, she was the watchdog of rationality in a largely irrational family, and my grandfather did not like to upset her. We did not mind waiting, the plans we had to make, the whispering; his surreptitious inflections only made the story better.
When my grandmother was safely down the road marketing or talking with the neighbors, my grandfather would b
egin the story. He always started in a soft voice with the best of intentions but by the end he’d be shouting as loud as Fletcher and I.
My grandfather looked forward to the day his soul would grow light and rise and he could finally dance on the surface of the sun.
“It’s very hot, but your feet don’t burn,” Fletcher would say dreamily.
“You have no feet,” I said in a high voice, “or arms or anything, but somehow you know it’s you anyway.”
“That’s right,” my grandfather said. “It’s because only your soul goes.”
“The soul knows things we never taught it,” we said together. “The soul remembers things we didn’t think we knew. It knows languages we never learned.”
His hands tried to capture the movement of the soul out of the body for us. They sort of fluttered from his heart in front of our faces, and we watched spellbound as they rose toward the ceiling. Once in a while my grandmother would come in just in time to witness my grandfather standing on a chair, his arms stretched over his head, his hands beating against the rafters as the soul journeyed through the roof off into the sky. Fletcher and I would be swaying around his feet chanting something like, “The soul is a beautiful boat, the soul is a slow, beautiful boat.”
It must have looked to my grandmother, blown in from the real world, like some primitive dance meant to ward off dark spirits, and in a way I guess it was. She took a deep breath. “Angelo, come down here,” she’d say as quietly as she could, “before you break your neck.” Once he was down she would whisper, loud enough for us to hear behind the refrigerator door where we were getting juice, “Such things to tell children, Angelo. Shame on you.” She felt it her duty always to voice her opinion, to try to retrieve our lives from the dream if it was at all possible. But my grandfather smiled, just a little, as she scolded him; I think he measured the degree of success of any particular story by the disapproval in my grandmother’s eyes.
“Well,” Fletcher would say, quite soberly, “what do you think happens after we die, Grandma?”
My grandmother, despite years of Mass, believed that the end was the end, and since no one had come back to talk about it there was nothing else really to think. “No one know of anyway,” she’d say, looking at my grandfather, waiting for him to admit that he, too, did not know one person who had returned with proof.
“Proof!” he’d laugh. “Oh, my Maria, where is your faith?” Her lack of faith pained him.
“So this is it?” he gasped, gesturing out the window where a few sheep roamed against a field of brilliant green.
“As if this were not enough for you, Angelo!” she laughed.
“Faith,” he said, massaging her shoulders. “Faith,” he said, tickling her at the waist.
And in fact she was right. It was this world my grandfather loved—the world that held my grandmother’s stern voice; the world where we stood by his side, listening to his stories, loving him; yes, the world where sheep roamed and food grew in dirt.
“But I sense there is more,” he said. The gout in his hands was bothering him. “Don’t you know?”
What my grandmother knew was that what always happened would continue to happen, despite what we sad humans wished for so desperately. To use our energy on any sort of speculation was to waste it. Life was short—at her age she could vouch for it.
Both my grandparents’ attitudes towards the afterlife struck me as highly developed and acceptable. We spent every summer with them, and every summer I waited for the day when some philosophy might grow inside me. But the summer days with my grandparents passed quickly, like so many brightly colored playing cards being flipped in a deck, and at the end I had neither my grandfather’s faith that what waited for him on that brilliant day when his breathing changed shape was heaven nor my grandmother’s rational accepting eye.
What I wished for every night, staring at the ceiling before I dozed off, was a point of view, something I believed, a way to respond to the world that would be distinctly my own. Although Fletcher was younger than I, it seemed he had an opinion about everything as soon as you asked him. But any good argument—any beautiful face, a sliver of sunlight, the modulations of a voice—might alter my views or change my mind. Over and over I looked to my parents, but they were little help. All they could do was to send me back to the world; they were unwilling or perhaps unable to translate it for me.
I wonder if my parents, had they been simpler people, more predictable, more easily satisfied, would have been any better at being parents. They shrank from the parental role, uncomfortable in the authoritative stance. “Children do not grow better by themselves,” my grandmother said sadly into my father’s ear, and I do wonder what it would have been like to have had examples set and rules made, to have had meals on a schedule and someone who cared if you didn’t do homework or missed school. No one scolded us if w e forgot to brush our teeth or drank black coffee or stayed up past midnight. The idea of parents having power over their children seemed absurd to my father, and senselessness of any kind made my mother shudder.
“How do you get a point of view?” I would badger my parents. “How do you know something for sure?” I would ask over and over. My father would always shrug. To him it smacked of philosophy classes long ago at Princeton. And my mother, not inclined toward this sort of thought, would just laugh her long, lovely laugh. “Oh, Vanessa,” she’d say, elongating the vowels, “oh, Vanessa.”
The only thing that ever came close to guidance from them was my mother’s cryptic instruction, “You must be able to face what you see—to let it in, whatever it might be.” This advice, I am afraid, was wasted on me then. While other mothers were suggesting to their daughters what they might talk about on dates or showing them the various ways to shave a leg, my mother was telling me all she could: to trust myself and to trust what I saw. “You must be willing to live dangerously, to take risks.” But to live dangerously in Mystic, Connecticut, I wondered, what did she mean? I didn’t know, though I always suspected that my mother’s life was very dangerous indeed.
I decided to start observing my parents very carefully to see what it was they actually meant by “to live dangerously, to take risks.” In the spirit of my grandmother, I was looking for examples, for proof—a pattern, a repetition, a design of some sort. My grandmother would have called this enterprise a waste of time, and on this occasion she would have been right—no pattern ever emerged.
Still, I continued to watch. I watched them so often and so intentiy that soon my body assumed a position which it always took thereafter to accommodate deep concentration. One eye is squinted, my head is tilted to the side, my arms are folded across my chest. Candid photos of me at numerous occasions reveal this pose—at parties, at the zoo, at picnics, at poetry readings. Whether I am eight or ten or sixteen I always look the same: my right eye squints, my head tilts to the side, fixed in concentration, as if sheer w ill might expose to me the secrets of the universe. But, of course, this posture, a child’s invention, never helped to unravel the intricate workings of my parents’ hearts.
“You think about the strangest things sometimes, Vanessa,” Hetcher said, putting his arms around me. He was worried. He couldn’t understand what I needed to know so badly. For a second, I knew, he thought he was losing me to the incomprehensible world of our parents, but he should not have worried so; I would never even get close.
I will never get close. Still I have not entirely given up, even now.
I remember watching Father one night as he listened to Fletcher talk about the Civil War. I remember especially how carefully he listened to Fletcher, occasionally interjecting a comment of his own. I could tell that it brought my father pleasure to see Fletcher consider what he had said.
“It’s more complicated than you make it,” my father told him. “You have to let yourself really live in the South to understand the Confederacy,” and Fletcher nodded. Then, looking down at his plate, my father would say in that voice that was half here, half somewh
ere else, “What fine tomatoes and fine corn this season has produced. It’s been an exceptional season, I think.” At this point he smiled and closed his eyes, thankful for the good food and for Fletcher’s intelligence and curiosity and for his wife and daughter who on this rare occasion were all together at the same time for dinner. He looked so happy, so calm, that you would think that feeling of well-being would have stayed with him after we had all left the table.
“I’ll do the dishes,” Fletcher volunteered as he wandered through the Appomattox courthouse. “I’ll help,” my mother said.
How, then, was it that, when I followed my father out into the garden, this same man who minutes before was so content now seemed to be trembling as he turned the same black eggplant over and over in the evening light? It was a mystery to me what in the composition of this scene might turn my father into a sadder man, a smaller one. The mosquitoes at his neck? The whisper of fall in the air? The earth cooling drastically with the sunset?
“Daddy,” I asked, this year’s tomatoes turning in my stomach, “is anything wrong?”
“No, nothing, sweetheart,” he murmured and kissed the top of my head. “Come on, it’s getting chilly. Let’s go inside.”
And consider Mother, as we entered the house, sitting in a chair, a pencil poised in her hand, her eyes closed. What could I learn from the way she lived?
“Tell your brother that I would like to see him,” she said to me one day. But when I returned with Fletcher she had disappeared, nowhere to be found, not in the house or in the garden or near the lake.
“Mother,” we cried into the arms of trees. “Mother,” we said, kicking up rocks as if with some small adjustment the whole world would fall into place. When I eventually learned of Virginia Woolf ‘s death by water, I began to fear for my mother and that magnetic lake. I am grateful now that no such idea ever crossed my mind independently on those days when we searched everywhere for her to no avail.