by Lisa Alther
I phone my grandmother to convey greetings from Vonda, Zella, Bob, and Hetty. But I censor news of Maggie Gibson, Abby Easterd, Betty Reeves, and John Wesley Swindall. She’s so intent on her Tidewater ties to Confederate cavaliers that I don’t have the heart to unknot them. But I do realize that it’s through such cowardice that the great scams of history are perpetuated.
Although my evasions about my trip may have put her mind at ease, I can tell from her tone of voice that she’s still suffering over Kinflicks. As a peace offering, I ask if we can go together to visit Aunt Ura.
She hesitates, then replies, “Well, we might could, but we hadn’t ought.”
There’s a long silence. Every time she comes out with one of these anachronisms from the hills, I’m reduced to speechlessness, feeling myself in the presence of a flesh-and-blood fossil. She seems embarrassed, as though her dentures have just tumbled out on the dinner table.
“Why not?” I finally ask.
“Aunt Ura may be dying.”
“Isn’t that all the more reason to visit her?”
“Let her die in peace,” murmurs my grandmother.
I say nothing, but I see no reason why Aunt Ura should get to die in peace when I’m coming unglued trying to figure out what these people are hiding from me. I’ve never been a fan of conspiracy theories, believing for example that Lee Harvey Oswald was likely a lone lunatic. But lately my grandmother has been behaving like Lady Macbeth in more than just her diction. Who are these shunned ancestors whose legacy she’s strangled with her well-manicured hands?
I go see Aunt Ura anyway. After all, she’s my twice-great-aunt. I find her lying on white sheets in a bedroom in Annette’s house. Her face is dark and cracked like an old motorcycle jacket. Her sharp cheekbones form caves for her tightly shut eyes. She resembles a mummy. I reflect with wonder that her father John Wesley Swindall fought in the Civil War. As Faulkner said, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
I sit down and chat with Annette, eventually describing my mission. I don’t use the M-word, having finally understood that it’s a deal-breaker for older people who haven’t grown up in an era of ethnic chic. But I do use the C-word, asking Aunt Ura in her apparent coma if she knows whether we have any Cherokee ancestors.
She lies so still that I begin to suspect she’s already dead. After a while she rolls over and turns her back to me. Annette looks at me, her dark eyebrows raised, and shrugs. I apologize to Aunt Ura for bothering her, and I wish her a speedy recovery.
As I head back to my parents’ house, I reflect that someone who’s guarded her secrets for 104 years isn’t about to spill them now, deathbed or no, and certainly not to a published author. This is Kingsport, Tennessee, after all, not Hollywood, California.
5
Blood Sport
FOR THE NEXT DECADE AND A HALF, I give scarcely a thought to my annoying ancestors. I’m too preoccupied with the present, having joined a feminist karate group. We’ve hired a brown belt from Florida to instruct us. But everyone is down on her because she acts as though she knows more than we do. Many are complaining that she’s elitist. We spend our practice sessions sitting in a circle with her, processing our resentment. Those who feel a circle is too fascistic roam the room, offering their feedback from wherever they please.
I’ve also joined a basketball team called the Hot Flashes. We play in the Burlington city league against teams of former stars from the local colleges. Because of our antihierarchical policy of letting every member play an equal number of minutes, even those who can’t dribble, we usually lose by at least a hundred points.
In addition to my athletic endeavors, I’m busy policing a teenager, writing novels and traveling to promote them, getting divorced, conducting romances, and attending therapy sessions to recover from them. A child of the sixties, I came of age believing that the human heart was just another muscle, one that could be strengthened by aerobics, the more the better. Always a slow learner, I prowled around a few too many campfires, trying to project an aura of louche glamour, before finally understanding that my heart is not a muscle. It’s a mushmelon, unsuitable for use as a kickball on the playground of desire. I’ve also gradually come to understand that other people’s hearts can be snapped as easily as chicken necks and must be handled with care, or not at all.
Never one to waste material I’ve paid good money to acquire, I write my third novel, Other Women, about the interaction between a therapist and her client, a lesbian mother and emergency room nurse who’s trying to comprehend the violence in the world. It’s set entirely in New England, the first time I’ve grappled fictionally with Yankees. But since I’ve by now lived longer in the North than in Tennessee, it seems about time. And therapists strike me as the Yankee equivalent to southern preachers — the often flawed mortals to whom you skulk once you finally admit that you don’t have all the answers. For several hours each week for six months I’ve interviewed my ex-therapist, trying to gain some insight into the mechanics of the process.
Psychotherapy was nearly as popular as polio when I was growing up. We Kingsporters were supposed to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps while maintaining stiff upper lips. I start fretting that once this book about people who acknowledge problems and seek help for them is published, I’ll undergo a public defrocking as both a southerner and an Appalachian.
To make matters worse, both southern and Appalachian women are known for standing by their men, single-handedly harvesting tobacco crops, sewing wardrobes from flour sacks, and planting petunias in diesel tires — even as their men drink, gamble away their paychecks, run around with honky-tonk whores, and knock their devoted wives senseless. I used to see the “accidents” resulting from this ethos while working as a candy striper at my father’s hospital during high school. By featuring a heroine who prefers to stand by another woman, it seems likely that I’ll not only get myself defrocked but may also be branded on the forehead with a large letter L in the middle of the church circle at the head of Broad Street.
*
My father calls one night in the midst of all this personal growth to say that my grandmother has died. I’m unexpectedly grief-stricken — unexpectedly because she was ninety-nine years old and I thought I was prepared for her departure. Every time we parted during the past twenty-five years she told me, “Now, Lisa, this is the last time you’ll see me alive.”
She always seemed leery of death, which surprised me because she was such a staunch Baptist. I suspect she was worried about hell, though I can’t imagine why, since I’m sure her most egregious act might have been to steal a recipe or two from a fellow Virginia Clubber.
In any case, you can’t prepare for the loss of someone you’ve loved. My grandmother has loomed large in my life, and with her goes a whole chunk of my past. With her also goes my last chance to learn firsthand the truth about her mysterious family.
Other Women comes out, and nothing much happens. There are the usual nasty reviews that no one but me notices — and some nice reviews that I scarcely notice because I’m so upset by the bad ones. If anyone in Kingsport has even read the book, they don’t mention it. (This means they hate it.) I get a few letters from disgruntled therapists, suggesting that I stick to my own profession. But the defrocking and branding don’t occur. I’m almost disappointed. As any mother of a teen knows, most people prefer even negative attention to no attention at all.
One night I find myself in the basement of a Vermont church with several dozen recovering alcoholics. The therapist I interviewed for Other Women died of alcoholism as I sat at her bedside in the Burlington hospital. Although I thought I knew her well, I had no clue she was a closet drinker. Since I drink very little, and my parents and grandparents not at all, I didn’t notice any warning signs. But I still blame myself for not having somehow intervened.
I’m also mad as hell at her for posing as an expert on human behavior while secretly drinking herself to death. I’ve been trying to convince myself that a creek can s
till convey water to the thirsty even if it absorbs none itself. But creeks don’t charge $75 an hour for their services.
While sitting there listening to grim sagas of violence and despair, I glance at a woman who’s cross-legged on the floor beside me. In her lap lies an open copy of Other Women. Many sentences are underlined in black ink or highlighted in yellow. I suppress a snort of laughter and decide not to tell her that the crackpot to her left is its author. It might be as demoralizing as learning that your priest abuses altar boys — or that your therapist is an alcoholic.
Fourteen of us are gathered at Richard’s cottage on Lake Champlain — my parents from Tennessee plus all my siblings, their spouses, and children from North Carolina, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and California. It’s twilight. The day has been a scorcher, and the lake surface is glassy. Most of us are eating inside when John and his wife Dale yell from the porch that something strange is going on in the lake. We all run out and stand along the bank, hearing waves crashing on the rocks farther down the point.
Suddenly, some twenty feet offshore we spot a snakelike creature the diameter of a truck tire slithering past us. At any one time three or four rolling humps break the surface. They’re dark in color, but they glisten in the fading light. Speechless, we watch this creature, which appears to be about thirty feet long, as it parallels the shoreline. Its wake slaps the shelves of rock below us.
“Somebody get a camera,” murmurs Michael. But no one moves.
The animal curves away from us and heads out to the middle of the lake.
My family has never even heard of Champ, as Vermonters call this legendary creature. I find it satisfying watching them struggle to fit it into their scientific worldview In addition to my father, Bill, Michael, and Jane are physicians. John is a sociology professor. They’ve always been a sleeper cell of skeptics in a loony world. Every woolly concept that was ever voiced at our dinner table — astrology or UFOs, the Virgin Birth or the parting of the Red Sea — was always blown clean like a dandelion gone to seed.
I’m the black sheep, often agraze in the pastures of la-la land. I’ll believe anything, at least for a while. I inherited this trait from my grandfather Reed, who once bought beachfront property in Florida sight unseen. When he visited it, it lay under three feet of water. He sold it for pennies on the dollar to a developer, who filled the area with sludge from the Gulf, built a gated community, and made millions.
My family members are speculating about floating logs, wakes from unseen boats, and schools of giant fish. But all reluctantly agree that none of these scenarios fits what we’ve just seen.
Richard phones the Champ hotline to report our sighting. The man on the other end, who’s never seen Champ himself, despite having spent his vacations floating around the lake in an inflatable boat, nearly weeps as he adds ours to his list of 250 sightings. The first recorded one was by Samuel de Champlain in 1609, and several of the most recent were by Vermont’s former governor Richard Snelling, an enthusiastic sailor.
Coincidentally or not, the cliff across the lake from this cottage was called Snake Mountain by the Iroquois, who had a legend of a horned serpent who lived in these waters. The lake at this point is over four hundred feet deep. Some believe it to be connected by underwater caverns and rivers to smaller lakes in Canada and the Adirondacks, where there have also been reports of Champ-like creatures over the centuries.
The handful of sane scientists who will openly endorse the possibility of the existence of a breeding colony of Champs in Lake Champlain propose that they’re descended from marine reptiles called plesiosaurs, thought to have gone extinct along with the dinosaurs sixty-five million years ago. Their reasoning is that some survivors were trapped in Lake Champlain after the last ice age, when the glaciers melted to form the lake and the land crust, freed from their weight, rebounded to cut the lake off from the St. Lawrence seaway and the Atlantic.
The next morning John, the professor, comes downstairs looking frazzled. He has puffy bags under his eyes. He announces, “I’ve finally figured it out: that was no sea monster. It was a line of frogmen in wet suits doing the butterfly.”
I begin to suspect that in my northward flight toward freedom, I haven’t really left home. The house I’m living in, on farmland outside a Vermont village of 2,500 people, is an 1803 brick Georgian with a layout identical to that of the house in which I grew up. The foothills I used to hike, with Sara in a backpack, are similar to those I roamed as a child. The fields around me are full of Holsteins, just like our farm back home.
Vermonters, although more reticent than East Tennesseans, have the same droll affability. The accent is different, but the grammar “mistakes” are the same. I could just as easily hear “I ain’t never seen nobody like you” in Vermont as in Tennessee. And I know a man up here who’s called Snake Eye.
Vermont, I finally register, is merely the northern end of the Appalachians, which is why I feel so much at home here. The entire mountain range was settled by Anglo-Saxons and Celts — predominantly English Puritans in Vermont and Scots-Irish in the South. The settlers’ ballads, clogging, and speech patterns were nearly identical all along its length, apart from contributions by the Cherokee in the South and the French Canadians in Vermont. I conclude that the Mason-Dixon line is an imaginary demarcation established for reasons of political manipulation. The reality is that Vermonters and Tennesseans are two of the Lost Tribes of Britain. I don’t have to choose between them anymore because they’re one and the same.
In the grip of this awareness I write my fourth novel, Bedrock, which features a Vermont village full of eccentrics, composites of people and situations I’ve known in both Tennessee and Vermont. By now I’ve lived in Vermont for twenty-five years, and several of my mother’s eighteenth-century ancestors lie buried in Rocking-ham, Vermont. Nonetheless, a Boston reviewer maintains that I have no right to satirize Vermonters since I’m a southerner.
I’m standing on a hillside overlooking Lake Champlain. The sun is setting in shades of salmon behind the Adirondacks on the opposite shore. In the field below me, several dozen buffalo are grazing. I’m surrounded by a hundred women in attractive cocktail attire. At the top of the hill perches a vast white pinnacled tent that resembles Camelot, where we’ll soon dance, drink, and dine.
But meanwhile, we’re watching two women dressed in white satin tuxedos wave feathers over a smudge pot so as to waft smoke toward the four poles. As the priestess in her embroidered robe reads lines from Kahlil Gibran, I realize that I’m wrong once again: this event would never ever occur at the Southern Baptist end of the Appalachians.
Once my daughter is grown and gone, I’m lonely in my farmhouse in the Vermont countryside, despite the amiable Holsteins all around me. So I buy an apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan near Central Park. When my parents come to visit, we walk down to the Roosevelt/St. Luke’s Hospital, where my father was a resident. We study the dome of the old operating theater where he watched and performed hundreds of operations. They point out the apartment on West Fifty-eighth Street where they lived for four years. My mother tells about wheeling John twice a day to the playgrounds and zoo in Central Park even while pregnant with me.
I’ve unwittingly bought an apartment only nine blocks from the site of my conception. Like a salmon leaping upstream, I’ve returned to my spawning ground.
With a second jolt I comprehend that I’m not actually a southerner, an Appalachian, or a Yankee — I’m a New Yorker. (New Yorkers aren’t Yankees. They’re a breed apart.)
I spent my first seven months in utero on the Upper West Side and in Central Park. I no doubt absorbed through the wall of my mother’s abdomen the honking horns and screeching brakes, the sirens of police cars and ambulances, the shrieks of children in the playgrounds, the clop of carriage horses’ hooves, the scraping of skate blades on the ice rink, the melodies from the calliope at the merry-go-round, the calls of birds and animals at the zoo, the speech of shopkeepers and waiters, the tunes at the
Broadway musicals about which my parents are reminiscing. The amniotic fluid in which I floated was composed of water from the New York taps, and my bones were formed of calcium from the milk and cheeses bought at New York delis.
After all these years of searching, I finally know who I am: I’m a cosmopolite, a creature of busy streets where darkness never falls. This city chicken has finally swooped home to her natal roost.
My apartment is located in a building near Central Park, one of half a dozen built in the early 1900s by European writers, painters, and musicians who wanted space in which they could work as well as live. Most apartments, including mine, have huge north-facing windows for the painters. Some have extra soundproofing for the musicians. The elegant front apartments have two-story living rooms and elaborate oak woodwork. The rear ones like mine, much smaller, were the working studios.
My building has a cage-style elevator. Every time I enter it, I expect to find Katharine Hepburn seated on its tapestry-covered banquette. The other owners are friendly, helpful, and interesting. Some are writers, publishers, and photographers. Others are involved with the Metropolitan Opera just down the street. There are lawyers and stockbrokers, businesspeople, filmmakers, and restaurateurs.
The only bad apple I’m aware of was murdered shortly after my arrival by a girl in his stable, according to one of my doormen. (Like a Greek chorus, the doormen of New York know all— and tell all.) Slight and bespectacled, the murder victim played an oboe in an orchestra when he wasn’t pimping. We used to chat about Mozart in the elevator.
I have several friends in the city from my publishing days, as well as some writer friends and a college roommate. I find my fellow New Yorkers quite stimulating. The only problem is that we’re so busy that we rarely see one another. We work day and night, and on the weekends most go to country houses. Although I still own my house in Vermont, it’s too far away for weekend excursions, so I often write on weekends as well. New York is my new orange crate.