There is always booze, with its paradox of revelation and impotence, but he chooses not to go there; life is getting so much shorter in these latter days, so much shorter it even seems an indulgence to worry about any of George Buck’s public nightmares. But he does, he does.
What future there is is the work he will do, the chaos of the past he will somehow make into form, all the fragments now swirling just out of reach, the excitement inside him somewhere like an itch he can’t scratch, a pain he can’t locate. Pain is one of the necessary functions, however.
The circle of yellow light on his desk seems to contract and grow brighter. The only light in the whole dark house is directed here.
Fragments. He’s got to get everything together, first, then discard what must be discarded. And he must tell the truth—that all of us were once immature and stupid, oscillating between the banal and the sublime (or in some range between those polarities), and that the banal is also true. Allard Benson, once flip, facetious, to whose golden youth other bodies were sometimes felicitous tools, must learn and be touched. We perceive depth slowly. When a man tries himself he constructs a scaffold and a throne.
There is a letter, a document he hasn’t read for a long time. He never deliberately looks for it, but every once in a while he comes across it and reads it again. It is surprising that he still has it around here somewhere—in a drawer or folder or stuck in a book. Where is it now? Most things from those times have worn out, been discarded or lost in his travels.
In the semi-dark outside of the circle of light his hand goes to a drawer below a cupboard, to an old manila folder, straight to the letter. His act of keeping it all these years is vaguely shameful, as though he has kept it as a souvenir, something as untoward as the polished wristbone of a corpse. The letter was written to him out of a sadness that was too close to self-hatred. It was a sadness he caused, though everyone grows sad and who knows whether this or any unhappiness would have been less if he had never been born. But he has kept these sheets of scalloped-edged, buff-colored stationery, this document, because even from the beginning it has always suggested to him use, a colder use. The handwriting is round, generous but not unformed, the hand of a girl who did her lessons and was bright. It is neat, spaced, incapable of lying, written in liquid blue ink with a fountain pen. That alone proves this document to be of historical interest, yet he must remember her as the young girl she was, so much of her unused, untouched, unworn. Eighteen, and adult life just beginning for her.
Mary, he thinks, but is then startled; her name, of course, was not Mary, and again he is troubled by the uses he must make of past reality. Once this beautiful, complex being did exist upon a real Earth, but the Earth has changed and any recalling of it will be shaped, changed again.
Dear Aaron,
You don’t sound like you in your letters, you sound like an old philosopher or something, so I don’t know who’s writing to me. Am I reading the truth or some sort of fictional treatment of a letter? Do you enjoy writing them or is it painful to get around to saying what you mean? I know I never criticized you like this, but I know it doesn’t really make any difference anymore.
I get this terrible feeling that you’re the only boy I’ll ever love. I sometimes think—maybe all the time when I’m not trying to think of something else—that when I let you make love to me I was marrying you and I was a stupid little fool because you weren’t going to marry me so I threw it all away. I mean the whole possibility, ever, of marrying a boy I could really love. Because there will always be you back there smiling about it all and composing those sophisticated letters with all the long sentences and subtle little twists in the middle of them that mean you’d like to make love to me but you don’t love me enough to marry me. I know.
In July my period came about six days late and that was a scare. But it’s all right now—you didn’t leave any tracks behind you.
Don’t worry about going to the University of Chicago in the fall. I’m not going back to school anyway. I couldn’t walk around there and see all those places again. Dad isn’t any better so I’m going to stay here and take care of him. Richard will be gone, you know. Dad looks so bad we’re really worried about him. He’s even more yellow-colored now. The whites of his eyes and his fingernails are yellow. He has trouble getting around and spends most of the time in bed. It’s sad because even if he’s grateful he can’t show it because he resents being like he is so much. He’s only fifty and there was Mother’s death and now he’s so sick I guess it all just doesn’t seem fair.
Natalie wrote me a long letter trying to explain everything and cheer me up at the same time. She is very angry at you. Sometimes I feel like a baby or a feebleminded child everybody is trying to reassure. But I guess I do feel different from the rest of you. You were always trying to convince me that all the things we did weren’t sins and all that. But I know they were, even if it’s just how empty I feel now. I never used to feel empty. I don’t feel complete anymore. Why should I believe Natalie doesn’t feel that way too?
She’s thinking of transferring to Hunter College beginning in the spring semester next year. Anyway, we sign our letters “love.”
Sometimes I resent the way nothing really matters to you, so you can just jump on your motorcycle and you’re away, free as a bird. But I don’t think it’s your fault. That’s the way you are and always will be. Maybe it was that about you made me love you. But no, it wasn’t. You’re really a very kind person, Aaron, I know. You can be a little sarcastic sometimes but you don’t go out of your way to hurt people. It’s just that you’re not really mature yet and you don’t want to be tied down. You’ve got a wonderful career ahead of you, Aaron, I know it, I’m sure of it. I guess I can’t blame you even if like a little idiot I wanted to be with you always. Well, don’t let my self-pity spoil your summer.
Sincerely,
Maura
But now it is the present, timeless time, tense; only we pass, and that is some of the meaning, he supposes, of every story, even of that other, unchanging one, in which Billy Hemlock gained strength and knowledge from the powders, especially from the powder of the graceful hand, which he finally recognized as the outermost frond of the hemlock tree. And so he did enter, as a descendant of the Old People, the passage into the mountain denied to Eugenia, and after many adventures found Janie and Oka in that strangely warm interior valley. The old lady was the Lady of the Deer, one of the ancient gods herself, her feet delicate deer hooves. Then, refreshed by grateful gods in the form of wheat, sweet grasses, the very bodies of the animals who were conscious only as long generations, generous in the timeless knowing that they would always survive, Billy and Janie came home with Oka, bearing sustenance, to wake Eugenia and Tim Hemlock from their long sleep of despair. How the children loved that loving reunion.
But that was the children’s story, and they are not here, in fact are no longer children. When they return tomorrow they will bring to him lives that are their own, that are growing away from him. All lives move beyond his ken. George Buck will have to leave after next year, George and Edward and Helga vanished from their beautiful house. You can’t write another man’s story for him. You can’t raise Mark Rasmussen out of the despair of his years. But this is only reality with all its collisions and coincidences.
It is deep in the fathomless but temporary night. Aaron has gone to bed, alone into the fresh sliding of the sheets of his and his wife’s bed. Soon he is washed under, where the currents, themselves not in control, control him. He dreams that a strange woman watches him. He is twenty-six years old, ageless, having had all of his experiences yet inhabiting the quick, observing body that is never conscious of its perfection. He is sitting on a couch, in an old brownstone garden apartment, in a gray city of the 1950’s. The air is the air of the city, not dirty but busy, moving, only a trifle gritty. The towers of the city are gray stone and crystal glass, having meaning and dignity, as have the trees in its parks, its arcades, avenues, squares. All have the somber dignity of the
city. Windows are clean, all of its interiors are clean, polished, glittering with care. He half reclines on the couch in the high-ceilinged apartment, the strange woman standing across the room next to the French doors, watching him. She is not strange, she is in part every girl he has loved; she is Agnes, a mystery. She is twenty-four—old, experienced, wryly humorous, her light hair floating around her thoughtful face in undisciplined yet deliberate small fronds. She does not smile as she looks at him. The brave, eternal angle of her hip as she stands, in a light dress, melts his heart and he holds out his arms to her.
AFTERWORD
I WAS BORN IN Iowa City when my father was a student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. My mother remembers being pregnant with me and wheeling my brother around in a stroller. She walked all over the city, giving my father time and quiet so he could write. They lived in a motel for a while. It couldn’t have been easy to get any work done. A few months or so after I was born my father was offered a job at the University of New Hampshire and we moved to Durham. New Hampshire was my home until I returned to Iowa in 1995 to attend the Iowa Writers’ Workshop myself. My father never knew that his daughter would eventually head back to Iowa, following in his footsteps.
When I drove across the Mississippi into Iowa that August of 1995, I think I was hoping something would happen. Some magical revelation. It seemed something should happen when a body returns to the place where it came into the world. A few days later, when I walked around Iowa City and past the hospital where I was born, I was still waiting for something to become apparent to me—what exactly, I didn’t know.
I brought only one photograph with me when I left for Iowa. I was afraid of feeling homesick if I had reminders. And my car was small, a two-door Ford Escort; I packed only necessities. The photograph I did bring was of my father. My mentor. I couldn’t imagine sitting at my desk without looking up at him every now and then. In the photo he’s standing in front of our mountain, Mount Cardigan. My parents built a cabin there in 1954 and lived on the mountain in the summers. They built it out of stones and logs, with no power tools. My mother mixed cement in a wheelbarrow, shoveling sand they hauled in a borrowed dump truck. She chopped down trees and skinned the logs with a draw shave. My father laid the stones and rigged homemade pulleys to lift beams. Over the fireplace they erected a granite slab, dragged from an ancient cellar hole in the field below their site. On that slab my father chiseled Tom and Liz built this house, 1954 AD. That summer they slept in a tent next to the brook until the cabin was finished enough to move in. There are black-and-white Polaroids showing my mother in a halter top and shorts, pushing the wheelbarrow. She was beautiful, trim and light-haired. Strong. She was twenty-six or so. My father looked about seventeen at twenty-eight. He always looked younger than he was.
This was before they went to Iowa. He’d already written a novel, Ceremony of Love, based on his experiences in Japan during the war. There aren’t many copies of Ceremony of Love around anymore, and I think my father was glad of that. It was his first novel and he was embarrassed by it, thought it could have been better. There’s a copy on the bookshelf at the cabin that he doctored with a knife. After you turn a couple of pages there’s a hole—a neat rectangle has been carved out through the middle of the rest of the pages, forming a sort of secret compartment, though there’s nothing in there. My mother tells me how impressed she was with that novel, however, especially the vivid descriptions of the first scene in which a young man is on a boat, heading across the Pacific toward Japan.
My father had asked my mother to marry him just before he left for Paris. He was going to the Sorbonne on the GI Bill. They’d been hiking in New Hampshire, and he very casually asked, “Will you marry me when I get back?” She didn’t take his proposal seriously, and said, “Sure. When?” She’d just finished nursing school and was on her way to Pennsylvania for a postgraduate class, which is what she did, and he went off to Paris. Eventually, she moved to New York City to work in the operating room at Presbyterian Hospital. Then he wrote her, told her what boat he was coming in on. I love that he came back on a boat.
She took a long weekend from her job and joined my father in Lebanon, New Hampshire, where he’d lived before the army. They went to a justice of the peace. Besides the JP’s wife, they needed another witness. There was a man working in a nearby field; they called him in, and they got married. No relatives. No fancy celebration. No plans. When my mother went back to New York to quit her job, the head of the OR was angry with her. She said, “You don’t just do that kind of thing.”
My mother got a job at Mary Hitchcock Hospital in Hanover, New Hampshire. My father didn’t have a job, but he was writing. Once, while I was visiting my parents, my father told me that he’d gotten married so he could finally settle down and get to work. I was between boyfriends, a waitress who dabbled in folk music and spent way too much time hanging out with musicians at a local club rather than writing fiction, which I thought was what I wanted to do. He said I should get a wife.
My parents didnc’t know where they’d end up, but they took a chance building that cabin, hoping it would be some place to call their own, and go to occasionally. A place to call home. When I think of them in Iowa later—my mother pregnant and with a toddler, my father just beginning the writing program—I admire the risks they took. They weren’t going to wait for things to be just right, or until they had money, to have a family.
In the photograph I brought to Iowa the ridge of the mountain arches over my father’s head. It’s the ridge of Fire Screw, the summit to the right of Cardigan. I’ve always thought the mountain resembles a woman lying on her back. Fire Screw is her stomach and my father is inside her. He loved that land. When he was dying, he’d say, “What more could I want, but to be here in this place?” He kept a little notebook in which he recorded how many deer or bears or moose he’d seen crossing the front field each week. He wrote down other things, often using the second person:
Sixty-two years old this is the very teetering verge of being over the hill. And you are probably not going to do much about changing anything. You must be motivated by the novel now read it over.
Or:
So what do you want? Can you spend the proper amount of time on this story, these stories? Can you make a book out of it? When are you going to do it? Tomorrow, yes, but after the fishing one, what? You need a model a beginning a possibility.
When I read some of his little notebooks after he died, I was struck by the use of the second person. What’s in a writer’s head that he speaks to himself from such a distance? Separates himself from himself. Maybe we’re always looking at the world omnisciently—even ourselves. It’s safer—as if we aren’t really real, just living inside our own creations.
The mountain in my father’s novels and stories is named Mount Cascom. His fictional land is Leah. Long before he died, he gave me those names and others. Passed them on to me. After reading one of my stories in which I’d given our mountain a name he didn’t like, he suggested I take his names. I use them now in my fiction.
When I went to Iowa, I couldn’t stop looking for signs of my father. I’d imagine him on the streets, making his way to class. I did find one of his novels on a remote shelf in the Workshop office. That same novel’s book jacket was framed on the wall of the Linn Street Café, an expensive restaurant in Iowa City. I saw it when an editor came through town and took a bunch of us out to dinner. I don’t think anyone at the table knew how much it affected me when I suddenly spotted his book cover, hanging over the table of some nearby diners. I didn’t say anything about it until we were leaving. I nudged a friend and pointed it out across the room. He was as pleased and intrigued as I’d hoped anyone could be. “My father won the National Book Award for that novel,” I told him. “What’s his name?” someone else asked. “Thomas Williams,” I said. “You’ve probably never heard of him.” No one had. “He’s dead now,” I said, amazed that it had gotten easier to say those words when I still could hardly believe th
em. We filed out, saying good-bye to the editor, but my thoughts were back inside the restaurant. It was as if the book jacket was my father, nodding to me, saying, I’m here. But it was just a wall in a restaurant and there were maybe fifty or more framed book jackets hanging next to people eating dinner.
When he was very ill, going through chemotherapy, and radiation, and hell, I remember sitting with my father on the lawn looking out at our mountain. He was telling me things about our family’s history. He’d lost all his hair. He joked that his head, white and the skull now visible and not completely smooth, looked like a used turtle egg. He often wore a stocking on his head to keep warm. For some reason the stocking material my mother had fashioned with a rubber band around the long end fit better than a hat. It was comical and he knew it, sported it with a smile, when he could.
As he talked he bent forward, hands on knees, face screwed up. He was holding out through waves of pain. My stomach muscles contracted. I felt nauseated. I was always trying to keep my eyes from tearing up. He hated to see me cry.
My source was dying. I wrote stuff down. I didn’t want to forget anything and there was so much I didn’t know. We often talked about writing. He was my teacher—literally, for two semesters when I was an undergraduate at the University of New Hampshire. In class we kept it a secret that I was his daughter. I loved his class—everyone was at ease and interested. Back then, we could smoke in the classrooms. I remember smoking cigarettes, sharing an ashtray with the student next to me, while we discussed stories. My father smoked too. There we were, father and daughter, in a classroom, smoking. I quit smoking a long time ago.
Long before I was his student and long after, he read my work. He was an excellent critic—completely honest and thorough. I hadn’t sent a story out that he hadn’t read first. When he died, I was worried that I’d never be able to write a story without him. I couldn’t imagine who would ever give me that kind of attention line by line that he gave me.
The Hair of Harold Roux Page 40