Clear Springs (23 page)

He finished the veal scallopini, spearing the mushrooms and mopping up the marsala sauce with a hunk of Italian bread. He ate sloppily, drunkenly.

I didn’t know where this was going. I had been feeling that my job and my ambition and my background were all a jarring and jerky mix, like Mondrian’s
Broadway Boogie-Woogie
. At my job, I was exploiting people who romanticized the movies, but Bob Hazel exalted the very kind of people who loved the movies and TV—farm folks, laborers, working people—while condemning what they felt. My parents were at home watching
Gunsmoke
. Bob Hazel would have sneered.

“I’ve spent my life getting away from my rural Indiana background,” Bob explained when I tried to ask what for me were central
questions about a writer’s material. “My family thought writing was sissy, even though I was a quarterback on the football team.” He slugged down some more wine. “You’ll have to resist sentimentalizing ‘good country people’ if you’re really going to be a writer,” he said. “They’re too nice. You need to get tough.”

“Does that mean I can’t write stories about where I come from?”

“It means that you have to stop going to those shit movies and think about what Randall Jarrell said.”

I don’t remember what he said that Randall Jarrell said. It was indistinguishable from what he said that Allen Tate said and John Crowe Ransom said and Wallace Stevens said. On the subway, I reread
Lie Down in Darkness
, about a Southern girl who went off to New York and eventually committed suicide. It was written from her father’s point of view. None of it applied to me.

Bob Hazel invited me to Poughkeepsie one winter weekend to visit his brother and family. From the train window I saw trees, whole forests, deep in snow. I hadn’t realized how much I missed trees. Vividly, I recalled the ice-covered twig I had broken when I was a child, the act that stung me with guilt. These trees seemed so calm and beautiful, so necessary in the landscape. As we rode along, Bob spotted a teddy bear left out on a fence, and he pointed it out. Maybe he wrote it down. It was the sort of thing he would put in a poem, he said.

There was a party that weekend, dozens of professional, nonliterary people in their thirties. I wore my black cocktail dress with the taffeta balloon-hem, the dress I had worn the last time I saw the Hilltoppers. It was still stylish. Bob said to me, “How does it feel to be the most beautiful woman in the room?” I was twenty-two. The others were all old. He was forty. He thought I was beautiful because I was young.

I returned to New York on an afternoon train on Sunday, in time to meet Kyra and rush to Rockefeller Center for
The Jack Paar Program
, a weekly television show. Someone at work had given us tickets to the taping. George Burns and Pearl Bailey were guests. I knew I didn’t belong in New York. And I knew I shouldn’t be building a career based on TV stars. Before long I began searching for a different job. I went to an interview at an address on Fifth Avenue, on the sixteenth floor. I knew that the Empire State Building was in that vicinity. Afraid of heights, I had always avoided going there. It was only after I was far down the block, after the interview, and glanced back that I realized I had been in the Empire State Building. For a long time that trivial irony impressed me. It seemed like the teddy bear on the fence.

By then, it was trees I needed. The occasional trees I saw in the city’s concrete landscape leaped out at me like images in a 3-D movie.

I could not imagine my future. I thought I would be alone, but not lonely. My farm background had taught me to take what comes—drought, cattle disease, dead dogs. I had thought that if my life were to change, some opportunity had to present itself to me, so I should keep bumbling along until this cosmic accident occurred. But now I came to realize I had to take my life in hand. I had to ask myself what I really wanted. I knew I wanted sanity and clarity, and I knew I didn’t want to waste my life. Bob Hazel started me on my true course, but he yanked me backwards, too. Then I yanked loose. Later, I saw that for all his shining facade and sad romanticism, he had been utterly serious. He was a genuine poet, and I was still young, unformed.

In 1963, only weeks before President Kennedy was murdered, I left for an upstate school to take a graduate assistantship in literature. Bob warned me that academic study was anathema to a writer, but I knew I had plenty to learn before I could write. In Binghamton, the trees were blazing autumn colors on forested mountainsides. I had never seen trees perform so brilliantly. Back home, the predominant oak trees made the autumn brown and gold. But this Northern landscape was full of fire; the trees were flames.

When I went away to New York City in the summer of 1962, I left many of my college books at home. Mama stored them out in the junkhouse. Why keep books in the house, where they would be in the way? Two years later, during a visit home, I learned that Granny had found the books soon after I left, and she had read a few of them. She read
The Old Man and the Sea
by Ernest Hemingway and
Anglo-Saxon Attitudes
by Angus Wilson. And she read my copy of Henry Miller’s
Tropic of Cancer
.

“Such as that is awful,” she told me. The books were stacked on her wicker lamp table, on a white doily. Her hands worked nervously along the edges of her apron.

A pervert looking for filthy books could have searched the whole University of Kentucky library and not found anything naughtier than
Tropic of Cancer
. It’s raw sexual adventure. It has the word “fuck” in it. I had left that book behind and taken
The Great Gatsby
with me. As far as I was concerned,
Tropic of Cancer
was a reject—too sordid and lacking literary style—while
The Great Gatsby
was a treasure.

I knew I had caused my family worry, but I did not dwell on the possibility that I had sent my grandmother to the nuthouse. She seemed better now, and I was immersed in my studies.

Later, when Granddaddy got sick again, I was studying James Joyce. I came home for a long stretch—from Thanksgiving to New Year’s. The weather was mild, and I sat outside at a picnic table in the oak woods by the house, reading
Ulysses
. Dutifully, as I had always been taught to study, I was following a guidebook, annotating the pages of the novel. There was a comfort in plunging deep into this methodical task while trying not to think about what was happening with my grandparents. Fourteen years before, when Granny was at the hospital
in Memphis and I was certain she was dying, I had been deeply afraid. Now I had annotations to do. Joyce had used the kidney as the dominating organ of the Calypso chapter. Copying that in my book didn’t seem at all wacky to me then. I kept notebooks of system and design. Joyce’s art was too dazzling to question. I consumed, I regurgitated.

No one in the family knew about James Joyce, and I would not tell them anything. Anyway, they didn’t ask. I wouldn’t tell them
Ulysses
had been banned, or that Joyce and Henry Miller might have crossed paths in Paris. I didn’t know how to explain a writer who had taken years to write six hundred pages about a day in the life of an Irish ad salesman. I couldn’t tell my family what pure pleasure was in this book, surely of no relevance when it came to stocking the freezer for the winter. Mama had wanted to follow my studies with me in high school, and we began with the Latin text, but she was too busy to keep up. After a few fitful starts and stops, she had to quit. Now, at a school of higher learning, I felt guilty that I was soaring out of sight, into the arcane—and often inane—intricacies of scholarship.

Granddaddy died in January, 1965, a victim of ulcers, his stomach lining gnawed away from years of secret worry about Granny’s delicate health. The day before his surgery, I was in his hospital room. He unzipped his leather change purse from the bedside drawer and counted out several coins.

“Go get me some cream,” he said.

At the drugstore across the street, I bought two dips of vanilla ice cream in a waxed pasteboard cup. I was aware of his dignity, his precision, his intention to pay his way, and his love of ice cream. He was very much alive. I didn’t consider that he would not survive the surgery.

The evening after his funeral, I was watching Marilyn Monroe in
River of No Return
on TV. Granny said, “How can you watch such trash at a time like this?” That night in bed I was afraid of childhood ghosts; I pictured my grandfather rising from the grave. The thing I had feared throughout my childhood had finally happened. A family member had died. I could not bear to think about it. For several years afterwards, whenever he came to mind, I deliberately switched him off. Eventually, I realized I could hardly remember anything about him except the time he spit tobacco juice into my eye. I was about ten. He was walking toward me on the driveway behind his house, and when he got close, he spit toward me. He was probably absorbed in
thought and didn’t see me, but when I howled with pain, he kept walking, ignoring me. This heedlessness of cruel effect—this harsh, blind innocence—was a trait I also saw at times in my father.

Daddy had promised his father not to leave Granny alone at night, so he brought her to live at our house, in the tiny back room. Even though her house was only a few dozen yards away, it must have seemed a hundred miles to her. She didn’t have her kitchen, her things, her own home. Everything was wrong. She found fault with Mama’s cooking. Don and LaNelle were young and troublesome. Her husband was dead.

LaNelle’s records blared out of her room. The squawks sounded to Granny as if a fox had got in the henhouse. In the spring, while the Beatles blasted throughout the house, Granny sat outside in the car to escape the sound. Granddaddy’s car, a green boxy Dodge, was parked in the woods behind the house. Granny stayed there for many hours, in her bonnet, head lowered, studying her plight. She had never learned to drive. She had not learned the areas Granddaddy had handled—the finances, the livestock trading—just as he had not learned to patch pants or work up preserves. Now Daddy was in charge of the manly jobs. She often called him “Bob” by mistake. When she talked to anyone, she repeated that the funeral expenses were $1,294.75 and the hospital bill was $1,048.45; she told how much money she had left, and how her house was deteriorating with no one in it.

After six months of listening to Granny’s litany of complaints, Mama and Daddy and LaNelle and Don moved to her house with her. With grim resolve, my mother stored much of her furniture and belongings in one of the outbuildings. She did not fight the move, because she did not see any alternative. Besides, she figured Granny would not live long.

Granny’s house had a large living room, a dining room, a kitchen, a closet, a recently installed bathroom, and a new gas furnace. But there were only two bedrooms. There was a large, closed-off attic, but it did not occur to anyone to remodel that space to make more bedrooms. My parents placed their bed in the living room. They stowed Don in the front hall, on a small bed, just inside the glass-paned front door. He had nightmares there, fearing ghosts and the legendary man with the hook for a hand. LaNelle occupied the north bedroom, with its high ceilings and cold drafts. Outside, long-armed spirea bushes scraped menacingly across the windows.

The house was uncomfortable and old. The floorboards bounced. The kitchen faucet dripped. Granny’s clock struck every hour. Mama hated the clock, but Granny could not sleep without its regular announcements of time’s trek.

Once again, my mother was living with her mother-in-law. She didn’t know what her life was going to come to now. She had sent one set of children out into the world, and she had another pair yet to raise. It was exhausting. She had little time or energy to take Don and LaNelle to the lake or the show, and she paid scant attention to their schoolwork. She was often needed in the fields, and her garden grew larger each year. To earn cash, she sewed for people, working into the night on elaborate suits and dresses. In the cramped kitchen, Granny was at Mama’s elbow, trying to direct the cooking and insisting on her scummy lye soap for the dishes.

I imagine Mama felt she was drying up, disappearing like a pea vine in the fall. Daddy, however, began to bloom after the death of his father. He began frequenting flea markets, collecting old gun parts and piecing together collectible antique guns, which he then sold. He still enjoyed trading; it was in his nature and his history. He was curious about the world, sociable within his own class, and now he began to emerge from the slump he had suffered when Don was born. He bought some beef cows and some machinery. He was truly the man of the place now. Granny continued to call him Bob. Her nerve medicine, from Hopkinsville, fuzzed her mind. For the rest of her life, she took Thorazine to calm her nerves and to keep her head from swimming.

Daddy rented our little white house in the woods to Janice and her husband. He installed a water heater because Janice had a new baby, her second. He had never put in a water heater for Mama. She had always heated our bathwater in her largest stewpot on the kitchen stove. A few years later, Janice and her family moved to a place in town, and our little house became the trashing ground of a series of renters. It caught on fire once—a cigarette on a mattress. Large families stressed out the septic system.

I usually came home at least twice a year, but I didn’t fully appreciate the strain the family lived under. I didn’t see their day-to-day life, so I didn’t realize how, for them, my visits were celebrations. Mama made cakes, and we played cards till midnight. I played games with LaNelle
and Don and drove them to the lake. I watched TV shows with Daddy. We always had a great time. Granny clasped my hands tightly when she greeted me, and she wept when I went away again.

Although in some ways I had renounced the South, I could not lose the ties to my immediate family. But I did lose touch with the kinfolks at Clear Springs. I saw them only infrequently. Over the years, Granddaddy’s sisters and brothers all died off, almost without my knowing it. I forgot about his sisters—Little Daisy, whose high-pitched voice was always cheerful, and Dove, whose strong jaw and husky voice startled me as a child. And Granny’s ancient aunt Etna, whose mile-high, featherlight angel food cakes were renowned in Clear Springs. Years later, at my parents’ fiftieth anniversary, Daddy’s cousin Herman accused me of “going off,” as if it were a sin to leave. “You forgot your kinfolks,” he said. I realized it was true. I didn’t think of them when I was away. I was free to adventure, while my loyal parents kept a place for me. I was loyal to them too, even though I was too busy to inquire into farm prices or Granny’s nerves or Mama’s burdens. I was devouring Homer and Virgil and Chaucer and Shakespeare. The sweep of Western literature offered pleasing abstractions—such as the journey theme and the quest-for-the-father theme. Was Telemachus looking for his father as much as he was looking for an idea of his father?