Rumors from the Lost World (2 page)

“I like living in the attic,” he told me once, smiling for my mother. “It's a quick way to get off the face of the earth.” He waved his cigar. “I'm closer to heaven in case of a stroke.”

“Where's heaven, Grandpa?”

“It's on the left side of the moon. You can't ever let them shoot the moon. That's where you go for coffee and beans when you're out of luck.”

The day after that last confrontation at the library, he came down dressed in baggy slacks and a rust-colored turdeneck that climbed the pale skin of his abdomen. A tattered socialist newspaper under one arm, one white-knuckled hand holding tightly to the banister, he descended upon Edward, my younger brother. Wearing a blue Detroit Tigers cap, Edward was folded fetus-like into the recliner, entranced by a game show.

“Turn off the damn television,” my grandfather said.

Edward looked at me. I raised an eyebrow in silent complicity, forgetting the yellow smell of the newspaper, the mustiness of the attic room with its narrow metal bed, the sound of that scratchy voice echoing from the rafters. I only remembered how often, under duress, I read a radical primer instead of a book of high adventure, how often my grandfather scoffed at my baseball cards. For an awful minute, I only remembered standing in the library, blaming him because he somehow wasn't what people expected.

Edward, who was no gendeman, doffed his cap like Al Kaline, his hero, after a home run. “Grandpa, sit down and shut up.”

“All right,” he said, to my amazement, and sat on the sofa. He pulled out a cigar and tore off its tip. “We'll watch it together, you and I, we'll see what we can see.” I suppose he intended to pontificate on the evils of consumer capitalism, but the whirling wheel of the game show, the incessant detergent commercials and the moderator's patter hypnotized him. He fell off to sleep, head thrown backwards, mouth open. Edward planted his cap back on and called my mother. She tried to work a plastic sheetcover under him—he was becoming incontinent—but he woke. “What the hell?” he mumbled, rubbing his eyes. “Where's your husband? He's never home, is he? Too busy filling this goddamn coffin with gadgets.”

“Hey, ‘Gunsmoke' is coming on,” Edward said, turning up the set. Chester, the gimpy deputy sheriff, was trying to keep order until Matt Dillon returned from Topeka.

“Look, this can't continue,” my mother said. “Why don't you form your own society or something? I don't see you refusing the food we put on your plate.” In fact he ate like a bird, lived on coffee and toast. “Besides, we've achieved everything you've dreamed of.”

“But you don't have
dignity
, you don't have
respect,”
he said, nodding with conviction.

He tried to retreat to his room, muttering under his breath, but couldn't negotiate the stairs. He sat down on the bottom step, feet planted on the hardwood floor, and covered his face with his hands. “Oh hell,” he said. “Oh hell.”

When my father heard the story, his face turned an ugly color. He tossed a few union leaflets on a sideboard. A family portrait, an oil painting, hung a little lopsided on the wall. In it, my grandfather was absent and we were all much younger, smiling like Christians because the painter had been one. “That's it,” my father said. “He's brought this on himself. I wash my hands of it.”

Even my mother, who devoted so much of her life to keeping things clean, never put it quite that way.

At the Sleepy Hollow Care Center, he had a tiny airy room. Outside his window was a flower garden, part of a public park, in season well-tended and full of salmon colors and greens and blues.

When we paid him a visit, he had nothing to say, just worked his jaw and stared at the flowers.

My parents inscribed his favorite Shaw quote on the headstone, one he repeated often, especially when mocked or contradicted: “Some people see things as they are and ask why. I see things that never were and ask why not.” On the day we buried him it rained. I stood in the drizzle beside his grave, staring at the words on the tombstone and daydreaming into the spit-shine of my best shoes until the service was completed. Afterwards, we went for pizza.

Without him in the attic as ballast I floated away, and my mother, after a prolonged but successful quarrel with my father, sent me to Bible School, of all places. Talk about Jesus got mixed up with diatribes about the workers' struggle for dignity, the batting average of Mickey Mantle, and the plot of
The Time Machine
. By the time I went off to college, the thought of that inscription in the cemetery made me cringe.

One cloud-swept autumn afternoon, I told Sally, my wife, about the inscription, expecting her to grin. “A neat old man,” she said. “You know that's the quote Bob Kennedy used on the campaign trail?” She nodded, staring from the wraparound porch of the restaurant to a bevy of geese flying south in formation. She had worked hard for Kennedy, followed his every notion in the papers. “How come you never talk about him?”

I stared at her. It was true. After a fashionable renouncement of my family, I decided politics, especially Shaw's creaky socialism, lacked existential truth. I felt profoundly sorry for my grandfather. His illusions had made his life miserable. I shrugged. “You saw what happened to Kennedy,” I said, stroking my goatee sagely as geese plummeted through tatters of cloud the color of cigar smoke.

Even long dead, he continued shouting. I'd wake, thrashing upstream in my dreams, to the odor of cigar smoke and attic mustiness. He wanted his story told, he wanted someone to listen to an account of his ungentle passage through the world, but instead of sitting my wife down and talking until I got hoarse, until vocal fry punctuated my memories, I'd take off my glasses and palm my hands over my eyes, then journey to a lake cabin with a redwood deck. Stones dropped into clear water, making concentric circles. My grandfather sat beside me, rocking on the porch. I have his weak eyes, you see, use them as much as he did. In another exercise, my eyes open to the darkness inside my hands, I saw him walk past me, swinging his rubber-tipped cane, staring at the fence, the cow-pasture finish to our deadend street. He hooked the cane on a strand of barbed wire and climbed. On the other side, he paused, surveyed the high grass, gathered a breath and went on, into a field of black-and-white cows.

“How can he be dead?” I said, finally telling her the story one late afternoon. “I can still
see
him. He's still there, sitting at the kitchen table, pinching off the tip of a cigar, quoting Shaw or Carl Sandburg.” All afternoon we had sandpapered our bedroom wall and spackled nail holes, getting it ready for a new coat of paint. The cigar-smoke color of the paint as I rolled it onto the walls, or maybe the intoxicating effects of its fumes, set something off in me. I couldn't stop talking. “So I stood in a hard rain beside the grave,” I finished, “wearing my best boots, and then we went for pizza.”

“Boots? You wore boots?” Jaunty after a job well done, she grinned. But it was clear she had listened, really listened. “Somehow I can't imagine you in boots.”

“Shoes. Okay?” I clicked my tongue, a little irritated. “You find the rhythm of the story, a few details change. The point is, I had something on my feet.”

“Sure,” she said. “I get it.” Then she furrowed her brows.
“Pizza?
You went for
pizza
after a
funeral?”

“Yeah,” I said, and bit into my lower lip. “What's wrong with that?”

“Nothing.” She shrugged. “We have to eat, I guess. In respect for your grandpa, though, I hope you skipped the anchovies.” She put down her putty knife and went off to rinse her hands with turpentine. When she returned, her mood had changed. “No, look, I'm sorry. Really. I'm sorry he was so unhappy.” She rubbed her eyes and sniffed her knuckles, as though ready to cry. “If it's any consolation, your father was right, I think. We don't earn our afflictions. Sometimes they're just given to us, we have to live with them.”

That was it. My grandfather was alive in somebody else's head, the head of someone I loved, and I knew she would keep him there, tell people about him from time to time. Air him out, so to speak, let him move through the world in a way which was still very difficult for me. She smiled, shrugged, and padded into the kitchen to start dinner. I worked on details in the bedroom, touching up the baseboard, smoothing out the rough spots, but by nightfall the job was finished, the paint mostly dry.

I joined my wife. Candles were flickering on the dining room table and the good china was laid out like a message from a more perfect world. Sally had pulled out a silver wine bucket, a wedding gift forgotten for years, and filled it with ice and a bottle of
vin ordinaire,
the only sort of wine we drank. After dinner, we brought the candles and the last of the wine to the new room and toasted my grandfather. The room was pale gray and satisfying to sit in, like being a child again and walking with him to that red-shuttered library on an overcast afternoon, his mind filled with the plight of the workingclass, mine with the necessity of traveling back and forth in time.

E
mily, after rejecting the eighties and its gold-plated bait, has come to the idea that she can learn about herself and her times by learning about her mother, getting in touch with her roots. Emily even flirts with taking a course in Italian, a language her grandfather spoke with gusto. English, though it served him well enough, never gave him pleasure. He liked to roll Italian phrases in his mouth, feel how they forced his lips to puff out and pucker with male pride. In English, he was much diminished.

For Emily's sake, her mother tells and retells the story of a rainy February evening in 1942, when two government agents tore apart the house with carnival glee, as though Mardi Gras, which vanished with the war effort, had to be replaced with something more physical than periodic blackouts and air raid practice, the self-important warden with his metal hat and flashlight smirking as he lectured the nineteen-year-old girl. “A single match could give away our position, sister.”

Emily takes the story to heart, cites chapter and verse. “You were an American, Mama, New Orleans born,” she says, rubbing her fingers together like her father. “You went at things the way your ancestors did, hardscrabbling, getting in the door without asking. Isn't that what the Vietnamese are doing, the Mexicans, the Cubans, the Haitians, all the immigrants?” Emily gave up managing a health spa in the suburbs of New Orleans to work with displaced people. “The same people who want to keep them out are the ones whose fathers wanted to keep us out, at least until they learned how to use us as strikebreakers. And now they want to cut the capital gains tax and give another break to people who don't need it. Isn't that right? Am I getting it right?”

In response, her mother swirls her teaspoon in her coffee-and-milk. Each time she tells the story, she manages to recall more of the truth of what happened, because, God knows, on that overcast February evening she couldn't explain herself the way she can now, after chewing it all over for so many years.

“But you were valedictorian the year before the war started. Isn't that right?” Emily says. “You gave the commencement address. You knew a thing or two.”

Whatever, her mother says. It was 1942 and Mama motioned me close. “Come upstairs, child,” she told me, though I was a high school graduate, already rebelling against the social constraints my father insisted on. “I don't want them going through the tin box.” This was World War II, remember, fought so long ago people called it The Good War? Against the Germans, the Japanese, the Italians. Errol Flynn came once to the Municipal Auditorium to sell war bonds.

“It's a scream,” Emily says. “You know I'm right, don't you? New Orleans has always been the country's salad bowl. Greeks, Italians, Irish, blacks, French, Spanish, Eastern Europeans. You name it. The whites thinking they could do what they wanted to blacks, the Irish and the French thinking they were better than Mediterraneans. Am I right?”

Well, her mother says, we saw newsreels of the Blitz, used ration stamps, had to line up for meat, sweeten our coffee with saccharine, do without ice cream and cake. We knew something was wrong. Patriotism seemed like the answer. Anyway, I couldn't figure why Mama wanted the box hidden away, but no matter. I was obedient. It was GI green, about the size of a breadbox, full of our papers. Birth certificates, death certificates, marriage certificates. A world in a breadbox. And my father's alien registration, paperclipped to a miniature Italian flag—those bright sun-filled colors, so different from the war effort. You know we had to mix bright yellow food coloring into the margarine to make it look edible?

I shoved the box into my closet, because the two agents downstairs, even though they were tearing our house apart, wouldn't search the room of a girl, an innocent daughter. So Mama figured, anyway, leading me back downstairs. “Not a word,” she said. “Not a peep.”

At nineteen, I was the youngest of thirteen children born to Mama, and the only one who still lived at home. It was a Tuesday, I remember, a meatless Tuesday, and Olsen was as thick as a steak, a good half foot taller than me. He slit open a sagging chair, the one in front of our gramophone, a console bought second-hand and polished to a high mahogany sheen. The chair would be worth maybe a dollar on the street, but it was the one nobody else sat in when Papa was home.

“You toiletface,” I said. My mother put a hand to her mouth, my father started grinding his jaw, but he was afraid to speak. It was the first time in my life I used such a word, the worst I could think of, though God knows I heard it often enough, something my brothers called my older sister. But the effect was different, a little scandalous, very vulgar, in the mouth of a bashful child, five foot two. I was no bigger than Charlie Chaplin. “What right you have to come in here?”