Canada (2 page)

My sister and I could easily see why my mother would’ve been attracted to Bev Parsons: big, plank shouldered, talkative, funny, forever wanting to please anybody who came in range. But it was never completely obvious why he would take an interest in her—tiny (barely five feet), inward and shy, alienated, artistic, pretty only when she smiled and witty only when she felt completely comfortable. He must’ve somehow just appreciated all that, sensed she had a subtler mind than his, but that he could please her, which made him happy. It was to his good credit that he looked beyond their physical differences to the heart of things human, which I admired even if it wasn’t in our mother to notice.

Still, the odd union of their mismatched physical attributes always plays in my mind as part of the reason they ended up badly: they were no doubt simply wrong for each other and should never have married or done any of it, should’ve gone their separate ways after their first passionate encounter, no matter its outcome. The longer they stayed on, and the better they knew each other, the better she at least could see their mistake, and the more misguided their lives became—like a long proof in mathematics in which the first calculation is wrong, following which all other calculations move you further away from how things were when they made sense. A sociologist of those times—the beginning of the ’60s—might say our parents were in the vanguard of an historical moment, were among the first who transgressed society’s boundaries, embraced rebellion, believed in credos requiring ratification through self-destruction. But they weren’t. They weren’t reckless people in the vanguard of anything. They were, as I said, regular people tricked by circumstance and bad instincts, along with bad luck, to venture outside of boundaries they knew to be right, and then found themselves unable to go back.

Though I’ll say this about my father: when he returned from the theater of war and from being the agent of whistling death out of the skies—it was 1945, the year my sister and I were born, in Michigan, at the Wurtsmith base in Oscoda—he may have been in the grip of some great, unspecified gravity, as many GIs were. He spent the rest of his life wrestling with that gravity, puzzling to stay positive and afloat, making bad decisions that truly seemed good for a moment, but ultimately misunderstanding the world he’d returned home to and having that misunderstanding become his life. Again it must’ve been that way for millions of boys, although he would never have known it about himself or admitted it was true.

Chapter 2

O
UR FAMILY CAME TO A STOP IN GREAT FALLS
, Montana, in 1956, the way many military families came to where they came to following the war. We’d lived on air bases in Mississippi and California and Texas. Our mother had her degree and did substitute teaching in all those places. Our father hadn’t been deployed to Korea, but been assigned to desk jobs at home, in the supply and requisition forces. He’d been allowed to stay in because he’d won combat ribbons, but hadn’t advanced beyond captain. And at a certain point—which happened when we were in Great Falls and he was thirty-seven—he decided the Air Force was no longer offering him much of a future and, having put in twenty years, he ought to take his pension and muster out. He felt our mother’s lack of social interests and her unwillingness to invite anyone from the base to our house for dinner may have held him back—and possibly he was right. In truth, I think if there’d been someone she admired, she might’ve liked it. But she never thought there would be. “It’s just cows and wheat out here,” she said. “There’s no real organized society.” In any case, I think our father was tired of the Air Force and liked Great Falls as a place where he thought he could get ahead—even without a social life. He said he hoped to join the Masons.

It was by then the spring of 1960. My sister, Berner, and I were fifteen. We were enrolled in the Lewis (for Meriwether Lewis) Junior High, which was near enough to the Missouri River that from the tall school windows I could see the shining river surface and the ducks and birds congregated there and could glimpse the Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Paul depot, where passenger trains no longer stopped, and up to the Municipal Airport on Gore Hill, where there were two flights a day, and down the river to the smelter stack and the oil refinery above the falls the city took its name from. I could even, on clear days, see the hazy snowy peaks of the eastern front, sixty miles away, running south toward Idaho and north up to Canada. My sister and I had no idea about “the west,” except what we saw on TV, or even for that matter about America itself, which we took for granted as the best place to be. Our real life was the family, and we were part of its loose baggage. And because of our mother’s growing alienation, her reclusiveness, her feeling of superiority, and her desire that Berner and I not assimilate into the “market-town mentality,” which she believed stifled life in Great Falls, we didn’t have a life like most children, which might’ve involved friends to visit, a paper route, Scouts and dances. If we fit in, our mother felt, it would only increase the chance we’d end up right where we were. It was also true that if your father was at the base—no matter where you lived—you always had few friends and rarely met your neighbors. We did everything at the base—visited the doctor, the dentist, got haircuts, shopped for groceries. People knew that. They knew you wouldn’t be where you were for long, so why bother taking the trouble to know you. The base carried a stigma, as if things that went on there were what proper people didn’t need to know about or be associated with—plus, my mother being Jewish and having an immigrant look, and being in some ways bohemian. It was something we all talked about, as if protecting America from its enemies wasn’t decent.

Still, at least in the beginning, I liked Great Falls. It was called “The Electric City” because the falls produced power. It seemed rough-edged and upright and remote—yet still was a part of the limitless country we’d already lived in. I didn’t much like it that the streets only had numbers for names—which was confusing and, my mother said, meant it was a town laid out by pinchpenny bankers. And, of course, the winters were frozen and tireless, and the wind hurtled down out of the north like a freight train, and the loss of light would’ve made anybody demoralized, even the most optimistic souls.

In truth, though, Berner and I never thought of ourselves as being from anywhere in particular. Each time our family moved to a new place—any of the far-flung locales—and settled ourselves into a rented house, and our father put on his pressed blue uniform and drove off to work at some air base, and my mother commenced a new teaching position, Berner and I would try to think that this was where we’d say we were from if anyone asked. We practiced saying the words to each other on our way to whatever our new school was each time. “Hello. We’re from Biloxi, Mississippi.” “Hello. I’m from Oscoda. It’s way up in Michigan.” “Hello. I live in Victorville.” I tried to learn the basic things the other boys knew and to talk the way they talked, pick up the slang expressions, walk around as though I felt confident being there and couldn’t be surprised. Berner did the same. Then we’d move away to some other place, and Berner and I would try to get situated all over again. This kind of growing up, I know, can leave you either cast out and adrift, or else it can encourage you to be malleable and dedicated to adjusting—the thing my mother disapproved of, since she didn’t do it, and held out for herself some notion of a different future, more like the one she’d imagined before she met our father. We—my sister and I—were small players in a drama she saw to be relentlessly unfolding.

As a result, what I began to care greatly about was
school
, which was the continual thread in life besides my parents and my sister. I never wanted school to be over. I’d spend as much time inside school as I could, poring over books we were given, being around the teachers, breathing in the school odors, which were the same everywhere and like no other. Knowing things became important to me, no matter what they were. Our mother knew things and appreciated them. I wanted to be like her in that way, since I could keep the things I knew, and they would characterize me as being well-rounded and promising—characteristics that were important to me. No matter if I didn’t belong in any of those places, I did belong in their schools. I was good at English and history and science and math—subjects my mother was also good at. Each time we picked up and moved, the only fact of life that made moving frightening was that for some reason I wouldn’t be allowed to return to school, or I would miss crucial knowledge that could assure my future and was obtainable nowhere else. Or that we’d go to some new place where there would be no school for me
at all.
(Guam was once discussed.) I feared I’d end up knowing nothing, have nothing to rely on that could distinguish me. I’m sure it was all an inheritance from my mother’s feelings of an unrewarded life. Though it may also have been that our parents, aswirl in the thickening confusion of their own young lives—not being made for each other, probably not physically desiring each other as they briefly had, becoming gradually only satellites of each other, and coming eventually to resent one another without completely realizing it—didn’t offer my sister and me enough to hold on to, which is what parents are supposed to do. However, blaming your parents for your life’s difficulties finally leads nowhere.

Chapter 3

W
HEN OUR FATHER TOOK HIS DISCHARGE IN
the early spring, we were all of us interested in the presidential campaign then going on. They agreed about the Democrats and Kennedy, who’d soon be nominated. My mother said my father liked Kennedy because he imagined a resemblance. My father profoundly disliked Eisenhower for reasons having to do with American bombers being sacrificed to “softening up Jerry” behind the lines on D-Day, and due to Eisenhower’s traitorous silence about MacArthur, who my father revered, and because Ike’s wife was known to be “a tippler.”

He disliked Nixon as well. He was a “cold fish,” “looked Italian,” and was a “war Quaker,” which made him a hypocrite. He also disliked the UN, which he thought was too expensive and allowed Commies like Castro (who he called a “two-bit actor”) to have a voice in the world. He kept a framed photograph of Franklin Roosevelt in our living room on the wall above the Kimball spinet and the mahogany and brass metronome that didn’t work but came with the house. He praised Roosevelt for not letting polio defeat him, for killing himself with work to save the country, for bringing the Alabama backwoods out of the dark ages with the REA, and for putting up with Mrs. Roosevelt who he called “The First Prune.”

My father maintained a strong ambivalence about being from Alabama. On the one hand, he pictured himself as a “modern man” and not a “hill-William,” as he said. He held modern views about many things—such as race, from having worked alongside Negroes in the Air Force. He felt Martin Luther King was a man of principle and Eisenhower’s civil rights act was badly needed. He felt the rights of women needed a fairer shake, and that war was a tragedy and a waste he knew about intimately.

On the other hand, when our mother said something slighting about the South—which she often did—he grew broody and declared Lee and Jeff Davis to be “men of substance,” even though their cause had misled them. Many good things had come from the South, he said, including more than the cotton gin and water skis. “Perhaps you could name me one,” my mother would say, “naturally excluding yourself, of course.”

The instant he quit putting on his Air Force blues and going to the base, our father found a job selling new Oldsmobile cars. He felt he’d be a natural at selling. His warm personality—happy, welcoming, congenial, confident, talk-a-blue-streak—would attract strangers and make what other people found difficult easy for him. Customers would trust him because he was a southerner, and southerners were known to be more down to earth than silent westerners. Money would start coming in once the model year ended and the big sales discounts kicked up the values. For his job, he was given a pink-and-gray Oldsmobile Super-88 to use as a demonstrator, which he parked in front of our house on First Avenue SW, where it would serve as good advertising. He took all of us for drives out to Fairfield, toward the mountains, and east toward Lewistown and south in the direction of Helena. “Orientation-explanatory-performance checks,” he called these day trips—though he knew little of the country in any direction and actually knew very little about cars except how to drive them, which he loved doing. He felt it was easy for an Air Force officer to land a good job and that he should’ve left the service when the war was over. He would be way ahead now.

With our father out of the Air Force and working, my sister and I believed our life might finally achieve a permanent footing. We’d been in Great Falls four years. My mother caught a ride each school day out to the little town of Fort Shaw, where she taught the fifth grade. She never talked about teaching, but she seemed to like it and sometimes spoke about the other teachers and remarked that they were dedicated people (though she seemed to have little other use for them and would never want them visiting our house any more than people from the base). At the end of the summer I could foresee starting Great Falls High School, where I’d found out there was a chess club and a debating society, and where I could also learn Latin, since I was too small and light to play sports and had no interest in any case. My mother said she expected Berner and me both to go to college, but we would have to go on our wits because there would never be enough money. Though, she said, Berner already had a personality too much like hers to make a good enough impression to get in and should probably just try to marry a college graduate instead. In a pawn shop on Central Avenue she found several college pennants and tacked these to our walls. They were articles other kids had outgrown. Furman, Holy Cross and Baylor were my three. Rutgers, Lehigh and Duquesne were my sister’s. We knew nothing about these schools, of course, including where they were located—though I had pictures in my mind of what they looked like. Old brick buildings with heavy shade trees and a river and a bell tower.