Memories of the Ford Administration (20 page)

I said to my mother, with false cheer, “How’re you holding up? Not every day a body turns eighty.”

“Thank the Lord. I hope He doesn’t afflict me with too many more birthdays.”

“Don’t
say
that, Mother. The children were enchanted tonight—we all were—by your liveliness, your wit, your gift of recall. Though you didn’t have to work so hard selling my virtues; they don’t need to be sold, they’d
like
to have me back.”

“Norma, too?”

“Sure. At least I assume so.” I had never doubted it—was there room to doubt?

“Well, then, what’s the problem?”

“
I’m
the problem. I like it out there, out of this house. I’m moving my Buchanan book along at last. I’m getting my”—in the Ford era, though much was permitted, one didn’t say “shit” to one’s octogenarian mother—“act together.”

Perhaps if I had said “shit” it would have brought us to a new level of frankness and intimacy. But Vermont proprieties still ruled our relationship, and she was feeling the weight of her eighty years. My mother sighed and said, “That Buchanan. I never knew anybody had a good word to say for him until you took him up. He tried to ship the whole country south, Republican gospel had it when I was a girl.”

“A totally unfair charge,” I said. “He tried to hold the country together was his only sin. But we New Englanders finally got our way, Mom. We got our war.” I saw she wasn’t following this, and told her, “Go to bed whenever you’re ready. I have to go say good night to Buzzy.”

As I climbed the familiar stairs, with its pair of creaking landings, I could hear Norma singing to Daphne, sweetly, if not as sweetly as Genevieve to her two daughters.
A mezzo
versus a coloratura.
A History of Western Music:
that rankled. Possibly the Wadleighs had reconstituted their marriage on the then-fashionable “open” basis. Wendy had come calling on me once or twice in the year past, letting one thing lead to another, and I had flattered myself that she was cheating on Ben; if he knew of these visits, it became, repulsively, as if I were fucking him, too. Sex is always to some extent group sex.
Odious
, in Andrew’s sudden heartfelt word.

But Buzzy’s room still had the pre-sexual aura—the posters of foreign cars and fighter planes, the plastic dinosaurs arranged in a row, the telescope trained upward out the window at the lifeless moon and inviolate stars, the smell of glue, of collecting and making, the smell the universe has when it is new to us. “Hi.”

“Hi.” His room was dark and he was already in bed. His voice came out of the darkness deeper than I remembered it.

“How’s it going, fella?”

“O.K.”

“Really?” Taking care not to kick over the telescope on its tripod, I made my way through his hobby-crammed room to his bed and sat on the edge. “Your mother told me you’ve been getting some bad reports at school. That shouldn’t happen to you. You’re smart.”

Blue light from the winter night outside rested on his profile, with its short nose flattened at the bridge like a baby’s; his hair, which in my mind’s eye remained fixed at a crewcut he had had at age six and that made his head look round as a ball, in fact was quite long, like a Rolling Stone’s, and in its greasy length rather repulsive. He could have been an untidy girl, but for his deep voice. “I’m not so smart.”

“What makes you say that?”

He turned his face toward me; his babyish profile vanished.
“At school, when we read, I can tell the other kids are getting more out of it than I am. And they’re quicker.”

“Really?” It was hard to come down out of my own exalted preoccupations—the sublime sex with Genevieve at the still center of our scandal, the obscure doom that gathered around black-haired, hot-blooded Ann Coleman one night late in 1819—and enter into the difficult small world of this male child, but I must, I must. “When have you last had your eyes checked?”

“A while ago. He said the right eye was sort of sleepy and maybe the next time I should get a prescription.”

“Well, then,” I said, too briskly. “We’ll get you a prescription.”

“Glasses’ll make me look dumb,” Buzzy protested.

“You’ll only have to wear them when you read.”

“Yeah.” Dear child, thus quickly and meekly he had accepted the embarrassment of glasses, of a yoke slipped onto his face. Yet, braver and more realistic than I, he did not give up on his basic point. “I can see the words O.K., it’s that they don’t add up in my head—they’re like scrambled.”

“Well, there’s such a thing as dyslexia, maybe we should have you tested. Some people’s brains reverse the letters; it has nothing to do with general intelligence.”

He respectfully considered this palliation I was offering him, but insisted, “I’m not smart. Andrew is smart. He gets things right away. Daphne, too, even though she’s a girl. Not that that makes any difference.” In the Ford era, it should in fairness be admitted, genuine attitudinal progress was being made against racism and sexism, especially in the minds of the middle-class young.

“You’ve always seemed smart to me,” I told Buzzy. “All your collections and interests. You’ve always gotten good
grades. Not top, but good.” I, my mother would have been the first to proclaim, had always gotten top grades. And where had they brought me? To postgraduate work in adultery and child neglect.

“Until last year,” he said. “Until the seventh grade, and now the eighth. You haven’t been around.”

He meant it mildly, factually, but it stunned me. The moonlight blue on the shreds of snow in the yard, seen through the twigs at Buzzy’s window. A sense of gentle endless falling. A deeply serious wound in things which the world usually conspires to let us ignore. I had to say it: “Do you think that’s the reason? Because I’m not here? If I came back, do you think you could concentrate on your reading better?”

He was quick to excuse me. “Naa. I don’t think that much about it any more. A lot of the kids’ parents have broke up.”

“That’s like saying everybody’s starving makes your own stomach feel full.” He smiled at this, I could see. My eyes had grown accustomed to the dark of his room. Forms had shapes, rounded into being by crescents of bluish light. “Buzzy,” I said, “I’m sorry. Your mother and I—what can I say? We’re trying to work things out for the rest of our lives. We both love you a lot. I feel rotten about this, rotten all the time.”

“It has nothing to
do
with you, Dad. It’s
my
problem.”

His voice sounded stern, even. “Oh, baby.” I wanted to rest my head on his chest, but distrusted the melodramatic impulse. Why should he, with everything else weighing on him, have to pity me? “You’re so brave to say that. We’ll get some tests done, and see if there’s anything wrong with your reading skills.” The academic phrase made me hear that I was copping out. He had raised a serious issue, he was trying to face a limit to his life, a something like death, and I should address it with him, this one night when I was here in the
house again as an occupant. “There’s different kinds of smartness,” was all I could think to say. “You can be very sensitive and intuitive and artistic and not do very well on academic tests. Lots of great people, like Einstein and Edison, didn’t do well at school. Not that I’m saying you won’t do well; it’s just there’s more to life than school. None of us are as smart as we’d like to be, but what can you do? If we were smarter, we wouldn’t be us.”

He saw that I had done my best, that my vial of consolation had been emptied. “O.K.,” he said, excusing me to go, and added, “Maybe I’ve just been being lazy. The stuff they have you read is so dumb,
Animal Farm
and like that, showing how lousy Communism is.”

“I’m sure that’s it,” I said, rising in relief, he having found the way out for me. “Don’t be lazy,” I could say now. “Give your teachers a chance. They’re people, too. They’re trying. We’re all in this together.”

Together in this pitiful world, I meant. I had meant to say good night to Daphne, but her door was closed and no light showed beneath it. Downstairs, I said to Norma in the pantry, where she was pouring herself some vermouth, “Poor guy, I can’t stand it. I’ve fucked up his head.”

“Oh, don’t be so self-centered.”

“That’s what
he
told me. But you’re both just being sweet. Where’s my mother?”

“Gone up. I had to steer her toward the stairs. She’s in terrific shape, really, but then suddenly she’s just had it.”

“Me, too. I’m shaking. I feel so bad for Buzzy, so helpless. Let’s get him some dyslexia tests.”

“He’s had them. Less than two years ago. They said he was fine. Have you really forgotten?”

“I can’t remember everything. Let’s get him tested again,
and at least get him glasses, for Christ’s sake. What kind of goof-off parent are you, anyway? Andy says you’re out every night with jerks.”

She looked at me oddly, coolly, as if I were shouting to get her attention. “He did not,” she said. She was sure of him, she lived with him, I didn’t. “He wouldn’t say any such thing. You seem upset. How about a slosh?”

The ceiling of the pantry was very low and the overhead light pressed on our heads, carving downward shadows on our faces. Norma didn’t wear lipstick, her lips were the same pale flesh as her chin and as the fingers holding up to her lips the glass of pale-green fluid. The only time she had ever had her hair done in a beauty parlor had been on a boat we took to Europe the summer before she became pregnant with Andy, and the spray-set beehive made her so self-conscious she couldn’t rest until she had swum it away in the ship’s pool. Her lips in the harsh overhead light were colorless cushions of slightly cracked flesh. Her freckles this time of year had faded. There were areas—the nape of her neck, and the insides of her upper arms, and the sub-buttock sections she bared when opening her legs to me—where freckles never appeared. “Want to try out your old bed?” she lightly asked, glancing away from me toward a corner of the pantry shelves, where the dustiest teacups rested.

I did, but said, “Come
on
, Norma. I can’t do it to her.”

“You did it to me.
Are
doing it.”

“After many a year. And it’s not right. I’m trying to make everything right, let’s just move on. Let me go back across the river. I’ll be back here again in time for breakfast, I promise.”

The Queen of Disorder in her artistic insouciance rarely became angry, but when she did, it frightened me. Her eyes,
the color of her vermouth, suddenly developed red rims, and her lips tightened so the cracks in them doubled in number. “
No
, damn it. She’s
your
mother, you stay here with her. I’ll go to bed alone like I always do. Your virtue, if that’s what it is, is safe with
me
, buster.”

In haughty silence, her cheeks mottled with rage as my mother’s hands had been mottled with age, she showed me to my room—her studio, a large space we had made of two small maid’s rooms by breaking down the wall between them, early in the years of our ownership. I had been a jolly householder back then, friend to the sledgehammer and the plasterer’s hawk. The space now was given over to Norma’s painting and paintings; the walls, loaded with canvases, supported along the baseboards additional leaning sheaves, thick as collapsed dominoes, few of the paintings finished but all of them containing some passages of feathery offhand rightness, these areas often away from the center, where she had worked less intensely. Where she concentrated, the paint got heavy and stiff. Some of the paintings were fruit-and-vegetable still lifes, their subjects overtaken by organic rot, and others showed vistas seen from the house, often with the mullions of the window included, like the bars of a cage. A few—relatively very few—were of the children, painted unsmiling, with severed feet and uncompleted arms, and two or three had taken up a new subject, Norma herself, beheld in a mirror, wearing that furtive three-quarters glance self-portraits have, whether by Van Gogh or Velázquez. It must have been hard for her, who was always looking away, to gaze steadfastly into her own evasive eyes. One canvas, painted presumably in the summer, showed her nude from the waist up—from a little below the waist, actually, though the pearly blank of her lower belly, its
glow built of the most ephemerally faint blues and blue-greens and diluted ochres, was unfinished. Even if she had finished, her pubic bush would have fallen below the edge of the canvas. The whole room smelled strongly of oils and turps. Though in so many ways relaxed, Norma had been ever shy of my face between her legs, because of her smell; but this more powerful smell bloomed wherever she painted. My bed was to be an old airfoam-slab sofa left over from the Kirkland Street apartment,
circa
1960. Newer acquisitions of furniture had chased it in here, where the cats and dogs used it as a bed while their mistress painted and sipped her afternoons away, into the dimness of dusk. Its rough gray fabric was covered with animal hairs, as if to weave a second cloth; for the night it had been made up in starchy lemon-colored sheets and some old blankets fragrant, I discovered when I lay down upon my narrow pallet, of mothballs.

I could not sleep. This I do remember. The sound of my estranged wife’s feet, first in shoes and then without, over my head in our old bedroom, and the nostalgic pungence of her oily paints all around me kept me awake with erotic possibilities unseized and all the more attractive for that. I must have masturbated, trying to be tidy and quiet about it, though the little screwed-in tapered legs of the sofa had a distinct wobble and squeak. The household animals, barred from a space they could usually include in their roamings, mewed and rubbed and scratched outside the closed door, and only reluctantly padded away. The radiators, responding to the melancholy tidal soughing of the furnace below, ticked and gurgled in a way to which I had become unaccustomed. Around eleven-thirty, Andrew came home, the Volvo in the driveway as loud as a gravel-crusher, and his ransacking of the kitchen for a final snack as tumultuous as the raid of an army platoon.
Then, as the inhabitants of the house settled and the thermostat bid the furnace be quiet, my room with its many windows grew chilly. Like Ann Coleman, I wanted the servants to come and build a fire. There were no shades on the tall staring panes and the moonlight fell in in plangent rectangles. An owl down in the woods by the river issued its sickly interrogative call, like some luminous ectoplasm lumpily pouring. The sleep of the others in the house, three generations all tied to me and all emotionally deprived on my account, pressed down upon me as I gingerly and then furiously twisted between the rumpling sheets and sought harmony with the pillow, softer and flatter than the two back in my shabby but accustomed rooms in Adams.