“I was up here off and on one summer, let’s see, thirty-some years ago. Haven’t been back since. It’s still beautiful.”
“Yes it is.”
“You kind of want to put it under glass. When I came up I stayed with a family named Hartshorn. They had a large diary farm near a village called Ebenezer. The village consisted of a one-room schoolhouse and three or four old farmhouses stuck at a crossroads. No one had electricity then. All those damn cows got milked by hand.”
“There are still Hartshorns around. It’s funny how much continuity you get up here. Surprising.”
“Why? It’s a lovely place. The son was a friend of mine, a medical school classmate. It struck me years later that he was probably in love with the woman I married. She picked me, he was killed in the war. World War II that is.”
Leonard said, “I’ve heard of it.”
“No doubt. Tell you what, Leonard. Maybe you’d like to have dinner with us tonight? I plan to take Liz out for a steak. I haven’t seen her for a couple of months.”
“Oh,” he frowned and ducked his head, “that’s kind of you, but my wife and I have other plans.”
“Well, I can’t beat that excuse. So I’ll just leave Liz a note and toddle off on my own for a couple of hours. Maybe if I look real hard I can find Ebenezer. I invested in a map of the county. Wasn’t the Hartshorn barn that burned, was it?”
“No, a family named Knacker. They’re neighbors of ours, actually.”
“Mmm.” He bent, scribbled a few words on a slip of paper, folded the message and impaled it on the tip of a pencil that stood with a dozen others in an old green glass Mason jar. Then he held up a big hand in salute and eased himself out of the door.
Nice guy, Leonard thought and snapped on his desk lamp. The sun had moved around the building to the west, leaving this back office cooler but darker. “While the rest of the nation is immersed in the unfolding drama of the Watergate break-in,” he read, his editor’s pencil poised, “up here in Sussex County, New Jersey, preparations for the Independence Day celebration proceed as usual. In these parts, The Fourth is a day for seeing friends at picnics and barbecues, or for family reunions. Driving along the local roads you’ll see hand painted signs directing you to Pierce, Wengler, Shaw, Sohmer, Van Kirk, De Kay—all families who have large reunions planned. Although many family members have long since moved elsewhere, they know their roots are here, and in some cases, predate the Revolutionary War. The De Kays, of Huguenot origin, trace their arrival back to the year 1642, while the Spangenburgs, another old county family, came here in the mid-eighteenth century as part of a Moravian community determined to settle in the west Jersey wilderness and Christianize the local Indians. Both the De Kay family and the Spangenburgs expect a large Independence Day gathering of cousins, second cousins, aunts, great uncles …”
Again Leonard thought of his grandmother, eighty-four years old, whose family, reduced to memory and photographic likeness, now resided in a tin Peak Frean Biscuit box. Only once had he seen her cry. She’d been born a Protestant but eschewed religion, as rigorous in her unbelief as any True Believer, yet she allowed herself at Christmastime the emotional luxury of a small tabletop evergreen. He had seen, with his very own eyes, that iron lady sit looking at nothing on Christmas Eve, with her frail hands folded on the head of her cane, and her blue eyes purblind (silver tears trailing down her powdered cheeks), silently crying for all her family dead. And she’d said, after a moment, setting her jaw, shrugging a shoulder, raising her blurred blue eyes, “Nah, ja. So ist es. Nichts zu tu’n.”
2.
And yet, here was Leonard at the age of twenty-seven thinking not of founding his own family but of divesting himself of the only family tie he had thus far acquired. As a kid, it hadn’t ocurred to him that his parents, Emily and Karl, had tried to provide their children with more than the usual allotment of family security, economic and otherwise. In that upstate New York red brick mill town, Leonard knew from the time he went to kindergarten that his family was different in two ways: first, they were “rich”; that is, they lived in a large white house in a part of town that had such houses set back on green lawns under old shade trees, and second, they had no local ties, no kith nor kin, no generational history. They were outsiders. His father was a “foreigner.” In 1938, a year after he’d arrived from Hitler’s Germany, Karl had passed his New York State Medical Board exams and married Emily. Since New York City was chock-full of refugee physicians and since Emily didn’t much care for city living, they decided to try out life in the small Mohawk Valley town of Cato, New York.
In 1938, Emily and Karl didn’t own a car. One afternoon, carrying two suitcases apiece, they boarded a train at Grand Central Station. The train arrived in Cato, New York, at nine-twenty p.m. Everything was shut up tight except the dingy hotel across from the railroad station. In the dark, carrying their suitcases, they picked their way across a cobblestone street which gleamed under the dim light of a far-off street lamp. The dark street smelled of sulphur, the hotel lobby smelled of brimstone (or perhaps cigar smoke); the only bright spot was the shine on the brass spitoon. Their room smelled of carbolic acid. The door had a transom which they couldn’t close and which all night long admitted the dejected yellow beam of a solitary hall bulb as well as the noise of constant erratic movement. The hotel guests seemed a restless lot, doors opened and closed, there were penetrating shrieks of laughter, spasms of coughing, the clink of bottles, and all of the voices, male or female, talked in a coarse incoherent dialect, as if two hundred miles from New York City the Gannets had exiled themselves to a lost and infernal colonial outpost on a dangerous and unexplored river.
The next morning they left the hotel carrying their suitcases. From the hotel steps they could see the Mohawk, wide and blue, sweeping slowly between the hills. A barge was going west; it gave a little toot. Puffs of white smoke came out of its stout red chimney, and a man wearing a cap leaned on the barge’s railing contentedly smoking his pipe and looking down into the churning wake. Across the river the roofs of houses gleamed in the morning sun and at the very top of the hill a large windmill painted blue and yellow wore a sign that said Van Kirk’s Dairy. A night in Mozambique, a morning in Amsterdam, Holland.
The Gannets prospered in Cato. Life in the upstate town was enlarged by frequent trips. There was money enough for good food, good clothes, good schools, and a “camp” in the Adirondacks. It was on a small, very cold blue lake rimmed by dark green mountains. Summer mornings, the peaks wore wreaths of curling mist; on somnolent summer afternoons, when the gnats and no-see-ems came out, these vaporous puffs reappeared, turned grayish and sullen and lay upon the mountain summits like icebags cooling an ardent headache.
All this apparent privilege! And yet what Leonard felt growing up was unease, clear ambivalence as to his place in the town and the world. World War II had provided boom times for the town’s textile mills, but in the nineteen-fifties the mills had moved to South Carolina, where there were no unions and taxes were low. After that, driving around Cato, you saw knots of men standing on street corners with their hands in their pockets, smoking, spitting, passing the time of day. Nothing on Main Street had been painted or repaired since before the Depression, but the town endured, mocking itself or shrugging at its own scruffy doggedness.
Leonard grew up well-off in a poor man’s town, but by the time he was eight or nine he realized there was something else that made him “different.” They were (“more or less,” his father said cautiously) Jewish, in a town that was seventy per cent cent Roman Catholic and twenty-eight per cent Protestant. They were not, as a family, observant Jews, and it seemed to Leonard that there was always a faint air of apology or embarrassment about religious matters. In Germany, Karl’s family had been “more or less” assimilated; his mother had been a Protestant. As for himself, Karl said, he wanted only to get along peacefully.
One day when Leonard was in the fifth grade, he was set upon in the middle of the Church St
reet Bridge by a gang of kids from the east side. They chanted “Hey, Jew, how are you?” and took his music books and tossed them into Cattaraugus Creek. They might have tossed him into the boiling creek, too, if a couple of high school girls hadn’t come along.
“Get oudda here, ya little snots!” one of the girls yelled. “You okay, honey?” she asked, looking at him sympathetically with her dark, dark-lined Italian eyes. She grappled in her pocketbook and came up with a pink tissue, wet it and dabbed at his bloodied forehead where some kid he didn’t even know had hit him with a rock.
On the other hand, in high school (he went away to school, to Lawrenceville) he dated Bibby Chickering, whose parents liked him and welcomed him into their home. Bibby’s father, J. Arnold Chickering, was the First Vice President of the Cato National Trust Company, an elder of the Presbyterian church, a third degree Mason, a trustee of the country club, a graduate of Dartmouth College, a founder of The Mohawk Scene, the local little theater organization, and a reader. Mr. Chickering subscribed to the Book of the Month Club and he liked to sit in the living room with Leonard and discuss Literature while upstairs Bibby (in her pink and white gingham checked bedroom which Leonard only saw when the Chickerings were out of town) got dressed for their date.
Bibby went to Douglass College, Leonard went to Princeton, destined, he thought, for medical school. When he came home for Christmas vacation his sophomore year something had happened. Bibby had dyed her blonde hair black and was singing with a rock group. Leonard quit thinking about medical school and joined SDS. Bibby and Leonard didn’t seem right for each other anymore. Still, in January, Leonard and Skip Loomis, his Princeton roommate, went down to New Brunswick to hear Bibby sing. Her group was called The Flames and they were performing at a place called The Good Times Bar. At the Bar, the music bravely oscillated between The Flames and Shauna McKeown, who played guitar and sang folk songs. Later, he, Bibby, The Flames, Skip, and Shauna all went to a party where he met Alice Hintle. He woke up the next morning in bed with Shauna but depressingly had no recollection of how he’d gotten there. He apologized to Shauna, who laughed her deep marvelous laugh, throwing her head back and showing her strong white throat, which had not one freckle upon it. After that weekend, Skip occasionally dated Alice, but in the summer of 1968, Leonard and Alice began going out steadily. The first week they spent together was in a house on the Jersey shore that Shauna and Alice were renting. Leonard had just bought a used car, a gold Mustang convertible, and they went everywhere in it, he and Alice, Shauna and her fiance, Bill McLaughlin (who smiled continuously and drank constantly and never said much except, “Wanna go fer a beer?”).
That summer, Alice wore a shiny dark blue bikini with thick rope-like drawstrings. Leonard could still remember in his fingertips the stubbornness of the knotted strings. He tugged at them while Alice breathily giggled into his ear (and the glitter of sand that lay between her small breasts and the sand in the crotch of her bikini as she slid his finger under the hemmed edge of the bottoms, sand and the prickles of hair where she’d shaved and the cotton crotch of the pants, also sandy, but with an inviting sticky wet spot in the center).
He’d felt staggered by lust and love: passion. He felt as if he’d been hit on the head. That week in July they couldn’t leave each other alone. On a rainy day, they made love in the back of the Mustang, with the top up. “This is like Girl Scout Camp,” Alice said dreamily, lying under him, “when it rained on your tent? And after Rest Hour you knew there’d be crafts at the lodge instead of swimming.”
They made love in her concave bed in the rented beach house, on mint green sheets that had a central trough full of sand; they made love in the kitchen at two a.m. They were both blazing with sunburn and desire and one night when the others were out they made love on the cool black and white ceramic tiles of the bathroom, Alice on top. Looking up, Leonard saw her pink-tipped white breasts bobbing like little pears, her scalded pink chest, her enflamed peeling face, her peeling nose, puffy eyes, swollen lips helplessly agape, grinning over her large perfect white teeth. “Oh! Oh! Oh!” she sang out and collapsed on top of him.
She had a year of college left, he went on to the Columbia School of Journalism. He tried off and on not to see her; it killed his schedule, but when he didn’t see her he was angry and morose. They were married in June of 1970. “You’re going to hate my family,” she said.
She was right. En masse, the Hintles struck him as small mean souls who disliked: Jews, Protestants, Niggers, Wops, everybody but the Hintles. On the other hand, they didn’t like each other much, either. What kept the family going was an endless capacity for spite, envy and malice; Leonard thought they’d all been born with bile instead of blood. They never (while sober) attacked him to his face, at least not at first, not until they discovered he had no money.
After they were married, Leonard and Alice rented an apartment in Manhattan, in the West Village, two rooms over a bakery on Jane Street. Alice worked as a waitress, Leonard looked for a job, any kind of writing-editing job. These were hard to come by. After a few months, they sublet their place and moved to western Massachusetts, where Leonard worked for a small Berkshire newspaper, and then back to New York again, where Leonard got a job on a new weekly as a reporter. The salary was abysmal. Things weren’t terrific. Alice had grown up poor and wanted more, and Leonard who had not grown up poor wanted more, too, although more of what he couldn’t precisely define.
One winter night Skip Loomis came by. Leonard hadn’t seen him for two years. There was something heartening about the very clump of Skip’s boots heading up the wooden stairs. He held in his thick-gloved hands a cardboard takeout box that was full of Chinese food. They sat and ate and talked until three a.m. Skip had just seen Wayne and May Steptoe. The Steptoes knew of a place in the country that was up for sale, or alternatively, for rent. If they could get enough people together, the rent would be nothing, man. And here was the other thing. They could finally do what they’d talked about doing for years—start a newspaper. Finally, they could be a community, a real working community, with common interests and a goal. They’d be living together in a way they wanted to live.
“You mean,” Leonard said sarcastically, “like the Oneida Community?”
“The what?” Alice asked sleepily. She lay on the sofa with her eyes half-closed.
“Not exactly,” Skip said smiling. “We won’t promote eugenics. But come on, Len. Seriously. Aren’t you sick of it? The crap? The bullshit? The shoddiness? The fake salute-the-flag stuff? The whole crummy ethic—don’t think, just do. Don’t rock the boat. Do what we tell you to do. Think what we tell you to think.”
Leonard grunted.
Skip squinted his eyes. “Let’s see, who else’ve we got? Wayne and May, you and Alice, me. Maybe a couple more people? This place has bedrooms like a hotel.”
“Shauna,” Alice said, opening her eyes. “She’s had it with mental health. I’ll call her.”
“Hey,” Leonard said frowning. “Let’s talk about this first, okay?”
“Why?” Alice said, and closed her eyes again.
Skip yawned and shook his head. “Anyhow, the place comes with a handyman. He’s a guy our age, a carpenter. He’d live there, too. May’s talked to him, she says he’s great, working class and very funny and with it.”
“How about you?” Alice asked Skip. She lazily turned her head and looked up at him from under her blonde lashes. “You bringing a girl?”
“I don’t know, sweetie,” Skip said, and smiled tenderly. “If I can find one. So. When do you want to go out?”
“You mean to see it?” Leonard asked.
“To see it,” Skip said, “maybe to rent it. How about April first? That way, we get to spend spring in the country.”
“Well, Jesus,” Leonard said, and rubbed his hand over his chin, “I don’t know if we can swing it. We’d have to sublet this place, unless they give us back our deposit.”
“Tell them I’m pregnant,” Alice said. “T
hat’ll make them want to get rid of us.”
Skip grinned. “Are you?”
“No,” Alice said. She got up and went into the tiny bedroom, slamming the door behind her.
When Leonard finally, wearily, stumbled into the bedroom, he thought she was asleep, but she sat up in bed and said furiously, “You should’ve asked him to take us to breakfast.” Then she flopped over, pulling the blankets across the bed with her. They were down to five dollars and twenty cents and the check Leonard had been waiting for hadn’t arrived. Whenever they got really low on cash they both went home, if they could afford the bus fare. This time they couldn’t. Leonard knew it was his fault they were poor and that poverty had made Alice angry and grasping. She was always worried. They had no health insurance; her worst fear was a pregnancy. Making love was okay, but the next morning Alice would get up with a face hewn out of stone. The problem, he knew, was that he wanted to try things out, wasn’t ready to lead the trudging life of a breadwinner-husband-father.
And Alice, who at first had been so sweet and wanton and wild, seemed to expect exactly that out of him. She had fooled him and no doubt he had fooled her, with his good education and his good tweeds and the large white clapboard house in upstate New York, its three-car garage, its swimming pool and tennis court. Yet, really, hadn’t he understood Alice all along? He’d taken her home so that she could admire. He’d known or guessed that when Skip had dated Alice he’d never taken her home to his folks, but Leonard had done it, taken her upstate, displayed before her the trappings of upper-middle-class life. You could call it misrepresentation. He’d wanted her love so badly. Maybe he’d even had it, at least for awhile. Later, it occurred to him that they were locked into marriage the way the country was locked into the Vietnam war; by pride and deception.
Now what he wanted was peace—no fights, recriminations, tears. Long ago, he’d decided not to live his life merely tactfully, timidly or apologetically, but marriage to Alice demanded precisely these accommodations. He found himself tiptoeing around her and hating himself for it. Peace at any price. No. He couldn’t continue to do it. He told himself that by the end of the summer he’d know, finally, how to end it.
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