George A. is telling me about their most recent meeting now, as he passes me the joint and unsleeves an album and puts it on the platter of the AR.
–So when was this?
–Last spring, he says. He came up to school to take me out to dinner.
As the music starts to play, George A. grabs his sweet new Gibson and sits down in the little cane-bottomed rocker, knees almost at his shoulders, takes a toke and paints the scene for me. He’s dressed for dinner—hair wet-combed, blue blazer, striped rep tie, spit-shined size 16 loafers. He knocks on the motel door at the appointed hour to find Bill on the floor with his toolbox open, shop rags, greasy pliers and wrenches spread around him. When George A. asks what he’s doing, Bill gives him a portentous look and nods to the vanity mirror above the sink, where the hot and cold water handles are reflected.
–Do you see what they are?
Under pressure, George A. fails the test.
–They’re inverted crosses, Bill says, giving him the crib, and for the next thirty minutes, as the reservation hour comes and goes, George A. waits, one knee jigging—as it’s jigging now—as Bill removes and replaces them, reversed.
I come by my superstitious leanings honestly. We’ve christened Bill “Ahasuerus,” after the Wandering Jew, in honor of his new career in peddling. George A. and I reserve a savage ridicule for Bill similar to that we turn on Jack, yet different, too, for Ahasuerus, to us, was once a king, and when we speak of him we drop our voices to a tone that flirts with religious awe. And our religion, the kind that can still make us quake and fall down on our knees, is of an angry Old Testament God who stalked our childhoods, often drunk, pulling doors off hinges, whose roar shook the house foundation and the stones beneath it.
Some are sad.
And some are glad.
And some are very, very bad.
Why are they
sad and glad and bad?
I do not know.
Go ask your dad.
This is among the passages most floridly defaced in that One Fish Two Fish Colleen will one day send, less a child’s doing, more as if the text has been parsed—closely and repeatedly—by a mad exegete with an unsteady hand. Did George A. do it when he was manic?
Perhaps I’m wrong, perhaps my path—which is George A.’s, too, for now, at least—diverged from our eastern North Carolina peers’ before I went away to Exeter, before we left Henderson in full retreat, and the gray-shingled house on the hill above Ruin Creek, where George A. and I shared twin bunks with matching cowboy quilts in that little amber room with college pennants thumbtacked to the wall, model airplanes hanging from the ceiling on clear monofilament and silver trophies on the chest of drawers.
Sometimes at the Nags Header this summer, and in Chapel Hill the previous year, walking past frat row on Saturday nights, I stop and gaze into a courtyard where a band of men—black men—is playing beach music to kids—white kids—who are shagging, cutting up, and it’s as if I’m looking back into a prior world, seeing who my grandparents and parents were and who I might have been and won’t be now. On the outside looking in, I’m like a ghost that can’t come home again and can’t quite leave. Why don’t I cross the road and join them?
The answer goes back six years earlier, to an afternoon in Henderson in 1968, when Bill, in his solemn baritone, calls down to my bedroom.
–David, come upstairs, your mother and I would like to speak to you.
I find them waiting in the formal living room we rarely use, seated side by side and gravely posed. I’m thirteen in this scene, which makes them thirty-one and -three. Margaret, by the look of things, has just come back from an engagement—luncheon at the Club perhaps, or Altar Guild. She’s wearing a tweed suit in an autumnal plaid, black and tan, with round, black fabric–covered buttons, like something you might see Jackie O. wear. Her long black hair is in a beehive like Audrey Hepburn’s in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. She’s a noted beauty in our hometown. Her black-brown eyes are solemn windows into something deep and old I can’t see to the bottom of, though the grievance in them is familiar to me, like a shadowed grove in an ancient sun-drenched country.
Yet even as I write, I recall her saying how she would come home from school in the middle of the afternoon in her saddle oxfords and her turned-down bobby socks and see Pa’s car in the driveway where it wasn’t supposed to be till supper, would enter the back door to find the whiskey bottle—Seagram’s 7—open on the sideboard, and a sinking feeling would come over her. And I remember when I was in my thirties surprising fiftysomething Margaret on the sofa once, with her legs curled under her, watching Beauty and the Beast on tape, the TV series with Linda Hamilton, weeping into Kleenex after Kleenex, and as I watched, surprised and touched, she would tell me this was her all-time favorite story, her all-time favorite one.
Her father, George A. Rose, whom we called Pa, was king of our first world. He built the big brick house on Woodland Road in Henderson and Four Roses, where we summered, and in the depths of the Depression started Rose Oil Company, the family business, and on the side dealt in farms and real estate and timber. For fifty weeks a year, Pa pulled the plow for everybody else, and then once or so a season he locked himself away in the big house like Bête in the enchanted castle and drank apocalyptically for five or six days running. And if his sober labors—like mine when I was four and came home from Mariah Parham Hospital—went unnoticed, when he drank the family paid attention. His wife, Mary, threw up her hands or collapsed with vapors. Genevieve, Margaret’s older sister, cleared out and slammed the door behind her. And Margaret? I expect Margaret ministered and stroked his head and said, Poor Daddy, and perhaps that was the time they were closest, when Pa took to bed and drank the ice-cream soda. And when he’d got his quota and received the rest he could no longer give himself in any other fashion, Pa rose, slapped Aqua Velva on his cheeks, put on a Hickey Freeman suit, and went to work with a blood-dotted scrap of tissue pasted to his Adam’s apple and bought another farm or built another service station.
And Margaret, who—just as I did—loved Pa above all others, married Bill Payne, a man as unlike George A. Rose as possible, one from a teetotaling family who, in the upshot, couldn’t hold his liquor either. And she drinks, too, Margaret—she’s not so solemn when she’s had a couple—as George A. and I are drinking in the lair at 9:30 in the morning, as I now, writing this, am thinking of the vodka in the freezer, glancing at the clock on my computer—1:30 P.M., September 9, 2006, a little early, but I’ve been at it since 5 A.M. and didn’t sleep so well last night and haven’t, if the truth be known, in fifteen years or longer. Life consists of so much struggle after all, and I look forward to my brief reprieve, the little private party that begins each day at an uncertain hour, that makes me feel, for the first thirty minutes, maybe forty-five, as though life is what it should have been, what I still thought it would be when George A. and I were together in this scene.
To pour the thick iced vodka on the cubes, to hear the viscous glug glug glug, to drop the olive in and see that little liquid starburst wink at me. When I resist, I feel it as a pressure in my chest and lungs, as though an invisible cinch is being tightened, restricting my ability to breathe. Or it’s as if I’m sinking in deep water, watching the silver shimmer on the surface recede, recede, recede. I’m panicking; I have to breathe, but there’s no oxygen, so I breathe alcohol. Drowning’s a release, and maybe now I’ll get my fifteen minutes on the sofa and when I’m once more capable of typing I can write my wife the email in the middle of her meeting and she can get the children and come home and stroke my head and whisper, Poor David, poor, poor David, and finally pay attention.
–What’s the matter? Did I do something wrong? I, thirteen, ask Bill and Margaret as I come up from my basement bedroom.
–Have you made up your mind about school? Bill says.
–No, sir. Not yet, I answer, relieved that this is all it is.
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Woodberry Forest or Exeter—we’ve long since winnowed down the list to these, one Southern and familiar, the other Northern, enticing, but above the family pay grade.
–You need to make a decision, son.
–Yes, sir, I know.
–Which do you think is the better school?
–Well, Exeter, I guess, but . . .
–But?
I gaze back and forth between them, but their faces, still more solemn, give no clue.
–Sit down, David, he says. I want to read you something.
Belatedly, I note the book in Bill’s lap, his finger at the place. I can’t tell what it is, some old edition from his college English days, I think. When he opens it, I see his class notes in the margins, written in block letters like a child’s, as large and lax as mine are small and tight. He begins to read now:
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky . . .
If this were a chess game—and, of course, it is—this gambit is one I could never have anticipated. Like the point man in a platoon, walking into certain ambush, I gaze at the ground for the thin gleam of the trip wire.
The idea of going off to boarding school has arrived a year before like a mysterious package on the doorstep. There’s a knock, and when I open, there it is, wrapped in silver paper stamped with gold crests. I hold it to my ear and shake. Eventually I can’t help opening it. Inside is a ship’s manifest. Aladdin’s cave, Annette Scherer’s drawing room in War and Peace, Gatsby’s West Egg mansion—as a port of call, “Exeter” seems as glamorous and no more real than these are. Yet, strangely, when I scan the columns, I find my name already set down. When I ask, my parents answer, But, David, don’t you know? It’s always been there; your name was written there before the world was made. Even when you were a little boy, we knew that you would go. And as they tell me this—and by “tell” and “ask,” you understand, I mean the deeper sort that passes without words—I fall into a trance, the same one I’m in now as my father reads in his beautiful, hypnotic baritone, and it’s as if I, too, have always known, as if the idea doesn’t come from outside, but is my own.
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question . . .
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
As he reads, Margaret sits composed and silent on the sofa, swept along, like me, on the flood tide of my father’s energy.
Here’s the thing, though—Bill Payne is the child of two public school teachers who scrimped to make ends meet. His father came down from the Shenandoah during the Depression, penniless, to teach high school math and coach the football team. He rose to become the principal at Henderson High, the school I’ll be leaving whether I choose Exeter or Woodberry, and either amounts to a rejection of his lifework and his values. And does my father—whose paternal refrain, in later years, when asked for help, will always be, “No one ever did it for me”—did he, then, at thirty-three, come up with the extravagant generosity of Exeter? No, though the power seems to flow from him, on revisiting this scene, I see now what I didn’t then.
It’s my mother, who sits—hands clasped in her lap, ankles crossed just so—and never speaks a word, who goes to her family, the Roses, for the money. It’s she who grew up with boarding school as a social possibility. In high school, she went away herself—to St. Mary’s in Raleigh, a finishing school for affluent North Carolina girls, where her sister, Genevieve, went before her, and their mother, Mary, and Mary’s sister, Polly. Margaret put on white gloves that buttoned at the wrist and a fashionable hat for chapel every morning, and at night she snuck out through a hole in the back fence, where Bill Payne with his duckbill haircut and his purple stovepipe corduroys waited in his father’s hand-me-down jalopy.
They drove to Chapel Hill and hit the parties on frat row, where bands of black men played for white children, who were dancing, cutting up, and they danced and cut up, too, and drank. If alcohol brought Margaret out, it shot Bill from a cannon. Two months, not even two, after big sister Genevieve’s white wedding—when the hosts assembled and the house filled up with presents—Margaret was pregnant. Her father, the first George A., offered her the chance to go up north to have it fixed in Philadelphia, but she said no. Years later, after everything has crumbled, she’ll tell me: When I married Bill Payne, I didn’t know if he was going to be a scientist and discover the cure for cancer or become the president of the New York Stock Exchange. Something high, though, whatever it would be, and I think Margaret wanted to sit behind him on the dais in a killer outfit, Bill a way out of her family through the back fence. We were just so much in love we couldn’t stand to wait, Margaret told me later, but if you look at twenty-year-old Bill in their wedding photos—six-foot-six and 180, in a pale summer suit too big for him, hands clasped in a formal posture—he looks like someone being escorted to his execution and trying to summon some dignity. And beside him, Margaret, eighteen, looks desperately happy.
Four months after Genevieve’s white wedding, then, Margaret’s black one, and she, too, through crisis, gets her needs met: autonomy, adulthood, a husband, a way out. With their parents following behind in a reluctant caravan, they drive down to Bennettsville, South Carolina, where proof of age is not required, and say their vows before a justice of the peace.
Married in September 1954, they have the baby—me—the following April and we live in a small garage apartment on Vance Street in Chapel Hill while Bill finishes his last two years of college and enrolls in med school. Before he can discover the cure for cancer, he has to get through the first-year curriculum, only it turns out Bill doesn’t really want to be a doctor and doesn’t make it. It was his mother’s ambition for him and Margaret gets aboard with Letty though the two agree on little else and can’t stand each other, frankly. So he puts down his scalpel and heads off to the KA House to shoot hoops and knock back some cold ones with his former brothers. Meanwhile, eighteen-year-old Margaret is alone with me in the apartment, trying to breast-feed with a condition called inverted nipples. Hers turn inward and it hurts to feed me and there’s “blood in the breast milk,” as she tells me later, and maybe that’s where dependency and need turn dangerous and I become a Taoist and try to give up material sustenance and subsist on air and sunlight. And one day the Dean calls Bill in and says, Son, it’s clear you’re bright and will do well at something. Not this, though—your heart’s not in it.
So what next and how now? Pa Rose, the first George A., offers Bill a stopgap job at Rose Oil Company. Margaret wants no part—Richmond, Atlanta, New York City, anywhere but Henderson. She’d rather Bill enlist, she tells him, rather be an Army wife and live on base, serving tea and cakes to other young lieutenants’ wives than go back home defeated. To Bill, though, Henderson makes sense. Henderson is what Bill wants.
Why not? With a word, they—he—can have a house without a mortgage, a new car without a coupon booklet or a monthly payment, a maid to cook their meals and raise their children, a membership at the Country Club, a pew at Holy Innocents, a job at Rose Oil Company with the implication that Bill will one day run the business. As Bill was Margaret’s ticket out to something brighter bigger better, so Margaret is Bill’s ticket back into the fenced world that her family came from and his family didn’t. As Margaret trapped him, so Bill traps her, pari passu, each taking what the other doesn’t wish to give up. So sickness, injury, collapse, and crisis bring rewards that independence doesn’t. You get something, but you have to give up something for it. Perhaps Bill doesn’t know this; Margaret does, though, and I expect that’s why she doesn’t want to return to Henderson and place herself, and them, back where she started, in the power of her parents, beholden to them for the ice-cream soda.
Yet as she got her way on the marriage, Bill gets his now. So for the next fourteen years Bill will work at Rose Oil Company a
nd take a Rose Oil paycheck and live in the gray-shingled house they build with Margaret’s money and drive the car George A. and Mary Rose give them as a wedding present and sit in the Roses’ pew at Holy Innocents at the 11 o’clock service, not at First Methodist where his parents sit at the same hour. And he’ll eat Sunday luncheon at the Country Club where the Roses pay the dues for the young couple, and after the buffet, Bill will ride to Woodland Road with Margaret and trade repartee with Margaret’s mother, whom Bill calls “Sherry Mary,” as Mary calls Bill “a long tall drink of water.” And on Monday morning, Bill puts on khakis, brogans, and a white T—the same uniform George A. wears in the lair when he comes off the sanitation truck—and when the dew is on the grass, Bill heads out to the Rose Oil Plant and fills the tank truck with No. 2 barn oil. For $45 a week, he drives out deep into the country, to the old pole tobacco barns in Vance and Warren Counties, where mules are hauling the drags of primed leaves to the barn and the women in bandannas tie the hands and pass them to the boys who hang them in the rooms inside. George A. comes three and a half years after me, and if I spend my first year and a half on Vance Street struggling with Margaret, George A. spends his with Eva Brame, the black woman Margaret hires on our return to Henderson, and perhaps when he wants things Eva provides them simply, without drama, and so he becomes a Dowist and later has no issue asking for the Gibson I could never ask for.