True North

  About ten minutes to go. I have my wristwatch, the pocket watch from my briefcase, and the room clock on the table before me, all within three minutes of one another. My mind and body are full of butterflies. I go down early in hopes of settling myself before her arrival but she’s already there across the street from the hotel entrance. She’s leaning against a spiffy new car and dressed very nicely in a pale green dress, a slight man in a trim blue suit standing beside her. The son with my father’s jaw sits half out of the back door glowering. She sees me and crosses the street with the wind whipping her dress. I step off the curb as she approaches. She is still unbearably handsome but her face is taut, her eyes furtive and unfocused. “You can’t be here. This is impossible. I know your heart is good but this is impossible.” I take her hand but then she withdraws it. “I’m so sorry for what happened,” I begin to say but my voice catches in a cold knot. “Yes but you did nothing bad. I wanted you to be my boyfriend but I was too young. This is impossible. Embrace Cynthia for me. Good-bye,” and then she turned and walked back across the street.

  Mexico City, March 6. Of course I wept, so much so that my eyes were swollen and I didn’t want to leave the room. I ordered a fish to eat, a snook again, but didn’t touch it. I thought absurdly of taking it with me, this mysterious creature that led its entire life underwater.

  I made a few calls and left the hotel abruptly. I spent the night on the top floor of a hotel in Mexico City where they were playing tennis on the courts above me. I fell asleep on a bench in the gardens of the hotel next to a bush with blue flowers that had a strong odor of the sea. A guard woke me around midnight and I had a nice bowl of soup in a café where young, well-dressed Mexican couples were drinking French wine and laughing. A girl of surpassing loveliness looked like she could be a younger sister of Vera. I was naturally thinking of the fatal structure of life that allowed people who cared for each other to separate forever. The idea somehow achieved a latitude above my father being the cause. It was haphazardness of love that doesn’t overcome the rest of life. I thought of Polly and how love conquers itself.

  I didn’t leave my room until I went to the airport, amused that the whole trip was costing me more than I ordinarily spent in a year and the sheer idiocy of my visit to the travel agent, which was as uncomfortable as going to a lawyer, into a bank, or visiting a doctor. On the plane, an Air France flight, I devised three different letters to Vera before it dawned on me that it wasn’t allowed. There was no way to reenter her life. The only solid relationship I had with a female was my dog Carla who seemed to equally adore Clarence. My mother was mostly a pleasant ghost in Evanston and despite the fact that I was older I would always be Cynthia’s “little brother.” Polly was married with two children and a second chance was unlikely. When I was dropped off at the Mexico City airport and had passed all of the airline desks it occurred to me that my upcoming attempt to solidly connect with Vernice was comic at best. One down and one to go. I could board a flight to Los Angeles and become a movie star or a flight to Montreal and become a French voyageur and fur trapper. I didn’t feel the least rejected by Vera, only that I didn’t belong in her company, not even as a memory.

  A stewardess in a pale blue suit kept pouring me a delicious red wine that I recognized as one my father liked. He couldn’t very well be wrong about everything. He had lived for a year in Paris when he was five. It was a fatuous story. My grandfather had sent two local Marquette men to North Dakota to shoot several hundred pheasants for an enormous feast he was planning. When they returned late one October afternoon he had posed in hunting clothes with the pheasants as if he had been on the hunting trip. This struck my grandmother as disgusting and off she went to Paris with my father and Richard, who was an infant at the time, and Mrs. Plunkett’s mother who worked for her. I liked this story because it bespoke the careless freedom of adults and had confirmed my early convictions of their untrustworthiness. Gradually, when I would come upon the picture of my grandfather with the lawn full of pheasants in a photo album, I admitted to myself that this man looked like the consummate asshole that he was. When I heard he had lost more than three-quarters of the family fortune during the Depression I was pleased. My father said that all the land couldn’t be lost simply because no one wanted to buy it. It was “lucky” for the family when World War II began and the price of iron ore went way up.

  Paris, March 7. Cold and rainy. Perfect weather for the dipshit romantic on the last leg of his not very romantic grand tour. We landed right after dawn and I quickly perceived why certain people love this place for reasons of an ineffably sweet melancholy. The taxi driver had spent a year near Atlanta, Georgia, as an exchange student and consequently his language owned southernisms, “What y’all doing here?” Before I could answer he stated a fee to take me on a sex tour that evening to a place called Pigalle. Without thinking I said that the next day I had to attend a funeral in Aix-en-Provence. I realized at this moment that I was still infused with a dream I had had just before landing. I had fallen asleep after drinking a red wine from a place called Beaune. In the dream I had an involved memory of a seminar at theological school where a professor from England had spoken of the historical aspects of the concept of forgiveness. Some of us thought that this man’s Oxonian accent made him sound more intelligent than he was. Anyway, he talked of the idea in early church history that if you couldn’t for give someone you became their slave mentally. This had irked and rattled me. After the seminar I had taken a long walk. It was February and there had been a heavy snowstorm in the Chicago area and people were shoveling out their cars in Evanston. In the dream no matter how far I walked I was still wading through deep snow on the same street in a state of being pissed off at this professor. This was at a time when I still actively fantasized about shooting my father in the same manner that Lee Harvey Oswald had shot President Kennedy.

  The dream was obvious but when I got to my hotel I called Coughlin in Chicago and by luck caught him when he wasn’t busy. We talked about my trip to Mexico and the palpable early spring itch to go trout fishing. I brought up the idea of forgiveness and he said that for it to work it had to be a complete experience rather than just an idea and that perhaps when I got home I should visit my father in Duluth or wherever. Forgiveness wasn’t excusing the offender but unburdening yourself of the tyranny of the offender by seeing him in a full human perspective. I said that this sounded a little abstract to me but he countered with the notion that if I considered all of the worst things I had ever thought of I might look at my father as a man who enacted them. I paused, recalling that after I had seen Vera’s bare butt in the upstairs hallway I felt lustful for days. Coughlin then said that his own father had told him he had forgiven the men who smashed his hands mostly to avoid traveling back north to Belfast and shooting them. If he had shot them he would have lived a life of rage in prison far from his family and also from the pleasure of trout fishing.

  At the hotel my room wouldn’t be ready until noon so I drew a grubby rain parka from my duffel bag and got a map from the desk man who marked the location of the hotel, looked at me closely, then wrote down the Hotel de Suede’s address and phone number for my wallet fearing I’d get lost. I set off on a four-hour rain-soaked stroll of the Left Bank from my start near the Invalides up the Seine to the Jardin des Plantes circling back through the Luxembourg Gardens.

  At the outset I was a little blind to my surroundings because when we closed the conversation Coughlin had advised that I try to be slow and judicious with these feelings about forgiveness because there was no available safety net. He said he could liken the process to carrying a heavy backpack for twenty years then suddenly tossing it away. To do so would be to abandon much of the energy, however faulty, for a large part of my life. For instance, would I give up the project that had been central to me for so long?

  Jesus Christ, I thought, walking swiftly along the Seine. No, I wouldn’t give up the project because for nearly a year I had been walking or snowshoeing in
the outback without my vision becoming self-referential. What “is” overcomes what “was.” I didn’t functionally believe the humdrum drone of “knowledge is power” but gradually I seemed to be acquiring a topographical view of the maze. It had become more important to me to understand the entire maze than trying to limit myself to comprehending my family’s part of it. In January near Sagola I had been lost in a snow squall for a brief but modestly frightening half hour just before dark and then I suddenly teetered on a snowbank and slid down onto the county road on which my truck was parked to the north of me. In the driving snow I nearly walked into my pickup before I saw it.

  The long wet walk in Paris lifted another layer off my confusion. Some rich and powerful men obviously had a firm aesthetic sense. This was far less apparent in urban areas in America than it was in Paris where you came close to not believing your eyes and your skin prickled as if you were looking at a great painting. There was something historically troubling in America’s geopiety that allowed her to become proud of the destructiveness of her creation of ugliness. The capacity to cut all of the virgin timber in the state of Michigan became a source of pride.

  Somewhere in the puzzling streets between the Jardin des Plantes and the Luxembourg Gardens a little fresh air entered my mental wanderings. Vernice had tried to peel away the filmy blindness of my own sense of beauty and hadn’t quite realized, as I didn’t earlier, that my obsession with the landscape was more aesthetic than scientific. This idea was fresh enough to me that I tried to push it away for the time being. In the midst of my obsessiveness I had rejected many of the forms beauty can take. My depression over my father’s wrongdoings and consequently those of my ancestors had prevented me from living a life of wholeness as surely as greed had blinded them.

  It was now about noon and my pants were soaked and my shoes squished. The wind had clocked to the south according to my map and when I passed a restaurant called La Closerie des Lilas I stopped and asked myself, “How can we be so wrong?” This feeling was a little bit silly but the restaurant reminded me of my father’s admiration for Hemingway and his book A Moveable Feast which I had read. I never cared for Hemingway but that was beside the point at this moment. In college the young men I knew who loved Hemingway tended to wear flannel shirts and seemed to affect a heartiness I never felt. I didn’t know it at the time but I recognized it later that I was too possessed with questions to think that manliness was an answer. Besides, when you came from the Upper Peninsula you were scarcely mystified by the “big woods” because you were born and raised within it and with proper caution it wasn’t threatening. My father presumed to see a different Hemingway than I did. When I read his early work the writer seemed as fragile as I was. What was nagging at me now like a virus was that what the war had done to my father wasn’t simple and literary. When you added the history of family malfeasance the war had pounded my father into a monster. My grandfather had been an officer in World War I but never left Washington, D.C. He had made war on Germany as surely as he had made war on the land. The Fourth of July marching music that I dreaded helped us forget the dead and maimed. I had been at war with human nature so long I had forgotten to live a life.

  I was walking splaylegged down Montparnasse because my wet pants were chafing my crotch now. The rain had slowed to a trickle and I took off my parka and pushed back my sopping hair. Now many people were in the street including lovely, fashionable women and pert shopgirls. There were glances at the wet dog, the idiot American, meaning me. I went into a bistro and ate a whole roast chicken, though it was relatively small, and drank a bottle of red wine, leaving when I began to doze over the question of how to live a life.

  I slept half a dozen hours waking at twilight. There were birds in the large garden behind the hotel but I didn’t recognize them. When it was dark I called down for coffee and the name of the owl I was hearing in the garden. The desk girl said “chouette,” a nice name for an owl. I sat there and questioned whether greed always overwhelmed the aesthetic in life but then quickly dressed because I had done enough thinking for one day. I was tempted to try to call Vernice to set up a meeting but dismissed the notion because I was beginning to enjoy the slapdash quality of my trip. If she had left town I could always sit there and wait for her return or pursue her. If I met her lover I’d introduce myself as her cousin from Indiana. Fort Wayne, to be exact.

  March 8. I’m on a fast train south to Marseille where I’ll change to a local for Aix-en-Provence. I’m understandably nervous about seeing Vernice but any sort of trepidation is not in the league of Vera. When I was about twelve I envisioned women falling into my arms when they met me. First it was Ingrid Bergman, then Deborah Kerr, then Ava Gardner, then Grace Kelly who probably drank iced tea and wore white cotton underpants like a girl named Nancy in seventh grade who would lift her dress and show you her underpants for a dollar which seemed expensive at the time.

  Last night after a long walk I had a herring snack at Café Select and talked to some people at the next table who were graduate students at the Sorbonne. One was an attractive young Jewish woman from Thessaloníki in Greece. It boggled me as I had never heard the word Thessaloníki outside of the Pauline epistles. I didn’t get to talk to her because her companion, about my age, kept quizzing me about American Indians. I explained that I mostly knew only about the Chippewa which he properly called the Anishinabe. He was studying Native religions and asked what chance there was if he came to the Upper Peninsula of meeting and talking to a shaman. I said that from what I knew this was unlikely. I had known Clarence’s cousin Harold for twenty years before I learned he was a shaman. I explained that it wasn’t really an open society when it came to religion. I added that my brother-in-law Donald had wished to talk to a shaman who wouldn’t have anything to do with him until he sat for three days and nights without food, water, or shelter. Donald had made it two days but intended to try again. I added “no wine” which they thought was funny. The girl from Thessaloníki who was studying the Sufis teased her boyfriend that he should try it. She reminded me of Vernice and as they quarreled in French I reflected on the accidental nature of affection. Laurie was Cynthia’s friend. Vera arrived from Mexico. Polly was at a hamburger stand in Iron Mountain when I worked on construction. Vernice approached while I talked to Fred outside the Newberry Library. It was all so random. The Jewish girl was so attractive and witty I would have run away with her. To cap it all off a beautifully dressed middle-aged woman in the far corner of the café bore a passing resemblance to my mother. The scholarly couple asked me if I wanted to go with them to an American jazz club and I said I couldn’t because I was leaving early in the morning for Aix-en-Provence to look for someone. They advised that I simply sit at a café called Deux Garcons and I’d eventually find my prey. Untypically I changed my mind and went to the club where the jazz band turned out to be from Detroit. The young woman sat between us and when he went to the toilet she put her hand on my leg and gave me her phone number. Sweat popped out on my forehead. I realized again how comparatively inexperienced I was for a man of my age but then I was unaware of the statistics. You meet very few women in the woods plus what affections I had were manic and limited. I left after an hour and on my way back to the hotel decided that the main problem of cities is that you couldn’t see the stars up in the dark.

  After a splendid train ride and checking into a fancy hotel I’m sitting at the Café Deux Garcons. I have this idea of returning to France at some point with a small suitcase and spending a couple of weeks riding trains.

  It’s two in the afternoon now and I’m prepared for a long wait despite not quite knowing what I have in mind. What would I do if Vernice threw herself in my arms screaming “I want to have your baby”? Though this is indeed unlikely anything is possible except world peace. I have started some sort of log rolling down a long hill. For instance, this morning I decided to visit my mother and see if she has forgiven my father, and then visit my father to see if he is willing to explain his life. I
suspect this elementary idea was caused by the movement of the train. Time is passing.

  But Vernice. Once I was sitting on the deck of our unused sailboat and my father and some friends were on the slip dock. I was attempting to ignore their talk about a pretty young woman who had just walked by and boarded a large cabin cruiser down the wharf. She was a daughter of what they call a “leading family” but had been spotted in the arms of a black man in a Chicago nightclub. My father and his friends were busy agreeing that this woman was “high octane” which puzzled me because the term referred to gasoline. Later that day my buddy Glenn explained that it meant a “high-powered crazy bitch.”

  What would I do if I won her away from her poet? I had read his book called Études (not the real title but close, to protect identities). He was one of those improbably tortured souls and what’s more he made a living at it. There was a long poem about how much he missed his young daughter Lila in California. It was a lovely poem but raised the question of why he didn’t go visit her. “Destiny has swept me away from you,” he wrote.