Harkavy Clinton Bell, my father’s father, spent the last seven years of his life in Old Holly. Before retiring he had been one of advertising’s early legends, the second man to use a coupon in a newspaper ad. It was he who left the house to my father. I was six when we moved from West End Avenue; Jane was nine and Mary ten. I was happy there as a child. It was a house of dubious architectural parentage, a bastard house, a stray, to be loved as mongrels are. Harkavy’s portrait was over the mantelpiece, misty hills behind his head, and he looked like Mona Lisa’s corrupt uncle. I filled my room with fishing rods, college pennants, baseballs and model planes.
Winter of my twelfth year.
The boys vanished in the heavy snow. I ran inside and took off my boots, coat and hat. I was always running then and I was always leaving on my hat till last. I stood by the window and watched the snow pile up. It was the first snowfall of the year, filling the evening with silence and falling heaviest inside the light of the streetlamps. A parked car was covered, humped in white, and nothing moved but soft light across sleeves of snow on the branches of every tree. It was warm inside the house and I could hear my mother and older sister preparing dinner. Soon my father came home and I ran to greet him. He stood in the hallway, big and pink, shaking off snow, clapping his gloves together, breathing smoke. After dinner I went back to the window and chewed on homemade cookies. Mary washed the dishes; Jane drew a picture of my mother with chalk on a slate; my father turned the pages of a magazine; the radiator whistled. All these sounds in the warm house, of water running and steam, of shrill chalk and the rustling of paper, of voices known and of time moving down the grandfather clock, all these, inflections of the house itself, all-comforting and essential, told me that I was safe.
And then the first sound of men with shovels was heard.
I could not see them but I knew they were out there, bulky men folded behind their shovels. The shovels chipped at ice, scraped on concrete, and my father began to get interested. He stirred and put down the magazine. My mother quoted something she had read the day before, grim statistics about shoveling snow and heart attacks, about pneumonia, sprained backs, broken hips. My father said he had a long way to go before he started worrying about such things and in a little while he got up and put on his coat. There is no denying a man who wants to shovel snow.
Outside a car went by, slowly, wipers working, and then my father emerged from the basement with the shovel. I could see three streetlamps from the window and each beam of light brimmed with snow. Soon it would be Christmas and there would be visitors and gifts and too much food. And if we were lucky enough to have snow then it was that much better because there was nothing ahead but school and the bleak dark months before the first true day of spring. But it was too early to look forward to spring because there was still Christmas ahead. The worst stretch was after Christmas. It was a long time to spring and there was nothing but school. My mother began to cry.
I went outside and stood by the gate. My father was shoveling snow and didn’t see me and all up and down the street other men were shoveling and not talking and they were all breathing smoke and in the quiet and unfaltering tenor of the snow they looked like ancient men engaged in timeless professions, shepherds in a field or patient fishermen whose lines sprawl in the water of a winter lake. The night air was keen and thin. No cars passed and it was too cold now for walking your dog or for boys testing the snow for its snowball qualities. I wanted to do some shoveling myself but there was only one shovel and it was something I knew my father enjoyed so I let it go. I thought of all the people in town I liked and all those I didn’t like. I imagined myself crawling through the woods, a commando, with a knife between my teeth. It was hot and the jungle birds were screaming. I moved up to the house on my belly through the trees. It was the doctor’s house, Weber’s, and I climbed through the window. He came downstairs and I stood behind the kitchen door. He walked in and reached for the light-switch and then quickly, hand over mouth, knife to throat, softly, softly, whispering my vengeance to his warm ear, I killed him.
In the snow now the joyous men shoveled. I went up the stairs and felt something hit me in the back. I turned and saw my father shaking the snow from his hands and smiling. I waited until he returned the shovel to the basement. Then we went into the house together.
* * *
My best friend was Tommy Valerio. Whenever I went to his house, his mother would squeeze my cheeks and rub her knuckles on my head. It used to embarrass me and soon I found excuses to stay away. When Tommy was sixteen his father died of a heart attack and Tommy took possession of the family car, a ‘46 Chevy. We kept a bayonet under the front seat. We didn’t have licenses and Tommy used to sit on a pillow when he was driving so that he would look taller and therefore older. One day he told me that the police chief’s youngest daughter, Kathy, was available for experiments of all kinds. We drove her over to the yacht club and took turns in the back seat. She chewed gum throughout. The police chief’s name was Brandon Lovell. He and my father used to shoot skeet together. I was going to prep school in New Hampshire but I was home about six weekends that winter and there would always be one afternoon in the yacht club parking lot. One Saturday I borrowed the car and drove over to the drugstore on Ridge Street. Kathy was there and I took her to the lot. She told me that her father used to walk around the house naked. That was why her two older sisters had left home. Once he wore his gunbelt and holster and nothing else and fired six bullets into the sofa. I asked her who she liked better and she said Tommy. I took the bayonet out from under the seat and asked her again. I didn’t know whether I was kidding or not. She said Tommy. I hit her in the jaw with the blunt end of the bayonet and threw her out of the car.
That summer, with my father’s consent, I got a junior driver’s license. He owned an MG at the time and we went driving almost every weekend. One night he agreed to lend me the car even though I wasn’t supposed to drive after dark. I told him that a friend of mine from Larchmont, a classmate, had just died of amnesia, and this was the last night of the wake. I had spent a long time working out the minor details of the lie but he gave me the keys without asking questions. There was a movie I had to see.
I sat through it twice. During the intermission an usher came around with a tin can for the heart fund. It was even better the second time. There was an immensity to Burt which transcended plot, action, characterization. In my mind he would be forever caught in that peculiar gray silveriness of the movie screen, his body radiating a slight visual static. I saw him in person once at Yankee Stadium and even then, before he left in the fourth inning because the autograph hunters would not leave him alone, even then, in civvies and dark shades, Burt was the supreme topkick, inseparable from the noisy destinies of 1941. I was glad I had not asked anyone to come to the movies with me. This was religion and it needed privacy. I drove home slowly. My father followed me up to my room. I was sitting on the bed, one shoe just off, still in my hand, when he entered.
“How could anybody die of amnesia?” he said.
“Amnesia? I thought I said anemia.”
“You said amnesia, sport. I didn’t realize it till you left. But even granting you meant anemia, the question still goes. Who dies of anemia today? Didn’t this friend of yours get enough to eat?”
“It’s a blood thing, dad. It has nothing to do with malnutrition. The red corpuscles don’t get enough hemoglobin. Something like that.”
“You were out with that little piece of tail, weren’t you? Lovell’s daughter. If you don’t get the clap off her, you’ll never get it. That’s dynamite you’re fooling around with, pally. Lovell’s a friend of mine but he’s got some kind of maniac inside him. Some big mean redneck waving a shotgun. If he finds out you’re fooling around with his daughter, he’ll blow your head off. What I’m giving you is sound advice based on a pragmatic interpretation of the facts as I see them. I’m not moralizing, Dave. That’s your mother’s department. Listen to your old man. Have I ever given yo
u a bum steer?”
“I went to the movies,” I said.
“Yeah.”
“It’s the truth this time.”
“Let’s forget it.”
“Can I drink beer at the dinner table from now on?”
“Can you drink beer?” he said. “I don’t give a rat’s ass if you drink double bourbons. Do you good. But that’s also your mother’s department. Maybe if you sipped it from a sherry glass she’d give you the okay.”
I laughed and took off the other shoe.
“Is she still making preparations for the big party?”
“She’s moving into second gear. A full month in advance. She’s a honey all right, your mother is. Nobody like her.”
“Will you let Arondella come to the party?”
“Don’t mention his name in this house,” my father said.
* * *
At the table my mother usually talked about food. When she was riding in a car, her conversation centered around cars and driving. Knitting, she talked about clothes; sweeping, about the virtues of cleanliness; watching television, about watching television.
When she was feeling well, we became absorbed in her, grateful for every simple moment. But she was rarely well. There was no pattern to her illness, none that we could discern anyway. Each break in the bad weather gave us hope and my father would put off until another time the necessary task of seeking professional help. He understood nothing and therefore did nothing. She was not a photograph that could be retouched. The maimed child could not be cropped out of the picture. She was not an advertising campaign and so he did not know what to do about her. When she was well, he lived within latitudes defined by her intelligence and grace, as we all did, lovingly. The rest of the time we did our best to pretend she was not there.
She was blond, blessed with smooth lovely skin, with almost musical hands. She was quite small. In her simplest actions was a delicacy so theatrical and self-aware that one often felt witness to some lonely child’s performance. Virginia born, the only daughter of a minister and a minister’s daughter, she met my father when he was visiting relatives in Alexandria. Two months later they were married. It embarrassed me to hear stories of their courtship, such as it was, and the early years of their marriage. She was seventeen when they were married and I was born five years later. She told me the story of those years dozens of times. She seemed to consider my birth the culmination of a series of preparatory events almost ceremonial in meaning and scope.
The Episcopal church in Old Holly was called Calvary. My mother spent a lot of time there. The church had organized a permanent fund-raising drive for the orphans of Asia. My mother was in charge of Burma and South Korea. Although she was genuinely devout, I think she was uneasy about the whole idea of the passion of Christ. Perhaps he sweated too much for her taste. I say that without facetiousness. She used to tell me charming little fables about Jesus. It wasn’t until much later that I realized she made them up. In her fables Jesus was a blond energetic lad who helped his mother around the house and occasionally performed a nifty miracle. “And after Jesus cured the blind man,” she would say, “he went home to the farm and helped his daddy milk the cows.”
As a child I was devoted to her. But we had our differences. Most of our arguments were pedantic flurries and whoever lost would usually try to even things up with a senseless display of spitefulness. I was playing baseball one day, or hardball as we called it, standing out in center field, when I saw her coming across the grass toward me.
“Good little boys do not pick their nose,” she said.
“Do not pick their noses. Boys is plural so noses has to be plural.”
“Boys are plural,” she said. “I was quite a brilliant little grammarian as a girl. I also played the harpsichord.”
She turned and left before I could say anything. The game resumed and when the inning was over I trotted in and sat on the grass behind the first-base line. Tommy came over and sat next to me. He asked me what she had wanted. I told him.
“If that was my mother,” he said, “I’d have told her to go take a flying fuck at the moon.”
Her bedroom was full of childhood things. Several cloth dolls sat on the dresser, slumped over in their dull colors, limbs woefully bent. There was a set of toy dinnerware in the closet as well as a small dollhouse, a teddy bear and bunny, six or seven coloring books. Jane and Mary were not allowed to play with any of these things. Music boxes were everywhere.
At times her presence in the house seemed accidental. She was one of those people who turn up now and then only to fade into some parenthesis of the middle distance; one catches glimpses of such people in parks and museums. Walking down the hallway I would see her move from room to room, a quick white daze of cloth, hair, bare arms; turning the bend in the staircase I would see first her feet, then knees, hands, face, a tired light in the eyes. She liked to sit on the top step. There was an apparitional quality about my mother. She seemed almost translucent and no expectation of eye or mind could ever fully prepare me for the sudden glimmers of her comings and goings.
When we were alone in the house I sometimes sat on the steps with her. That’s where she first told me about Dr. Weber. It was a summer afternoon. The house was full of sunlight. A bear’s great warm slumber was spread over everything. The girls were playing tennis.
“The minister and the doctor are the heart of every community,” she said. “Your great-grandfather on my mother’s side, Philip Thatcher, was a fine country doctor. We’ve had doctors and ministers in our family practically all the way back to Jamestown. I’ve always had the greatest respect for doctors. In my family the doctor was second only to the minister. It was the tradition. And that’s why Dr. Weber surprised me so. Dr. Weber is part of no tradition I know of, and if he’s second to anyone it’s probably a field hand. If I’m going to tell this story—and I am because one day you’ll realize that true education is made up of shocks and rude surprises, so I am going to tell it—but first I have to tell you what an internal examination is. It’s an examination of a woman’s most intimate parts. Don’t ask me why, but these things are necessary from time to time. Dr. Weber told me to take off my clothing and put on a white gown. It was like the gown you wore when you had your tonsils taken out. Then he asked me to recline on a big funny table and he put my legs in a pair of stirrups. Then he put a pillow on my stomach so I couldn’t see what he was doing down there. I can tell you there wasn’t much dignity to any of this. Then he began to do things. He asked me if I liked it. Naturally I said no. He said of course you do, everybody does, it’s only natural, and what a pretty young thing you are to have three children; what a pretty young woman and already three times a mother; so young and pretty, he kept saying, and do you like it and of course you do and you’re the prettiest woman I’ve ever seen, Ann, and no one will ever know. He called me by my first name.”
Whenever I saw my mother go through the house with the can of air-freshener I knew the Reverend Potter was expected. They had informal discussions every few weeks. She had known him since she was a girl in Alexandria. She talked of him often. She would run through the litany of his credits as if he were a make of automobile that had competed successfully in the various economy runs and endurance trials. The Boston Latin School. Harvard. The Protestant Episcopal Theological Seminary in Alexandria. Holy Trinity Church in Philadelphia. St. Bartholomew’s in New York. Rector of Calvary Church in Old Holly. Added to the resonance of the man was his full name, William Stockbridge Potter; that Stockbridge was perfect, implying great girth and distinction, and it did not disappoint, for he was big, hearty and companionable. So I would see her spraying all the rooms with lavender sachet and I would find an inconspicuous chair in the living room and duck my head behind a copy of Treasure Island or the favorite sports stories of Bill Stern.
“Ann, this tea is delightful. You know how carefully I choose my words and I say this tea is delightful.”
“What about the Judeo-Christian ethic
?” she said.
“What about it, Ann?”
“I came across it in a magazine. I said to Clinton I must ask William Potter about this.”
“Correct.”
“Well, what about it?”
“I suppose it refers to certain common elements in our heritage and theirs. I suppose it distinguishes these elements from those of the Moslem ethic, if there is such a thing.”
Reverend Potter sat in titanic splendor, slouched elegantly in the armchair, legs high and crossed at the knees, hands joined just beneath his lower lip, fingers barely touching. I was fascinated by the length of his fingers and by the small gray hair-fields above and below the joints of each finger. I had never seen such long fingers, nor fingers with so much hair growing on them. His black shoes gleamed. His hair was long and gray. He had harsh blue eyes and his voice seemed like steel struck on rock in a deep cave. The sight and sound of him filled me with fright and pleasure. To me, he could not have been more striking if he were an Abyssinian chieftain. But despite the beauty of his voice, there was something odd about the way he spoke. He often inserted long pauses between sentences and even words. Sometimes he would not respond to my mother’s simplest question without a full minute’s pause. Listening to him had its own measure of suspense. I used to imagine words tangled up in his throat and I would silently encourage them to spring out. There were times, the longest pauses, the slow hinging and unhinging of his jaw, the tentative sound echoing up his larynx, when he appeared to be on the verge of a torrential belch. It was part of his fascination. When he did speak finally, there seemed to be a curious disparity between the sounds he made and the movement of his lips; somehow they did not quite mesh. Perhaps the long pauses, the expectation, created an illusion of imbalance, but it seemed real enough then. It wasn’t until years later, when I joined the network, that I found a term which perfectly described the way his words issued from an unrelated mouth. William Stockbridge Potter was out of sync.