Standing at the chain-link fence for balance, I stretched my calf muscles, then set off towards the start line and jogged slowly round. A catbird squawked in the pines around the track. I tried to imagine myself into Patrick’s pristine size-twelve running shoes.
Spring is a dangerous season for old men – you don’t have to be a poet to figure that out. Something in their blood starts bubbling at the approach of summer. It’s the time of year, after all, when life calls on the living to get up and at it. And who wants to admit he’s past the age when life called to him and meant it? Do anything but face that truth.
Mad with spring breezes, my Uncle Patrick had taken up jogging at the age of sixty-three.
Sixty-three. That’s a number to conjure with. Patrick always said that people’s numerical imaginations were very jaded. Between two and ninety-nine there’s not much to hold their attention. What he called zero and I call nought is mystical, inviolate, virginity. Number one is golden, primacy – the American obsession: One hundred is a century, tantalizingly outside the span of human life. The days of our life are three score and ten.
Jogging lends itself to mathematical speculation. There’s the beat of your shoes on the asphalt, measuring out four hundred metres with each lap. Each one is a quarter of a mile. Each time you pass the start, it’s a lap gone. From here, it’s only a small sideways step from maths to metaphysics: every birthday is a year gone. Every summer gone means another winter. And your whole life goes, seven years at a time, as invisibly and relentlessly as the hour hand. Seven, fourteen, twenty-one, twenty-eight, thirty-five, and so on: the scheduled climacterics, the times allotted by nature for retrospection and despair. Patrick was at sixty-three – the ninth lap of ten; thirty-five, which I was at the time, is the fifth.
I suppose that, pounding round the shimmering asphalt, Patrick was pursuing his youth. His heart was in the chase, but not up to it. He must have been miles away: remembering the summers he spent as a lifeguard along the North Shore; or the gleaming pompadour that he whipped up with Vitalis for the high-school prom; or some other memory that was too important to share with anyone, something that he kept back for himself as a bulwark against despair. A kiss, perhaps; or a poem; something he told no one. I wondered what he remembered as his congested heart gave out on the back straight; I wondered if it was an answer to the question that was bothering me: Who was Patrick March?
FOURTEEN
PATRICK MARCH WAS A WRITER but that’s not the first thing that I remember about him. The first thing that I remember about Patrick’s life is that he wet the bed as a child. I say ‘remember’, but this fact surfaces without any effort on my part. At boarding school, I suffered from enuresis too – an improbably tidy term for a constellation of humiliation, discomfort, rubber sheets and special talks with the housemaster. You can imagine how understanding thirteen-year-old boys are about someone who can’t help pissing in his own bed. And I grew up in more enlightened times than Patrick. His own uncle, a priest – who like other Catholic priests was considered an authority on children and marriage on account of having no personal experience of either – was delegated to talk to him about it. ‘You’re killing your mother!’ was, according to Judith, his memorable first approach. Then: ‘When you’re married, are you going to piss on your wife?’
Patrick’s bedwetting, like mine, cleared up on its own, but it was always looked on as something shameful. Tricia, the niece who inherited the collected Frederick Rolfe, once tried to humiliate him by alluding to it. The three of us were standing on the deck of my father’s rented house in Provincetown. Tricia was in her early teens, and a broth of hormones, orthodontic engineering, big hair and pullulating skin. Patrick had been teasing her about her boyfriends.
‘I know something about you,’ she said.
‘What? Come on, what?’ Patrick dared her, his voice rising an octave on the final question.
‘I could say something about you, but I’m not gonna.’
‘Come on.’
She narrowed her eyes and hissed at him: ‘Wed-betting!’
Wed-betting. Her unintentional spoonerism dissipated the tension and gave Patrick a let-out.
‘I’ve never bet on a wed in my life,’ he said.
*
As the oldest son, Patrick had borne the weight of his family’s expectations. He had carried this burden invisibly – in high school he was handsome, popular, athletic and outgoing. Then, at seventeen, he went to a Franciscan seminary to train for the priesthood – a choice that seemed less of a non sequitur in those days. Patrick used to describe arriving on the first day and choosing a box of cornflakes from a variety pack for his supper. It stuck in my mind because it seemed like the last thing in the world trainee priests would eat. What’s more, there were no bowls. The seminarians would lay the cartons flat, tear off the front panel, pour the milk in and eat the cereal straight out of the box.
He left the seminary after two years, went to the state university at Amherst and then got a job teaching English in a missionary school in Western Samoa. He was happy there for a couple of years, but when the principal left, Patrick fell out with his replacement and came home. He won a place at Harvard Law School in the same year as my father, but left after two semesters. The ‘J.D.’ after his name on the signpost was wishful thinking.
Aged twenty-five he seemed to be settling into a pattern of false starts. He had acquired a range of almost wholly useless abilities – basic conversational Latin from the seminary, good Samoan, a degree in English Literature – and a new prickliness about what he felt was his inability to live up to his potential. Meanwhile, my father was lapping him, winning plaudits from his professors and showing a single-mindedness that must have seemed like a reproach to Patrick.
My grandmother was so anxious about him that she agreed gladly when he proposed going to art school in New York. To a second-generation Italian American like her, it can only have seemed a slightly less criminal waste of money than dropping a suitcase of dollar bills into the Charles River.
Patrick drifted through art school. He took himself off the Fine Arts course after a couple of semesters and studied instead for a degree in commercial art – another name for graphic design, I think. Previous experience had stiffened his resolve to finish and he stuck it out to the end, but then had difficulty finding work. He toyed with the idea of a doctorate. ‘More education?’ was his mother’s incredulous reaction. My grandfather said nothing: it was his nature to be as stoic and uncommunicative as Plymouth Rock itself. By this time, my grandparents’ ambitions had devolved entirely on to my father. By the time Patrick finished art school, my father had been practising law in London for almost two years and his wife was expecting their second child.
Patrick spent a miserable summer working night shifts with a team of construction workers, building a tunnel to carry a road through downtown Boston. In the fall, he found a job teaching art at a private girls’ school in Rhode Island. He got paid enough to live on, had rooms on the campus and enough free time to paint and write.
He taught his lessons in a perfunctory way and saved his energy for the evenings when he would write in longhand at the kitchen table of his tiny one-room apartment. He used the same long yellow legal pads my father used for his work.
The first draft of Peanut Gatherers was finished in less than three months. It’s a remarkable fact – all the more so when you consider that Patrick struggled to finish anything else for the rest of his career. He was borne along by alternating spells of fear and enthusiasm. He once compared writing to a walk that began as a gentle downhill stroll in sunshine and quickly became an uphill struggle against worsening weather and diminishing light. What kept him going, I think, was the fear of adding another failure to the train he felt he dragged along behind him.
It is a novel about an innocent abroad, drawing heavily from Patrick’s own experiences as a teacher in Western Samoa. He took advantage of the increasingly liberal sexual climate of the time to write frankly
(and titillatingly) about the customs of the island and the adventures of its protagonist, Horace: the apparently innocent title is a punning allusion to a Samoan sexual custom.
Peanut Gatherers is a great book. It’s written in a breezy style that’s quite uncharacteristic of Patrick and is full of mischievous humour. There’s a funny section about two witch-doctors who conduct a necromantic mind duel from their respective huts over the ownership of a Boston Red Sox baseball cap. In my favourite episode, a missionary from Utah gets Horace to help him translate the Book of Mormon into Samoan. Horace sabotages the translation, filling it with swear-words and nonsensical idioms. There’s a brilliant set-piece where the missionary reads the translated book to a church full of incredulous locals. (‘My manly element is as kinked as a taro root. I allow eunuchs to pleasure my rectum with green bananas. May ringworm visit my mother’s descendants unto the fifth generation.’) His services become the most popular events on the island. At each one, members of the congregation cry and wet themselves from laughter and the missionary thinks they’re being visited by the Holy Ghost.
The book was quickly accepted by a Boston publishing house. It didn’t sell particularly well, but by one of those twists of good fortune which had so far been absent from Patrick’s life story, the rights were bought outright by a Hollywood studio for a fairly considerable sum. Patrick was given a lot of money to write the screenplay, and then when he and the executives found themselves at loggerheads, he was given even more not to write it.
Peanut Gatherers opened in 1966 as one of the last big-budget Technicolor musicals just as old Hollywood was about to be swept by a new avant-garde. It bombed at the box office but was nominated for two technical Oscars – set design and make-up.
Patrick had long before dissociated himself from the movie. His experience of Hollywood soured him and brought out an ugly – and uncharacteristic – streak of anti-Semitism. One of his pet projects was a list he kept of important figures in the film business and their original, Jewish, surnames.
His subsequent books were either unreadable or unpublishable: a libellous roman-à-clef about Hollywood; a novel about Button Gwynett – one of the signatories to the Declaration of Independence; a stream-of-consciousness novel about a left-handed hero that would be written in mirror-writing.
With many of these ideas, it was almost as though he was avenging himself on the approachability of the novel that had brought him his first success. As he got older, and none of his books gained an audience, he found himself in the perplexing position of being haunted by his own ghost, the ghost of a successful young novelist.
He did write children’s stories and publish books of poetry privately. But what literary reputation he enjoyed was damaged by the whole scandal over Amazon Basin.
Amazon Basin was – even by Patrick’s standards – a strange book. It purported to be a straight account of a journey through the Brazilian rain forest, but almost as soon as it was published a few careful readers had written to point out that the whole middle section had been lifted, unchanged, from a 1920s travelogue called I Married a Headhunter by a woman named Edna Beveridge.
This is odd for two reasons. Firstly, the plagiarised section of Patrick’s book is easily the worst thing in it. The beginning and end of Amazon Basin together form a wonderful long essay about the nature of travel writing itself. The opening chapter (‘The Fiction of Solitude’) argues that all travelling is really a version of a more profound interior journey; that we are all, always, ‘travelling’ in this way; and that an unknown country is just a screen on which the traveller encounters his own fantasies. Patrick’s version of this idea was a very extreme one. He insisted that all travel writing was actually fiction. Since the true subject of every journey is the consciousness of the traveller, he wrote, patently untrue tales of sea monsters and flying islands are actually more valid than ‘accurate’ accounts of places and customs. The conscious fabricator is more aware of his real theme than the traveller who mistakes his perceptions for objective reality. It’s a dense and peculiar piece of writing which draws on phenomenology, medieval travel writing, the Vinland sagas, fake maps, budget guidebooks, the works of T. E. Lawrence and Sir Richard Burton and the logbooks of Donald Crowhurst – the yachtsman who went crazy during a solo circumnavigation of the world.
‘The Fiction of Solitude’ convinced at least one person that all travel was really unnecessary. Having written the chapter, Patrick didn’t bother leaving Massachusetts to write about Brazil. He just slapped someone else’s travel book into the middle of his own, as though his only concern was fulfilling his contractual obligations to his publisher.
The second strange thing is that I Married a Headhunter is not even a book about Brazil, it’s a book about the dayaks of Borneo.
Amazon Basin was eventually withdrawn. It has a certain cachet with collectors.
Subsequent projected volumes included a Comparative Dictionary of Onomatopoeia – Vivian said it would be Finnegans Wake without the laughs; a novel about a woman who runs a marathon within two hours – the action was to be set within the time frame of the marathon with flashbacks; and a book that was actually a kaleidoscope, its pages to be sheets of textured and coloured glass that could be shuffled to produce different optical effects.
Thinking about the windfall that had altered Patrick’s life, I couldn’t help comparing it to the one that had altered mine. Luck – whether apparently good or bad – has a way of reversing itself in its consequences; and then repeating the trick. I wouldn’t say that it was completely bad for Patrick, but the independence he got in this unanticipated and unlooked-for way exacerbated a dangerous part of his character. Money had released Patrick from any dependency, but it meant that he had been able to give up living, in the way that most people understand the word. He’d locked himself away; had become as autochthonous as a heartbeat or a self-winding watch. But why? ‘He lacked hunger’ was what my father had said. It seemed improbable to me.
These were the bare outlines of my uncle’s life as I knew them. I was aware of gaps and missing years; episodes that blurred into one another; contradictions of time and place. What I knew, I knew imperfectly, and I was sometimes confronted with objects that showed the limits of my knowledge.
One evening, looking for a book to read, I found an album of photographs on one of the shelves in the library. They were of Patrick and my father some time in the 1950s. I knew instantly they had been taken in London, in winter or early spring. It was something about the colours. A rainy London day has a very specific palette. And the two brothers had the wintry, grey faces of early morning commuters. I turned the page, idly wondering who had taken the pictures, and saw two or three more, all in the same location (Wandsworth or Streatham Common?). These were all permutations of three people: Patrick, my father and my mother – looking improbably blonde and pretty. There were perhaps ten pictures of them, and the last two showed all three of them standing together. They were smiling awkwardly in the first – at whoever had been corralled into taking the picture – the second had been taken immediately after, and already the pose of the first had begun to dissolve, my father had turned away from the camera, my mother’s eyes were closed as she laughed and brushed her hair out of her face. Patrick’s hand was on her shoulder, and he looked absently across the frame.
The fact that Patrick had visited London came as a revelation. I didn’t recall his ever mentioning it. I knew he had travelled in Europe – the rest of the photos were snaps of various European capitals, and blurry ones that looked like they had been taken out of a train window (Poland? Russia?) – and I suppose that would make a visit to London inevitable, but neither he nor my father had ever said anything about it.
It was only a glimpse into a single afternoon of three lives, but it implied that the dimensions of my ignorance were vast.
For a few days, I got so caught up thinking about the past that I stopped paying attention to the present. When I came back to myself, it was with the da
wning realisation that coming to Ionia had led me to a dead end. It wasn’t a flash of insight – a conversion – but something more slow-growing and deeply rooted: I couldn’t stay. Sooner rather than later, I knew I would have to move forward and that meant leaving the island. What I didn’t – couldn’t – foresee was that going forward would just lead me more circuitously into the past.
FIFTEEN
AT THE BEGINNING, when I wasn’t painting, I found myself odd jobs to do: I rooted around in the shed, planted vegetables and put up a bird feeder in Patrick’s Japanese maple tree. I harvested pears and peaches from my orchard and delivered some in a brown paper-bag to the Fernshaws with a note thanking them for their help on the day of my arrival. There was no one at home, so I left the bag on the steps of their house. I occasionally passed Nathan selling lemonade on the empty highway as I drove back and forth to the Colonial Market for milk and newspapers.
I made a point of stopping every time. He was unfailingly rude, which I began to enjoy in a strange way. It became one of the reliable features of my routine. I always pretended not to notice, and chatted happily to him when I pulled up to buy his lemonade. He never took off his headphones, but served me with the music leaking out of them into the sunshine.
My proprietorial zest for my new home soon waned. I found living in the house even more uncomfortable than I had anticipated. To stay there with time on your hands was to get sucked into the unwinnable war against entropy that Patrick had been waging halfheartedly for years. For every one thing I fixed, two more seemed to break. Or, the quest for the right tool would take me to another part of the house where I would uncover worse damp, more dangerous wiring, or an impassable mountain of crockery that had been stacked up because the cabinet it was intended for needed fixing.
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