Toward the End of Time (11 page)

And who is this sitting beside me, wearing a wind-whipped red bandana and a squint that makes the planes of her face look romantic and detached, like a lean Indian squaw’s? It is
my
steady, my girl and first wife, the fair Perdita. She was a lanky, taciturn, frequently tan art major who was to bear me five children and remain, loyal if unenraptured, my spouse to nearly the end of the twentieth century. Our children, though slower to marry and breed than we were, have now produced ten grandchildren—nine boys, and a final, adorable female infant. Born so close together,
our children were fed and bathed and taken for outings as a close group, and to this day exhibit toward each other a symbiotic deference and regard. They married, for instance, strictly in the order in which they were born, and bore their children—two each—with the same sense of priority. Their generational mode is to have stable small families, in contrast to the large and messy and eventually doomed households in which they were raised. In further evidence of their conservatism, all reside within this state, strung out within an hour’s drive along Route 128, so that the ancient highway bears familial as well as romantic associations for me. Its hinterland, out of sight beyond the thinned trees and hazardously sharp turnoffs, is rich for me with small backyards and electronically overequipped living rooms and soccer fields and elementary-school auditoriums where I have attempted, however ill-rehearsed, to play the role of grandfather.

The catastrophic dip in world population has not, oddly, brought back the stretches of forest through Peabody and Danvers that I recall. Perhaps there can be no replacing the landscape of youth. The towering, freshly leafing branches scudded past Perdita’s profile; she squinted with stoic calm while an edge of the red bandana beat at her temple like a frantic pulse, her hazel eyes mere slits, her pursed lips cracked and dry. We smoked, and our cigarettes kept flinging sparks and hot ash on our faces and clothes. We whisperingly would confer, the destination at last reached, about asking Josh to put the top up on our return drive. A chem. major, on the gastroenterologist track, he wore thick glasses, had a bad complexion, and could be prickly about what he fancied his prerogatives. Hester, that flaxen-haired JAP, was oblivious to the discomfort of those in the back seat. In the tumult of the wind and scudding scenery my eyes fastened
on Perdita’s exposed knee, already tanned by sessions of semi-undress on the grassy slopes encircling squarish Campus Pond. When we at last arrived at the beach, and clamorously went forward to dip our toes over the edge of the continent, she would hoist up her winter skirt and expose her lean legs to mid-thigh. Holding her skirt with one hand, she would bend over the shallow, sliding shore waves like some kind of gatherer, a timeless figure from Millet, posing thus until the tumbling water’s frigid grip hurt her ankles and she scampered back, laughing with the pain. When we all lay together behind a hot dune the grains of sand would fall from her drying bare feet one by one, like the sands in an hourglass that silently steal away even the most tranquil and disaster-spared life. I vowed I would live in sight of the sea, and I have.

Her feet were exquisite, now that I think about them—the pads of the soles thick and rounded, the little toes lifted off the ground and clearly vestigial. She was the most placid, the most adrift in nature’s currents, of the women I have known, or perhaps that is the way I prefer to remember her, memory being no less self-serving than our other faculties. Her genes now float up toward me from the faces of my grandchildren, diluted by a quarter. My daughters startle me at times by their resemblance to Perdita, her way of absent-mindedly posing, with a certain graceful solidity, as if letting some invisible current flow through them. The middle of my daughters has married an African, from Togo, and it has changed the temper of the entire family, for the better. Split, or extended, by divorce, we did not quite know how to be a family until the Africans showed us. Adrien has many brothers
and sisters, in many countries, getting advanced degrees. Though very slender, he speaks in a deep voice, slowly, in an accent in which French and English elements are charmingly mingled. His great-great-grandfather, a clerk and translator for the occupiers, spoke German; Togoland was a German territory until 1914, when Allied colonial armies from the Gold Coast and Dahomey invaded. Would that the trench war in Europe had been resolved as quickly!—the entire maimed and vindictive century now past would have been different. Adrien presides over my children in a way I never did. My status, shadowy at best since my defection from their mother, a matter of sneak college visitations and shamefaced appearances at weddings and baptisms, took on a sudden refulgence with his arrival among us. My sins were brushed aside. His own father had lived in Tanzania, across the great continent, an implementor of Nyerere’s
ujamaa
, and with an array of informal wives had bestowed upon Adrien a number of half-siblings. This was patriarchal behavior. I was given a Togolese robe of many colors, and took my place in the outdooring ceremonies whereby my two brown grandsons were presented to the sky god. I was given cards in which the appropriate blessings in Kwa were phonetically spelled; pronouncing in a loud voice, I tipped the glass of gin, a substitute for palm wine, three times (inwards, toward my breast, not outwards) to offer libation to the ancestors within the earth. Being an African grandfather was made realer to me than being an American father. My adult children, thanks to Adrien’s African magic, suddenly had permission to love me again.

Adrien and Irene and little Olympe and étienne live in one of Boston’s endless western suburbs, a slice of land wedged, with its lone factory, strip mall, and playing field, a thrifty distance beyond fashionable Concord and Lincoln. I
drive along 128, and then miles of 62. Their house stands in a tract of development on a hillside, with a view of muddy yards and abandoned plastic tricycles. Adrien and Irene go out, after a few grave and girlish, respectively, remarks to me, to dinner and a local movie house, while the boys and I watch some unintelligible (to me) cartoon video that has been thoughtfully provided, and then I try to put them to bed before their parents come back. This is the game, and they know we are playing it, and they tumble and frisk upstairs and down not quite defiantly, just making everything, from getting into their pajamas to brushing their teeth, maddeningly difficult. The house is full of masks and knotted, braided, beaded pagan symbolizations from Togo; a studio portrait of me, taken at the request of the firm at some stage of my advancement through the ranks of Sibbes, Dudley, and Wise, occupies a place of honor in the exiguous living room. Yet this fetish does not ensure discipline. The boys, dodging my bedtime attentions, have lovely pearly smiles, like mischievous Irene’s when she was their age, but with lavender gums. Their eyes are of an astonishing inky solemnity—not a fleck of even nutmeg in the blackness of the irises. Their hair is pure Adrien: helmets of kinky frizz, pleasingly springy to touch. I can’t stop petting their heads. Where else can I touch an African coiffure? It was something my life hadn’t promised me. I wonder what barber, in this nearly all-white town, knows how to give them a haircut. They are seven and five. They like, amazingly, being read to, which I would have thought was too tame an entertainment for children raised among VCRs and PCs and CD players; Adrien teaches computer science at a local prep school and the baseboards of his house crawl with wires, plugs, adaptors, and winking power-surge preventers. So, lying between my grandsons on the bottom bunk of their
bunk beds, I drone through one battered, shiny tale after another of fire engines and milk trucks, of elephants wearing trousers and party gowns, of bewildered kings and gentle giants and witches in shingled huts in forests where medieval Germany merges, in terms of housing, with the round huts of Togoland. After a while the springy soft heads nestling against my cheeks become less restive, and I make my first attempt at abandoning them to their dreams, an attempt which usually collapses in a flurry of scampering footsteps and brotherly blows and cries of recrimination. With a weary imitation of indignation and surprise I mount the stairs again and resettle them in their beds, only to find, on my next return up the creaking stairs, them together in the lower bunk, Olympe asleep but a glitter of wakeful black still caught in étienne’s long curved eyelashes. He fidgets against sleep’s tightening grip. His bottom lightly touches that of his older brother, through their flannel pajamas; their round heads are side by side on one pillow. I never had a brother. Any moment, Adrien and Irene will be coming back, with a loud crack of the front door that often wakes the boys into a scamper of gleeful welcome. I notice, as Etienne in the dusk of the lower bunk settles into self-forgetfulness, that his bare foot, dilutedly brown, bears a cashew-shaped little toe as vestigially uplifted as Perdita’s.

This is set down, I suppose, in the search for meaning. As one supernatural connection after another fails, the chain of ancestors and descendants—the transcendent entity of family—offers to solace us. But the dissolution of ego, which family demands, is just what we fight. Immortal DNA offers as cold a comfort as the transmigration of souls. If we can’t take our memories with us, why go?

Spring for me has always been the season to fear death. I wake heavily, with something undigestible gnawing my
stomach, in the intensifying white light. My idiot subconscious, meanwhile, responds to the time of year with dreams of sex. Last night, as Deirdre’s lean body rested light on the mattress beside me—her long tanned bony back is heart-breakingly boyish—I dreamed I was making love to, of all people, Grace Wren. My woken self could not believe the passion with which I lay my body on top of hers (trumping it) and I ground my pelvis against the auburn-haired ace of hearts at the juncture of her legs. Her breathless face, her ample (but more youthfully, jauntily so; this was the Grace of twenty years ago) breasts, and that hairy crotch holding its responsive buds and folds were all under me with such passionate reality that my poor hard-on ached like a bursting bladder. In my dream the focus of my pain had recourse to her warm mouth, she was blowing me, she was giving me pure head, for she had no body, there was just her severed head with its closed eyes sucking. Horrors! I awoke with the monstrousness of it, the Dahmeresque atrociousness. It was as bad as something in Greek mythology or Aztec religion. The sexual parts are fiends, sacrificing everything to that aching point of contact. Society and simple decency keep trying to remind us of everything else—the rest of the body, the whole person, with its soul and intellect and estimable socioeconomic constituents—but in the truth of the night our dismembering needs arise and chop up the figments of our acquaintance like a Mogul swordsman gone berserk, and revolt us with our revealed nature.

During this same March night, while I was sleeping, a warm rain turned to freezing rain and then snow, depositing a candied crust on the reviving greenery, a white carameliza-don that sparkled on the skin of the driveway and in the buckgrass and wild blueberry that grow along the edge. The winter still had a kick of cold in it. Halfway down, I regretted
not bothering to put on gloves and my little rubber hunting shoes, with their soles patterned in chains, for my morning walk to retrieve the newspaper. I slipped and slid. In the headlines, President Smith, that anonymous, derided man, was offering free farmland to citizens willing to go and work an assigned acreage of the depopulated Midwest. The Homestead Act anew. Little fragmentary sheaths of ice showered upon me as a chill breeze stirred the beech twigs overhead. This should be the terminal mood of my life, I thought: everything mundane candy-coated.

Deirdre got me to go to the Peabody mall yesterday; she had a whole list of depleted household necessities, including bathroom washcloths. With her cervine sense of smell she claimed that all of our washcloths inexpungeably stank. “What have you been wiping with them?” she asked me.

I blushed, answering, “Only myself. That’s the smell of old age.”