The Hair of Harold Roux
Page 41
After he died, my mother sat down every night and reread his books—all nine of them—until she’d read them all. It made me sad to realize she was doing this, but it was a way for her to hear his voice. Maybe it was a way for her to hold on a little longer, then let go. I remember that she felt bad about some criticism she’d given him on one of his novels. She worried that she hadn’t been supportive enough. Maybe enough time had passed—the subject of the novel wasn’t so close to home or immediate. Whatever reasons, she wished she could tell him how she felt about the book now. My mother also worried that she’d allowed the doctors to give my father extra morphine sooner than they should have—that maybe they could have held out longer. About this I know she is wrong.
It took me a long time to reread any of my father’s books. When a collection of his stories came out posthumously, I read it through tears. Several of the stories came from events I remembered—two boys lost on our mountain, hornpout fishing at night (the setting of my own first published story). The story “Goose Pond,” about a fifty-eight-year-old man whose wife has just died from cancer, amazes me in its exploration of grief. He wrote it when he was in his twenties. He was a brilliant, beautiful writer. Such a smart man. He knew everything—any subject. In the introduction to Leah, New Hampshire, a collection of my father’s stories, John Irving, a former student and friend of my father, wrote:
he would correct you when your language was vague, he was instructive during a walk in the woods: he knew what sort of moss or fern you were standing on, and the name of the tree you were leaning against; he knew the birds and the animals, and—astonishingly—he was also one of those men who understood how mechanical things work. He knew engines, he knew tools, he knew guns … But what I admire most in these stories from Leah, New Hampshire—and in Mr. Williams’s novels—is how much he knew about human nature, and how much he fathomed psychologically about people.
My father never got rich or famous, but he was content with his life and his accomplishments. He loved his mountain; he was proud of his children. He loved my mother, and they’d built that amazing cabin together. He’d won the National Book Award and many other awards. Even if people haven’t heard of him, and may never read his books—most long out of print—I have his words, his worlds; his good, kind, sharp vision.
My mother tells me that when I was born, my brother and father stood in the parking lot next to the hospital, looking up at the window of her room. Kids weren’t allowed inside, so that’s how my brother got to see her. She waved down at them. I was in the nursery nearby. When I got to Iowa City and walked past the hospital, I thought about that. Me up there in the hospital and me down below, standing in the place where my father once stood so long ago. It was like being omniscient, seeing all, being inside my dad and inside myself in the past and future.
The day before he died, when I went to the hospital to see him in the afternoon, my father was sitting on the edge of his bed, still hooked up to tubes and breathing apparatus. I put on the usual face mask, and went into the room to see what he was doing. He appeared to be trying to get out of bed. His johnny had slipped off his shoulders and he was thin, grayish, bony. He was barefoot and stretching to get his feet on the ground. I hardly dared to touch him, he was so fragile seeming. He didn’t know I was there as I tried to put the johnny right, and urge him back into bed. I looked desperately toward the glass window to see if any nurses would come and help, but there were none around. I started sobbing and trying to get him to lie back. He didn’t know it was me; the morphine had clouded his mind. Then he looked at me and said in the most casual tone, “Oh, Annie, it’s you. Hello.” Suddenly he was lucid, and innocent, and there was his kind voice, and his face, full of delight at seeing me. At knowing I was there.
He stopped trying to get up, to go wherever it was he thought he had to go.
That night my brother flew in from Colorado and my mother and I met him at the hospital. My father could barely breathe. He was in pain. He’d already been through a year of chemotherapy and radiation, and was too weak for more. He was dying. That was clear. The doctors suggested more morphine and my mother agreed. They asked my father if he knew what that meant. He said he did.
My father died of lung cancer on October 23, 1990. There are days I look up at his photograph and feel overwhelmed with sadness. I wish he was still around to coach me. I miss him, and I could use his help. But then I guess I have it. There on the bookshelf is a long line of books. I am lucky to have such an inheritance: all those words to guide me as I travel a similar road.
—Ann Joslin Williams
Note: Portions of this essay first appeared in different
form in The Chattahoochee Review under the title
“My Father’s Footsteps.”
A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR
Thomas Williams was born in Duluth, Minnesota, in 1926. He attended the University of New Hampshire and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and returned to the University of New Hampshire to teach for many years. His short stories appeared frequently in Esquire, the New Yorker, the Saturday Evening Post, and elsewhere. Williams’s first novel, Ceremony of Love, was published in 1955, and he went on to publish seven more novels and a collection of short stories. Another book of his stories, Leah, New Hampshire, was published posthumously. His work was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and twice nominated for the National Book Award, which he won in 1975 for The Hair of Harold Roux.
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
Ceremony of Love
Town Burning
The Night of Trees
A High New House
Whipple’s Castle
Tsuga’s Children
The Followed Man
The Moon Pinnace
Leah, New Hampshire
Copyright © 1966, 1970, 1974 by the estate of Thomas Williams
Introduction copyright © 2011 by Andres Dubus III
Afterword copyright © 2011 by Ann Joslin Williams
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner
whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief
quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address Bloomsbury
USA, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
First published in 1974 by Random House, Inc.
Published by Bloomsbury USA, New York
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA HAS BEEN APPLIED FOR.
ISBN: 978-1-60819-583-1 (paperback)
First published by Bloomsbury USA in 2011
This e-book edition published in 2011
E-book ISBN: 978-1-60819-728-6
www.bloomsburyusa.com