by Jim Harrison
My parents came home the Wednesday evening before Labor Day weekend, nearly a full week before their usual return from the Club. Jesse quickly disappeared after bringing in their luggage and carrying it up to the master bedroom. My father had a black eye and a fat lip and my mother’s eyes were red from crying. She went out to the back porch with a stiff drink and my father followed her with a larger one but not before giving me a manic grin and saying, “I got the best of the asshole.” He also paused to watch Cynthia and Vera hurry upstairs as if he were judging a dog show. I went into the den but through an open window I could hear them quarreling on the back porch. Their voices were muffled but I deduced it was something about her refusal to loan him money for a “margin call” on the stock market. It must have been an emergency because it had been one of Jesse’s blue-suit days and when he had returned from downtown his face had been perceptibly grave. He hadn’t changed his clothes before driving off north to pick up my parents.
I turned on some music on the radio to drown out the ugly voices and my father’s shouts of “you goddamned bitch.” I heard my mother come back into the house and go upstairs. I felt trapped in the den but wasn’t sure how to make my escape when my father came into the living room. I eased out the den door but my father ignored me as he filled a water glass with brandy. I slipped on the first step of the stairs and my father quickly pulled me up by the elbow but it was as if he couldn’t really see me.
I couldn’t sleep and struggled to read a ponderous Thomas Mann novel without getting the names straight. I took an unnecessary codeine and a hit from a bottle of schnapps I had in the desk drawer. At about two A.M. I heard a truly piercing scream from down the hall. I woke to discover I was sitting at my desk. There was another scream and I grabbed my crutches and went out into the hall where Cynthia and my mother were already standing outside their bedroom doors. My father came stumbling out of Vera’s room with his large, partly erect dick sticking out of his underpants. I thought I saw blood. I wobbled on my crutches and sat down on the floor. Cynthia went in her room, dialed her phone, and started yelling at the police. My mother followed her and tried to grab the phone. My father went in his bedroom and quickly came out with his clothes and lurched down the stairs. Jesse who had heard the scream came in the house dressed only in his pants and raced up the stairs. My father ran out the back door and I heard my mother’s Buick start.
It was a full hour before a policeman came and then it was the chief of police accompanied by the senior member of the law firm our family used. We had sat in the living room in a tableau of silence except for Cynthia who said several times “I’m going to kill him.” Vera wore one of my mother’s robes and she sat on the sofa with Jesse’s arm around her shoulder. Jesse tried to take her out to the garage apartment but Cynthia wouldn’t let them go. I sat at the dining room table holding my mother’s hand.
When the policeman and lawyer arrived they were nearly overcome with embarrassment. I could see that some kind of delay or cover-up was already in progress. The lawyer poured himself a drink and it was decided that statements would be taken in the morning. Cynthia was hysterically angry. Jesse and Vera refused to say anything. My mother wept. I shivered. Cynthia ranted. I stayed up until dawn with her when Donald arrived. She left without luggage.
By the time I got up at midmorning quite groggy from my codeine sleep —I had taken two more —Jesse and Vera were gone. My mother sat at the dining room with a suitcase beside her. Clarence came in, took the suitcase, and drove her to the airport for the noon flight to Chicago. Clarence avoided looking at me. I went over to the sofa and fell asleep not wanting to be upstairs and out of earshot in case the police came for a statement. They never did.
Before dinnertime I awoke and heard Clarence mowing the lawn which didn’t need it, and then he came and asked if he should call Mrs. Plunkett and I said not for the time being. I knew that she was headed down to Kenosha for Labor Day weekend and I didn’t want to interrupt her vacation. We went to the diner and I had a hamburger and potato soup. When Clarence dropped me off back at the house I wondered if it wasn’t like the house had burned down with all of us in it. No. We were still here, wherever they had gone, but it was likely we would never be all together again which was just as well.
Part II
1970s
13
Laurie died just before dawn three days before the summer solstice. I didn’t want to be in the room but I was at her insistence. She touched her three-year-old daughter’s hand, then her mother took the child from the hospice room. Laurie’s husband, Brent, sat dozing by the corner window, the lilacs outside all bleached out, frazzled and dead. He naturally didn’t want me around but Cynthia took him to a nearby tavern and gave him a lecture while I took the three-year-old daughter named Clemmie for a walk. Laurie’s breast cancer was aggressive, rapacious, as it often is in younger women. She was twenty-five and told me that she had known it was happening for several months before she had gone to the doctor. Why, I had asked? She was depressed because she was divorcing her husband having discovered that what she had wanted was a baby not a husband.
The week before she died and when she was still coherent we talked out our entire lives because I had seen little of her in nearly ten years. We’d talk for an hour or two and then she would nap. I’d kiss her bald head good-bye feeling her skull beneath my lips, and remembering that I had dreamt so long ago of her arriving at this condition. How could this be? Obviously our souls are more accessible to our unconscious. This was far from the strangest conclusion I had come to at age twenty-seven.
She was so placid in the last week of her life partly, of course, due to the IV morphine drip. Her voice was so thin I had to sit close to the bed. She teased me about my “cheap” clothing, my masquerade as a normal person. She was delusional enough to suggest that she should never have had the abortion but that we ought to have run away together despite the fact that I had been sixteen and she fourteen. “They do it in other countries,” she said. I tried to keep her talk of “what might have been” to a minimum by changing the subject as deftly as possible. I avoided her husband by leaving before he came in after work, and coming back late in the evening when she called. That way I also missed her parents, especially her father who had said, “She could have been a great tennis player,” when in fact Laurie had quit the game when she was twenty. Her halfback had graduated from the local college and had become a “top notch” real estate salesman who was brusque to everyone except customers. Fred had described his type as the “new Americans” of which there were more every day.
When Laurie touched her daughter’s hand with a forefinger and her mother gathered up the child we looked at each other and I saw the sight disappear from her eyes. She didn’t so much die as withdraw, and her body under the sheet was still but there was an aura of departure that made me feel cold despite the warm room. Instead of pressing the button to call a nurse I listened to an aspect of emptiness I hadn’t heard before as if her passing had stopped all other sound. I’m sure it couldn’t have been more than a few moments but time had collapsed. When it was over I had nothing left about which to draw conclusions. My incomprehension was total. She was here and then she wasn’t and though I understood the biological fact of death the whole ballooned outward from the mute sum of the parts.
I walked for a couple of hours thinking of nothing because I had exhausted my capacities. I hadn’t awakened her husband before I left the room. Out on Presque Isle I passed the thicket where we had made love on a rainy night, then turned back toward town. I met Clarence and Jesse at the diner and simply nodded when they looked at me questioningly. I thought of calling Cynthia from the pay phone but it could wait. She had lain in bed with Laurie and they chatted as if the inevitable was worthy only of being ignored. They even sang a few songs, but then Cynthia had to go home to Sugar Island near Sault Sainte Marie. She and Donald now had two children, a boy of eight years and a girl five. There was absolutely nothing in their small h
ome on St. Mary’s River to indicate her past except a photo of Laurie and me in my rowboat and one of Mother as a teenager.
Clarence still took care of the yard though I had doubts about what sort of paycheck he was drawing. I knew he was at least sixty-five though he didn’t look it. After that night when the house had emptied out and there was only me left Clarence had continued his job as if nothing had happened, whether mowing, gardening, raking leaves, shoveling snow before daylight, fixing the refrigerator or furnace, cleaning ice out of the eaves troughs. That winter of my senior year of high school I was sure he was having an affair with Mrs. Plunkett who was staying in the guest bedroom. One moonlit predawn I had seen her from my window making her way back to the house from the work shed. Six days a week Clarence arrived at around five A.M. and when it was cold he’d start a fire in the woodstove in the work shed. Having put in his eight hours at our house he’d leave early in the afternoon for the marina when he worked as a handyman in the summer and repaired boats in a big shed in the winter. When I was about ten and beginning a strenuous effort to understand the world I asked my father how Clarence could possibly work sixteen hours a day. “He supports a lot of people,” he said, as if Clarence’s labor was nothing in particular. This was my first clue well before my project started that the alpha predators in the lineage from which we came didn’t have contempt for the ordinary workingman, they simply ignored him.
Jesse was another matter altogether. Why he came back to work for my father after the rape of his daughter was utterly beyond me, and a horrid incident five years before during the last months of my marriage to Polly had taken a degree of warmth from our friendship that has never been restored. What happened is that I had just entered the seminary in Evanston at Seabury-Western that fall and by mid-October our marriage had disassembled. It was my fault because I had admitted a month after we married the year before when I graduated from Michigan State and she was working on a master’s in education that I had no intention of ever fathering children. I actually lied and said I had a spermatic cord torsion which was true, from an accident, but the lie was in not saying it was easily correctible. She let this slide for a while but when we drove north to have Christmas with her parents her father was very direct when he said how much he looked forward to having grandchildren. In married housing at Michigan State we were surrounded by couples with children and Polly was painfully envious. She maintained her good humor to protect my feelings, but then I finally admitted when we moved to Chicago the summer after graduation that my sterility was correctible. Our apartment was too small to say this kind of thing aloud. I insisted that the males in my family for the last hundred and fifty years didn’t constitute the kind of bloodline that should be perpetuated. Since Cynthia already had given birth twice Polly couldn’t accept my refusal.
Like many others I’m somewhat doubtful on the matter of repressed memories but then I certainly have no talent in the somewhat bruised arena of psychology. When I think of my four college years it’s never on purpose. For instance, if my feet become wet with slush on the streets of Marquette in March I am effortlessly taken back to trying to negotiate the crowded sidewalks of Michigan State University’s campus between class periods. The pallid beiges, grays, and greens peculiar to government building interiors sweep me back into the same institutional colors at the university and you have to wonder what malign imaginations devised such ugliness so in contrast with the beauty of the landscaping of the campus influenced by its justly famous horticulture department. Visual ugliness seeps into the soul and is banished only by an extraordinary teacher of which I cherished only three, possibly four, or a few books discovered in the sepia anguish of the library. Not oddly you fall back on your sexuality in desperation. One day I stooped before a bottom shelf in the library and removed a book which gave me a clear view of the other side where a coed was sitting on the floor in a wool plaid skirt raised a bit and her legs apart so I could see her vulva packed tightly in white cotton panties. It was akin to touching an electric fence. I left the library, cut my next class, and drove home to our horrid apartment in the huge married housing complex. Polly was hard at work writing a term paper at the kitchen table and refused to make love until I quite literally broke into tears. “O you big baby,” she said, and leaned over the table with a text still before her. She cooked poorly and kept repeating fried chicken livers or meat loaf or fried indistinguishable fish. The level of discourse in a sociology text would upset my stomach and only sex would heal me. We took to having pizza twice a week and having sex both before and after the pizza. In short, I utterly loathed college but still cherish the teachers who gave so much of their enormous minds. Two of them, Weisinger and Jaffe, were Jewish and from New York City. They had come to our intellectually pathetic interior and saved my sorry neck. Only these men, pizza, and sex with Polly could raise me from my collegiate doldrums.
By early October we had pretty much disintegrated. Everything had gone wrong. After a single month I could see that preaching in an Episcopal church wasn’t going to work for me though I intended to see the year out with that curiously destructive bravery of the midwesterner who never quite knows when to cut and run. We decided to drive north to the cabin I had inherited from Sprague and talk it out. Before our marriage I had lived there for as much as three months at a time in a state of self-congratulatory ascetic withdrawal but Polly on her two visits with her characteristic honesty had found the place “creepy, scary, eerie.” She didn’t see the point in the essentially barren room and the small cooking shed I had clumsily built out back. She found the grave of Sprague’s wife unpleasant, feeling that the dead should be buried with other members of the human race. I had taught her to love classical music but when she tried to bring along her battery-operated radio I said that I didn’t allow music at the cabin at which she tossed the radio from the back of the truck and it splintered on the sidewalk. We were north past Milwaukee before she said a word and by then she had used half a box of Kleenex. Well north of Green Bay I turned off on a gravel road and we took a walk which made it worse. We had forgotten the sandwiches I had made and she screamed, “I have to have a baby you selfish son of a bitch.” She ran down the road and I couldn’t catch her with my bad ankle which would never be good for anything but walking.
We were temporarily saved by a golden afternoon once we entered northern Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula. The popple and aspen had turned yellow while the conifers stayed green and all the hardwoods were shades of red and gold. We were nearly emerged from our slump near Bruce’s Crossing and I idly said that maybe we should abandon Chicago, move up here and buy a farm. She laughed at the idea of us as a farm couple, turning in the seat, and I could see up her legs under her skirt. This usually aroused me but I felt nothing. Unable to leave this absence of desire alone I pulled the car off on a wooded two-track and tried to make love to her without success. This had never happened to me and I was so frustrated my eyes became misty. Polly was becoming increasingly confused and we sat there in the emotional flipside of the glorious Indian summer day in our homeland. The lump in my throat was enlarging and Polly looked like she wished very much to be elsewhere.
The worst by far was yet to come. We had a quick early dinner and drove out toward the cabin. I had bought a bottle of whiskey which was unusual because I rarely averaged a drink a month after having had a hard time with alcohol as a college freshman and realizing I was in danger of falling into the family trap.
When we reached the gate it wasn’t my gate. It was a new, wider galvanized gate with a heavy padlock and the two-track beyond it had been graded and expanded and my favorite oak tree had been cut down. Polly said nothing and I was shocked to the point I nearly vomited. I climbed the gate and trotted down the road in the twilight. The porch had been torn off my cabin and a new one was being built. In place of my cookshed there was a prefab garage that contained a big generator for electricity. Steps built out of railroad ties made a path down to Lake Superior. Out in back the
gravestone was gone and the beaver dam taken out so the pond was drained.
It was nearly dark when I started back to the car. Polly met me halfway and when I stumbled and fell she helped me up. I drove to the house of the old Finn who checked the cabin every week and had done repairs for Sprague. His wife said he was at the tavern and did I want my stuff, meaning my cooking utensils and sleeping bag and a carton of books. I loaded them into the trunk and drove to the tavern. Naturally I had guessed what had happened but it didn’t make me feel less murderous. Tad and three other old Finns were playing euchre. He looked up and said blearily, “Your dad sold it in August.” I wasn’t capable of more than a murmur but said, “It wasn’t his to sell.”
It was a grotesque night on the phone. Polly finally got another room at the motel. I drank most of the whiskey and vomited all over myself when I tried to sleep. I tried to call my father who was in Italy with his crony Seward. Jesse wasn’t at home but he had left a number of a motel in Duluth and there was no answer there. I called my mother in Evanston who knew nothing of it but said, “I’m so sorry.” I called my father’s main banker and the head of the law firm in Marquette and neither of them admitted knowing anything. All of our family papers of any consequence, including my own, were stored at the bank and readily accessible to my father and Jesse who also had power of attorney in most matters. I finally got hold of Jesse at around midnight when I was very drunk. He said only that he couldn’t bear to tell me in July. I hung up thinking how easy the crime had been to commit in that my father was David Burkett III and my legal name was simply David Burkett. I passed out, vomited, choked, and slept. At first light Polly helped me clean myself up. She drove most of the way to Iron Mountain where I dropped her at her parents’ and proceeded to Marquette. My throbbing hangover was the least of my discomforts. When we kissed good-bye in front of her parents’ house I knew it was truly a goodbye kiss. She might still love me like you would a mad dog if it was your own but it was definitely time for her to give up my ghost. In my senior year at the university when we had been living together before our marriage she had looked at me in a coffee shop after a movie and asked, “Are you ever going to be all right?” I had said, “Of course, darling.” The Fact that I wouldn’t be what she called “all right” until I finished my project was becoming obvious to me.