Peaceable Kingdom (9 page)

“Give up all what?” Eli said. “The snow? The cold? We might move to California.
I
might move to California…

The word “California” startled Grady. He had offered to move there with Harry, but Barbara said what she needed now was to concentrate all her energies on getting well. When Grady tried to imagine California, where he had never been, he saw an opaque blue rectangle, a shiny, swimming-pool blue. What else awaited him there? Barbara with her childish handwriting, her crackpot healing theories, that gyroscope point of pain in her head around which her whole life whirled.

“There’s a woman there,” Eli said. “Naturally she’s in television. In L.A.” He waited for Grady to make the slightest nod or noise to indicate: Go on. But Grady couldn’t respond. In fact, he wanted desperately to keep Eli from telling him this, from unburdening his secret heart to him, a stranger he’d never met till tonight and would probably not see again. Grady felt he had to say something, not out of politeness or sympathy, but out of necessity. It seemed to him that a chasm had opened between him and Eli, a hole he must somehow fill before Eli jumped in with the story of his love. The silence reminded him of those hushed moments just before he began his puppet shows, moments he was often tempted to prolong, to see how long they could last—a temptation that always dizzied him with that same mix of fear and seduction he felt on the edge of a cliff.

Eli was getting ready to speak when Grady said, “I used to live in California. In San Francisco. This was ages ago. I was staying with friends. Every night I ate at this Vietnamese greasy spoon down the block, just a few Formica tables, but they had terrific food. The waitress spoke maybe fifty words of English, but she was so beautiful I didn’t care. Pretty soon I noticed I was thinking of her all the time. I began going later each night, imagining how I could ask her to come for a walk after work. I began to notice that when I walked in, she looked strained, as if she was looking for me; then she saw me and her face brightened. So one night we went for a walk up Clement Street. She took me to her room. We got into bed and began kissing. But a funny thing happened. I was nervous. I couldn’t…”

“Happens to everyone,” Eli said.

“She didn’t seem worried,” Grady went on. “She got up and got a letter from a drawer. An aerogram, postmarked Dayton, Ohio. ‘Please,’ she said, ‘read this.’ Clearly she meant aloud.

“‘Dear Ba,’ I read. ‘I love you very much. Every night I go to sleep thinking of what it was like to be with you in Hue. My mother is sick here, so I won’t be able to meet your plane when you get into San Francisco. I don’t know when I can get there, so here’s what to do. Every Saturday, at ten, go to Sutro Park and wait for me. You don’t have to wait long. I’ll be there the first Saturday after I get into town. I love you. I love you. Tom.’

“I said, ‘Do you know what this says?’ She smiled and shook her head no. And suddenly I felt I had to make her understand. It was Friday. Tomorrow this guy might be waiting in Sutro Park. ‘Come on,’ I said, and I took her downstairs where I’d seen some elderly Vietnamese women sitting on the stoop. I found one who spoke English and told her about the letter. She said something in Vietnamese and the girl answered and both of them laughed. The old woman said, ‘This is a very old letter. She has already met this boy, she doesn’t like him anymore. But she wanted you to read it aloud because she thought it would relax you to tell her a few times, ‘I love you.’”

After a silence Eli said, “Wow. What a story. Did it work?”

Grady nodded yes. It was like shaking himself awake. He woke up shocked to find himself here, standing beside Eli, having just told a made-up story about a woman he’d never met, a place he’d never been to, a love affair he’d never had—a story you only had to think about for a second to see it was full of holes.

“How was it?” Eli asked.

It took Grady a moment to realize that Eli meant his night with the Vietnamese girl. He didn’t know how to reply. He looked out the window, where now it was so dark that you couldn’t see the teenagers, or the snow, couldn’t see anything but the glowing green ball and the bright trails it left in the blackness on its high loopy arcs through the air.

“It was amazing,” he said.

N
OT LONG AGO I
happened to glance through a book on Renaissance painting. I saw the Ghirlandaio portrait of the old man and his grandson and immediately closed the book. After a while I turned back to the Ghirlandaio, and then I kept looking until, for a moment, I quite forgot where I was. I was remembering the year when that painting was on loan at the museum and my father took me to see it; remembering how, as a child, I couldn’t stop staring at the old man in the painting, at his bulbous grapey nose. And I could almost hear my father’s voice telling me once again that what the old man had—what made his nose look like that—was lupus erythematous.

My father was a doctor. He loved medicine and art and loved especially those places where the two seemed to him to coincide: paintings of saints curing lepers; Van Gogh with his digitalis-distorted color sense; Monet, whose retinal degeneration my father pronounced to have influenced his later works; and most of all astigmatic El Greco, his
View of Toledo
that we lingered before, gazing at the roofs and spires and nighttime sky that El Greco with his bad vision had seen and painted as squiggles. My father walked briskly through the museum, visiting his favorites as if he were making hospital rounds, and in my slippery party shoes I skated after him. The Ghirlandaio double portrait was my father’s idea of what art should be, and I was glad that it gave him such pleasure, that winter when nothing else did.

I remember that winter so clearly that I can say with both certainty and amazement: I never imagined that by the next year my parents would be divorced. It seems incredible now that they never argued in front of me. But it was also the very last year when I chose to take my parents’ word for what was real and what wasn’t. I believed life was as they told me, as it seemed, and what seemed to be happening on those Sundays was that my father wanted to go to the museum and my mother didn’t, and she argued against his taking me because this was 1955, at the height of the polio scare, and she was afraid I would catch it in the damp overheated galleries.

But polio, my father said, was a summer disease, and besides, the European painting wing wasn’t exactly the community swimming pool or a movie theater showing
Dumbo
to a thousand runny-nosed kids. He made it seem silly to worry about this, and only much later did I understand that this was not my mother’s real fear. I have often wondered if, at some time on those trips, my father and I might have run into the woman he would soon leave my mother for. How would I have known? She was no one a child would have noticed in a museum full of adults, and even if my father had seen her and reacted, I don’t think I would have noticed that either. I was eleven, and the drama of my life was happening elsewhere.

Several times, as we stood before the Ghirlandaio, I asked the same question: “Could someone die from that?” And my father, his love for the subject outweighing his customary awareness of what he had already told me and I had obviously not paid attention to, said, “Well, not immediately.” There was a secret conversation beneath this, what he and I knew and did not say: my sixth-grade teacher, Miss Haley, had pretty much the same nose. The reason I kept asking was that—though I couldn’t have admitted it, not even to myself—I half hoped Miss Haley might die of it, if not instantly then sometime during the school year.

It is difficult now to remember how large our teachers loomed. Each grade teacher was our fate for a year that lasted so much longer than any year does now; they were the only future we believed in. We collected the rumors, the gossip, the reputations, studied their passions and personality tics for clues to our future happiness. What you heard about Miss Haley was that her nose looked that way because she was a Christian Scientist and wouldn’t go to a doctor, and that after a while you got used to it. We heard that you did Ancient Egypt, that she had strong, inexplicable, immutable loves and hates—either she loved or hated you, and you knew which it was right away.

From the first day of school it was perfectly clear that Miss Haley hated me, and sixth grade unrolled before me in all its grim, unendurable length. Miss Haley was a stocky, energetic elderly woman who drew fearlessly on the blackboard in very long straight lines that I recognize only now for the marvels they were. By lunch we felt as if hers were the most normal nose in the world, and we realized the truth of what the former sixth-graders had told us. Something in her presence made it clear that her nose was not to be spoken of—not even among ourselves, in private—and it truly was remarkable, how deeply we took this to heart. We were at an age when we watched very carefully—to see what you said and kept quiet, what you showed and concealed—and this was especially crucial in regard to things of the body.

Many times that first day she repeated, “Of course, when we study Egypt…” and she drew an enormous pyramid on the far side of the board. Each day, she explained, one well-behaved student would be called up to write his or her name in a brick. The Good Behavior Pyramid was much too young for sixth grade, when anything that smacked of the babyish embarrassed us beyond words. Even so, I longed—without hope—to write my name in a Good Behavior brick.

Miss Haley’s unfriendliness might simply have been the result of that chemical friction that sometimes springs up between teacher and student, so that nothing between them goes right. I was a sallow, skinny girl, alternately know-it-all and mopey—it certainly might have been that. It might have been that I was half Jewish and had a Jewish name in that small, suburban private school where hardly anyone did. Any of that seems more likely now than that Miss Haley disliked me for the reasons I thought—because she and my father (and by extension me) were opposites, because my father represented everything her religion was against, because my father smiled, compassionate and superior, when I told him about her being a Christian Scientist, and because on Sundays my father and I stood before the Ghirlandaio and discussed her disease.

She couldn’t have known that, but I imagined she did, and in fact was so certain of it that I never complained to my parents. Enough had begun to seem wrong at home without my adding that. I never suspected the truth—that my father had fallen in love and didn’t want to be, and fought it, while my mother waited helplessly for him to decide—no more than I recognized our trips to the museum as almost the only things he could still do for comfort and without guilt. Still I sensed danger, some mood that hung over our breakfasts and dinners, some drifting of attention that made it necessary to repeat what we said to my father several times before he heard. I misread my mother’s attempts to charm him and make him laugh, her expecting me to do the same; briefly I worried that my father might be sick, or that he was losing his hearing. And I refused to bring home one more bit of bad tidings for my parents to think was their fault.

I, too, realized the difficulty and great importance of keeping my father interested—but I hesitated to say anything which might accidentally reveal my unhappiness at school. At meals, when my father asked what we were studying, I’d mumble something like “Egypt.”

“What about Egypt?” my mother would say.

“I don’t know,” I’d say. “Pyramids. The Pharaohs.”

“What about the pyramids?” said my father.

“I don’t know,” I’d say.

“
We’re
the guys who built the pyramids,” he’d say. “Actively
shlepped
the stones.” Then catching my mother’s eye he’d add, “On my side, that is. On your mother’s side, Cleopatra.”

Sundays, at the museum, my father often suggested a walk through the Egyptian wing. How it would have pleased him to read me the captions and hear what little I knew. There was so much we could have discussed—embalming techniques, anthrax powder, the ten plagues. But I feared that the artifacts themselves would somehow betray the only information that mattered: I’d never been called on to tell about Osiris being hacked up in chunks and thrown into the Nile, or to make a clay man for the funeral barge our class was constructing, or to fill in, with colored chalk, the scarab Miss Haley outlined each day on the board.

By then our class was launched on what Miss Haley called our little journey down the Nile, and when she pulled the heavy dark-green shades and showed us slides of temples and sarcophagi, I did feel just a bit rocky, as if we were floating past everything that I knew, and the dusty metallic smell of the projector became the salt, garbagey odor of river water and sand. Pretending to watch the slides, I stared at the dust motes streaming in that wedge of light until my eyes went out of focus and the classroom disappeared and a scary chill of aloneness startled me back to myself.

There was no one in whom I could confide; it would have been foolish to let my friends know I cared how much Miss Haley disliked me. We were at that age when much is secret, much is embarrassing, when certain questions—what to do with our shoulders and knees, and whether people like us—assume an intensity they will never have again. At that age, everyone and everything is love object, mirror and judge, and we go around frantically wasting ourselves on whatever is nearby.

On top of my other problems, that year I fell in love. This, too, I had no one to tell. It was one thing to love Elvis—all the girls loved Elvis except a few who were famous for
not
loving Elvis, and there were a couple of upper-school boys we all agreed were cute. But we were late bloomers; love was still something you did in a group, by consensus, and the consensus was that we hated sixth-grade boys.

But there was one I liked. His name was Kenny something. I remember that his last name changed between fifth and sixth grade, when his glamorous actress mother remarried—but I don’t remember either name. I have only the fuzziest sense of what he looked like—red hair in a spiky fifties crewcut—which is strange, because our love was so purely physical, so exquisitely located in those angular shoulders and knees, in our skins, in inches of distance between us. All we asked was to look at each other or brush, accidentally, his hip or his elbow grazing me as we ran out to the playground. This happened perhaps twice or three times a week; the rest of the time, I replayed our moment of contact. For days we didn’t look at each other. Then a weekend would pass; on Monday the looks and collisions began again. Everything was unspoken, potential, and in constant flux.