So there's the matter of our
crimes. The remembrance of our misdoings is grievous to us; the burden of them
is intolerable. Lies, whispered, of friends' indiscretions; instances of envy
when we hate the people we love; peccadilloes; filched office supplies;
inflated expense accounts; violent obsessions of all kinds; reckless speeding;
a fender bender whose scene we left; the belt from Macy's we slipped into our
own belt loops (they're the easiest thing to take); a copy of Montaigne,
nineteenth-century edition, never returned to the library; a kiss stolen from
someone else's lover; a night out of state upon a tanned mattress when the
energy of adultery seemed so persuasive that we concealed from ourselves all
memory of our spouses; gifts never sent; allegiances never acknowledged;
inexplicable cruelties to people with bad luck; inexplicable cruelties to
friends; the waiter we upbraided that time; we cheated at cards; we cheated at
tennis; we cheated at backgammon or at chess or at some board game of our childhood;
we tripped that guy in the backfield and then waltzed in for the goal; we took
things for granted, took privileges for rights; we demanded things in no way
due us. And then with some of us there are worse crimes, crimes unspeakable,
though we might write of them, like robbery, battery, or rape. We fell into
coercion or abuse or full-scale embezzlement or even murder, the murder of
innocents, perhaps; we committed crimes of rage so that afterward we couldn't
sleep, couldn't forget, couldn't think straight, and whispered to ourselves,
revisiting these instances of our transgression. There's the matter of our
crimes.
Down underneath New York
City, in a network of tunnels and caverns, rat populated, perspiring, rumbling,
lonely, I was troubled, as I have often been troubled, by these alarums of
conscience. Who knows why? I was bothered, as you may be bothered yourself, by
what I had gotten wrong or by some feeling that I might have done better, or I
was bothered by the conviction that I might have done without some luxury,
might have put aside some vanity or selfishness. What I liked about this
particular cavern of archetypes, the New York City subway system, in the
intoxication of conscience, was the farthest end of the platform. I
liked to stand in unpopulated spots. To get there, at my particular station,
the passage was at one juncture quite narrow, around a stairwell, around a pair
of I beams (weekly repainted and that day deepest blue) dank with condensation.
It was a setting dangerous in ways both actual and allegorical. Nonetheless, I
was purposed upon the end of the platform because I liked to ride in the
last car, the car most crowded with people who lived on the trains, with
men and women doing their nine to five sprawled out lengthways, their faces
turned from their compatriots toward the hard shell of benches. If you are
remorseful by nature, you believe that a great evil will befall you whichever
way you turn. If you are remorseful by nature, around every street corner
is the speeding crack- or booze-intoxicated driver who will veer up on the
sidewalk for blocks, flattening pedestrians, including yourself. Your death
will be lingering and painful. Thus I often imagined in this particular
dangerous setting that I would be pushed from the platform into the path of an
oncoming train. I imagined the aftermath, the dismemberment, the morphine drip,
a head injury that rendered me speechless or paralyzed. Headlines in the Post.
In consideration of my fate in the landscape of NYC nightmares, where the
riders sometimes tongue-lashed one another I was passing around the I beam
I've described, through the narrowest spit of platform, when I came up short in
front of an impasse. A fellow New Yorker. Lost in a dance of circumnavigation
should I go left, should I go right I paid little attention to my dance
partner until this New Yorker began to hide, like a sprite, like a
pixie, behind the I beam that separated us. To allow my own unimpeded passage
to the end of the platform? To push me to my death? Maybe. I intended to catch
a look at him, if he were a he, as I passed around the sturdy navy blue I beam.
I intended a bland smile of appreciation. I intended to acknowledge our mutual
awkwardness by catching his eye, by catching the spot where his life's experience
was etched for appreciation. The spot where his harried but polite New York
visage might await me, or maybe his furrowed brow, his impatience and
irritation, maybe his contempt.
But there was no face for me
to see.
He was faceless. This guy.
Instead of a face there was a large hooded garment, a sort of ski jacket,
probably, an anorak, a cloak, just about, a costume from The Seventh Seal, and
accordingly this hood hung down over his face, not just over his forehead, so
that no face was apparent there at all, none whatever, no chin, no patch of
unshaven neck, no stubble, no face at all but just the hood, in a kind
of dusty, grimy taupe, swinging this way and that, a loose integument, so as to
permit whatever infrared eyes my fellow New Yorker had beneath his garment to
do little but steal a glimpse of the immediate ground before him, if that. The
ski jacket was enormous, a body suit; it hung down about the knees, over gray,
fouled chinos. He wore gloves. Work shoes. He had some kind of battery acid cologne.
So here he was, Death, that personage of the Middle Ages. The guy from the
D?rer engravings. He kept the I beam between us and then swiveled up the
platform, like a pinball caroming off bumpers, startling locals up and down the
platform, a gaggle of parochial-school kids, lawyers jabbering (fresh from the
courthouse), the elderly, teens who shouldn't have been scared of anything,
least of all another subway freak.
On American mass transit, I
have, as all New Yorkers have, seen every variation on sorrow. Watched the guys
in the two-seaters with their faces in their hands, wound into postures of
despair, was even one of these guys myself, riding the express to midtown the
morning of my sister's death, hunched over during rush hour, red and raw,
mutely sobbing, with no fellow rider to ask, Are you okay? Subways are
the high-volume freight carriers of despair. In time through the triumph of
deinstitutionalization you learn on the trains a lot about disorders of the
soul, you live with schizophrenics, manic-depressives, drug addicts,
homeless people, religious pilgrims, panhandlers, and thus, upon the platform,
the sudden appearance that day of a man who entirely concealed his face from
his community should not have been entirely astonishing. But it was. I did a
jig with Death, he went left, I went left, and I gazed at him (on this
dreary road, darkened by all the gloomiest trees of the forest), and could
not move, was paralyzed until he fled. Was he badly disfigured? Did he haunt
the far end of the platform like an untouchable, secreting himself to spare me
the horror of his appearance? Was he driven by hallucinatory voices? Was he
evading pursuers, was he on the lam, having ratted out some crime syndicate?
And what's in a face, anyhow, except the uncomplicated story of a man? What's
in a face that makes it the nail on which we hang our ideas about people?
A train thundered into the
station and I got on. In spite of the certainty that I had long since seen all
the worst that New York City had to offer, I felt heavy with the dark
reverberations of some spirit world. Through subway windows covered with
scratched names, I watched that ghost make his way up the platform and I felt
safer for being shut away from him. His gait was reckless. Yet somehow he was
able to see beneath the hem of his cowl. He threw himself impulsively about the
platform. Parochial-school kids scattered out of his path. My train lingered
with the door open. Would he slip ultimately onto the car? Would he sit with
me? Could I talk to him? Would he answer? What catalog of woes would he
enumerate? And what would his voice be like? Was it my own voice, a mockery of
my voice, flush with bad news about my failures? Don't be ridiculous. Death had
no intention of riding my train. Death was not that methodical. The
doors rattled shut, and as they did, as we pulled away, this familiar
momentarily passed out of my waking thoughts.
Still, I began to imagine,
in some other register of consciousness, that unlike the permanent vagrant
population of my neighborhood the Vietnam vet by Borough Hall, the guy with
the crutch in front of St. Anne's Church this apparition really was the
projection of my troubled conscience, the personification called forth by a
certain average, guilty, middle-class taxpayer. He was my homeless
person, my particular deinstitutionalized person, my symbol, my poltergeist. By
which I mean that the ghost of the subway station, by his one appearance,
ushered forth in me things that long preceded him or his appearance on the
platform; the ghost of my subway station was a ghost from my childhood, and
perhaps a ghost from before my childhood, so strong was his symbolic
heft; like all enduring images, he was spectacularly uncanny, he was something
which should remain hidden but which has come to light, he was part of the
lore of family, of the very constitutional fabric of family.
What did he tell me? Was he
just a mother's son, a guy named Horace, maybe, or Linwood, or Parker, a guy
from New England, uncomfortable in the city, didn't care for it, stuck here
now, living in tunnels, out of touch with what family remained, if any? Was he
part of one of history's diasporas? Had they all died in the fire in
which he was scarred, in which he was disfigured? We have our prejudices about
who our homeless are, about their origins and their logic, but are these
prejudices really valid? Wasn't he related to all of us? or so I began
to argue, in certain insomniac settings. Wasn't he related to the mariners of
the thirteen colonies or to the immigrants of the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, this particular American, related to me, to my interlopers on
the continent, authors of Manifest Destiny, sufferers of conscience, my
settlers with their inventory of persecutions worried out like bad fevers
through the troubled sleep of the centuries? Horace Cabot or Horace Adams or
Horace Mather, or some such name, in his ragged cloak, sleeping badly, giving
up on the consolations of family, village, and nation.
He began to appear to me
regularly. Which period coincides with the beginning of these pages, the middle
nineties. The Hooded Man on the R train. At Borough Hall, and later standing
peacefully, arms folded, at the Canal Street Station or at City Hall. The
Hooded Man, sentry, at Fifty-seventh. In the morning, in the evening, late at
night, face covered. Emblematic. Occasionally placid, occasionally restless. I
began to ask people. Had they ever seen this guy? Was anyone as preoccupied
with him as I was? It turned out that everyone had seen him. He was a
fixture in my New York City. On the way to rehearsal dinners and fancy society
balls, book parties, press screenings, we had all seen him, dressed in our
rental tuxedoes, wearing excellent perfumes, or maybe just in business
casual, in sportswear, we had all found ourselves in the orbit of this
celestial body. He'd made a celebrity of himself by zipping his hood, hiding
his face. Or maybe that is simply my interpretation.
The disease of an evil
conscience is beyond the practice of all the physicians of all the countries in
the world, says
W. E. Gladstone, or, according to an American thinker about inherited remorse: The
world should recline its vast head on the first convenient pillow, and take an
age-long nap. It has gone distracted, through a morbid activity, and, while
preternaturally wide-awake, is nevertheless tormented by visions.
Readers in search of a tidy,
well-organized life in these pages, a life of kisses bestowed or of novels
written, may be surprised. My book and my life are written in fits, more
like epilepsy than like a narrative; or: the process of this work is obsessive
and like all obsessions is protean, beginning with the burden of conscience,
moving through the narrative evocations of that sensation, shame, remorse,
guilt, regret, into the story of a particular search for the original image of the
veil in my life, the veil in the life of my family, the original image of facelessness,
all this in an account of a five-day driving trip to Maine to locate the
origin of the veil among Moodys, this five-day search woven like a braid into
an account of my own difficulties, which are not entirely unlike the
difficulties of the hooded ghost on the R train. Alas, this account
never settles for the orderly where the disorderly and explosive can
substitute, because obsession is not orderly, it is protean, like
consciousness, it is one thing on a day sunny and cool with offshore breezes,
quite another in winter, as in this preface, where there is description and
then analysis, where there are disembodied quotations (some from Hawthorne,
some from others) that float like ghosts of literature past. Encountering
obsession is like encountering a whole person; obsession has its blind spots,
it is occasionally inexplicable, it is worrisome, it is amazing and sometimes
charming, it is both deceitful and forthright, it features recurrent and
persistent thoughts, impulses, or images that are experienced, at some time
during the disturbance, as intrusive and inappropriate and that cause marked
anxiety or distress; you deal with obsession the way you deal with an
unusual neighbor, uncertain about your right to demand his complete story all
at once, satisfied with the way details are parceled out here and there,
because that's how a life goes, helter-skelter, like crows rising from a tree
where a hawk has just settled, famished. If birds will describe the obsession,
I will break away to describe the birds I have seen; if baseball will describe
the obsession, I will break away to speak of foul-outs and pop-ups of my life;
because I am myself the matter of this book, you would be unreasonable to
expend your leisure on so frivolous a subject, as Montaigne advises. Get to
know my book the way you would get to know me: in the fullness of time,
hesitantly, irritably, impatiently, uncertainly, pityingly, generously.
Children, with bright faces,
tript merrily beside their parents,
or mimicked a graver gait...
Fathers make fetishes of
their cars. Mustang convertibles, spor-tutility vehicles, Jaguars, Corvettes
(fathers receding into their middle years), Audis, Saabs, the restored Nash
Rambler, the MG, the Ferrari, Lexus, Lotus, Lincoln Town Car; there are
souped-up motorcycles and fathers are out in the driveway, on their backs,
fumbling for wrenches.
I'm concerned here with
patrimony, with all the characteristics attendant thereupon, with self and the
vain reiteration of self implicit in fathers and sons, with national pride,
national psychology, national tradition, with inheritance, with all the
eccentricities that run in families, so you will have no choice but to get to
know my dad (to the almost complete exclusion of my mom, unfortunately), as you
will also have to wrestle with certain long-standing rules of dads. My
particular dad, Hiram Frederick Moody Jr., didn't appear in my life until I was
nine. He was in residence before that, sure, throughout the early years, but in
a way more capricious than fatherly. He made his way around the premises. He
had thinning dark hair and glasses (worn with embarrassment since early
childhood). He was slim. His most frequent expression was one of furrowed
skepticism. He dressed casually but never sloppily. My dad wore Top-Siders and
cable-knit sweaters and tweed jackets with patches on the elbows. And
tortoiseshell glasses. He was, compared to me, very large. He was a behemoth.
My childhood interest in dinosaurs, in the T. rex or the pterodactyl,
was really a metaphorical interest in dads. He dispensed incontrovertible
orders. We executed these orders. But my father was also a cipher to me, a mystery,
an enigma at least until my parents were divorced in 1970. This was all in
Connecticut, in the suburbs. In Darien, mainly. Sun-dappled lawns, sprinklers,
station wagons. My parents had to go as far as Mexico to secure their divorce.
My mom had to go. That I hadn't been aware of any difficulties between them
says more about what awareness is to a child than it says about their
difficulties. My parents didn't talk to each other very often; they would pass
through the kitchen or the front hall or on the way to the bar in the den and
acknowledge each other in a miserly way. They didn't yell or bicker. They
mostly agreed in public. But they managed to avoid being in a room at the same
time, and we (my brother and sister and I) were rarely with the two of them in
the family constellation, that I remember, except occasionally on our sailboat.
I have the pictures of their wedding to attest to the fact that they were
married at the same location and moment, but that is the only evidence. Dad
turned up late, most nights, after my bedtime. Or, if earlier, he secluded
himself in front of the network news, in a recliner, with a cocktail (vodka
martini very dry with twist) and dry-roasted peanuts. Occasionally, I
fitted myself into a small crevice beside him on the vinyl recliner, my head
upon his shoulder, and watched the news with him, not understanding a word
Vietnamese body counts, riots at the convention not talking to my dad, as my
dad didn't talk to me. I absorbed the warmth of his sweaters and enjoyed the
irrefutability of the head of household. When he took us out on weekends to
play games, to engage in athletic contests, to school us in competition, he
seemed distracted. Especially when baseball was involved. Baseball was too
slow. Baseball was a game of the past, a nineteenth-century game, an Indian
game. A game from the old America. The pitcher is the only important player,
he observed. Why was anyone interested in it? My father watched football on
the television in the den; he watched the New York Giants and grumbled at their
performances, at Frank Gifford. We tried to excel at football as a result, even
my sister, because we wanted to rouse him from distraction. Out on the lawn. In
the space between crab apple trees and dogwoods. The neighbors came by and
played too. Somebody's feelings were always hurt. The rules had not been
effectively stated! Someone was cheating! I often tried to declaim facts
about football in order to impress my dad, like that the Los Angeles Rams were
very good, but my heart was not in it. I wasn't even in possession of genuine
facts.
Fathers use acronyms.
Fathers refold maps; fathers like to appear as though they have infallible
knowledge of direct routes between any two points. Fathers are purveyors of
ethics.
My brother is hard of
hearing on one side because of chicken pox contracted as an infant. Because of
his deafness, he never much trafficked in single words. There was no dada or
mama or doggy or kitty period in his language development.
When he learned to speak at all in sentences it was late, and he had a lot
to say. Before language, he had a sentient glow but was unnaturally silent. Of
course, silence is an incredibly powerful conversational gambit. He understood
everything but reserved judgment. One day he was sequestered in the nursery, in
his crib, and I was visiting him there while he passed time coloring,
scribbling webs of color onto a pad in the tones of the old Crayola box. As I
watched and offered commentary, he impulsively selected a certain yellow crayon
and began to draw on the wall of his room. An eggshell wall, or perhaps
a very pale linen?hued wall. Flat finish. Soon Dwight had made some compelling
galaxies there. On the wall. The Crab Nebula. The Milky Way. Here were some
really large-scale wall murals of a color-field sort. Like Motherwells or
Rothkos. I watched this. It was fascinating because I knew intuitively that
these designs did not belong on the wall of his room, and yet when no
retribution was forthcoming (Mom was down the hall), I began to think that
maybe I was wrong, maybe there were no parental regulations on the subject of
coloring on the wall. Maybe everything was permitted. Maybe pandemonium was
allowed. Why hadn't we ever thought of this before? The wall offered many
inviting planes onto which to fashion our creations! It's a family trait to
court trouble with authority, to incline toward trouble as though trouble were
the sweetest grog. We were just coming into our inheritance.
My brother, however, having
made a yellow scribble almost a crib length in diameter on the wall of his
nursery, having filled in this scribble with swooping arcs of yellow
sun-worshipping icons, petroglyphs, became bored with the exercise. He went
back to his pad or went back to playing with his mostly decayed blanket, his transitional
object, which accompanied all his peregrinations. I was not bored, however.
I was just getting interested. I climbed up into the crib, stepped around my
brother's diapered body, chose a purple crayon (the opposite of yellow), and
made a small palm-sized quadrilateral smudge on the wall. The two drawings, it
seemed to me, went well together. They were complementary.
Then my mother happened on
the action. She darkened the threshold at the very moment when I, with crayon
poised, was beginning to decorate my brother's decoration. This
linen-colored paint job just was not right. It needed a little zing. A little
something. Dwight was busy with some incredibly adorable three-year-old
business that had nothing to do with defacing the house. Smiling his
unforgettable smile, his snake charmer's smile. I was drawing on his wall. To
my mother, fresh from another responsibility, it must have appeared as though I
had myself made enormous yellow orbits on the wall and had now, in purple,
begun to set off this yellow with some of my ideas about color harmony. There
was a long, dramatic silence in which the enormity of the tableau sunk in. My
mother slowly, incrementally, took note. Perhaps she fell tiredly against the
door frame. But soon she seemed to regain her verve. In order to shout. She was
not a person who expressed her rage easily (she was small and
soft-spoken), but in this instance she made an indelible impact with words that
had often been used before but until now only preemptively: Wait till your
father gets home.
My parents were not
committed to corporal punishment, to its theory or practice, to forms and
styles of beatings, the belt, the open palm, etc. The threat was rare in our
house, reserved only for really dreadful childhood crimes: maltreatment of our
animal friends, theft, burglary, bodily harm of neighborhood children. In my
brother's nursery, with my action paintings behind me, I suddenly knew,
however, that I had placed myself on the list for such treatment. I was going
to be spanked. My first thought was: How do I pin this on Dwight? It
should have been easy. After all: my brother couldn't speak. I could say he had
done anything. He's hiding behind his disability! He stole your savings
passbook! He strangled the dog! He made me do it! He did it all and I seized
the crayon from him, anxious to spare the room the terrible yellow and purple
scribbles! I was trying to supervise! My brother's silence, however, had a
sweetness that could have won over any jury. Look at that smile. Look at that
blond mop. Look at those blue eyes.
And my mother believed him.
I spent the afternoon
skulking around outdoors, playing alone with sticks and scraps of trash. (I was
the middle child, I was lefthanded, a brunet among blonds, I was covered with
freckles, I was a mutant, a criminal, a foundling, a monstrosity. I was
going to perish.) And then my father came home from the bank. He had barely
loosed his tie, as I reconstruct it, before my mother, hands on hips, alerted
him to the new interior decorating in my brother's nursery. Next, they stood in
the doorway illumined by a dim ceiling light, silently inspecting the damage.
Our circular artwork. This is how much it will cost to repaint or this is
the weekend that will be lost to do it ourselves. My mother came to find
me. I was guiltily attempting to hide in the family room, behind a Shaker
chair. Your father wants to talk with you. My sister and brother avoided
the whole contretemps. They knew what was up, and they were staying clear. Serious
trouble was communicable. It might travel from one of us to another.
I refused to move. I
screamed as my mother dragged me out into the hall. I grabbed on to furniture.
The fullness of mortal terror emerged from me. I blamed Dwight. I blamed
Meredith, my sister, who had been at school and had nothing to do with any of
it. I blamed anyone who was at hand. I was misunderstood. I was unloved. I was
a special case. I pleaded for my life, for mercy, for kindness. The whole
neighborhood would know of my torture. Finally, my parents sequestered me in
their bedroom. Pale gray walls. My father's suit pants were folded over the
back of a chair designed to maintain their press. The closet in the bedroom was
open, and inside cellophaned delicates shimmered. I remember the simplicity of
Dad's hairbrush on the countertop. Tortoiseshell. Classic, masculine,
functional. Was it plastic? Were plastics advanced enough for hairbrushes by
the mid-sixties? The weapon had stiff brown bristles. Never before had it
occurred to me to wonder which side of a hairbrush was used for a beating,
bristle side or smooth surface, but now I knew. Bristles would have been too
cruel. Or so I hoped. My father asked for no information on my
wall-decoration project. This defendant was not encouraged to address the
judiciary. In fact, my father didn't want to talk to me at all. He went through
the business of taking down my trousers in silence. My skinny backside
was exposed. And in some ways this was the worst part of the punishment, the
Victorian spanking: the nakedness of it, the humiliation, the loss of
self-determination. The spanking itself, one stroke only, was over instantly.
Crimson indignity welled up in me alongside the sharp sting. I hopped around,
gathering the complete text of my howl. I was left to hitch up my trousers
myself.
My brother got off without a
scratch.
Fathers may offer
standard-issue praise, such as Attaboy! Stick with it! or Way to go! Fathers
are able to dispense paternal wisdom even in a semiconscious or unconscious
state. Fathers dispense advice that they spurned themselves.
He hated noise. The noise of
kids, the footsteps of kids, herds of kids, mainly because he had gotten out of
school, married immediately, spawned his first child ten months after marrying,
two more by the time he was twenty-six. He had no idea how he was going to pay.
How to get us through college, how to manage difficult teenage rebellions, how
to play baseball with us (when he hated baseball), how to talk to children when
they were clearly a separate species. The noise of kids made my father wild
because he was not actually watching the New York Giants on television
or the news or whatever he feigned watching. He was brooding about how he was
going to pay. And plots must have abounded at the office. And there was the
unhealthy quiet of his marriage. And there was the uncomfortable political
ferment of the times. Up on the second floor of our house in Darien, the house
where we lived while my parents were married, I would be throwing a pile of
shoes, one by one, at my brother, trying to hit him in the head and knock
him unconscious, and my brother would be crouched and screaming behind a
desk, aiming a poison-tipped plastic spear at my face, when suddenly we would
hear the sound of my father's voice in the stairwell, What the hell is going
on up there? And we would fall into our shameful silence, an anxious
silence so familiar as to have preceded our very births. Sometimes, intoxicated
by the need to inflict bodily harm on each other, we ignored the initial
warnings until we heard footsteps in the hall. Then at the door. And then the
door would open.
Fathers speak in code.
Fathers speak of equity or short positions or of the zero coupon or of the long
bond; fathers speak of the need for a balanced portfolio; fathers shake their
fists at the enduring misery of the bear market; fathers try to explain rate
fluctuation, money supply, policy at the Fed. Fathers will have certain
stirring anthems that they need to replay on the stereo again and again, such
as anthems from Broadway shows or occasional hard-luck country ballads.
We were gathered around the
fireplace, the kids, in Darien, one autumn evening when my mother explained
that she and Dad couldn't get along anymore. His recliner, next to where we
stood, was empty. To one side of the fireplace, the irons, the bellows. Wood
smoke wreathed us. My mom was wearing plaid. I wasn't surprised by the
direction of her remarks, though I had never seen any acrimony. There was a
predictability about the whole discussion. A leaden disquiet to the scene. My
brother was the only one who spoke up initially. By then he was a chatterbox. Don't
get divorced! Don't get divorced! How did he know the word, since we were
the first in the neighborhood to achieve that milestone? And though he stuttered
much of the time, there was no stutter now. His plea was articulate and sad. My
mother looked helpless. I tried to conceal myself behind my sister throughout
the discussion, and this became my strategy later: Don't draw attention.
Mom journeyed south of the
border and secured the paperwork, brought back certain gifts. I received a pair
of ornamental spurs (they are somewhat rusted but still intact). My sister
received a Native American hand drum that split along its length after a couple
of New England summers. My brother's gift is lost to time. While my mom was in
Mexico, Dad was in San Francisco, on business, or that was what we were
told. Actually, he was banished. He brought me back a bar of Ghirardelli
chocolate, a gigantic, monolithic chocolate bar weighing in at a couple of
pounds. Therefore, we were rich in material distractors from the trouble of
separation, but we were not distracted in full. When my parents' travels were
over, so was their marriage. We anesthetized ourselves for days at a time. With
television. While my parents drank. My mother slept on the couch for the next
few weeks. They governed us in turns. Then we moved out. My mom and the three
of us moved out, and there were the months of wrangling over visitation, child
support payments. The bickering of lawyers. I had stomachaches. Just the words macaroni
and cheese could produce a stomachache in me. All-beef franks. I
could vomit over the idea of all-beef franks. I was the kid with the constant
stomachaches, the kid who swilled Maalox and chomped Gelusil. And since my
father was recovering from an ulcer himself, he not only identified with my
woes but offered remedies and made dietary recommendations. Cream of Wheat and
white toast. Mashed potatoes and chicken soup. It was an early bonding
experience.
The arduous visitation
schedule began, and we were in my father's company two Sundays and one long
weekend a month and alternate holidays and August. We drove back and forth
across Fairfield County on thruways. I knew every hill on the Merritt Parkway.
I knew how many overpasses there were between Stamford and Darien. Lovely stone
overpasses from the school of George L. Dunkelberger. On the first or second of
these weekend visits, my father, at a tollbooth on the interstate, explained to
us that he couldn't understand why my mother was doing what she was doing, and
in the middle of offering this opinion, my father found that he could not go
on. He covered his face with his hands. The car was stopped. People behind us
swerved to change lanes. They honked. He wasn't the guy who had yelled at us
about the noise. There had been a metamorphosis. He was in a bad spot. My mom
was in a bad spot. My father had no idea how to cook for himself. His own
parents were infirm. He had expenses: he was making $33,000 a year and owed a
big chunk in child support and to my sister's private school, which later
became three private schools. We lingered at the tollbooth, impeding traffic,
in a stillness.
Fathers have a hard time
quitting smoking.
He smoked Kents, a brand
that doesn't seem to have the profile now it once did. He lit one then, in the
car, fumbling with the lighter. I loved the smell of cigarettes newly lit in
enclosed spaces, the perfume of sulfur followed by the ribboning of tobacco
smoke, clouds lingering like halos around smokers, the meditativeness of
cigarette paraphernalia. All suggested for me, as the New York City subway
token once did, the seriousness and gravity of adults. The theatrical business
of grown-ups. Ordering a coffee regular, putting on cuff links, lacing
up wingtips, putting stamps on envelopes, presenting a credit card. This was
the world I longed for when I was a kid, in the backseat of the car at the
tollbooth. I didn't want to be a passenger. My brother and sister and I tortured
my father by crushing whole cartons of his Kents, knocking the cigarettes out
of his mouth, intoning quotations from antismoking propaganda we'd seen. Then
all three of us became smokers. When my sister died, many years later, she was
still hiding her smoking.
Fathers, unmarried, will
pursue girlfriends.
The first girlfriend he
presented to us was like an insoluble problem like the existence of God, the
location of the soul upon which you founder in your undergraduate course
work. My father arrived to pick us up one weekend, and the front seat of the
red Firebird, the front seat over which we argued so relentlessly (only to cede
it time after time to my sister), was occupied by this woman, this
blonde, not our mother, our small, frail, indomitable mother, and this woman
was going to treat us so well, in ways we never deserved nor understood,
because it was so sad how much trouble we had been through, us kids, and we
were so cute, and we would ignore her as a matter of course and we would
constantly measure her against our mom, waiting for her to disappear so that we
could move on to the art of making the next girlfriend feel just as miserable,
holding all of these perfectly generous women in the dungeon of our contempt,
inducing them to come to our Little League games and then upbraiding them for
it, in our black, disconsolate moods, displayed for anyone who walked into the
middle of our remorse and tried to soothe it with respect.
Fathers tell stories.
Fathers are responsible for the very shape of storytelling; all stories issue
from the mouths of fathers, and all laws about stories, including laws about
the number of examples that will suffice to tell stories, how many times it is
permissible to repeat jokes, and the role that rhythm plays in the deployment
of anecdote.
For example, stories about
working in the body shop, and how the one guy came in with the brand-new sedan
complaining about an awful scuff on the hood, and how my father got up onto the
hood to buff away the offending mark, to make the sedan shiny and new, only to
leave a foot-wide circle on the hood completely free of its paint job. Or the
stories about summers working in the psychiatric hospital, the catatonics, the
hebephrenics and their laughter, the schizophrenic guy upon whom you were not
to turn your back because he would pick up his lunch tray and attempt to break
it over your head. Or the tales of Maine my father's friendship, in
Waterville, with the son of the driver of a Hostess truck, how they were
allowed to ride in the truck and sample the baked goods, cupcakes, Twinkies,
sweetmeats; how, after changing elementary schools for the fourteenth time, my
father hid in a packing barrel to avoid going to school while my grandmother
had the police combing the neighborhood looking for rapists, abductors,
pedophiles. Or tales of army life during the Berlin Crisis, my father launching
howitzer shells, my father, married with two kids (my brother wasn't born yet),
getting ready to ship off to Berlin, where the Soviet and NATO tanks were parked
headlight to headlight. Stories that were not always funny; stories that often
had fear as an unstated dimension: my sister, outside Fort Bragg, North
Carolina, swimming in a local creek, surrounded by water moccasins; my father,
as a kid, deciding to take his skiff across a harbor to one of the islands off
the coast of Maine during the preliminaries of a hurricane and getting lost,
fogged in upon the water, so that he might very well have motored accidentally
out to Europe until he ran smack into some rocky Maine beach. Stories
that got repeated until they acquired the mythological status of shaggy-dog
stories, stories at which you smirked and cringed, so that in long car
rides you would beg him to alleviate the tedium of unchanging landscapes with the
one about the guy who would break the tray over the orderlies' heads. Fathers
appear to us to love us without condition if only we can interpret their
complicated language. Fathers move over expanses of time, across abysses of
generations; fathers move across impediments, opening out, softening, becoming
unguarded, giving away the rules of fathers to younger, angrier men; fathers,
over time, become solicitous and kind, regretful and warm, sensitive and, even,
gentle.
We had five different
addresses in five years. With my mom. I was shy to begin with, wary,
disappointed by human interaction. I took months to get up the pluck to
start a conversation. I refused to be photographed. I was sick a lot. After a
couple of relocations, I gave up worrying about it all. I crossed off the days
on a calendar, waiting to move again. My brother and sister were untroubled by
this, or so they have said, but for me what was broken was irreparable. I
hungered for company, and this famishment was my first perception in the morning
and my last before bed, and I couldn't remember feeling any other way, though
there were people who loved me all around and there had always been. I was the
focal point of cheating scams and extortion schemes at my public schools Let's
make Moody give us the answers! I cried spontaneously, I plotted the murder
of my brother, banter seemed impossible, kids pushed past me as though I were
spectral. My camouflage was perfect. But what I was good at was reading. It
started in the sixth grade with The Old Man and the Sea. I read through
most of Hemingway that year. Complete disclosure: I also liked J. R. R. Tolkien
and anything having to do with horror or science fiction. Where I found that
one reliable thing, that other thing, that elsewhere, that space unavailable to
me in contests for masculinity and prestige and social standing, was in books.
And this was where I met my dad. Where I encountered a guy I had never before
been introduced to, really, whose preoccupation had always been numbers,
numbers, numbers. October in Darien, and my sister and brother were outside, in
the urgency of a chilly weekend evening, and I asked my dad to explain the
epigraph to For Whom the Bell Tolls, and he located somewhere in his
house a copy of selected John Donne and we sat and went over it line by line on
the couch where my mother had last slept when she slept in what was now my
father's house, lines about being a part of the herd, the rabble, the people of
whom I knew nothing. About lineage too, or so I thought, how we are of one
substance with the past, with countrymen, with peerage, with all who went
before us, even in the nomadism of the late twentieth century, when families
were easily sundered and people moved away from one another. No man is an
island. And Hemingway wasn't the only American writer my dad knew about.
He'd been an American literature major. I wasn't sure what this meant, but it
sounded formidable. There was Hemingway on the bookshelves, there was
Fitzgerald; there was Salinger (I quickly consumed The Catcher in the Rye and
Franny and Zooey), John P. Marquand, Stephen Crane, Thoreau, Frost. I'm
sure that my father, with this additional time to spend with us, this time of visitation,
was canny enough to search out areas where my sister and brother could bask
in his attentions too I'm sure my brother learned to make the football spiral
properly, I'm sure my sister learned to operate a manual transmission but I
felt, as a reader, that the bright light of parental affection had been turned
on me for the first time. I was good at something.
It wasn't long before my
father urged on me his favorite book, the book on which he had spent most of
his college years, Moby-Dick. Illustratively, he began reading aloud a
certain passage annually, over Thanksgiving dinner:
Wonderfullest things are
ever the unmentionable; deep memories yield no epitaphs; this six-inch chapter
is the stoneless grave of Bulkington. Let me only say that it fared with him as
with the storm-tossed ship, that miserably drives along the leeward land. The
port would fain give succor; the port is pitiful; in the port is safety,
comfort, hearthstone, supper, warm blankets, friends, all that's kind to our
mortalities. But in that gale, the port, the land, is that ship's direst
jeopardy; she must fly all hospitality; one touch of land, though it but graze
the keel, would make her shudder through and through. With all her might she
crowds all sail off shore; in so doing, fights 'gainst the very winds that fain
would blow her homeward; seeks all the lashed sea's landlessness again; for
refuge's sake forlornly rushing into peril; her only friend her bitterest foe!
Know ye now, Bulkington?
Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep,
earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open
independence of her sea; while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire
to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore?
But as in landlessness alone
resides the highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God so better is it to
perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even
if that were safety! Take heart, take heart, O Bulkington! Bear thee grimly,
demigod! Up from the spray of thy ocean-perishing straight up, leaps thy
apotheosis!
A strange passage to read at
hearthside at the celebration of our nationhood. In which wonder and memories
are unmentionable. In which domesticity is repudiated and the wild call of
landlessness is celebrated in its stead. Better to perish in that howling
infinite. After some years of this, my brother and I both got much of
chapter XXIII by heart, and would quote from it while engaged in more
pedestrian activities.
And in the midst of this
homely education in the American classics, which stretched out over my early
teens, my father must also have let me know about the coincidence with respect
to Nathaniel Hawthorne of Salem, Massachusetts. He was a good writer, of
course, not as good as Melville, but pretty good, Scarlet Letter is pretty
good, except for where the allegory gets the best of the work, but what was
most interesting about Hawthorne was that he had written a story about a
relative of ours, a story about a Moody! Forefather of our clan. It was the
kind of thing you repeated on the playground. I'm related to Davy Crockett!
My grandfather owns a newspaper! My father fired off a howitzer! Some guy
called Hawthorne wrote a story about our family! Dad had a complete set of
Hawthorne, a nineteenth-century edition, and he therefore provided
substantiation, produced the uncut leaf on which the facts were to be found,
the first page of "The Minister's Black Veil" in the Twice-Told Tales volume
of The Collected Works:
Another clergyman in New
England, Mr. Joseph Moody, of York, Maine, who died about eighty years since,
made himself remarkable by the same eccentricity that is here related of the
Reverend Mr. Hooper. In his case, however, the symbol had a different import.
In early life he had accidentally killed a beloved friend; and from that day
till the hour of his own death, he hid his face from men.
He wore a veil? What did
that mean? Hey, who cared? We were famous!
By the advent of the evening
in which I sat down to discuss John Donne, my father had mostly retired from
literature. He had responsibilities. He was a dad, clocking in and out, getting
vested in the pension plan, writing the child support checks, taking the car to
the shop, catching the 5:02, but according to my daydreams, maybe more than
that too, maybe he was part of a great long line of dads, it seemed to me,
extending back to intrepid religious protesters of the seventeenth century, to
Carvers, Bradfords, Winslows, Brewsters, Allertons, Standishes, Aldens,
Fullers, Martins, Mullinses, Whites, Warrens, Howlands, Hopkinses, Tilleys, and
their ilk, the trash, as I have heard it put, that came over on the Mayflower,
who wrote on their way to their New World, Haveing undertaken, for ye
glorie of God, and advancement of ye Christian faith and honour of our King
& Countrie, a voyage to plant ye first colonie in ye northern parts of
Virginia, doe by these presents solemnly & mutually in ye presence of God
and one of another, covenant, & combine our selves togeather into a civill
body politick, for our better ordering, & preservation, & furtherance
of ye ends aforesaid; and by vertue hearof to enacte, constitute, and frame
such just & equall lawes, ordinances, acts, constitutions, & offices,
from time to time, as shall be thought most meete & convenient for ye
generall good of ye colonie; unto which we promise all due submission and
obedience, and if not one of these, then part of some other wave of
immigration, some other American flotilla, part of something, I felt,
after learning about Hawthorne, even if lapsed, even if a television-watching,
martini-drinking, sports car?driving, American cheese?eating dad, even if
estranged from ancestry, even then part of something, and I part of his tribe,
though I was perhaps a disappointment to the ghosts that hovered around me: These
stern and black-browed Puritans would have thought it quite a sufficient
retribution for their sins, that, after so long a lapse of years, the old trunk
of the family tree, with so much venerable moss upon it, should have borne, as
its topmost bough, an idler like myself.
What trouble we got into
next. I'll have more to say about it. The resistance to fathers is
honorific, and resistance to fathers is always the last lesson in the
instruction of fathers. Fatherhood knows that it is honored by teenage
contempt. My sister was expelled from Rosemary Hall for curfew violations
and finished up at Pelham High. She crashed my dad's car and pretended that it
had nothing to do with drinking. My brother crashed my dad's next car. We stole
booze from my father's liquor cabinet and stayed out all night and we walked
the beaches, or went driving, looking, searching among contemporaries for
lessons calling from the past. A whole sequence of fathers and sons and their
relations looking backward for answers, finding, ultimately, that the most
impossible father, with the most draconian set of regulations, was not in the
living room preparing to lecture them, but cradled inside and impossible to
dislodge.
Copyright © 2002 by Rick Moody