Читать книгу The Lost Landscape - Joyce Carol Oates - Страница 16

DO ALL FAMILIES HARBOR secrets? Do all families conspire in secrets, if not cultivate secrets? The family is the social unit that seems to depend crucially upon a clear separation of those who are in power and those who are subordinate; those wielding power are required to know more than those who are subordinate to them, and there almost seems, at times, a kind of taboo in sharing such knowledge. Before you were born is both a neutral designation and a way of shutting a door in your face which you would wish to open at your own risk.

Of course, all that children are not told, children somehow know. Not the words to the song but its melody, and its tone. A writer might be one who, in childhood, learns to search for and decipher clues; one who listens closely at what is said, in an effort to hear what is not being said; one who becomes sensitive to nuance, innuendo, and fleeting facial expressions.

And there are the abrupt silences among adults, when a child comes too near.

IN HIS PREFACE TO What Maisie Knew, Henry James ponders the “close connection of bliss and bale”—the irony of “so strange an alloy, one face of which is somebody’s right and ease, the other somebody’s pain and wrong.” Nowhere is this paradox more true than in the matter of a premature and violent death, for example the murder of my mother’s father which was also, in effect, the murder, as it was the irrevocable dissolution, of a family.

All this happened long before I was born, in 1917. In a Hungarian community in Black Rock, now a part of Buffalo, New York. My mother’s father was in his forties at the time, a Hungarian immigrant from the countryside near Budapest, who worked in a factory in Buffalo; one night, in a tavern in Black Rock, he was killed by another Hungarian immigrant, allegedly “beaten to death with a poker.”

Beyond these blunt bare facts, nothing more seemed to be known. The killer must have been identified, maybe even arrested and charged, and very likely the killing would have been described as “self-defense”—possibly, this was true. All I would ever know of my mother’s father was that he was, like other Hungarian males in the family, an individual of whom it might be said that he was not slow to flare up in anger, if not rage, and that he was a “heavy drinker.” The word peasant is a disallowed word, a shameful usage to contemporary ears, but Hungarian peasants is probably the most objective description of my mother’s relatives who’d immigrated to western New York in the early 1900s. By contemporary standards these immigrants were desperately poor people of the class of those about whom Upton Sinclair wrote so compellingly in The Jungle (1906), set in the Chicago slaughterhouses.

The sudden death of my mother’s father left her family destitute. Her parents had had eight children, the older of whom were already working. (Recall that this is 1917, when immigrant children rarely went to school but worked in factories, mills, and slaughterhouses, for wages much less than those of adult men.) My biological grandmother, whom I would never meet, nor even see a photo of, gave away at least one of her children at this time, the youngest, my mother, who was nine months old.

The infant was given to the couple whom I would know as Grandma and Grandpa Bush—Lena and John Bush. (“Bush” was the name the immigrant couple had been given at Ellis Island, as it is an approximation of their Hungarian name “Bus.”) One day it would be told to me, or suggested, in the casual way in which such genealogical information was likely to be provided, that John Bush may have been a brother of my mother’s deceased father—in which case, my mother had been sent to live with an uncle and his wife, which does not seem quite so desperate as being given away to strangers. There were no “adoptions” in those days—at least, no government agencies that were concerned with the fate of immigrant children of whom, in heavily Roman Catholic communities like Black Rock, there were many. My mother was taken in by a couple who not only wanted a child, but also needed another farm-helper in their household; as soon as she was old enough, she was given farm chores; for a few years she attended a one-room schoolhouse a mile away from the small farm in Millersport, across Tonawanda Creek in Niagara County—the very one-room schoolhouse I would attend years later.

Briefly too my mother attended a Roman Catholic school taught by nuns, in Swormville, from which she graduated after eight grades, at which time her education ceased. Eight grades were considered more than sufficient at this time in our history, in rural communities especially, where the designation “high school graduate” was a matter of pride.

When my mother Carolina Bush was eighteen or nineteen years old, and working part-time as a waitress in a restaurant on the Millersport Highway, she and my father Frederic Oates met. This would have been 1935 or 1936. Fred Oates was three years older than Carolina; he’d been born in Lockport, a small city seven miles north of Millersport, on the Erie Canal. Like my mother’s early life, my father’s early life had been shaped by the premature and violent death of a relative, in this case his maternal grandfather, a German Jewish immigrant who’d tried to kill both his wife and his fourteen-year-old daughter (my grandmother-to-be) with a shotgun, and ended up killing only himself. My father, too, had had to quit school young, and began work in a “machine-shop” (Harrison Radiator) in Lockport. He would work at Harrison’s for an astounding forty years before retiring, though by degrees he was to be promoted from the assembly-line machine shop to tool and die design.

Since such family secrets were shrouded in mystery, as in mortification and shame, I never knew, nor had I any way of substantiating, whether these two (very attractive) young people confided in each other, or commiserated with each other; both sides of my family were notable for reticence, and a stubbornness in reticence; these were not individuals for whom openness came easily, still less anything approaching “full disclosure.” The ardor of confession for which our era is known would have been astonishing to them, scarcely believable and in no way desirable. There seemed the fear among my adult relatives that something misspoken could not be reclaimed; if you spoke heedlessly, you would speak unwisely and you would regret it. In much of my fiction there is a simulacrum of the “confessional” but to interpret it in these terms is misleading. Not literal transcription but emotional transcription is the way of the writer.

While we were growing up, my brother Fred, Jr., and I had no idea of our parents’ backgrounds. We had no idea that my mother had been given away by her mother, after her father’s murder; we had no idea that my father’s mother had nearly been murdered by her raging father. We had no idea that my father’s mother Blanche Morgenstern was Jewish. (In western New York State of those days, we had no idea what “Jewish” was.) We would be adults before we learned even the skeletal outline of these old, shameful secrets that had both altered the trajectories of our parents’ (impoverished) lives but also made our births, in 1938 and 1943 respectively, possible.

It was fascinating—I suppose. To live among adults who must have frequently spoken to one another in a kind of code. (My mother’s stepparents with whom we lived would certainly have talked about my mother’s biological mother and her siblings, who lived less than ten miles away; there were Bush uncles and aunts and cousins who appeared at a little distance, and gradually became known to me in my teens.) Much of adult life was forbidden of entry to children—not just family secrets of this sort but financial crises, health crises, problems with work. Outside the brightly-lit “home” there is the murky penumbra of adults who don’t especially care about you, and are not obliged to wish you well. It may be that the writer/artist is stimulated by childhood mysteries or that it is the childhood mysteries that stimulate the writer/artist. Sometimes in my writing, when I am most absorbed and fascinated, to the point of anxiety, I find myself imagining that what I am inventing is in some way “real”; if I can solve the mystery of the fiction, I will have solved a mystery of my life. That the mystery is never solved would seem to be the reason for the writer’s continuous effort to solve it—each story, each poem, each novel is a restatement of the quest to penetrate the mystery, tirelessly restated.

The writer is the decipherer of clues—if by “clues” is meant a broken and discontinuous subterranean narrative.

I WAS WELL INTO adulthood and living far from Millersport by the time the Bush family secret came to light, and even then it was a faint, glimmering light, about which no one wished to speak without averted eyes, an air of embarrassment and shame, and a wish to change the subject. Growing up in their household, on that farm in Millersport, my brother and I may have had a vague awareness that John and Lena Bush were not my mother’s “real” parents—beyond that we couldn’t know, and in the way of family reticence, which is a kind of dignity, we could not ask, any more than children of that era would have boldly asked their fathers what their incomes were and their mothers whether they’d really wanted children.

But here is the surprise: my mother’s account of that traumatic time in her early life did not center upon the murder of her father (whom she had not known—after all she’d been an infant at the time) but on the mortifying fact of having been “given away.” When for a special feature in O, The Oprah Magazine in the late 1990s several women writers were commissioned to interview their own mothers, I learned of some of this old, sad story, still upsetting to my mother so many decades later. All my mother seemed to know was: her father had been murdered, her mother had given her away. Several times she said, “My mother didn’t want me. I used to cry and cry . . .” I was stricken to the heart—my mother was eighty years old! This trauma of 1917 was as recent and fresh to her as if no time had intervened.

Of all the relatives on both sides of our family my mother Carolina Oates had the reputation of being the most generous, the most kind, the warmest and “sunniest”—I did not want to think that, in her innermost heart, Mommy thought of herself as a child whose mother had not wanted her.

Crimes reverberate through many years, and through many lives. It is a rare homicide that destroys only one person. And it is a paradox to accept that, had a Hungarian immigrant not been murdered in 1917, I would not be alive today; how many of us, many more than would wish to speak of so sordid a fact, owe our births to the premature deaths of others whom we have never known but to whom we are linked by that mysterious shared fate called “blood.”

Here is the ironic equipoise of which Henry James wrote: this catastrophe that was for my mother, through her life, a source of acute sorrow and shame was for me, her daughter, the very genesis of my life.