I told him I’d never been to the Rainier Club before. Mr. Barry took this as a cue for genealogy: on his mother’s side, he said, they were the Fosters from a Tacoma investment house and the Colemans in logging—not members of the club, but one of the Fosters had been mayor of Tacoma, and one of the Colemans had been a lead engineer at Grand Coulee Dam. On his father’s side, though, they’d all been club members, starting, of course, with his father himself, and including his great-uncle James Barry, who’d owned the Acme Fish Company, and his great-uncle Langdon Barry, founder of Western Sand and Gravel. Mr. Barry didn’t stop there: Dexter Coleman, on his mother’s side, was vice-president of Meyer Brothers, the company responsible for logging most of southwestern Washington; Thaddeus Coleman was a partner at Coleman & Denny and a legal adviser to First National Bank of Commerce; Younger Foster financed hydroelectric projects; Toby Foster was a majority partner in Foster Shipyards. At last Mr. Barry paused, possibly to consider if he’d forgotten any family luminaries, but also to grapple more vigorously with his tie and to sip from the Sprite with ice our server had delivered, on a pewter tray, with my coffee and a fresh bowl of mixed nuts. “By the way,” he said, locating a cashew, “I congratulate you on your enormous good fortune. You could join the club, you know, if that was what you fancied.”
There was a roar—air conditioning starting up—and with it came the smell of supper: the daily buffet was being prepared for service in the Heritage Dining Room, which we’d peeked into, with its wall sconces and Rococo chandelier. Mr. Barry chose this moment to extricate a monogrammed white handkerchief from his coat pocket, ball it between his fingers, and pat his nose. He also checked his watch, and I recalled that he was looking forward to Hospitality Hour downstairs; when I’d met him in the lobby, with its timbered ceiling, he’d stopped to scrutinize a readerboard schedule with a hint of anxiousness coloring his mien. John William once told me that his father stopped drinking, every year, as a Lenten regimen: forty days of prohibition Mr. Barry endured to justify indulgence through the rest of the calendar. After Easter, no cocktail would be poured in the house until five, except on weekends, when noon was the rule. I supposed this explained the glass of Sprite Mr. Barry held now, as well as his agitation as he’d scrutinized the lobby’s readerboard—he was holding back and looking forward simultaneously; he wasn’t indulging at the moment, with me, so as to enjoy hospitality later with his friends.
“It’s hard to see myself as a member of the Rainier Club,” I said. “Did you get my letter?”
“I did,” he answered, “and I’m very appreciative of your sincerity, Neil, but I would also advise you not to be too hard on yourself, because you’re not to blame for a thing.”
“But I am to blame, if blame’s the word. I—”
“Right there,” Mr. Barry said, and pointed at me. “I’ve noticed a tendency with your generation—the difficulty it has in assigning blame. With responsibility. With things that aren’t gray but instead black and white.” Mr. Barry spilled some pop and added, “I believe it has to do with Vietnam. That was the problem for your generation. When I was with the Seabees on Munda, we knew what we were doing there. We were going to stop the Japanese, because they’d attacked Pearl Harbor. It wasn’t complicated. So let me tell you who’s to blame insofar as my son is concerned. His parents are to blame. Virginia and myself. We did a very mediocre job of raising him.”
I said, “He’d still be here if I’d—”
“I don’t believe that,” said Mr. Barry. “That poor boy was in trouble from the get-go. First of all, he had no siblings, because his mother had the operation done that prohibits future pregnancies. By the way, this wasn’t something she and I conferred on, that John William would be an only child. This was unilateral on her part. I heard about it after the fact. You have two children, so you know that the exchange between them, the interplay between siblings, is extremely important. I felt we should have had more children, but my point of view was dismissed.”
He sipped from his Sprite. “Another thing,” he said, picking up steam now. “So you don’t blame yourself, Neil. John William had a terrible colic. I used to put cotton balls in my ears. Do you want to know what his mother did about it? She planned a schedule. And she implemented a regime I didn’t approve of. Her thought was that the boy should not be deferred to—she characterized his crying as a test of wills: who would break first, the mother or the child? There was a hell of a lot of crying in that house as a result of this ridiculous campaign of hers. I’m not sure where she came up with this plan, or if a pediatrician recommended this strategy, but her idea was to sit in the corner of the living room with her nose in a book while the boy was crying in his crib and not to go to him no matter the duration. We were at odds about that, because I did not feel it was the proper approach at all to a child’s crying. I used to feel sorry for him, but my hands were tied, and I was not allowed to meddle in this business of his crying. You know, I wasn’t there very much. I worked for the Boeing Company from June of 1948 until August of 1989, so I was not in charge of child-rearing. We had roles. I was the breadwinner, and I was a more-than-adequate breadwinner, but I couldn’t walk in the door at five-thirty p.m. and take command or make decisions regarding this crying that my son was doing. So I put in the cotton balls. That was my strategy. That was how I dealt with things. I came home, said hello, and put in cotton balls. Now, would you do that?”
I shrugged ambiguously. “You wouldn’t,” said Mr. Barry. “But I was a very busy man then. My work was demanding, but I liked my work because it was so challenging and…stimulating. Frankly, I preferred work to being at home, with all that crying going on.”
Mr. Barry fiddled some more with his shirt front. “If you want to blame someone,” he said, “blame the psychologist B. F. Skinner, because Virginia believed in this B. F. Skinner, that you didn’t want to positively reinforce the negative behavior of crying by offering comfort, that was her argument. Incidentally, there was no speaking with Virginia about this or anything else. She was always smarter than me and always correct—she was correct as a matter of course. Personally, I thought it best to console the boy. There were reasons for crying. This was his way of communicating, he had no other. From time immemorial, women have taken babies to their bosoms in response to crying. Wasn’t this obvious? Let me tell you something I remember perfectly. If I was making a point, Virginia kept her nose in her book. My points were so negligible and unworthy that she could read while I made them. Now, I saw the scorn in that, of course, as I know she meant me to. She would read while I was talking, and she would talk into her book while she was responding to me. Which was she talking to, the book or her husband? Here was all this crying, and then Virginia taking her position so adamantly. I’m going on a bit, but my point is, I’m sure it had an impact on John William. What if your first experience of the world is to cry and cry and get no response? I’m not a psychiatrist, but I have made my own cursory forays in the area of psychology, reading a little about these things, and everyone who is an expert on the subject agrees, you can’t mistreat an infant like that and afterward have a reasonable expectation that all will go right in adulthood. It doesn’t work that way. It’s basic. It’s fundamental. Do you agree with that?”
I said I did.
“Blame,” said Mr. Barry. “As far as blame is concerned, I have to say that a measure of mental illness enters into the equation as far back as 1956, the year John William was born, even though Virginia wasn’t hospitalized for this condition until the summer of 1967, eleven years later. I would say that her actions, from the time of his birth, did not proceed so much from logic as from difficult and irrational emotions. I’m certain I first noticed this about Ginnie at about the time John William was born, and I remember being disturbed to realize that the woman I married, I don’t know, was off somehow, if that term makes sense. Does it? Of course, it was obvious politically that Virginia was not in the mainstream, and that she fancied herself as among the left wing,
at that far end of the political spectrum, even an anarchist, but strictly in theory—because she liked to live well and did live well, enjoying fine dining and so forth, nice vacations, and sailing trips, as much as she could—but let me make this other point now, that Ginnie was also just mentally off for many, many years before it blew up and became a self-evident, material mental illness demanding my intervention. What do I mean?” Here Mr. Barry lifted his left hand in a fist, out of which popped his little finger. “I mean, first, that she was sometimes very adamant and forcefully committed to an illogical course of action, as I have pointed out in describing her techniques of child-rearing in 1956, and I mean, second, that she was a terrible insomniac from the time of our wedding until 1967, when a doctor prescribed her with the right medication. Third was environmental phobias. I couldn’t paint a stair railing without her making a stink over toxins. There were just so many perturbing and difficult things that were part of her makeup, I had to throw up my hands and keep my mouth shut if I was going to survive. And I did keep my mouth shut,” said Mr. Barry. “I was mum in the face of Virginia’s mental illness, and that was just a terrible mistake.”
I have to say I was surprised by his sudden cogency and by the turn our afternoon had taken toward confession. He was so forthcoming that I asked about it, to which he replied that he had prostate cancer—“the slow kind”—and was interested in seeing “that the record reads accurately. You know,” he added, “I mentioned to you earlier my interest in reading, not literary reading most of the time but books I enjoy, and in this vein I’ve read, oh, at least a half-dozen biographies that are sensationalistic, and let me tell you, these kinds of authors are coming out of the woodwork. Have any of them contacted you, Neil? Two have contacted me.”
“No,” I said. “What did you tell them?”
“That I would never cooperate regarding that sort of thing.”
“In that case,” I said, “I should probably tell you that I’m…fiddling with a book about your son.”
Rand seemed unruffled by this bit of news. “Well,” he said, “you were his friend, if the newspaper is correct, and friends have an interest in the truth.”
“Truth’s like blame for my generation, though. It doesn’t mean anything clear.”
Rand said, “Personally, I think it’s interesting, the truth. I think readers would be interested in hearing what happened.”
“What happened?”
“His parents happened. Virginia and I. I’ll give you an anecdote,” added Rand. “I’ll give you a representative ‘for instance.’”
TRUTH? AFTER A DAY at the Boeing Company, in mid-July of 1956, Rand came home to find the house in disarray and poured himself a Dewar’s and water. The kitchen smelled like spoiling food, and in the bathroom, on top of the ammonia of baby urine and the lidded bucket of soiled diapers incubating its stench of infant stool, there was the odor of Ginnie’s houseplants. Meanwhile, in a corner of the living room, Ginnie sat blithely reading in her favorite chair, a Chippendale turned toward a garden window. (This was before her revelation about “modern,” when everything in the house would be summarily carted off and replaced by furniture Rand didn’t care for.) And, of course, the baby was crying. It was all oppressive in the extreme for Rand, standing in the kitchen doorway and assessing Ginnie in profile, Ginnie with her reading glasses and her book of poems by Lawrence Ferlinghetti (he couldn’t quite see the cover from his distance, though it looked like the book by this Ferlinghetti she’d been carting for the last three days). Rand tucked the Post-Intelligencer under his arm and swirled his drink. He knew better than to say “dinner.” Beset by domestic facts, he gathered soda crackers, a cutting board, a knife, and a wedge of Swiss cheese. “I’ll be on the patio,” he said.
“Perfect,” called Ginnie, without looking at him.
Outside, Rand opened the sports section. His rhododendrons were well past their prime, but the lawn was thistle-free and green for midsummer. Three weeks until the Gold Cup, but already the paper was reporting hydroplane news, and there was an article by Royal Brougham on Pete Rademacher, “blood cousin to Wrong Way Corrigan,” who’d boxed in the P-I’s Golden Glove tournaments and was now training for the Melbourne Olympics. A plane flew overhead, and Rand knew from the sound of it, muted as it was, that this was the Boeing 367-80 with its four Pratt & Whitney engines. The Littletons were barbecuing; their hornbeam hedge shielded this activity from view, but not the smell, the tinkle of their glasses, or their voices. Rand sliced his cheese. There was a wasp nest under the eave he hadn’t noticed until now, evening stragglers making return flights to its portal. Rand watched avidly. He shut his eyes for thirty seconds, but then the baby cried louder. Or shrieked. “Shrieking” was the right word. Two and a half months in, and Rand was thoroughly familiar with the term “periodic irritable crying” and with the diagnosis “hypertonic baby.” Sometimes the problem seemed to be colic, and sometimes it seemed to be generalized fretting, but either way what issued from John William’s throat was an insufferable caterwaul. Rand struggled out of his chaise longue, panicked, and went into the kitchen to refill his Dewar’s. Mute irritation welled in him while John William wailed, up and down the register, changing octaves now and again, and pausing only to gather more oxygen. A tempest of angry need, a storm of unmet desires, a railing against helplessness—or just plain shrieking. Rand was about to stuff cotton balls in his ears, but then Ginnie called, from her post in the Chippendale, and in a tone of stringent and weary insistence, “He has everything he needs and is crying for no reason. I don’t want you even thinking of going in there.”
“It’s sure loud,” said Rand.
“Please. Just take your second cocktail out to your deck chair.”
“This is just a splash of Dewar’s, you know.”
“Whatever it is, take it out.”
Higher decibels from the infant John William. “I’m going to tell you this because I have to,” Rand said, abrogating his principle of marital muteness. “A child doesn’t cry for no reason.”
Ginnie tossed her book to the floor—now he could see that it was by this Ferlinghetti, a volume called Pictures of the Gone World. She twisted in her chair and yanked off her reading glasses, but a shriller shriek now emanated from the nursery, and she had to wait for that to subside before she could castigate her husband. “Something’s wrong,” said Rand.
“If you’d like to take over my job,” said Ginnie, “just say the word and it’s yours.”
Rand knew this was the perfect moment to redeploy his tongue-biting policy—except that the baby was still bawling. “That sounds different to me,” he said. “Couldn’t he be stuck by a diaper pin?”
Ginnie slapped her forehead. “A diaper pin,” she said. “You’re not here all day the way I am, are you. This? What you’re hearing? It’s the garden variety. It’s the everyday crying. It’s the feed-me-whenever-I-want-you-to crying. If you go in there now, you’ll undo all my efforts. You’ll undercut my ten weeks of discipline. I absolutely, positively won’t have it.”
With that, she fitted her earplugs into place—the rubber sort used by swimmers. She preferred them because of their fit in the ear canal, because their small flanges created perfect seals; these were what she wore in bed while John William screamed away the wee hours. Every night, at 2 a.m., the alarm went off and Ginnie rationed out five and a quarter ounces of evaporated milk diluted by water—but from then on, until 6 a.m., let John William wail: she would not respond.
Rand retreated. Back on the patio, a late wasp had found the cheese. He stuffed in his cotton balls. The past-their-prime rhododendrons looked bedraggled. In the glow of evening, they also appeared dour. A breeze came up, and Rand smelled Lake Washington. It was the ripe odor of foul chemistry, and it reminded him of Munda—mud, innocent American colons racked by coconut milk, and a perdurable, painful dysentery. Laurelhurst, when the wind was right, smelled like a makeshift navy latrine. Rand plugged his nose. The wasp crawled into a crater in t
he Swiss, which at its cut edge was already hardening and yellowing. It was clear, too, that the eaves needed painting, that he’d fallen behind on his flower-bed weeding, and, finally, that his cotton balls were acoustically insufficient. Because there was that yowling and whimpering still, muted but no less incessant and irritating. There was that railing against unjust circumstances. Rand’s son in extremis, desperate for attention. Actually, it was how he himself would cry if crying was at this stage a credible option. It wasn’t, and Rand didn’t have three hands to stop his ears and nose at the same time. He understood that to a hypothetical observer he would look tranquil in his segmented chaise longue, a Laurelhurst householder sipping a cocktail with the newspaper beside him and a water view, and yet, between the putrescence of the darkening lake and the lament of his baby—not to mention his spouse—he was in turmoil. He was enduring, he felt, intolerable conditions. Rand stood, downed his Dewar’s, went inside, and waved his arms at Ginnie, who was again at her reading. He pointed at his chest, mimed a driver at ten and two on a steering wheel, waved goodbye, and fled.
Rand drove his Bel Air convertible out of Laurelhurst and north on Sand Point Way. He’d bought this model in the main out of curiosity about its high-lift camshaft and four-barrel carburetor—both new for ’56—but also because of a Car Digest story in which a Chevy engineer drove it up Pikes Peak in under eighteen minutes. Rand had gone whole-hog: power-operated top, fender skirts, and whitewalls. The salesman was an old fraternity brother, Carter Lodge, already as lustrously bald as his father, who owned the dealership and looked like Daddy Warbucks. Rand kept the Bel Air waxed, but not scrupulously. There wasn’t room for that in his schedule, and it was the sort of thing—the bent posture of polishing—that made his lower back stiffen on the right side. He did buy high-octane gasoline, almost always at Larry’s Chevron near Five Corners, and he changed the oil every two thousand miles, a job he enjoyed. He would listen to Husky football (Hugh McElhenny was gone but they had Dean Derby), Seattle Rainiers baseball (Elston Howard behind the plate), or Seattle U basketball (the young Elgin Baylor jumping over everybody) while inscribing tune-up notes in a binder on his workbench. Rand gapped his points and set his timing with a strobe light, decompressing with a bottle of Pabst’s Blue Ribbon; now, driving, he measured the precision of his latest tune-up by the timbre of the Bel Air’s hydraulic lifters, a hum with substance behind it, a flawless concordance of engineered parts that could be heard and felt. He liked driving, particularly in the countryside—driving for no reason other than to appreciate the engineering of his car. On this evening, the farther north he went—top down, following the lakeshore—the better he felt, and as the July twilight deepened into moodiness, he began to enjoy, with self-destructive glee, his seditious escape and bold flight from domesticity. Though there would be hell to pay, eventually, in one way or another. His mutiny couldn’t stand. Ginnie would win in the fullness of time. But—that came later. For now, capriciously and happily on the lam—if a bit guilty to have left his son in torment—Rand toured. He traveled east on new but badly engineered arterials. More of “Lake City,” as this area had come to be called, had been clear-cut since the last time he’d motored this direction. There was obviously no oversight of the manner of development. No foresight, either. A lot of haphazard construction along the contours of ravines, homes slapped up on stump-riddled hillsides, insufficient municipal infrastructure, and a lack of storm drains. Rand saw dollars with little wings attached, bags of coins with helicopter props disappearing into the distance, as he wended through “Lake City.” And gloaming—was that the word? Chintzy new “ranch houses” going purple in the gloaming. Night was falling, and no citizens were about. Rand realized it must be the case that many of them worked for Boeing.