But after he had gotten us all revved up about the peace and joy and harmony of the good life that was waiting to be had within those walls that were for sale, he’d start to see cracks in the foundation, gaps around the windows. Soot that said the furnace would have to be replaced, and then he’d turn to the realtor and sigh, “I don’t know. It’s an old house.”
“Isn’t that what you wanted?”
Careful to avoid answering that one, he would answer, “I don’t know, it’s the kind of place that would take a lot of upkeep. Just keeping the lawn mowed would be a full-time job for somebody.”
“If you’d like to see something less expensive . . .”
“It’s not the money. It’s the time I’d have to waste thinking about it.”
“Could you be more specific, Mr. Friedrich?”
“Well, now that I’ve looked at it, it just doesn’t seem that much better than what I have now.”
At which point we’d all groan and say, “You’ve got to be kidding,” and “Harrison Street’s a dump compared to this.”
Which would embarrass my father into asking the realtor, “Do you have anything better to show me?” Invariably, they would say yes. And after seeing what another ten or twenty thousand dollars would get us, Dad would decide to “keep looking.” Which really meant, wait until he had another ten or twenty thousand to spend. And we’d drive back to Greenwood feeling tricked, and he’d go to work and make more money.
The trouble was, when he’d saved the additional ten or twenty K he’d needed to buy the house that had seemed perfect six months earlier but out of his budget, and we’d go back to look at it, even if it had been repainted, in his eyes it would have lost its luster. Even if it had a tennis court or a pool, my father would find a way to convince himself that it was a fundamentally unsound and shabby investment compared to what we could have, if we just waited for him to make another thirty or forty thousand, in his fantasy of the good life.
After a year or so of looking at lifestyles we were longing to live but my father refused to buy into, Lucy, Fiona, and Willy went on strike. Fiona and her guitar were in college by then. Lucy had a boyfriend who had a house and a pool and a tennis court of his own. And Willy had stayed off the Oreos, lost thirty pounds, and grown four inches and was on the high school cross-country team. Lucy and Fiona refused to get into the Skylark; Willy ran from it. I was happy to have my parents to myself.
I was as sick of looking at houses Dad wasn’t going to buy as they were, but without my sisters and brother to complain, it was easier to cajole my father into stopping the car at a likely-looking stream or brook or river and go fly-fishing. I’d turned ten by then. I wasn’t very good at fly-fishing, and hooked far more innocent branches and defenseless shrubs than I ever did fish with my casts.
But I loved it all the same. Partly because my father loved it, but mostly because Dad was different knee-deep in a brook with a fly rod in his hand. On dry land, anger could spark out of him, as though an invisible squall had knocked down a high-tension wire inside his head. He was grounded in such a way that he was unaware of the voltage he unleashed at those closest to him. He’d say things that were bothersome, scary, and sometimes mean, oblivious to the effect they had on others. And after ten or fifteen minutes had passed, most of his brain would forget he had ever said them, and he’d be left wondering why his children stayed away.
But out on the water, standing against a current that could be gauged, thinking only about how to think like a fish, my father could relax and stop thinking about what would make him happy and actually be happy.
Though I wasn’t cognizant of it at the time, I can see now that what I also loved about fly-fishing on those phantom house-hunting trips was, when we were on moving water, I didn’t have to compete with anyone but the trout for his attention. The only part of my father’s life my mother did not feel the need to share, the single passion she did not claim and invade with heart and soul, was fishing. In the solitary arena of gurgling brook and rock-strewn streams, with their deep pools riffled with shadows cast by the low overhang of woodland hemlock and beech, my mother was content to sit on the bank and read secondhand paperback mysteries and be an innocent bystander to his life.
I did not mind if the mosquitoes bit and the fish didn’t, because it was safe to be close to him on the river. Knowing that one of the catastrophes Dad imagined was buying hip boots for his youngest son only to have him slip and fall and the boots fill with water, drowning me in a trout-filled pool, I did not complain that while Dad was snug and warm in sure-footed, felt-soled, chest-high rubber waders, I was shivering bare-legged in icy brooks, wearing only shorts and sodden sneakers.
In the summer of ’65, we got lost on the way to look at an old house down near Chester. A colonel in the Union Army had ordered it constructed in the shape of a heptagon, so that when he came back from the war, he and his bride could have a different view for every day of the week. It was unclear whether it was the fact that the house had seven sides, or that the colonel didn’t live long enough to ever sleep in it, but my father thought that this unseen mansion might just be strange enough for him to feel at home there.
Each time we made a wrong turn, my father would mutter, “I have a good feeling about this place.”
My mother smiled as she flipped the pages of her mystery. “That’s what you always say.”
“What if it’s haunted?” I was just making conversation while I studied the map, looking for a place to fish.
My father laughed. “You don’t believe in ghosts, do you, Zach?”
My mother looked up from her book. “I believe in ghosts.”
My father gave her a look. “No, you don’t.”
“Have you ever seen one, Mom?”
Before my mother could answer, my father announced, “I think it’s time we go fishing.”
I don’t remember the name of the river he found to distract us, but it was narrow and deep and walled on either side by chestnut and dogwoods all tangled up in wild grapevines as thick as my wrist.
We followed our usual routine, rods were assembled, flies chosen, and a fresh hatch of damselflies darting and hovering over the river told us which feathered hook to pick. My mother spread out an old army blanket and retreated into her mystery as I waded out after my father into the undertow. Sometimes, fishing made my father talkative. He would become generous with stories of his youth and random thoughts in his head. But that day he was quiet. My mother’s saying she believed in ghosts bothered him. I waited for the white noise of water moving over rocks rounded by the Ice Age and tree trunks felled by lightning we had not witnessed to drown out his thoughts of all that could still go wrong.
But that nameless, crooked tributary we had chanced upon was hard fishing for a boy not yet twelve. Even my father was challenged. The leafy overhang that jungled up and out over both sides of the stream made it hard for me to cast my line where I wanted it to go. My hook snagged branches and vines. Each time I tried to free it, my line tangled. After losing three flies and dropping my rod in the water twice, I shouted to my father, “It’s too hard for me.”
“We’re here.”
“That doesn’t mean we can’t go somewhere else.”
“What do you have in mind?”
“We’re not too far from Needmore.”
“What’s that got to do with fishing?”
“Remember the river you used to take us to, before I knew how to swim? It was full of trout, and no trees.”
My father took his eyes off the shadow of the fish he was trying to lure up off the bottom and stared at me. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.” He began to walk toward me gently, as if I were a trout that might be spooked.
“Why?” I slapped at the greenhead that had bit the back of my calf.
“To get there, we’d have to park at the hospital.”
“So? You know all the doctors there.”
“I don’t want to risk it.”
“Risk what
, dammit!”
The greenhead had just taken a bite out of my other leg.
“Casper might be looking out the window of his cell and see us. Might bring on a setback.”
“What kind of setback?” My father didn’t like talking about Casper.
“Cause him distress.”
“Did he ever say why he didn’t drown me?” The question rose up in me like a fish striking live bait.
“No.”
“Why do you think he didn’t?”
“I wish I knew.”
“Do you think he’ll ever tell us?”
My father shook his head no, then put his hands on my shoulders and brought me close to him as if to make sure I was seeing what he wanted me to see. “It’s time to forget about Casper.”
“What if I can’t?”
“Sometimes, if you stop talking about something, you eventually stop thinking about it.” They’d tried that with Jack.
“Does that mean I can’t talk about him?”
“No, you and I can talk about him anytime.” I was glad he said that. But then he had to add, “Of course, since it’s not a subject I’m particularly fond of discussing, you might want to consider why you’re so determined to bring it up.” He took his hand off my shoulder.
“What do you mean?”
“Just don’t bring it up in front of your mother.”
“How come?” I knew why, but I wanted to hear what he’d say.
“It distresses her.” I had suspected she and Casper had something in common.
Back then, it was easier for me to fish by my father’s rules. Which is to say, it worked for a while. Not talking about Casper didn’t make me forget about him. But I thought about him less and less often.
In 1966, much to my entire family’s amazement, my father fi-nally not only found but bought a house he could live in. It was a barn that had once been home to a herd of black-and-white dairy cows, built with beams of black walnut felled and squared by hand with double-bladed axes a hundred years earlier. Set into a hillside, it was four stories high and constructed upon a foundation of stones and rocks pulled from its fields by mules when that part of Hunterdon County was first being cleared of stumps of hardwood trees crosscut into eighteen-foot lengths with two-man handsaws to provide boards for the siding. It was a monument to sweat and backbreaking work. And my father loved the struggle that had gone into its construction even more than its unwalled cathedraled hayloft or its cozy stonewalled milking stalls.
In the course of a little less than a year, my father succeeded in paying for the installation of a kitchen, bathrooms, plumbing, and huge picture windows that made it hot in the summer and cold in the winter but allowed him to spy visitors half a mile before they knocked on our door.
The most exciting thing about the barn my father bought to shelter the Friedrich herd was that the twelve pie-shaped acres that came with it had a river, well, a stream, really, running along its longest border. It was fifteen feet wide in places, and had a waterfall that dropped four feet into a pool that was over-your-head deep and home to native brook trout, savage and shadowy. No matter that it was called Cold Creek; it was a major tributary in my mind, the place where my father and I would bond not just for a few hours on weekends, but for forever.
When Dad committed to the purchase, I was in heaven. At the age of twelve, I had become almost as good as he was at losing myself and my worries in the certain sound of water falling downhill from the heartland to the unseen sea. But in the year it took to construct his sanctuary, I gave in to a different kind of gravity.
By then Fiona was in a graduate school MFA program that allowed her to keep painting and still live in New York City. Her paintings were big, six, sometimes eight feet across. She’d start out painting a family, mother, father, couple of kids, then she’d cover the whole thing over with a thick glop of pigment mixed with beeswax, and then smear off just enough with a spatula to make you wonder what she’d covered up.
My mother said Fiona had found her style. My father thought he was being funny when he’d say “I just wish she’d find a husband who could pay for her to keep painting paintings that nobody but me and Lazlo buy.”
Lucy was looking for her style, too. She was the only senior in her college who had had two engagement parties and was secretly contemplating a third. Willy and I had fulfilled our father’s upwardly mobile dreams by being accepted by a private boy’s school older and more snobbish than Hamden Hall, called St. Luke’s.
My parents, especially my father, had made a big deal about how important it was that we get into St. Luke’s. He didn’t come out and say we’d grow up to be losers if that prep school of choice turned us down; he just made it clear we’d be “perceived” as losers. In spite of it being such a big deal, my father’s career, coupled with his anxiety about rejection, prompted my parents to procrastinate in mailing in our applications until after they returned from eight weeks spent in South America testing antidepressants on people who, he came home saying, wouldn’t need mood elevation if they had better plumbing. Perhaps he wanted to be able to blame himself if we didn’t get in. Whatever, after several nervous-making months, our letters of acceptance finally showed up in the mailbox midsummer.
I was too crazy about fishing to get revved up about going into eighth grade at St. Luke’s in September. School was school for me. But Willy was even more excited than Dad. He jumped up and down, clapped his hands, and shouted, “Yes!” The St. Luke’s cross-country team had won state championships four years running.
He felt differently about things when my father announced, “Willy, after giving it some thought, I decided that it might be best if you repeated your junior year.” Willy stopped jumping up and down. I saw the betrayal he felt flush his cheeks. My brother was looking forward to being a senior—Willy was good at school, impatient to get away from us and go to college.
“Why?” Willy’s voice was a whisper.
My father smiled like he was doing him a favor. “Well, a lot of boys, scholar athletes like yourself, take a postgraduate year when they make a change from public school to prep school.”
“Kids who stay back are stupid—I’m smart.”
“That you are. And because of your intelligence, you’ll realize another year of high school competition will toughen you up for the big races you’ll face in college.” My father was doing a good job of pretending he cared about track. Dad liked the winning, but the race bored him.
Willy glared at my father and smiled. “What’s the real reason?”
My father looked at my brother as if he saw something invisible that made him sad. Then he put one hand on each of our shoulders. “Well, it had occurred to me that if you repeated your junior year, when you’d be a senior, Zach would be out of ju nior high and a freshman. Maybe if you shared a year of high school, went to classes in the same building, ate in the same dining hall, went to the same dances, you two would find you have more in common than you now imagine.”
Willy hated my guts before my father applied the brakes to his life for my benefit. Now, in a matter of moments, my father had cubed the distance between my brother and myself.
In fairness to Willy, I was not an easy younger brother to be burdened by. I started fights with him, and then when he won, made him out to be a bully, i.e., I fixed it so there was no way he could win. But part of what separated us was more fundamental than that. Our natures seemed to demand mutual disdain. Willy didn’t care enough about what other people thought of him; I cared too much.
That night, after we found out about St. Luke’s, Dad took us out to a restaurant called the Ryland Inn, and Lazlo drove out from New York to join us and ordered champagne and gave me a present from Zuza, a small bronze brain with wings on it. Between having my own river and getting into St. Luke’s, the future looked like a sure thing. Until I got up from my shrimp cocktail to go to the bathroom, and Willy followed.
“You’re lucky to have me for a brother.” As Willy straddled the urinal
next to me, he fingered the tie tack he had gotten for coming in second in the state cross-country championship.
“We’re both lucky.”
“I work for what I get. With you, it’s just dumb luck.”
“You’re just jealous ’cause fish don’t like you.” If I hadn’t been feeling so good, I would have said, You’re just jealous ’cause Dad likes me the best.
“I don’t think they have courses in fishing at St. Luke’s.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You told me yourself you didn’t know half the answers on the entrance exam.”
“So?”
“So the only reason you got in was because the track coach wanted me on the team, and Dad said we were a package deal, and told him you were psychologically scarred because of Casper.”
“Dad told you that?”
“He tells everybody that before they meet you. That’s why everybody’s so nice to poor little Zach.” He flushed the urinal and let me linger with that possibility.
The next morning, I greeted my father at the breakfast table with “Do I have to go to St. Luke’s?”
“We paid for it.” He meant that in more ways than one. “What’s wrong?”
I told him what Willy had said. My father looked out the window. He could see Willy running down the hill, shorts over his long winter underwear. “Is it the truth, Dad?”
“It’s Willy’s truth.”
“Was he lying?”
“You didn’t flunk the entrance exam.”
“You’re just saying that because you don’t want me to give up.”
“I wasn’t going to tell you this, but you scored higher than anyone else who was applying in your class.”
“But I guessed.” We both knew I wasn’t very good at school.
“Maybe you know more than you think you do.”
I liked that idea. And after I let it sink in, I asked, “Why’d you hold Willy back for me?”
“I did it for Willy, not for you. He needs more time to think about who he is.”
Even though I didn’t like Willy, I thought it was shitty of my father to stick him with an extra year of high school. And yet, I sensed my father wasn’t trying to be shitty; he was trying to do something kind for his first-born son. But at that moment, what I wanted most was for Dad to stay focused on me, say something else that would make me feel better about myself.
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