Genoa (3 page)

and so Linda works, going on the second shift at
GM
, already at her machine before I leave the first, and we have dates on the weekends. She cooks dinner before leaving home, puts it in the Frigidaire in warm weather, in the oven in cold, leaves the kids in care of the vacuum tube,

and I reach for the oven.

Now, there is a kind of ceremony about this, that I like. I, Michael Mills, presiding over the kitchen, the living room, the children, the house and grounds—a great chief, chef (of a meal already cooked),
un jefe grande
—Opening the oven door, lifting out the meatloaf and setting it on the stove, I stand for a moment, rubbing the five o’clock stubble on the mandible, listening to the sounds of home (cowboy bullets) from the next room, and thinking

of Ushant, the old tar in
W
HITE
-J
ACKET
who survived the massacre of the beards—one of the people, merely, he held the hair of his chin, grimly, against the officers

and of Melville’s own—“no soft silken beard, but tight curled like the horse hair breaking out of old upholstered chairs, firm and wiry to the grasp, and squarely chopped.”

and thinking, too, as the warm air from the open oven fills the room, of

Melville’s daughter, Fanny, reporting him to be unhandy with tools, of no use around the house,

and thinking that, as common sailor on many a ship, he must have learned a certain handiness—but this he would not employ, to benefit
THE BARK OF DOMESTIC FELICITY
. . .

and passing the meatloaf to the table, and the beans and the potatoes, from the top of the stove, there is a momentary recall, a pleasurable memory in the glands and the blood, of the three occasions when the children were born—I took leave from work and kept house while Linda was in the hospital, and each day, after cleaning, washing, making beds and taking in the milk, there was the ceremony of cooking dinner—made truly ceremonial, made ritual by the fact that, for a week, I grew a helluva ragged beard, and, as I cooked each evening, drank a glass of white port wine and smoked a black, child-destroying, outsize cigar

          
“Now, the leaf called tobacco is of diverse species and sorts. Not to dwell upon vile Shag, Pig-tail, Plug, Nail-rod, Negro-head, Cavendish, and misnamed Lady’s twist . . .”

Knowing better than to call the children before the commercials are over, I sit at the table and wait, warm and reminiscent. Then—we might have pickles, milk for the children, butter for beans and potatoes, and—a glance through the window at the steady dripping rain, the thick atmosphere—and

          
“ale must be drank in a fog and a drizzle.”

These from the Frigidaire to the table, and a swallow of ale inside; turning the bottle in my hand, and then staring at the jar of pickles, and my hand goes off the bottle and into my pocket, drawing forth a fragment of paper, before I think the connection. Shard of an old shopping list:

                    
pickles

                          
&

                    
popsicles

and a scribbling on the back, that I must have copied or added,

                    
Pick-L-Joy

                          
&

                    
Popsie Pete

                    
“enclose the wrapper

                                
with twenty-five cents

                    
and you will

                                
receive two ball point pens”

The cowboy bullets have changed to talking cereal boxes, and I begin to serve the plates. In a moment, the children come to the table, and we have jokes, laughter, squabbles, scattered information, questions, jumping up and sitting down, a few tears, and—only casually and incidentally—the business of eating. Still, for all that,

a better temper than prevailed in the Melville household, where Herman would harangue his wife and two daughters (this was after the sons were gone) on matters that had no interest for them, and they would roll their eyes, and sigh, and wait, or there would be outbursts of temper, sarcasm

“Daddy, are we going to have a dessert tonight? A popsicle?”

There is an experience that I must try to understand, and it has to do with awareness, with a point in time and perhaps also in space where the awareness may be fixed, a time-space location, such as, say, a whale-ship, or perhaps what a cosmologist means when he says—
with his stage the universe—“A fundamental observer partakes of the motion of the substratum, that is, he is located on a fundamental particle.” Or, in my own terms, there is Carl, my brother, and the picture that flashes is Carl laughing, holding a book and laughing, and, at once, the illusion of hugeness, an illusion fostered, perhaps, by contrast with my own small frame, but shared nonetheless by others who also reported it, and it came not from height, for he was only five foot eight, but perhaps from a way of using himself, arrogant and careless, from a general stockiness of build, from a sultanic gluteus maximus, and, most of all, from the monstrous, out-shapen head that heaved and rolled with his mood, upon his shoulders. And it is all there, in this picture that flashed up from some back corner of my brain: the hugeness, a little of what Pliny meant when he said that “nature creates monsters for the purpose of astonishing us and amusing herself,” and of the meaning of the word “Teratology,” the medical term for the Science of Malformations and Monstrosities, from the Greek “teratologia,” meaning “a telling of wonders.” It is in the way his body and head shift, shake, and revolve, as he laughs, as though composed of epicenters, randomly contiguous, with no single center, the parts loose, accidentally associated; it is in his hands, which are large hands, but again not as large as they appear from the way he uses them, the manner he has of holding the book, possessing it loosely, embracing it so as altogether to smother it, and at the same time letting it go loosely from his fingers, holding it at no single point, seeming to extend some of the casual humanity through his extremities into the very binding and paper, so that the pages flutter with the fierceness of the wings of a bird trapped, as he loses his place and finds it again, and quotes, from W
HITE
-J
ACKET
:

          
“I love an indefinite, infinite background—a vast, heaving, rolling, mysterious rear.”

And again the burst of laughter, the explosion and reshaping of his body, the unplanned and weirdly incomplete arcs described by his head, the book squeezed and relinquished in one gesture. And as I hold this picture in my brain, this momentary recall—or as I am held by it—and add to it, bring alongside it, the fact, the datum: Carl is dead, killed by gases released into a pan beneath his chair in
the death chamber at Jefferson City, Missouri—this, his execution, being the last in a series of events as strangely associated as everything in his life, and which I still do not understand; when these—the image of him laughing, quoting, and the fact of his execution—are brought together, there is this experience, the fixing of my awareness at some time-space point that I am unable to identify, a seizure of elation

          
“My memory is a life beyond birth . . .”

Melville, in M
ARDI
. And there is this: the time-space point is not limited to my own lifespan, nor to the surfaces of the earth that I have traveled—nor are these areas excluded. My body feels dull, the blood slows, sensation withdraws from the extremities and consciousness, toward the trunk, and the meatloaf sits in ale, undigested in my stomach.

There is, after this, an illumination, an area of local bodily sensation, random and ephemeral, one following another, as a corollary, perhaps, an inscrutable hint, to the time-space fix itself—an intense warmth just above the heart, then something, an alertness, say, in the cells of the thigh; an ache in the shoulder, answered in a vertebra, and back again to the shoulder . . . and in the club, in the high, thick-soled boot, a tingling

“Daddy! Daddy!”

It is Jenifer, and her voice conveys alarm. I localize myself, search out the condition that she has discovered, and realize that, for some moments, I have been gazing at her, altogether oblivious to her. I glance for a moment at the room, open the senses: the old woodwork painted white, the warm air, the food smells. Turning to Jenifer—a smile, a word, a gesture, and she is restored. The dinner begins to move once more.

But eating I recall the medical student, interning in obstetrics, who made a custom of talking to newborn infants, presenting simple requests such as “open your eyes,” “raise your right hand,” or the like, and claimed remarkable results—the nurses liked to have him around, said he could quiet the most
irritated or soothe the most feverish child;—pursuing his research, he developed a strange look, began to study philosophy and religion, and left medicine abruptly for divinity school.

One of the greatest pleasures of this house is the presence in it of the old chimney. In a fit of modernizing, Mother once wanted to cover it with wallboard, but I protested, successfully. A great mass of stone and mortar, it centers and roots the house; and, although all the fireplaces except the one in the livingroom have been sealed, portions of it appear, the stonework obtruding, refusing to be hidden, in nearly every room. Sitting at the table, now, observing the corner of it that appears in the kitchen, the sealed flue opening before which the old black cookstove used to sit, I am reminded of Melville’s I A
ND
M
Y
C
HIMNEY
—and of the engineers, when we put in the furnace, telling me that the old chimney couldn’t be used, a new one would have to be built, the flue wouldn’t work—and of how I argued and persisted, with the result that now the stones impart flue heat—heat that would otherwise be wasted—to every room of the house, and even the long, narrow attic, running the length of the house, the attic where I keep my desk and books, the husbanding of Melville and medicine, history and archeology, even the attic is made livable, on a stormy spring night, by virtue of heat radiant from the old stones.

The children have begun the nightly chore of cleaning up the table and washing the dishes—spreading the job, fluctuant between dishwater and television. The day’s manifest obligations having been met, it is not difficult for me to ascend the two flights to the attic—the heavy foot following the light, and then leading it—to meet, to face, to examine, perhaps, some of the other obligations, such as

Item: a Post-mortem: to understand my brother Carl

and

Item: for the living, myself and others, to discover what it is to heal, and why, as a doctor, I will not.

TWO

          
“Save the prairie-hen, sometimes startled from its lurking-place in the rank grass; and, in their migratory season, pigeons, high overhead on the wing, in dense multitudes eclipsing the day like a passing storm-cloud; save these—there being no wide woods with their underwood—birds were strangely few.

          
“Blank stillness would for hours reign unbroken on this prairie. ‘It is the bed of a dried-up sea,’ said the companionless sailor—no geologist—to himself, musing at twilight upon the fixed undulations of that immense alluvial expanse bounded only by the horizon, and missing there the stir that, to alert eyes and ears, animates at all times the apparent solitudes of the deep.

          
“But a scene quite at variance with one’s antecedents may yet prove suggestive of them. Hooped round by a level rim, the prairie was to John Marr a reminder of ocean.

          
“With some of his former shipmates,
chums
on certain cruises, he had contrived, prior to this last and more remote removal, to keep up a little correspondence at odd intervals. But from tidings of anybody of any sort he, in common with the other settlers, was now cut off; quite cut off, except from such news as might be conveyed over the grassy billows by the last-arrived prairie-schooner—the vernacular term, in those parts and times, for the emigrant wagon arched high over with sail-cloth, and voyaging across the vast champaign. There was no reachable post-office as yet; not even the rude little receptive box with lid and leather hinges, set up at convenient intervals on a stout stake along some solitary green way, affording a perch for birds, and which, later in the unremitting advance of the frontier, would perhaps decay into a mossy monument, attesting yet another successive overleaped limit of civilized life; a life which in America can today hardly be said to have any western bound but the ocean that washes Asia. Throughout these plains, now in places overpopulous
with towns overopulent; sweeping plains, elsewhere fenced off in every direction into flourishing farms—pale townsmen and hale farmers alike, in part, the descendants of the first sallow settlers; a region that half a century ago produced little for the sustenance of man; but to-day launching its superabundant wheat-harvest on the world;—of this prairie, now everywhere intersected with wire and rail, hardly can it be said that at the period here written of there was so much as a traceable road. To the long-distance traveller the oak-groves, wide apart, and varying in compass and form; these, with recent settlements, yet more widely separate, offered some landmarks; but otherwise he steered by the sun. In early midsummer, even going but from one log-encampment to the next, a journey it might be of hours or good part of a day, travel was much like navigation. In some more enriched depressions between the long, green, graduated swells, smooth as those of ocean becalmed receiving and subduing to its own tranquility the voluminous surge raised by some far-off hurricane of days previous, here one would catch the first indication of advancing strangers either in the distance, as a far sail at sea, by the glistening white canvas of the wagon, the wagon itself wading through the rank vegetation and hidden by it, or, failing that, when near to, in the ears of the team, peeking, if not above the tall tiger-lilies, yet above the yet taller grass.