Rubicon Beach (28 page)

He and I were different in a lot of ways, and as we got older he got more and more like who he was and I got more and more like who I was. He always needed people around him, he was always taking them into his orbit; down at his paper he’d be mixing it up with the printers or whomever, his sleeves up to his elbows and his hands black from ink and blue from the metal filings beneath the first level of flesh. He put up with things for which, from his own family, he wouldn’t have had the patience; sometimes I thought he had more patience with those he employed than with those he loved. By the time I was nearly twenty I felt as though I had no patience for anyone.

If you’d called him a reformer or liberal he would have stared at you aghast. If you’d called him a crusader he would have been disgusted. Later after my mother was gone, close to the second world war, I’d hear people in bars call him a crusader. When they called him this it wasn’t meant as a compliment. But when I was younger, after I began hearing the music in the fields, I woke one night to a red glow over the ridge down by the creek; the Negro’s mill was afire. The Klan had come over from Indiana at the news that a woman in Gary had been affronted by a colored man in broad daylight. Given the broad daylight, you might have thought they’d have a better idea of who it was, but it probably didn’t matter; they picked on the first colored man they came across and the fact that he was in another state just made it all the more inconvenient in terms of legal prosecution. The Negro got out of it roughed up but alive. Pop ran about seven or ten stories on it and got copies into Gary. He shamed two states into extradition proceedings. He was always running stories about the Indians too. But call him a crusader, he had no use for it.

In fact Jack Senior considered himself rather a conservative, in that his values were unabashedly traditional, and his self-identification, when asked about his politics, was simply “Patriot.” This in an age mesmerized by the convulsions of the East, in which the vanguard held hopes that had nothing to do with countries. “Prattle,” said the father to one-worldism. Still, in the son Jack Senior saw an inner withdrawal that struck him as luxurious and irresponsible. This triggered an argument. It was late in the day and they were driving back from visiting Bart and his new fiancée in Milwaukee, and from Chicago where Jack Junior had applied for admission to the university. The road curled above them like a blue vapor and across the valley in the wet rust of twilight the wheat silos of the farms, burning moments before, were doused to silver. When the valley went dark the sky went riverblack, houses and barns cauterized in stabs of gold and slash-red. Into the dark father and son drove angry and speechless. Finally the father sighed. “I know you’re not like others. I know you hear things others don’t hear, I know you hear your music. But all the more reason, you know. All the more reason. You’re curt sometimes. You’re abrupt. You ought to think about other people sometimes.”

“I don’t give a damn about other people,” the boy said. The older man was crestfallen. They got home and parked the car. The boy had a lump in his throat; hating himself, he said to his father as they walked to the house, “I didn’t mean that.” He had meant something else. He had meant he felt alone next to his father who knew people so easily. He had meant that no matter how hard he tried, he could not be who his father was, his father who got more and more like who he was. The father barely heard him. “I didn’t mean it, Pop,” the boy pleaded. At the door Jack Senior nodded.

When he was admitted to the university, the month before the economic collapse of a hundred million lives, Jack Junior filed his papers under the name of John Michael Lake (no junior), which was a fiction, not so much to mute the gunfire of the father as to escape the symmetry of the son.

Bart first married in the last years of the nineteenth century, when Jack Senior was still a boy; for that matter Bart was still a boy, barely twenty. By the time he was thirty the marriage had ended, the young wife having met a saloon keeper about whom she made no secret of her excitement. Jack Senior would later conclude Bart’s drinking started in those days as he wandered saloon to saloon looking for the man who had stolen the wild Mrs. Lake. One night he found the saloon, with the man, with Mrs. Lake, upon which confrontation the new couple demonstrated to the abandoned husband the full extent of their crashing passion, in a kiss that couldn’t begin to match the demonstrations Bart had seen in his mind time and again. Bart ordered another drink. He left only after the keeper went off his shift and took Mrs. Lake with him. Bart and his wife had had a daughter who was well into marriage and motherhood herself when he met his second wife; the daughter was two years older than the prospective step mother.

The match was even more curious than this. Bart was now in his late forties, the edge of his masculinity dulled in a previous decade, a man of some ascendant means, and a large man of height and girth that bespoke recent fortune. Melody was a pretty blonde. She had much humor and was not wild like her predecessor; she didn’t want or need wild things. Given her own childhood, it was enough that she had a man who would care for her, it was enough to have an affectionate love rather than a passionate one. They lived in Wisconsin, a Wisconsin couple. It never occurred to Bart when he met her that he had a chance with her; when he got the chance it never occurred to him he could actually keep her.  They married in 1921, quietly. Jack Junior knew nothing of it until it was over; later in his life he couldn’t even remember a ceremony, at which his father was best man. Every month or two Jack Mick and Rae and Jack Mick Junior drove to Milwaukee to visit; sometimes Bart came down alone, as on the night they got the wire about Dirk. After the marriage the drinking did not abate but became worse as Bart waited dreadfully for the new wife, blond and pretty, to get wild and leave like the old wife. That she did not, at least not until life became intolerable for her and her love for Bart was rendered so clearly inadequate, only tortured him more.

This business with my uncle and his second wife went on over some time of course. I was growing up through most of it. I never understood anything was wrong anyway, the insurrections and dashed treaties of the bedroom were beyond me, and mostly I remember Melody laughing all the time. Also I was at the university. Also I was in my own world, as my father always complained: I barely saw the soup lines, the liquored amber flash of gangland nights. I don’t think it occurred to me something was wrong in the country until one evening in the door of a flophouse I recognized a man from my bank, a man who’d been sitting behind a desk nine or ten months before, deciding whom to give money to. Then I noticed every road off the college grounds seemed to be an alley of sleeping men, and the yellow lights of the flophouses were dim not because the houses were closed but because they were so full that men inside were sleeping against the windows one atop another, the light from the bulbs barely seeping out between the fingers of their hands. I think one day I said to myself, Life’s different now. Meanwhile my family was coming apart too and I didn’t know it. In my third year, when I was nineteen or so, a couple of things happened. I met Leigh. I found The Number. 

I was computing an equation one night in my room at my desk when everyone else was sleeping, and there it was. I shouldn’t have been startled: it was the twentieth century. Mathematics was new. It shouldn’t have startled me that there was this other number no one had ever found. It was there between nine and ten. Not nine and a half or nine and nine-tenths, not the asteroids of ten or nine’s missing moon, but a world of a number unto itself. For the next year I tried to compute the moral properties of this number; it was not the number for justice or desire, or avarice or betrayal. It was the number of an altogether different promise made from an altogether different place. No field or plain had ever sung it. No dream or memory had ever known it. I told no one of it, not yet.

Young “John Michael” fell in love with Leigh the second time he saw her only because he was incapable of so unequivocal a response to anything the first time; it was also one of those rare instances when he remembered a real life event with such statistical certainty. Jack Mick/John Michael had never gone with a girl, discouraged by his wiry slightness and the dark Indian quarter of him which he supposed would frighten the creamy girls of Chicago. Leigh was in fact attracted by this lndianness. She was the creamy daughter of a district judge and had scandalized her family by becoming a Red. Her cadre worked out of the shack of a newly failed boat-building operation on Lake Michigan. Jack/John saw her distributing leaflets one morning to eight hundred laborers in line for three jobs who watched her with open mouths. It wasn’t what she said to them, they had heard that before, it was the gold of her, as though in the windblown flame of her hair was the transience of their luck, the flight of their futures. They would have ridden her hair to other births, somewhere out west, where there was no history. “Ah, utopia,” the boy said when she handed him the paper, and he nodded knowingly. “Go back to your books, college boy,” she answered, and took back the leaflet. But it meant, of course, she knew who he was.