Abruptly, the photo shoot for Vogue ceased.
Perhaps it was at this instant that the image was “captured” on film: the instant when the private and inward is waylaid, appropriated, and redefined by an act of violence.
In such an instant you feel sick, animal fear. You become totally physical, visceral. Panic floods your veins, your heartbeat runs wild. Your confused thoughts are of the most primitive sort—Am I injured? Am I alive? Am I in danger? Am I—all right?
For it is not uncommon, that individuals who are terribly, even fatally injured will imagine, initially, that they are all right. If they can breathe, or move an arm—desperately the brain signals Yes. I am alive—I am all right.
I was reminded of the more protracted panic we’d felt, trapped in our house on Sherbourne Road, Detroit, several years before. From sometime in the early morning of July 23, 1967—(when Detroit police raided an unlicensed “drinking club” on Twelfth Street in an African-American neighborhood)—for forty-eight hours or more we’d remained in our house hoping it would not be set on fire, or that police or snipers wouldn’t shoot into our windows; less than three blocks from our house, on Livernois Avenue, store windows were smashed, and stores were looted; there were arson fires, looting, gunfire, street violence, near-continuous sirens. It was as if—literally—the world had erupted into madness. At such times of peril you think, pleadingly—This can’t be happening to us! And if you are very lucky, it isn’t.
The photographer, the photographer’s assistants, and I staggered out of the brownstone on West Eleventh Street, and onto the sidewalk, where the air was befouled—smoky and gritty. We were dazed, panicked. What had happened? Were we in danger—would there be another explosion? With stunning abruptness the intimate moment of “art” had ended to be replaced by this brute and utterly perplexing reality, of which we could make little sense. Around us were frightened pedestrians, stalled traffic, a cacophony of sirens and horns. No one had an idea what the explosion had been: a boiler? Gas line? Bomb?
A block away, in the direction of Fifth Avenue, it seemed that flames shot upward from what appeared to be a brownstone town house. It would turn out to have been an elegant nineteenth-century house with a Greek Revival facade, the boyhood home of the poet James Merrill.
Later, it would be revealed that the explosion had been inadvertently caused by an amateur bomb maker who’d triggered a timer on a homemade “antipersonnel” bomb being assembled in the basement of a house at 18 West Eleventh Street by members of the radical group Weathermen; their murderous intention had been to set off the bomb at a dance at the Fort Dix, New Jersey, army base. The bomb detonated that morning killed three individuals, two men and a woman named Diana Oughton, former debutante and Bryn Mawr graduate, whose body was grotesquely dismembered in the blast and who would be identified only by fingerprints; fleeing from the burning house, on foot, were two female Weathermen, one of them Kathy Boudin, later to acquire notoriety of her own. That season of peril. The sour, sick dregs of 1960s counter-culture idealism. In such rocky soil the seeds of nostalgia yet grow.
My husband and I left New York City the next morning, to drive back to Windsor, Ontario, Canada, where we now lived. It had come to seem an ironic commemoration: my novel them, set in Detroit, Michigan, in the era of the riot, and yet something of a valentine for the Detroit of those years, had been honored only after I’d departed Detroit forever, to move across the Detroit River to a more hospitable, as it was a Canadian, city, where the buildings and grounds of the University of Windsor partly fronted the river. Living in Ontario during the ongoing, spiritually exhausting crisis of the Vietnam War, in a foreign country with the advantage of hardly seeming foreign, I would gaze out the windows of my study at the fast-flowing, choppy, often lead-colored river at the foot of our lawn and I would feel a pang of loss, that I had been expelled from the United States, seemingly—out of despair and frustration with American politics of the time, and out of a genuine wish to work with those young Americans known contemptuously as “draft-dodgers”—individuals who seemed courageous to me, in their refusal to fight what appeared even then to be a futile and unjust war—as well as with excellent Canadian students, for whom high school was four years in contrast to the three years of American high school, and who were consequently much better prepared for university than American students. Ten years in exile, in Ontario—a fruitful and altogether wonderful decade, that ended too soon.
And often I would remember, seeing the Vogue photo which my practical-minded publisher would use on my book jacket covers for years, the circumstances of that dramatic photo shoot; how curious and fleeting is the intimacy between photographer and “subject,” how abruptly it can end; and the image that remains can be both timeless and time-bound, a memory of nightmare crystallized in art.
JUST NOW, ON A balmy late morning in May 2014, I have walked past the brick town house at 18 West Eleventh Street, an entirely new building of course, refashioned, more “modern” than the old, amid a block of handsome, highly respectful, and very expensive West Village properties. From somewhere close by, on Fifth Avenue, a siren is wailing—but soon fades.
FOOD MYSTERIES
TOOTSIE ROLL, MALLOW CUP, Milky Way, Junior Mints, Snickers, Hershey Bar, Mars Bar, Oh Henry!
Juicy Fruit, Dentyne chewing gum.
Bubble gum. “Jawbreaker.”
Hostess CupCake: chocolate with “cream” filling.
Pies in crinkly waxed paper that fit into the palm of the hand, to be devoured rapturously on the sidewalk outside the store in which they were purchased.
Magical syllables—“Tastee-Freez.” Transit Road, Lockport.
Orange, chocolate, cherry Popsicles slow-melting at first, then rapidly melting. Fingers sticky.
Fudgsicles, Creamsicles. Front of shirt stained, bare toes sticky.
At The Royale on Main Street, Lockport: hot fudge banana split with maraschino cherries, whipped cream, crown of sugar wafers.
At Castle’s Dairy on Main Street, Lockport: vanilla malt so thick you could barely drink it through a straw; strawberry milk shakes, double-dip ice-cream cones, chocolate ice-cream sandwiches.
At Rexall’s counter, chocolate Coke.
Freddie’s Doughnuts: glazed, chocolate, frosted, cinnamon, sweet doughy filled to bursting with whipped cream/jelly and covered in confectioners’ sugar that leave a guilty ghost-smile on your face.
MAYONNAISE SANDWICH
Mustard sandwich
Peanut butter sandwich
Baloney sandwich
Kraft American cheese sandwich
Grilled cheese sandwiches
Hamburgers/cheeseburgers/hot dogs
Ketchup, mustard-and-relish
French fries. Coleslaw. Salty, sugary.
Salty “buttery” popcorn sold at Palace Theater, Rialto Theatre hungrily devoured despite perennial rumors of rat droppings, cockroaches in popcorn boxes.
North Park Junior High cafeteria: (scorched) macaroni-and-cheese casserole, Chef Boyardee spaghetti and tomato sauce, grease-encrusted French fries.
Beef doves. Shepherd’s pie. Texas hash.
(Canned) fruit cup.
Rice pudding, bread pudding. Chocolate pudding.
Shiny quivery red Jell-O in fluted mold.
Pizza: cheese, tomato, green pepper and coin-sized slices of pepperoni sausage glimmering with miniature pools of grease.
Tiny (canned) shrimp, macaroni with Kraft’s mayonnaise on lettuce leaves.
Steaming-hot gluey oatmeal with milk, brown sugar.
Cheerios, Rice Krispies. Wheaties.
Gingerbread, fudge.
Triple-layer devil’s food with fudge frosting.
Excitement of baking cookies: carefully placing Mom’s cookie dough on baking tin. Chocolate chip, oatmeal, ginger, sugar.
Frosting Christmas cookies in the kitchen. Star-shaped, Christmas-tree-shaped sugar cookies with tiny sparkles like mica.
Excitement of coloring Easter eggs: care
fully lowering egg into dye, on teaspoon.
PEPSI, COCA-COLA, DR PEPPER, Sunkist. Royal Crown Root Beer.
Sip of Daddy’s dark ale—so bitter! hurtful on the tongue!
Foods fried in lard. Thickly coated in bread crumbs.
Southern-fried chicken, glazed ham baked with (canned) pineapple slices.
Campbell’s soups: tomato, chicken noodle, cream of mushroom.
Heinz’s Pork-and-Beans.
Breaded fish sticks dipped in Heinz’s ketchup.
Breaded cutlets, breaded chicken parts.
Mashed potatoes with gravy-pools.
Mashed potatoes with slow-melting wedges of butter cold from the refrigerator.
Roast turkey. Bread stuffing. Cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie, Grandma’s gravy boat brimming with fatty gravy.
Shame of Planters Peanuts eaten greedily out of the can in the car en route home from shopping at Loblaw’s, Lockport.
Salt/grease acute. Interior of mouth smarting.
Cheese omelets the size of automobile hubcaps, preferred rubbery to “moist.”
Iceberg lettuce wilting beneath spoonfuls of neon-pink “Russian” dressing.
From the dank earthen-floored cobweb-festooned cellar with its myriad odors, jars of canned applesauce, homemade—from the “fruit closet.”
Canned pears, sweet cherries, peaches swimming in syrup—from the “fruit closet.”
Blueberry pancakes. Waffles.
Vermont maple syrup in the sticky plastic pitcher.
Homemade spaghetti sauce, meatballs. Daddy’s favorite meal simmering on the stove.
Wonderful lost foods of childhood, adolescence—where gone?
HOW COULD WE HAVE eaten such heavy, unhealthful food?
Happily, mostly.
MY HUNGARIAN GRANDMOTHER LENA Bush made thick goulashes with sour cream and paprika. She made her own noodles rolling stiff chalky-white dough into layers on a breadboard, sprinkled with flour; stacking the layers together to be cut, precisely, with a long sharp knife. On her stove was a continuous simmering beef- or chicken-broth.
My grandmother’s most intricate specialties were Hungarian pastries that required such patience, skill, and single-minded purpose that my mother rarely tried to make them after my grandmother’s death. One of these consisted of thin pancakes prepared in a large iron skillet, filled with fruit (pears, cherries, peaches) and sour cream; another, yet more complicated, was rolled to airy thinness on the breadboard, filled similarly with fruit and sour cream, then rolled up tight, baked, cut, and served in small dishes. (Years later I would learn that these were variations of the traditional Hungarian Almás palacsinta, Egri félgömbpalacsinta, and rétesek.)
I never learned to prepare any Hungarian dish. I never learned a word of Hungarian except by osmosis, curse words of my grandfather’s which I would never have dared repeat.
MEATLESS FRIDAYS. IT WAS a mystery to me, how, when our family “converted” to Catholicism after my grandfather’s death, we could no longer eat meat on Friday.
There were venial sins, mortal sins. Eating meat on Friday was blatantly disobeying a decree of the Church (since rescinded), thus a mortal sin punishable by Hell.
I did not strongly question these decrees. I was not a confrontational or rebellious daughter, except inwardly, in secret; whatever I was expected to believe, a small still voice in my head assured me You will do what you want to do. Nobody can make you do anything you don’t want to do.
Eating meat, not-eating meat—this issue meant little to me. But the idea behind it, the Why?—this was not so easily swept aside.
How strange and unsettling it seemed to me that my father, so skeptical by nature, had become mysteriously quiet, even passive, on this matter; as if to resist the strictures of Catholicism was in some way to betray the memory of John Bush, and to further upset Lena Bush and (for a while, at least) my mother Carolina.
And so on Fridays I would help my mother prepare “fish dishes” for us—salmon patties fried in a skillet, creamed tuna fish with peas on toast.
Except for the bread these ingredients were canned, of course. Packed in water and salt. Indeed, it would be years before I fully grasped the concept that “salmon” and “tuna” are in fact (large, beautiful) fish of the kind that swim in the ocean.
Does God care what we eat? Why?—in the Pendleton church in a haze of boredom I would ponder such questions, to which no adult had any answer except This is what the Church teaches.
Any young person will smartly counter But somebody is making up these things, not the “Church”!
Yet it is true in some way, that there is holiness bound up with the food we eat, when it is prepared for us with care and intention. And where there is holiness, there is the possibility of its reverse—the forbidden, the taboo.
By the standards of a world beyond Millersport these were crude meals—salmon patties, canned-tuna-on-toast. Also macaroni and cheese, “fish sticks.” And yet, how we loved them! The memory of such meals, and my family at the small kitchen table upstairs in the old farmhouse in Millersport, now leaves me faint with hunger.
FACTS, VISIONS, MYSTERIES: MY FATHER FREDERIC OATES, NOVEMBER 1988
NOVEMBER 1988. IN MY study in our home in Princeton, New Jersey, I am listening, as dusk comes swiftly on, to my father playing piano in another part of the house. Unhesitatingly my father moves through the presto agitato of Schubert’s “Erl-King,” striking the urgent sequence of notes rapidly but firmly. There’s a shimmering quality to the sound, and I am thinking of how the mystery of music is a paradigm of the mystery of personality: most of us “know” family members exclusive of statistical information, sometimes in defiance of it, in the way that we seem to know familiar pieces of music without having any idea of their thematic or structural composition. After a few notes we recognize them—that is all.
Neuroscientists can explain how such recognitions are instantaneously possible, or should be in a normally functioning human brain, but we who experience them have no idea of the astonishing circuits the brain has closed for us in a fraction of a second, a kind of learned knowledge that seems virtually instinctual. The powerful appeal of music is not easily explicable, forever mysterious, like the subterranean urgings of the soul; and so too, the appeal of certain individuals in our lives. We are rarely aware of the gravitational forces we embody for others (if we embody any at all) but we are keenly aware of the gravitational forces these certain others embody for us. To say My father, my mother is to name but not easily to approach one of the central mysteries of my life.
How did the difficult, malnourished, frequently violent circumstances of my parents’ early lives allow them to grow, to blossom, finally to thrive into the people they’ve become?—is there no inevitable relationship between personal history and personality?—is character somehow bred in the bone, absolute fate? destiny? But what do we mean by “character”? What roles do “environment”—“family”—play?
I am determined to memorialize my father, my mother. But—how to begin?
In families, facts often come belatedly to us. Rarely are we told the most crucial facts of our parents’ lives when we are most intimate with them, as young children; such knowledge comes, if it comes at all, when we are older. And what exactly are facts, that we should imagine they have the power to explain the world to us? On the contrary, it is facts that must be explained.
HERE ARE FACTS:
My father’s father Joseph Carlton Oates left his young wife Blanche when their son, Frederic James, an only child, was two or three years old, in 1916. Abandoned them, to be specific, in Lockport, New York. There was no question of child support or alimony: this was the early 1900s, and such laws did not exist; even if they had, it isn’t likely that Joseph Oates, allegedly a “heavy drinker,” would have been willing or able to help support his family. My grandmother Blanche had to find work where she could (shopgirl? mill worker? chambermaid?) in this small city on the Erie Barge Canal north of Buffalo; when Frede
ric was thirteen, he began to work part-time; at seventeen, he quit school to work full-time. Twenty-eight years after he’d left his family, one night in 1944, Joseph Carlton Oates reappeared in a country tavern in Swormville to seek out his son Frederic, now living a few miles away in the crossroads community of Millersport, not to ask forgiveness for his selfishness as a father, nor even to explain his abandonment of his family: he’d come, Joseph Carlton announced, to “fight” his son.
For it seemed that Joseph Carlton had been hearing rumors that his son Frederic had long held a grudge against him and wanted to fight him, so Joseph Carlton sought the younger man out to challenge him. (Since leaving Lockport he’d been living in the Buffalo area, not really far from his former wife and their son, but in those years twenty-five miles could seem distant, what one hundred miles might seem like today.) But when the swaggering and belligerent Joseph Carlton confronted Frederic, the elder in his mid-fifties, the younger a married man and father of thirty, it turned out that Frederic had no special grudge against Joseph, and didn’t want to fight him.