The Sunflower Forest (31 page)

‘No,’ he said sharply.

‘Dad, Klaus is my brother, my half brother. He’s my flesh and blood. After all that’s happened, I really would like to see him. I keep thinking about him all the time, about who he is and what he’s like. I dream about him. I just cannot get him out of my mind.’

‘No,’ he said flatly. ‘Holy God in heaven, Lesley, I am not going to let this happen to you too. If you want to go off on some cockeyed trip, if you feel your life is so blighted that you can’t exist without that and you have to go, that’s one thing. In the end I can probably accept that. But not this. Not Germany. Germany I forbid. Klaus is not going to get you too.’

‘It’s different for me than for Mama, Dad.’

‘No. It isn’t. And he’s not having you. I mean it. You don’t go there.’

The expression on his face left no room for argument. Sighing, I turned away and hung up the dish towel. It seemed hopeless, this conversation. We’d already had it in so many other forms. ‘Don’t you understand, Dad?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t. I guess that’s the whole problem between you and me.’

‘I carry Klaus and Germany and Lébény and Wales and all the other places around inside of me, like that stuff happened to me instead of you and Mama. I’ve got your worlds in my head. And I need to make my own world. It’s time for me to grow up and have some experiences of my own. Not just secondhand ones.’

Slowly he turned and leaned back against the counter. He regarded me for several moments. ‘To me,’ he said at last, ‘it doesn’t sound like you know what you do want, Lesley. On one hand, all you talk about is escaping, getting new experiences, getting away from the burden this family suddenly seems to have become for you. And on the other hand, where is it that you want to go? Back to these very same places Mama told you about. Back to Mama’s stories. Back to Klaus, after all he’s done to us. I guess I could understand it if you wanted to go somewhere completely foreign, to Spain or Norway or Argentina, but the places you’re talking about are no escape. And it just doesn’t make sense to me.’

Frustrated, I stood without replying. I didn’t know what to say to him to make him understand what I meant.

‘You’re not going to find any answers over there. I can tell you that right now, Lesley.’

‘Well,’ I replied, ‘if I can’t find the answers, then at least I need to find the questions.’

I
decided on Wales. It was the least volatile of my options, and moreover, the travel arrangements were already sorted out. Dad suggested that I write a letter to the farmer who owned Forest of Flowers and see if he minded if I visited and if he could tell me where to stay while I was there.

The son of the farmer wrote back to me. His father had died in 1968 and he was owner of the farm and of Forest of Flowers. I was most welcome to come and see the cottage, he wrote. I could stay at the farm, if I wanted.

Resigned to the notion of the trip, my father sat down one evening and helped me with the impossible-looking Welsh place names. Not a language for foreigners: all the words had too many consonants and sometimes no vowels at all. Carefully, my father pronounced them for me, and they sounded strange coming from his mouth. All those years Mama had chattered away, first in one language and then another, often in the same breath. Never in all that time had I heard my father utter anything but English. He never answered her the way Megan and I had, saying
ja ja
Mama, until we, like she, said
ja
all the time, instead of yes, and got into trouble for it at school because our teachers believed we were lazily saying yeah. He never spoke back to her in the language she was using, as we did, so at night when Mama was tired, you could hear a completely bilingual conversation between them, Mama in German, Dad in English, back and forth, as if it were one language. So it sounded odd to hear him say the convoluted Welsh place names so easily. Llanymawddwy. Cwmystradllyn. Bwlch-llwyd-ddu. He wrote out the phonetic pronunciations of the words beside each one for me: Coed-y-Bleiddiau (coyd-uh-BLAITHE-ee-aye), the Welsh name for Forest of Flowers.

Somehow, we survived that May. And finally it was June, the month all the high-school seniors were waiting for. So immersed in these other things was I that I almost forgot graduation was imminent. It had lost its importance for me, other than marking an end. The senior prom, the graduation dinner, the baccalaureate service all went by without my caring. However, my father insisted that I go through the graduation ceremony itself.

The house was in chaos the night of graduation. Megan, wearing nothing but her underpants, was standing at the bottom of the stairs. ‘Dad? Daddy?’ she was bellowing up. ‘You got to iron this for me.’

I was in my room and could hear my father come out of his. He went to the head of the stairway. ‘Megan, you can’t wear that,’ he called down to her. ‘That’s too small for you. Wear the pink dress in your room. The one with the bows on it. It’s already ironed.’

‘Noooo,’ Megan moaned. ‘I want to wear this. But I don’t know how to iron the little thingies. Do it for me, OK?’

‘Wear the other dress,’ I said. ‘That one you have there is too small for you.’

‘No, it isn’t. Please, Dad? I want to wear this one.
Please?
’

I was standing in front of my mirror. I was already dressed and had pulled on the gown to see how it’d look. The cap, I noticed, was slightly too large and the point in the front came down between my eyebrows. In the mirror I saw Dad go by, returning to his room. He was struggling to get the cufflinks into his shirt. Megan had been left standing at the bottom of the stairs. I could hear her begin to cry.

‘
Daddy!
’ she wailed. There was no response from his end of the hall.

I stared at myself in the mirror. Thirteen whole years of my life, I thought, if I counted kindergarten. All those Halloween parties and Valentine cards and Christmas plays. All the arithmetic papers and flash cards and papier-mâché maps for social studies. I could very clearly remember learning to read, Mrs Johnson printing the letters carefully on the chalkboard, keeping me after school because I kept forgetting what came after
R
in the alphabet. I remembered throwing up in the garbage can in second grade, and my teacher telling me what a good girl I was for not throwing up on the floor. I remembered Mama clapping so loudly at the Mother’s Day pageant when I was ten that I told the girl next to me I didn’t know who she was.

And now it was over. Somehow, I’d thought graduation would mean more to me than it did. I felt nothing.

Megan was in the doorway. Eyes teary, she clutched the dress to her chest. It was the blue gingham cotton one with the eyelet pinafore that Mama had bought her for Easter the year before. Megan had been into her overalls-and-turtlenecks stage then and had gotten invited to Easter dinner with her friend Katie, so Mama had had to take her out to get something presentable.

‘Will you iron it for me, Lessie?’ she asked with a snuffle.

‘Megs, it really is too small for you.’

‘No, it isn’t.’

‘Meggie, it’s going to show your underpants when you bend down. You don’t want all the boys to see your panties, do you?’

Tears down her cheeks again, she just stood, staring at it. Her mouth dragged down into an unhappy grimace. ‘I won’t bend down, OK?’

‘Wear the pink one that Daddy has ironed for you already. You look really pretty in that one. You do. It looks nice with your hair.’

‘It’s these,’ she said sorrowfully and fingered around the tucks in the front of the pinafore. ‘I don’t know how to iron them so they look nice. Please, Les, won’t you do it for me?’

Then my father was there. With one hand, he tugged his tie into place. ‘Megan, I thought I told you to put on that other dress. Now I mean it. Put this one away and get going. We’ll be late.’

Once again she was crying in earnest.

Dad sighed, eyes rolling heavenward.

‘Mama would have ironed it for me,’ Megan sobbed. ‘If Mama was here, it wouldn’t be like this.’

‘Even your mama couldn’t have stopped you from growing, sweetheart, and that’s all that’s happened to that dress. Nothing else. Now get down to your room and get changed.’

I watched the whole transaction in my mirror. Still clothed in my cap and gown, I kept my back to the doorway.

‘Are you ready?’ Dad asked me. ‘I want you to come downstairs so we can take some pictures.’

I looked at him.

‘Outside by the spruce tree, I think. That would be a good contrast to your gown.’

‘I don’t want to, Dad.’

‘Are you worrying about Megs? She’ll be all right. You know how she’s been. Don’t worry.’

‘She’s going to be all snotty nosed from crying.’

‘She’ll be OK.’

I continued looking at his image in the mirror. Even from where I was, I could smell his aftershave. It was something with a dreadfully erotic name that Megs had bought him for his birthday. The smell was musky but cloying.

‘I don’t really want to do this,’ I said.

‘What? Take pictures?’

‘No. This. All of it. You know what I mean.’ I pulled out the gown.

‘Once you get going, you’ll be all right. It’s just nerves.’

I shook my head. There was a pause and it grew long and apparent.

‘I don’t feel anything, Dad. Nothing whatsoever. I stand here and I look at myself and it’s like I’m dressed up for Halloween. I just don’t want to go. It’s make-believe. After everything that’s happened, to pretend this is important is just make-believe.’

He shook his head.

‘I don’t want to go.’

‘If you don’t, you’ll regret it,’ he replied. ‘In years to come, when things are different, you’ll regret missing this a lot, if you don’t go through with it.’

I stared at him in the mirror. I couldn’t imagine when things would ever be different.

Three days after graduation I went with Paul to the park at Third and Elm to walk his dogs. The day was a very warm one. He’d let the dogs off their leashes to run while we sat on a park bench near the playground. The two dogs galloped from spot to spot around the park, sniffing urgently, reading dog messages, leaving them. With my eyes I followed them as they moved, their black tails held jauntily as they went about their business.

‘I got into that course,’ Paul said to me. He was scraping dirt out from under one of his fingernails with a twig. ‘That course that runs first summer term up at Fort Hayes.’

‘The one on computers?’

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I didn’t think I was going to get in. Rob Thurman’s going on it too and he’s a lot better at that kind of stuff than I am. He’s going into some kind of computer programming or something at Cal Tech in the fall. Did you know that?’

I shook my head.

‘Anyway, I’m really relieved about this course. I need computing. I mean, you can’t get anywhere in an area like statistics, if you can’t use a computer.’

I wiped perspiration from my temple. Lowering my hand, I looked at the moisture. It made my fingertip glisten in the sunlight.

‘Hey, did I tell you,’ Paul said, ‘I managed to sell my telescope the other day? I got a really good price for it. Almost five hundred dollars. A guy from Dodge City bought it.’

‘Geez.’

‘It was worth more. I paid eight hundred, and that was almost five years ago. And a telescope’s not going to wear out, is it? But even so, that’s more money than I thought I’d get.’

There was a small pause. I looked over at him. ‘What about the other one?’

He turned his head in my direction. ‘What other one?’

‘You know. The one you and I were going to build. Before everything happened.’

‘Oh, that one.’ He shrugged. ‘We never did get very far. All we had really were the mirrors and lenses.’

‘What did you do with them?’

‘They’re in a box under my bed.’

Again, a pause. Paul picked up one of the dog leashes and swung it around.

‘I dunno,’ he said. ‘I’m thinking maybe I’ll sell those too. I told that guy from Dodge City that I had them, and he sounded sort of interested. I might as well. They’re just taking up room. And I can always use the money.’

‘But if we don’t build that telescope and you’ve sold the other one, you won’t have any,’ I replied, thinking not only of the hours of fun we had had together stargazing but also of all the volumes of notes and observations Paul had made over the years. He had started watching the skies when he was twelve and had charted the stars on almost every clear night since. ‘You’re going to lose track of where everything is in the sky, if you quit watching.’

Still swinging the leash, he studied its motion. Finally, he let it drop between his hands. ‘Yeah, but… I mean, I couldn’t have done it at college anyway, could I? There won’t be the time. And they wouldn’t let you set up a telescope anyplace interesting. Besides, somebody’d probably just rip it off, and then where would I be? A lot of bucks poorer.’ He picked up the leash, coiled it and put it between us on the bench. ‘What the hell. It was just kid stuff anyhow.’

We were only yards away from the playground part of the park, and there was a little girl climbing up the slide. She was very young, hardly more than a toddler, and when she got to the top of the slide, she was afraid to come down. The grandfatherly man who was with her stood at the bottom of the slide and attempted to talk her into trying. His voice was coaxing but embroidered with impatience.

Paul and I sat without talking. Minutes went by. Paul whistled one of the dogs back from the edge of the road.

‘What are you going to do with all that money from the telescope?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know.’

One of the dogs came running over to us. Even though it was fully grown, it had a floppy-puppy gait, and that goofy, gleeful expression of joy that is so endearing in Labradors.

‘You want to come with me?’ I asked. ‘If you sold the lenses and mirrors too that’d probably be enough money.’

‘What do you mean? To Wales?’

‘Yeah,’ I said and grinned. ‘It’d be a blast. We could have a really good time, the two of us, just bumming around.’

There was a slight smile on his lips, and I knew he was considering it. The smile never quite faded. He lay his hand on my thigh.

‘Why don’t you?’ I urged.

Finally, a sigh, and he shook his head. ‘I can’t.’

‘Why not? Your folks wouldn’t care.’

‘They would. My dad would. He’d think I was screwing around with his money.’

‘But it’s your money.’

‘Well, so he’d think I was screwing around with my money then. Same thing. Just as bad. Actually, probably worse, because it’d make him believe he was right about me and the way I do things. Besides,’ he said, ‘I have that computer course in Fort Hayes, remember?’

‘Stick the stupid computer course, Paul. You can do that some other time.’

He didn’t respond immediately. The one dog remained near us, and Paul rumpled the fur around its collar with his hand. Looking over to see what had become of the little girl and the man, I noticed them by the swings. I wondered how the conflict on the slide had been resolved. I hadn’t been watching.

‘The thing is,’ Paul said, ‘I really need that course. Like I was saying, I got to know computing to be any good at statistics, and this is my chance to get a head start.’

‘You’re really getting serious about this statistics stuff, aren’t you?’

He shrugged. ‘Well, you got to get serious some time, haven’t you? There’s about ten million other people out there trying to get good jobs, and the only way I’m going to make it is to not goof around and wreck my chances.’