The Syme Papers (83 page)

It took me two weeks to go through the house. ‘Have you ever’, I once asked, on a much happier occasion:

This,
however, proved slow and mournful work; much of it unbearably finicky and tedious; all of it unmentionably … well, I would say ‘soul-destroying’, but it seemed simpler than that and less dramatic. ‘Defeatist’ is perhaps the better word, or ‘defeated’ – though neither seems quite right. (I had ample – I would not say,
leisure,
to choose the word for what was happening to me in those two weeks. I picked and pored over it, as I packed and unpacked and repacked; and sold and threw out. But having said it was unmentionable, I will not mention it any more.) Let me say only that he left a great many … worthless papers behind; and I recognized my inheritance.

Among them (and after this, I will let the matter … rest), I discovered a rather surprising collection of notes, photocopies and clippings, from the period leading up to my mother’s death. He used, as I said, to spend his Sunday evenings at the public library – shoulder to shoulder with the bums and the drunks and the kooks and the pill-poppers and the needle-pushers and the out of work and the washed-up pensioners in threadbare suits who frequent such honourable institutions – researching his great treatise on the history of falsework: ‘the temporary structure which enables the permanent structure to be constructed, and which must be retained until the permanent structure is self-supporting’. Only he wasn’t, you see. I found instead a notebook, meticulously dated and annotated, carefully pasted over with newspaper accounts of miraculous recoveries.

From
cancer
– and there are countless such; it is a strange, proliferating disease that yields almost as many opportunities for new hope as for sudden despair.
(Sure
as
blackthorn
bursts
with 
snow,
the words echoed in the hollow of my thoughts,
cancer
in
some
of
us
will
grow)
Some of them dated as far back as the death of Syme’s own mother, after that terrible storm, so many summers ago. My finger paused over the crinkled, glued-on, yellowing paper, to find that father and son had, in their separate pursuits, stumbled across the same jumbled account:

Somehow, this hidden treasure of my father’s fears (and hopes) only saddened me. I could abide the fact that he neglected my mother from an
absence
of
love
–
fled to the library in the evening while she suffered that ‘severe pain without the smallest hope of relief’. (Mother and son watched the
Sunday
Night
Movie
together; I dreaded school in the morning; she, chemotherapy.) Marriage teaches many things, among them indifference and its attendant desire – for honesty and the solitude necessary to its practice. It was, no doubt, foolish of God to invent a species of creature whose heart is corrupted by even the kindest dishonesties; and whose life cannot pass without them. Yet I did not mind the way he escaped her suffering, until I saw that he neglected her
out
of
love.
And such
a strange, curious, burrowing love, that sought relief of fear in books and newspapers and his own crazy speculations – pipsissi-way, for God’s sake – and never in his wife or son. That leakage in all of us whose flow may only be staunched by a human touch had been
plugged
up
in him, till I had no news within, to judge whether he rotted or dried up. ‘And I became conscious’, in Phidy’s words,

You must remember that I was sleeping in my boyhood bed at this time, in a house emptied of father and mother; and Dad had changed little since she died and I left; only disorder and disrepair had accumulated since. I should be forgiven a certain indulgence in morbid thoughts. I thought to call Susie but could not and did not, shrunk into solitude till my voice squeaked at the touch of air. (Strange how quick we grow unaccustomed to company; how deep the current of loneliness runs within us, if we let it.) I sat up, sleepless, through the loud summer nights, going over the father’s old papers in the son’s old room, drinking up whatever he had left in the house: foul blackberry wines and flat beers; mini-bottles of gin and vodka, carried off a plane; an untouched bottle of Christmas port.

I discovered, before closing his affairs and turning home, one curious account, unlike the mass of miraculous recoveries he pasted in the book. It struck me at once – it was the only story that ended in the sufferer’s death. The article, which appeared in the
San
Diego
Chronicle
shortly after my mother’s diagnosis, described the slow and inexplicable decline of a ‘young man, newly married and the father of a baby-girl’ thirty years before. He had simply begun to ‘shut down’ – that was the phrase – in his late twenties, complaining at first of a slight nausea, general lethargy, tingling in the legs and hands. He grew fat, unpleasantly, awkwardly fat, despite a general loss of appetite; he was confined first to his armchair and then to his bed; in the end, he lacked the energy even to relieve himself, and a full-time nurse was installed to shift him
periodically and induce the necessary evacuations. His wife moved into the spare room as she awaited his recovery. He never recovered; the doctors despaired; first, second, third opinions retired perplexed. The man hovered at last at the edge of coma, without slipping under – he could just about manage a grunt to acknowledge some passing relief from the tireless monotony of his life. In an almost equally astonishing triumph of lethargy (and love), the wife never shifted from her temporary sleeping accommodations; turned every night to the same small bed beside an office filing-cabinet; hoped her husband would ‘feel better’ in the morning. (A lesson in the subtlety of time.) Thirty years passed.

Then a new doctor, alerted perhaps by a gossiping nurse, desired to inspect the patient. By this time, the baby-girl had escaped to Seattle, as far away as she could drive up the coast of the Pacific; the wife was grey-haired, somewhat delicate. The trouble, the young man concluded, was that her husband’s metabolism – for whatever reason – had simply ‘switched off’ (this was the phrase). That’s why he just kind of slowed down‚’ he said. A new procedure, lately developed, might just ‘turn the switch back on again’. Mother and daughter didn’t know whether to hope or fear –
what
to hope for or what to fear. But they accepted the experiment, and watched astonished as the old man rose to life again, awkwardly, miserably, hungry and sharp. By the end of one month, he could walk about the house, resting each hand on a shoulder (the daughter had returned) – how he talked, gazed at the television, gobbled his grub again! By the end of two, he could venture into the front yard and stare at the passing traffic of the street – immeasurably saddened by such excess and exhaust of energy, endlessly repeated. By the end of three, he was dead – from cancer of the liver, which had been arrested by his general decline and lain dormant in him through his long dormancy. His body had sunk instinctively to such low ebb that the barest breath of life remained and the cancer starved. Now it revived again in his general revival, and killed him. The article did not say for better or worse – though clearly the body itself had sought to live, even at the lowest rate.

What made my father paste this terrible story into the book? What faith or doubt did it inspire? Of whom did it remind him? My mother, in her ageless skinniness, fearful of any change? My father himself, retreating for survival so deep into his own resources, and slowly freezing over? And yet to my mind it suggested nothing so clearly as Syme: happily buried in the ice of his obscurity, until my intemperate revival dragged him to the heat and light of day again, where he began to rot and stink, and required a second burial.

You may guess I turned from my home in some relief, and settled to the long road quite happily, despite the close air of hot old leather and the broken seat-springs in the family Cadillac.

I took the southern route home again. ‘Have I not said home already‚’ Phidy once asked, ‘and can I in the space of a few lines use the word for so distant and different a destination?’
Yes,
is the only answer – and I drove six thousand miles, and forty years, as it were, from my childhood to my middle age. I passed through the dry breadth of Texas – along the shoulders of that great state, across the neck – and tinkered with the thought of turning south to Austin at its heart. Over the long, flat road I imagined several pithy conversations between myself and Bunyon, happily reunited, shall we say – in which through various feints and false lunges, misdirections mischievously applied, I managed to turn the talk (and tables) upon him at last, to utter a clinching comeuppance to the phrase I am sure he had forgotten long ago: ‘Pitt is a genial little goblin, and I wish him well.’ But such is the stubbornness of our fancy, composed as she is of a logic older than and independent of ourselves, that she baulked where I would bend her and refused – granting instead even in
my
mind’s
ear
the last word to Bunyon. ‘You’ll thank me, Pitt‚’ he said, almost whistling through the exposed brickwork of his grin, ‘in the end.’ Knowing, as I did, that he was right – I was better off going where I was going, and doing what I was doing, in a small way; so I did not stop at Lubbock, nor turn south‚ but headed straight to Dallas, thence to Arkansas, before nudging gently to the north.

Only coming through Virginia on a burning, stinking summer day, with a black cloud hanging over the road, which declined to budge or shake into rain at last, did I consider,
A
quick
look
couldn’t
hurt.
The air conditioner on the family car had broken down in 1973, and a sweet, hot handful of sweat ran down my spine, and stuck against the leather seat. So I stopped at a diner outside Richmond, ordered the home-brew ice-tea and asked the waitress, a round-faced high-school girl with a nose-ring and a summer cold, if they had a phonebook I could borrow? Pactaw itself I knew had long gone the way of all flesh (and wood). Union Pacific bought the land in the 1870s and tore down the village to lay a track (itself now defunct) from DC to Richmond, across a narrow pass of the Potomac. But the family Jenkyns, along with Syme himself, had moved to Richmond after Phidy’s disastrous departure in 1827.

There were no Symes in the phonebook, and I expected none; the enduring convalescence of his later life produced, as I had supposed, no heir. And ‘Syme’ itself is an uncommonly uncommon name, for such an ordinary conjunction of the alphabet. It is the ‘y’, I believe, that bears such rare distinction. Of Jenkinses and Jenkynses (the strange ‘y’ notwithstanding) there proved to be a greater selection, five or six perhaps of the latter, though I knew my man at once: the Reverend Thomas, of 17 Kendal Place. ‘Called to the Church by family tradition‚’ Phidy wrote of Jebediah – a tradition which, I hoped, had survived these hundred and thirty-odd years since Tom died and I came to look for his descendant. Odd how deeply this living instance of the familiar name moved me, to a recollection of those passionate and solitary two years I spent attempting to restore Syme’s withered glory, when I had leave, in his phrase, ‘to go over even old ground with a fresh hand, a clear head, and a curious heart’.

I ignored the telephone number along the dotted line, determined to venture everything upon the luck and courage of the moment. ‘These’, I said, returning the heavy tome to the snuffling waitress, ‘are wonderful –
historical
–
records. If I could begin’, I declared to her, to brighten her middling afternoon,
‘my career from scratch, I should choose to study that rich ground on which genealogy and geography overlap. In short, phonebooks and graveyards – scenes of the heartbreaking juxtaposition of
name
and
place.
Now, my dear girl – might I trouble you for a map?’