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Authors: Melanie Gideon

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BOOK: Valley of the Moon
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—

The O'Learys left on a beautiful day in April. I'd gone to their cottage before the party I couldn't bring myself to attend, said my goodbyes, then made my excuses. An upset stomach. I said I was going off to the infirmary in search of an antacid. Instead I climbed up into the hills.

A hawk circled above my head. I soothed myself by looking down upon Greengage, which looked particularly Edenic that morning, bathed as it was in the late morning sun. All was as it should be. The hens were fat and laying eggs. Sheep grazed in the pastures and bees collected nectar.

I could see Matteo Sala working in the vineyard. He leaned back on his shovel and wiped his brow with a hankie. He came from a family of Umbrian vintners and was doing what he was born to do—what made him happy and fulfilled. That was the entire point of Greengage. Why would anybody want to live anywhere else?

The bell gonged, announcing the start of the party. People walked toward the dining hall. Fathers carried their children on their shoulders. Women strolled arm in arm. What was on the menu? Butter and cheese and apples. Mutton stew. Lemonade and beer. The smell of freshly baked sponge cake was in the air.

I'd worked hard over the years, carefully cultivating relationships outside of Greengage, gaining a solid reputation as a fair and honest businessman. We sold much of what we grew to restaurants in San Francisco and Glen Ellen. It wasn't difficult. Our produce was magnificent. When asked how we did it, I talked about nitrogen-rich cover crops, compost, some of the traditional Chinese farming methods that we employed. I didn't tell them our secret: contentment. We were a happy lot.

“Joseph!” called a woman's voice from down in the valley.

My sister, Fancy, had caught sight of me. Now I was doomed. I would have to attend the party.

“Get down here, you cranky old man!” she shouted.

She stood in the meadow surrounded by a group of children who all craned their heads up and began shrieking for me as well. My heart filled at the sound of their voices.

If only I'd brought my camera. I was not a sentimentalist, but I would have liked to have captured that moment. To freeze time in my lens. To be able to gaze back at the image of the party just beginning. To remember precisely how it felt when the pitchers of lemonade were full. When the cake had not yet been cut, and the afternoon stretched out in front of us.

—

Early the next morning, before dawn, I went outside to relieve myself. As I was walking back into the house, the floor began to shake. A temblor. I froze in the foyer, waiting for it to stop. It did not.

Martha shouted from upstairs. “Joseph!”

“Come down!” I yelled. “It's an earthquake!”

Martha appeared at the top of the stairs in her nightgown, her eyes wide. The staircase rattled, the banister undulated.

“Hurry!” I held out my hand as she ran down the stairs. I threw open the front door and we stumbled into the yard. The full moon was a bone-white orb in the sky.

The sounds that followed next could only be described thus: a subterranean clap of thunder, an ancient sequoia splitting in two, a volley of bullets, the roaring of a train coming into the station. A preternatural
whoosh, whoosh, whoosh,
a lasso spinning through the air.

We'd been through many earthquakes and I knew one thing for certain. Never had there been one like this.

It was April 18, 5:12
A.M.
We clung to each other on the front lawn and waited for the shaking to stop.

—

When we walked back into the house, Martha gasped. Nothing had been disturbed. No painting had fallen off the wall, no porcelain jug had bounced off a counter. No books had slid out of a bookshelf. No brick had cracked in the chimney. Everything looked just as it had before. It was incomprehensible. In every earthquake, no matter how minor, we'd sustained some damage. This temblor was clearly a monster and yet…

“Quickly,” said Martha. “We must see how the others have fared.”

We all knew the emergency drill. Fire or quake—congregate at the dining hall.

The sky slowly brightened, from indigo to a robin's-egg blue. We walked through Greengage in a state of disbelief. No trees were downed. No chasm rent a field in two. The schoolhouse, the cottages, the dormitories, the winery, the barn, the cooper's shed, the workshop, every structure was intact.

Martha, who rarely showed her affection for me in public, picked up my hand and threaded her fingers through mine. It was not a romantic gesture. It did not make me feel like we were husband and wife. Instead it stripped me of my years and made me feel as if we were two orphan children wandering through a vast forest.

You might think our behavior odd. Why weren't we rejoicing? Clearly we'd been spared. But I was a realist, as was Martha.

Something was very wrong.

Everybody was present and accounted for, and there wasn't so much as a single scratch or a scraped knee. If there were wounds, they were not the visible sort.

The only thing that was different was the towering bank of fog that hung at the edge of the woods.

—

“Glen Ellen,” Magnusson reminded us.

“Yes,” said Martha. “Of course, our friends in Glen Ellen.” She clapped her hands together and shouted out to the crowd. “We can't assume they've been as fortunate as us. We must go to them.”

I stopped a moment to admire my spitfire of a wife. Barely five feet tall, maybe ninety pounds. Butter-yellow hair, which was loose around her shoulders, as the earthquake had interrupted her in mid-sleep. Martha was not a woman who traded on her beauty. It shone through, even though she eschewed lipstick and rouge and wore the plainest of serge skirts. I felt a sharp prick of pride.

It took us nearly an hour to organize a group of men and a wagon full of supplies.

“Be careful,” said Martha nervously as I climbed up on my horse. “There could be more aftershocks.”

“The worst is over,” I said. “I'm sure of it.”

“I don't like the look of that fog,” she said. “It's so thick.”

It was a tule fog, the densest of the many Northern California fogs. When a tule fog descended upon Greengage, spirits plummeted, for it heralded day after day of unremitting mist and drizzle. But these fogs were vital to the vineyard as well as the fruit and nut trees. Without them the trees didn't go into the period of dormancy that was needed to ensure a good crop.

“I know the way to Glen Ellen. I could get there blindfolded.” I smiled brightly in order to allay her fears. “We'll be back before you know it.”

—

Within seconds of entering the fogbank, I fell off my horse, gasping for air. Disoriented, confused, my chest pounding. A profound, fatal breathlessness.

The two men who had gone before me were already dead.

I was lucky. Magnusson pulled me out before I succumbed to the same fate. Friar, our doctor, came running. He later told me that when he felt my pulse, my heart was beating almost four hundred times a minute. Another few seconds in the fog, and I would have died, too.

In my experience, when the unthinkable happens, people respond in one of two ways: they either become hysterical or are paralyzed. Greengage's reaction was split down the middle. Some panicked and screams of anguish filled the air; others were mute with shock. Only a minute ago we'd ridden into the fog, as we'd done hundreds of times before. And now, a minute later, two of our men, husbands and fathers both, were dead. How could this be?

I preferred the wails; the silence was smothering. People covered their mouths with their hands, looking to me for answers. I had none. I was as shocked and horrified as anybody else. The only thing I could tell them was that this was no ordinary tule fog.

—

We put our questions on hold as we tended to our dead. The two men had been stalwart members of our community, with me since the beginning. A dairyman and a builder of stone walls.

Magnusson tossed a spadeful of dirt over his shoulder.

“Let me help,” I said to him, feeling a frantic need to do something.

“No. You are not well.”

“Give the shovel to me, I'm fine,” I insisted.

Nardo, Matteo's sixteen-year-old son, took the shovel from Magnusson. “You're not fine,” he told me. “You're the color of a hard-boiled egg.”

He was right. Whatever had happened in the fog had left me utterly exhausted, and my rib cage ached. It hurt to breathe.

“Thank you,” I said.

The boy bent to his grim task. Digging the graves.

—

That afternoon, time sped by. It careened and galloped. The men were buried one after the other. People stood and spoke in their honor. People sank to their knees and wept. Grief rolled in, sudden and high, like a tide.

Then it was evening.

I lay in bed unable to sleep. I felt hollow, my insides scraped out. I sought refuge in my mind. I turned the question of this mysterious fog over and over again. Maybe we were mistaken—perhaps the fog was not a fog, it was something else. Had the massive temblor released some sort of a toxic natural gas that came deep from the belly of the earth? If it
was
a gas, it would dissipate. The wind would eventually carry it away. By tomorrow morning, hopefully.

—

During breakfast in the dining hall, I relayed my theory. The gas was still there, as dense as it had been yesterday, though it didn't appear to be spreading. There was a little niggling thought in the back of my mind. If it was a gas, wouldn't it also emit some sort of a chemical, sulfurous odor?

I divided us into groups. One group set off to investigate the wall of gas further. Where did it start? Where did it end? Probably it didn't encircle all of Greengage, but if it did, were there places where it wasn't as dense? Places where somebody fleet of foot might be able to dart through without suffering its ill effects?

Another group conducted experiments. The gas had to be tested. Was there any living thing that could pass through it? The children helped with this task. They put ants in matchboxes. Frogs in cigar boxes. They secured the boxes to pull-toys, wagons, and hoops. They attached ropes to the toys and sent them wheeling into the gas.

The ants died. The frogs died. We sent in a chicken, a pig, and a sheep. They all died, too. The wall encircled the entirety of Greengage, all one hundred acres of it, every square foot of it as dense as the next. Whatever it was made of, it did not lift. Not the next morning. Or the morning after that.

—

The first week was the week of unremitting questioning. Wild swings of emotion. Seesawing. The giving of hope, the taking of hope.

Was it a gas? Was it a fog? Why had this happened? What was happening on the other side of it? Were people looking for us? Surely there'd be a search party. Surely somebody was trying to figure out how to get through the fog and come to our aid.

The second week was the week of anger. Bitter arguments and grief.

Why had this happened to
us
? What had we done to deserve this? Were we being punished? Why hadn't any rescuers arrived yet? Why was it taking so long?

People grew desperate.

Late one night, when everybody was asleep, Dominic Salvatore tiptoed into the fog, hoping if he moved slowly enough, he would somehow make it through. He got just five feet before collapsing.

We lost an entire family not two days later. Just before dawn, they hitched their fastest horse to their buckboard, hid under blankets, and tried to race their way through the fogbank. The baker was the only one awake at that hour. The only one who heard the sound of their wagon crashing into a tree. The horse's terrified whinny. The cries of the children. And then, silence.

After that, nobody tried to escape again.

The third week, the truth of our situation slowly set in. Meals at the dining hall were silent. Appetites low. Food was pushed away after one or two bites. Everybody did their jobs. What else could we do? Work was our religion, but it also produced our sustenance. It gave us purpose. It was the only thing that could save us. The cows were milked. Fields plowed. Everybody thought the same thing but nobody would voice it. Not yet, anyway.

Help wasn't coming. We were on our own.

I
sat in the passenger seat holding a squirmy Benno on my lap. He had a ring of orange Hi-C around his mouth. I'd have to scrub it off before he got on the plane; it made him look like a street urchin. He sucked on the ear of his stuffed Snoopy while his sticky hand worked the radio dial.

He spun past “Bennie and the Jets” and “Kung Fu Fighting.”

“But you love ‘Kung Fu Fighting,' ” I said.

He vehemently shook his head and Rhonda laughed, her Afro bobbing. An X-ray technician at Kaiser, she'd left work early to drive us to the airport and help me see Benno off. We'd been roommates for the past three years, and she was the closest thing I had to family in California. Right now she seemed to be the only person in my life who wasn't keeping a constant tally of my failures (perennially late everywhere I went, maxed-out credit cards, beans and toast for dinner three times a week, musty towels, and an ant infestation in my closet due to the fact that Benno had left half an uneaten hot dog in there that I didn't discover for days).

Benno stopped turning the dial when he heard whistling and drumming, the opening instrumentals for “Billy, Don't Be a Hero.” He nestled back into my chest. Within a minute, his eyes were welling up as the soldiers were trapped on a hillside. He moaned.

“Change the station,” said Rhonda.

“No!” shouted Benno. “The best part's coming. The sergeant needs a volunteer to ride out.” Tears streamed down his face as he sang along.

“God help us,” I mouthed to Rhonda.

“Babe, is this a good cry or a bad cry?” I whispered to Benno.

“G-good,” he stuttered.

“Okay.” I wrapped my arms around him and let him do his thing.

Benno loved to feel sad, as long as it wasn't a get-a-shot-at-the-doctor kind of sad. He loved, in fact, to feel. Anything. Everything. But this kind of emotion, happy-sad, as he called it, was his favorite flavor. Tonight I would indulge him. We wouldn't see each other for two weeks.

Rhonda took one last drag of her cigarette and flicked the butt out the window. She was no stranger to this kind of melodrama. The song ended and Benno turned around, fastened himself to my chest like a monkey, and buried his head in my armpit.

I stroked his back until he stopped trembling. He looked up at me with a tear-streaked face.

“Better?” I asked.

He nodded and ran his finger across the faint blond down on my upper lip. He made a chirping sound. My mustache reminded him of a baby chick, he'd once told me. I told him you should never refer to a lady's down as a mustache.

—

I'd given Benno my mother's maiden name—Bennett. I loved the clean, bellish sound of it. She'd flown out for his birth; my father had not. At that point he and I had been estranged for more than two years, and my choice to have a son “out of wedlock” was not going to remedy that situation.

My mother, Miriam, had been campaigning for Benno to come east for a visit for months. I'd said no originally. The thought of shipping Benno across the country to my hometown of Newport, Rhode Island, land of whale belts, Vanderbilt mansions, and men in pink Bermuda shorts, was unthinkable.

“Please,” she said. “He needs to know where he comes from.”

“He comes from San Francisco.”

“He barely knows me.”

“You visit three times a year.”

“That's not nearly enough.”

She upped the ante. She promised to pay for everything. The airfare, the escort who would accompany him on the plane. Finally I relented.

—

I'd met Nelson King, Benno's father, in a bar a week before he shipped out to Vietnam.

“You're not from here” was the first thing he said to me.

I'd been in San Francisco a little over a year at that point and thought I was doing a pretty good job of passing as a native. I'd worked hard to shed my New England accent. I'd traded in my preppy clothes for Haight-Ashbury garb. The night we met, I was wearing a midriff-baring crocheted halter top with white bell-bottom pants.

“What makes you say that?” I asked.

“You hold yourself differently than everybody else.”

“What do you mean? Hold myself how?”

He shrugged. “Stiffer. More erect.”

I puffed out my cheeks in irritation. He was an undeniably good-looking man. Pillowy raspberry lips. Luminous topaz skin. He could be anything. Persian. Egyptian. Spanish. Later I'd learn his mother was black, his father Puerto Rican.

“That wasn't an insult,” he said. “That was a compliment. You hold yourself like somebody who knows their worth.”

I was nineteen, in between waitressing jobs, and desperately searching for an identity. That he saw this glimmer of pride in me was a tiny miracle. We spent every day together until he shipped out. It wasn't love, but it might have blossomed into that if we'd had more time together.

After he'd left, I'd written him a few letters. He'd written back to me as well, echoing my light tone, but then we'd trailed off. Three months later, when I'd found out I was pregnant, I'd written to him again, but didn't get a reply. Soon after, I discovered his name on a fatal casualty list in the
San Francisco Examiner
.

Although his death was tragic and shocking, the cavalier nature of our relationship and that it had resulted in an unexpected pregnancy was just as jarring. We'd essentially had a fling, a last hurrah that had allowed for a sort of supercharged intimacy between us. A quick stripping down of emotions that I imagined was not unlike the relationship he might have had with his fellow soldiers. The details of our lives didn't matter and so we'd exchanged very little of them. We'd just let the moment carry us—to bars, to restaurants, and to bed.

In an instant, the dozens of possible futures I'd entertained for myself receded and the one future I'd never considered rolled in.

I was pregnant, unmarried, and alone.

—

“What do I call the man?” asked Benno as Rhonda pulled into the airport parking garage.

“What man?”

“The man who lives with Grandma.”

“The man who lives with Grandma will be away when you visit,” I said.

The man who lived with Grandma, a.k.a. my father, George Lysander, would be spending the last two weeks of August at his cabin in New Hampshire, as he'd done for the last forty-something years. My mother had timed Benno's visit accordingly.

“I met him before,” said Benno.

“You were only two, Benno. Do you really remember meeting him?”

“I remember,” he insisted.

My father had been in San Francisco for the Association of Independent Schools' annual conference (he was dean of admissions at St. Paul's School in Newport). He'd arranged to stop by our apartment for dinner: it would be the first time he'd met his grandson.

“For you,” he'd said to Benno, handing him a loaf of sourdough bread.

Benno peeked out from behind me, his thumb in his mouth.

“Say thank you to your grandfather,” I prompted him.

“He doesn't have to thank me,” said my father.

“Yuck crunchy bread,” said Benno.

I watched my father taking Benno in. His tea-colored skin. His glittering, light brown eyes.

“I don't like it either,” my father said. “How about we have your mother cut off the crusts?”

Benno nodded.

“We can make bread balls.”

It was an offering to me. Bread balls were something my father and I did together when I was a little girl. Plucked the white part of the bread out of the loaf and rolled tiny little balls that we dipped in butter and salt and then popped into our mouths. It drove my mother crazy.

That was all it took. Benno adored my father. He climbed into his lap after dinner and made him read
The Snowy Day
three times. I washed the dishes and fought back tears of relief and resentment. Why had it taken him so long to come around?

But he hadn't—not really. When Benno was standing in front of him in the same room, he came around. But when he was three thousand miles away from us, back home in Newport, the distance grew again. His contact with Benno dwindled to a once-a-year birthday card. The incongruity between our realities, the life I'd chosen and the life he'd wanted for me, was too great to reconcile.

“What if he's there?” asked Benno.

“He won't be.”

“But what if he is? What do I call him?”

“Then you call him Grandpa,” I said. “Or Grandfather. Or Mr. Lysander. Or George. Christ, Benno, I don't know. You'll have to ask him what he wants to be called, but I don't think it'll be an issue. You won't see him.”

My father had never missed his precious two weeks at the lake. He would not be missing them now.

—

I hated airports. They were liminal space. You floated around in them untethered between arrivals and departures. A certain slackness always descended upon me as soon as I walked through the airport doors.

“Are you scared?” I asked Benno.

“There's nothing to be scared of, kid,” said Rhonda. “You're going on an adventure.”

“I'm not scared,” he said.

“Look, babe. The days will be easy. It's the nighttime that might be hard. That's when you'll probably feel homesick. But just make sure you—”

“Can we go up the escalator?” he interrupted me.

I stopped and crouched down. “Benno, do you need a hug?”

He blew a tiny spit bubble. “No, thank you.”

“Don't do that, that's gross.”

He sucked it in.

“Well, may I please have a hug?” I asked.

“I'm busy.”

“You're busy? Busy doing what?”

“Leaving, Mama,” he sighed.

—

Abortion wouldn't be legal in California for another three years, but even if it were, I never would have terminated the pregnancy. Perhaps given different circumstances I'd have chosen differently, but for this baby my choice was life. Of course I didn't know he'd turn into Benno.
My
Benno. I just knew he needed to come into the world.

Everybody thought I was crazy. Not only was there no father in the picture, but the father was black. How much harder could I make it for myself—a single white mother with a mixed-race child?

He brought me such joy. I never knew I was capable of loving somebody the way I loved him. Purely, ragged-heartedly. I couldn't imagine my life without him in it.

But my life with him in it was also ridiculously hard. I was a parent twenty-four hours a day. Every tantrum, every cry of hunger, every question was mine to soothe, to feed, and to answer. I had no spouse to hand him off to. No partner to help pay the bills. I could never just walk away. I was the sole person in charge of resolving every issue in my child's life, from how to deal with bullies, to
Is that rash serious?
to
He's three years old and still not using a spoon properly—what's wrong with him?

I wasn't stupid. I'd known that raising a child on my own would be challenging. It was the isolation that blindsided me. The intractable, relentless truth was that I was alone. I could meet other mothers on the playground. We could talk bottle-feeding and solid foods, how to get rid of cradle cap, the best remedy for diaper rash. We could laugh, commiserate, watch each other's babies while somebody ran to the bathroom. But at the end of the day, they went home to their husbands and I went home to an apartment that was dark until I turned on the lights.

—

When we got to the gate, I was panicked but doing my best to hide it. I'd never been separated from Benno for more than a night.

“You must be Benno,” said the stewardess when we checked in. “We've been waiting for you!” She picked up the phone, punched three numbers, and spoke softly into it. “Jill, Benno Lysander is here.” She hung up. “You are going to adore Jill. She's a retired stewardess. She's got all sorts of activities planned for you, young man. Crossword puzzles. Hangman. Coloring books. A trip to the cockpit to meet the captain, and if you're very good, maybe you'll get a pair of captain's wings.”

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