Sweet Talk (2 page)

W
hen I was twelve years old, my father was tall and awesome. I can see him walking across the parade ground behind our quarters. The wind blew snow into the folds of his coat and made the hem swoop around his legs. He did not lower his head, he did not jam his hands into the pockets. He was coming home along a diagonal that would cut the parade ground into perfect triangles, and he was not going to be stopped by any snowstorm. I stood at the kitchen door and watched him through a hole I had rubbed in the steamy glass.

My grandmother and mother fidgeted with pans of food that had been kept warm too long. It was one o’clock on Saturday and he had been expected home at noon.

“You want to know what this chicken looks like?” said my grandmother. “It looks like it died last year.”

My mother looked into the pan but didn’t say anything.

My grandmother believed my mother should have married a minister, not an Army officer. Once my mother had gone out with a minister, and now he was on the radio every Sunday in Ohio. My grandmother thought my father had misrepresented himself as a religious man. There was a story my mother told about their first date. They went to a restaurant and my father told her that he was going to have twelve sons and name them Peter, James, John, et cetera. “And I thought, Twelve sons!” said my mother. “Boy, do I pity your poor wife.” My mother had two miscarriages and then she had me. My father named me Gemma, which my grandmother believed was not even a Christian name.

“You want to know what this squash looks like?” said my grandmother.

“It’ll be fine,” said my mother.

Just then the wind gusted on the parade ground, and my father veered to the left. He stopped and looked up. How is it possible you have caught me off guard, he seemed to ask. Exactly where have I miscalculated the velocities, how have I misjudged the vectors?

“It looks like somebody peed in it,” my grandmother said.

• • •

“Keep your voice low,” my father told me that day as we ate the ruined squash and chicken. “Keep your voice low and you can win any point.”

We were living in Fort Niagara, a little Army post at the juncture of the Niagara River and Lake Ontario. We had been there through the fall and into the winter, as my father, who was second in command, waited for his next promotion. It began to snow in October. The arctic winds swept across the lake from Canada and shook the windows of our house. Snow drifted across the parade ground, and floes of ice piled up against each other in the river, so that if a person were courageous enough, or foolhardy enough, and also lucky, he could walk the mile across the river to Canada.

“And always speak in sentences,” he told me. “You have developed a junior-high habit of speaking in fragments. Learn to come to a full stop when you complete an idea. Use semicolons and periods in your speech.”

My mother put down her fork and knife. Her hands were so thin and light they seemed to pass through the table as she dropped them in her lap. “Zachary, perhaps we could save some of the lecture for dessert?” she said.

My grandmother leaned back into her own heaviness. “The poor kid never gets to eat a hot meal,” she said. She was referring to the rule that said I could not cut my food or eat while I was speaking or being spoken to. My father used mealtimes to lecture on the mechanics of life, the how-tos of a civilized world.
Normally I was receptive to his advice, but that day I was angry with him.

“You know, Dad,” I said, “I don’t think my friends are going to notice a missing semicolon.”

I thought he would give me a fierce look, but instead he winked. “And don’t say ‘you know,’ ” he said.

He never said “you know,” never spoke in fragments, never slurred his speech, even years later when he had just put away a fifth of scotch and was trying to describe the Eskimo custom of chewing up the meat before it was given to the elders, who had no teeth. He spoke with such calculation and precision that his sentences hung over us like high vaulted ceilings, or rolled across the table like ornaments sculptured from stone. It was a huge cathedral of a voice, full of volume and complexity.

He taught me the alphabet. Able, Baker, Charlie, Dog. It was the alphabet the military used to keep
b
’s separate from
v
’s and
i
’s separate from
y
’s. He liked the music of it, the way it sounded on his fine voice. I was four years old and my grandmother had not come to live with us yet. We were stationed in Manila, and living in a house the Army had built on squat stilts to protect us from the insects. There was a typhoon sweeping inland, and we could hear the hoarse sound of metal scraping across the Army’s paved street. It was the corrugated roof of the house next door.

“Don’t you think it’s time we went under the house?” my mother said. She was sitting on a duffel bag that contained our tarps and food rations. The house had a loose plank in the living-room floor, so that if the roof blew away, or the walls caved in, we could escape through the opening and sit in the low space between the reinforced floor and the ground until the military rescue bus came.

My father looked at me and said, “Able, Baker, Charlie, Dog. Can you say it, Gemma?”

I looked up at the dark slope of our own metal roof.

“Can you say it?”

“Able, Baker, Charlie, Dog,” I said.

The metal rumbled on the road outside. My mother lifted the plank.

“We will be all right,” he said. “Easy, Fox, George, How.”

“Anybody want to join me?” said my mother.

“Easy.”

“Rachel, please put that plank back.”

“Easy, Fox, George, How,” I said.

My mother replaced the plank and sat on the floor beside me. The storm grew louder, the rain fell against the roof like handfuls of gravel.

“Item, Jig, King.” My father’s voice grew lower, fuller. We sat under the sound of it and felt safe. “Love, Mike, Nan.”

But then we heard another sound—something that went
whap-whap
, softly, between the gusts of rain. We tilted our heads toward the shuttered windows.

“Well,” said my father, standing up to stretch. “I think we are losing a board or two off the side of the house.”

“Where are you going?” said my mother. “Just where do you think you’re going?”

He put on his rain slicker and went into the next room. When he returned, he was carrying a bucket of nails and a hammer. “Obviously,” he said, “I am going fishing.”

We moved back to the States when I was six, and he taught me how to play Parcheesi, checkers, chess, cribbage, dominoes, and twenty questions. “When you lose,” he told me, “don’t cry. When you win, don’t gloat.”

He taught me how to plant tomatoes and load a shotgun shell. He showed me how to gut a dove, turning it inside out as the Europeans do, using the flexible breastbone for a pivot. He read a great many books and never forgot a fact or a technical description. He explained the principles of crop rotation and the flying buttress. He discussed the Defenestration of Prague.

When I was in elementary school, he was sent abroad twice on year-long tours—once to Turkey and once to Greenland, both strategic outposts for America’s Early
Warning System. I wanted to, but I could not write him letters. His came to me every week, but without the rhythms of his voice the words seemed pale and flat, like the transparent shapes of cells under a microscope. He did not write about his work, because his work was secret. He did not send advice, because that he left to my mother and grandmother in his absence. He wrote about small things—the smooth white rocks he found on a mountainside in Turkey, the first fresh egg he ate in Greenland. When I reread the letters after he died, I was struck by their grace and invention. But when I read them as a child, I looked through the words—“eggs … shipment … frozen”—and there was nothing on the other side but the great vacuum of his missing voice.

“I can’t think of anything to say,” I told my mother the first time she urged me to write to him. He had already been in Turkey for three months. She stood behind me at the heavy library table and smoothed my hair, touched my shoulders. “Tell him about your tap lessons,” she said. “Tell him about ballet.”

“Dear Dad,” I wrote. “I am taking tap lessons. I am also taking ballet.” I tried to imagine what he looked like. I tried to put a face before my face, but it was gray and featureless, like the face of a statue worn flat by wind and rain. “And I hope you have a Happy Birthday next month,” I concluded, hoping to evade the necessity of writing him again in three weeks.

• • •

The autumn I turned twelve, we moved to Fort Niagara, which was the administrative base for the missile sites strung along the Canadian border between Lake Erie and Lake Ontario. It was a handsome post, full of oak trees, brick buildings, and history. The French had taken the land from the Indians and built the original fort. The British took the fort from the French, and the Americans took it from the British. My father recounted the battles for us as we drove there along the wide sweep of the Niagara River, past apple orchards and thick pastures. My grandmother sat in the back seat and made a note of each red convertible that passed. I was supposed to be counting the white ones. When we drove through the gate and saw the post for the first time—the expanses of clipped grass, the tall trees, the row of Colonial houses overlooking the river—my grandmother put down her tablet and said, “This is some post.” She looked at my father admiringly, the first indication she had ever given that he might be a good match for my mother after all. She asked to be taken to the far end of the post, where the Old Fort was. It sat on a point of land at the juncture of the lake and river, and looked appropriately warlike, with its moat and tiny gun windows, but it was surprisingly small—a simple square of yellow stone, a modest French château. “Is this all there is?” I said as my grandmother and I posed for pictures on the
drawbridge near two soldiers dressed in Revolutionary War costumes. It was hard to imagine that chunks of a vast continent had been won and lost within the confines of a fortress hardly bigger than Sleeping Beauty’s castle at Disneyland. Later, as we drove back along the river, my father said in his aphoristic way, “Sometimes the biggest battles are the smallest ones.”

The week after we settled in our quarters, we made the obligatory trip to the Falls. It was a sultry day—Indian summer—and our eyes began to water as we neared the chemical factories that surrounded the city of Niagara Falls. We stopped for iced tea and my father explained how the glaciers had formed the escarpment through which the Falls had cut a deep gorge.
Escarpment
—that was the term he used, instead of
cliff
. It skidded along the roof of his mouth and entered the conversation with a soft explosion.

We went to the Niagara Falls Museum and examined the containers people had used successfully to go over the Falls early in the twentieth century, when there was a thousand-dollar prize given to survivors. Two were wooden barrels strapped with metal bands. One was a giant rubber ball reinforced with a steel cage. A fourth was a long steel capsule. On the walls were photographs of each survivor and plaques explaining who had been injured and how. The steel capsule was used by a man who had broken every bone in his body. The plaque said that he was in the hospital for twenty-three
weeks and then took his capsule around the world on a speaking tour. One day when he was in New Zealand, he slipped on an orange peel, broke his leg, and died of complications.

We went next to Goat Island and stood on the open bank to watch the leap and dive of the white water. My mother held her handbag close to her breasts. She had a habit of always holding things this way—a stack of dinner plates, the dish towel, some mail she had brought in from the porch; she hunched over slightly, so that her body seemed at once to be protective and protected. “I don’t like the river,” she said. “I think it wants to hypnotize you.” My father put his hands in his pockets to show how at ease he was, and my grandmother went off to buy an ice-cream cone.

At the observation point, we stood at a metal fence and looked into the frothing water at the bottom of the gorge. We watched bits and pieces of rainbows appear and vanish in the sunlight that was refracted off the water through the mist. My father pointed to a black shape in the rapids above the Horseshoe Falls. “That’s a river barge,” he said. He lowered his voice so that he could be heard under the roar of the water. “A long time ago, there were two men standing on that barge waiting to see whether in the next moment of their lives they would go over.”

He told us the story of the barge then—how it had broken loose from a tug near Buffalo and floated
downriver, gathering speed. The two men tore at the air, waved and shouted to people on shore, but the barge entered the rapids. They bumped around over the rocks, and the white water rose in the air. One man—“He was the thinking man,” said my father—thought they might be able to wedge the barge among the rocks if they allowed the hull to fill with water. They came closer to the Falls—four hundred yards, three hundred—before the barge jerked broadside and stopped. They were there all afternoon and night, listening to the sound of the water pounding into the boulders at the bottom of the gorge. The next morning they were rescued, and one of the men, the thinking man, told the newspapers that he had spent the night playing poker in his head. He played all the hands, and he bluffed himself. He drew to inside straights. If the barge had torn loose from the rocks in the night, he was going to go over the Falls saying, “Five-card draw, jacks or better to open.” The other man sat on the barge, his arms clasped around his knees, and watched the mist blow back from the edge of the Falls in the moonlight. He could not speak.