All Those Vanished Engines (18 page)

For many years she lived a life that was disordered and uncertain. But by the time I knew her, when she was an old woman, that had changed. This was thanks to forces outside her control—her sister Annie had married a lawyer who defended the German government in an international case, the Black Tom explosion of 1916. An American gunboat had blown up in the Hudson River amid suspicions of sabotage.

The lawyer's name was Howard S. Harrington. Afterward, on the strength of his expectations, he gave up his practice and retired to Ireland, where he bought an estate called Dunlow Castle. Somewhere around here I have a gold whistle with his initials on it, and also a photograph of him and my great-aunt, surrounded by a phalanx of staff.

But he was never paid. America entered the First World War, and in two years the kaiser's government collapsed. Aunt Annie and Uncle Howard returned to New York, bankrupt and ill. My grandmother took them in, and paid for the sanatorium in Saranac Lake where he died of tuberculosis, leaving her his debts. In the family this was considered unnecessarily virtuous, because he had offered no help when she was most in need. Conspicuously and publicly he had rejected her husband's request for a job in his law firm, claiming that he had “committed the only crime a gentleman couldn't forgive.”

She had to wait forty years for her reward. In the 1970s a West German accountant discovered a discrepancy, an unresolved payment which, with interest, was enough to set her up in comfort for the rest of her life.

At that time she was director of the Valentine Museum in Richmond. Some of her father's household silver was on display there in glass cases, along with various antebellum artifacts, and General Jeb Stuart's tiny feathered hat and tiny boots. She was active in her local chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. She used to come to Rhode Island during the summers and make pickled peaches in our kitchen. I was frightened of her formal manners, her take-no-prisoners attitude toward children, and her Southern accent, which seemed as foreign to me as Turkish or Uzbeki. She had white hair down her back, but I could only see how long it was when I was spying on her through the crack in her bedroom door, during her morning toilette. She'd brush it out, then braid it, then secure the braids around her head in tight spirals, held in place with long tortoiseshell hairpins.

She wore a corset.

One night there was a thunderstorm, and for some reason there was no one home. She appeared at the top of the stairs, her hair undone. She was breathing hard, blowing her cheeks out as she came down, and then she stood in the open door, looking out at the pelting rain. “Come,” she said—I always obeyed her. She led me out onto the front lawn. We didn't wear any coats, and in a moment we were soaked. Lightning struck nearby. She took hold of my arm and led me down the path toward the sea; we stood on the bluff as the storm raged. The waves were up the beach. Rain wiped clean the surface of the water. For some reason there was a lot of phosphorescence.

She had hold of my arm, which was not characteristic. Before, she'd never had a reason to touch me. Her other hand was clenched in a fist. The lenses of her glasses were streaked with rain. The wind blew her white hair around her head. She pulled me around in a circle, grinning the whole time. Her teeth were very crooked, very bad.

2. T
HE
G
LASS
H
OUSE

It occurs to me that every memoirist and every historian should begin by reminding their readers that the mere act of writing something down, of organizing something in a line of words, involves a clear betrayal of the truth. Without alternatives we resort to telling stories, coherent narratives involving chains of circumstance, causes and effects, climactic moments, introductions and denouements. We can't help it.

This is even before we start to make things up. And it's in spite of what we already know from our own experience: that our minds are like jumbled crates or suitcases or cluttered rooms, and that memory cannot be separated from ordinary thinking, which is constructed in layers rather than sequences. In the same way history cannot be separated from the present. Both memory and history consist not of stories but of single images, words, phrases, or motifs repeated to absurdity. Who could tolerate reading about such things? Who could even understand it?

So our betrayal of experience has a practical justification. But it also has a psychological one. How could we convince ourselves of progress, of momentum, if the past remained as formless or as pointless as the present? In our search for meaning, especially, we are like a man who looks for his vehicle access and ignition cards under a streetlamp regardless of where he lost them. What choice does he have? In the darkness, it's there or nowhere.

But stories once they're started are self-generating. Each image, once clarified, suggests the next. Form invents content, and so problems of falsehood cannot be limited entirely to form. A friend of mine once told me a story about visiting his father, sitting with him in the VA hospital the morning he died, trying to make conversation, although they had never been close. “Dad,” he said, “there's one thing I've never forgotten. We were at the lake house the summer I was twelve, and you came downstairs with some army stuff, your old revolver that you'd rediscovered at the bottom of a drawer. You told Bobby and me to take it out into the woods and shoot it off, just for fun. But I said I didn't want to, I wanted to watch
Gilligan's Island
on TV, and you were okay with that. Bobby went out by himself. And I think that was a turning point for me, where I knew you would accept me whatever I did, even if it was, you know, intellectual things—books and literature. Bobby's in jail, now, of course. But I just wanted you to know how grateful I was for that, because you didn't force me to conform to some…”

Then my friend had to stop because the old man was staring at him and trying to talk, even though the tubes were down his throat. What kind of deranged psychotic asshole, he seemed to want to express, would give his teenage sons a loaded gun of any kind, let alone a God-damned .38? The lake house, as it happened, was not in Siberia or fucking Wyoming, but suburban Maryland; there were neighbors on both sides. The woods were only a hundred yards deep. You could waste some jerkoff as he sat on his own toilet in his own home. What the fuck? And don't even talk to me about Bobby. He's twice the man you are.

Previously, my friend had told variations of this childhood memory to his wife and his young sons, during moments of personal or family affirmation. He had thought of it as the defining moment of his youth, but now in the stark semiprivate hospital room it sounded ridiculous even to him. And of course, any hope of thoughtful tranquillity or reconciliation was impeded, as the old man passed away immediately afterward.

Everyone has had experiences like this. And yet what can we do, except pretend what we say is accurate? What can we do, except continue with our stories? Here is mine. It starts with a visit to my grandfather, my father's father, sometime in the early 1960s.

His name was Edwin Avery Park, and he lived in Old Mystic in eastern Connecticut, not far from Preston, where his family had wasted much of the seventeenth, the entire eighteenth, and half of the nineteenth centuries on unprofitable farms. He had been trained as an architect, but had retired early to devote himself to painting—imitations, first, of John Marin's landscapes, and then later of Georgio de Chirico's surrealist canvases; he knew his work derived from theirs. Once he said, “I envy you. I know I'll never have what you have. Now here I am at the end of my life, a fifth-rate painter.” His eyes got misty, wistful. “I could have been a third-rate painter.”

He showed no interest in my sisters. But I had been born in a caul, the afterbirth wrapped around my head, which made me exceptional in his eyes. According to my father, this was a notion he had gotten from his own mother, my father's grandmother, president of the New Haven Theosopical Society in the 1880s and '90s and a font of the kind of wisdom that was later to be called “new age,” in her case mixed with an amount of old Connecticut folklore.

When we visited, my grandfather was always waking me up early and taking me for rambles in old graveyards. Once he parked the car by the side of the road, and he—

No, wait. Something happened first. At dawn I had crept up to his studio in the top of the house and looked through a stack of paintings:
Ghosts Doing the Orange Dance. The Waxed Intruder. Shrouds and Dirges, Disassembled.

This was when I was seven or eight years old. I found myself examining a pencil sketch of a woman riding a horned animal. I have it before me now, spread out on the surface of my desk. She wears a long robe, but in my recollection she is naked, and that was the reason I was embarrassed to hear the heavy sound of my grandfather's cane on the stairs, why I pretended to be looking at something else when he appeared.

His mother, Lucy Cowell, had been no larger than a child, and he also was very small—five feet at most, and bald. Long, thin nose. Pale blue eyes. White mustache. He knew immediately what I'd been looking at. He barely had to stoop to peer into my face. Later, he parked the car beside the road, and we walked out though a long field toward an overgrown structure in the distance. The sky was low, and it was threatening to rain. We took a long time to reach the greenhouse through the wet, high grass.

Now, in my memory it is a magical place. Maybe it didn't seem so at the time. I thought the panes were dirty and smudged, many of them cracked and broken. Vines and creepers had grown in through the lights. But now I see immediately why I was there. Standing inside the ruined skeleton, I look up to see the sun break through the clouds, catch at motes of drifting dust. And I was surrounded on all sides by ghostly images, faded portraits. The greenhouse had been built of large, old-fashioned photographic exposures on square sheets of glass.

A couple of years later, in Puerto Rico, I saw some of the actual images made from these plates. I didn't know it then. Now, seated at my office desk, I can see the greenhouse in the long, low, morning light, and I can see with my imagination's eye the bearded officers and judges, the city fathers with their families, the children with their black nannies. And then other, stranger images: my grandfather had to swipe away the grass to show me, lower down, the murky blurred exposure of the horned woman on the shaggy beast, taken by firelight, at midnight—surely she was naked there! “These were made by my great-uncle Benjamin Cowell,” he said. “He had a photography studio in Virginia. After the war he came home and worked for his brother. This farm provided all the vegetables for Cowell's Restaurant.”

Denounced as a Confederate sympathizer, Benjamin Cowell had had a difficult time back in Connecticut, and had ended up by taking his own life. But in Petersburg in the 1850s, his studio had been famous—Rockwell & Cowell. Robert E. Lee sat for him during the siege of the city in 1864. That's a matter of record, and yet the greenhouse itself … how could my grandfather have walked that far across an unmowed field? The entire time I knew him he was very lame, the result of a car accident. For that matter, how could he have driven me anywhere when he didn't, to my knowledge, drive? And Cowell's Restaurant, the family business, was in New Haven, seventy miles away. My great-great-grandfather personally shot the venison and caught the fish. Was it likely he would have imported his vegetables over such a distance?

Middle-aged, I tried to find the greenhouse again, and failed. My father had no recollection. “He'd never have told him,” sniffed Winifred, my grandfather's third wife. “He liked you. You were born in a caul. He liked that. It was quite an accomplishment, he always said.”

Toward the end of her life I used to visit her in Hanover, New Hampshire, where they'd moved in the 1970s when she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. It was her hometown. Abused by her father, a German professor at Dartmouth, she had escaped to marry my grandfather, himself more than thirty years older, whom she had met in a psychiatric art clinic in Boston, a program run by his second wife. It surprised everyone when Winifred wanted to move home, most of all my grandfather, who didn't long survive the change. He had spent the 1930s in Bennington, Vermont, teaching in the college there, and had learned to loathe those mountains. In addition, I believe now, he had another, more complicated fear, which he associated with that general area.

Because of her illness, Winifred was unable to care for him, and he ended his life in a nursing home. He was convinced, the last time I saw him, that I was visiting him during halftime of the 1908 Yale-Harvard game. “This is the worst hotel I've ever stayed in,” he confided in a whisper, when I bent down to kiss his cheek. But then he turned and grabbed my arm. “You've seen her, haven't you?”

I didn't even ask him what he meant, he was so far gone. Later, when I used to visit Winifred in New Hampshire, she got in the habit of giving me things to take away—his paintings first of all. She'd never cared for them. Then old tools and odds and ends, and finally a leather suitcase, keyless and locked, which I broke open when I got home. There, in an envelope, was the drawing of the horned woman riding the horned beast.

There also were several packages tied up in brown paper and twine, each with my name in his quavering handwriting. I brought them to my office at Williams College and opened them. The one on top contained the first three volumes of something called
The Parke Scrapbook,
compiled by a woman named Ruby Parke Anderson: exhaustive genealogical notes, which were also full of errors, as Winifred subsequently pointed out. Folded into volume two was his own commentary, an autobiographical sketch, together with his annotated family tree. This was familiar to me, as he had made me memorize the list of names when I was still a child, starting with his immigrant ancestor in Massachusetts Bay—Robert, Thomas, Robert, Hezekiah, Paul, Elijah, Benjamin Franklin, Edwin Avery, Franklin Allen, Edwin Avery, David Allen, Paul Claiborne, Adrian Xhaferaj.…