The Noah Confessions (6 page)

“Your grandpa was a good man,” Mama said, speaking of Grandpa Pittman, “but he wasn't strong enough to override her. His first wife died on their honeymoon. He never got over her. He only married your grandmother because he didn't know what else to do. He settled. But he was completely shut down, his whole life.”

You had to take my mother's assessment of the whole thing with a grain of salt. She never liked my grandma Lucille, and Lucille never entirely liked or trusted her. It wasn't the woman she imagined her son marrying. If she had even been sane enough to imagine such a thing.

But before we get to that. Aunt Margaret did well in school and went to college and eventually met and married a man from Georgia and moved there. Before all that happened, though, a curious and life-altering thing happened to my father.

He had graduated from high school and was working at a gas station in town. He had grown tall and very handsome and he spent all the money he made on nice clothes. The girls loved him. He was living it up. He could see an entire future for himself, and why not? His life was turning easy, because of his job and his looks and his clothes. He hadn't really established himself in Union Grade because that was a long, hard climb. He was from hunger and this was a town full of old money types, landowners and pre–Civil War gentility who still half expected to regain the respect of the rest of the world. They mainly aspired to this by closing ranks and refusing to let the likes of my father in. But he had a plan. He would work hard enough, dress well enough, be handsome enough, and perhaps marry well enough to rise up through the social heirarchy. He was just a poor boy in a rich place, but he could see a way in through his own talents, a tiny crack of light under the door, and he was heading for it. If nothing else, he was blessed by his own countenance, his own beauty. He was one of the pretty people—a random throw of the genetic dice, but one, he had learned, that wielded a certain amount of power.

Who knows what would have happened to my father if he had simply been allowed to pursue that course. Women loved him. Even the rich women. He courted them. He was a man about town. He had charm. Doors opened for him. But he was still poor and it was still going to be a struggle. He was prepared for it. He was ready to do battle. I can only imagine how he felt in those days. The same people who frowned on him and kept him out and saw him as a poor laborer were suddenly forced to confront him. He wanted in and he was not going to take no for an answer. I admire his spirit in that regard. I'm not sure if I would have had the kind of resolve that he did in those days.

Then he was drafted. It was 1951 and the Korean War was going full force. The notice came in the mail. He told me more than once, “It was like a nightmare when I opened that letter.” He was sitting in the kitchen, as he told it, and his mother said something like, “Tell them you're too sick to go,” but he knew he wasn't sick, knew he hadn't actually had rheumatic fever, but was simply the victim of a nervous and crazy mother, and a lazy doctor. Maybe something about that made him want to go.

He went off to Colorado to boot camp. I'm not entirely sure what happened there. He trained for battle, that's for sure. He told me enough about that. But then there was a test. Some kind of aptitude test. They found out a few things about my father. One was that he had an above-average IQ. The other was that he was particularly gifted in the area of language and radio skills. They sent him off to Alaska to be in a special part of the army.

This part he couldn't tell me much about. “I'm not supposed to talk about it, even now,” he said to me sometimes. But Alaska was the best part of his life, he often said, and it was because he had been identified as special and smart and a cut above the rest of the guys who were being shipped off to Korea and were “dropping like flies.”

A couple of years ago, when I was helping him clean my Barbies and other toys out of the garage, he came across his army jacket from his Alaska days. It looked like a plain old army jacket, but with fur on the collar and a big embroidered image of a grizzly bear on the back. He glanced around as if we were possibly being observed and said, “I did special things in the war.”

“Oh, yeah?” I asked.

He nodded and put a finger to his lips. He went to another box and pulled a machine out and put it down in front of me. It looked like a kind of adding machine, except there were strange, unrecognizable keys on it. He said, “Do you know what this is?”

“No,” I said.

“It's a code machine.”

“What kind of code?”

He said, “That's what I did in the war. I was a codebreaker.”

“Oh,” I said.

“Don't tell anyone that I told you. I'm not supposed to talk about it.”

“Okay,” I said.

I didn't have any desire to talk about it. By then I already knew things about him. Many things I wasn't supposed to talk about. But the code machine gave me a clue as to how it all happened. How I ended up where I am now, writing this letter to you.

He said, “They wanted me to stay in the army. They promised me a future. But I didn't want it. I just wanted to come back home and have a normal life.”

“Come back home to be with his mama,” my mother would say, on the odd occasions when his lost career in the military was being discussed. “He could be a colonel or a general by now. But he couldn't leave his mama.”

“It's true what your mother says,” he told me, that night we were cleaning out the garage. “I should have pursued my career, but I was afraid. Afraid that my mother needed me. I should have been braver than that.”

I didn't know how to get in the middle of it. I didn't know how to intervene. It all seemed a long, long way from me. I had no idea it was the whole reason why my life had turned upside down.

         

After two years being a codebreaker in Alaska, my father was honorably discharged from the army and he came back home. He knocked on the door of his childhood home in the middle of the night. He told me how shocked he was when his parents came to the door. They were old, he said. He left them looking one way, and he came back to find them looking another, with gray hair and sagging faces. They hugged him and fixed him something to eat, but the whole night he was in shock. Shocked to be out of the army, shocked to have old parents, shocked to be back in Union Grade with no clear idea of who he was or what he was supposed to do.

For a long time after that, he didn't know how to get his life back together. When he was in the army, he was somebody. He was important. He did special, important work but he couldn't talk about it. He had been sworn to secrecy, even after he left the army. He was looked down upon, he said, because he hadn't seen combat. There were guys from his town, guys he'd played basketball with in high school, who had either died or come home with limbs missing or other debilitating injuries. They glared at him as if he'd done nothing special, as if he'd gotten a free pass. He couldn't even tell them; he couldn't tell anyone what he'd done. He was prohibited from explaining that his work was the most special work of all. He'd gone to Alaska because he was smarter and better. But upon his return, he was treated as if he'd simply found the coward's way out.

He didn't know what to do. For a long time, he just hung around town and went riding with his friends, looking for girls. Eventually he got a job in the local bank as a teller. He put his time in during the day, but in the evenings he went partying with his friends. There were girls, a lot of them. He was allowed to wear his uniform for a few months after service, but eventually he had to hang it up and then he really was no one at all.

The frustration festered inside of him. He had gone places and seen things. He had been in Alaska, where he learned to cross-country ski, where he learned to drive a jeep on ice, where he learned all the rules of defending against frostbite. Because he was in Intelligence, he learned other things, too, aside from radio skills. He learned how to build bombs and how to defuse them. He learned to start fires and put them out. He learned how to kill a man with his bare hands. He learned how to survive in the wilderness. He learned how to shoot a gun in the dark with gloves on. The list went on. He knew things that he would never be able to use in Union Grade. Still they treated him like a poor laborer, when he knew in his heart he was a specially skilled soldier.

Time passed and he began to think about getting married. He was getting nowhere in Union Grade. Being a bank teller brought in a steady wage, and it helped him support his parents, with whom he was still living, but it did nothing to carve out his special niche, the one he felt he had earned during his time in the army. He was still being treated like a rube, like a no one, because he couldn't speak of his special skills. It drove him to distraction. Maybe marrying the right woman would earn him his rightful place. Maybe that was what he needed.

Perhaps all these things had been in his mind the night he met my mother in a bowling alley in Danville. He was out with friends. They met up with some other people. My mother was among them. She had a job as a receptionist for the local newspaper then. She was probably feeling secure and powerful. When I was a little girl I asked my father why he married my mother. He said, “Because I thought she was the most beautiful woman I'd ever seen. And I still think so.”

Even as a little girl, I knew that wasn't a good reason to marry someone.

But it was his reason.

Of their meeting, my mother only said, “I thought he was stuck-up.”

Apparently, they circled around each other for a while, and then he finally asked her out and they went out and the romance started.

In my mind, he had on his uniform when he first saw her. I like it that way. She saw this handsome soldier. It can't be true—at least a year had passed since he had gotten out of the service. But I remember what my mother always said: “He was just out of the army and he was so handsome.”

So these two beautiful people found each other in their beautiful clothes and something inside both of them clicked. Maybe they each saw their imagined future. I know my mother saw the man who could take care of her and help her get her son back. My father probably saw a difficult and lovely woman who would never bore him. Maybe he even saw, at last, the woman who would help him break away from his mother. Whatever forces aligned on that night, these two people saw a potential way out, and they lunged at it.

And they became my parents.

         

Good stopping point. I was exhausted.

I put the letter aside and turned off the light.

I lay in the dark for a long time thinking about it, this sudden and profound history lesson. My parents never talked about their past; it was as if they didn't have one. I used to ask my mother about her family and she would say, “Oh, sweetie, you're never going to have to worry about them.”

I didn't understand why family was something you'd have to be worried about. But I was smart enough to sense that a sad story had to be behind it all. And I didn't want to make her sad. I never liked to think of either of my parents as having strong emotions apart from joy and humor. When you're a kid, your own emotions are all you can handle. Later you let your friends have some, but that was where it ended.

The story was interesting and I had grown to like having my mother's voice so close to me. Now I felt she was under the bed, at least, instead of always under a white stone in Westwood.

I still wasn't entirely sure how any of it related to me having a car.

All I knew was that I was slowly losing my concern and the sense that I had been deprived. Maybe that was the point.

My father was not a stupid man at all.

SIXTEEN
and Two Days

• 1 •

Zoe thought it was completely Gothic that I met a boy in a cemetery.

“Things like that never happen to me,” she complained.

“That's because you don't have a dead mother,” Talia reminded her.

“Oh, yeah,” she said, and for a moment she actually pouted and seemed jealous.

“So your dad is not kidding about the car,” Zoe said. We were eating our lunches on the manicured lawn of Hillsboro. The sun was shining and I had a sudden image of what we would look like to someone like Clyde Pittman. To him I would have been one of the in crowd, one of those fancy types in Union Grade who wouldn't give him the time of day. It also made me think of Mick, and whether or not he saw me that way. I had never really thought about social classes before, never thought of myself as rich or privileged. But now it was starting to come into focus.

“No,” I said. “He's not kidding. There will be no car for Little Lynnie Russo.”

“That is so bizarre,” Talia said. “It's tragic, really.”

“It's not,” I said. “I mean it sucks, but it's not tragic.”

To Talia everything was tragic. And I realized that before I'd started reading the letter, I would have agreed with her.

“I see you're still rocking the bird bracelet?” Zoe asked.

I had almost forgotten it. I had slept in it and woken up with tiny little bird marks on my wrist.

“I'm starting to like it,” I said. “Is that scary?”

“Pretty scary,” Zoe admitted. “I mean, the birds look deformed.”

“Maybe it's some kind of metaphor. Even deformed birds can fly,” Talia said.

I laughed, but there was something to it.

“So rumor is you went surfing with Jen,” Zoe said, “the day you ditched. Are you a surfer now? Should we prepare for the red beads and the Uggs and the lingo?”

“It was really fun. I think I'm good at it.”

“Lynne, we cannot lose you to surfing,” Talia insisted.

“Yeah, we'd rather lose you to the guy in the cemetery.”

“You're not going to lose me to anything.”

But I wasn't entirely sure about that. I was changing and I could feel it.

I stayed late at school to finish my homework. But also, I realized, because I was avoiding the letter. I wasn't afraid of it anymore. I just wanted to make it last.

My cell phone rang as I was riding home on the late bus. The number that came up was unfamiliar to me. I answered it anyway.

“Hi,” he said, “it's me, the guy from the cemetery.”

I laughed. “I meet a lot of guys in the cemetery.”

“Mick,” he said.

“I'm kidding. I don't meet guys in cemeteries.”

“Oh, okay. I'm nervous.”

I smiled. I thought it was cute that he admitted to being nervous.

“How did you get my number?”

He said, “I know a guy who dates a girl at Hillsboro. He got me a school roster. Your number is on there. Is that creepy? Am I stalking you?”

“Not yet. But there's time.”

He laughed.

He said, “Well, I was just wondering if you wanted to get together sometime and hang out.”

“In the cemetery?”

“Sure, if you want to.”

“You're totally missing all my jokes.”

He said, “Well, I take all my dates to the cemetery, so I thought it would make sense.”

“Funny.”

“So I guess I just admitted that I'm asking you on a date.”

“You don't do this a lot, do you?”

“Almost never,” he admitted. “I mean, I have dated. Not in cemeteries. You know, this went much better when I practiced it in my room.”

“Oh, really? What did I say when you practiced it?”

“You said you'd love to go out with me sometime.”

“I'd love to go out with you sometime.”

“Oh, shit,” he said. “I didn't practice anything after that.”

“Well, let's see. Here's where you tell me what night you were thinking of and what we might do.”

“I haven't thought about that, either.”

“Do you want to call me back after you've rehearsed it?”

“No, no, I can think on my feet. We could see a movie. No, wait, we could get dinner. No, probably just meeting at Jamba Juice or something in Larchmont after you get out of school. And if we like each other over smoothies, then we could do something more serious.”

“Like go to the cemetery.”

“Right.”

“Okay, when?”

“Tomorrow. Which is a Friday. That's a good day for a date.”

“It's a date. See, that wasn't so hard.”

He laughed. “You've done this before, haven't you?”

“No,” I answered honestly. “This will be my first juice date.”

“I'll see you tomorrow, Lynne,” he said. A kind of electric current went through me when he said my name. I hung up the phone and settled back in the seat and smiled out the window at all the things passing. The world looked good to me.