Ghost Dance (12 page)

As a fraction it is composed entirely of 1 ‘s layered in an infinite series. The number becomes a sort of arithmetic “image” of the geometric property of the ratio. It is represented endlessly within itself. If a square formed by 1 side of a golden rectangle is cut off, a golden rectangle remains. If squares are continually removed, there is an infinite spiral of golden rectangles contained within each other.

If a curve is drawn based upon the golden rectangle, it is precisely the shape of a chambered-nautilus shell. It is a logarithmic curve of continuous growth. Any two segments of the curve are the same shape; they are just different sizes.

As a snail grows, it produces shell material in the same formation. Similar curves lie in the center of a sunflower, in the shape of a fir cone, and in other natural forms that contain the golden ratio.

In the manipulation of abstract material, which reveals new relations and structures, math and music find their common formal ground.

In Beethoven piano sonatas there is the sense that a concentrated exploration of musical elements is taking place as one listens; when a theme returns in a recapitulation, it is no longer heard as it was in the beginning.

—This aesthetic has been central to the West and is implicit in the golden ratio. This concept of beauty involves proportion between various elements and a relation between parts and whole—a reproduction of macrocosm in microcosm.

I never asked my father about the golden rectangle. I wonder if he still thinks about that divine proportion now as he stares out to sea and the waves crash against his ocean liner and the sky begins to darken for what will seem like forever.

It is too late for me to ask him, and, even if he were here, I probably would not dare to. I violated his privacy that day, the method of his life. I stepped right into one of his unspoken obsessions, though I did not mean to do so. I was only a child that day looking for boots, only a curious child who loved this kind stranger called Father.

Now the dark is coming on. My father bends down and puts his hand in the frigid water. The snow starts to throw the towers and gables of the Baltic into romantic relief. Ships move about the harbor. A waltz plays. My father in a white tuxedo stares mesmerized by the dance of shadow and light.

Daddy, I would label every leaf on every tree for you. I would wedge my fingers into the wind and bring it to your ears so that you might hear what it whispers. I would build fires around your cool body and teach you to sing. I would shape your soft skull into the fleshy bulbs of lilies or tulips that bloom, then rest, then bloom again. I would make the daylight fluid and let you swim in its secrets, if I could.

“She is princess twice,” my father reads from the paper, “a duchess four times, nine times a baroness, eight times a countess. However, since a majority of the prince’s domain now exists in name only, her kingdom, in reality, is indeed a small one, covering three towns and 22,000 people.”

He comes forward. He hesitates. He stops. He must be walking in his sleep again. He barely looks like my father. He seems shorter somehow—older. “Daddy,” I say, hoping he might speak more easily in his sleep, hoping he might tell me what dream makes him this way.

My grandfather lilts his ax. When it is poised above his head, my father, just a boy, freezes the scene. He is afraid to watch the ax drop, for my grandfather is not chopping wood as one might expect. My father pulls himself from the bed and moves closer to the window. He rubs his eyes just to be sure and then he sees it: his father is cutting down the beautiful tomato plants, grown from seed, hacking them down to the ground. Earlier that season they had put up stakes together for those fragile plants to hold on to.

Is this what my father means when he says there are things it is better to forget? Is this what he is forgetting—his own father out in the garden chopping the tomato plants into pieces, insisting that they are Americans now, not Italians? Did his father announce that there will be no more Italian spoken in his house? No more wine drunk with lunch, as he burned the grape wines? Did he tell his wife there would be no more sad songs from the old country? How much she must have wept, hugging her small son to her breast!

My grandfather takes his ax from the toolshed, and when he lifts it above his head the scene freezes—but only for a moment. He hacks down those sweet tomatoes while the small boy looks on from his bedroom window and the eggplant and the peppers cower in terror.

“Vivaldi,” my father says. “Albinoni.”

“Albinoni,” I say.

“Paganini.”

“Paganini.”

“Corelli.”

In November the turkey industry presented a fifty-five-pound turkey to the President, but Kennedy spared its life, my father read.

“It’s local fair time in Ashtabula, Ohio,” the fat man reads from the newspaper, “where you will find the prize bulls, homemade pies, merry-go-rounds, animal freak shows, vegetable contests—prize pumpkins.

“Pumpkins,” the fat man puzzles.

“You know, Father,” the girls shout, “what we carve and put in the windows at Halloween.”

He turns the page to the next article. “Ah, yes,” he says.

“Alabama,” the father reads.

“Alabama,” Christine says. Such a pretty name, she thinks. She says it out loud, “Alabama. Alabama.”

I picture my father being an avid newspaper reader once, opening it over a breakfast of cereal and eggs and folding it expertly so as not to get it in our faces. I seem to remember that: his daily origami ritual as he routinely turned the
New York Times
into a square, a rectangle, a bird, while we watched.

We had a television in those days, too, I think, and he liked to watch the news in the evenings until the news event occurred that made all other news unnecessary—the news event so great that it allowed his mind to wander around it tirelessly for years.

He sits transfixed, watching the six gray horses draw the caisson that holds the flag-draped coffin Behind the caisson is a riderless, chestnut-brown horse. Empty boots pointing backwards hold themselves somehow in the stirrups. A beautiful mother in a black veil holds the hands of two small children.

My father moves to the piano, a giant dwarfing the keys. Hunched over, he plays the
Goldberg Variations
with a heavy-handed deliberateness. He moves back to the television.

I grew up regretting in a mild way the death of our handsome president but mourning the realization that my father was not a happy man and that he probably never had been. I have linked in my mind, unfairly, the death of President Kennedy with my father’s great sadness because I never really noticed it before that day. Surely at that moment as my father sat listlessly in front of the TV set, his head in his hands, he must have abandoned the dream of the golden rectangle forever. Still—he did not destroy the notebook. It was there for me to find on that fleeting, snowy afternoon a few years later.

My father reads: “Catholics who attended the luncheon that Friday in Dallas were given a special dispensation and were allowed to eat meat.”

My father reads: “The presidential office was being redecorated in red and white. The change was planned months before. The red carpet was being laid down when the news of the death was received.”

My father reads that Jackie put her wedding ring on her dead husband’s hand but, unable to get it past the knuckle, she left it there, halfway down his stiff finger.

My father reads that Caroline has broken a few small bones in her wrist in a fall from her horse Macaroni, a gift from President Johnson.

I am frightened when my father reads me these things.

“There are questions about the assassination that have not been answered to my satisfaction,” he says to my mother over dinner one night. “I’m just not convinced.” He sits there without eating for a long time and draws something with his finger on the table.

“Maria,” my grandfather said one day long ago, “today your name is Mary. Today I change my own name from Angelo to Andy. Today we are real Americans.”

I am forever grateful that I was not there to witness the scowl that must have appeared on my grandmother’s face at this news. It must have been terrible. Of course, she never once called him Andy and the name, unused, faded. And when she refused to answer to Mary, my grandfather sadly returned to Maria, for he missed my grandmother too much. She would not look at him or say one word; he was addressing a stranger.

“I was given a name at birth and I will die with it, Angelo,” she said.

“We could call the baby Mike. What do you think?”

She frowned.

“Oh, Maria, your whole family wears that frown,” he said on the day he finally gave in. “Such stubbornness!” he cried. “I am sure it has ruined more than one good idea.”

The evening of their second day here, my grandfather registered both of them for English classes at the local school. Right from the start he was a model student, staying late, trying to improve his pronunciation, persevering.

“I leaf in New Hope, Pencil-bannia,” he said hesitantly, concentrating impossibly hard on every syllable. “I live, I live, I live in New Hope, Pencil, Pencil-vay-knee-a in the United State of America.” I’m sure mv grandfather smiled when he got to the America part, for he could sav it perfectly. He had been saying it his entire life.

“America begins and ends w ith the letter
A
. America. See you too-marr-ah, too-morr-row,” he said to the pretty young teacher, “American redhead. Thank you very much. Good-bye.”

“The accent must go,” he said each night before bed. “The accent must go,” he said in the morning to his small son, Michael. “An accent is no good in this new country.” Maria sighed, exhausted by so much enthusiasm. He was a teacher’s dream, not a wife’s. She felt lonely. The village where she was born and had lived her whole life welled in her stomach; she had to eat a lot of bread to keep it down; she had to sleep under heavy blankets.

“We need new clothes for a new country, Mary,” my grandfather said. She was not answering, especially to Mary. “If you’d like to come with me, I’m going into the downtown.” Still she did not answer. Meticulously my grandfather observed the dress of the people on the neighboring farms before going out to get his own blue jeans and work shirts and boots. He especially noted the dress of the Negroes whom he considered the most authentic Americans. They were new and exotic like America itself. And above all they were not Europeans. Europe became “for the birds.” “Oh, Mary,” he would say, “haláis for the birds. In America there is jazz music, Charlie has told me, in a place called Harem.” “Harlem,” Charlie would correct him. “Yes, Harlem,” my grandfather would repeat, “where women wear flowers behind their ears and the music is hot.

“I’d like to go there,” my grandfather said in his halting way, something I imagine he picked up from Charlie.

“That’s cool,” Charlie said.

Hot and cool, my grandfather thought. “This is some country, Mary,” he said, hugging her. “Hot and cool, at the same time,” he said to his small son, Michael. This wonderful place, America, beginning and ending with
A
.

He felt the wind against him on the mountaintop and praised it, praised the Great Spirit, the wonderful, incomprehensible one. He looked at the stones, knelt down and touched their smooth, flat heads. He knew the oldest gods lived there in stone. He lay on the sacred earth for a long time, and listened to the stones that spoke.

“Welcome to Savannah, that sleepy southern city, that city of azaleas, lilies, camellia, dogwood, and cherry, that langorous town of balconies and secret gardens, its avenues lined with gray-bearded oak. Spanish moss. That beautiful trader’s city where one can watch the oceangoing ships come up the river right beside the downtown. The City of Hope, founded in 1733 by the British general and idealist James Oglethorpe.”

“Read more,” the children whisper, “oh, please read more,” they say, growing sleepier and sleepier.

“Wisteria and pillars…mansions, verandas…and the sea, the smell of the sea.”

“The redwoods of California are the tallest living things on earth,” the fat man reads in the fading light. “They live from 400 to 2500 years and may be the descendants of trees standing thirty to forty million years ago.”