The family had owned a car when Lee was born, a green Model A Ford, but before he was old enough to go to kindergarten the car had disappeared, and was not replaced with another. That was how poor they had become. They were so poor that Grampop went to work for the borough highway crew and Granny cleaned the houses of her relatives—she had many; she had been the baby of twelve children—to bring in a few extra dollars.
Daddy worked, too, of course. He put on one of his suits almost every weekday and went off into the world beyond the front hedge. But the work he did there—adding up figures for other men, bookkeeping for a fine-gauge silk-stocking factory—didn’t bring very much money home. The men who worked on the factory floor, as machinists and full-fashioned knitters, earned more, Lee became aware when he began to attend school with their children. These fathers were robust, cheerfully rude men with a pleased look about their eyes and a teasing crease about their mouths that Daddy didn’t have.
Also, he didn’t have a belly, the way workers and farmers did. Even Grampop had a belly, on which he would rest the wrist of the hand holding his cigar while he stood in the yard smoking. Often Lee and his grandfather were the only family members out there as the warm spring night crept in. There was a dewy weight to the air that pressed a wave of sweetness from the darkened bed of lilies-of-the-valley, and caused a scattering of cherry blossoms to fall. The old man would lift his head, listening to the birds’ last chirpings. His glowing cigar end would somersault as he tossed it into the peonies. It did not occur to Lee that he, Lee, was the reason his grandfather stood there—“to keep an eye on the youngster.”
It did occur to Lee, though not in words he could say, that he was a bright spot in a demoralized household. In the houses across the street—the narrow row houses lined up like gaunt, asphalt-shingled angels—the children outnumbered the parents, and the sounds of screeching and weeping that escaped the walls showed that a constant battle was being waged on near-equal terms. In Lee’s house, the only sounds of battle arose between his parents. Some complaint, or set of complaints, lay between them. Otherwise, he felt the four adults as sides of a perfect square, with a diagonal from each corner to a central point. He was that point, protected on all sides, loved from every direction.
Yet there were scrapes, scoldings, childish tantrums, vows to kill himself to make everyone else sorry, various ways in which he let his guardians down. Once, irritated at how his hair kept falling over his eyes as he tried to copy a comic strip while lying on the floor, he had taken his toy tin scissors and cut some off; his mother acted as if he had cut off a finger or his nose. Haircuts, in general, were dangerous. For one thing, the chief barber at the shop they went to was a rabid Roosevelt-hater, and gusts of shrill debate swirled around Lee’s hot ears as he huddled embarrassed on the chair, on a board laid across the broad porcelain arms. For another thing, his mother was usually dissatisfied with the haircut when he came home. Of the three barbers in the shop only Jake, the Roosevelt-hater, could cut Lee’s hair to her satisfaction. When he pointed out to her that Jake’s political opinions were the opposite of theirs, she said yes, but he was an artist.
His mother had this idea of art, of artistry, on her mind. She would sit crayoning with Lee on the floor, her weight gracefully propped on her arm, her legs folded within her nubbly wool skirt, but for the knees, white and round, that peeped from underneath. She praised Lee’s little drawings beyond, he felt, their worth—or, rather, she penetrated into that secret place within him where they were valued very highly.
There was something disproportionate, something hotter than comfortable, about his mother. She had copper-colored hair and freckles and a temper. Sometimes after a fight that had rattled through the house all one Sunday afternoon, his father would say to Lee, with a certain sheepish pride, “Your mother. She’s a real redhead.” When Lee was even a little late coming home for supper from playing in the neighborhood, anger would show in a red V between her eyebrows. The sides of her neck would blush. More than once she whipped him, with a switch cut from the base of the pear tree, on the backs of his legs. It not only hurt but felt like a forced, unnatural exercise; it made him want to keep his distance. He liked his mother best when she sat alone at the dining-room table playing solitaire under the stained-glass chandelier, focusing on the turn of the cards, talking to herself, or when she pushed the lawnmower around the yard like a man. Their yard seemed huge, with its shaggy, fragrant bushes (hydrangeas, bridal wreath, viburnum) encroaching greedily upon each other and upon the lawn, forming secret shady spaces, dirt-floored caves where not even a weed could grow. He liked hiding in these caves, getting his shorts dirty.
At about the age of six, when first grade was teaching him how to read, he created a masterpiece of comic art—a drawing of their side hedge where the brick walk made a gap, one leafy edge slit so that a face on a long neck could be poked through, back and forth, imitating Betty Jean Halloran peeking to see if he was at home, available to play. She was tall for her age, and shy. Perhaps she sensed his grandmother’s disapproval of her family, which lived down the street in a house without plumbing, just a pump on the back porch. Lee expected this paper trick to please both his female guardians, but his mother, studying the drawing and making the head poke out once or twice, conveyed without saying so that he had been cruel, because Betty Jean after all was a faithful friend, one of the few friends he had.
His being an only child was part of the soreness, the murmuring quarrel, between Daddy and his mother. Perhaps she would have been better off marrying one of the big-bellied full-fashioned knitters; at least there would have been less worry about money. But no, there was something sensitive and wary in her nature that shunned the world around her. Daddy did not shun it—on days when he didn’t do accounting, he went off to teach Sunday school or watch a Saturday softball game on the school grounds—but he always returned, and he indulged his wife and son in their conspiracy about art, a way to push back at the world without touching it. When he heard them talking about art, he would say, “It’s miles over my head,” obviously not believing it, believing instead that it was beneath him, who dwelt high and clear among numbers.
What he did not know but Lee did and his mother sensed was that crayoning was Lee’s way of getting away from her, from all his guardians, into a realm quite his own, where love did not fall upon him but descended from him, onto the little creatures, the humanoid animals, the comically unchanging comic-strip characters that he copied, his nose a few inches from the carpet that smelled of shoe leather.
When Grampop entertained his old-man guests on the cane-backed sofa, they sometimes, in their mutual pleasure at the conversation, kicked up little balls of fluff from the same faded carpet. Lee’s mother complained about this, her face getting not quite as red as it did over the smell of cigars. Lee felt her heat, the afterglow of her unpredictable passions, most intensely in the piano room, which blended into the living room through an archway with side pillars and a band of ornate stick-and-beadwork overhead. This passage of carpentry was the grandest thing about the house, and his failure to succeed at piano lessons, though he took them for years, was the most distinct disappointment he made his mother suffer. The piano area, with its sheet music and brass candlesticks on top of the upright, belonged to his mother; the kitchen, with its warping linoleum and black stone sink, to Granny; the front room, with its sagging sofa and dusty view of the neighbors, to Grampop; and the front vestibule and door to Daddy, who was always going out or coming in.
As Lee lay on the carpet, his guardians in their attitudes of suspended discomfort felt like the four corners of the ceiling far above him. The shelter they formed held through Depression and world war, and even his adolescence and his constantly outgrowing his clothes did not disturb the configuration, though Grampop underwent a cataract operation that made him hold his head very still while Lee read the newspaper headlines to him, and Granny stooped and her hands shook more and more and Parkinson’s disease slowly stopped u
p her speech, and his father turned gray and had to find another accounting job when the hosiery mills went south after the war, and his mother put on weight, and the bushes in the yard grew taller and wilder, and Betty Jean Halloran became a beauty with a racy reputation and had long since stopped peeking around the hedge.
He had always dreaded one of his guardians’ dying, disappearing into an unbelievable nothingness, ripping away a corner of his childhood shelter. As if knowing this, they contrived to stay alive until he was safely away at college and beyond, protecting him to the last from anything too ugly or frightening. They died, at tactfully spaced-out intervals, in the order of their births. Grampop was over ninety, and healthy and walking within two days of his death; he felt queasy and went to bed on the first day, and on the second day believed the bed was on fire and, in escaping it, fell dead to the floor. Lee was at college when he heard about this. Granny lingered in bed another year, unable to talk or sit up on her own finally, and was found one morning by her daughter, asleep for good, her sharp nose and deep sockets smoothed into a youthful beauty of the bone. Lee by now was pursuing an M.F.A. degree in Iowa City. For some years Daddy shuttled in and out of hospitals with angina, and nonfatal heart attacks; his young doctor confided to the widow that he “gave them all a rough hour” at the end. Lee was living in San Francisco at the time, pursuing art and his identity as an artist, and was relieved that he could not get to the bedside in time to see his father struggling for life, for air. His mother, like her father, dropped to the floor one day—the kitchen floor, the dishes just done and set in the strainer. She had moved from the long old house to a newer, smaller one, all on one level; her red hair went pure white, and she became mild and whimsical and good-tempered in her solitude, and never rebuked Lee with the rarity of his visits. Her once-a-week cleaning lady saw the body on the floor through the back-door window, and the police and undertakers and clergy did the rest, while Lee flew in from Taos, where he had moved when San Francisco didn’t work out.
Now all were gone. Of that early-twentieth-century household, only Lee was left. The coal bin in the cellar, the shelves of homemade preserves, the walnut icebox, the black stone sink, the warping kitchen linoleum in the pattern of little interlocking bricks, the stained-glass dining-room chandelier shade, the front-hall newel post with ribs around it like the rings of Saturn or Plastic Man’s telltale stripes, the narrow back stairs that nobody used and that became a storage space choked with cardboard boxes and appliances to be repaired some day, the windowless stair landing where they had huddled in the pitch dark during mock air raids, the long side porch where hoboes had knocked for handouts, the pansy-faced calico cat that came to the porch to be fed but was too wild to come into the house, the tawny wicker lawn chair where Grampop would sit in the twilight with his cigar, watching the fireflies gather—only Lee was left to remember any of this.
As part of his self-consciousness, while old age overtook his once-infantile brain, he made occasional efforts to envision his situation as science proved it to be. He would look at the half-moon and try to see it not as the goddess Diana or as a comic-book decal but as a sphere hung in empty space, its illumined side an infallible indication of where the sun was shining on the other side of the earth’s huge round mass. He tried to imagine the surface under his feet as curved, and hurtling backwards toward sunrise. With a greater effort, he tried to imagine empty space in something like its actual vastness, each star light-years from the next, and the near-absolute vacuum of interstellar space containing virtual particles that somehow generated an energy the reverse of gravity, pushing the stars and the galaxies faster and faster apart, until the universe would become invisible to itself, cold and dark forever and ever, amen. He tried to picture organic life as Darwin and his followers described it, as not a ladder of being, climbing toward ever more complex and spiritual forms, but as a flat swamp, a diffuse soup of insensible genes whose simple existence, within however ignoble and grotesque and murderous and parasitic a creature, tended to perpetuation of those creatures, without the least taint of purpose or aspiration. It was all in the numbers, as Daddy had said. What was was, and tended to be the same, generation after generation.
There was comfort in this, Lee thought. His guardians were still with him. They were within him, extending their protection and care. From Grampop—who had had a quaint, tentative gesture of lifting his thin-skinned hand as if to bestow a blessing or to ask for a moment’s halt from the powers that be—he had inherited longevity, and from Granny a country toughness, a wiry fiber that had only slowly bent beneath age and disease. His father’s receding realism was his, and his mother’s intent, dissatisfied heat. His guardians were within him, propelling him like a tiny human crew within a tall, walking armature of DNA. They would not steer him wrong; his death would come tactfully, and was nowhere near close.
The Laughter of the Gods
BENJAMIN FOSTER—an ungainly name, carrying in the bearer’s own ears a certain formal, distant resonance, as if he were a foster child—took an interest, once his father was dead, in how his parents had met, courted, and, deepest in the darkness, conceived him. His mother told him, “We met in the registration line the very first day of college, and the second we clapped eyes on each other we started laughing. And we didn’t stop laughing for the whole four years.”
“Didn’t you date other people, ever?”
“ ‘Dating’ seems to mean more now than it did in the Twenties, but no, not really. Nobody else would have anything to do with us. That was our feeling. That was our fear. We were held together by fear, your father and I, a fear that nobody else would have us. We were freaks, Benjy.”
She looked up, unsmiling but mischievous. Old age had made her tongue more reckless than ever, as if she were testing the echo off the walls of the house, where she lived with a deaf and lame old collie.
In the past their child, their only child, had tried to reassure himself that his parents had not been freaks in college by looking into their yearbook, called The Amethyst, bound in padded purple—the year 1925, the college a small Lutheran one on the Pennsylvania bank of the Delaware. The college was named Agricola, after Johann Agricola, an early associate of Luther’s and, in regard to the burning issue of antinomianism, Luther’s adversary for a time.
The senior photos and write-ups were arranged not in alphabetical order but as if at a dance, boy paired with girl on facing pages. His parents were thus paired, as were their faithful friends the Mentzers, when Mrs. Mentzer was still a Spangler. Benjamin’s mother, under her maiden name of Verna Rahn, was shown with glossy thick bangs. Elsewhere in the yearbook she appeared in a riding outfit with boots and jodhpurs, in a tubelike party dress and a glittering headband, and in a middy blouse with dark neckerchief—the uniform of the hockey team, for which she was listed as co-captain and “right inside.” She had been class secretary, her young son learned, and president of the hiking club, “a certain blue-eyed damsel from Firetown, Pa.,” one with “a true innate love of nature” who could “ride a horse at break-neck speed.” The motto the yearbook editors assigned her was “Fair as a star, when only one is shining in the sky.”
His father’s motto was “The cause of wit in others,” his nickname was “Foss,” and his write-up was rather joshing, calling him a “ray of sunshine” and asserting that “No fewer than a baker’s dozen of the fair sex have fallen victims to his winning and jovial disposition.” The yearbook even more far-fetchedly claimed that his native town in New Jersey had “become famous on account of his brilliance.” Yet the photocopied college records that at some point had been tucked into the yearbook showed him getting mostly C’s and even D’s, whereas Verna Rahn pulled in A’s and B’s; she was especially adept in Latin, though Benjamin had never heard her utter a single phrase of it. The college’s purpose had been, it seemed, to produce ministers and marriages; pages at the end were devoted to a diary recording the year’s flirtations and pairings. The lead item on a page titled “Jokes”
was:
Frosh (after attending one of Dr. Rutter’s hygiene lectures)—
“Some terrible things can be caught from kissing.”
Second Frosh—“Right! you ought to see the poor fish my sister caught.”
“And yet,” Benjamin pointed out to his mother when she was in her seventies, “you and Daddy didn’t marry right after college. You didn’t marry for how many years after graduation?”
“Three. We were giving each other time to get away, but nothing better occurred to us. We had no imagination, Benjy. We were cowards.”
In trying to imagine their attraction, their need to pair off, Benjamin would begin with the fact that they were both tall, his father two inches over six feet and his mother no less than five nine, awkwardly large for a woman of her generation. She put on weight over the years, but in the yearbook she was slender; young, she looked like him, Benjamin thought, and as he grew old he looked more and more like her—faintly shapeless in the face, with a sly, flirtatious expression to the mouth, as if he were prepared to take back whatever he had just said. From his mother he had learned the social arts of teasing and side-stepping.
. . .
His parents loomed large in his first memories of them—giants in their underwear, shambling with their white flanks and patches of hair to the bathroom and back. His little room was tucked behind theirs, at the back of the house, but he was often in their bed, it seemed, sick or frightened of the dark. It was a maple four-poster painted blue-gray and stencilled with a silver crescent moon and several clumsy stars. Benjamin and his mother had done it together; she had made the stencils and he held them while she applied paint. The bed was too high for Benjy to climb into by himself at first; once he could hoist himself up he was often there, as at an observation post, while his mother and father moved about him in semi-nudity, with a docile mute air they lacked when fully dressed.