Picture him: thirty, eyes like rinse water, hair bleached white in the sun, the tender glossy skin showing through the molt of nose and cheekbone. A gangling tall man who walked with a limp and carried an umbrella everywhere he went. He was an Anglican clergyman. His superiors had sent him to the island on a mission of mercy: to save the aboriginal Tasmanians from extinction and perdition both. Robertson had leaped at the opportunity. He would be a paraclete, a leader, an arm of God. But when he stepped ashore at Risdon, he found that no one had seen a native Tasmanian—alive or dead—in nearly five years. Like the thylacines and wombats, they had withdrawn to the desolate slopes of the interior.
The one exception was a native woman called Trucanini who had been captured five years earlier and integrated into colonial life as a servant to the governor. When John Bowen had organized a line of beaters to sweep the bush and exterminate the remaining “black crows,” the drive had turned up only two Tasmanians—Trucanini and her mother, who were discovered sleeping beneath a log. The others had vanished. Trucanini’s mother was an old woman, blind and naked, her skin ropy and cracked. Bowen left her to die.
The day he landed, Robertson limped up to the back door of the governor’s manor house, umbrella tucked under his arm, stepped into the kitchen and led Trucanini out into the courtyard. She was in her early forties, toothless, her nose splayed, cheeks and forehead whorled with tattoos. Robertson embraced her, forced her to her knees in the sand and taught her to pray. A week later the two of them struck off into the bush, unarmed, in search of the remnants of her tribe.
It took him four years. The governor had declared him legally dead, his mother back in Melbourne had been notified, a marker had been placed in the cemetery. Then one afternoon, in the teeth of a slashing monsoon, Robertson strode up the governor’s teakwood steps followed by one hundred eighty-seven hungry aboriginal Christians. Wooden crosses dangled from their necks, their heads were bowed, palms laid together in prayer. The rains washed over them like a succession of waterfalls. Robertson asked for safe conduct to Flinders Island; the governor granted it.
The Tasmanians were a Stone Age society. They wore no clothes, lived in the open, foraged for food. Robertson clothed them, built huts and lean-tos, taught them to use flint, cultivate gardens, bury their excrement. He taught them to pray, and he taught them to abandon polygamy for the sacrament of marriage. They were shy, tractable people, awed and bewildered by their white redeemer, and they did their best to please him. There was one problem, however. They died like mayflies. By 1847 there were less than forty of them left. Twelve years later there were two: Trucanini, now long past menopause, and her fifth husband, William Lanne.
Robertson stuck it out, though he and Trucanini moved back into Risdon when William Lanne went off on a six-month whaling voyage. There they waited for Lanne’s return, and Robertson prayed for the impossible—that Trucanini would bear a child. But then he realized that she would have to bear at least one other and then that the children would have to live in incest if the race were to survive. He no longer knew what to pray for.
When Lanne’s ship dropped anchor, Robertson was waiting. He took the wizened little tattooed man by the elbow and walked him to Trucanini’s hut, then waited at a discreet distance. After an hour he went home to bed. In the morning Lanne was found outside the supply store, a casket of rum and a tin cup between his legs. His head was cocked back, and his mouth, which hung open, was a cauldron of flies.
Seven years later Trucanini died in bed. And George Robertson gave up the cloth.
Concerning the higher primates: there are now on earth circa 25,000 chimpanzees, 5,000 gorillas, 3,000 orangutans, and 4,000,000,000 men.
Didus ineptus, the dodo. A flightless pigeon the size of a turkey, extinct 1648. All that remains of it today is a foot in the British museum, a head in Copenhagen, and a quantity of dust.
Suns fade, and planets wither. Solar systems collapse. When the sun reaches its red-giant stage in five billion years it will flare up to sear the earth, ignite it like a torch held to a scrap of newsprint, the seas evaporated, the forests turned to ash, the ragged Himalayan peaks fused and then converted to dust, cosmic dust. What’s a species here, a species there? This is where extinction becomes sublime.
Listen: when my father died I did not attend the funeral. Three years later I flew in to visit with my mother. We drank vodka gimlets, and I was suddenly seized with a desire to visit my father’s grave. It was 10 P.M., December, snow fast to the frozen earth. I asked her which cemetery. She thought I was joking.
I drove as far as the heavy-link chain across the main gate, then stepped out of the car into a fine granular snow. My fingers slipped the switch of the flashlight through woolen gloves and I started for section 220F. The ground stretched off, leprous white, broken by the black scars of the monuments. It took nearly an hour to find, the granite markers alike as pebbles on a beach, names and dates, names and dates. I trailed down 220F, the light playing off stone and statue. Then I found it. My father’s name in a spot of light. I regarded the name: a three-part name, identical to my own. The light held, snowflakes creeping through the beam like motes of dust. I extinguished the light.
(1977)
THE FOG MAN
He came twice a week, rattling through the development in an army-surplus jeep, laying down a roiling smoke screen that melted the trees into oblivion, flattened hills and swallowed up houses, erased Fords, Chevies and Studebakers as if they were as insubstantial as the air itself, and otherwise transformed the world to our satisfaction. Shrubs became dinosaurs, lampposts giraffes, the blacktop of the streets seethed like the surface of the swamp primeval. Our fathers stood there on their emerald lawns, hoses dripping, and they waved languidly or turned their backs to shoot a sparkling burst at the flower beds or forsythias. We took to our bikes, supercharged with the excitement of it, and we ran just behind him, the fog man, wheeling in and out of the tight billowing clouds like fighter pilots slashing across the sky or Grand Prix racers nosing in for the lead on that final excruciating lap. He gave us nothing except those moments of transfiguration, but we chased him as single-mindedly as we chased the ice-cream man in his tinkling white truck full of Drumsticks and Eskimo Pies, chased him till he’d completed his tour of the six connecting streets of the development—up one side and down the other—and lurched across the highway, trailing smoke, for the next.
And then the smoke settled, clinging to the dewy wet grass, the odor of smoldering briquettes fought over the top of the sweet narcotic smell of it, and we were gone, disseminated, slammed behind identical screen doors, in our identical houses, for the comfort and magic of the TV. My father was there, always there, propped up in his recliner, one hand over his eyes to mask an imaginary glare, the other clutched round his sweating drink. My mother was there too, legs tucked under her on the couch, the newspaper spread in her lap, her drink on the cluttered table beside her.
“The fog man was just here,” I would announce. I didn’t expect a response, really—it was just something to say. The show on TV was about a smiling family. All the shows were about smiling families. My mother would nod.
One night I appended a question. “He’s spraying for bugs, right?” This much I knew, this much had been explained to me, but I wanted confirmation, affirmation, I wanted reason and meaning to illuminate my life.
My father said nothing. My mother looked up. “Mosquitoes.”
“Yeah, that’s what I thought—but how come there’s so many of them then? They bit right through my shirt on the front porch.”
My mother tapped at her cigarette, took a sip of her drink. “You can’t get them all,” she said.
It was at about this time that the local power company opened the world’s first atomic power plant at Indian Point. Ten years earlier nuclear fission had been an instrument of war and destruction; now it was safe, manageable; now it would warm our houses and light our lights and power our hi-fis and toasters and dishwashers. The electric c
ompany took pains to ensure that the community saw it that way. It was called public relations.
I didn’t know the term then. I was eleven years old, in my first week of my last year of elementary school, and on my way to the power plant in a school bus crammed to the yawning windows with my excitable classmates. This was known as a field trip. The previous year we’d been to a farm in Brewster and the Museum of Natural History in New York. We were starting early this year, but it was all due to the fact of this astonishing new technological force set down amongst us, this revolution in the production of electricity and the streamlining of our lives. We didn’t know what to expect.
The bus rumbled and belched fumes. I sat on the hard cracked leatherette seat beside Casper Mendelson and watched the great gray concrete dome rise up out of the clutch of the trees, dominating the point and the placid broad fish-stinking river beyond it. It was impressive, this huge structure inside of which the titanic forces of the universe were pared down to size. Casper said that it could blow up, like the bomb they’d dropped on the Japanese, and that it would take all of Peterskill and Westchester with it. The river would turn to steam and there’d be nothing left but a crater the size of the Grand Canyon and we’d all be melted in our beds. I gaped out the window at the thing, awestruck, the big dome keeping a lid on all that seething complexity, and I was impressed, but I couldn’t help thinking of the point’s previous incarnation as an amusement park, a place of strung lights, cotton candy and carousels. Now there was this gray dome.
They led us into a little brightly lit building full of colorful exhibits, where we handled things that were meant to be handled, scuffed the gleaming linoleum floors and watched an animated short in which Johnny Atom splits himself in two and saves the world by creating electricity. The whole thing was pretty dull, aside from the dome itself and what Casper had said about it, and within the hour my classmates were filling the place with the roar of a stampede, breaking the handles off things, sobbing, skipping, playing tag and wondering seriously about lunch—which, as it turned out, we were to have back at school, in the cafeteria, after which we were expected to return to our classrooms and discuss what we’d learned on our field trip.
I remember the day for the impression that imposing gray dome made on me, but also because it was the first chance I got to have a look at Maki Duryea, the new girl who’d been assigned to the other sixth-grade section. Maki was black—or not simply black, but black and Oriental both. Her father had been stationed in Osaka during the occupation; her mother was Japanese. I watched her surreptitiously that morning as I sat in the rear of the bus with Casper. She was somewhere in the middle, sitting beside Donna Siprelle, a girl I’d known all my life. All I could make out was the back of her head, but that was enough, that alone was a revelation. Her hair was an absolute, unalloyed, interstellar black, and it disappeared behind the jutting high ridge of the seat back as if it might go on forever. It had hung iron straight when we first climbed aboard the bus that morning, but on the way back it was transformed, a leaping electric snarl that engulfed the seat and eclipsed the neat little ball of yellow curls that clung to the back of Donna Siprelle’s head. “Maki Duryea, Maki Duryea,” Casper began to chant, though no one could hear him but me in the pandemonium of that preprandial school bus. Annoyed, I poked him with a savage elbow but he kept it up, louder now, to spite me.
There were no blacks in our school, there were no Asians or Hispanics. Italians, Poles, Jews, Irish, the descendants of the valley’s Dutch and English settlers, these we had, these we were, but Maki Duryea was the first black—and the first Asian. Casper’s father was Jewish, his mother a Polish Catholic. Casper had the soaring IQ of a genius, but he was odd, skewed in some deep essential way that set him apart from the rest of us. He was the first to masturbate, the first to drink and smoke, though he cared for neither. He caused a panic throughout the school when he turned up missing one day after lunch and was found, after a room-by-room, locker-by-locker search, calmly reading on the fire escape; he burst from his chair at the back of the classroom once and did fifty frantic squat-thrusts in front of the hapless teacher and then blew on his thumb till he passed out. He was my best friend.
He turned to me then, on the bus, and broke off his chant. His eyes were the color of the big concrete dome, his head was shaved to a transparent stubble. “She stinks,” he said, grinning wildly, his eyes leaping at my own. “Maki Duryea, Maki Duryea, Maki Duryea”—he took up the chant again before subsiding into giggles. “They don’t smell like we do.”
My family was Irish. Irish, that’s all I knew. A shirt was cotton or it was wool. We were Irish. No one talked about it, there was no exotic language spoken in the house, no ethnic dress or cuisine, we didn’t go to church. There was only my grandfather.
He came that year for Thanksgiving, a short big-bellied man with close-cropped white hair and glancing white eyebrows and a trace of something in his speech I hadn’t heard before—or if I had it was in some old out-of-focus movie dredged up for the TV screen, nothing I would have remembered. My grandmother came too. She was spindly, emaciated, her skin blistered with shingles, a diabetic who couldn’t have weighed more than ninety pounds, but there was joy in her and it was infectious. My father, her son, woke up. A festive air took hold of the house.
My grandfather, who years later dressed in a suit for my father’s funeral and was mistaken for a banker, had had a heart attack and he wasn’t drinking. Or rather, he was strictly enjoined from drinking, and my parents, who drank themselves, drank a lot, drank too much, took pains to secrete the liquor supply. Every bottle was removed from the cabinet, even the odd things that hadn’t been touched in years—except by me, when I furtively unscrewed the cap of this or that and took a sniff or touched my tongue tentatively to the cold hard glass aperture—and the beer disappeared from the refrigerator. I didn’t know what the big deal was. Liquor was there, a fact of life, it was unpleasant and adults indulged in it as they indulged in any number of bizarre and unsatisfactory practices. I kicked a football around the rock-hard frozen lawn.
And then one afternoon—it was a day or two before Thanksgiving and my grandparents had been with us a week—I came in off the front lawn, my fingers numb and nose running, and the house was in an uproar. A chair was overturned in the corner, the coffee table was slowly listing over a crippled leg and my grandmother was on the floor, frail, bunched, a bundle of sticks dropped there in a windstorm. My grandfather stood over her, red-faced and raging, while my mother snatched at his elbow like a woman tumbling over the edge of a cliff. My father wasn’t home from work yet. I stood there in the doorway, numb from the embrace of the wind, and heard the inarticulate cries of those two women against the oddly inflected roars of that man, and I backed out the door and pulled it closed behind me.
The next day my grandfather, sixty-eight years old and stiff in the knees, walked two miles in twenty-degree weather to Peterskill, to the nearest liquor store. It was dark, suppertime, and we didn’t know where he was. “He just went out for a walk,” my mother said. Then the phone rang. It was the neighbor two doors down. There was a man passed out in her front yard—somebody said we knew him. Did we?
I spent the next two days—Thanksgiving and the day after—camping in the sorry patch of woods at the end of the development. I wasn’t running away, nothing as decisive or extreme as that—I was just camping, that was all. I gnawed cold turkey up there in the woods, lifted congealed stuffing to my mouth with deadened fingers. In the night I lay shivering in my blankets, never colder before or since.
We were Irish. I was Irish.
That winter, like all winters in those days, was interminable, locked up in the grip of frozen slush and exhaust-blackened snow. The dead dark hours of school were penance for some crime we hadn’t yet committed. The TV went on at three-thirty when we got home from school, and it was still on when we went to bed at nine. I played basketball that winter in a league organized by some of the fathers in the development
, and three times a week I walked home from the fungus-infested gym with a crust of frozen sweat in my hair. I grew an inch and a half, I let my crewcut grow out and I began to turn up the collar of my ski jacket. I spent most of my time with Casper, but in spite of him, as the pale abbreviated days wore on, I found myself growing more and more at ease with the idea of Maki Duryea.
She was still foreign, still exotic, still the new kid and worse, much worse, the whole business complicated by the matter of her skin color and her hair and the black unblinking depths of her eyes, but she was there just like the rest of us and after a while it seemed as if she’d always been there. She was in the other section, but I saw her on the playground, in the hallway, saw her waiting on line in the cafeteria with a tray in her hands or struggling up the steps of the school bus in a knit hat and mittens no different from what the other girls wore. I didn’t have much to say to any of the girls really, but I suppose I must have said things to her in passing, and once, coming off the playground late, I found myself wedged up against her on the crowded school bus. And then there was the time the dancing teacher, with a casual flick of her wrist, paired me off with her.
Everything about dancing was excruciating. It was not kickball, it was not basketball or bombardment. The potential for embarrassment was incalculable. We were restless and bored, the gymnasium was overheated against the sleet that rattled at the windows, and the girls, entranced, wore peculiar little smiles as Mrs. Feldman demonstrated the steps. The boys slouched against one adamantine wall, poking one another, shuffling their feet and playing out an elaborate ritual to demonstrate that none of this held the slightest interest for them, for us, though it did, and we were nervous about it despite ourselves. Alone, of all the two classes combined, Casper refused to participate. Mrs. Feldman sent him to the principal’s office without so much as a second glance, chose partners arbitrarily for the remainder of the class and started up the ancient phonograph and the arcane scratchy records of songs no one knew and rhythms no one could follow, and before I was fully cognizant of what was happening I found myself clutching Maki Duryea’s damp palm in my own while my arm lay like a dead thing across the small of her back. She was wearing a sweater thick enough for Arctic exploration and she was sweating in the choking humid jungle atmosphere of the gymnasium. I could smell her, but despite what Casper had said the heat of her body gave off a luxurious yeasty soporific odor that held me spellbound and upright through the droning eternity of the record.