Читать книгу The Blessing - Gregory Orr - Страница 20

9

Alcove

Dashing, spontaneous, irrepressible, my father, James Wendell Orr, must have swept my mother off her feet when they first met. He was darkly handsome, with thick black hair, dense eyebrows, and an open, grinning face. Everything about his manner said that life was fun in a wild kind of way and should be enjoyed. Coming from her pinch-faced, teetotaling New England background, my mother couldn’t possibly have ever seen anyone like him before. Grammie Howe, my mother’s mother, hated him from the start, which may have made him only that much more irresistible to my mother. Within months of their meeting, my parents were married.

My father’s father had begun as a homeless newsboy on the streets of Detroit and risen to become city editor of the New-York Tribune and later, secretary to the governor of New York. My own father had grown up as the spoiled youngest child of his rich Yonkers family.

Somewhere in the story of my father’s privileged childhood something is missing: Is it a simple bump in the road, or a secret point on which his whole life pivoted? Somewhere in his early adolescence is his own story of responsibility for the sudden death of a loved one. It is not a story he has ever told to anyone I know. Not a single word about it has ever passed between him and me in all these years. My mother spoke her single, cryptic sentence about it to me the day of Peter’s death, and then she, too, would never mention it again. I could tell from the way she spoke that it was a dark and shameful secret. And yet, now I do know something about it; I even know the victim’s name. Six years ago, I called my father’s older sister, a woman I knew as Aunt Doe. She and my father hadn’t talked in forty years, though I didn’t know why.

“Aunt Doe,” I said, “this is your nephew Greg. If you don’t mind, I need to ask you an odd question.”

“Well, go ahead.”

“When Peter died, my mother told me something like that had happened to my father, too, but she never said what. Do you know anything about that?”

“You mean, your parents never told you about Charley Hayes?” she asked incredulously. No, I assured her; I had never even heard his name before. And she told me all she knew:

“Charley and your father were inseparable. They were best friends. They must have been ten at the time. It was at our country house; we’d just come up the day before from Yonkers. The two of them snuck a rifle out of the house, one that the chauffeur kept in the trunk of the Packard. And some paper plates from the kitchen—they were going to go skeet shooting in a back field, you know, throw the plates into the air and pretend they were clay pigeons. Then it happened, somehow your father shot Charley. We don’t really know the details of it. Your father ran back to the house and then the chauffeur went out to the field and carried Charley’s body back. Your grandmother packed us up that same day and took us back to the city. I don’t know whether that was right or not, but something like that is so terrible. It was awful. I can’t believe they never told you about it when Peter died. It was the first thing we all thought about, the awful coincidence of it.”

And that was all she could tell me, though I sensed in her voice questions about how her family had responded to Charley’s death, whether Dad’s mother was right to whisk them so quickly back to the city. Behind that act, I could sense a familial response I knew from my own childhood: the sudden flight from the scene that is the first concrete step toward denial of the horror.

And so my father’s adolescence continued. Even in the middle of the Depression, he was dropped off by the chauffeured Packard at a fancy New York private school. By the time he went on to Hamilton College, his spirited and irresponsible tendencies had acquired a wilder, more dramatic cast. He flunked out before the end of his first year, then started over at Columbia College. But shortly after, when World War II began, he joined the Navy Air Force and was sent to Ithaca for flight training.

My mother’s maiden name was Barbara Howe. Her solid, straightlaced family traced itself back, with somber vanity, to an English ship that arrived off the coast of Massachusetts in 1630. My mother’s father worked as an executive for Boston Sand and Gravel, devoting his bland working life to selling off by the truckload soil mingled with his ancestors’ bones. Somehow it was apt—except for his big adventure as a young man in the First World War, he himself was a colorless, basic man who might have been made of the substances he sold. After high school, my mother became a scholarship student in architecture at MIT. I’ve tried to imagine her back then—what a serious, even brilliant student she must have been to have gained entrance into that bastion of male science and technology back in those prefeminist days. In her high school graduation portrait, she’s wearing a string of pearls and a simple, short-sleeved sweater. She has a wide, plain face, high cheekbones, and clear, intelligent eyes that make her quite beautiful in an unassuming way. In the photo, she’s wearing her hair in braids wrapped around the top of her head like a rustic halo. After her first year at MIT, America entered the Second World War and she was lured to Cornell by the Curtiss-Wright Aircraft Company, which was training women to work in aircraft design. It was there she met my father, and by the time he was transferred to navigation training in Indiana, they were married.

In Indiana, he ran into disciplinary trouble and washed out. He started over again, testing so well that he was put in a “Ninety-Day Wonder” school at Northwestern University that put extraordinary enlisted men through intensive officer training and graduated them as ensigns. Again, he misbehaved and was demoted, though he somehow managed to graduate. From there, he was sent to underwater demolition training in Florida. One night, he smuggled my mother onto the base disguised in a sailor’s uniform and took her out with his crew and several cases of beer for a midnight cruise in the small landing craft he commanded. Drunk, they ran across a coral head and sank ten yards off a beach. He somehow escaped the full consequences of that escapade, only to find himself at war’s end on Guam, without ever having fired or been fired upon.

When Dad returned to the States, he went back to Columbia, where he was still only a sophomore. But he was admitted—rather inexplicably he thought—into medical school while he was still a junior premed. As far as he knows, he never completed his undergraduate degree but simply moved on in the confusion of all the servicemen returning to school on the GI Bill.

In the winter of 1947, when I was born, he and Mom were living in a farmhouse without indoor plumbing or hot water and heated only with a woodstove. The farmhouse was near the hamlet of Alcove in the rugged Helderberg Hills thirty miles southwest of Albany, where my Dad was enrolled in Albany Medical College. The one-story farmhouse was ramshackle, and the unpainted barn, where Mom kept her herd of goats, two dozen rabbits, and a milk cow, was even more dilapidated. What had been an apple orchard behind the house was long abandoned, and my first memory is of climbing onto a rusting truck that rested under one of these unpruned trees, bristling and scabbed with neglect. Still, the landscape had a bleak kind of beauty, according to my father, and the hayfield in front of the house gave a view down to the pine-flanked Alcove reservoir, where the occasional bald eagle was still seen.

I was the third baby boy born in as many years. That first winter of my life the house still had no furnace and no hot water—my mother washed our diapers in cold water handpumped into the kitchen sink. How odd it must have been for these two children of urban privilege to have chosen such a place to begin their lives together. Why didn’t they rent an apartment in Albany? Or a house in its suburbs? The only explanation my father has ever offered for their living in such primitive circumstances was that he’d had enough of close quarters with other sailors in the war and when he came back he wanted to live as far from people and crowds as possible. What my mother thought of it, I’ll never know.

Although alcohol fueled almost all the escapades that unraveled so disastrously and in such rapid succession during my father’s young adulthood, it had utterly vanished by the time I was born. The rash and passionate relationship with booze that had come close to wrecking his young life a dozen times had been replaced by something else.

Early on in his medical school days, my father discovered amphetamine. What a miracle this powdered electricity compressed into little tablets must have been to him, as it was to countless other overworked medical students and interns—what a descent of grace, what balm in Gilead, what an oasis of green energy in the gray wastes of his daily exhaustion and stress! The endless complex studying and exams, the red-eyed, round-the-clock ward duties, the long drives home, and the labor on the farm as well—all these responsibilities that rose up and promised to overwhelm him now receded before this potent chemical that unlocked the mysteries of the human brain so that a man was turned into a demigod and a mortal gained knowledge and concentrated powers a god would envy. Holy tablets more precious than gold—my father hugged them closer than Moses gripped those flat stones God himself inscribed.

Those pills so saturated my father’s life that they seemed to have the power to appear anywhere, like mushrooms on a green lawn. Years later, my father drove me to my first day at college. We’d just pulled into the freshman dorm parking lot and I’d begun to unload suitcases from the back seat when he lifted from the open trunk a large, opaque plastic jug. “Here,” he said, “this might come in handy,” and he transferred it to me. It weighed six pounds and had to be carried in the crook of my arm like a small baby. It could have been an industrial-sized jar of ketchup or some other condiment, but it wasn’t—it was a bottle of one thousand amphetamine tablets, an extravagant parting gift from a man ordinarily noted for stinginess.

In the short time we spent unloading my stuff in the dorm, he gave me my first full sermon on the gospel of speed, though there had been hints before—casual, grim quips like: “Unhappy? We can give you a whole new chemical personality.” “Unhappy” said with an unctuous, drawn-out tone of concern ending in the diabolical parody of a completely insincere, salesman’s grin. And this “we” was all the up-to-date physicians, my father chief among them. Today, our culture is inured to the concept of a chemically engineered personality, but back then, in the early sixties, the phrase shocked and unnerved me. Nor was it reassuring to hear my father so insistently and intently cynical. Some of that cynicism must have emerged from despair: amphetamine in the morning; sleeping pills at night; then amphetamine again as the next morning dawned. My father was a walking, fast-talking endorsement of his grandiose claims, but he was also a partly empty husk sparked by the stuff—a hopped-up, volatile, addicted puppet. Only last year, Jonathan told me that, lying on the living room couch one day when he was ten, he heard my mother shout: “Jim, a mouse!” Dad was napping in his shorts at the time, in one of those frazzled collapses that alternated with his chemical highs. He leapt up, grabbed the .38 he kept in his bedside drawer at the time, ran down the stairs, and began blasting pistol shots at the tiny beast as it scurried among the dining room chairs and Jon screamed for help from the next room only a thin wall away. “Yes,” I said, though Jon’s anecdote was more overtly violent than any memory I had of that time. Yes, this is the man about whom we’d whisper our encrypted warnings in the dark halls of the house: “Stay away, he’s in a bad mood.”

Even with amphetamine’s chemical assist, my father’s struggle to graduate from medical school was immense. When he was still at Columbia, a professor told him that if any medical student lived more than fifteen minutes by subway from Columbia, his teachers knew he would flunk out by semester’s end. My father often thought about that as he drove his Model T truck the one-hour trip down out of the hills into Albany.

The life my parents lived those years in Alcove wasn’t an easy one. It wasn’t easy to survive in those circumstances. Not everyone did. Bill, the oldest, was born in 1945; Christopher, a year later; and I, the year after that. When Christopher was three years old, he climbed out of his crib in the middle of the night, opened my father’s desk drawer, found and swallowed enough pills to poison himself, put the bottle back and closed the drawer, then returned to his bed to sleep. By the time my mother found him comatose the next morning, my father had already left for school. Not until much later that day did they discover what had happened, but by the time they could pump his stomach it was too late. He died the following day.

The one account my father gave of Christopher’s death, years later, was so freighted with guilt and shame that I felt guilty myself as I tried to press past the narrative’s bare bones. My father’s genial countenance distorted into twists and turns, as if half the muscles in his face contracted in a painful effort to focus even as the rest tried to blur and avert his gaze.

“What kind of pills were they?” I asked.

“They were a French antihistamine, little sugarcoated pills Dr. Perkins prescribed for your mother’s allergies,” he said.

“How did he find them?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know.”

Tortured by my own guilt, I had no stomach for his suffering no matter how much I longed to know more. And yet I saw it clearly—the small boy alone in the room, opening the forbidden drawer. There in the dark, with moonlight from the window leaking in and smearing the edges of things with its cold, mercurial light. He slides it open, that drawer, that narrow rectangle of wood that could have been his coffin if he were smaller. Careless drawer, irresponsible box that gives away so easily its dangerous secrets, that surrenders its poisons so readily. Of course such a drawer is appalling; of course, my father will learn from this and lock up these evil boxes before they can do more harm. And yet he does not—its lesson of jeopardy is one he cannot learn and only ten years later my brother Jonathan will enter my father’s bedroom and slip open the distant cousin of Christopher’s drawer and lift out the loaded .38 pistol to point around the room, to pretend with.

How can you reason with a drawer, a stupid piece of wood? You can’t grab it by the lapels and shake it and scream, “Wake up, don’t you see what’s going on?” A drawer in a desk doesn’t think, it doesn’t act, it’s not responsible for what happens.

Jon told me the story of my father’s mouse hunt in response to my telling him the story of Christopher’s death, which he knew only as rumor. I have always been the difficult member of my family—the one whose desperate curiosity about the past irritates and threatens others because it brings back such painful memories. For much of my life, I’ve felt compelled to probe certain silence-shrouded events and their consequences. It’s not a role I chose but one born out of my own torment and guilt and desire to survive. I wasn’t after other people’s secrets; all I wanted was information that could be light and clear air. And so, periodically, when the pain got bad, got unbearable, I would ask questions I knew I should not. The last question I dared about Christopher came closest to the agony that dominated my own life:

“How did you and Mom deal with what happened?”

“We didn’t. In those days, people didn’t talk about things like that. Your mother and I never spoke about him.”

So, I was left with a full, empathetic knowledge of how such an awful event must have devastated both of them, but with no model for my own coping. Yet for all their stoic or paralyzed silence, I know Christopher was often in their thoughts. Many years later, I mentioned casually to my father how much I loved the light blue of chicory flowers that, ubiquitous, filled the fields and lined the dusty roads in the Hudson Valley where we lived, and Dad replied: “Christopher’s eyes were that color.”