“Be,” I added uncertainly.)
LaRoue existed for us as a gently tolerated and lonesome guest. She was fat where we were thin, blonde where we were dark. The thick pelts of our eyebrows shrieked across our faces, some legacy of the Quebec fur trade. Hers were faint and wispy, like an aerial shot of grain. She was older, separate, glum, periodically in some state of convalescence the details of which our parents did not reveal. Claude and I had staked out a separate contract. When people were gone, we explored their rooms. We’d get home from school early, our father still at work at BPM downtown — or “downstreet,” as we used to say; at the mill he was head of the forest management department. Our mother would be at some steering committee meeting for the United Women Proposing the Beautification of Horsehearts — racking up minute notes about petunias and elms with Hilma Johnston, Thelma LaRose, Betty Dreiser, Lou-Anne Gerard.
LaRoue, after school, was usually at the Saddle and Riding Club.
And so Claude and I stepped in and went through stuff: my father’s slacks hung by the cuffs from the top dresser drawer; his old wooden shoehorns like puppets on the closet floor. My mother’s drawers full of sachets and girdles, and in the clutter on the dresser top the bright coral lipsticks and Avon colognes and old tinted photographs of herself when she was in college and had won Ankle Contests. In this way we gathered information about our parents; we were true and successful spies, for our parents never gathered much about us, we believed, nor cared to, in the way that was so often the case in large families of that time. My father could not even recognize me in a group, couldn’t pick me out in the annual class picture—“Dad, that’s not me, that’s Cynthia Odekerk!”—never recognized us on his way to work when he passed my brother or me in a group of children heading to or from school. “Who?” “Cynthia Odekerk!” He walked, hatless and lost in thought, down through the village toward the river, where the mill was—“Hello, hello!” we’d call, and he would wave to us in a general, uninterested way, still moving with his big shoes and long stride, not really even looking up. “There’s your father,” a friend might say. Or, “That’s your father?” as baffled as we.
I suppose we felt less bullied by his neglect than by his attentions, which tended to take the form of correcting us when we hit a wrong note on a Brahms piano intermezzo. “Aow!” he would yowl. “C-sharp, C-sharp, C-sharp!”
If we cried, he would say firmly, “Stanch and starch the mush!”
He started calmer conversations with us when it had to do with the crossword puzzle he was doing; he would call us to his side in the den, if he needed the name of a TV show he’d never seen. Once you’d given him the name of the show, he would ignore you again, turn back to the puzzle, and leave you standing there talking about the show a little, the various characters in it, what had happened to them, and what you thought would happen to them next. You’d be standing there talking to no one.
Nonetheless, we adored him. If he didn’t know us, love us, even recognize us, it wasn’t because he was invested elsewhere in other children. We had no rivals for his affection, except perhaps Brahms, Dvořák, the daily crossword, and our mother — and even then, not often her. In his iconic way our father remained very much ours. And in the long shadows of his neglect, we fashioned our own selves, quietly improvised our own rules, as kids did in America, in the fatherless fifties and sixties. Which was probably why children of that time, when they grew up, turned out to be such a shock to their parents.
No doubt some part of us, of course, remained obediently reduced and cowed by our lack of a deeper possession of him, by the inattention, no matter how we thought we had resourcefully accommodated it. But these were lessons and deformities perhaps more conspicuous in adulthood than in childhood, where we were often obstreperous and eager for battle; we had faces and jeers and impudent hand signals, our eyes rolling, our hands quacking at our sides when a grown-up spoke. But later, for years, I referred meekly to any strongly felt and informed opinion, or weeks and weeks of my own research, as “my two cents’ worth.”
C-sharp, C-sharp, C-sharp!
In public my grown brother muted his own fiercely forged self to a collection of apologies and excuses and if-you-don’t-minds. Somehow we fell back from our original willful midnight constructions into ordinary, passive positions, mysteriously and in no time. Still we believed we could resume the other whenever we pleased, the Hieronymus Bosch, the artful splay, the Zappa arabesques, waiting for someone to walk in and see us like that and at last know who we really were deep down.
C-sharp!
Our father was unquestionably an impressive, solitudinous, autocratic figure. He had grown up in a family of cellists, Germanophiles, had even visited Germany in 1930, when he was ten; he had seen Hitler in a hotel lobby and was dazzled. But when all that celebrity and fine music played itself out so badly in history, he retreated with his passions, became a Baptist, listened, transported, to symphonies and tried to remember his children’s names. We loved him, in the inexplicable, snobbish way of children: he was the tallest and most intelligent father in all of Horsehearts — this was generally acknowledged — and that seemed at the time all we or any other child ever really needed of a dad. We took our cues from our mother, who admired him to the point of debilitation; she was “brought up to do that with men,” as she herself eventually came to declare. But we, as kids, did likewise. Sometimes I can still make my eyes well up — like a kid’s game of fainting at will — thinking of how much I wanted him to like me. Though any adult can do that, make themselves wail like babies for the love that as children they had desired so, sought so, distorted themselves so to get but never got. I once rode eighty blocks with a cabbie who kept saying over and over, “And he never hugged me, and he never kissed me,” until by Eighth Street he was weeping and I had to get out. It was unbearable.
Once, when I was nineteen, I gave my father a Father’s Day card meant for uncles and neighbors. “You’ve Been Like a Father to Me,” it read. His distance from us had become something of a family joke, but to him, staring at that card, it was unutterable and a shock; I don’t know what I was thinking — that he’d laugh too? — I don’t know, but the look of hurt that came across his face stunned me, confused me, sent me out for a striped tie and a different card: one with a demented sort of glitter and the word “Dad” writ large.
Years later, however, I grew angry; taking inventory of all he’d said and done, I came to think of him, bitterly, as a kind of Nazi. I was studying history. When I married a Jew, I waited for him to say something vague and dark, but he didn’t. He was courteous and formal, not uncharming. My husband, upon meeting my father, encountering for the first time his towering blend of Fred MacMurray, Fred Gwynne, Fred Astaire — all the Freds — whispered to me in a panicked way, “Your father is such a Father. An über-Father. The mother of all fathers.”
“Yeah,” I said, smiling. “The mother of all fathers.”
Sils was not really in love with her boyfriend, Mike, I was sure of it. I could tell it. He was tiring her out. You’d see them together: he all grinning and bursting, all raring to go, like an Irish setter, a tense dog, too much energy shining at the mouth, and she, exhausted from the night before, used up a little, unable to keep pace with this nineteen-year-old boy and his apartment, his revving motorcycle, his plans. Shortly after he met Sils he’d moved from Albany to Horsehearts to be near her. He worked highway construction, and the highway construction, too, had moved north. In the moist cool green of the early mornings, the humidity just beginning to catch the sun and promise heat, she would unstraddle his Harley, out in front of Storyland, when he dropped her off for work, and one could see her attempt to make the shift into day, into light, a Cinderella in reverse. She had a habit, when someone else was around watching, of raising her eyebrows and pointing at him when he spoke, and then in the nick of time returning her face to normal when he looked over at her. Or not. Sometimes he caught the edge of it, a wild bird that had disappeared down her throat, that she had madly swallowed to spare him, and he would stare at her.