PART VII
One night when I was ten, in the year before we left town and moved to the farm at the bottom of the mountains, a man carrying a gun knocked on the front door of our house on Lewis Mountain Road, in Charlottesville. My father answered — he’ d been waiting for this visit — and the armed man, a literature professor, my father’s friend and colleague at the university, said hello. My father and mother had until that moment been fighting. It was a bad fight. My father thanked the man for coming and invited him in. The gun, as I remember, was a long-barreled revolver holstered on a coiled western-style gun belt that the man held in one hand. The gun hung at his side, down near his knees. He walked into the house, carrying the gun, and my father closed the door. I watched from above, from the dark landing at the top of the hallway stairs, and could see, looking down between the banister’s white railings, my father and his friend as they crossed the entryway into the living room, where the man said, “Hello, Lou.”
“Hello,” my mother said to him. He placed the gun belt on the coffee table beside her chair. Did my father mix our guest a cocktail? I had not yet learned to measure, over the course of a night, the predictive correlation, in my parents’ lives, between drinks and fights, though I’d become accustomed, during the years when my mother and father had been divorced — when she, my sister, and I lived in our one-story brick house on Eighth Street, in Tallahassee, Florida — to seeing my mother with her bourbon on the rocks.
We’d been a family of an incomplete sort, the three of us in that house, the house across the street from the church with its rusting steeple detached and laid on the ground. In my memory, the churchyard grass was patchy and weedy — not brazenly wild in the manner of a yard surrounding a derelict house, but unkempt. Was the church lacking funds for its own upkeep? Was that why the steeple lay abandoned on the ground?
On the other hand, I can remember that the churchyard was, in fact, tidy and well tended. The borders of the walkway leading from the street to the church doors were, it seems to me now—can seem to me now — neatly trimmed. Maybe weeds and tall grass grew only around the perimeter of the steeple itself, inside the narrow zone that could not safely or easily be reached by lawnmowers and edging tools. On Sunday mornings, a nicely dressed congregation gathered on the church’s mowed front lawn, and later, during the service, their singing could be heard coming from inside the building. It is possible that the weeds in my memory grew not in the pretty churchyard but on the vacant square of land adjacent to it, the roughed-up, improvised neighborhood playground on the other side of the recumbent steeple.
Then again, wasn’t the church itself as badly in need of paint as its amputated top? What sort of people went to that church, anyway? I was eight years old, then nine, and I climbed on their steeple, ran its length, jumped from it, and tumbled in the weedy, or, possibly, lush grass. The steeple was like the peeling hull of a boat that had years before been dragged inland and stripped of its teak and brass. Nowadays, I expect that I might find it there in the churchyard, were I to visit our old house in Tallahassee. Of course, this is unlikely. Almost forty years have passed since we left that town. I have not returned, and neither has my sister. In the late 1970s, our mother went back as a student, commuting from Miami in order to complete the work required for her doctorate. I do not remember her ever speaking about the house or the church or the steeple. And so, unlike other places where we lived either with or without our father, places which, for one reason or another, I have revisited — Sarasota, Miami, Charlottesville — that place, with its giant trees hung with Spanish moss, its smells of pine, its sand roads near the center of town, and its nearby lakes and slow-moving black rivers, exists for me with the power of a fantasy.
In this fantasy, a man not my father comes to visit my mother and take her to dinner and a movie. When he arrives for their date, two Chihuahuas leap from the passenger side of his car, tear across the yard, and chase our cat. Who is this man? Why is he here? What about our father in Virginia, to whom I write postcards saying, “Dear Dad, I am fine. How are you?” and which receive replies that read as pleas: Can’t I tell him something about my life? Won’t I tell my father what I am doing?
What am I doing? I am lying awake at night, sped up on amphetamines, fighting to breathe. I am playing the Beatles’ “Day Tripper” on pretend drums, with my friend John Covington faking guitar. I am trying to get the courage to leap from the high diving board at the Florida State University pool, and I am riding my red bicycle. I practice gymnastics with the Tallahassee Tumbling Tots, though I fail to progress past a cartwheel. I like a blond girl named Susan in my third-grade class, but she moves away. For years I will dream of finding her. Alone in my room, I build model ships and airplanes, impatiently spreading paint across the hulls, guns and fuselages after the models have been built, because I can’t wait to see them finished. I want my chair, my desk, the walls of my room painted orange, but it never happens. A fireman, his wife, and their son live in the house next door to us, and the son’s band, The Other Side, practices in their garage, and I go over and sit on a speaker. The room smells like burning electrical wiring. One after another, the band’s brothers and friends disappear into Vietnam. I am a Cub Scout. Our black-haired den mother lets us scouts hurl water balloons off the roof of her house at pedestrians walking by on the far side of a tall hedge. She has a son we never see, though we hear him playing a horn in an upstairs room. Down in the yard, we goof off and tackle each other, messing up our blue uniforms. One day, the Cub Scout powers-that-be fire our den mother, and soon I am standing in a treeless, suburban backyard learning slipknots, or sitting at a kitchen table painting candy canes onto a coffee cup for my mother. I know in my heart that something is wrong. I want my father to come back to us for good, instead of once each month. I am a No-Neck Monster in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof at the university theater. A sign on a bathroom door backstage forbids flushing the toilet during showtime, yet I manage to flush in spite of this, and the sound fills the theater. The following year, when I play Young Macduff, my picture is in the paper, accompanying a notice about the production. In the caption I am “little Donnie Antrim.” The photographer has asked me to scream, but I am too self-conscious to scream for the camera, yet try to fake mortal agony anyway, and so it appears in the newspaper that a freckled boy is laughing the laugh of the insane while a dagger is sunk into his back. Many years later, in New York, I will meet the man who played Macbeth. He is appearing as the monster in a downtown production of Frankenstein. He tells me that Lady Macduff is alive and well and living in Massachusetts.
Back in the fantasy, however, my sister and I are riding in the car with our parents. Our father has driven down from Virginia for one of my parents’ hostile weekends, and we have been visiting grandparents in Sarasota. Before returning to Tallahassee, we stop in Clearwater. At an aunt’s house, Terry and I get a surprise. The aunt, who can’t keep a secret, asks us how we feel about our parents’ decision to remarry. Are we excited? Are we happy? This is wondrous news to us, and we jump up and down and run around our aunt’s kitchen table and tug on our parents’ clothes and shout up at their faces, “Are you? Are you getting married? Are you?”