The Poison Tree (30 page)

“Rocks at ducks?” I said, reddening at being caught in the act. She knew that I wasn't really trying to hit them, of course. She said this in a way that told me she knew I was doing just that, but even though we both knew I had done this really weird thing, she didn't hate me for it. Her younger sister had seen me, too, and said I was cute, but asked why I dressed like an old man. I liked the idea that they were watching me, talking about me, and that someone thought I was “cute” even if I had been spotted throwing rocks at the ducks.

We continued walking, then headed to the off-campus Arboretum. We saw a field with apple trees, and sat down on the grass. At first we just sat; then I decided to pick the apples. I had a little penknife with me and tried to peel the skin off an apple in one go like Gramps had done when I was a child. I still couldn't do it. I sliced up one of the apples and started feeding Patty slices, slowly at first, then faster and faster. When I tried to force the last one
into her mouth, she laughed. I loved her laugh. It wasn't a sultry laugh like Laura's, but it wasn't a little girl's giggle, either. It said laughter was all right; laughter was nothing to be ashamed of.

I kissed her. Her kisses felt different than Laura's, but wonderful in a less experienced way. We lay down in the field in and hugged. Then the air grew cooler and I took in the scent of the apples mixed with the honeysuckle of her hair.

When we woke up it was cold and dark. I draped my jacket over her shoulders. As we headed back, she noticed a primitive sign.

“Oh, my God!” Patty said. “How could we have missed that?”

“What?”

“That sign! Those apples were sprayed with pesticide!”

“Well, at least I've spared you a horrible death. Thank God for that. As far as I can recall, I was the one who touched the apples and peeled them, right?”

“My hero!” she swooned and fell into my arms, Camille-like, then pretended to breathe her last there upon the grass. I lay back with her and we kissed.

This was our first date. We had been together twelve hours.

When we reached the dorms, it was midnight and past curfew in the women's dorms. We knew Patty was going to be “campused,” forbidden from leaving her dorm after dinner, even to go to the library. She was summoned before the Judicial Board, and told she could not leave the dorm for a whole week for her transgression. The next day I snuck into her dorm room and stayed there, pressed against her warm body until morning. We were recreating a scene from
Romeo and Juliet
with her roommate, Barb from Oshkosh, as the Nurse, posted as lookout to make sure no one saw us. At daybreak, I climbed out her window and scrambled onto the lawn and back into my dorm room without being detected.

Within a week of our first date, however, we broke up. In fact, we broke up all the time. Sometimes, our fights had to do with my jealousy; she refused to tell her St. Louis boyfriend that she was seeing me and me alone. Sometimes, I deliberately picked fights because I was terrified about the closeness of a relationship, which troubled my self-conception. I didn't exactly know what that conception was, but I knew it didn't involve dating a nice Jewish
girl from St. Louis named Patty Cohn. Things came to a head after Patty confessed to an affair with her T.A. before we'd met. I exploded, neglecting to mention my own illicit sessions with Laura the previous year. After that, there was our Afro-Asian History professor who asked Patty to come to see him during office hours. Thinking it was about her work, which had begun to suffer a bit after meeting me, she complied only to be blindsided—he wanted to talk about our relationship, not her work. He said I seemed crazy, that she should stop seeing me. He told her she had “stepped out of a painting by Rubens; your sad friend out of one by El Greco. I've never seen a more ill-matched pair. That boy is clearly unstable. Is he seeing a psychiatrist?”

When she told me, I began to scream that he obviously wanted her for himself—that's what these professors do, I said. I was furious that she would even listen to that pompous windbag and stomped out, leaving her alone, crying. An hour later, I called and apologized. She refused to accept it. I called back and we made up.

Near the end of the semester, Patty surprised me by breaking off her relationship with her St. Louis boyfriend, whom everyone back home considered her fiancé. She invited me to spend time with her at her home in St. Louis over winter break. I said if we were still seeing one another by then, I would come. Christmas vacation was weeks away, and it didn't look like we would make it. But I had no other plans, and was certainly not looking forward to returning to New York at Christmas, or any other time.

On the flight to St. Louis, I fell asleep with my head thrown back against the headrest. When I awoke, my neck was completely stiff. We were met at the gate by a crowd of relatives. Patty's parents were there of course, along with her sister who had seen me throwing rocks at ducks and thought I was cute, her grandfather and his redheaded girlfriend, and several aunts and cousins.

I greeted her family with my head down, unable to make direct eye contact because of my neck. Was this new boyfriend pathologically shy or otherwise deeply disturbed? There were whispers as the relatives helped with my luggage. Still averting my eyes, I mumbled something about seeing the
Arch. Patty's ten-year-old cousin blurted out that was impossible—it must have been the McDonald's by the airport, since the Arch, recently erected in 1966, was in the other direction.

Taking our bags into the house, I lifted my head to the other position available to me—straight up. The sky looked huge. I hadn't noticed a sky like that in Madison, so it must be something unique to St. Louis. Patty led me through the door to their home since I was unable to look anywhere but up or down. On the dining room table, a lavish spread had been laid—none of which I was able to touch, given my dietary proclivities: smoked salmon and whitefish, corned beef, sour pickles, mustard, and two huge glass bowls of tuna and egg salad. I figured that I would be able to eat the pickles and mustard, along with a bagel. Within seconds, the brightly colored room was filled with life. It wrapped itself around me in a tight embrace. I kept apologizing that my neck was stiff, and no, I could not eat corned beef, whitefish, tuna, or egg salad. Patty's bright fourteen-year-old sister, Racey, kept asking why I had become a vegetarian? If I couldn't eat egg salad or tuna fish—what could I eat? Having seen me heaving rocks on Lake Mendota, she asked Patty why I was now so concerned about a tuna sandwich when I thought nothing about possibly killing ducks indiscriminately a few months previously.

After our meal, Patty's father, Max, distributed our luggage (we had to sleep in separate rooms, of course), and announced he was going to take their Pekingese for a walk. I went along. He wore a tweed cap, and we smoked our pipes. It was beginning to snow, and I glanced up at the huge expanse of white St. Louis sky. What a strange world I had stumbled into! Max walked a few steps ahead with the little dog, and I noticed his shoes were worn unevenly at the heels. Overweight and balding, his front teeth were yellowed from decades of pipe smoking. He hadn't said much until now, but as we continued on our walk, he began to open up. First, there was the snowfall and how lucky we were to have arrived before the ten to twelve inches were dumped on St. Louis. As we walked up the hill, he told me how his whole family had moved into or close by their subdivision. They all lived within a quarter mile of one another. In my family, they would have already been sarcastic and fighting. Here everyone was friendly, even loving, towards one another—amazing! He told me he had worked for his brother's printing business since high school and had never attended college.

“Harold handles all our accounts, bookwork, and what not,” he said. “I do the printing. That's the way it's been for more than twenty years now, and I hope it will never change. We've never had a single disagreement. Not ever. Even Harold's wife Nettie and my Edna love each other like sisters,” he smiled. What kind of
Twilight Zone
episode had I stumbled into? Here it was normal to have close, loving relationships. Even pets were not neurotic like Blackie—helplessly chained to his urine in the kitchen until attempting suicide. It didn't seem banal or trite—it seemed beautiful in its very simplicity. Max had no aspirations beyond working six days a week at Press-Craft, and providing for his wife and two daughters. He wasn't articulate or even particularly interesting, but he had no hate or envy and truly loved his family. A few months ago, this would have seemed pathetic, even contemptible to me. Now it appeared beautiful—the way a family should be. Perhaps my New York world wasn't the real one. Perhaps family could be more than a poison tree.

Max spoke nostalgically about serving in the Fifth Armored Division during World War II, and the camaraderie in his Intelligence unit. I couldn't imagine how this poorly educated, simple man could engage in espionage. He laughed like a little boy recounting the time he got lost behind enemy lines. They sent a whole platoon to search for him, and he suffered a demotion to Staff Sergeant. He took the pipe from his teeth and his eyes watered as he recalled his rescue. The tears were not a lament for his disgrace, they were tears of gratitude and affection for buddies who had risked their lives and brought him back alive.

I thought about my own father, how he had not served in the military, and had never confided in me a single time. Never had he shared a single moment of vulnerability or intimacy, and the soles of his shoes would most certainly never be unevenly worn. Our communication, on the rare instances when we had it, was always about my deficiencies, my weaknesses, never his. For all I knew, he had none. Despite my father's arrogance and pride—in his intelligence, his ambition, his infallible sense of what was proper and right, he had never served his country or risked his life. I couldn't help thinking that Max—so insignificant beside my father's brilliantine hair and moustache, his money and power—had discovered the secret to something about which my father didn't have a clue: how to receive love from others and love them back in return.

The snow was falling heavily now, and Max and I put the little dog inside the house, and began shoveling a path leading up to the door of their modest ranch house. Patty's mother opened the door a crack, and told us to come back inside. I had just flown and must be tired, she said. I told her I wasn't; I wanted to stay out there with Max and finish digging our path. We shoveled together, and I loved the exertion and the sense of Max and I doing this work together. Snow blanketed everything like a snug down comforter. After we finished the path from the street back into the house, we cleared the driveway so Max could get his Chevy station wagon out in the morning. It felt like important, useful work, and I didn't want to stop until it was complete. Finally, we tramped back inside, took our boots off, and grabbed mugs of hot chocolate and sat by the fire in the den and played Gin Rummy. Before going to bed, I inspected the little pathway we had made from the door; it was ragged, but it would serve.

Patty's mother was the soul of the family. She worked part-time as a substitute teacher, but her dedication to home was her real job. The house was spotless—but not the kind of spotlessness which is constricting. Their ranch house was modest, but it was a place where something had taken root other than anger and brutality. In the center of the living room, an enormous dieffenbachia plant rose all the way to the ceiling. On the refrigerator, I read a list of handwritten menus for the week in Edna's elegant, school-teacher cursive.

Since she has been warned about my peculiarities, a second refrigerator out in the garage was stocked with vegetables and fruit reserved for me. It was Shabbat, and the smell of homemade matzo ball soup and challah smelled so good that I decided to violate my principles. It felt wrong to eat spinach, broccoli, rice, and grapes while everyone else was celebrating together.

I tasted Patty's matzo ball soup. Moments later, I asked for a bowl of my own “if there's enough for everybody.”

“Enough?” Edna laughed at the absurdity of the question. I asked for a second bowl. A plate of roast chicken and roasted potatoes followed.

Long after Patty and I were married, I realized that on that very day I began constructing an alternate family for myself. I substituted the chaos and cruelty of New York for the affection I discovered in St. Louis. Each member of Patty's family played his or her part. I understood it might be possible for me to one day build a world that was not watered by tears and violence.

This did not happen without pain. When I proposed marriage, I bought Patty a fifty dollar engagement ring with my own work-study wages. Our wedding was set for the summer of 1969. Among the few available dates was my own twenty-first birthday. We jokingly said I should choose it so I would remember our anniversary. However, I had far more personal, symbolic reasons for choosing it.

My parents knew we were dating, but were unaware of any plans to marry. We chose to have our wedding in St. Louis. I knew my parents would be violently opposed to our engagement, let alone marriage. Patty's family and their modest lifestyle made it impossible for them to support such a step. And I was only twenty years old! To spare them—and myself—I refrained from telling anyone. Nor did I tell Patty's family that my parents had no idea about our wedding.

During the two years Patty and I had been together, I became serious about my studies and was able to graduate Wisconsin with honors. My parents agreed to come out (separately, of course) for my graduation, and Patty's family planned a picnic to celebrate both our graduation and impending marriage. We were sitting at a long picnic table when Edna lifted a champagne glass to propose a toast. Everyone raised a glass, including both my parents. Then Edna added how delighted she was about our recent engagement, and how much she looked forward to greeting everyone in St. Louis for our August wedding.