Daughters of the Revolution (5 page)

He grew here among other, older Byrds: his father, grandfather, and Olympia, his mother’s sister, a radical reformer, an embarrassment and a curiosity; she spent her vital years traveling across New England, campaigning for birth control and the sexual gratification of women. She also advocated for fair working conditions, though she, like God’s father, proved mildly oblivious to the anxieties of laboring people. The disposition of family business—the links and chains of history—absorbed them both. They loved nothing better than talking over their investments in an unpretentious restaurant, over cocktails and a cod.

Olympia’s arguments poured out in long, uninterruptible loops. There was so much of her to take in—the rich, full-throated voice, her baronial appetite, her extraordinary figure. Her cause consumed her, filled her with a ravenous energy.
When not traveling, she worked in the Byrd Brothers factory, arranging shipments of vulcanized rubber caps to women in Boston and beyond, or inciting halls full of women to demand sexual pleasure. Every word she spoke was charged with passionate intensity about one subject:
Children were avoidable
. Her lectures and demonstrations drew crowds. God’s father had once remarked, “People love to listen to your aunt. She has a magnificent bosom.”

Olympia sowed one thousand of her caps across five states in the first two decades of the nineteenth century, the way other women massed Dutch bulbs around their birches. Even as a young boy, Goddard was drawn to his aunt, especially in the absence of his mother, who died at eighteen from one of the usual causes—a childbirth infection from a doctor’s friendly, filthy hand.

When Goddard turned twelve, his father, concerned that this live-in aunt might exert too strong an influence, took him aside. “Olympia,” he explained, “has worked all her life to make sexual union safer for women, so that one day females might undertake congress from healthy desire as much as from duty.” (His father’s conversation bloomed with legislative metaphors.) Because of Olympia, God always recalled that he’d come himself from a line of revolutionary thinkers and reformers.

As a boy, Goddard studied letters (bound in ribbons) written to Olympia by women whose admiration seemed almost physical in its intensity, as well as intimate objects that moored her to her time and sex: a girdle, a hot-water bottle and siphon, products made possible by Byrd Brothers India Rubber and by his grandfather’s work in chemistry, and especially by Charles Goodyear’s refinements to latex. Young Goddard occasionally came across Olympia’s teeth soaking in a glass of water on her bedside table, resting from their oratorical labors.

He glances up now, across Penzance Point. Has he walked eight miles? He has. (Vitality, longevity!) The moon has risen; water and sky are welded together in glossy black. In the center of the town square, visible from every front-facing window in every house, the original pre-Revolutionary stocks still stand, twin monuments to Cape Wilde’s stern views on deviance. The town’s civic leaders have since ordered azaleas, lobelia and astilbe to soften extreme impressions left by history. In this season, though, and at night, the square appears austere. God remembers what he must still do. Reread
Heart of Darkness
. Speak up publicly—a letter to the paper? a chapel talk?—about integration and boys. Taste again that roast squab and succotash at the East India House that brought tears to his eyes.

Past midnight, he arrives at his front door (Federal), which is boldly painted red. The house has a date—1732, an old and unimpeachable lie—inscribed on the lintel. God thinks, as he always eventually does, of his wife, of the patient way she bears her impatience, the patina of irritation that brings a glow to her cheek.

She was devoted to him once; he has been, well, faithless. (His forebears were what God’s wife calls “rubber barons,” but that money has dwindled, and as head of the Goode School, he earns a modest seventeen thousand dollars a year.)

What he reveals now will depend—on her. He’ll describe the bomb, the explosion, the confusion, his innocent presence in town. At the proper moment, he will ask for a small glass of gin, which she’ll bring to him in a juice glass. Later, she’ll make his favorite breakfast—eggs in hell, in a special cup, with Worcestershire. They’ll watch the small disaster unfold again on television, listen to the hysterical analysis and exchange their usual remarks. God looks forward to it all. “Home” is a gift presented to him daily by his wife, and God receives such gifts humbly, like alms.

The rubber tree, oppressed these seventy years by the roof, has grown laterally, moving toward the south-facing windows, gracefully bending down and down, its grayish trunk segmented like a worm. The woody fibers where the trunk and branches meet the pointed leaves occasionally crack open and bleed sap down the banister. God’s wife, Madeline, stands knifelike at the head of the stairs, one hand resting on the balustrade, the other gripping the pineapple knob. Her attitude is confrontational; her body has become a wall. She has, he sees, been working herself up to this. Her eyes address him with the tense attention of a game animal. (And he is a
tiger
—though a tired old bloody one.)

He will kiss her. Gamely he mounts the stairs, reaches for her pale blue robe. She emits a feral roar and pushes him away with one hand at the center of his chest; the other hand grips the pineapple post. His hands, now empty, grasp at air.

At the cocktail hour, they watch the news on television. Women are enraged about the Miss America pageant, the war and the fascist dictatorship of the nation. Using tactics developed by the Vietcong, they have blown up a trash can in protest, injuring several people. God brings forward the fugitive blue coat as evidence: He was there. Madeline clucks sympathetically but does not, she says, understand him. She sets plates on the table and drops her own bomb. Tonight, after they eat, she will leave him. She stands up straight as a knife in her dowdy town clothes. Her reading glasses hang poised for action in the neck of her jersey; her eyes shine. Her leather handbag on the kitchen counter looks greased and ready to run. A suitcase—from a set that belonged to God’s father—stands by the front door.

She gives him a frozen bag of peas to dull the ache in his head, mixes him a drink and pours a small portion for herself. She has been to her GP, come home and packed a bag.

“I had a thorough checkup,” she tells him. “It turns out I’m healthier than I thought. Goddard, I could live twenty more years! I drove home and realized how unhappy I am. Twenty more years—I thought I’d have to kill myself.

“This can’t surprise you,” she tells him, doling out chicken pie and boiled peas. Yet God feels surprised.

“I don’t regret my marriage,” she says bitterly.
“Je ne regrette rien.”

“I’m glad of that,” he begins.

“I’d like to live for myself. But that’s not all. I’m too angry right now to be married to a man like you. You have not been faithful to me. You gave me
crabs.
”

God cannot think how to dignify a remark like this.

“Perhaps you think I’m ridiculous,” she says. “But I’m not. Let’s not get into the blame game; let’s not put labels on each other. You aren’t a cad. I’m not a—a
cunt.
”

He finds he can’t eat. God puts down his fork and wipes his mouth with a napkin. She has been his amanuensis, his right hand, an efficient machine, deciphering and typing up his pieces for the
Head’s Journal
, delivering his opinions to the newspaper. For years she has thrown herself into his work, typing, repairing, introducing new errors and ideas, refinements and subtleties. She helped with his great work to date, a defense of Joseph Conrad, and he dedicated this volume to her: “For my Bride, who kept the home fires burning.” She has been useful to him, at least until the middle years, when she sometimes became troubled and drank in the daytime or slept in the garden, or went around the house foaming at the mouth. She pulled out some of her hair, complained of voices in her head. He was, she said then, an exhausting spouse—charming and charismatic, but overbearing, unfaithful and demanding. (She improved somewhat on a diet of witchy-sounding pills, extracted from the urine of a horse.) She might have been an artist (she has that unforgiving temper) but for her tragic flaw—everything she
touches turns beautiful. She became, of course, a gardener and rules her dominion like a tyrant. She represses roses and astilbe, withholds water from strawberries, which produce tiny deep red fruit of exquisite intensity. She serves them, in season, at breakfast, in a fluted white bowl. God eats more than his share because she takes less than hers.

She’s austere. She prefers the single to the double, the pure marigold to the hybrid that’s had the yellow bred out of it, the modest gloxinia to the arrogant giant. Chrysanthemums, yes, dahlias and gladiolus, no. She is devoted to unruffled petunias and her mauve queens. Winters, she reads seed catalogs and leaves lists all over the house—in the telephone book, on the tank of the loo. Names show up like coded messages in the margins of the morning newspaper, folded out to the half-finished crossword: Penn State marigolds, early prolific straight-neck squash, delphiniums, penstemon, butterfly bush, black lilies and fall-blooming rue. He knows all this because she records the little details in a diary, which God occasionally peruses.

His wife could raise a rose from a rake. She throws bleak kindling into a bucket, then calls it a centerpiece—and so it becomes. The sticks leaf out and flower on the piano. She spends whole evenings in the garden, cutting slugs in two and pathologically coaxing nature to an unnatural intensity; she’s stuffed forget-me-nots and oxalis in among the ferns.

How can she leave him after all these years? She gives him telephone numbers, instructions on the house and garden, everything he needs written on a lined canary pad.

Now she puts a hand on his arm. God’s eyes cloud over and he weeps. He can’t stop. She has to sit down awkwardly in a chair, in her coat and gloves, and hold him.

W
hen my father drowned in the ocean off Cape Wilde wearing a pair of Keds sneakers and carrying a dollar in his wallet, the tragedy propelled Mei-Mei and me out of the ordinary even as it sunk us. We were liberated instantly and forever. Life became extraordinary, surreal, unpredictable, and our senses grew acute, like those of wild animals. Mei-Mei, only twenty-nine at the time, fell in love with Tragedy as she had once fallen in love with my father. Tragedy consumed her, wrote his story in lines on her face, comforted her at night with his constancy. Tragedy has been her lover ever since. The story of my father’s death was, in this sense, a romance: the story of two bold and irrepressible athletes in a German kayak crossing the eight-mile stretch between Cape Wilde and Capawak Point, a proving ground for generations of Wampanoag braves; the glowering weather on a rainy March afternoon; the dramatic rescue of the other man (by a swimming champion from the public high school); the way the ocean drank my father down and spat him out; the dollar in his pocket when he died.

Mei-Mei has yellowed copies of the newspaper articles from the
Capawak Gazette
and the
Globe
that tell the story. (The reverse of one clipping shows an ad for an outfit that made products out of whalebone: “Ladies Cinched Their Corsets Tight and Danced the Polka in the Mansions of the Nation.”) My father’s whole life is there in a couple of columns: pitcher on the baseball team in high school and college (he pitched a winning game against Milton Academy the day his father died), almost a
year of medical school behind him. Goddard Byrd, head of the Goode School and my father’s English teacher, wrote a verse poem called “Anguish and Assuagement,” casting Heck Hellman as a heroic athlete in an idealized Greek style:

Heck, in brief you were too loved to lose

Bold hero never idle on the field

We grieve the hour when sport became the ruse

And life the contest you were forced to yield