We Are Still Married (35 page)

A couple of days after the snow didn't fall, I was walking down Fifth Avenue and heard a man behind me say, “There is no such thing as collective intelligence! Ha! It's
individuals
who think. You got to have
individuals
in the collective!” I turned and looked at him, but he didn't look back. He was talking to himself, engrossed in his own company. He snorted. “Collective intelligence! That's a contradiction!” Somehow, I thought, a good storm, with eight inches of snow whipped into high drifts, would have got his attention and drawn him into the epic along with the subway preacher, the carpenter, me, and all the others. But if it can't snow, then at least it can turn to spring: we await the advent of baseball.

“W
E CATCHED FISH AND TALKED, and we took a swim now and then to keep off sleepiness,” said Huckleberry Finn. “It was kind of solemn, drifting down the big, still river, laying on our backs looking up at the stars, and we didn't ever feel like talking loud, and it warn't often that we laughed—only a little kind of low chuckle. We had mighty good weather as a general thing, and nothing ever happened to us at all.”

Huck was a hippie, searching for freedom, and, long ago, most of the people I knew were too.

In 1970, in search of freedom and dignity and cheap rent, I moved out to a farmhouse on the rolling prairie in central Minnesota, near Freeport, where I planted a garden and wrote stories to support my wife and year-old son. Rent was eighty dollars a month. It got us a big square brick house with a porch that looked out on a peaceful barnyard, a granary, and machine sheds and corn cribs and silo, and the barn and feedlot where Norbert, the owner, kept his beef cattle. Beyond the windbreak of red oak and spruce to the west and north lay 160 acres of his corn and oats. (I believed it was oats, but on the odd chance it might be wheat or barley, I didn't mention anything to Norbert about it being oats.) Our long two-rut driveway ran due north through the woods to where the gravel road made an L, where our mailbox stood, where you could stand and see for a couple miles in all directions, the green fields and the thick groves around the farmsites.

My pals in Minneapolis considered this a real paradise (so did we) and they often drove up and enjoyed a weekend of contemplating corn and associating with large animals. On the Fourth of July, 1971, we had twenty people come for a picnic in the yard, an Olympic egg toss and gunnysack race, a softball game with the side of the barn for a right-field fence, and that night we sat around the kitchen and made pizza and talked about the dismal future.

America was trapped in Vietnam, a tragedy, and how could it end if not in holocaust? We were pessimists; we needed fear to make us feel truly alive. We talked about death. We put on loud music and made lavish pizzas with fresh mushrooms and onions, zucchini, eggplant, garlic, green pepper, and drank beer and talked about the end of life on earth with a morbid piety that made a person sick, about racial hatred, pesticides, radiation, television, the stupidity of politicians, and whether Vietnam was the result of strategic mistakes or a reflection of evil in American culture. It was a conversation with concrete shoes.

I snuck out to the screen porch with my son and sat and listened to crickets, and my friend Greg Bitz sat with us and two others came out, tired of politics and talk, and we walked along the driveway out of the yard light and through the dark trees and sat down in a strip of alfalfa between the woods and the oats. (“What's that?” they said. “Oats,” I replied.) And then we lay down on our backs and looked up at the sky full of stars.

The sky was clear. Lying there, looking up at 180 degrees of billions of dazzling single brilliances, made us feel we had gone away and left the farm far behind.

As we usually see the sky, it is a backdrop, the sky over our house, the sky beyond the clotheslines, but lying down eliminates the horizon and rids us of that strange realistic perspective of the sky as a canopy centered over our heads, and we see the sky as what it is: everything known and unknown, the universe, the whole beach other than the grain of sand we live on. The sight of the sky was so stunning it made us drunk. I felt as if I could put one foot forward and walk away from the wall of ground at my back and hike out toward Andromeda. I didn't feel particularly American. Out there in the Milky Way and the world without end Amen, America was a tiny speck of a country, a nickel tossed into the Grand Canyon, and American culture the amount of the Pacific Ocean you bring home in your swimsuit. The President wasn't the President out there, the Constitution was only a paper, and what newspapers wrote about was sawdust and coffee grounds. The light I saw was from fires burning before America existed, when my ancestor John Crandall lived in the colony of Rhode Island. Looking out there, my son lying on my chest, I could imagine my grandchildren, and they were more real to me than Congress.

I imagined them strong and free, curious, sensual, indelibly cheerful and affectionate, open-handed—sympathetic to pain and misery and quick in charity, proud when insulted and modest if praised, fiercely loyal to friends, loving God and the beautiful world including our land, from the California coast to the North Dakota prairie to faraway Manhattan, loving music and our American language—when you look at the stars you don't think small. You don't hope your descendants will enjoy your mutual-fund portfolio, you imagine them as giants on the earth.

Between the tree line and my left elbow, a billion stars in the sky, each representing a billion we couldn't see. We lay in the grass, thinking about America and also a little bit about snakes and about spiders clambering from blade to blade who might rappel down into our mouths, and looked open-mouthed up at the heavens, and everything we said out loud seemed hilarious to us. Tiny us gazing up at the South Wall of the Unimaginable Everything and feeling an obligation to comment, and our most profound comments sounded like peas dropped in a big empty bucket. “It makes you feel small, doesn't it.”
Plink.
“I used to know the names of those.”
Plunk.
One more peabrain having to share the effect that the world is having on him. “It's beautiful, isn't it.... I remember when I was a kid—” someone said and we laughed ourselves limp—Shut up, we said, laughing, we're sick of sensitive people, everything you see just reminds you of yourself! So stick it in your ear.

Perhaps in 1776 our ancestors, too, were rattled by current events and the unbeatable logic of despair and had to go out and lie in the weeds for a while and think: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.

Indoors, the news is second-hand, mostly bad, and even good people are drawn into a dreadful fascination with doom and demise; their faith in extinction gets stronger; they sit and tell stories that begin with The End. Outdoors, the news is usually miraculous. A fly flew in my mouth and went deep, forcing me to swallow, inducing a major life change for him, from fly to simple protein, and so shall we all be changed someday, but here under heaven our spirits are immense, we are so blessed. The stars in the sky, my friends in the grass, my son asleep on my chest, his hands clutching my shirt.

M
Y SON WAS due in at Heathrow Airport at nine-forty last night, flying from New York, and about noon yesterday, a Sunday, lying around in my hotel room reading the Sunday papers and drinking coffee, I started to think about him on a plane and got the jitters. He is twenty and has flown to Europe on his own before and could find his way to the hotel OK, but I am a father who is susceptible to jitters, and I can't talk myself out of them. I think about a plane over the ocean with my progeny aboard and pretty soon the plane wobbles, and then I need to take a walk.

The neighborhood here isn't so different from parts of Manhattan, except that the streets are named George, New Cavendish, St. Vincent, Weymouth, Paddington, Devonshire, Nottingham, and Marylebone High Street. The last isn't so different from a New York shopping street, except for the ironmonger's, the photocopy centre, the cafe offering takeaway food, the shops with “TO LET” signs in the windows, a pub called The Rising Sun, the red brick façades and knobby roofs out of Dickens, and the Mobil station selling unleaded premium for forty-eight pence per litre.

Facts such as these help to calm down a father who is suffering from sudden propulsive anxiety, the sort that every parent knows well. The last time I traveled in Europe with my son, we rode a train to West Berlin, and at the last station in East Germany grim squads of border guards came aboard and searched the car, and I had a sudden, stark fear that the guard who was studying his passport picture might notice the tones of green in his long hair and pull him off the train and find marijuana in his bag and we would enter into a bureaucratic hell that would occupy our lives for the next three years. My skin got tight at the thought of it; my nose trembled. This is the sort of fear I am capable of. My son came into the world, after forty-eight hours of labor, in a teaching hospital where the staff seemed to be a few chapters behind the one my wife and I were on. Since then, I've worried about him pretty consistently. Facts are consoling, compared with what a parent can imagine. The plane shook from side to side, and loud snapping and whirring noises could be heard from below.

The outstanding fact of Marylebone High Street lay just north, across from the corner of Beaumont. In a lot between a bakery and a school (where, beginning on Monday, September 25th, the Westminster Adult Education Institute was offering classes in Calligraphy, Vegetarian Cookery, Welsh 1, Navigation [Day Skipper], Guitar, Transactional Analysis, and Jazz Dance and Fitness for fifty-five pence per hour) was a little park behind an iron fence, about two storefronts wide and forty feet deep. Close to the fence was a white obelisk about eight feet high marking the burial place of Charles Wesley (“Crown'd through the mercy of thy Lord/With a free full immense reward”), the hymn writer and a founder of Methodism. The park was paved with bricks and stone. Inside were tombstones set into the brick walls and some in the pavement. Six wooden benches faced a sunken stone floor about ten yards square, which was, according to a plaque on the back wall, the exact site of the old parish church of Marylebone, built in 1400, where Francis Bacon was married (1606), and Richard Brinsley Sheridan (to Miss Linley, in 1773), and where Lord Byron was baptized (1788).

Facts—you could sit on a bench and contemplate them one at a time or all together. Death, for one. In the center of the stone floor was a tablet beneath which lay Lady Abigail Hay, and around her, according to another plaque on the wall, lay the following:

I strolled along the wall, reading tombstones, until one of them set my teeth on edge. It read:

This struck too close. I am forty-seven, and my only son was over the ocean. I could understand how the death of a child could bring on an illness that would last seven and a half years and finally kill you. The plane bucked and dove; the lights went out. I turned away, then turned back and wrote the inscription down on a blank check, the only paper I had on me. A dignified gray-haired lady watched me from the sidewalk. She wore a brown coat, a blue skirt, and black stockings, and carried a cane. Perhaps she saw I was an American and thought I was trying to buy the park, but all I wanted was Hester Wilton's epitaph, and when I got it I headed back down Marylebone High Street toward the hotel, where my son would be arriving, by cab from the airport, in about three hours. Somewhere between there and The Rising Sun, it struck me that I could fill up some of that time by simply taking the Underground out to Heathrow and meeting him at the gate.

I caught a train at the Baker Street station at eight-thirty and got off at Green Park to change to the Piccadilly line, where an electric sign over the platform told us patrons exactly how long until the next train: “HEATHROW ... 1 MIN,” it said, and a minute later in she came. We rolled into Terminal 4 at Heathrow at nine-fourteen. I took the escalator upstairs and found that British Airways Flight 178, due in from JFK at nine-forty, had landed at nine. About ten limo drivers waited for their customers, along with forty or fifty of us civilians, including the actor Peter O'Toole, in a gray tweed suit, who was waiting, it turned out, for a lanky, elegant woman pushing a cartload of luggage, and a boy of about nine in a blue blazer. He raced into Mr. O'Toole's open arms and was hoisted up and kissed twice, and soon after him came my son, twenty, with a guitar on his back, and wearing one of my old shirts and a pair of black pants with white paint stains on it. He grinned, and we shook hands.