The Syme Papers (62 page)

Sam’s force was spent and he sat mum, a mass of silence. Then I
spoke, feeling the sad arch of his neck beneath my hands. ‘Now is
not the time. Another chance will come, Tom. He must give a space
to his grief, or it will crowd him later. Who could talk of crowns and
vacuii, when all our thoughts turn to another hollow, six feet deep?
Bubbles needs a brother and Edward a son.’

‘They can wait three days.’

‘I
have my own reasons for returning,’ I said.

‘Then go.’

Sam still sat quiet between us, so I spoke for him. ‘Mourning is
also an occasion and a chance to be missed, Tom. Besides, he does
not have the heart for it.’

‘Is this what you feared, Tom, in the end?’ Sam broke in at last.
But I could not guess his meaning, though Tom’s answer was clear.

‘If you do not attend the great gathering in Independence Hall in
three days’ time, which lies directly in our route, and for which we
have laboured all summer, I have done with you, Sam. You still bear
all my love, but my services are over.’

‘There is no service left
‚
’ Sam said.

‘Another chance will come,’ I cut between them.

‘Without me‚’
Tom said and left
through
the kitchen into the
garden. We heard the door shut. A fly buzzed and banged in the
room, and I turned again to all the loud blue summer air tugging
at my heart a stone’s throw through the window. It was a heavy
question, but suddenly my heavy heart was gone. Sam looked up
at me and said, ‘It is only Tom’s love, you know that. It does not
matter now.’

‘I will go out to him if you wish.’

‘Do. I need an hour to myself.’

I found Tom sitting with James in the glorious afternoon sun, in
the wind-shadow of long white sheets hung from the washing-line.
James turned shyly away and lay on his side, picking at the grass.
He had the trick of inconsequence, and Tom and I did not heed him
as we fought over Sam’s prospects.

‘I am
not deaf
to his grief
‚
’ Tom said, gently at first. ‘I wish him
the best. But it would have been a rare occasion, Phidy, like the
passing of a comet, that holds our attention though nothing follows
from it. A last chance, and he could be miserable for eternity and be
damned to him. She was not so kind a mother to call him down from
such an eminence. Do you not see it? The packed hall, the mayor
and his wife, a gallery of scientists, the indescribable heat of half a
thousand bodies sitting side by side, and the timbre of a clear voice
speaking loudly, to its full dimensions for once, filling the walls
around it without fear. I would like to see Sam with such space
around him.’

I
confess I was moved by Tom’s picture. But I was too
happy
under my rising star.
For
six
months I had waited on them, bending
beside them even in my own thoughts. I was not grown to live in
such cramped quarters. At last I felt I could walk straight again.
And I knew then (in the thoughtless way one knows vast things,
like one’s own death) that there was no substance to Sam’s dream,
and that Tom was indeed a shadow’s shadow.

‘Sam could bring the world to his feet, if he chose
‚
’ Tom said.

‘Perhaps he does not wish it.’

‘Of course he does,’ Tom snapped, as though I were a child.

‘I
will not help you, Tom, I will not tear
him from his mother’s
grave to please your own ambition,’ I answered, angry myself. ‘Not
when my own father needs me.’ (Of all my reasons, this had the
least virtue in it) As I stood up to go, James turned over in the
grass. I ducked beneath the laundry-line into the house.

If I was cold to Tom, I had the most insidious of serpents to tempt
me: the harmony of my own nature. Who can deny the call of their
own good health, so innocent a tempter? My thoughts were no
longer corrupted by humility. I saw and spoke clearly for the first
time. How easy to think such good brings all good with it, when it is
only the taste that grows clear, not the food that becomes whole
some.

Sam had not moved from the table, though the sun now fell at his
back, casting his hands in
shadow. ‘I’m afraid I fell asleep, Phidy‚’
he said. ‘Is there anything to eat? For I’m starvation hungry.’

‘Of course,
Sam.’

‘Call Tom.’ I
stood at the door and shouted, as anyone might on a
summer afternoon, into the garden, through the thick, wet sheets. I
heard Tom’s face against the cotton and then he stepped quietly
inside.

‘I will come‚’
Sam said, ‘for you, Tom.’
He had only postponed
the argument, and he was angry. A thin, sharp line had come
between them, which cut them the nearer they moved in their ways.
I
stood between them now.

Towards Philadelphia we journeyed, heavy of heart.

H
E WAS ALWAYS BEST AT BEGINNINGS
, my father, made a great fist of them. Pitt Snr enrolled in night school in high spirits (his briefcase stuffed to the gills with paper pads, pencils in martial array unsharpened, sharpener, note cards and course catalogues, stapler, hole-punch, one sandwich bag full of paper clips, one sandwich bag smeared with peanut-butter sandwiches, a copy of
Goldfinger
wedged in the buckle for casual access) at the Mesa County Community College to study, of all things,
History.
He had never finished high school, enrolled instead upon another venture, Korea; and settled into construction work when he got back. Then he signed on for MCC; and there he met my mother, Jinny Meeks, making a fresh start herself after an ‘unpleasantness at college’ in her sophomore year at UC-Davis, involving a boy and a degree of coercion Pitt chooses not to think on. My father made a beginning of her and they both made an end of their education.

My mother was better at endings. They relieved her greatly, partly because, as she declared herself a dozen times a week, in exasperation that never quite lied its way into surprise: ‘I just don’t have any energy today, dear. I feel – awful – slow.’ There was always a check to her free stride. Whenever she got going, something made her … flinch; and such weariness these checks induce! Until her right foot never deserted the comfort of her left, and she stood still. (Her characteristic posture: back quite straight, arms limp at her sides, her shoes tucked in together, her eyes blinking. This, she said, was how Mrs Arthurworry, her ballet teacher, had taught her to stand, age seven; and she couldn’t unlearn it – the only thing she hadn’t unlearned! – since quitting, at seventeen.) Time, of which she used so little, had been kind to her in return; and into her forties she looked like a girl, preserved.

Dance, it seems, had been her only love. And she ‘attended’ (her
word) any production of the San Diego Ballet, whenever ‘she got the chance’. ‘Going’ to the ballet seemed cheap to her. Ballet was a mark of class, she didn’t like to make a fuss of it, but the fact was she came from slightly different ‘people’ to her husband – had ‘different pleasures, expectations’, in consequence. (Few pleasures, it should be said; fewer expectations.) Yet she taught her son a love of ‘culture’ – he was greedy for it, heaped his plate regardless of proportion or appetite. This pleased her quietly; and Pitt did not surprise himself when he fell in love with Susie Wielengrad, daughter of the New York Jewish upper classes.

Making an end of something relieved my mother – partly, as I mentioned, for weariness’ sake, and partly for honesty’s. ‘I don’t know‚’ she often said, pursing her thin lips, on returning from an evening out with ‘Dad’ – dancing, or bowling, or playing Scrabble with ‘some
people,
your father knows them’ – ‘it just wasn’t
me.’
Me
, it should be said, proved a rather exclusive quality, rare in the extreme – few thoughts, or pleasures, or places, seemed to possess it. Every Friday she had supper with her mother across town, and Pitt and son fended for themselves (pizza and the television). She came back brimming with the ‘same old wrangles. I try to tell he – I’m not seventeen any more – I can make my own way’ – obscurely satisfied, for once, with being clearly in the right; and content to leave the matter at that. Wrangles over motherhood, wifehood, career – she worked as a secretary at UC-SD, in the English Department, for Dr Morgenthal, to whom an old professor at Davis had recommended her, ‘until she found her feet’. She had found them, and never left them.

Rooms
grew
in her presence. Her thin figure seemed like an outline of negative space – how vast ceiling and wall stretched around my mother, echoed like halls. She offered a wonderful evocation of exhaustion – so familiar to us that one fatal source of it was hidden in the general malaise, until too late. If she appeared dry of life as a parched ground, then ‘Dad’ on the other hand danced like rain, danced and danced, and never quite managed to – soften her. They developed a curious language to interrupt the silence between them; and I grew up speaking it like a native
tongue. Talk ran backwards among us, away from conclusions. Every statement had its echo in a question. ‘Wet day‚’ Jinny might say, parting a curtain just around her nose to watch rain disappear into the winter-brown lawns. ‘I wonder what the weather is?’ Dad would answer, rubbing his hands in silly high spirits.

My father, I believe, despite lacking ‘class’, had the quicker brain and might have got on in life, but for a severe dyslexia (lately diagnosed) that made his love of Scrabble all the more amusing. I can think of no fitter emblem for Pitt Snr than the sight of him poring over an impossibility of letters, broad shoulders slumped, elbows rolled up, his fist in his nose, and that snuffing heavily – while endless combinations of non-words suggested themselves to his scrambled sight, and he leapt at each (half-rising from his seat and licking his finger), then paused, hesitant, abashed, dimly aware of what he called ‘his lack of judgement’ (spelling), and sat back sighing, before he turned with undiminished pleasure to even greater possibilities that consoled him for his earlier indecision. Crying at last, ‘The kid never thinks –the old man has it in him‚’ whenever he put down a word.

The old man had a great deal in him, Pitt has no doubt, with more proposals at his beck than he had thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in. He wished, he said, in his youth to be a writer, in the manner of such folks as Herman Wouk, a great inspiration; only he lacked imagination. ‘I tell you something‚’ he told me once. ‘Whatever I wrote, it all sounded like lies. All I need is – material.’ ‘Material’ was a great word with my father. It suggested to him something that might satisfy his hands – and he had clever hands. It suggested something of which there was a superfluity, spilling over and getting dirty in the overflow. (He liked dirt.) He often came home from work brimming with tales of ‘great material’ – and these ranged from the banter of his workmates to the buildings he worked upon (never repairing them, only setting the stage for such repairs). He spent his life preserving materials and considering uses.

There were the improvements, of course – those revolutions in the art of scaffolding that would yield lighter, stronger, simpler
frames, if only he could solve the trouble of … Well, there was always some trouble: such as expense, distribution, spontaneous collapse, etc. Then came the history of scaffolding and scaffolders, for which he spent several months of Sunday nights at the San Diego Public Library, taking notes. He loved notes – beautiful
mate
rials
of his own production. He relished the
heft
of a stack of papers, scribbled over in his own round, flowing hand, as large as a child’s. My earliest memories involve fisting crayon sketches on the back of discarded pages, notes towards some never-to-be-finished history or proposal. They lay, bound in rubber band, all over the house.

Young Pitt was a keen cartoonist, and might turn over his creation to discover:

The prose suggested to me a curiously adult world – a world, alas, I have come to learn too well – in which distinctions of some perplexity and no conceivable interest are debated in terms as familiar as the weather. For example (discovered lately on the flip-side of a giant tree, from Pitt’s purple period, between six and seven):

My father was a meticulous man. He threw nothing away, including his own thoughts.

(Now the boys use the backs of my proofs for pictures. Turn over any bright, blotted drawing stuck against our fridge, and you will find some fragment of Pitt’s research upon them, some fragment of this, perhaps – the bones of my words beneath the skin of their felt-tip colour. For Pitt, like his father, accumulates.)

‘Falsework’, Dad called his notes. ‘Everything you don’t end up wanting, afterwards, is only falsework‚’ he said, and quoted C.J. Wilshere’s seminal guide to
Construction Practices:

(I conned this by heart as a child.) If anyone dismissed something as ‘false’ in his presence, he lifted his stubby forefinger in stubborn pedantry. ‘False
work‚’
he insisted. ‘I guess I should know‚’ he added. ‘I spent my life on it.’ (How rare it is, I sigh, that permanent structures grow self-supporting, free of their falsework – as Syme knew all too well.)

According to C.J. Wilshere, ‘There are a number of forces which the falsework must resist; it is necessary to consider combinations of these, to make sure all conditions are considered.
But to consider all the worst conditions at the same time may be unrealistic.’ In the event, the combination of two forces proved sufficient to overload my father’s structures of support. The first was this: that Pitt’s blue-eyed boy was leaving for college (only as far as the University of California at San Diego, as it happens –
happened
). The second, it should be said, was less expected.

My father made a great beginning of my mother’s cancer. For one thing, he took the day off. He drove her to the clinic on Medical Arts Road, and waited, under the stippled ceilings of the lobby, by the bubbling water dispenser, among the etiolated plants and the bound magazines, for four hours, while my mother waited, in a paper nightie, at the edge of a table-bed a corridor away. My father read slowly, happily and indiscriminately – and worked his way through several back issues of
Home Furnishings,
before he noticed the day had almost gone, and the clouds of dusk had settled over a blue Californian November afternoon. If patience is a virtue, then another gift is its equal – the capacity for such casual, insignificant curiosity as passes the time. My father had both, and could always turn from the trouble at hand to the magazine at hand.

The doctors discovered a dot upon her breast and rang up the next morning with the news. (Nobody told me.) Jinny, having lately finished breakfast, took off her clothes again and went to bed – I remember her, as light as kindling, under the bony sheets. ‘She could scarce stand when she awoke, so we brought her a-bed again, and put her feet in bowls of water, for it is damnation hot‚’ Edward wrote to his travelling son. It was quite cold that day in fact; rags of clouds hung over the sky and dripped from time to time. We clicked on the heat, and dusty breaths coughed from the floor vents.
My
father took off his boots, his jeans, his turtle-neck, and joined Jinny in his Y-fronts and undershirt and socks, and together they watched TV deep into the afternoon. I ran to catch my schoolbus, suspicious, not for the first time, of the world of adults and their imaginary jobs. Your mother is feeling unwell, he said; I thought what he really meant was something to do with sex.

By the time she went in (and under), for a preliminary exploration, I knew the story. My father woke me at five that morning, breakfast set upon the table, the orange in my glass gleaming like a coloured-in photograph. Jinny was forbidden food, and Pitts, plump father and son, ate nothing; even the juice proved too bright and acid for my bitter stomach. I remember coming back at eight – between consultations – to see the light of morning spread over the tablecloth, and a fly sprawled splay-legged in the juice, drunk or drowned or dead at the orange rim against the glass. I picked it out then reconsidered and tipped the juice into the drain and listened to it run away. For once, I thought, according to the obscure logic of grief, I was permitted waste, and a fresh glass.

We drove back at ten to see how she was getting on. That’s when the trouble began, I believe. Jinny lay in the high bed too light, almost, to dent the pillow. So thin and dry my mother was, the nurse could find no flowing vein to prick and plug with the sugar drip hanging glossy and glutinous on the rack. She banged once, twice; pinched and slapped, and banged again. Jinny’s arm seemed desiccated, nothing but bone and rolls of skin, more likely to crumble like powder between fingers than flow with blood. But then the nurse struck red, and the plug took and the sugar eased into her arm. Father and son looked down, and saw vermilion spilled upon the tiles, her heart’s blood, bright as a fire-engine, shining sleekly.

My father lifted the knuckle of his thumb to his mouth and sucked it. Then he sat down. He was a gentle man, could not bear the sight of blood; he possessed too light a temper to support so great a weight.