from House of Windows
Like most men under the right circumstances, my father could walk on water. In fact, he did it often, and sometimes he took me along. Together we stood on the frozen whitecaps of Cape Ann looking back at the lights of our town on the Massachusetts north shore. Even half a mile away they appeared as close and bright as tropical fruits, and I was tempted to reach out and pluck every one and deposit them in the sled on which my father had dragged me. Our load might have weighed us down, yet I knew Father could bear it. He was master of the waters, Neptune of the North Shore, slayer of cod, tuna, even shark.
Father would say: Look, there's Devon House and the Schooner Restaurant and the Gull Cafe. Though he didn't mention it, there was also the fish cannery where he went to work each morning at six. Standing beside him on the ice, I felt myself safer than anywhere since. We wouldn't talk much. I stared back, imagining Mother in the kitchen behind one of those windows making soda bread and mincemeat pie. While I gazed longingly landward, Father turned both ways: toward our house, and toward the sea. Had we glanced down, we might have noticed a web of cracks forming under our feet.
It was years before the fissures finally broke, setting us adrift in different directions, but the causes for the crackup must have been present even in that moment. They were the causes whose effects I've lived with ever since. Another name for it is history.
My father owned a boat, and sometimes he supplemented his income from the plant by doing a little wildcat fishing. Out at four, he'd return as darkness smoked from the water. Like most of his colleagues, he drank, though its effect on him at that time still seemed reliably soothing. But he was away a lot. At night Mother and I worked on projects together: we built a Viking ship out of peanut shells, painted what we thought the weather gods looked like, and made elaborate costumes for Halloween. Our preparations for it began in December. We hardly noticed Christmas. When I was seven or eight, I asked why, while other kids decorated trees, we were installing grow lights and planting pumpkin seeds, and my mother told me about Jesus. Mother's sister, my aunt Joan, was a nun, which made Mother an authority on the subject. She said Jesus taught you should love everything that lives, even people who don't like you. I said, I don't like Mr. Maynard, a neighbor who complained whenever we chased a ball into his yard. She said: You should try loving Mr. Maynard especially. Just try, she said.
As a boy, I stumbled amid mysteries. One morning I walked into the kitchen to find my parents at the table, arguing. The scene might have been captioned, in gothic letters, Anger. Father�s head was thrown back. He breathed heavily through his stuffed-up nose. His eyes were shut. His arms, thick from hauling nets and hoisting crates, knotted over that chest he so often let me use for a trampoline.
Mother, always feisty, a chaos of red hair lashing her shoulders, leaned across the table with a letter, perhaps a bill, in her hand.
"We can't afford this," she said emphatically. "And Vera, too?"
Father tilted his head further back, as though dodging a blow.
Because my parents normally shielded me from their scenes, I panicked. Yet I was already aware of money, whose sullen magic engineered the appearance of everything from bicycles to summer vacations in the mountains. I suspect it also fueled the sharp words between them.
But in this case, money seemed secondary to some greater danger represented by the envelope in Mother's hand.
It took them a few seconds to acknowledge my quivering presence–their relationship was a kingdom unto itself, a place apart. One on one, they could be the best of company; together they often generated an exclusionary force field.
"Why aren't you in school, Tommy?" Mother asked.
"It's Saturday," I reminded her.
"Son," Father murmured without opening his eyes.
My great-aunt Vera's name was always a red flag for trouble. Vera and her sons were our last surviving relatives in Western Europe. Or put it this way: she was the only figure from his past Father had carried over with him. She was the sponsor of all gratitude, the mirror's dark backing reflecting us to ourselves: Finish your dinner, you don't know what hunger is. Have I ever told you about Vera?
Only about a million times. A new version every year, each more gruesome than the last.
But until I was ten or eleven, he repeated the familiar yet always changing story about the winter Vera ran out of food.
Telling it, my father, that large, broad-shouldered man–his physical presence dominated my world, filling every room in the house–contracted, rattling the windows instead with his voice, which rose and fell like a winter wind howling over the bleak steppes to which we were suddenly airlifted.
She boiled her shoes, then served the broth to her three boys. They gnawed the leather, but it left them hungry. Finally, she swaddled her feet in cloth strips and walked out into the sub-zero snow-covered landscape to hunt for food. After days of wandering, she came upon a lone dove huddled in the crook of a poplar. The bird was out of reach, so she picked up a stone and hurled it, but she was tired and her arms were frozen and she missed. The second time, the bird wasn't as lucky.
She reached her house just as the stars appeared over the ice-covered steppes.
She slammed the door and rushed to the cold stove to check on her sons. There was one, and here another. But where was the third?
And then she saw what was left of the body, and the blood-smeared faces of the two boys staring up at her like startled animals.
She grabbed a knife off the floor and lifted it over her head above the eldest. He made no move to hide or protect himself.
Seeing his trusting gaze, she dropped the blade and threw her arms around both boys, pulling them to her. All three wailed to heaven for mercy.
That was one version. By the time he was done, sweat beaded Father's forehead and eyelids, and he rubbed his lips with the back of his hand, his eyes fixed on a point ten million light years away.
No one else I knew endured such mealtime tales.
"You expect me to eat after that?" I asked.
"Every last bit."
"How do you know this, anyway?"
"Vera told me," he answered, taking a long sip of Jameson's, watching me closely from under his lush brows.
Even as a boy I felt there were holes in his story large as Siberia and one day I would drive right through them.
The problem, or the complication, is that my parents were by no means always at odds. There were times I'd catch them laughing over a game of checkers, at which Mother was ruthless, or they'd row out into the cove, abandoning me onshore–who knew what they did once they disappeared behind the rocks?
Many of our activities involved animals. We drove to Plum Island in late April to watch plovers building their nests and in August we went for the monarchs who stop there yearly on their way to Mexico. Once we found one with a broken wing and took it home. We created a terrarium from an old fish tank, pilfering my model railroad and building for the butterfly a miniature version of Devon, complete with Dogtown. Several times a day I dipped my middle finger in sugar water, then watched the insect tap the bead with its long feeding tube until it was more domesticated than a cat.
One evening, after finishing my homework, I'd taken the butterfly out when I heard the door slam, followed by Mother's loudest scream.
In the living room stood Father with something huge and black in his arms, looking like a mummy greased in glistening oil. It took a minute to figure out it was a baby seal. Winters, hurt and lost seals frequently washed up onshore.
"Fill the tub," he barked. "Cold water."
Mother did, but she accidentally turned on the hot tap, then went out of the room to grab some old towels from the laundry, and when she returned Father yelled at her, "You trying to kill the pup?" and she emptied it and refilled it with cold while I jumped about anxiously, excited by the new arrival.
The month before I'd done a report for school about the life cycle of the harbor seal. Phoca vitulina concolor. While their ancestors, fifteen million years back, walked on land, these were strictly aquatic, capable of remaining underwater for half an hour, able to plunge down three hundred feet. You see them lounging on rocks alongside their buds in the harbor, but basically they're loners who socialize mainly in order to mate and chill in safety.
Their courtship rituals, I told the class, included bubble-blowing and mouthing each other's necks.
Father deposited the creature gently into the tub, and it was then I noticed its flipper bent in the wrong direction. The three of us watched its black eyes staring out at us.
"Where's its mother?" Mother asked.
"Who knows," Father said. "Sometimes these little fellows get caught in a current and dragged away. If they can't find their way back before they're ready to be on their own, well, you can imagine," he said, wiping his face and hands on the towel.
Later, I returned to my room to find I'd forgotten to put the butterfly in the terrarium.
A window, slightly open, invited escape. I leaned my forehead on the glass and looked to the harbor. Lights flickered over the water, riding the waves to the edge of the world.
That may have been the first time I saw the law of exchange in action. The seal entered; the butterfly left. A trade had occurred. Unfortunately, I wanted both. Not being able to get both led in time to my theory of the turn.
It was nothing heavy, my idea that amid the world's variety you could find anything you imagined–indeed, your imagining brought the thing, life itself, into being; at any given moment the world contained everything you'd ever dreamed of–you only had to turn to it and it would come alive as though it had been waiting. Turning to one, you had of course to turn away from another. Everything gripped you because its very life depended on you. Without you, it would disappear into some other dimension.
I had turned away from Father, and look what happened.
Then there were those times when someone, or something, turned to you first.
The next morning Dr. Looby, the town vet, came by.
"You should bring it to the aquarium in Boston," he said after examining the seal and wrapping its flipper in adhesive. "It's a she, by the way."
"I should," Father shook his head, "but . . ." He looked over at me. "I won't. Tommy here could stand another companion. I'm going to be out a lot this winter."
"You know how much they eat," Dr. Looby said softly.
"Ten to eighteen pounds a day," I rattled off. "Shrimp, salmon, squid, and mollusks."
"That's going to be a tithe off your take," the doctor said.
Father shrugged.
That was how I wound up spending several weeks caretaking a seal. We bought a huge wading pool, which we set up on the porch in front of the house. I'd get right in with Sheba, who delighted in squirting me with water from her pursed lips. She put weight on fast. At feedings, she swallowed whole shrimp and clams.
I was beginning to dread returning her to the sea when, one morning, I awoke and padded out, still sleepy, eyes gummed shut, only to find her lying on the porch floor. She�d worked her way out of the tub. She wasn't moving. Her skin, normally glistening, had already dried and begun to crack. A fly circled her nostril.
I shouted loud enough to bring Mother running from the kitchen. We threw ourselves at the creature, poking and probing, hoping to revive it, but it was too late.
Later that night, Father had to carry her out. I wanted to bury her in our yard, but Father insisted the right thing was to send her home to the sea, so we placed her, swaddled in tarp, in the back seat of his Buick, and drove to the water. There, standing on the tip of the jetty, together we heaved Sheba back to the source. A bitter wind sprayed our faces. Father put his hand on my shoulder, and we returned to the apartment in silence.
Soon after, Father decided I needed to learn how to play the piano. Next thing I knew I was taking lessons from our downstairs neighbor. Once a week I descended to Ms. Johnson's apartment. The place smelled clean and inviting, as though she'd scrubbed the floors with cookie dough. Tall, big-haired, large-busted, and funny, she wore long, flowing, brightly colored dresses and earrings the size of basketball hoops. Romare Bearden prints hung on her walls, and an imposing African drum with a tight leather face rose in the corner of the living room.
Since we couldn't afford a piano, Father painted a keyboard for me on a two-by-four. I practiced an hour each evening, running my fingers up and down the keys. Mother looked at me skeptically, asking: "Can you really practice like that?"
I nodded.
While I had no ear for music, I possessed a lively imagination and could hear myself playing with no problem at all. The notes rose up in four dimensions. I raced through finger exercises, scales, and arpeggios. Before long, I preferred the notes I imagined to the sound of a real piano, which inevitably seemed a little off-key. I hammered away, window open, lace curtains swaying to my silent, pitch-perfect tune.
The piano helped, but as tensions between my parents escalated, school became my haven and my obsession. Mother posted my gold stars, certificates, and awards around the apartment. Visitors to the bathroom were invited to reflect on my "Reflections on A Separate Peace" tucked in between Newsweek and People. I quickly discovered how easy it was to please teachers, how little it took to get their attention and praise. I made sure my assignments were always longer and fuller than what had been asked for. A five-page paper on Slaughterhouse Five? Why not fifteen, or twenty, with footnotes? While my peers yanked at their leather mitts under lights that whooshed on as twilight descended, I huddled in the library. My interests included sailing, taxidermy, and Eastern European history. I studied photographs of stuffed dogs, cats, and lynxes, admiring their claws, bared teeth, and glass eyes opened forever–wishing I'd known of this option when Sheba died. Then I read about czars, and peasants, and revolutionaries–maniacs from Father's part of the world.
Maybe it was because of the seemingly disconnected stories hovering in the air, names without contexts, that, by the time I graduated high school, the "and then" of history–the study of cause and effect–had become my way of organizing the products of time.
One evening, he offered another take on the Vera tale, which bore little resemblance to the earlier fable.
We were in the living room. He was leaning back in his favorite recliner. The evening news was on. Something the anchor said–a story from the annals of the seemingly endless Cold War�struck him. Father pulled up and hunched forward, clearing his throat.
"You should know about Vera," he said.
In this account, Father claimed that Vera's husband, a hospital administrator, had actually bought her from her mother in a village near Kyiv. "For money?" I asked. "That's my point," he said. "People were poor." Vera's own husband had worked in various Soviet clinics around the country before finally landing, then losing, a position in Bucharest, Romania. Unemployed for some time, he'd avoided conscription into the Iron Guard–your friendly local Nazi group–and severed friendships with men he'd known since childhood. Eventually he fell off the back of an electric tram as it rounded the corner a few blocks from his home. There was a rumor he'd been pushed, but Vera never verified it. What good would it do, knowing her husband had been murdered? His death left Vera to raise her two sons alone.
"I thought you said she had three. Three sons."
"One died. Remember?"
"That was a true story? Come on, Dad. That was just how you got me to eat my peas."
The old man shook his head.
"But you were born in Kyiv."
"I may have been."
"May have been?"
"I was a boy. Everyone's dead. The facts are unclear."
Two sons. Three. Unclear? The facts didn't matter. Soon he'd be telling me Vera had never existed.
For the moment, though, the story was that at the start of the war Vera worked as a nurse in the asylum her husband once administered on the outskirts of Bucharest, raising her boys on its grounds. Countless people went mad in those years, and the facility was so overcrowded that patients slept two to a bed. Since many were incorrigible sex offenders, the nights were loud and violent, and sometimes not everyone returned for breakfast.
It seemed my great-aunt Vera had been a nurse in a hospital for the mad at a time when inmates ruled the world.
"Why are you telling me this now?" I asked.
"Somebody's got to know the story," he said.
A woman I dated in college accused me of having had a happy childhood. I took the charge seriously. I was then drifting in a bohemian milieu, and at that age neuroses and articulate despair were evidence of superiority and sophistication.
"But it all went bad," I protested, hoping to score points.
Doesn't matter, I was told, it's the first six years that count.
I admit without shame: For a while–no matter how briefly–my childhood of beach plums and thorny bushes and biting winds and storms had been lit by the kind of wild light you find growing up by the sea, reared by two characters who had their differences but who knew how to take their pleasures, too. The lighthouse from Ten Pound Island glared nightly into the third floor of our triple-decker like that eye of God on a dollar bill. Ms. Johnson sang opera in amateur productions in Beverly, and many nights I'd fall asleep to arias from Aida or Carmen wafting up through the vents or open windows. And sometimes I would hear her standing on the back porch whistling Mimi's song from La Boheme, accompanied by foghorns. Our neighbor on the first floor wasn't so nice–he was a mechanic who drank, fought loudly with his girlfriend, and, as we found out when he was arrested, sold heroin to kids at the school up the street. But he never gave us any trouble because he respected Father, even feared him. The way all of us did, I suppose.
What we feared was all we didn't know about him, which as it turns out was just about everything.
Later, of course, I understood there were no water-walkers in my family, no miracle workers, no escape artists, and I see now that was a good thing. Because there were no waters to walk on in the first place. The Atlantic never freezes, at least not in New England. And miracles, I've found, take no work at all. They just happen, effortlessly–or else they don't.
The contradictions in Father's character made me believe I needed to understand him before I could love him. I was young. Only later–and why it took so long would require eons to tell–only later, too late for some things, did I learn that love has no prerequisites at all.
None.
