Family Portrait with Trees
The photograph falls from the book as I am packing up the place. It has survived all these years, outlived my father and mother.
We pose, the three of us, beneath the trees in front of the house.
The First House
From the window, a girl looks back at herself. She is six. There is a storm in her bedroom: thunder, his breathing near her ear. Almost mildly from the window she looks back, at herself, at him. Studies them almost, his body ravenous to be opened by the small corkscrew of her body. From the window she views all this impassively, watching till she feels a deep sharp pain, one that seems to have no body, that has lost its body. For a moment, the girl being of soft heart, she observes this pain with tenderness, thinking to restore it to its rightful owner; suddenly, however, a kind of boredom sets in and she turns her head. The window. Outside. Rain. She loses herself in the sound. In her heart it begins to rain a couple of geese, a duck, a rabbit, twin possums with mucusy snouts. It rains antelope and lawn mowers, lime and fertilizer, the white veils of lime rising from lawn in the heavy August air. There are bushes with squashable red berries in front of the house, and the gardener’s name is Ely. She puts herself there.
Thirty years later … And now in my heart it rains this house: this milk-colored study, these cream-colored walls, these twenty-paned windows, through which I see the road, the ailing old maple trees, the lip of sunlight on a fallen branch. It rains and I must say goodbye.
The Shadow
I pull the white sheet up around my ears and watch a shadow form as the full moon emerges from a cloud. It is the shadow of a hatted man, the shadow of something half-forgotten — a flannel hat hanging on a hook in 1959 or ‘61 when, evenings, my father surrendered this to his waiting watchful wife. She was, then, no longer a bride. Years of submission had faded her looks. A certain haggardness had set in early, a looseness of skin auguring ill a future time. But she would never get old, surely, this bride, like his mother, or like those other women—half the world in fact—for whom his disdain hid fear. My father had sharp eyes and a sharp heart, but his body lacked all such definition. An obese man, his body was a cushion, a long failure of softness.
Sleep
The sixteen-room house in the photograph is in upstate New York. He has a dream while asleep on the red velvet sofa in the formal living room, lying on his side, his face toward the unused fireplace in which the TV lives. The Mets fans cheer, a single spindle of saliva contacts the sofa cushion.
Cooking, my mother is undisturbed by the proximity of the blaring television. It’s been this way for years.
My father dreams of their wooing. Oh yes, he was once a young man with dreams. He sat in an east village bar, the grey flannel hat on a seat beside him, and stared into the frightened amazed eyes of my not-yet mother.
The Dream
He is already filled with a certain brand of hatred for the idea that is forming in his head. The Proposal. He sits here. His left arm wanders across the table and closes in on hers. She looks across at him like he is—what? How he fears her—that hairspray-stiff back-combed hairstyle she wears, that perfect little ski slope of a shiksa nose, her delicacy of feature! And from there he goes on in his mind, his hand closing around hers, his thoughts spreading on to her inexperience, her poor background, that claustrophobic fried fish-smelling Brooklyn house of hers with its tawdry curtained upper rooms facing the dingy treeless street. She has a mother too who doesn’t care for him, he is too racy, too saucy; she senses evil in his eye.
He wonders how it is possible that things are coming out of his mouth at which my mother smiles. He stops talking, looks down at her hand. Her left hand. White. Ringless. Waiting, in fact, for a ring. When he looks back up, she is gazing at him expectantly.
“So how about it, Rose,” he hears himself say. “You wanna get married, or what?”
As she leans across the table, his hand closing around hers, my mother too is filled with a kind of hatred, the kind bred of oppression, of satin underwear worn just for him, of girdles to cinch in this or that, of brassieres to cross her heart in order that she continue to lie. You cannot call it love, this thing she feels, though my father is a rather dashing young man. She’s already heard about his thoroughbred racehorse, Stilts. About his father’s Rolls Royce Silver Ghost. About his mother’s collection of priceless Limoges. But already, borne on his warm breath, she smells foul exaggeration. She is filled with an emotion my father would never suspect.
His House and Mine
My father lies on the sofa, dreaming. He wears long grey pants.
I share one trait with him, and that is the staunch avoidance of shorts. His legs are beefily muscular; mine hang with loose flesh I cannot beat into hardness.
And what is this? On the TV, between innings, there’s a commercial. They always put these on louder and he likes the volume up high anyway, so now it blares. A laxative commercial that starts by telling you: “A woman’s body is different than a man’s …”
I look at my father. He works his mouth as if tasting something.
I have to be careful as I stand here. He will sleep through a game, through commentary, cheers, the sound of stamping feet. He will sleep through Rachmaninov. His wife’s tears will cool on her cheeks before he wakes; but let me make a noise — what small noise my body can make — he will wake and kill the dream.
The TV fills the cavity of the elegant unused fireplace. The fire screen has been lifted aside by his hands, the television angled, position adopted and sleep attained; the Mets fans will begin cheering again at the end of the ad that reminds us: “A woman’s body is different than a man’s …”
It’s My House Now
Today, the shadows of the trees lie on the lawn. This summer has been so dry that the grass scorched. It looks unsightly, but out of the dry brown scrub sprout little colonies of viper’s bugloss. Under the yew there now grows a single cardinal flower. Weeds overtake the driveway. The house breathes with a kind of vanity.
Seventeen rooms take a long time to pack. Exhausted, I fall asleep on the old red sofa and have a dream of my own. I am lifeless, the car in whose path I aim myself now printed with my body. Inside the metal folds my body’s essence is sealed. Like the pimpernel. A flower that closes in bad weather.
Oh, but I am thankful to this stranger who spares me this pain, of looking back. My dreaming body is light. When he picks me up my hair falls away in drapes that undulate with his stride. How tenderly he walks with me, placing me down in front of the trees before the house.
The Dye Is Cast
In his dreaming being, my father unfolds, a man made reckless by fear.
“I want you to know,” says my mother, “I have never loved anyone…”
He leans back in his chair.
“Sure you haven’t.” He speaks distractedly. “No really. I want you to know the truth, that I —”
“There’s something I want you to know…” He peruses her, then leans toward her with the lure of disclosure. “I want you to know, Rose, that I —”
In his dreaming being my father bares his teeth, browned with nicotine.
“What, darling? Tell me, Cliff.”
He looks at her and can’t answer. And it cannot truly be said that she expects him to. They merely sit here, each of the other taking silent measure.
Stilts in A Field
Golden rod blooms in the field, and Stilts runs through it to meet his master. My father’s young boy face is eager, his pockets disfigured with sugar cubes. Each night before going to bed he stokes his pockets so that in the morning, he has only to throw on his clothes and, shoe laces streaming, take the steps, two at a time, to the door, whose rusty hinges seem always to bemoan the presence of such exuberance. Free, he stands now at the edge of the field, arm across the gate, awaiting the pony’s warm breath on his hand. The animal’s forelock parts in the breeze as he canters up. The other hand in his pocket, my father gathers his gifts. He waits for the silver pony, of whom he is master.
The Dream
My mother says: “I have never loved anyone …”
He nods. How to word it? That was clumsy. But she doesn’t seem to care. Try again.
“Would you, Rose, take me, Clifford –”
She is laughing.
“What’s the matter? All I said was, Will you, Rose —”
“I’ve never loved anyone,” she says. “Have you?”
“Anyone? No. Did you ever love anything?”
“Rhapsody On A Theme Of Paganini. I love that.”
The Boy
My father was an only child (possibly, he told me once, a mistake.)
He doesn’t know why his father bestows such a gift on him. Stilts, the pony, the lively, silver creature trotting to meet him in the uncut field behind the house. He is beautiful, Stilts, so filled with life! He runs for mere joy, the kind of thing a boy ought to do. But such exuberance is often missing from my father’s make-up, a shameful omission he sets about correcting by a forced show of gaiety. Looks are not on his side: though beautiful of face, his doughy body makes the bigger statement. His mother, a vain Viennese woman, collector of cheap fun fair statuettes, laughs at him. His jaunty antics cause her statuettes to shimmy to the shelf-edge and clatter treacherously. And though one has not as of yet fallen, she deems it more economical to blame him in advance.
* * *
It is an extravagant thing to do in the year 1933. My father is ten and has never seen his father out of a suit. The good grey on weekdays, the blue serge on Saturday and Sunday.
Now, in the field behind the house, father and son build a lean-to.
Sitting on a ladder, a half-constructed shell around him, “Hand me that pencil,” his father says, meticulously rolling up the sleeve of a flannel shirt. “We’ve got to measure things out properly. You want to care for your pony properly and that means good solid shelter in all seasons.”
“Yes, Sir,” says my father, making a grab for the pencil that succeeds in upsetting a box of penny nails. “I will care for him properly. I’ll care for him, all right.”
Glancing over the edge of the workbench, he looks down at the crop of fallen nails. Several of them stick straight up out of the grass, a bad omen for sure.
“Yes Sir,” he goes on, edging himself forward in hopes of concealing the accident. “I’ll be out here all the time—no matter what the weather is — because I —”
“Why don’t you just concentrate on finding me that pencil …” his father says.
From up on the ladder, his son’s clumsiness has not escaped his notice. He checks the reflex of anger to which he is not accustomed.
That his blunder has gone undiscovered is suggested to my father by the steady tone in his father’s voice. It comes as a great relief to him. Beginning to look for the pencil, he turns over a leaf of sandpaper, picks up a hammer, an awl, a jelly jar filled with screws. He looks everywhere. It doesn’t appear. But what does it matter? Life is OK.
Suddenly he stops, gazes beneath the bench. Making a dive, he comes up with it.
“She’s all yours, Dad!”
The endearment, once escaped, cannot be recalled. Taken aback, his father, guilty for his harsh appraisal, cannot bring himself to look down or accept the offering, leaving the boy to stand here with his arm raised. Confused, the boy tries straightening his thoughts.
“Let’s get on,” the elder finally suggests, for which my father is infinitely grateful. “Why don’t you start by gathering up those nails.”
The Child
From the window, I look back at myself. I am six.
It’s in the buttery yellow shadows he steals in. I wake up and see him, a fly in ointment, stuck against the yellow wall, only not stuck, loose and wanting.
Later, we pose, the three of us, beneath the trees in front of the house.
The moment before the camera shutter clicks, Ely, the gardener, says smile, because I’m not.
The Sofa
But for the TV, how quiet it is in this house. Dreaming, my father lies on the red velvet sofa, a cat curled into the space above his shoulder. I sit on a chair across from him, not wanting to look. But I must make myself. I aim my eyes on him.
His eyelids pop up with the impulse of a corpse.
The Gift
Snorting warm breath in the dawn, Stilts stamps his hoof on the frozen golden rod, his master at the fence, my young father, chubby-cheeked and grinning. In his hand my father holds the sugar cube. Right and left pockets bulge with more; he feeds them one at a time to extend the indescribable delight of being liked. Eating them from the pink palm that stretches out flat like his father has instructed, the animal amazes with his tongue, his lips rubbery as they fidget over the boy’s lonely skin. Nobody at all touches my father but that pony, Stilts, bought for $10 from one Hannibal Carter Jr., who appreciated the extra cash in such slim times. He inherited the aging pony from his father, whose death left his son in a deep hole.
Hannibal Jr. doesn’t even know what to feed a horse. It takes two days before an old hand-painted board is nailed to a fence post at the bottom of the driveway: ‘Horse for SALE. REAL Good TEMPER. White when CLEAN. $25 LIVE.’ By then the animal is hungry.
The day after the sign goes up my father’s father happens to be passing in the old Ford roadster, on his way to an insurance claim not a mile from Hannibal’s house. He stops the car and sits there, looking at the sign.
He is disturbed. His wife has been complaining. The boy again. He hears her voice: “I don’t know what to do with him. All the long day he hangs around. Plays the schlemiel. What kind of life this is? No hobbies. No friends —” A stickler for proper usage, he corrected his wife’s English first, and thought it over second. Was he neglecting his son? He never thought much about it. Still, did she have to nag him about it? Turning the whole thing over, he decided (as he decided most things—distilling out complexity) to simply put an end to both.
A few minutes later he is standing before the barbed wire fence of the animal’s corral. Hannibal Carter leans beside him, one foot resting on a strand of wire.
“Good horse, that,” he says.
The animal, which has trotted up, is now trying to get a whiff of the newcomer who, remembering his good grey suit, backs off.
“This is no horse,” says my father’s father.
Carter shifted legs.
“Well it ain’t a camel.”
The visitor offers up a tentative hand. Stretching its neck over the top strand of barbed wire, the animal veers its head, going straight for his sleeve.
“No,” he says, withdrawing. “What I mean is, this is no horse, it’s a pony.” Turning, he faces Carter who, unimpressed with such banal distinctions, flicks his head in the opposite direction and spits.
“You might put him on stilts,” Carter suggests. “Raise him up a piece.” He laughs.
The pony, meanwhile, seeming to sense in the newcomer its one remaining hope, gives up on the sleeve and reaches for his hand.
“He’s small for a boy,” he says, avoiding the damp muzzle. “My boy, anyway.” He pats the pony’s neck. “Does he have a name?”
Carter shrugs.
“Stilts,” he says, improvising. “He knows it too. Can’t change it now. That’d be cruel.”
The deal lines Hannibal Carter’s pockets with two five-dollar bills which, in the local bar room, falls promptly through the many holes in his character.
Mirror, Mirror
While I sweat over boxes and packing paper, a phrase returns to me from Rachmaninov’s Rhapsody On A Theme Of Paganini. A single lilting theme played first by the piano, then picked up by strings. My mother’s music. The music by which she calls me back. Tempting, it arrests me. I must try to resist, to make myself listen and not succumb.
I recall Christmases in this house: tree in corner mounded at base with too many presents; nervous stabs of laughter coming always from some other room; Mother cooking. From the kitchen, I hear someone coming up the butler’s pantry stairs, clip clop: Mother in her light blue robe, her pale terry mules. When she reaches the top, she will see me waiting, and smile. She does not have to speak. I follow her to her room, where her Christmas clothes are laid out on the bed. She watches me watching as, unbelting the robe, fleece courses down her arms, her hips, her legs. A shiver, she steps out of it: an unwanted skin.
Mother was queen, the fairest of them all. She used my face like a mirror into which she gazed, confirming her own superior beauty. This is how she wishes me to remember her.
By The Bed
She is lying on her bed. I do not want to draw near, to meet my father as he presides over the death. Our eyes do not meet as he reproaches: “She wants to see you. You barely made it in time.”
There is nothing to talk about. Or everything. I can feel her thin hand around mine. I cannot open my mouth beyond a hackneyed: “How are you, Mother?” It is she who musters up the squeeze, her fingers wrapped around the ball of my fist, her wedding ring digging into my knuckles. It is she who says, with a twitch of her mouth, the mockery of a smile: “Well, here we are then, aren’t we, after all these years …”
I sit beside her, looking down at her face. Her eyelids close.
“I want you to know,” she says, “I have never loved anyone …”
The effort seems to exhaust her and her lips close too.
My father looks away.
“— never loved anyone, I mean, but you …”
Neither of us answer her. We each wonder who she’s talking to. Almost comically the moments wrack up.
Suddenly my father says, “And I love you. I’ve never loved anyone but you.”
Scarcely another instant passes before, falling asleep, my mother’s grip loosens. Her grip leaves a dull but even pain, the imprint of her hand on mine.
As for my father, I need not have looked at him to know: speaking, he had not been looking at his wife.
Gravity
The pony’s skin was so warm it melted the frost in a circle all around him. It was as if something in the earth opened up, marking his life for a few short hours.
When my father found him, the sun had already risen, and the browns and grays of the winter field had been recovered from their bed of white. Squinting into the oncoming sunlight, he saw Stilts lying in the far corner of the field, near the lean-to. He thought it odd his pony would choose this kind of sleep, unprotected in the open air. The animal, though, seemed peaceful; and so my father quelled the alarm that sounded deep within by proclaiming it a miracle: the pony trusted his master enough to witness this sleep.
My father maneuvered himself up on to the gate. Ungainly as he was, he managed to stay up. Sitting there, he seemed in a kind of trance. Balancing. Conquering gravity.
Fire
The night my mother dies, a fire blazes in the fireplace. Upright, my father sits before it. The TV is gone, yet I seem to hear the sound of it against the crackling logs. A woman’s body is different, it says … A woman’s body … is a woman’s body.
In truth my father is terrified of fire. In their final months, he and my mother used to sit in the living room, side by side staring into the empty hearth. Staring. Sitting. Nothing more.
As close as you could get without touching.
A Direction
When she is alone again the child lies on her side, her exposed cheek white, wet: a mushroom after rain. It is then that she hears the bird call, taking her to a berry, a twig, a leaf. Lovely to behold in sound, it beckons to her ear. What is it? she mouths, not a sound from her lips.
The answer that comes is the hopping of the bird:
From branch to branch, hopping a direction.
Away from the room, the house, the road. Into the woods. Deep woods. Where trees live, undisturbed.
Memory
It comes when I close my eyes and look into the dark within. It comes when I see my mother, younger than I am now, sitting at a bar table, ringless. It comes when I see my father as a boy, his fist clenched with offerings; when image collects upon image and through these I sift as though through this box of old photographs. A house. A family. A history… Surely in all this can be found the single enduring image that will tell the story of who I am.
The Arm Of The Mistress
My father soon follows my mother to the next life, or none.
The shutters of the old white house will soon be closed. I stand outside on the lawn, the trees behind me now, cock my head up and squint into the sunlight. Out of each window in turn there comes a long white graceful arm, the arm of the mistress of the house — now me — and lovingly she grabs hold of each shutter, quietly pulling it to. I watch as window by window the house goes the way of darkness.
In a moment of hope I turn my sights to my new life, to people, undiscovered friends, to interesting things.
Behind me, the wind is a dusty coil in the trees; I imagine sap rising in the bark. Suddenly I remember the old childhood poem:
If trees gushed blood
When they were felled
By meddling man,
And crimson welled
From every gash
His axe could give,
Would he forbear,
And let them live?
/ / / / /
The concluding lines are “If Trees Gushed Blood,” a poem by Mervyn Peake, reprinted with kind permission from Carcanet, UK.