In The Garden Of The North American Martyrs (15 page)

It was raining, not hard but drearily. The air had a chill on it and as he circled the house Wharton walked into the mist of his own breathing. Two swallows skimmed the meadow behind the house, dipping and wheeling through the high grass. They did not break their pattern as he walked by them, yellow rubber boots glistening, and passed into the shadow of the tall trees.

He realized that he had not been in these woods for almost a month. He had been afraid to walk in his own land. He still was. “Go away!” he shouted, walking among the straight wet trunks of trees: “Go away!”

There were still clumps of snow lying everywhere, gray and crystalline and impacted with brown needles. The branches of pine and fir and spruce were tipped with sweet new growth. Stirred by the rain, the soil gave off an acid smell, like a compost heap. Wharton stepped under a sugar pine to catch his breath and scrape some of the mud off his boots. They were so heavy he could hardly lift them.

He heard another shot; it came from the direction of the pond and seemed to crash beside him. “Listen!” Wharton yelled. “I've got a rifle too and I'll use it! Go away!” Wharton thought that he was capable of doing what he said, if he had brought the weapon and had known how to work it. He had felt foolish and afraid for so long that he was becoming dangerous.

He walked toward the pond. The banks were ringed with silver birches and he leaned against one of these. The brown water bristled with splashing raindrops. He caught a motion on the surface of the pond, a rippling triangle like an arrowhead with a dark spot at its point. Wharton assumed that it was a duck and stepped out on a small jetty to get a better look.

Suddenly the creature raised its head and stared at Wharton. It was a beaver, swimming on its back. Its gaze was level and
unblinking. Its short front legs were folded over its gently rounded belly, reminding Wharton of a Hogarth engraving of an English clubman after a meal. The beaver lowered its head into the pond and then its belly disappeared and its paddle-like tail swung in a wide arc and cracked flat against the surface of the water. The birches around the pond squeezed the sound and made it sharp and loud, like a rifle going off.

Wharton turned and went back to the house and explained everything to Ellen and George. He made breakfast while they dressed, and afterwards they all walked down to the pond to look at the beaver. Along the way Wharton slipped and fell and when he tried to stand he fell again. The mud was on his face and even in his hair. Ellen told him that he ought to take a roll in the mud every day, that it would be the making of him.

George reached the bank first and shouted, “I see him! I see him!”

 

The beaver was old and out of place. A younger beaver had driven him away from his lodge, and during the thaw he had followed a seasonal stream, now gone dry, up to the pond.

When Vernon heard about the beaver he took his rifle back and went to the pond and shot him. Wharton was outraged, but Vernon insisted that the animal would have destroyed the birches and fouled the bottom of the pond, killing the plants and turning the water stagnant. George's biology teacher agreed.

Ellen left at the end of the week. She and Wharton wrote letters, and sometimes, late at night, she called him. They had good talks but they never lived together again. A few days after she left, George's friend Rory turned on him and threw his books and one of his shoes out the schoolbus window, with the help of another boy more to his liking.

 

But Wharton, standing in the warm rain with his family that morning, did not know that these things would come to pass. Nor did he know that the dog Ulysses would someday free him
from the odious Trapper Pierre, or that George would soon—too soon—put on muscle and learn to take care of himself. The wind raised small waves and sent them slapping up against the jetty, so that it appeared to be sliding forward like the hull of a boat. Out in the pond the beaver dove and surfaced again. It seemed to Wharton, watching him move in wide circles upon the water, that the creature had been sent to them, that they had been offered an olive branch and were not far from home.

M
y mother read everything except books. Advertisements on buses, entire menus as we ate, billboards; if it had no cover it interested her. So when she found a letter in my drawer that was not addressed to her she read it. “What difference does it make if James has nothing to hide?”—that was her thought. She stuffed the letter in the drawer when she finished it and walked from room to room in the big empty house, talking to herself. She took the letter out and read it again to get the facts straight. Then, without putting on her coat or locking the door, she went down the steps and headed for the church at the end of the street. No matter how angry and confused she might be, she always went to four o'clock Mass and now it was four o'clock.

It was a fine day, blue and cold and still, but Mother walked as though into a strong wind, bent forward at the waist with her feet hurrying behind in short, busy steps. My brother and sisters and I considered this walk of hers funny and we smirked at one another when she crossed in front of us to stir the fire, or water a plant. We didn't let her catch us at it. It would have puzzled her
to think that there might be anything amusing about her. Her one concession to the fact of humor was an insincere, startling laugh. Strangers often stared at her.

While Mother waited for the priest, who was late, she prayed. She prayed in a familiar, orderly, firm way: first for her late husband, my father, then for her parents—also dead. She said a quick prayer for my father's parents (just touching base; she had disliked them) and finally for her children in order of their ages, ending with me. Mother did not consider originality a virtue and until my name came up her prayers were exactly the same as on any other day.

But when she came to me she spoke up boldly. “I thought he wasn't going to do it any more. Murphy said he was cured. What am I supposed to do now?” There was reproach in her tone. Mother put great hope in her notion that I was cured. She regarded my cure as an answer to her prayers and by way of thanksgiving sent a lot of money to the Thomasite Indian Mission, money she had been saving for a trip to Rome. She felt cheated and she let her feelings be known. When the priest came in Mother slid back on the seat and followed the Mass with concentration. After communion she began to worry again and went straight home without stopping to talk to Frances, the woman who always cornered Mother after Mass to tell about the awful things done to her by Communists, devil-worshipers, and Rosicrucians. Frances watched her go with narrowed eyes.

Once in the house, Mother took the letter from my drawer and brought it into the kitchen. She held it over the stove with her fingernails, looking away so that she would not be drawn into it again, and set it on fire. When it began to burn her fingers she dropped it in the sink and watched it blacken and flutter and close upon itself like a fist. Then she washed it down the drain and called Dr. Murphy.

 

The letter was to my friend Ralphy in Arizona. He used to live across the street from us but he had moved. Most of the letter
was about a tour we, the junior class, had taken of Alcatraz. That was all right. What got Mother was the last paragraph where I said that she had been coughing up blood and the doctors weren't sure what was wrong with her, but that we were hoping for the best.

This wasn't true. Mother took pride in her physical condition, considered herself a horse: “I'm a regular horse,” she would reply when people asked about her health. For several years now I had been saying unpleasant things that weren't true and this habit of mine irked Mother greatly, enough to persuade her to send me to Dr. Murphy, in whose office I was sitting when she burned the letter. Dr. Murphy was our family physician and had no training in psychoanalysis but he took an interest in “things of the mind,” as he put it. He had treated me for appendicitis and tonsilitis and Mother thought that he could put the truth into me as easily as he took things out of me, a hope Dr. Murphy did not share. He was basically interested in getting me to understand what I did, and lately he had been moving toward the conclusion that I understood what I did as well as I ever would.

 

Dr. Murphy listened to Mother's account of the letter, and what she had done with it. He was curious about the wording I had used and became irritated when Mother told him she had burned it. “The point is,” she said, “he was supposed to be cured and he's not.”

“Margaret, I never said he was cured.”

“You certainly did. Why else would I have sent over a thousand dollars to the Thomasite mission?”

“I said that he was responsible. That means that James knows what he's doing, not that he's going to stop doing it.”

“I'm sure you said he was cured.”

“Never. To say that someone is cured you have to know what health is. With this kind of thing that's impossible. What do you mean by curing James, anyway?”

“You know.”

“Tell me anyway.”

“Getting him back to reality, what else?”

“Whose reality? Mine or yours?”

“Murphy, what are you talking about? James isn't crazy, he's a liar.”

“Well, you have a point there.”

“What am I going to do with him?”

“I don't think there's much you can do. Be patient.”

“I've been patient.”

“If I were you, Margaret, I wouldn't make too much of this. James doesn't steal, does he?”

“Of course not.”

“Or beat people up or talk back.”

“No.”

“Then you have a lot to be thankful for.”

“I don't think I can take any more of it. That business about leukemia last summer. And now this.”

“Eventually he'll outgrow it, I think.”

“Murphy, he's sixteen years old. What if he doesn't outgrow it? What if he just gets better at it?”

Finally Mother saw that she wasn't going to get any satisfaction from Dr. Murphy, who kept reminding her of her blessings. She said something cutting to him and he said something pompous back and she hung up. Dr. Murphy stared at the receiver. “Hello,” he said, then replaced it on the cradle. He ran his hand over his head, a habit remaining from a time when he had hair. To show that he was a good sport he often joked about his baldness, but I had the feeling that he regretted it deeply. Looking at me across the desk, he must have wished that he hadn't taken me on. Treating a friend's child was like investing a friend's money.

“I don't have to tell you who that was.”

I nodded.

Dr. Murphy pushed his chair back and swiveled it around so he could look out the window behind him, which took up most
of the wall. There were still a few sailboats out on the Bay, but they were all making for shore. A woolly gray fog had covered the bridge and was moving in fast. The water seemed calm from this far up, but when I looked closely I could see white flecks everywhere, so it must have been pretty choppy.

“I'm surprised at you,” he said. “Leaving something like that lying around for her to find. If you really have to do these things you could at least be kind and do them discreetly. It's not easy for your mother, what with your father dead and all the others somewhere else.”

“I know. I didn't mean for her to find it.”

“Well.” He tapped his pencil against his teeth. He was not convinced professionally, but personally he may have been. “I think you ought to go home now and straighten things out.”

“I guess I'd better.”

“Tell your mother I might stop by, either tonight or tomorrow. And James—don't underestimate her.”

 

While my father was alive we usually went to Yosemite for three or four days during the summer. My mother would drive and Father would point out places of interest, meadows where boom towns once stood, hanging trees, rivers that were said to flow upstream at certain times. Or he read to us; he had that grownups' idea that children love Dickens and Sir Walter Scott. The four of us sat in the back seat with our faces composed, attentive, while our hands and feet pushed, pinched, stomped, goosed, prodded, dug, and kicked.

One night a bear came into our camp just after dinner. Mother had made a tuna casserole and it must have smelled to him like something worth dying for. He came into the camp while we were sitting around the fire and stood swaying back and forth. My brother Michael saw him first and elbowed me, then my sisters saw him and screamed. Mother and Father had their backs
to him but Mother must have guessed what it was because she immediately said, “Don't scream like that. You might frighten him and there's no telling what he'll do. We'll just sing and he'll go away.”

We sang “Row Row Row Your Boat” but the bear stayed. He circled us several times, rearing up now and then on his hind legs to stick his nose into the air. By the light of the fire I could see his doglike face and watch the muscles roll under his loose skin like rocks in a sack. We sang harder as he circled us, coming closer and closer. “All right,” Mother said, “enough's enough.” She stood abruptly. The bear stopped moving and watched her. “Beat it,” Mother said. The bear sat down and looked from side to side. “Beat it,” she said again, and leaned over and picked up a rock.

“Margaret, don't,” my father said.

She threw the rock hard and hit the bear in the stomach. Even in the dim light I could see the dust rising from his fur. He grunted and stood to his full height. “See that?” Mother shouted: “He's filthy. Filthy!” One of my sisters giggled. Mother picked up another rock. “Please, Margaret,” my father said. Just then the bear turned and shambled away. Mother pitched the rock after him. For the rest of the night he loitered around the camp until he found the tree where we had hung our food. He ate it all. The next day we drove back to the city. We could have bought more supplies in the valley, but Father wanted to go and would not give in to any argument. On the way home he tried to jolly everyone up by making jokes, but Michael and my sisters ignored him and looked stonily out the windows.

Things were never easy between my mother and me, but I didn't underestimate her. She underestimated me. When I was little she suspected me of delicacy, because I didn't like being thrown into the air, and because when I saw her and the others working themselves up for a roughhouse I found somewhere else to be. When they did drag me in I got hurt, a knee in the lip, a
bent finger, a bloody nose, and this too Mother seemed to hold against me, as if I arranged my hurts to get out of playing.

Even things I did well got on her nerves. We all loved puns except Mother, who didn't get them, and next to my father I was the best in the family. My speciality was the Swifty—“‘You can bring the prisoner down,' said Tom condescendingly.” Father encouraged me to perform at dinner, which must have been a trial for outsiders. Mother wasn't sure what was going on, but she didn't like it.

She suspected me in other ways. I couldn't go to the movies without her examining my pockets to make sure I had enough money to pay for the ticket. When I went away to camp she tore my pack apart in front of all the boys who were waiting in the bus outside the house. I would rather have gone without my sleeping bag and a few changes of underwear, which I had forgotten, than be made such a fool of. Her distrust was the thing that made me forgetful.

And she thought I was cold-hearted because of what happened the day my father died and later at his funeral. I didn't cry at my father's funeral, and showed signs of boredom during the eulogy, fiddling around with the hymnals. Mother put my hands into my lap and I left them there without moving them as though they were things I was holding for someone else. The effect was ironical and she resented it. We had a sort of reconciliation a few days later after I closed my eyes at school and refused to open them. When several teachers and then the principal failed to persuade me to look at them, or at some reward they claimed to be holding, I was handed over to the school nurse, who tried to pry the lids open and scratched one of them badly. My eye swelled up and I went rigid. The principal panicked and called Mother, who fetched me home. I wouldn't talk to her, or open my eyes, or bend, and they had to lay me on the back seat and when we reached the house Mother had to lift me up the steps one at a time. Then she put me on the couch and played the
piano to me all afternoon. Finally I opened my eyes. We hugged each other and I wept. Mother did not really believe my tears, but she was willing to accept them because I had staged them for her benefit.

My lying separated us, too, and the fact that my promises not to lie any more seemed to mean nothing to me. Often my lies came back to her in embarrassing ways, people stopping her in the street and saying how sorry they were to hear that——. No one in the neighborhood enjoyed embarrassing Mother, and these situations stopped occurring once everybody got wise to me. There was no saving her from strangers, though. The summer after Father died I visited my uncle in Redding and when I got back I found to my surprise that Mother had come to meet my bus. I tried to slip away from the gentleman who had sat next to me but I couldn't shake him. When he saw Mother embrace me he came up and presented her with a card and told her to get in touch with him if things got any worse. She gave him his card back and told him to mind his own business. Later, on the way home, she made me repeat what I had said to the man. She shook her head. “It's not fair to people,” she said, “telling them things like that. It confuses them.” It seemed to me that Mother had confused the man, not I, but I didn't say so. I agreed with her that I shouldn't say such things and promised not to do it again, a promise I broke three hours later in conversation with a woman in the park.

It wasn't only the lies that disturbed Mother; it was their morbidity. This was the real issue between us, as it had been between her and my father. Mother did volunteer work at Children's Hospital and St. Anthony's Dining Hall, collected things for the St. Vincent de Paul Society. She was a lighter of candles. My brother and sisters took after her in this way. My father was a curser of the dark. And he loved to curse the dark. He was never more alive than when he was indignant about something. For this reason the most important act of the day for him was the reading of the evening paper.