All the Dead Yale Men

by Craig Nova

  His land also had a small greenhouse where Alexandra and I had gone when we were first going out together. A stream with brook trout ran in a ravine not far from the house, and around it the land supported deer, a bear or two, foxes, bats, wild turkeys, ruffed grouse, and copperheads. All of these creatures had been written about by my grandmother, Mrs. Catherine Mackinnon, in a series of notebooks. Of course, when I knew my father was cheating me, I thought these notebooks might give me a clue, a hint, something useful to use against him.

  Well, the first thing is that Mackinnon’s third law is damn right. The truth is a dangerous substance.

  There weren’t sixteen hundred acres anymore. My father had sold a thousand acres to the Girls Club of America, although, my father being the lawyer he was, he retained the rights to hunt the Girls Club’s land and to use the original farmhouse, the one his father had owned, to store things he had no place for. From time to time recently the Girls Club complained about precisely where the property lines were, and other things, too, like a bear who spent most of his time on my father’s land but who also liked to get into the Girls Club’s garbage and to scare those girls from New York City and Philadelphia, who had always thought bears existed only on the Nature Channel.

  So, when I was an assistant district attorney and wanted to find out how I was being cheated, I drove from Cambridge, where I lived, to the farmhouse, where my grandfather’s things were stored in the attic. My grandmother’s notebooks were a good place to start, particularly because of all the Classical Mackinnon’s Laws, the most intense was this. My grandmother may have been secretive, but in her notebooks she never told a lie about anything. Ever.

  At Hartford I got on 84 west and started the long drive to that piece of land that my grandfather had owned and left to my father, who more and more was oppressed by it, and even though he went there every year to hunt deer in the fall, and brought me along, and even though he felt it was his charge to hang on to the place, he was having trouble doing just that. The taxes were going up. People vandalized the buildings when he wasn’t there. And so, I guess, that explained some of the motivation to keep money that should have been mine. As I say, it wasn’t the three hundred dollars. It was the principal of something being violated between father and son, particularly when the cheating seems to be a sort of extension of some cheap CIA trick.

  Close to Port Jervis, the Delaware Valley stretched out in a floodplain with five shades of green and that gunmetal mist beneath a sky that was a little pale, but still reassuring, as though all this was harsh but not unforgiving. Then the road went through Port Jervis, where the last business still thriving was a bathing suit factory. Even as you went by it you could feel the injustice, the wrongness of the fact that heavy, cold women sat in an enormous room to sew bathing suits all winter so that young, thin, and beautiful women could wear them to go to the beach.

  The maples were in full leaf, full of moisture, shiny, the promise of them so keen as to make me think fall would never come. The lichen was copper-colored, green and flaky, on the stone walls that lined the fields. Here and there a deer flashed a white tail and disappeared, its coat that late spring gray. The turn to the gate was a hard left, and under the canopy of pines, the air smelled damp and ominous. The ponds came into view, and then the house with white siding and black shutters, the pond in front, surrounded by a stone lip, the water as still as fate (at least while it was hidden), the surface marked here and there by an insect that hatched with an anxious rush.

  The house itself was of medium size, with white siding and black shutters, and had a porch that went around three sides. It was here that my grandfather Pop liked to sit and drink a mint julep and tell jokes that even today I would hesitate to tell to someone at work. I stopped in front of the house.

  My shadow on the porch of my grandfather’s farmhouse looked as if it were cut from a silky fabric dragged up the steps. Of course, we had the right to use the attic for storage. But still, I had qualms. Fathers shouldn’t cheat a good son, but because someone is dead didn’t make me free to dig into her most private secrets.

  The farmhouse door opened with that sigh of recognition, as though it had been waiting, or so it seemed, all along. What had taken me so long? Of course, if you are frightened enough everything seems to revolve around you and to make you feel important. I guess it is this that saves you from panic.

  The stairs creaked, too, just the way they did when my grandfather and grandmother lived here and when my father had grown up here, at least when he was home from school, and the way it did when I was here for vacations, too. Then I emerged into the hall upstairs, and off of it, here and there, were the doors to the bedrooms, which the Girls Club had made sterile and sad: all single beds, as though this place, so dedicated to young women, was training them to be alone.

  The bulb in the attic made a stale light. And there, among the old bureaus and rugs that smelled of dogs, in with the rack of suits, all good tweed from Scotland, next to those lamps made of bamboo and the chairs that had come from a furniture designer’s notion of what an Anglo-Indian outpost would look like (my grandfather loved this look: if he could have imported tigers for us to shoot instead of deer, he would have done it in a minute), was the chest. Made of canvas. Leather corners and straps. Old brass buckles, so tarnished as to look like time made visible. The top of the trunk had a little pouch for a card, and my grandmother had written on one that had been white but was the color of yellow teeth, “Catherine Mackinnon.”

  She had kept notebooks all her life, mostly devoted to the animals she had seen around the farmhouse and on this land. Here, in those leather-bound notebooks, were her descriptions of animals, written at the depths of her loneliness and despair, animals she had described so accurately and with such love. Her books were written in an ungraceful hand, although a neater, crisper script was there, too, just a page, but my grandmother had kept it.

  Her discipline was obvious, her refusal to give into her despair as she wrote these things: it was a tensile strength that hung there in the dust of the attic, or in that zone where I now existed, in the musty stale light between the living and the dead.

  I sat down on one of those phony Anglo-Indian bamboo and rattan chairs, and while I had only glanced at these years before, I now started in earnest and opened a notebook, which cracked at the spine, like a bone breaking in a violated grave:

  Human beings are the least natural of creatures. They always want what they can’t have and are never happy with what they do have. Capable of such bravery and such cruelty, able to lie where they need to be truthful, truthful where they should keep their mouths shut. The female of the species is constantly available to mate, from the age of fourteen or so, when she will begin to search for a mate. The male of the species does not understand her. When she looks for a mate, when she is enticing and revealing, when she wears a dress that shows the whiteness of her skin or hints at the shape of her breasts, when she walks in such a way that shows the movement of her hips, as though they were keeping time, or marked off the scale of life, as though it was a ruler, she is only having a little fun, just enjoying the power of life. The male of the species thinks she is connected to him, when she is not. She is only enjoying a little power, and still needs to be won over. After mating, birth comes in nine months, the young cared for depending on the deepest mysteries of all, the depth of love: this species is not different, in kind, from other creatures, aside from one critical fact: this love is known by the creatures involved. They know what it is, and either it makes them the best they can be, or the worst. They can be brave when confronted, or cowardly, and it is not known, in advance, how they will behave. The males tend to congregate to tell lies, and the females tend to congregate to tell partial truths. They are not a happy species, aside from particular moments, and these are the ones they live for. Their biggest flaw is when they try to do what is right, but dismiss the obvious objections to this, those things that will come back to haunt them. Tall, bipeds, beauti
ful, particularly since they know their time is limited.

  So, I was at the habitat of family secrets that, of course, itched to escape. And what did she have to say about sacrifice and love?

  She wrote, when my father had come home from Germany, “How changed Chip is. Wounded in a way that I will never be able to touch, let alone heal. This is the misery of being a mother of a man who has gone to war.” And, as far as the brother who didn’t come back was concerned, she wrote, “How do you live with the knowledge that the only way you could remember someone was by the grief of his absence?” To forget the grief was to forget the person, since that’s all she had left.

  This was dated fall 1950. The year I was born.

  •••

  She continued:

  Of course, I have been writing about animals in this book, and they seem to me, of course, to be a glimpse, just the details of the glory of god, his delight in life and beauty. For instance, I wrote this about bears: “It is the bear’s solitariness, his inability to be social, the prison-like quality of his life that interests me. A bear has no muscles in his face, nothing in cheeks or forehead to show anger, fear, or the desire to be friendly. He is confined behind that brownish skin and fur, in that lipped and thick expression he carries . . . . ” But now that I am getting older, I want to say the truth to myself: I wasn’t describing just the bears here, which, of course, are such mysterious creatures, but people, too, if only to make sense of them. For instance, I was thinking of Pop, my husband, when I wrote about bears, since he was so imprisoned by his lack of love and his attempt to obtain it. And, of course, he thought it could be bought, like anything else, and he often negotiated with Chip when what my husband wanted was not control but the lack of need for it. He really wanted the warmth of being loved. But Pop just didn’t know how to do it. He was stuck with the details of financial deals; a worse way of getting love I can’t imagine. Pop negotiated. Chip did, too. How much better it would have been if they could have done something else, especially when Chip took up with that Jean Cooper and almost destroyed us all.

  •••

  So, I thought, that’s something. My father had had an involvement, an affair. I always wondered why, after my mother died, my father chased certain kinds of women and married one who died of cirrhosis of the liver.

  •••

  Then, in my grandmother’s notebook, this:

  At a certain age, you begin to think about romantic moments, and while no one would have dreamed of the possibility, since I am the most discreet woman I have ever met, I think it is time to talk about a romance, if you can call it that, of my own . . . . Of course, I mean, after I was married. He was not an educated man, and, if I had to say what drew me to him, it was the color of his eyes, the texture of his skin, and an odor that was like paradise . . . and some other qualities that, from some perspectives, would have been difficulties, but which I found mysterious, as though he was in touch with the largest unknowns there are.

  Of course, when Pop found out, and he did (I am still ashamed at how much I hurt him), his reaction was to negotiate: how were his financial affairs going to be settled. For me, and for the next generation, Chip’s children . . . . Could he control what I had felt with the promise of money? Could he hold my children as financial hostages, too?

  •••

  My grandmother saw behind the surface of things, and this was too bald. She was hiding something, and more was embedded here than such a causal admission. If you want to hide something, you admit only part of it and leave the rest in the dark. And so that was how I was left. A little light. A lot of dark. But what was it? What did she want to hide? More to the point, too, was this: how did the hidden element affect me?

  [ CHAPTER THREE ]

  NOW, IN 2005, that I am in so much trouble, I often think of this line of lawyers, my grandfather, my father, me, and at least the possibility of my daughter becoming one, too, although that is part of the trouble I am in. It is as though the lawyers had some secret they passed down from generation to generation.

  My father got into his car, an old Cadillac that he kept running in a sort of half-assed way, and drove along Storrow Drive, flipping other drivers the bone, honking the horn, and thinking how he was going to get away with pulling the wool over the eyes of his students at the Fleishman School of International Relations.

  I’ve had plenty of time to think about how he used these drives to show his disapproval of the world. And when I think about this I wonder if somehow I passed this quality of fierce defiance from my father to my daughter and that she defied me in the same way my father defied me, as though I was caught in a vise of generations. Maybe my daughter just saw him in action and that was enough, although when she was young, she used to do imitations of him. “I’ll just put a little gin in my wine,” she’d say. “Who can tell? That’s the beauty of gin. You want to see me walk a straight line?” Then she did just that, in the same way he did when drunk: with great precision and perfect balance produced by a monastic concentration. It had gotten him out of a lot of scrapes with the cops.

  My father approached children with the same attitude as when he flew a mission as a pursuit pilot over North Africa in World War II: nothing to worry about. Piece of cake. Just come in low so they can’t hear you coming. I translated this advice for me like this: Jesus, Frank, so you are having real trouble with your daughter, but daughters are going to drive you nuts. It’s hard for them to tell you the truth, so you’ll have to guess at what they really mean. It isn’t a mean lie, just a sort of diplomatic maneuver. “Why can’t you understand me?” they’ll say if you miss the code. Mackinnon’s Syndrome, he said.

  But there is another matter between fathers and daughters. Not only do daughters have a mystical instinct that scares the father, the father has a fear of being diminished in his daughter’s eyes. The last thing he wants is for her to sum him up and find him lacking. No matter what anyone says, it’s a high-wire act right to the end: a daughter wants a father, and a father wants to be just that, and if he falls, if he shows that he is a moral klutz, it is a terror for all concerned.

  •••

  My troubles began when my daughter Pia got involved with a young man who went by the name of Aurlon Miller. Sometimes he called himself the Wizard. His parents had conceived him on an acid trip in the mountains of Southeast Asia. Aurlon had, according to his mother, a blue aura. That’s what he told my daughter. He wore a gray cape. And sometimes, I have to say, he appeared to have a sort of smoky haze around him, as though he emerged from some underworld where the smoke is the color of an iris and as cool as the mist of dry ice. He had the habit, too, of staring just over your head to make you think he was looking right through you.

  You’d think this would be easy enough to handle. But, as in all disasters, the beginning is often disguised, and what initially seemed like ordinary foolishness was just hiding something else.

  On that drive in his current death-trap Cadillac along the Charles River in Cambridge, after five or six Negronis and a half jug of Almaden wine that had been in the back of his refrigerator for a month, my father flipped the other drivers the finger and honked the horn. This time my father found himself behind one of those young men in Cambridge who ride their bikes with a devotion that verges on the pathological. This one, though, was in the middle of the road, just before the Harvard Boathouse. Maybe the biker was getting ready to make a left turn, and had just pulled out from the right-hand lane, bright in his spandex and reflector strips, all lit up for my father to come out of his boozy haze and to discover just what the Cadillac was about to run over.

  The Cadillac, by the way, never had much in the way of brakes, and often when I had come for a visit to the house where I grew up in Cambridge (and where my father still lived, although I had moved to Brattle Street) I’d see a pinkish brake fluid on the apron, sort of like blood from a reptile or some creature that doesn’t have a heart, not really, not a mammalian heart that is warm, but cold and more o
r less indifferent. That’s what that pink stuff always reminded me of, although for my father it was just a matter of confronting that coldness, of showing that a devil-may-care attitude was the answer to everything. When he contemplated that brake fluid, he smiled, looked at me with a sort of challenge, and said, “Well, there’s still an emergency brake. See you later.”

  My father came up behind the biker. I know these things because of the investigation that the police did, and, of course, because everyone in Cambridge knew my father and wanted to tell me about it, not to mention that I had enough experience with him myself to take a good guess. Usually, when he was driving along the river he liked to go about twenty miles over the speed limit and weave in and out of traffic, proving he still had the reactions and the skill of the pursuit pilot. The odd thing is that often he was able, through sheer physical ability, to get out of trouble that would have killed a man with lesser reactions. This time a car had just passed him on the right, and so when he jerked the wheel to avoid the biker, he found that he was about to rear-end the car in the right lane.

  So, he was faced with a decision. And the more I think about it, the more it seems to me that this was a perfect expression of the difficulties he faced, almost always of his own making. Drinking, of course, has a lot to do with this.

  My father was faced with the decision of whether or not to flatten the bicyclist or to drive over the curb and toward the river. And even this had some disadvantages, since the apron of grass between the river and the sidewalk was filled with men doing sit-ups, sunbathing women, Harvard undergraduates mostly, working on their tans, and then young men who were out there playing Frisbee.

  My father turned toward the curb. I guess he was going about sixty at this point and so the car cleared the curb with a jolt that was moderated by the speed, since he was going so fast as to smooth out the bump as the car became airborne. Not for long, I guess, but ten feet or so. The women on the grass looked up, as though someone had called a name that they couldn’t quite hear. One of the Frisbee players made a long jump, a dive for the toy, and he was suspended, like a still from a Coke commercial, as my father found that while having made the first decision to avoid both the car and the biker he now faced another choice, between the women on the grass and the man who hung in the air.