Читать книгу Seven Mile Bridge - Michael M. Biehl - Страница 11

4

I wake up to what sounds like a snare drum rat-a-tat-tatting in the room. I’m cold and my back aches from napping on the sagging mattress. My eyes and nose are full of dust and I sneeze repeatedly.

The snare drum turns out to be the window in the gable, rattling violently in the harsh wind. I check to see if the window is latched. It is, but the sash is loose in the frame and no one has bothered to put up the storm window, this late into November. No wonder it’s so damn cold in the room. I pull a couple of magazines from a nearby bundle and jam them in around the window sash to keep out the worst of the gale. Outside, darkness is gathering in the bare tree branches and along the ground.

On my way back to the desk, I notice that the top of one of the boxes I moved off the bed is open, and some of its contents have spilled. I must have popped it open grabbing the flaps to lower it. It’s a large box that once contained a microwave oven. Pouring out of it onto the floor are more than a dozen old photographs. Three-by-five and four-by-six color prints, typical family snapshots. The box is packed to the brim with pictures, hundreds, maybe thousands of them.

I go downstairs to turn up the thermostat, and the furnace comes on with a resounding roar. How many decades has it been since that decrepit dinosaur was last serviced? I realize I am hungry, so I head to the kitchen and rummage around for something to eat. Spilled beverages, dark mold, and something green and sticky coat the inside of the refrigerator. Nothing in there looks bacteriologically safe; I’m surprised my mother didn’t die from food poisoning a long time ago. An off-brand can of pork and beans in the pantry looks like it won’t kill me, so I heat it up on the stove and eat from a pink plastic plate that dates from the ’50s.

The cheap plastic plates she wasn’t able to chip.

Down in the Keys I usually follow dinner with a couple of snifters of Curaçao. Here the best I can come up with is a slug of cheap vodka, which I take straight from the bottle. Thus fortified, I venture back upstairs to poke around in that box of pictures.

The photos are a jumble without even the chronological or subject matter grouping one might expect would occur naturally. It is as if the contents of the box have been spun in a clothes dryer for an hour. Snapshots of my mother gray-haired and holding hands with my stepfather Ray are mixed in with those of her young and holding my brother and me as babies, and with dog-eared black and white pictures of her as a baby herself, being held in the arms of my grandparents next to a shingle-sided bungalow and a car with running boards. Regardless of age, she has strong cheekbones, a short, straight nose, a broad, rounded forehead, and a penetrating, dramatic look in her eyes.

Decades of vacations, weddings, holidays, school portraits, and family get-togethers are all shuffled together, as if inside this box, linear time has unraveled and everything is happening all at once.

As a dive master and PADI scuba instructor I have had to learn rudimentary photography in order to take underwater shots for tourists and ID portraits for certification students. I can’t help but chortle at how consistently terrible the photography in these pictures is. So many shots centered on the faces, so the subjects are cut off at the waist and half the picture is empty space above their heads. Sunbursts in windows or mirrors from reflected flashbulbs. Overexposures, underexposures, jittery, cockeyed Polaroids. People with their heads or half their bodies cut off, out of focus, or lost in shadows. Fingers over the lens.

The most consistent blunder I see is the photographer standing too far from the subjects, so the people are tiny and their faces have no discernible expression. This is especially true of the vacation pictures, where presumably the excuse is the photographer wanted to get a lot of scenery in the shot, as if they really needed to have a permanent record of that particular beach. But it is also characteristic of the really old pictures from the time my grandparents were young and photography for the masses was a novelty. Some of these old photos are black and white, some are sepia. Virtually all of them are group shots with a whole lot of people lined up, as if at a company picnic. Even though the faces in these pictures are no bigger than match heads, just eye sockets and tiny hyphens for mouths, I can recognize my grandparents, great aunts and uncles, and my mother and her siblings as small children.

Here is photographic evidence that these folks all got together with some regularity back then. Now, the idea of assembling a group that size from either of my parents’ families seems ludicrous, as they are scattered across the continent, estranged, divorced, too busy to write each other, let alone assemble for a group photo. In this respect I think my extended family is fairly typical, and this strikes me as a change the last seventy years has wrought that is more significant than space travel or personal computers.

Near the bottom of the box I find a sealed envelope, yellowed, with “Lake / Audrey” handwritten on it in black ballpoint. It opens easily. Inside are a couple of black and white negatives. I hold one up to the light and see tiny black-faced minstrels standing on a granite slab in a sea of milk. As small as they are, I can recognize my mother and father. They are on a swimming raft in a lake. My mother’s blond hair is black as ink. She’s wearing a two-piece suit; she has a good figure, a little thick in the ankles. My father’s black hair is white, his baggy trunks riding low enough to reveal love handles and a slight paunch. Both are smiling, showing a lot of black teeth.

The other negative is of a foursome, in front of what looks like a small log cabin. My mother is in the same swimming suit, holding a baby. My father has his arm around her waist. At his side, a child whose head does not reach my father’s hips is holding onto his index finger possessively with one hand and grasping a small object in the other.

There is a Lake Audrey in western Sheboygan County, in the Kettle Moraine State Forest. My father took me fishing there when I was eleven. I sat on the grassy shore angling for bluegills with wax worms and a cane pole, while my dad waded in with hip boots and tossed a fly around. I remember it was a sunny day and the lake was weedy. We didn’t catch much, but we talked a lot and I don’t recall my father saying anything about having rented a cabin there when I was little. If Jamie was a baby, I must have been at least four. Old enough to have retained a few mental images, but I don’t remember it at all. This gives me a strange, hollow feeling, like I’ve lost a piece of myself and have no way of knowing how to get it back, or what else I may have lost. Maybe if I had prints made from these negatives, with a clearer image of the place I could dredge up a memory.

Just beneath the envelope with the negatives I find a picture from a day I do remember, and vividly: the day Sheboygan got ten inches of lake-effect snow on the seventh of April.

* *

April, 1971

School was cancelled, and my brother and I dashed to the quarry with our skis. One of the quarry walls was collapsed and it made a challenging, if brief, downhill ski run. There was no lift, of course, so after trudging up the hill ten times with our skis on our shoulders, we were worn out and went home.

Snow shovels awaited us, planted imperatively in a deep drift at the end of the driveway. We made short work of the task and then employed the shovels to hastily build opposing forts in the backyard for a snowball fight. My brother threw harder than I did, and more accurately. He laughed more, too, and louder, and went absolutely wild with glee whenever one of his missiles found its mark.

The snow was the sticky, good-packing kind, and after twenty minutes we looked like ambulatory snowmen. My father stepped out on the back porch with no coat or gloves and took this picture of me and Jamie, white-coated like powdered doughnuts, our faces red, wet, and raw. Then he called us in for hot chocolate.

Jamie and I stomped the snow off our boots and hung up our ski jackets in the mud room, both of us punchy from fresh air and exhaustion. My mother placed steaming mugs on the table. The kitchen was warm and smelled of chocolate. My father wasn’t there. I had almost shaken off the malaise from the sleepless night I had just spent worrying about my parents and the letter from the Bank of Wisconsin. The stricken look on my mother’s face brought it back.

“Jamie, hang up your coat. It’s on the floor.” Grief in her voice, as if the jacket were a dead infant.

“So what?”

“You have to make that jacket last another year.”

“Forget it. I hate that jacket. The sleeves are too short already.”

My mother stood at the kitchen sink, pressing the tips of her fingers against her forehead. “You have to take better care of your things.” Her jaw muscles clenched. “Hang the jacket in the closet.”

“I’m tired. I’ll do it later.”

Jamie held his mug in both hands and blew on his hot chocolate. My mother whirled around and yelled, “Pick it up!” Jamie ignored her. I couldn’t decide whether he was being valiantly defiant or just obtuse. With Jamie it was hard to tell the difference. Either way, I thought he was about to catch hell, which was always a guilty pleasure for me.

Before my mother said another word, Jamie took a sip of his hot chocolate and spit it out in a spray. “The cocoa’s too hot!” he snarled. “I burned my mouth! Gah!” He banged the mug down, slopping half its contents onto the table, and bolted from the room.

My mother started to mop up the spilled brown liquid with a dishcloth, then slumped down in Jamie’s chair and leaned forward with her brow resting on the heel of her hand. Her hair, which she usually wore in a Jackie Kennedy flip that sentenced her to sleep in large rollers, was shapeless and hung over her face. The bright sunlight that streamed through the kitchen window illuminated the gray in her hair and wrinkles around her mouth and eyes that I hadn’t noticed before. Her shoulders shook. She was crying.

Until that morning, I had never seen my mother cry, except a couple of times when we were watching the Hallmark Hall of Fame on television. I’m sure she wept plenty of times, like the day Dr. McNulty called to report that an x-ray showed Jamie had bone cancer (three days later he called back and told her a specialist overread the x-ray and said it was just a minor stress fracture, sorry to have worried you). But she never let us kids see her cry, and I felt sort of honored that she was showing me her emotions in this crisis, like in some way it elevated me to adult status.

I didn’t know what to do. We didn’t hug much in my family. I considered saying, “It’ll be all right, Mom,” but I didn’t know if that was true and was afraid it might sound juvenile. So I said nothing.

“Jonathan,” she said, and sniffed deeply. “There’s something I have to tell you. I’m going to need your help to get through this.”

Gosh. I was getting more grown up by the second.

“Jonathan.” She heaved a long sigh. “We’re in trouble. Your father has done a very stupid, stupid thing. This is hard for me to tell you.”

I felt guilty for not confessing that I had snuck a look at the letter and knew all about it already. It hurt to hear her call my father stupid, while at the same time it gave me a weird little boost in the dark recesses where I felt I was in competition with him for my mother’s esteem. That made me feel even guiltier.

She went on to explain why the Bank of Wisconsin was demanding that my father pay $108,715.87, which was more than seven times his annual income and over ten times our entire net worth. Philip Newley, the guy the bank couldn’t locate, was a friend of my dad’s boss at the Dieworks, Leon Bridette. My mother said Newley was an “entrepreneur,” saying the word like it was synonymous with “con man” or “thief.” Newley had once served on the school board, and with school lunch programs on the upswing, he decided there was easy money to be made selling lunch trays to school districts. He formed a corporation and signed a couple of contracts to supply trays. Problem was, Newley needed a bank loan to start the business. He had a bad track record with the local banks, having started businesses before that had failed.

“So,” she continued, “he asked Leon Bridette to get someone at the Dieworks to co-sign for the loan. Do you know what that means?” She sipped the dregs of Jamie’s hot chocolate. Her eyes were clearing and she seemed to be regaining her usual starch.

“Yes.” My mother waited while I chewed on this. I asked her, “Why would Bridette make Dad the guarantor?”

She glanced up from the mug and shot me a suspicious look. My remark disclosed that I had listened in on the argument the night before. Worse than that, while she had said Bridette got someone to “co-sign” for the loan, I said he made Dad the “guarantor,” the word Frank T. Shriner used in his letter. I was trying to sound sophisticated, but I think she caught on that I had seen the letter.

“Bridette told Dad that Newley’s company was going to hire the Dieworks to stamp the thousands of lunch trays he was going to sell. Newley had contacts all over the state and your dad’s company was supposedly going to make a whole lot of money.” She waved her hands up and down like she was dribbling invisible basketballs. “Big deals, big deals. But they never made one lousy tray. The loan came through and Newley took off with the money, eighty thousand, leaving David holding the bag.” Her jaw slid into an underbite and her lip curled. “Him and some other patsy.”

“Why did Dad go along with it?” My father’s title was Manager of Product Design, which sounds distinguished but at a low-tech, mid-sized company like Falls Dieworks was a modest job. He was not one of the big shots, not by a long shot.

“You’ll have to ask him that.” She put the mug down and began clicking her fingernails. “Some baloney about it being a test of loyalty to the company. He and the other patsy were in line for the same promotion, and your dad would lose out if the other guy went along and he didn’t.” Click, click, click. “David says he would have looked like a milquetoast if he didn’t do it. If you ask me, he did it because he’s a milquetoast.” Click, click. “But,” she sneered, “I don’t understand how these things work.” Click.

Anger and contempt wafted in the air around her, souring the smell of the hot chocolate. I couldn’t blame her. She had good reason to be angry and contemptuous. What I didn’t appreciate at the time was that she used anger and contempt as anesthetic, so she wouldn’t feel the fear.

I felt the fear, though, in my chest and neck, hard and cold. “Will this other guy pay the loan?”

“David says no. He’s like us, no money.” She looked off to the side and seemed absent for a moment. “Years and years. No money.”

“What happens if we can’t pay the loan?”

She got up and walked to the sink, rinsed out the mug, drenched the dishcloth, wrung it out. I thought she wasn’t going to answer my question. Then she leaned on the counter, her face pale and furrowed.

“I don’t know, Jonathan. We might lose the house. We might lose everything. I may have to get a job. You’ll have a lot more responsibility around here. I don’t know if David and I will stay together. I just don’t know.”

I looked out the window. The sun was melting the snow fast and the gutters dripped as if it were pouring rain. Elevation to adulthood suddenly didn’t seem so peachy.

“And Jonathan,” she added. “Don’t tell Jamie about any of this. He’s a lot more fragile than you.”

Jamie? Fragile? Strong, stubborn, obtuse Jamie? I thought of him as about as fragile as a block of wood.

“Promise me, Jonathan. Promise me you won’t tell Jamie.”

* *

I look at the photo my father took of Jamie and me in the backyard, coated with melting white snow, our wet faces smiling, our eyes squinting against the glaring sunlight. My high school graduation portrait, taken less than a year later, is lying on the floor at my feet. In it, my hair is shaggy and my face has the same expression as the guy with the pitchfork in American Gothic. I look like a different person.

I kept my promise. I never told Jamie. As I lie down on the sagging, musty mattress, I wipe dust from my lips with the back of my hand, and say, “You shouldn’t have told me.”