“You bring back how the red-winged blackbird shrieked …”
Mr. Early gave me the poems by the poet with the goofy name, whose affection for his daughter made me sad.
Once I told Mr. Early that my father had wanted to be a poet, and Mr. Early said, “That’s where you get it from. All the more reason you should,” he said, by which he meant I had to do for my father what he could not now do for himself.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Yes.”
“I don’t …”
“You do.”
FATHER
THE PREPOSTEROUS BLOSSOMS, CANDY pink and stupidly profuse, were in the night light strangely come as from another planet. But about time was what Aunt Frances said, “Spring? We never thought we would see it!”
Wash the windows then. Ruck the garden. Scatter seed. The dots of yellow in the wood, the spiked, green start of things: snowdrop and daffodil and crocus.
My father never came back — no matter what he may have promised. He took off one morning in the car we called the Mouse: gray, rounded fenders, a grill that looked like a snout and a decoration of chrome banding the hood for whiskers. The Mouse was a harmless name for a harmless looking car, and it killed him; or it was the water that took his life though he drove to it. The rolled-up windows imploded, sounding the glassy dazzle and rush of water as my father passed down and down in what might have been a lie, this story of how he died. I never did see him again. He was elsewhere buried after he was found.
Late spring, hard ground, then from out of nowhere nodding flowers and loaded branches.
FATHER
“EVERYTHING CONNECTED BY ‘AND’ AND ‘and,’” the poet writes on travel; I have some lines by heart. In the dark of the car, they occur; the words flare, and I see the driver’s neck. Hairs curled over a collar, a creased skin — white or reddened — always damp is how the driver’s neck looks to me. I will not touch him there — any more than I would touch my father there or the men I took for fathers. A father’s breathing, I remember, a breathing close and wet in my ear. The beard merely scorches.
My father.
My father is a name and the black oily roots of hair in damp, creased places. My father is a cutout — stark, defined — a standard man as seen by me from behind.
I am seated behind the driver and considering his neck and rising water rising to his neck and the kind of cold it must be creeping upwards with the water.
The passing scenery is passing.
ARTHUR
ALL THOSE YEARS I was always ready when the time came to leave, yet Arthur teased. He said, “I thought you wanted to stay.” Aunt Frances, too; my Aunt Frances said, “Now you’re sure? We have room.” Nonna was fretting when I left her, kneading the blanket’s silk banding even as she turned to be fed.
I was glad to be the one leaving — for camps and schools and college — but my intention was always to come back.
III
THE BIG HOUSE
OLD DEAD HANDS PRAYERED, a draped arrangement of draping skin, a fleshy hem colored to look alive by the gentle mortician, Nonna was in the casket, and I was at her side, yet “the glazing eyes shunned my gaze,” or that was what I was remembering about her as we drove to her interment.
Arthur had driven us — Uncle Billy, Aunt Frances, me — through a gardener’s rain that gullied the tent as we stood at the site, Nonna’s gravesite, brighter greens, June, plate-sized peonies beaten in the downpour, the coffin shiny.
Who can forget? some said. Description of the too long-alive, now dead. The homily for Nonna went on and on, and Arthur had to wait.
Who would have guessed there was so much left to say?
At the Big House everyone I saw chewed with his mouth open. At the Big House Nonna’s lawyer sleeked through the room, nodding at stories, saying, “Yes, she was an amazing woman, yes, indeed.”
Indeed, indeed sounded like my mother when she was being formal, but my mother was not here. Mother was in California, the state she called her home. “I can be a kook and not stand out,” she often repeated when we spoke on the phone.
Uncle Billy had not spoken to Mother in a while, and he excused himself for keeping my mother uninformed, saying, “Your mother would be too upset,”
By the time I told her, Mother said it was too late for her.
“I need weeks to get ready,” Mother said, “and besides Nonna’s been dead for years.”
Aunt Frances said, “Your mother’s not interested in other people anyway,” which wasn’t true, I thought; because Mother wanted to know about Aunt Frances, yes, and Uncle Billy. Mother wanted to know about them especially and asked me, she asked me often now that we spoke any day of the week and not just Sundays — Mother asked me, “How are your aunt and uncle spending their money these days?”
But how would I know? I didn’t live here anymore; I recognized very few faces. Mrs. Greene’s, Mrs. Greene’s daughter, Arthur, of course, the Nordstruckers, Miss Pearl of Miss Pearl’s (still alive!), the Miller sisters, Mr. and Mrs. Vanvogel. Uncle Billy and Aunt Frances moved among these and other friends they said were Nonna’s but who were, in fact, theirs, as who was left alive that Nonna knew?
Death, a death mound, like those lumps in the earth Aunt Frances had pointed to as burial grounds for the Indians. Of course, Indians, Uncle Billy’s found and collected arrowheads from the Potawatomi! Next to the case of sprung-winged bugs and other artifacts. Buckskinned men powwowing lake paths in soft-soled moccasins, they and their squaws and their sick-to-death children were turned into lumps in the earth where Aunt Frances had pointed. Nonna and Nonna’s friends — even the absent O’Boyle — and Arlette and my father were turned into hillocks I drove past, touring the countryside because I couldn’t stay at Uncle Billy’s house watching the people eat with their mouths wide open — no. I didn’t want to talk to Nonna’s lawyer, so I took the second car and drove to where I could sit off the road and smoke.
I smoked and thought of Nonna and how she had outlived my dread of her dying.
I smoked and wondered at how green it was, June, green and cold, a bed of iced lettuce, and in the distance down the hill, the lapis-blue of lakes, one after another, as though the land were a lake and the lakes, blue stone, and skipped. How was it possible to be cheerful, and yet I was; I was oddly gleeful and merrily giant-stepping into my life.
Nonna left me money — thank you, Nonna! — and a large diamond ring and a double strand of pearls. I bought an apartment in a brownstone with most of what she gave me. West Seventy-Six, in the city where sunlight is expensive.
NONNA SPEAKS
HOW DID I KNOW except that I knew and had always known what Nonna would say. How Alice came early and fast — rudely. The way she was. July 10, 1928, a scorcher. “Tubs of dry ice ringed my bed, and the smoke was impossible to see through. I could feel people around me, but I couldn’t see them. Midwife and helper, and someone at my ear, fanning, but no one else. Although I didn’t really look, I didn’t open my eyes, I didn’t want to see who was in attendance. Feeling was enough. I hadn’t wanted another child; and if I had to, not a daughter. I don’t like women, and they were all around me when Alice was born, ahead of time, loudly. The way she was. Forward and boisterous from the beginning. Even as a little girl, she had precocious ideas about beauty. Once Alice cut off the heads of my peonies and floated the blossoms in saucers. Saucers, and more saucers, everywhere. The house felt like a pond I was swimming through. Her father said then, and for years after, that Alice was simply artistic. Well, maybe she was, but the way she used the downstairs phone closet as a sketch pad was no amusement to me. Drawings of high-heeled feet, a bit of shoulder and neck, a woman’s face on the baseboard corners isn’t my idea of funny. I am from the old school. Stiff, phony — I heard her clichés, the repellent voice she used to say, my mother. But the stories she started about her father’s affairs were the most hurtful. The redhead on the train, the woman Alice said was really her mother, and the story that she had been adopted and brought to the house and wasn’t mine. Hah! She should have a taste of a midwife’s stitchery! The coarse repair of what that girl tore. Alice is a cruel and hurrying person; the miseries that befell her she brought on herself. She was only eighteen when she met your father. He was years older with a college degree and experience of war. His father was dead. He was a sad sack even then. How old was he — thirty? But your mother insisted. ‘What’s your rush?’ we asked. Alice! She should have known better than to drive with a man who couldn’t drive; but even after the second accident, after he had broken her face in a dozen places, she let him take the wheel. It was his fault she lost her good looks. We all said, leave him. Poor boy. Moping around the house on a weekend without even the energy to dress. And what was there to be sad about? The man didn’t have to work, mind you. He could go on sputtering poetry. Alice had money. Her father had made sure of that, but Alice should have married someone like her daddy. Her problem was she wanted. Alice wanted, wanted, wanted, on and on. She was expensive. She was spoiled. Her father had made sure of that. Alice thought if she filled a husband’s closets with expensive suits he would wear them and make her a fortune. I told her she was a fool, but she wanted a family right away. She said not in a million years would I ever understand. Alice was mean — her father was mean — and she deserved what she got. I can’t say I was sorry, but her husband was unhappy; he needed help; he shouldn’t have been left home to drink