America America (20 page)

A
T
H
AVERFORD,
Holly and I were spending almost all our days and nights in each other’s company, and our sophomore year we finally took the bus to Memphis for me to meet her family. This was over Easter break. By that point, I should add, I hadn’t been home for any length of time since the summer I graduated from Dunleavy. I’d come back from Philadelphia at Christmas my first year of college, but only for a few days, and I’d spent that summer in an apartment at school, working in a bookstore and continuing the weekly discussion meetings Holly had organized around campus. Saline was simply too fraught for me by then, not only from what had occurred there, but also because of what I was trying to make of myself at school.

The Steens lived in a small brick house in a tidy block on the western edge of the city. The neighborhood ran down a hill onto flats that ended at the Mississippi, and when we stepped out of the dilapidated cab that had taken us in from the bus station, the smell of river mud was in the air. There was something about that. Holly sniffed, too, and made a face. Then she gathered herself and we walked up the concrete drive to the door. She knocked. There was no answer. I was holding both of our bags, and after a while I set them down. Then the door opened.

It was Mrs. Steen. “Lordy, Lordy,” she said. “They have arrived!” She was solid looking. Not fat, exactly, but stout, and no taller than Holly. Much of her appearance was softened by her puffed cheeks and an elaborately set hairdo, but she had a broad, eager face in which I immediately saw Holly’s own—especially the eyes, with their darkened, excitable stare. They were animated in the same way as Holly’s, too, glancing here and there across the porch but then fixing intently on my own, just as her daughter’s had at the duck pond. The same forceful brown irises, too. I must say the resemblance was disconcerting. Mrs. Steen coughed loudly into her elbow, then stepped out the door and hugged Holly. When that was done she took another step onto the porch and hugged me, too. She smelled of cooking. “Come in,” she said, “you poor tired souls. Come in. Come in.” Before I could stop her, she had picked up both the bags.

Inside, she handed me a glass of lemonade that she’d already poured—maybe this was why she’d taken so long to get to the door—then without asking proceeded to show me through the whole house, which didn’t take long. It wasn’t much different from the one I’d grown up in myself. A tidily kept living room. Work boots by the back door. A TV in the den with two recliners in front of it, one a little nicer than the other. A framed piece of needlepoint above the kitchen sink that said “Welcome To Our Home.” A set of bookshelves that held photographs and dishes but not books. The bedrooms were down a hall, and she set down my bag in the one that had belonged to Holly’s stepbrother. There was nothing in the room but a bed and a dresser. No chair. No rug. No shade on the window.

All the way down on the Trailways bus, Holly had been warning me: her parents hadn’t had an education; they didn’t listen to music; they didn’t read. Her father could be gruff; her mother could be simple. Now I washed up in the tiny bathroom and came back out to see them, and when I arrived in the kitchen her father was there, too, standing halfway in the storm door with a mug in his hand. He was red-faced and bald, wearing coveralls with oil stains on them. The room stunk of cigarettes. He turned to Holly and said, “He ain’t so tall as you said.”

“Clem, this is Corey Sifter,” said Mrs. Steen.

“Nice to meet you, sir.”

He gulped from the mug and set it down hard on the table. “Like-ways, I guess,” he answered. Then he said, “Back for supper,” and continued out the door.

I knew at that moment how difficult it was going to be. The door snapped shut on its closer, and when I turned and looked I saw the typical, charming determination in Holly’s eyes. She blinked a couple of times and then smiled. Her mother began tidying up the kitchen, which was already clean.

If we’d gone to my house instead, things might have been different. My father didn’t read books, either—not in those days, at least—and he was always running out the door to jobs; but even then he could talk to people who did read, and there was a fundamental openness to his disposition that I’ve since found again and again among those who make their livings with their minds. The next night at dinner, Holly mentioned the Eakins show that we’d seen in Philadelphia, and Mr. Steen looked up from his mashed potatoes and said, “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

That was by far the worst moment of our trip. When I snuck into her bedroom that night to see her, I found her sobbing quietly in her childhood bed. I doubt my own father knew who Eakins was, either. But I know he wouldn’t have said that.

The rest of our time was pleasant enough. On the Saturday before Easter we went to the Peabody Hotel for tea and to see the ducks, and in the afternoon we walked along the river. Mr. Steen didn’t appear that evening for dinner, and when it was time to go back to school on Sunday, it was Holly’s mother who took us to the bus. Just before I boarded she drew me to her in a hug and said, “We’re so glad to have you in the family.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Steen,” I said.

For a few weeks, Holly and I made a joke about it. When she accidentally knocked a paperweight off our history professor’s mantle one night during a seminar, I said it to her—“We’re so glad to have you in the family”—and when I overwatered the potted ficus in her dorm room so that most of its leaves fell off, she said it back to me.

“Thank you, Mrs. Steen,” I replied.

T
HE
C
HICAGO
T
RIBUNE
IS A
R
EPUBLICAN PAPER
—Dewey Defeats Truman!—but one Saturday when I came in with firewood I found Liam Metarey reading it, and I must have realized something from his expression. This was soon after I’d started coming home from Dunleavy every weekend to work. In my days in that house I’d had plenty of opportunities to see items of confidential importance, but that afternoon, for the first and only time in my life, I took advantage of one of them. I came back after lunch, when he was out walking among the oaks, and I took a look at his desk.

The piece wasn’t on the front page, but the headline was:
NEW YORK SENATOR IN STATE PROBE
. The article itself was buried in the national section, and it said nothing except that sources from the New York State Police had revealed that Senator Bonwiller was to be questioned in a local highway incident.

Then the story disappeared. I looked at every copy of the
Tribune
that month, and at every copy of all the New York papers and all the California papers, too, but I didn’t see it again. With my parents—and then later in the teachers’ lounge at school—I watched Walter Cronkite every night; but nothing was mentioned about it there, either. It certainly didn’t make the
Courier-Express
, which I read all the way through in the library now, every morning. The story simply vanished.

“S
ON?”
I was being shaken awake. “Son?”

It was Mr. Clayliss again.

“Son. A phone call for you—I’m afraid—another call.”

“What time is it?”

“It’s late, son. Come on. Shhh. Come.”

He had a coat for me this time. “Here,” he said. “It’s cold out.” We descended the main stairs and crossed the commons toward his office, our steps clicking on the ice, but then we continued beyond it all the way around to the rear of the main building, where the headmaster’s residence stood. My feet felt heavy. At the door I brushed my shoes on the mat. But he urged me on. Inside, his wife was in a robe at the kitchen table. She had a pot of tea in front of her, and when I came in she slid a steaming cup across to me and pointed to the opposite chair. I sat down. The cup was china and there was a silver spoon in the saucer. Mr. Clayliss brought the phone over from the counter, holding out the earpiece. I picked it up. The wall clock, an alpine scene with pine trees for hands, said 4:32. I suppose I’ll always remember that.

“Cor?” I heard my father say. His voice was thin. “Cor? Are you there?”

FIVE

I

I
CAN PICTURE HIM,
earlier that night. Out on his call, running an auger in a waste pipe. He whistles as he works—“My Darling Clementine,” maybe “Bridgit O’Malley.” Carting up the motor and the heavy winder from the basement of a Metarey rental, turning to smile as the family thanks him on the stairs; then out to the side yard where the shared main line continues through to the street. “’Tis a Bright Golden Day on the Meadow.” A bite of cold in the air. There’s a cleanout here, too, and he knows he can do a better job by running the auger again to ream the long roots that are in every pipe in the neighborhood. So he does. It’s dark now. A dusting of snow picking up the moon. He sends the blade out forty feet to the drip line of the big Norway maple at the road. An extra few minutes but worth the effort. At this hour he gets time and a half anyway—but he would do it even if he didn’t get a penny. That’s how he is. My mother will have a bath ready for him when he gets home, doesn’t matter what time—so he might as well do it right. “Danny Boy,” maybe, because it gives him a sweet melancholy. When he’s finished, he stops at Flann’s for a pint of bitters—the song’s put him in the mood—and he talks to the bartender he’s known all his life and to a table of union men happy over their new contract, then goes to the pay phone at the door. A little late: he’s always courteous that way. He’s feeling something. The brace of the winter air. The tinge of the melody.

It rings in the kitchen, but no one answers.

He hangs up, drops in another dime.

T
HAT EVENING
she’s had the first inkling. The usual headache—she’s used to them by now—but this time it’s on her the instant she gets up from her nap. Maybe it even wakes her. There’s something different to it now. Hard to describe. The pain’s gone lower, come up underneath, closer to the side of her head. Has it done that before? She stops and looks out the kitchen window, toward the east. That’s where her son is at school. How can she put it? Her body doesn’t feel exactly hers: things at a distance. The moon rising now behind the house. The leprechaun clock above the door. Even looking at the hands she can’t say what time it is. That’s funny. Her arms half-given to someone else. More the right than the left. She shudders for a moment. Lifts them both. Yes—more the right. Opens and closes the fingers. That’s better. Puckers her lips. Says aloud a piece that comes to her somehow out of thin air, from her high school play. Gwendolen Fairfax.
Oh! I hope I am not that. It would leave no room for developments!
Her drama teacher, Mr. Ferrari, standing at the stage edge, imploring:
You ARE! You ARE!

Makes her laugh. She even remembers Donny Tarlow’s part, the fat boy with his piercing crush on her, always moving closer than he had to. His jeans that smelled like a barn. Turned out he became a veterinarian.
I am in love with Gwendolen! I have come up to town expressly to propose to her!

A vet!

She wouldn’t have been able to stand the smells.

Then comes the first blow. The feeling in her arm dropping away. A shudder over the shoulder and scalp. Then the swooning. The floor pitching. She tries to right herself. Grabs the counter. Use the other arm, silly. Lift! Silly girl! Up, Anna Bainbridge. Up! The floor, wrapping her. All over, how can it do that? Cheeks on the cold linoleum. Funny, funny! God, it’s turning me over. The black and white. The squares. A wave turning me over.

T
HE FUNERAL WAS HELD
in St. Joseph’s parish, and the reception was at the Metareys’. I’ll always be grateful that they did that. My mother’s sisters had spoken in the church, and so had my father, and I’d sat in the first row with a hundred friends behind me, thinking not of how I’d lost my mother but of how I’d lost all of
them
now; of how their lives at Roosevelt, and in the lime quarries, and at the beaches on the lake, were nothing at all like my new one at Dunleavy, and would never be again. Odd thoughts, I suppose.

But all I know is that I felt no grief. Not then. I felt only their eyes on me.

Glioblastoma multiforme.
Those were the words for it. That morning I’d found a page about it, sitting on our counter. I don’t think my father had even read it.

A brain tumor.

Under
symptoms
:

Headache

Personality change

It had bled finally, sometime in the evening, while my father was out on his call. That’s what Dr. Leary told us. It wouldn’t have taken long. Maybe a few moments. And she wouldn’t have felt much pain. “I want you to know that,” he said. “Granger. Corey. I want you both to know that.”

He was at the reception, and after he said this he moved away, vanishing into the crowd of jackets.

Clara and Christian were next to me. Clara kept going to the food table and bringing me plates of little things—crackers and cheese, tiny shrimp on toothpicks, ginger cookies. It was the first time she’d ever been kind to me. Both of them stayed at my side, and Mrs. Metarey acted the way my mother herself would have, leading me from one group to the next in the drawing room, touching me low on the back whenever the conversation faltered, moving me along. My mother had lots of friends, and they all were there, too, setting their cakes and roasts on the long table. Men from the union were there with my father. That’s where Mr. Metarey was, too, I could see—he was never far from Dad.

Late in the afternoon, when the crowd had finally thinned and Christian and Clara and her mother had left me alone, I stepped from the house and walked down to the fly pools. The grounds were almost empty now. A skin of new ice lay over the water, as clear as glass, and when the back door opened I followed the reflection of a man in uniform walking down from the house. He stopped a few feet behind me on the gravel but didn’t say anything. I had to turn around.

“Wow,” I said. “You’re back.”

“Special delivery.” We shook hands.

“How’d you get here?”

“C-130. Nha Trang to Fort Drum, with a stop to pee. Five-day R and R. Happened to be stateside when I heard, so I came right down.” He lowered his head. “I’m really sorry, Corey.”

“I appreciate it. I appreciate your coming. Giving up a day of leave.”

“It’s good to be back. Just nice to be chilly again, tell you the truth. Sorry it had to be like this.” He cleared his throat. “My sisters still taking care of you?”

“They are.”

“Nobody jumping in the water?”

“Nothing like that.”

“Nobody gouging any eyes?”

“Eyes are still fine.”

“The other word for right?”

“Starboard.”

“Well, good,” he said. “You’re ahead of when I left you then.” He shook his head. “I didn’t know your mother, Corey. But she had to be a good woman. Anybody can see it.”

“Thanks, Andrew.”

He looked down.

Up at the house, I saw Mr. McGowar’s stone-colored face watching us out the window.

“And what’s it like where
you
are?” I asked.

“Oh, not terrible. Not terrible.” He looked across the ice. “Long way from any action, at least. Rear medical base. Some bad-off guys in the beds but by the time I see ’em they’re cleaned up and stitched up. And drugged up. Army Medical Corps now.” He shrugged. “Things are going to hell in that country and everyone knows it—but all I see are white sheets. All the blood’s up front.”

Later on, of course, I found out that he wasn’t telling me the truth. Or that he wasn’t telling me all of it, at least. Maybe because of the occasion.

Finally, he shook my hand and took his leave. The door closed behind him at the house, and a moment later it opened again and Mr. McGowar appeared. He was in his black suit. I started up to him but he waved me back with his long hands, then started down himself. He walked as high-legged as he always did, throwing his comically long arms this way and that for balance as he chose his steps in the thin snow, like a daddy longlegs coming down the hill. Then he was on the gravel. It was an awkward hug.

“How are you, Mr. McGowar?”

He opened his mouth and a breathy sound came out. He pointed to his throat and shook his head.

“That’s okay, Mr. McGowar. Nice to just stand out here for a minute and look at the land. Beautiful, isn’t it?”

With his foot he was pawing at the egg-sized face of a rock that was coming up through the gravel. He took out his pad.

YOR MOM WUS BUTFL TU

I had to laugh. And why that suddenly made me cry—for the only time in a decade, as it turned out—why that made me cry for the only time until I was a father myself, I’ll never know.

ITS OK

He set the pad back in his pocket and then stood there in his funeral suit, patting me on the shoulder and working at the rock with his shoe.

“M
AY
I
ASK YOU SOMETHING
, T
RIESTE?”

“Of course.”

“You’re not going to give it back, then?”

“Oh—you’ve been thinking about that.”

“As a matter of fact, I have.” I was going about my words carefully. “Do you ever think it might make me wonder—well—do you ever think it might make me wonder whether I can trust you?”

“On the contrary, sir,” she said without hesitation. “It ought to show you that you
can
.”

I regarded her. She had that look again—the one-line-ahead-of-you look. We were alone in the office. It was after seven and she still hadn’t finished her piece. Now she was tapping the space bar on her keyboard.

“If I gave it back, sir,” she said, “you wouldn’t—” She looked up, almost impatiently. “Well, I mean you wouldn’t
have
anything on me.”

“Oh, I see,” I said. “That’s interesting, Trieste. Interesting logic.”

“I’ve been thinking about it.”

She went back to typing.

“Trieste, may I ask you something else?”

“Fire away, sir.”

“What do the other kids think of you?”

“Which other kids?”

“The kids at school. What do they make of someone like you?”

“The kids at my school are my brothers and sisters, Mr. Sifter.”

She typed a few more words.

“How do you mean that?”

“Literally.”

I regarded her.

“I’m homeschooled,” she said. “Remember?”

“Oh, right. I forgot. Well what’s
that
like then?”

“Homeschooling?” She took a sip from her carton of milk. Then she wrote some more words. “It’s using the whole buffalo.”

“Okay.”

“You eat the meat. You make clothes out of the hide. You make glue out of the hooves. You make a necklace out of the teeth. That’s homeschooling.”

“Interesting.”

“To a point.”

“And what about—well—a social life?”

“You mean—
boys
?”

“Well, that’s one thing. Yes, boys.”

“Not ironic enough. At least not the ones around here.”

“What does that mean exactly? Not ironic enough. My daughters say it, too.”

“Means they’re cutting with the dull edge of the knife, Mr. Sifter. Rooting for the Bills. Trolling for the prom date. I’ve given up on boys. At least till college.”