Americana (22 page)

* * *

Meredith and I were married between my junior and senior years at Leighton Gage. A week before the event, I got a letter from Ken Wild.

I had taken Wild’s letter, along with paper and pen and three cans of beer, to my favorite spot in Old Holly. This was the slope behind the firehouse, a green and treeless place, always private, facing west so that the grass turned slowly golden green as the sun circled toward the far hills. The slope dropped a hundred feet or so to a sort of lesser valley, a barren area of boulders, stunted trees and the scratched earth of a dried-out creekbed. Across the valley was a small hill, and on top of it, at the eastern limit of a large estate, was a pasture; and from the slope you could see the horses moving slowly, heads down, the lovely mild curves of their necks, grazing, moving against the more distant hills; or standing, where the hills dropped away as if to graze also on some low meadow, standing against the sky and the rich citrus setting of the sun.

Wild, of course, had yet to meet Meredith. Miss Dairy Products USA was a name of my own making and Wild was merely repeating my own bad joke. I had known, as junior year drew to a close, that I would ask her to marry me. I also
knew, pending her acceptance, that we would return together to Leighton Gage for my final year. My classmates in their evolving worldliness would consider Merry too pure, too naive, too inexperienced to be let loose outside of Disneyland. So I tried to prepare them—a joke here, an anecdote there, an occasional nervous quip. And as I said these things I would often think of her, in a London park or square, on a bench beneath some granite admiral, and she’d be so pretty, nodding as the pigeons nodded, pouting at the pouting children in their prams, so pretty and white, those thrifty breasts, salvation of Western man, furling a yellow umbrella. Some good-bad nights I spent, loving my self-hatred. I was trying to prepare them, that’s all; take the glint off their eager scalpels. I punished myself by going for long underwater swims in the artificial lake, coming up gasping, the sky regarding me through misty spectacles, quite curiously. And still I tried to prepare them. These are the things men do when they have orchestrated their lives to the rumble of public opinion. Merry arrived with me on campus the following autumn. They all said she was a nice girl and seven of us took a mass touchless shower.

Writing to Wild on the slope I did not mention her. I made no reference to the flaming engine and his soul’s need for crisis. I said nothing of his mock-epic poem, which was obviously just another scenic dream. In fact I wrote just one line:
I didn’t get your letter.
Then I sipped beer for an hour. I thought of adding something about his desire for less sanity. Wild truly believed that he would never be a great poet because he was not sufficiently insane. I tended to agree with him but I didn’t bother getting into it. I was on the third can of beer by this time and it tasted warm and flat. The sun had set and it was time to be getting home.

* * *

Even from this long way off, in the magnet-grip of an impending century, it is painful to write about her. It has taken me this long just to organize my thoughts. And although I
think I have come to terms with everything, it will be interesting to see whether I can put it on paper clearly and openly. Or whether I must blow some smoke into this or that passage—some smoke to hide the fire.

One summer she bought two dolls, one for Jane and one for Mary. Jane put both dolls on her dresser. But my mother objected and so Mary’s doll was put into Mary’s abandoned room. Jane was always trying to discuss these things with me. In her confusion she was comforted by the sound of voices. It was an article of her faith that tragedy could be averted, or at least detained in the sweep of its tidal and incomprehensible darkness, by two reasoning people sitting in a familiar room and discussing the matter. I didn’t want to talk about it. I feared silence less than the involvement of words. Distance, silence, darkness. In the vastness of these things I hoped to evade all need to understand and to cancel all possibility of explaining. Jane came into my room with a pot of tea and closed the door behind her.

“What are we going to do?” she said.

“About what?”

“You know what.”

“There’s nothing to do,” I said. “We should see about a doctor. Some shrink on Park Avenue. But that’s up to daddy, isn’t it? I’d like to finish this book and get it back to the library before they close.”

“What are we going to do about the dolls?”

“Leave them where they are and forget it.”

“What do you think it means, David?”

“How the hell do I know? Now let me finish this book in peace.”

“You can finish the book tomorrow.”

“It’ll be overdue.”

“It must have something to do with our childhoods,” Jane said. “She must be trying to make up for something.”

“Sure. Childhood. Absolutely.”

“I’m trying to remember whether I had any dolls like this
when I was little. Maybe we wanted this particular kind of doll and she didn’t buy them because they were very expensive. They look expensive. I wish Mary was here.”

“Look, she bought a couple of dolls. I don’t understand what all the fuss is about. All I can say is I’m hurt that she didn’t get anything for me. I wanted a fire engine. No fire gingin for Dabid. Dabid want big wed fire gingin. Dabid want to play with Jane and Mary. But mommy no buy him pwetty toys. Jane go way now so Dabid can wead his wittle book. Go way, Jane. Bye-bye. Jane go way. See Jane go. Jane is mad. See how mad Jane is. Jane slam Dabid’s door. What a bad wittle girl. Jane all gone. Bye-bye, Jane.”

The following April, at school, I was summoned to the telephone. It was my father. I remember what I was wearing. I was wearing white Top-Siders, white sweatsocks, a pair of olive chinos, and an old basketball jersey, white with blue trim and lettering, bearing the number nine. While we spoke I studied these articles of clothing intensely, as if keeping a mescaline vigil, my eyes seeking those immense explosions of beauty which are known to occur in the swirl of a grain of cloth.

“Bad news,” he said.

“What is it?”

“Your mother’s come down with something bad.”

“She’s sick? What is it?”

“I think she’s dying, kid. They found it too late.”

“What?” I said.

“What?”

“What did they find?”

“It looks like cancer. She doesn’t want to go to the hospital.”

“Cancer where? What part?”

“Take the first plane you can get. Wire and I’ll meet you at the airport. You need money, I’ll send it right out. But, look, hurry it up if you can. I should have called you weeks ago but I couldn’t get myself to believe it. Everything’s caving in. How the hell am I going to get in touch with Mary?”

“Where’s the cancer?” I said.

“It’s inside. It’s in the female region. Look, can’t we talk about it later? The doctor can tell you these things better than I can.”

“Who’s the doctor?”

“I got Weber.”

“Get him the fuck out of there,” I said. “I don’t want Weber in there with her. Get another doctor. Anybody. Just get Weber out.”

“It’s all my fault,” he said. “I’ve done everything wrong. I should have had her examined years ago. I should have had her examined for the other thing. Now there’s this thing and it’s too late. It’s funny, kid, but she said the same thing you did. She said to get Weber out.”

The plane, smelling vaguely of a child’s vomit, ranged through stormclouds over the mountains and then broke clear into a calm blue afternoon. When I came out of the toilet a man stopped me to introduce himself. He said his wife would like to have my autograph. He said she had recognized me and he wondered if I would say hello to her on the way back to my seat. I told him she had mistaken me for someone else. He said it didn’t matter; sign any name. And I did, I signed Buster Keaton, and when I stopped at her seat she took my hand and told me how very nice it was to meet me, how kind I was to interrupt my busy flying schedule in order to say hello to an admirer. An hour before we landed, the man came to my seat and offered me a twenty-dollar bill. Throughout the flight I kept getting mental pictures, against my will, of a growth inside my mother’s womb.

The vase held seven wizened zinnias. My father whispered to me as she slept. It was the cervix. It had been discovered at an advanced stage. The doctor had wanted to take everything out. She had refused. She told my father that she had known about it for a long time. There had been unexplained bleeding and she told him she had felt the thing spreading, a radial plague, spreading like medieval death. Only her collapse
had told him that something was wrong. And she had refused to let them take anything out. God has been defeated, she said. And nothing anybody could do with their knives and clamps could ever change the fact of this defeat. He was in my body and I let Him out. He was the light of my body and I blew Him out. I believe in the Middle Ages. Fire for witches and plague for the sins of the world. I believe in ancient Egypt. These things were read to me in a garden full of sunlight by a beautiful and shining woman.

I opened the window. All the sweet reek of April filled the room and when I sighed it was almost possible to believe that something out there returned the sigh, something raving in the wind as it stirred those groping trees, something terrible on the grass, an instant in which nature gave in to rape, birdshaped and muddied in blood.

Jane touched me on the shoulder. The Reverend Potter was standing in the doorway like a ship in an upright bottle. My father leaned over to tie his shoe. I heard the bells of the ice-cream truck.

And in the morning I cut myself shaving. The bleeding stopped seven minutes later and I knew it was safe to go out.

* * *

“She was a different breed of cat,” my father said. “She knew things nobody else knew. There was something magic about that woman. I don’t believe in devils or saints or evil spirits. If you can’t see it, is my theory, then it isn’t there. But when your mother talked about these things it wasn’t so easy to be a skeptic. Her mother drowned when she was a little girl. Maybe it did something to her. She remembered things that happened to her when she was only two years old. Maybe she just dreamed them but if they were just dreams she could make them sound deadly real. When she was carrying Mary, the minute she knew she was carrying Mary, she said it was a girl. She said it was the kite-soul of her mother. The kite-soul. It sounds Oriental, doesn’t it? Something Buddhists or Hindus might believe in. Something to do with
reincarnation. I’ve never come across that phrase before or since. But to get back to Mary. Mary when she was born resembled me more than anyone. And when Jane was born it seemed a sure bet that the blond side of the family had been lost somewhere, your mother’s side, and her mother’s side. Ann felt desolate. I think she felt a whole race had faded away in some genetic catastrophe. Then you were born. She looked at you and said there he is, up out of the Irish seas like Lycidas. I loved her like I’ll never love anything in this world again. When you were born she was happy and I didn’t care what she said or how little I understood. She was happy and that was all that mattered. I have that much to thank you for anyway.”

As she edged closer to death, he said, he began drinking heavily. Then one day he stopped drinking. He cut it out completely. He stopped drinking and got into his Maserati and took the first of a series of strange drives over the dark narrow roads around town. He would go out shortly after midnight and begin driving. He would take it up to 110, corner at 75, slam it way out to the fringe, the delicate pressure of his foot on the accelerator becoming part of a game of tender balances, and his hands on the wheel daring him closer to the bright splashing eyes in the adjacent lane. In the rain one night he went into a spin and ended up in a ditch. He got out of the car, bleeding around the head, and walked back to town. He went about a mile out of his way to pass through the Negro section of Old Holly, past the bars and old frame houses. He was waiting for a man with a knife to come out of a doorway at him. All this time, he told me, he had been trying to steal death from her body. By confronting it himself, he would keep it away from her. And on that last night a man leaned out of a bar and began following him. My father turned a corner, clenched his fists and waited. It was still raining and he could taste the rain mixed with blood running into his mouth. The man came around the corner and walked up to him and began to tapdance. My father stood there and the
man danced around him, shuffling slowly and mumbling some old scat lyric. When he started to walk away, the man followed at a distance of several yards, gliding and tapping with the loose elegance of the indomitably drunk. My father walked backwards for almost half a block, watching the man come closer. Then he turned quickly and began to run, and he could hear the feet still tapping behind him, diminishing now, and the voice growing dimmer, a weary moan from swamps or cotton, words of an unknown language.