Authors: Joyce Carol Oates
As it turned out, the world didn’t end on Halloween eve that year. But my father’s life did, and so did mine in a way. His suicide would become a mark of solemn, mostly unspoken shame for the Mecham family. Or, that is to say, for every Mecham except me, his namesake son Wyatt, who felt only black despair. Not that I didn’t understand their shame. Because who would want to admit that an otherwise sane, sober, solid man such as my dad—a decorated World War I veteran, forced by injuries and the stock market crash into early retirement—chose to sneak out the back door, leaving behind his family to the obscenity of alien violence, only to drown himself in Grover’s Mill Pond with boxes of nails crammed into the pockets of his trousers and coat?
I was not quite eight when my dad died, but I have keen memories of him, memories as sharp as paper cuts. The pipe-tobacco perfume of his mustache when he tucked me into bed and kissed me goodnight. Watching him at the workbench in my grandfather’s basement wood shop, where he taught me the craft of cabinetry—I write this sitting on a Windsor chair he turned on his own lathe. Nor did the prosthetic leg, which he himself fabricated after losing his real one to a grenade blast, slow him down when we used to walk into town on some errand or another.
Above all, we loved haunting the pond together, fishing from the same bank where he had once seen Woodrow Wilson casting for bass with Walter Grover, whose family our town is named after. When the fish weren’t biting, we’d take a walk around its edges, him gimping along with me close beside, drawing strength from the many beautiful hemlocks, huge willow oaks, and mockernut hickory trees that grew along the shore. Sometimes we’d stop and pick flowers together, a damaged soldier and his fond son, to bring home a bouquet of wild herbs for my mother, a clutch of asters or tawny day lilies. It seems to me even now that Grover’s Mill Pond was so much a part of my father that when he felt the world was coming to an end, his only recourse was to go embrace its watery soul, become one with it. And like him, I grew up understanding that the pond—at thirty-seven acres really a small lake—lay at the heart of my personal universe from as far back as my conception on its very shores.
In hindsight, I realize that although after his discharge from the army my father was awarded a sack of medals, he was too deeply scarred by what he had witnessed on the fields of France to be consoled by some shiny coins dangling from pretty ribbons. Soft visions of mustard gas, of men with bayonets lurching at mirror images of themselves, of tank treads churning fallen soldiers into foxhole mud—these visited him often in shrieking nightmares that woke the whole household when I was growing up. So when Halloween eve came around, I guess my poor father had seen enough war that he couldn’t face the big one, the unwinnable one, the one against the Martians.
The police found his wooden leg on a grassy beach where he presumably entered the water. At least he’d had the wherewithal to realize that keeping it on would have worked against his purpose that night. I still own it, my most cherished heirloom. And while I’ve heard it said drowning is the least painful way to die, the lungs filling with water just as if it were simply wet, heavy air, who would really know? In my father’s case, it was the only conceivably meaningful death, so there’s a dash of solace in that. And I’ll take a dash of solace over a dash of salt on an open wound any day.
* * *
My mother would wind up in the pond too. After Orson Welles had his little joke on America, and Grover’s Mill in particular, and my family in point of fact, my mother Mildred changed, spiraled downward. Her dark hazel eyes behind those horn-rim glasses she always wore grew misty and vacant as Christmas approached. She would be in the middle of doing something, baking bread, say, and the cawing of crows in a tree would distract her so that she’d head outside to see what the fuss was about, only to return an hour later having no memory of why she’d lit the oven and what this batter was doing in a bowl on the kitchen counter. Our bedrooms were separated only by a door, and I could hear her talking to herself at all hours of the night. I cupped my ear to that door but never understood the meaning of anything she mumbled.
Native ear long nursery, peach. Tat sing, dat-tut-tat. Why the fall flow jigger?
Part of me wondered if she wasn’t trying to communicate with the Martians.
What I did begin to understand, and quickly, is that I was in the midst of losing her as surely as I’d lost my father. She spent a lot of chilly evenings out in Van Nest Park studying the skies for saucers even though she, like the rest of the country, had been assured by the authorities, not to mention a contrite Welles himself, that the invasion was a hoax. I suppose my mother might have been looking for vindication for her husband’s death, or else hoping against all odds that some real Martians would take her away to join him. I recall thinking, as I hid behind a big rhododendron bush one evening watching her pace back and forth across the long grass, glancing up then shaking her head and staring at the ground, that she was becoming alien herself—or, at least, alienated. On the other hand, to be fair, let me confess here that she and I both did believe we saw suspicious lights that infamous night, like moving and beaconing stars in the ghastly sky.
She started drinking. I imagine it didn’t take much gin-mill hooch to send her, a thin, nervous woman, off the edge. Drunk, she began saying things at the dinner table that upset my grandmother. Things like how she wished she’d never met my father and how she’d give anything to get away from Grover’s Mill. How she hated its bleak bone-cold winters and sauna-muggy summers. How she couldn’t stand being this tantalizingly close to Manhattan but not having a plug nickel to go bathe in those bright big-city lights.
Once when my grandmother thought I wasn’t listening, she confided to a visiting neighbor lady, “Mildred’s gone and turned into Grover’s very own
Mill Dread
. If it weren’t for the boy, I’d set her out on her ear, for all that she’s my own poor son’s widow.” I cringed at her soft, confident chuckle and crept away to stalk the pond’s edge.
My grandfather took a kinder approach. He was no less a carpenter than my father had been. Indeed, father had taught son. Because my mother said she’d give anything to spend the upcoming springtime days rowing out to the middle of Grover’s Mill Pond to watch the skies for activity, maybe take a picnic with her son, he indulgently refurbished my father’s childhood rowboat for us to use. It was so beautiful, that boat. I could never get enough of leaning my head over its side and watching reflected sunlight dancing off the water, making its varnished belly glisten with different ever-changing shapes! And I must admit it made me feel proud to take my father’s place at the oars, even if I risked being seen by some of the whispering kids at school who already deemed my parents lunatics. After winter faded away, we kept it tied up at the nearby dock of a friend of my grandfather’s and went out on the water often.
For a time, my mom did seem to improve. Less midnight babble. Less astronomical observation. Her hooch still flowed like the Passaic, but not so much that she couldn’t start doing a bit of bookkeeping at Grandpa’s hardware store while I helped with the shelving of paint cans, drill bits, saws, glue pots, and yes, even boxes of nails after school. Rowing and fresh spring-into-summer air brought a bit of healthy glow back to her cheeks. Life seemed on the upswing.
It was an afternoon in late September—the first autumn colors blushing in the red maples and sweetbay magnolias, the rushes and deer-tongue grass swaying in breezes—that hinted of cooler days to come, that we rowed out for what would prove to be the last time. We’d made liverwurst and onion sandwiches together back at the house, her favorite. Some peanut-buttered celery stalks, along with dill pickles and potato chips, were packed in the small wicker basket with a couple of bottles of cream soda. This was to be a real feast. Also, it was an important moment for me, since I’d finally got up the nerve to tell her—now that she seemed enough recovered from my father’s suicide to act more or less normal—that our mother-son outings were going to have to wind down, maybe even stop. Some kids at school had seen us out here together on Grover’s Mill Pond enough times that I was now officially getting razzed as a mama’s boy. Time had come for both of us to grow up.
What happened next happened so fast I can scarcely picture it, quick as when a lightbulb blows out and the room goes instantly dark. We’d been talking about heaven knows what, a V of geese migrating south, how the pickles from Miller’s are crisper than the ones from Malory’s. Then I blurted it out. My concern about being seen out on the pond too often with my mommy, and how I was catching unholy flak for it at school. She pulled a hidden flask from her jacket pocket, unscrewed its cap, took a deep drink from it, and lit into me. Something about cowardice, something about me being my father’s son, something about how alone she was in the world and that I couldn’t possibly understand her pain. In the sorry wink of an eye, she was back to being her old unhappy self, wagging that silver flask in my face as she made her points.
My grabbing at it, slapping it away, was pure instinct. When it flew out of her hand and splashed in the greenish water, she just as unthinkingly stood up in the unsteady boat, snatched one of the oars, and tried to fish her flask back. I shouted at her to stop, that she was going to fall overboard, but before she could even turn her head to respond, the boat tipped over, throwing us and our wickerbasket banquet into the pond.
Our immediate impulse was to save each other. That much I recall with total clarity. But since I was the only one of us who could swim well enough to possibly get to shore with heavy, waterlogged clothes acting as a full-body drag anchor, I flailed her over to the capsized rowboat and shouted at her to hang on until I came back with help.
“I’m gonna drown, just like him,” she gurgled, water running out of her mouth. Her face was as white as paint primer.
“No you’re not!” I shouted. “Just stay put, you hear me?”
Wriggling out of my coat and frantically toeing my shoes off, I swam like mad, frozen with fear as well as the water’s chill. With every kick and doggy paddle stroke I made, the possibility that my mother was about to die in the same pond as my dad became more and more real. Half-drowned myself, I lurched into some sedge, covered in mud, slime, and a slick of slimy decomposing leaves that had fallen on the pond. By the time I managed to summon help, and some men hurried out to where the capsized rowboat serenely drifted, my mother had vanished into the murk. The frogmen, one of whom I recognized as having been on the same team that retrieved my drowned father not a year before, had her up to the surface in no time. But it was all too late. Her narrow pale face was already bloated, her lips gone purple.
So began a time in the house off Cranbury Road that degenerated from bad to awful. My grandmother and I hardly knew what to do with each other when alone in the same room. I think she blamed her son’s suicide on my mother, my mother’s death on me somehow, and also blamed me for having been the reason my parents were forced to get married in the first place. Much as I couldn’t admit to personal responsibility in that matter—after all, I had no say in their out-of-wedlock lovemaking under spicysmelling sweet pepper bushes on the pond’s bank—I understood how she could see me as a living symbol of her precious Wyatt’s downfall. As for my grandfather, he was truly heartbroken, and shouldered much of the blame himself.
“If I hadn’t got it in my head to fix up that boat …” he would mutter, then his words would trail off.
Grandmother Iris, who got more brittle and cranky by the day, could only agree with him. After my mother was buried in the cemetery next to my father, I was left by default in her care. Ours was a house of grief. But whereas my grandfather grieved for my mother and me, I got the sense that Grandmother grieved mostly for herself and the burden that I now had become. In school, we read about the ancient mariner and the albatross. I’d become an albatross, if no longer taunted for being a mama’s boy. The crowd of punks who’d made that accusation now shunned me for a different reason. I was, they decided, an angel of death. Someone to be avoided like the plague. I had neither the will nor way to contradict them. At home in bed, listening to the ticking clock in my parents’ empty bedroom, I found myself wondering if they weren’t right.
People die in threes. So goes the old saying. Though several years had passed since my parents’ drownings, one intentional, the other not, death once more came lurking to round out the number. My grandpa had taken ill with a case of walking pneumonia at Thanksgiving and was hospitalized in nearby Princeton by early December. The snow was particularly heavy that year. Wind drifted shapely piles around the house and frost clung to the windows in fernlike patterns. Since my grandmother hated driving in bad weather, a man named Franklin, who responded to an ad she placed in the local paper, drove us to the hospital every other day to visit. I couldn’t help but notice that around Franklin my grandmother seemed to lighten up a little, which was a relief to me, since I could only imagine how, deep down, she must have faulted me for her husband’s illness. Franklin sometimes stayed for dinner after we returned from Princeton, recounting the places in the world he claimed to have visited—exotic locales like Morocco and Brazil and Fiji. What he was doing in these far-flung countries and how he could afford all his globe-hopping was unclear to me, but what did I care. Pretending politeness, I listened, at least in the beginning, even though I figured it was all a pack of lies. If from the very beginning I didn’t trust his stories and overconfident manner, his presence meant my grandmother and I weren’t left alone at a painfully silent table. For that I was grateful.
As with my mother, my grandfather seemed to be improving daily, only to abruptly take a downward turn and die of complications between Christmas and New Year’s. My grandmother’s heartbreak over this, I must admit, startled me. She wept the most genuine tears I’d ever seen well from her steely eyes. For a time, I wondered if she wasn’t going to end up in the hospital herself, so bereft was she. Neighbors dropped by with tuna casserole, cold fried chicken, and potato salad, which I lived on for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, noticing that she ate nary a morsel.