Or an updated version of same. Palisades Parade was trying lethally to be “with it”; the house your parents built in Gloucester, Mass., was a traditional New England saltbox. But the spare-no-expense workmanship, the innocent faith in Niceness, was unmistakable.
My enjoyment of your father’s motto, “Materials are everything,” was not entirely at his expense. Up to a point, I saw the value of people who made things, and to the highest standard: Herb and Gladys built their own house, smoked their own salmon, brewed their own beer. But I had never met two people who existed so exclusively in three dimensions. The only times I saw your father excited were over a curly maple mantle or a creamy-headed stout, and I think it was over static physical perfection that he exalted; sitting before the fire, drinking the beer, were afterthoughts. Your mother cooked with the precision of a chemist, and we ate well on visits. Her meringue-topped raspberry pies that might have been clipped out of magazines, though again I would have the strong impression that it was pie-as-object that was the goal, and eating the pie, gouging into her creation, was a kind of vandalism. (How telling that your cadaverously thin mother is a marvelous cook but has no appetite.) If the assembly-line production of goods sounds mechanical, it felt mechanical. I was always a little relieved to get out of your parents’ house, and they were so kind to me, if materially kind, that I felt churlish.
Still, everything in their house was buffed to a high, flat shine, so much reflection to protect the fact that there was nothing underneath. They didn’t read; there were a few books, a set of encyclopedias (the wine-colored spines warmed up the den), but the only well-leafed volumes were instruction manuals, do-it-yourself how-to’s, cookbooks, and a haggard set of
The Way Things Work
, volumes one and two. They had no comprehension why anyone would seek out a film with an unhappy ending or buy a painting that wasn’t pretty. They owned a top-shelf stereo with speakers worth $1,000 apiece, but only a handful of easy-listening and best-of CDs:
Opera Stoppers; Classical Greatest Hits.
That sounds lazy, but I think it was more helpless: They didn’t know what music was for.
You could say that about all of life, with your family: They don’t know what it’s for. They’re big on life’s mechanics; they know how to get its cogs to interlock, but they suspect that they’re building a widget for its own sake, like one of those coffee-table knickknacks whose silver metal balls click fruitlessly back and forth until friction tires them. Your father was profoundly dissatisfied when their house was finished, not because there was anything wrong with it, but because there wasn’t. Its highpressure shower head and hermetic glass stall were impeccably installed, and just as he trooped out for a generic who-cares selection of best-of CDs to feed his magisterial stereo, I could easily envision your father running out to roll in the dirt to provide that shower a daily raison d’être. For that matter, their house is so neat, glossy, and pristine, so fitted out with gizmos that knead and julienne, that defrost and slice your bagels, that it doesn’t seem to need its occupants. In fact, its puking, shitting, coffeesloshing tenants are the only blights of untidiness in an otherwise immaculate, self-sustaining biosphere.
We’ve talked about all this on visits of course—exhaustively, since, overfed and forty minutes from the nearest cinema, we’d resort to dissecting your parents for entertainment. The point is, when Kevin—
Thursday
—well, they weren’t prepared. They hadn’t bought the right machine, like their German-made raspberry de-seeder, that would process this turn of events and make sense of it. What Kevin did wasn’t rational. It didn’t make a motor run more quietly, a pulley more efficient; it didn’t brew beer or smoke salmon. It did not compute; it was
physically idiotic
.
The irony is, though your parents always deplored his absence of Protestant industry, those two have more in common with Kevin than anyone I know. If they don’t know what life is for, what to do with it, Kevin doesn’t, either; interestingly, both your parents and your firstborn abhor
leisure time
. Your son always attacked this antipathy head-on, which involves a certain bravery if you think about it; he was never one to deceive himself that, by merely filling it, he was putting his time to productive use. Oh, no—you’ll remember he would sit by the hour stewing and glowering and doing nothing but reviling every second of every minute of his Saturday afternoon.
For your parents, of course, the prospect of being unoccupied is frightening. They don’t have the character, like Kevin, to face the void. Your father was forever puttering, greasing the machinery of daily life, although the additional convenience, once he was finished, burdened him with only more odious
leisure time
. What’s more, by installing a water softener or a garden irrigation system he had no idea whatsoever what it was he was trying to improve. Hard water had offered the happy prospect of regular, industrious de-lime-scaling of the drain board by the kitchen sink, and he rather liked sprinkling the garden by hand. The difference is that your father would wittingly install the water softener for no good reason and Kevin would not. Pointlessness has never bothered your father. Life is a collection of cells and electrical pulses to him, it
is
material, which is why
materials are everything
. And this prosaic vision contents him—or it did. So herein lies the contrast: Kevin, too, suspects that materials are everything. He just doesn’t happen to care about materials.
I’ll never forget the first time I visited your parents after
Thursday
. I confess I’d put it off, and that was weak. I’m sure it would have been colossally difficult even if you’d been able to come with me, but of course
irretrievable breakdown
prevented that. Alone, without the cartilage of their son, I was presented with the stark fact that we were no longer organically joined, and I think they both felt the same disconnect. When your mother opened the door, her face turned ashen, but when she asked me to come in she might have been politely ushering in a salesman for Hoover uprights.
To call your mother stiff would be unjust, but she is a great one for social form. She likes to know what to do now and what comes next. That’s why she’s such a fan of elaborate meals. She finds repose in set courses, the soup before the fish, and she doesn’t resist, as I would have done, the numbing way in which preparing, serving, and cleaning up after three meals a day can stitch up a cook’s time from morning to night. She does not, as I do, struggle against convention as a constraint; she is a hazily well-meaning but unimaginative person, and she is grateful for rules. Alas, there doesn’t appear to be recorded—yet—an etiquette for afternoon tea with your former daughter-in-law after your grandson has committed mass murder.
She seated me in the formal sitting room instead of the den, which was a mistake; the rigidity of the high-backed wing chairs only served to emphasize that by contrast The Rules were in free fall. The colors of the velveteen, sea green and dusty rose, were at such variance with the glistening, livid subtext of my visit as to seem musty or faintly nauseous; these were the colors of mold. Your mother fled to the kitchen. I was about to cry after her not to bother because I really couldn’t eat a thing when I realized that to deny her this one busywork delay for which she was so thankful would be cruel. I even forced myself to eat one of her Gruyère twists later, though it made me a little sick.
Gladys is such a nervous, high-strung woman that her brittleness—and I don’t mean she couldn’t be warm or kind—her bodily brittleness had kept her looking much the same. True, the lines in her forehead had rippled into an expression of permanent perplexity; her eyes darted every which way even more frenetically than usual, and there was, especially when she wasn’t aware I was watching, a quality of lostness in her face that reminded me what she must have looked like as a little girl. The overall effect was of a woman who was stricken, but the contributing elements of this effect were so subtle that a camera might not have captured it on film.
When your father came up from the basement (I could hear his tread on the stairs, and fought dread; though seventy-five, he’d always been a vigorous man, and the steps were too slow and heavy), the change wasn’t subtle at all. His cotton work clothes sloughed off him in great drooping folds. It had only been six weeks, a period during which I was shocked that it was possible to lose so much weight. All the flesh in his weathered face had dropped: the lower eyelids sagged to expose a red rim; his cheeks slung loose like a bloodhound’s. I felt guilty, infected by Mary Woolford’s consuming conviction that someone must be to blame. Then, that was your father’s conviction as well. He is not a vengeful person, but a retired electronics machinetoolmaker (too perfect, that he’d made machines that made machines) took matters of corporate responsibility and better business practices with the utmost seriousness. Kevin had proven defective, and I was the manufacturer.
Rattling my fluted teacup in its gilt saucer, I felt clumsy. I asked your father how his garden was doing. He looked confused, as if he’d forgotten he had a garden. “The blueberry bushes,” he remembered mournfully, “are just beginning to bear.” The word
bear
hung in the air. Bushes maybe, but your father had not begun to bear anything.
“And the peas? You’ve always grown such lovely sugar snaps.”
He blinked. The chimes struck four. He never explained about the peas, and there was a horrible nakedness in our silence. We had exposed that all those other times I’d asked I hadn’t cared about his peas, and that all those other times he’d answered he hadn’t cared about telling me.
I lowered my eyes. I apologized for not visiting sooner. They didn’t make any noises about that’s all right we understand. They didn’t make
any
noises, like
say
something, so I just kept talking.
I said that I had wanted to go to all the funerals if I was welcome. Your parents didn’t look baffled at the non sequitur; we had been effectively talking about
Thursday
from the moment your mother opened the door. I said that I hadn’t wanted to be insensitive, so I rang the parents beforehand; a couple of them had simply hung up. Others implored me to stay away; my presence would be
indecent
, said Mary Woolford.
Then I told them about Thelma Corbitt—you remember, her son Denny was the lanky red-haired boy, the budding thespian—who was so gracious that I was abashed. I hazarded to your mother that tragedy seems to bring out all varieties of unexpected qualities in people. I said it was as if some folks (I was thinking of Mary) got dunked in plastic, vacuum-sealed like backpacking dinners, and could do nothing but sweat in their private hell. And others seemed to have just the opposite problem, as if disaster had dipped them in acid instead, stripping off the outside layer of skin that once protected them from the slings and arrows of other people’s outrageous fortunes. For these sorts, just walking down the street in the wake of every stranger’s ill wind became an agony, an aching slog through this man’s fresh divorce and that woman’s terminal throat cancer. They were in hell, too, but it was everybody’s hell, this big, shoreless, sloshing sea of toxic waste.
I doubt I put it as fancily as that, but I did say that Thelma Corbitt was the kind of woman whose private suffering had become a conduit for other people’s. And I didn’t regale your parents with the whole phone call of course, but the full conversation did come flooding back to me: Thelma immediately admiring the “courage” it must have taken for me to pick up the phone, inviting me right away to Denny’s funeral, but only if it wasn’t too painful for me to go. I allowed to Thelma that it might help me to express my own sorrow for her son’s passing, and for once I realized that I wasn’t simply going through the motions, saying what I was supposed to. Apropos of not much, Thelma explained that Denny had been named after the chain restaurant where she and her husband had their first date. I almost stopped her from going on because it seemed easier for me to know as little as possible about her boy, but she clearly believed that we would both be better off if I knew just who my son had murdered. She said Denny had been rehearsing for the school’s spring play, Woody Allen’s
Don’t Drink the Water,
and she’d been helping him with his lines. “He had us in stitches,” she offered. I said that I’d seen him in
Streetcar
the year before and that (stretching the truth) he’d been terrific. She seemed so pleased, if only that her boy wasn’t just a statistic to me, a name in the newspaper, or a torture. Then she said she wondered whether I didn’t have it harder than any of them. I backed off. I said, that couldn’t be fair; after all, at least I still had my son, and the next thing she said impressed me. She said, “Do you? Do you really?” I didn’t answer that, but thanked her for her kindness, and then we both got lost in such a tumble of mutual gratitude—an almost impersonal gratitude, that everyone in the world wasn’t simply horrid—that we both began to cry.
So, as I told your parents, I went to Denny’s funeral. I sat in the back. I wore black, though in funerals these days that is old-fashioned. And then in the receiving line to convey my condolences, I offered Thelma my hand and said, “I’m so sorry for my loss.” That’s what I said, a miscue, a gaffe, but I thought it would be worse to correct myself—“
your
loss, I mean.” To your parents, I was blithering. They stared.
Finally I took refuge in logistics. The legal system is itself a machine, and I could describe its workings, as your father had once explained to me, with poetic lucidity, the workings of a catalytic converter. I said that Kevin had been arraigned and was being held without bail, and I was hopeful that the terminology, so familiar from TV, would comfort; it failed to. (How vital, the hard glass interface of that screen. Viewers don’t want those shows spilling willy-nilly into their homes, any more than they want other people’s sewage to overflow from their toilets.) I said I’d hired the best lawyer I could find—meaning, of course, the most expensive. I thought your father would approve; he himself always bought top-shelf. I was mistaken.