VISUAL AID 1.0
The day she died is thin and insubstantial too, and though I think I remember Dad sitting in a white bedroom making strange, strangled noises into his hands, and everywhere the smell of pollen and wet leaves, I wonder if this is not a Forced Memory, born of necessity and “iron will.” I do remember looking out to the spot where her white Plymouth had been parked by the lawn-mower shed, and seeing nothing but oil drips. And I remember, for a few days, until Dad was able to rearrange his lecture schedule, our next-door neighbor picked me up from kindergarten, a pretty woman in jeans who had short red porcupine hair and smelled of soap, and when we pulled into our driveway, she wouldn’t immediately unlock the car, but gripped the steering wheel, whispering how sorry she was — not to me, but to the garage door. She’d then light a cigarette and sit very still as the smoke squirmed around the rearview mirror.
I recall, too, how our house, once cumbersome and wheezing as a rheumatoid aunt, seemed tense and restrained without my mother, as if awaiting her return so it could feel comfortable to croak and groan again, allow the wooden floors to grimace under our hurried feet, let the screen door spank the door frame 2.25 times with every opening, consent to the curtain rods belching when an uncouth breeze barged through a window. The house simply refused to complain without her, and so until Dad and I packed up and left Oxford in 1993, it remained trapped in the ashamed, tight-lipped deportment required for Reverend Monty Howard’s dull sermons at the New Presbyterian Church, where Dad dropped me every Sunday morning while he waited in the parking lot of the McDonald’s across the street, eating hash-browns and reading The New Republic.
However not really remembered, you might imagine how a day like September 17, 1992, could float around in one’s mind when a particular teacher couldn’t remember one’s name and finally called one “Green.” I thought of September 17 at Poe-Richards Elementary, when I’d snuck into the murky stacks of the library to eat my lunch and read War and Peace (Tolstoy, 1865–69) or when Dad and I were driving a highway at night, and he’d lapsed into such strict silence, his profile looked carved on a totem pole. I’d stare out the window, at that black doily silhouette of passing trees, and experience an attack of the What Ifs. What If Dad hadn’t picked me up from school and she’d come to get me and, knowing I was in the backseat, made particular effort not to fall asleep — unrolling the window so her glossy hair flew all over the place (exposing her entire right ear), singing along with one of her favorite songs on the radio, “Revolution” by the Beatles? Or What If she hadn’t been asleep? What If she’d deliberately veered to the right at 80 mph crashing through the guardrail, colliding, head-on, with the wall of tulip poplar trees nine meters from the shoulder of the highway?
Dad didn’t like to talk about that.
“That very morning your mother had talked to me of plans to enroll in a night class, Intro to Moths of North America, so rid yourself of such dour thoughts. Natasha was the victim of one too many butterfly nights.” Dad gazed at the floor. “A sort of moth moon madness,” he added quietly.
He smiled then and looked back at me, where I was standing in the door, but his eyes were heavy, as if it required strength to hold them to my face.
“We’ll leave it at that,” he said.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
We traveled.
Due to the surprisingly high sales of The Powers That Be (compared to the other page-turners published by Harvard University Press that year, including Currency Abroad [Toney, 1987] and FDR and His Big Deaclass="underline" A New Look at the First100Days [Robbe, 1987]), his impeccable twelve-page curriculum vitae, the frequent appearance of his essays in such respected, highly specialized (yet little-read) journals as International Affairs and American Policies and Daniel Hewitt’s Federal Forum (not to mention a nomination in 1990 for the heralded Johann D. Stuart Prize for American Political Science Scholarship), Dad had managed to make enough of a name for himself to be a perennial visiting lecturer at political science departments across the country.
Mind you, Dad no longer wooed top-tiered universities for their esteemed multinamed teaching positions: the Eliza Grey Peastone-Parkinson Professor of Government at Princeton, the Louisa May Holmo-Gilsendanner Professor of International Politics at MIT. (I assumed, given the extreme competition, these institutions weren’t mourning Dad’s absence from their “tight-knit circle of incest”—what he called highbrow academia.)
No, Dad was now interested in bringing his erudition, international fieldwork experience and research to the bottom tiers (“bottom-feeders,” he called them in a Bourbon Mood), the schools no one had ever heard of, sometimes not even the students enrolled in them: the Cheswick Colleges, the Dodson-Miner Colleges, the Hattiesburg Colleges of Arts and Sciences and the Hicksburg State Colleges, the universities of Idaho and Oklahoma and Alabama at Runic, at Stanley, at Monterey, at Flitch, at Parkland, at Picayune, at Petal.
“Why should I waste my time teaching puffed-up teenagers whose minds are curdled by arrogance and materialism? No, I shall spend my energies enlightening America’s unassuming and ordinary. ‘There’s majesty in no one but the Common Man.’” (When questioned by colleagues as to why he no longer wished to educate the Ivy League, Dad adored waxing poetic on the Common Man. And yet, sometimes in private, particularly while grading a frighteningly flawed final exam or widely-off-the-mark research paper, even the illustrious, unspoiled Common Man could become, in Dad’s eyes, a “half-wit,” a “nimrod,” a “monstrous misuse of matter.”)
An excerpt from Dad’s personal University of Arkansas at Wilsonville Web page (www.uaw.edu/polisci/vanmeer):
Dr. Gareth van Meer (Ph.D. Harvard University, 1978) is the Visiting Professor of Political Science for the 1997–1998 school year. He hails from Ole Miss, where he is Chair of the Department of Political Science and Director of the Center for the Study of the United States. He is interested, broadly, in political and economic revitalization, military and humanitarian involvement, and post-conflict renewal of Third World nations. He is currently working on a book entitled The Iron Grip, about African and South American ethnic politics and civil war.
Dad was always hailing from somewhere, usually Ole Miss, though we never went back to Oxford in the ten years we traveled. He was also always “currently working on The Iron Grip,” though I knew as well as he did that the Grip—fifty-five legal pads filled with unintelligible handwriting (much of it water damaged), stored in a large cardboard box labeled in black permanent marker, GRIP — had not been worked on, currently or otherwise, in the last fifteen years.
“America,” Dad sighed as he drove the blue Volvo station wagon across another state line. Welcome to Florida, the Sunshine State. I flipped down the visor so I wasn’t blinded. “Nothing like this country. No indeedy-o. Really is the Promised Land. Land of the Free and the Brave. Now how about that Sonnet number 30? You didn’t finish. ‘When to the sessions of sweet silent thought / I summon up remembrance of things past.’ Come on, I know you know this one. Speak up. ‘And with old woes…’”