THE AQUA MUSTANG

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2011-06-02T13:40:00.001-07:00

http://insistentscenes.blogspot.com/2011/06/foray-into-america.html

Going Back Again

2011-01-14T08:12:00.000-08:00

For years it worked, move on to something exciting – Bangkok, Cuba, a revolution in Africa, girls and art in Port-au Prince, more adventure in Jordan or Taipei or Panama city. It relieved the depression and I did not think of anger – but each time my new state would come to an end whatever was around me. And the anger and something dark and immovable were still there.

So this too was on my mind, this puzzle about my anger that I seemed on the brink of resolving, on my mind as I entered places of the past in 1986 out to get the goods on the family malefactors – with more questions arising at each stage of the hunt.

And I thought of that very recent breakup with Jacqueline when while she was on the phone to me, while she was saying it was over, my white hot anger returned, and click click click, I was shouting angrily back thorough the years at Mary in my recent marriage, at Sheila, whom I had told I would return to Singapore to fetch, at Sunisar in her gold lame gown in Bangkok, and at Bonnie for whom I had left Sunisar, and moving on back through hyper sensual Kentucky Janet to Helga from Zurich, my long time lovely painter girlfriend Valerie, and back into hopeful adolescence with Sandie and especially Ellyse. And to places from which I had been, in the language of those times, eighty-sixed – a bathhouse in Peitou, Bradley’s in New York, a gentile hotel lounge in Nassau, a bar in Hong Kong where when you sat down with a girl they brought you a roll of toilet paper. And then, picking up again, going click, click click all the way back past Ellyse, all the way back to, of all people, my mother.

Last Gasp in Chelsea

2011-01-14T07:47:00.000-08:00

I

It is dark when I arrive back in Chelsea I have been over at Sloane Kettering to see Elizabeth, who is now scheduled for a bone marrow transplant. They have gotten a woman psychotherapist for her who believes in Valium and has given her a syrupy Leo Buscaglia motivational tape. Elizabeth says she is realizing that she may die. I think it better to change the subject.

On my way back from the hospital I went to see The God’s Must Be Crazy, a too cute movie about gullible and lovable Australian aborigines that everyone says is so great. Blonde, lush Amy, perennial tan and dresses that display it, said I should see The Gods Must be Crazy. She said I should also see Greystoke the Legend of Tarzan Lord of the Apes. I had seen the Tarzan movie and found it haunting, but was not sure if this was not about liking Amy more than about my respecting my own taste.

In my back pocket in my wallet there is a letter I have carried for almost seven years, since the beginning of this marriage that is ending, that has ended. The letter, from an old friend, a saintly English writer who had been in been in Bangkok since long before I got there, is about how I should be aware how baffling and scary my world must be to my new Asian wife. I am thinking it is time I got rid of that old letter.

I am back in Chelsea now ready to spent another night working on book proposals, which still seem to be relevant navigation tools now that my life is entering a new orientation. This funny narrow building I face now, funny in that the outside invites pleasantly snide comments, for in concrete it has balconies with designs that put a cultured person in mind of a Venetian loggia facade. I think Venetian loggia is the correct term. Like signs of Venice that Rebecca West had noted, and that I of course saw in my own time, on the Dalmatian Coast. God I now hate this moving back from lived life into books that can never change.

I go up the stoop and pause to check my mailbox. Behind me across 25th Street is the new Korean grocery and hot food and salad bar, and the long low brick building where my former landlady Rita lives. On counter in the small kitchen through which you enter my apartment there is a five-pound block of processed American cheese that Rita gave me this week when distributing food in the neighborhood from some government program she has mastered. And I think of a short girl with sexily tousled hair like that of the 1950s Leslie Caron, and also young Leslie Caron curvature, who lives in my building and whom I met at the Korean place, which she pointed out was bringing everyone in the neighborhood together. Which made me think that I had always been at an age when I could be haunted by missed opportunities.

By the mailboxes I am thinking of about a mailman whom I never met and never will, for everyone knows he recently killed himself. I am also thinking of how the apartment is coming together, I have a day bed from Rita in the living room, and in the small bedroom a new double bed I put on a credit card from a Florida bank for which, I am ashamed my mother co-signed. In the tiny kitchen by which you enter the apartment I have a solid butcher-block table on wheels which I might use if I take up cooking. I enter the building now, thinking of my view down over the disused garden and out over rooftops far down southern Manhattan. One the first buildings in the view, the back of one on 24th Street, is, I was told by Steve, a place where young Catholic girls live. I wonder if any of them undress in front of windows. Steve, who works and holds court from behind a deli counter over on Seventh Avenues was over at my placer helping me move in furniture, including two stools, a chair and the butcher-block. I had bought the furniture from him with money from Atlantic City. Steve seems to have a significant wry outlook on life from behind the deli counter. Last week I left a note at the deli asking him to stop by for coffee, thinking he might beone of many new people who would soon be part of my new orientation, one of the new people I would have over for parties, just like I did in my twenties in New York before foreign travel had been a good enough reason to give up my base. Steve is concerned and puzzled. He came wanting to know what was wrong. Thinking the note I left him meant I was in some sort of trouble – not knowing it was about bringing new people into my life. New people to supplement people from still around from early days – Walter and Regina and John and Pat and Al Prettyman and whoever he is with now, and likewise Alex Bespaoff. Though so many others have drifted away. While I drifted away.

I take the small, new-seeming elevator up to my third floor place. There are only four apartments on each of the six floors. I turn left to my door, unlock both locks, and am stepping across the threshold when I feel the presence of someone behind me.

Mary bursts by me into my apartment. She is shouting. How dare I have such a nice modern place. As she shouts, the phone rings, and that infuriates her. She picks up my phone, and the answering machine too, and hurls them across the room. This small person I had wanted to be my life’s love. And then she comes at me fast punching and clawing and shouting. And I know I am at fault.

II

These plans, anyway, were circulating. The one that seemed close to a paying off, the light personal experience book, Twins in the American Century, this funny situation of my twin an I traveling the world but always on opposite sides, the people he was connecting with wanting, and sometimes trying with success, to kill the people I was connecting with, and vice versa – it seemed funny when I talked it, but not when I tried to do the sample chapter. But anyway the worst of the plans, the travel series on the West Indies and the dull Bahamas, was ready to go and an offer seemed on the way and Amy was coming from Rome to join me in this first leg – something like the way I thought life should be. It should be like Amy looked.

My cousin Elizabeth, who until this year I rarely saw but with whom I had had a black sheep’s bond, died just before our departure date. It had seemed like the bone marrow transplant was a success and then she had fallen apart, wound up on a respirator not in the city but in Westchester near her tight family’s little Scarsdale world. Died on a respirator after saying she would not be well for she wanted to die, because of the things they had done to her.

I went to Scarsdale for the funeral, where not long ago I had gone for my uncle’s funeral, a big stone Episcopal church that actually had a British Union Jack flag draped off to the side of a tidy stone alter, and where they read from the Book of Common Prayer, which we knew was so British, and it reminder me of childhood in the New Hampshire summers, this church where my brother and I took up the collection and where they would actually sing God Save the King. These people.

It also reminded me of life outside the family. Once Nana has told me that Aunt Marjorie had had a bad experience for there was a problem in her church. At a Scarsdale country club a boy one of the girls had invited to a dance was asked to leave when it was discovered he was Jewish. Later I heard the story from his perspective, for I later discovered it had been my old friend, the brilliant Walter Karp. The problem for Aunt Marjorie was that her Episcopal minister had criticized the country club, and so the parishioners has had him removed.

After the church service everyone went first to Elizabeth’s mother’s house for drinks and hors d'oeuvres. Aunt Marjorie pointed out that this had nothing to in common with the wakes that other sorts of people, like Irish and Italians, staged. My wife was there. She had appeared at the church. We had been Elizabeth’s friends. This was first time I had seen Mary since that violent night in Chelsea. But she decided not to go along in a limousine caravan to a sprawling Brooklyn cemetery where, it was constantly pointed out, prominent people were buried, and where Elizabeth’s three little children looked like children who had been left by the side of road.

I hardly paid attention to these children, however, as if they had nothing to do with me.

I had gone 36 hours without sleep by then for I wanted to get the island plan right, more for possible publication than for this immediate sojourn, before we left. I went back to Chelsea to sleep to a few hours, and then met Amy at the airport.

Cousin Elizabeth dead. The others still alive, except for Cousin Paul who had been killed a few years back, The others still alive but, I thought, but in precarious lives. Cousin
Richard back drugged our and sexed and back from California to spend the rest of his life with his mother. Lawrence, whose theatrical ventures were getting more and more precious, Jonathan always on the verge of being caught out , because of his kleptomania, even though he had a PhD now and had once been an Eagle Scout.

I knew without knowing exactly how I knew, that Elizabeth’s death was only one of many death’s looming. And I kept thinking, even as circumstances seemed so different, of death in the air. My twin brother had sent me a letter suggesting I give up everything and find a dull job because I should remember that we had nearly 30 years left to live. Peter always had it figured out. Fifty years when we were 21. Then for a time 40 years, and now 30 years, and the time shrinking fast.

Was that what I had to fight? That in the family I came from, as made clear in the present by Peter, death had always near.

And I did not feel depressed. No clear path ahead, nothing like what I would have predicted, but nonetheless alive and invigorated, as in a dash to outrace death.

November summary

2011-01-13T09:41:00.000-08:00

And now it is November, two years after that strange cut-off time in the rented room. I still live on that block, but for two years I have had a bright airy place of my own with a view over an abandoned garden and then rooftops – and those wonderful wooden water towers– the view leading almost to the Battery. Two years, the first being an attempt to put everything back together – plans and schemes and this blonde woman in from Rome who went with me to the Bahamas, and everything was wrong. And those events that made it impossible for me not to see what that family came from was all about, even though there were the exciting parts I the family story – socialism and the writing of well reviewed novels. And then there had been an unleashing of everything I has kept in while unaware I was keeping most of it inside me. And then the plunge into the past, the plunge into the stories.

And now it was November and I was back in the north country again, for the fourth time in a year, this place I usually had though I thought I did not need to see again, back this time on a rescue mission, which almost ended before it started when I got caught in a full whiteout, snow that suddenly began while I was driving through Franconia Notch, one of those storms that in family lore could come up any time and kill you, like projected attacks by Mama bears, or rusty nails that could give you blood poisoning, or an out of nowhere lightening bolt – back here in Sugar Hill where all the summer people had lightening rods on their houses. Staying now with my old friend Mickie in a White Wings where I had spent the first three summers of my life before being moved to White Pines.

THE BIG THINGS AND THE SMALL

2011-01-12T11:05:00.000-08:00

Insistent Scenes

#176 - RED TIDE

2010-12-22T08:18:00.000-08:00

There was always a change at Tampa or Miami to a shaky little propeller plane, always a captain who looked about 18, and often I’d be tossed around for the there is always foul weather there or looming in this so-called sunshine state. And then I had survived another trip on one of these little unregulated commuter airlines. I was in Naples. It would be too cold to swim, despite Florida claims, and anyway you could rarely swim on the west coast because of something called the red tide that left great welts on Your skin. This place where my father had come to die his horrible death, and where my mother had to be waiting for hers, though she still got around. When the dial phone rang in her condo it could be the policed badgering old people for money. The condo was not on the gulf, for her eyes could not stand the glare from the water , but on a bay where sometimes alligators were killed right in front of her place. She no longer played golf, though she still had clubs in the trunk of the little Plymouth she hardly ever used. They had just built a new golf course and new country club building in the rich part of Naples. The developers had sold big houses, McMansions, on the basis that the country club was being built, sold the houses before letting it be known that the country club would not accept Jews. Naples, the nice people’s place. Mother found this of interest, and did not seem to take sides. Some days there were noxious swamp gases from the Everglades in the Naples air.

I had not seen my mother since I had gotten into the significant changes in all the old stories. And I had not seen her since receiving that postcard she sent when her cruise ship docked at the port of Manila, a city where I had recently been under death threat for my activities with the opposition, including the New People’s Army, to the Reagan’s dictator friends, Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos. On the card she said that my twin brother Peter, the good twin, the CIA twin, had been there to meet the cruise ship. What a surprise, she said. And Peter had added a line in the margin of the card making light of “people power,” which was the not very accurate name for what had just overthrown the Marcoses. Peter had sworn to me he never had anything to do with the Philippines.

I mentioned this now and my mother asked me what I was talking about. I must be mistaken. I must have made it up about Peter being there and writing on the post card. She could assure me it had never happened.

I did tell her I had been in the While Mountains. I said I had seen Mrs. Milner. She said Mrs. Miner had left the family because Aunt Alice was having an affair with her son, which was not even close to what Mrs. Miner had told me, for Mrs. Miner said she left because life at White Pines was cold and mean. Mother said she had been getting calls from Aunt Alice who said I had written her saying I did not want to see her when she came to new York for the winter because of how she treated Deirdre. Aunt Alice had told Mother that my refusal to see her was the worst thing that had ever happened to her. Mother reported this with no sign of any emotion about any of it.

I asked if she had old photographs, something I had not bothered with before. She did, she said, in a storage space below the bookcase. Actually Peter and his wife had gone through them, but there was still many they had not taken. I found somed I had never seen of mother holding her two little babies, or rather holding Peter in a safe grip and hardly bothering with me. That was when we were about a year old, and the same thing again in a photo a few years later. And there was a picture of me with old two stuffed animals, one of which I recognized as my old favorite – a pale yellow dog made of leather and fake fur that I had named Barksy.

I told her I had been looking into old places up in the mountains. I did not tell her why. I did not tell her about my need to get the story right, to find out why so many of the people from those perfect summers, including all my cousins were coming to such bad ends. Deirdre’s battering the least of it for unlike some of them she was alive and her brain was not damaged. I did not tell her what I had suspected had happened to me.

At one point Mother made a statement about the family. She said, “What separates us is that we have…” and here she paused, “We have good genes.”

That first evening she got a phone call from Aunt Peggy, my late father’s sister-in-law, one of the relatives who stayed away from his death bed scene. The news was that the wife of Peggy’s pampered older son Jonathan – who was named after a purported naval hero in her line of descent – had just killed herself. Hung herself in Rochester, where Fitz was a new assistant professor of anthropology.

I was thinking of this late the next morning, still in bed in the guest room, which had recently been my father’s room. I was thinking about Fitz’s wife Elkaa, who had written to me in Southeast Asia me before she got married saying she had heard a lot about me and was happy there was someone in the family who was not a standard issue Poole. And we hit off when I was back in the country and finally met her – a vibrant , good looking young woman with an ironic but kindly smile. And I knew she disturbed her in-laws. What made Aunt Peggy particular furious was that when Elka came to spend a night in Scarsdale she brought with her a much loved black cat. This was as serious as that Elka was Jewish. I wondered what would become of her cat.

Mother knocked on the bedroom door. She said she had good news. She said she had just been on the phone with Peggy, and Peggy had just been talking with Elka’s mother, and the two mothers had agreed that it was all for the good that Elka was dead now. She had always been such a problem to her family in Long Island. And now Fitz would be able to lead the life he was meant for. My mother presented this as good news.

One photo that hit me hard was of Mother’s father, Grandfather Taylor. I remembered him as a jolly man, even when he was wasted away with cancer. But in this photo he looked like an Irish barroom fighter. He also looked a lot like Pat Buchanan, the Nixon aid turned opinionated journalist who was running for president on a basically anti-Semitic platform. And I thought of how on his infrequent visits he called my mother Dolly, and how he would find a bar wherever he was. I was once asked to fetch him form a bar in Westport where he was regaling everyone with baseball talk and joking stories. As different as it was possible to be from a person in my father’s family.

And then one of those memories that stayed somewhere in conciousness but had seemed meaningless. Once when Grandfather Taylor visited us in Connecticut, which was while his ex-wife, Grandmother Taylor, was away, Peter and I were going through his things and we found a pouch filled with pencils that had our names printed on them, such as ones had had made to give us for Christmas but here were clearly for himself. This discovery set us of crying and shouting, scared and furious.

At one point I asked Mother to tell me something about her childhood. She said she remembered nothing until she was in boarding school except for a picture in her mind of a servant looking down at her when she was in a baby carriage. She loved her boarding school, she said. I remembered that, though she handily ever sang, she had sung to us her old school song – “Arden my garden, my school amongst that pines…”

#175 – “HOME” FOR "THE HOLIDAYS"

2010-12-19T11:18:00.000-08:00

A week after getting back to Chelsea from this perhaps final trip ever to the White Mountains it was time for my annual trip to awful Florida. Dull, pretentious bigoted Naples on the genteel people’s usually placid west coast – Naples where three years ago my father had died in great pain, his chest an open red and yellow cancer wound, the death bed scene taking place in a third rate hospital that they all thought was fine but thought turn away Mexican citrus grove workers who came with knife fight wounds. This death scene. My then wife and I would spell each other, though our marriage was entering death too. In turn we would nap beside him on a raised bed that had been placed next to the death bed. At the foot the death bed sat a sad eyed and laconic young private nurse who said she was from a river town in Kentucky. The only sound the forced uneven breathing of my father.

A death bed scene to which no one came, except at the end my almost ex wife taking turns with me there. The others from this family I was now getting the goods on had deserted him. I knew enough already although this was three years before my intense investigations began. I did not just suddenly decide I was not a part of this sometimes intriguing and but also bigoted and deathly world I was born into. The death bed scene to which they did not show up. My mother, his wife, drinking at their condo, where she had already removed his hospital bed and Hoyer Lift and turned his bedroom into a guest room, and my brother the twin, and his British wife, and my father’s last living sibling my Aunt Alice, and his still living sister in law Aunt Peggy – none of them would come to the death. Sometimes the excuse was that Dad was surely in such a coma he would not know, but my wife and I knew he knew a lot, knew he asked for his wife, but none of them would believe us.

My routine now was to go to Florida at Thanksgiving so as to avoid Florida at Christmas. Back in the city I was back with all these new people I had been with all year, people willing to go back into the past so as to be alive in the present, and I was back to drawing cityscapes, water towers and boxy buildings and cars that looked liked cartoon characters, and hanging traffic lights.

Everyone in ACOA knew about my visual adventures, just as they knew about dark things I knew or suspected about the places I came from. At this very time I was back for maybe the last time from the mountains, and about to be in Florida for a cold version of a cliché family holiday visit, a new book by Alice Miller came out and they gave it to me in ACOA. Alice Miller who she did more than anyone else to help get at family horrors and break free of family horrors, her own and those of her readers. Her new book was called Pictures of a Childhood. It contained reproductions of her free form paintings, the paintings by which she got at what had happened.

This tough Switzerland-based analyst who up till then had been an honored orthodox Freudian, holding on to all that Freud had used, including the child sex drive theory, to keep himself from the harshest parts of real stories, those of his patients and probably also his own. She wrote in an introduction of how when she started painting, which she had given up so long ago she had forgotten she ever painted. It was at a time in mid-life that she felt her life at a dead end, then something crucial happened. In the mysterious sphere of art a little girl took her by the hand and led her back into that past she had tried to make better and tried to deny. Back to a time when she was painting, which in the past had been a secret thing between her and the forms and the colors. And then she had stopped altogether so that the narcissists who were her parents couldn’t get to it and kill it. And now this little girl took her back into herself.

I carried Pictures of a Childhood on the plane to Florida. And I drew on the plane. Across the aisle a fit middle aged man was reading a best seller by a basketball coach.

What I was drawing on the plane to Florida were, first, full page cartoon-like faces so distorted they were surprisingly horrible. They appeared almost all by themselves on my drawing pad. They seemed to be faces I knew. And then while on the plane I became focused on what I had suspected all year and really known since that moment last month on the phone when my Aunt Alice was telling me that her daughter was in a battered women’s shelter and that she really sympathized with the batterer because her daughter, my favorite cousin Lauryn, was just too young looking and appealing for her own good. Had it always been this way – these things happening and there being a connection between them. Paul’s death. Elizabeth’s. Malcolm’s druggy incapacitation. Paul’s serial sexual assaults on Deirdre. Deirdre’s battering. I remembered now that in the sports bar Deirdre was also telling me that her mother had gone through the same sorts of things – which I thought I would have known if I had done any reading between the lines.

But that moment on the phone with Aunt Alice. That moment I had had a quite clear idea of why long before I was grown even to the point of looking for prostitutes much less getting involved with girls who seemed to love me, back even when I was so young I had only the vaguest and totally incorrect ideas about the mechanics of sex, not even that sex has anything to do with babies growing in female stomachs, even back then I knew, without knowing I knew, the feel of a bare rounded breast, of bare soft smooth skin, of the special skin on a woman’s inner thigh.

This is on my mind on the plane to awful Florida where I go for Thanksgiving as a way out of going for Christmas with my mother. I have with me Alice Miller’s Pictures of a Childhood and I have the drawing pad I had just taken with me on that last trip to the White Mountains to rescue Deirdre who was back there again just out of a battered women’s shelter in the Midwest. My favorite cousin.

Ever since that phone call I have had I this picture of myself at the end of the upstairs hall at White Pines, the end that used t be blocked off as servant’s quarters but by the time I came along servants wanted to live in their own homes in the village, So these bedroom at the end of the hall were available for overflow family people, as in when they realized how freighted my brother and I were by real and imagined sounds in the night when we spent the nights in the distant Boys Wing and so moved us to these servant bedrooms at the far end of the upstairs of the house. From outside my room here there was a very steep staircase that led right into one of the pantries of the huge kitchen, where I seemed to spent a lot of my time. Down at the foot of the stairs was a box on the wall on which numbers would fall down corresponding to the room of whoever had pressed a buzzer button meaning service to that person’s room upstairs was desired.

I drew the box and the numbers. I also drew a collapsible woods slat gate that was sometimes pulled across the top of the narrow stairs so that we children when alone there would not tumble down. Sometimes I would be visited by someone who came directly up those steep stairs, like the day my Aunt Alice, a proven war widow, told me she had it on good authority that the Japanese pulled their prisoners' tongues out – or when in a still earlier summer Aunt Alice and also a free-flowing California blonde cousin by marriage, came up at twilight time to tuck me in, kiss me good light. They were dressed in flowing silky things that showed their arms and backs and their breasts almost to the nipples. They were on their way to a formal dance, a Red Cross fund raiser, at the Playhouse. During the day I had been up there at the Playhouse with our nurse watching a man hang Japanese lanterns in rows for people pass between as they came in to the dance. These women in my room now, dressed for the dance, they smelled sweet, like my mother’s cologne but more so. And they seemed pampered like kids, their smooth skin powdered like their pretty faces.

On the way to the playhouse, where in my own time we danced in nearly pitch dark not to an orchestra but to LPs, locked together so that, though actual sex seemed out of reach, it felt wildly close.

After I drew the box a few times. I drew the gate. Right here in this anonymous airplane I could smell those women. But my drawing was not accomplished art work. Maybe after I started at Parsons…. As it was, in the three months of my trying to draw I had done the buildings and water towers and hanging traffic lights and waiting cars parked around where I lived. Inanimate things that felt animate. And I had done one of little girls at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden sitting Indian fashion in a semi-circle around a friendly looking fat tree and a friendly woman. I had also been trying to sketch people in the subways, usually adults and children leaning on each other.

In the plane now I can feel myself a small child wrapped in a smooth woman. When I am not trying to draw I am looking at the Alice Miller dream paintings, and reading about how what happened was that finally a little girl came out of the past and took her by the hand. I exactly didn’t see a little boy taking me back, but I was remembering things I had forgotten that had to do with putting lines and colors on paper. I remembered drawing World Wry II planes, like everyone was doing, but mine were flying between and around the planets.

I had not seen anything like it until a couple of weeks ago there was a post suicide show at the School for Visual Art of works by this artist, younger brother of my childhood friend, who had planned to drive up to Vermont with me at the start of the summer but had killed himself insteaed. In the show were paintings of little people pedaling fiercely on unicycles as they dropped through space.

#174 – DEFECTIONS

2010-12-16T11:11:00.000-08:00

There were defections. I knew there would be but it still was startling, like a lover moving on, and you had hoped and known she would, but when she does it is like it comes out of the ether.

An early defector was a chubby young girl who seemed violently unhappy, but kept saying everything was fine, a girl whose face was twisted in a grimace often and whose overweight body sometimes seemed nubile but sometimes it was like the sagging body of someone old and defeated. And when she talked, and she talked at length, it was always about how pretty she was, though her moments of seeming pretty were fleeting. She was a friend of the very alive and actually pretty young girl who was back in Lenox, Mass. I ran into the chubby girl one day on the subway. She said she was finished with ACOA, all these people who had nothing do to but complain. She was moving on as, she implied, she always knew she would. Goodbye you little people who can’t get your lives together.

Over on the East Side there was a sweating man in twisted middle age who said people should realize he was really with the CIA, and was gearing up to go on one last mission. And he said not to feel insulted if he did not recognize any of us for he had something in his brain that made it impossible to identify faces.

An older girl or woman who could really let go in meetings disappeared too. She had not claimed to be pretty. She had often spoken of being passionate about sexual attraction to and from women, and she would say that what made her really angry was that the men wanted to keep all the women to themselves. She was the one who when the Reaganites bombed unprotected people in Libya, and Reagan’s Defense Secretary was leaping up and down on television in apparent sexual arousal, came to a meeting angry at the French for, she said, we must all think the worst thing was that the French would not let our bombers fly over their country. And now I ran into her in the subway too. She said I may have noticed that she had not been around. She had had enough, she said, echoing an AA thing about “getting off the pity pot.’”

And there was a well-groomed, soft-spoken, clean-cut man who had been coming for years but now sent a letter around to everyone in Manhattan ACOA whose addresses he could find telling them he had moved on to another stage, and now would go only to a meeting in Brooklyn Heights where people held in their anger. A nice people’s meeting.

And some who stayed were defecting in other ways. A taut woman, who looked like someone who would carry a clipboard, announced what she called the good news that ACOA was getting a national organization, to be based in California. Worse than a defection, this could mean the end to the sorts of tough life-giving things that were happening with people in non-scripted, non-pious Manhattan ACOA. I had seen the vague California version on my last trip out there, the self flagellators, the pious followers of pious versions the 12 steps that we mostly ignored in Manhattan – the Californians’ penchant for cutting off what I thought of as healthy anger, to closing everything down in the name of harmony, whereas in Manhattan there were no rules, no hierarchy. In Manhattan, anything was allowed short of racial bigotry or necrophilia.

And something else was changing too. The really smart people, including the sympathetic therapist who had finally turned her attention to herself and her history, and also my frightening stalker Abigail, had gravitated to each other. We really smart people. And now there was a new intellectual named Harry who had just appeared and it seemed he was “one of us,” the therapist told me happily, “one of us” meaning, to her, that he was a solid atheist who would work to keep any soft and silly AA piety, or any other sort of piety, out of ACOA. She almost forgave him for showing up quite drunk at a couple of our meetings that had expanded to get the goods on all abusers but were originally formed to get the goods on abusing boozers. I certainly was not religious. An author’s directory had me as correctly atheist/agnostic. But this year would not have been this year if I had not become open to alternative versions of reality. I thought of those churches in Vermont. And now for the first time I could see that between my new allies and me there could be a chasm as great as the divide between me and the Poole dynasty of the White Mountains.

And I was finding that I was spending as much time in the museums as in ACOA meetings. I talked with Julia, a tall sweet, sometimes tortured girl in ACOA whose parents had been Cuban before they became American State Department people. She was an artist and understood what I as doing. And she was enrolled at Parsons.

I thought of an open and delicately sculptured girl named Trish, who was more vulnerable than I had realized and whom I had been with a number of times when I was with other girls too way back in the late fifties. She gave me a book of love poetry. It felt wonderful. I could not find her again three years later in a time of darkness after foreign adventures. Had she changed her name?

Trish had been studying fashion design at Parsons. Two parts of my inner and outer worlds coming together, my attraction to appealing visual art and my attraction of appealing women. Visual art, not writing. I had taken Trish on an expense account for something silly to Chicago for a weekend when I was 25. I knew Chicago from when I was 21 and was having what now seemed like serial epiphanies in the Art Institute. Something else in the past to consider in this year 1986 in which so much was coming to me visually, not verbally.

173 – WHALES

2010-12-13T12:25:00.000-08:00

There but for the grace of God go I. These words appeared from nowhere in this amusing old Mustang I was in, the car itself seeming as relieved as perhaps I should be feeling to be getting away from the White Mountains. This place I had avoided for so long and did not think I had to deal with, except to admire, until this year of exploration when it had become clear to me that I could not live unless I got the old stories straight. Some of my friends from childhood and adolescence were still there up there in the mountains and in the stories. My brother, who had the last of the big family houses, was still there with his English wife, summers in the mountains and winters in a Virginia suburb near the CIA, where he had gone to work. Donald was still there, for him a place to live with no career, his work life apparently having come to an end when, while still in his twenties, he was denied tenure at Dartmouth despite his work on Rudyard Kipling. And Ginnie was back having decided to delete her art career. And Terri, too, was again in this small corner of the world, living in one wing of a family house, White Wings, that was once one of our houses. Hal was coming up from Massachusetts frequently for the hunting and killing of small animals. These people from our summer gang had been out in the world, and now they were back. There but for the grace of god.

Not that I really believed then either in a god or that I could be trapped that way. But in this year of exploration I had realized how much before this year I had been protecting the family and its restricted kingdom, even while I stayed away, even while I made fun of them all. I had blocked off the mental meanderings that might have led me to figure it out, blocked out evidence of the death and abuse just below the surface – and the way they could kill off anything that did not have family precedent.

And I thought of how it has been when we were all young there. How I had been so sure we would all be so different from the kings and queens of these little kingdoms based on restricted ownership of big summer houses.

There but for the grace of God go I. An AA term, one of the AA sayings that many of us had fun with, and hated, in the much more free wheeling and open ACOA, Adult Children of Alcoholics, where everyone was out to get the goods on the propagators of horrors in the past. By 1986 I had not had a drink in over a decade – not even when back in the Far East – not even when in a failing marriage – not even when I would have moments of seeming success when a book came out. But I did not associate myself with these AA people we were attacking.

In one bleak year, when my marriage was grim and I could not write, I had dropped in with some regularity on an afternoon AA meeting on the Upper West Side, near where I lived then. I kept to myself. I went there not as a participant but to hear the stories of others. Now I thought I unconciously went there looking for some real draw to connections I lacked.

And now I was thinking as I drove away from the mountains, as I played on the tape deck Judy Collins and James Taylor and Joan Armatrading, whose songs has been accompanying me in this year of battle against the old kingdoms – I was thinking that those words from poor old AA applied to me too. For before this year it has almost seemed like life was over. I had finally had to admit despair, and not of the sweet romantic kind, and also the almost literal loss of hope, certainly the deepest of all the depressions I had known, including the incapacitating ones I had denied, this one feeling like the terminal depression – and all this has changed this year as I pieced the story together, revising the scenes of the past, finding witnesses from the past, finding memories I could trust – and people to accompany me to those ignored dark places.

As I drive down back roads all the way from the White Mountains, there is a welling up such as has become familiar in this year. Judy Collins is singing a song about a man on a sailing ship who goes all the way to barren Greenland to kill whales. She sings the line, “There is no bird in Greenland to sing to the whale." And on the tape are the actual sad and lonely whistling sounds of actual whales who will not be saved.

172 - WREATHS

2010-12-06T11:48:00.000-08:00

I spent my last afternoon with Lauryn while she was making big lush Christmas wreaths from pine boughs with pine cones and bright ribbons, all her materials laid out on the floor of a glass enclosed old porch at her boyfriend’s old Littlewton house. She said she had had this wreath business when she was living in Littleton in the past, so it was easy to get back in it now. This seemed so touching to me: the brave gorgeous girl being independent with something basically artistic, even back in the darkest days.

This warm world of girlfriends and boyfriends and a town where you were known. The pretty girl’s veneer that she was in a world that was light and happy.

But during the wreath-making her son kept appearing. He had lived in Littleton with his grandmother, Aunt Alice, since he was thrown out of the White Mountain School. Now he kept dropping in at the boyfriend’s house. He was a little angry. He said he thought what we were doing was ridiculous He said he did not like not being able to tell his grandmother that Fred was here in the mountains. Everyone, he said, should get along. His tone was arch.

Here in the warm world of girlfriends and boyfriends in regular place – with the grandson a messenger from places of a colder, sterner dispensation. Lauryn’s mother using her son to get her back.

When Lauryn was in her first weeks in college in Minnesota – a college she want to because her mother did not want her joining her town friends at the University of New Hampshire – she had called her mother for advice and help. She had found herself pregnant. Aunt Alice had promptly flown out to the Midest and talked Lauryn into having the child, though Lauryn wanted an abortion. I had asked her why she had not done what she had wanted to do. Her reply was, “Because this is my mother.”

Her mother, who had been the designated girl in trouble of her generation, the light airy one who was loved to distraction by her father and more or less openly had affairs that so disturbed people who never spoke of such things.

Her father loved her more than anyone else, though she scandalized them. And anyway she stayed loyal. She kept on returning to the White Mountains in the summers, even when she was living in England, and when the going got really tough it was to the White Mountains that she had gone, though to Littleton rather than the correct summer people’s towns. Afterwards she complained that none of the old family friends up there had been welcoming.

She was a problem, especially to my father, who had given up part of his inheritance, and then seen to it that that part and the money that had come to her directly was in a trust set up so that she could never get at the principal. Enough for her to live on but with no extraneous luxuries.

And now it was her daughter, the pretty one of the next generation, who had responded to hard times by returning to the mountains.

Lauryn said she wanted me to take me one of the wreaths. She said she really wanted me to have it.

#171 – A CAR

2010-12-06T11:42:00.000-08:00

The next morning Lauryn called me at Terri’s and said she needed a favor. She did not have her own car but someone was going to loan her one. Could I come by, pick her up and take her somewhere.

We drove to what looked like a gravel quarry turned into a construction area. The man who had the car was there in a long trailer where he apparently both worked and lived. Around the main part of it there were blueprints laid out on drafting tables. He was a tall youngish man, another who had been in high school with Lauryn. A quite well off young man whose family owned the property he was planning to develop. Like the boyfriend, he seemed so delighted to see this woman who still looked like a girl. Was quick and smart as well as lovely, challenged men to be their best, seemed not to have a care, seemed so well-adjusted and cheerfull.

This man with the trailer, the family business and the extra car was, she told me, the owner of the Littleton diner. This was not the time for my amusing punch line about the specialty of the day being cheeseburger quiche.

#170 – TOWN GIRL

2010-12-03T10:34:00.000-08:00

I started that day after the moonlight trek on little sleep but feeling new energy. It was as if during the night I had gone into battle and survived. A battle of competing versions of reality, my evolving version and that of the people who had been in those big old houses long before I was born, and during my childhood and adolescence. And it was as if during the night it had become absolutely clear what I had been doing and needed to do – not that I had felt at any time in the past year that the attacks I was making on family were not warranted.

Awake in late morning I looked out my room’s window past the aqua Mustang to the familiar field in front of White Wings. The remaining snow cover was melting. Brown grass was appearing.

Before Terri began bringing in retired farm animals this field had already been like a rocky grazing field – which I knew the people of the past would find classier than a tailored lawn. In my line of sight now was a bushy pine thing in the middle of the field, a pine thing that had many separate limbs growing up from the ground. I took from my very old briefcase my still new drawing pad, feeling that I was in the swing of something natural to me. I sketched the pine thing roughly with one of my still new drawing pencils.

I called Lauryn and we met in Littleton for coffee. This lively though so recently battered cousin I had driven up here to comfort or rescue. She told me now that last night she had forgotten to say she was doing therapy. When she got back from the Middle West, out of the shelter, she had found a new group of therapists had set up shop specializing in trauma right here in Littleton, this old time mill town, where she had gone to high school. I was suspicious since I had been hearing so many stories this past year of people going through years of therapy without every getting at family horrors. Therapists scared of their own stories. But she showed me a brochure that made it seem the new group in Littleton was cutting edge, with an approach that was perhaps not so unlike what we were doing in ACOA without therapists. I showed her the drawing. It was a Juniper, she said. And then she spoke again of how, now that the worst was over, she really wanted to continue her studies to become a landscape architect.

In the evening I went over to the house where her new boyfriend lived with his crusty old mother down by the rushing Amonoosic River, a timeless area of mystery with its weather beaten wooden buildings, some of them solid but some so flimsy you’d think the water could carry them away. Old houses. Old shuttered factories in the background. Old-time year-round people. A place of mystery. And in this place a warm old house where Lauryn had apparently found safety.

The TV was on and I believed it would always be on. The boyfriend was a friendly man who worked in construction in the summers and was on the ski patrol, based on Cannon Mountain, in the winter. He said that although he and Lauryn were in the same high school class they had been in such different circles that they hardly knew each other. She the popular girl of the time. And then she had gone away to college like so many in the class, to college or bigger places, and he had found himself one of the very few who never left. In the living room of his family house now she was running her fingers through his hair.

French Canadians down by the river in Littleton. A mill town. The summer people’s shopping town. A real town with its different place in the world. They told me his late father was a legendary figure who had made his living trucking booze in from Canada during prohibition. And the old rum runner’s wife, here dominating the living room even while she simply stared at the TV, she was as solid as the Old Man of the Mountains and nearly as craggy.

#169 – MOONLIGHT

2010-12-03T10:05:00.000-08:00

I come in late. I think I should be exhausted with all the ground we have just covered at the Clam Shell. But there is an almost full moon that bounces off the early snow that lightly covers the ground, the snow that came as I was driving through the Notch. The cold night air is so clear and fresh, and the past so present, that what I must see I can best see in moonlight.

I walk out the driveway though the field in front of White Wings to to Davis Road, this birch-lined road of summers, this road where I walked as a child with Gaga, who always had a cane and a floppy sun hat, and sometimes actual dogs though sometimes just remembered dogs, this road where Peter and I laid plans to be welcoming North Country inn keepers, this road I drove when I was 16 with my important girlfriend Ellyse – this road that eventually passes the little summer church where my parents were married and where at 14 in a rare good boy phase I would, with my twin brother, take up the collection, this church that some said was so like something you would expect in England.

By now I could not stand the sounds of British English for it reminded me of the fake British sounds of these summer people. But that distaste for those sounds was recent. And I still felt the pull of family that centered around the life and work of the grandfather, the writer, that had its radical side that I had tried to concentrate on – though he spent so much of his life here among people as far from old socialist colleagues as my grandfather could get.

This place that must carry an explanation for the molestation and early death that now seemed the hallmark of a family whose worst failings used to be snobbery – these people whom I had been attacking for a year now, the first year of my life that I have been free of depression.

I walk, through the snow now, past bare apple trees that in the night look like hanging trees, through the grounds of big houses that look now like gothic novel houses – in this place obscured by family fiction that I am trying to burrow into to find out what part is real.

There is beauty here in the moonlight. I am looking for more than horror.

My toes are numb but I walk all the way through pine woods down the twisting drive and look at White Pines against the mountains. From the outside you cannot tell it has been gutted and turned into cheap apartments. It is that house that is always there with the only difference being the cheap tin roof that has been added to what should have still been wooden shingles. The roof now is a giant reflector of moonlight.

I return to the long drive. I cross Davis road and walk below the Farmhouse, shuttered for the winter, and then I walk up to at a rectangle in the ground that is still clear even with light snow, like something marked out on an area where archeologists plan to dig. This place where the Playhouse had stood. I am below the ominous House on the Hill, owned for some years now by old virginal school teachers who never bothered reviving the family tennis court.

I pass a drive that may be to where the man my grandmother may have been having an affair with had lived. And I go on up Davis Road. No cars are out and here are no lighted houses, no houses at all before I get to the paved driveway going up beneath large branches to the Mallory’s old place. The chain barrier and the "Beware of the Dog" sign which in September Gillian had pointed out meant hostility to strangers, are no longer there.

I walked up the drive. It was not plowed but the snow was powdery and could not have been more than three inches. Up the drive, with on the right the long garage where the Mallory's kept their cars, with rooms above for the many servants they brought with them from Philadelphia. Black servants. Enough of them to amuse themselves, people said, since there was no place for Negroes to go in the mountains. Past the garage the tennis court where old family people had gathered, Mrs. Mallory sometimes playing a folky zither, and then the chateau-like main house where people used to go for movie evenings since Otto Mallory did not drink. His death was so ironic, everyone said, hit by a drunken driver while going for his mail in Pennsylvania.

Beyond the chateau at the start of woods there was something that looked like a little house out of a fairy tale that I knew was the house where children had stayed, the counterpart to the children’s house for the Gibbs grandchildren, which had its own kitchen and room for a nurse or governess, and the Boys Wing for us at White Pines, where there was a room for our nurse too. Ours was not a separate house but you got to it through the kitchen and pantries.

On up Davis Road. Cold but not minding it. Up all the way to that little summer church and just beyond the turnoff up past the Pioneer on one side and the Gibbs house on the other to where the old Sunset Hill House had stood. Had it burned down, or was that just something people said. Had it merely been demolished by wreckers, like the Playhouse? And now I come to the much smaller clapboard place that calls itself the Sunset Hill House but is actually the old building where the summer staff had lived, college boys who were summer bellboys, college girls who were summer waitresses. These older boys and pretty girls who came in from worlds beyond ours and with no family looking on – boys and girls who would not understand our people any more than our elders would understand them. The world beyond.

But here I am in the world within. It is painfully cold here. My toes ache and my feet are mostly numb. Probably not frostbite yet, but I do think I might be heading back to White Wings just in time.

#168 – ADRIFT

2010-11-24T08:28:00.000-08:00

On the news is a horror scene in the subway, a station not far from here. A pursed little man named Bernie Goetz had cornered three black men and shot them, leaving one paralyzed from the neck down. The police catch up with him and there is suddenly a right wing campaign to honor and save Bernie Goetz. It somehow – no mystery to my mind – gets all tied up with the exaltation of Ronald Reagan. Rita is on food stamps and also distributes government food, cheese and honey, to everyone on the block, whether they qualify as officially poor or not. But she is a great fan of Reagan who would take all this away from her. Also, she is Puerto Rican in this time when Washington is in the hands of racists. And now she has become a great fan of Bernie Goetz. And still she is about the nicest person I have ever met.

She keeps tabs on everyone in the neighborhood. Judging by her sweet, confident smile, and by the looks of a daughter who comes through, she was extremely pretty when she was young and thin and working as a catalog model, which was how she met her late husband. She rents to me illegally since this is a rent control apartment. She is all over the neighborhood, goes to mass frequently, knows everyone and everything. Although her apartment is cold at night, there is a feeling of plenty – a refrigerator full almost to overflowing, everything from ice cream to apple juice to turkey, sandwich spreads, ham apples, frozen deserts, and there are pantry shelves crowded with other fruits, and canned juices and meats, bread and pastries and crackers and cookies.

I am lonely here in this rented room that is so cold at night. Its linoleum floor feels refrigerated. And, moreover, I have the illusion I am wandering again in strange towns where I do not speak the language – Sarajevo, Cairo, Tokyo – though I am having this experience right here in New York where there are so many people I have known for so long. My window is on the ground floor, right on the sidewalk on 25^th Street, and there is some sort of bar nearby that at 4 in the morning empties out a batch of men who then traverse the block singing drunkenly.

It has become incredibly cold in here. I am reading, and also following on public TV, the Raj Quartet – sex and double dealing, in stifling hot places. Brits in jodhpurs, lovely tragic girls, some dark and some light, the Indians looking as Indian as the Brits look Brit. My old friend John Thackray has me going once a week to a yoga session, which takes place in a high apartment on Central Park West that looks out over the Central Park reservoir, which is so clear in the winter light. Three lithe girls, John and me, and the teacher, a personable out-of-work dancer. There are signs of the times here. Books linking angels to dolphins, and two flotation tanks. John tells me, in his ironically British tones, how you an be put in one of these wet coffin-like affairs in order to have some by-the-numbers spiritual experiences. But the guy who teaches the yoga class is no yoga martinet and is anyway not the owner of the place. John, who is a world class mountain climber and always in first rate shape (though he wasn’t when were friends 20 years ago) says it is the only yoga class where what they say about how to breathe makes sense to him and works. This yoga guy is a dancer who goes to auditions. All the classes are called off when he gets a role dancing and acting in a road company of A Chorus Line.

I go over to Murray Hill to see my doctor, who is actually the son of a doctor who delivered Peter and me and was a close friend of my grandfather’s close friend, an immigrant doctor with whom my grandfather worked in the settlement house movement early in the century. I like this doctor, who by now is himself getting old, because while we talk he chain smokes and his brash nurse brings him cup after cup of strong black coffee. Once when I was back from abroad and feeling awful he sent me to a series of specialists, all of whom were elderly men with thick accents. He gives me the sleeping pills I want, and I still see him even though he had told me a few years ago my only problem was is that I did not have a regular job. He had held up as an example his brother, whom he said was in the same situation, wanting to be a writer, until he got good job in public relations. He had said I needed therapy, but the kind where the therapist does most of the talking. He doesn’t repeat any of this now, but he does say that nothing physical explains the fatigue I feel, and so maybe I should look at certain aspects of my life. In the past he had said it was probably too late to do anything about whatever it was that kept me awake. My wife went to him once for a checkup and she told me he had said I was a person with whom he would enjoy having a drink.

On my way back I run into my Aunt Alice who has just arrived from New Hampshire to spend the winter in a residential hotel in New York. She is full of ideas of things we should do. At the top of her list is the movie Gandhi which is playing on East 23rd and which I do not want to see. I really cannot take these fictionalized versions of real life. I know what Gandhi looked like. I have seen a thousand pictures. He did not like Ben Kingsley going for an Academy Award. Also, in recent years I have found I cannot stand to be in the same room with Aunt Alice, which I have thought might mean there is something wrong with me. She has always been, to the family and myself, my favorite aunt, the careful rebel of her generation.

Aunt Alice asks me to come to dinner at her club. She say the words “my club” in the English way she learned in her years in London. It turns out, strangely, to be the National Arts Club where some very safe artists have studios and which is stuffier than the Players Club, where my father went when he was in publishing, and nearly as stuffy as the Century, where my father once took me to lunch to tell me I should not take an offered book advance because my grandfather never took money until he had finished a book. For this dinner Aunt Alice brings along the daughter of someone she knows. Match-making is being attempted.

The girl, who has a pretty face but wears a tailored suit, talks about a long love affair she had just gotten over. She works at what sounds like a boring job in finance. Her lover, however, was a painter. She talks of the long quiet evenings at his place where she would read and he would paint, and it all sounds so ideal that she must be sadder than she looks. There is nothing much between us, though it seems like there should be. She speaks about how her father has been diagnosed with Parkinson’s. Aunt Alice talks about her brother, my father, and his long decline into death with Parkinson’s – giving us and this girl, my aunt seems to be saying, the bond of having things in common.

Near my place I run into a neighbor, Harvey, who had been John’s best man years back when he married an appealing young actress at the Little Church Around the Corner, the Actor’s Church. Harvey is a smart lonesome guy who had a long affair with a woman who loved him but whom he rejected when they were in couples therapy. He works at part-time college teaching and never speaks about ambitions to do anything else. He is amusing in his pessimism about the political state of the world and the sad state of the arts. He lives in a studio apartment in London Terrace, an old middle class and upper middle class development, with strict controls on rents, that covers a full block just west of me. It has a long waiting list to get in. Elliot says it has dawned on him that he has such a good deal he will never leave, though he is unhappy that he did not think at the beginning to go for a one bedroom. I used to think we were at opposite ends – Elliot always down, me usually just back from some adventure or off on another. Now it looks like we may be interchangeable.

#167-EXPLANATION

2010-11-22T08:37:00.000-08:00

At end of the summer in Indianapolis I went to Connecticut for a long weekend with them all, Mother and Dad and my brother Peter at our house in Connecticut. When I stepped down from the train at the Westport/Saugatuck station what got their attention was the new hat I was wearing. A hat I had seen in a store window on a Friday afternoon and that had seemed just the thing to wear for when I was up in Chicago that night. At the train station in Connecticut, they all said in turn, amused and exasperated, that now he has a pork pie hat. Home!

At the beginning of November I spoke to them on the phone, an election night duty call much like a duty holiday call, though like those holiday calls I actually did want these occasional connections by phone back then. When it was clear the awful Eisenhower would win I went to a pay phone on a windy street so as not to be overheard calling home from the United Press bureau. To avoid an argument I skirted the issue of the election. Dad had said he could hear in my words that I had picked up a Middle Western accent, though actually in Indiana some people thought I sounded British.

The pork pie hat. The hint of a Midwestern accent. Always something that brought me back to a sorry role in the lurking family story, which I tried so hard to sweep under the rug until this time 30 years later when I was at last on the hunt for what was there behind the family façade.

When in Connecticut on the long weekend I told them only of the up times in Indianapolis. Of getting promoted to covering the Legislature for United Press, of getting bylines. I did not tell them of things that would only bring them back to their constant jibes. For example, this girl I went out with whose father had the Muzak concession for Indianapolis. On the walls of their homey kitchen there were framed sampler style sayings about the divinity of music and its soothing of savage beasts (breasts?) while down in the basement a huge spool of tape, set on its side, was turning night and day sending out the most awful syrupy stuff to every waiting room and office building in Indianapolis. She was a sweet girl and bright, and I did not want them attacking her even though it would only be their version of her and she would never hear it.

Was this why I was so angry? That they could not see beyond themselves? That nothing was meant to be real? It was crucial to their sense of who they were that my late paternal grandfather had been for a time quite famous, an American novelist who had been on most freshman English classes required or suggested reading lists.

I could not talk to them about what really interested me because they could not connect, perhaps, to any stories that they did not themselves create. So I didn’t tell them about the little man who had just been released from prison after 17 years – one of the stories I was on. It turned out he had been the grand wizard or dragon or something of the Indiana Ku Klux Klan in a time leading up to World War II when the Klan had run just about everything from politics to outright crime in Indiana. But he had been convicted after it was found he had kidnapped a girl, forced her into a Pullman sleeper compartment in one of the many trains running up to Chicago, and there he had not just raped her, he had bitten off her nipples.

I had not heard anyone mention the Klan until this guy was released, and now, knowing how it had controlled the state, so much that puzzled me was suddenly clear. The Legislature I had been covering had just passed a law that, if the courts did not object, would mean a 10-year-old child could go to the electric chair in Indiana for nighttime burglary. Everyone knew who did nighttime burglary. Non-white rapists.

And I had seen the governor, his name was George Craig, standing in the back of a black convertible, surrounded by men with guns, standing as if he had his arm his arm up and out in a way that was halfway between a blessing to his people and a fascist salute. He was driven slowly around the racing oval at the state fairgrounds stadium. He had risen not in the usual ways of politicians elsewhere but through the state police and the American Legion, which has its black marble national headquarters right here.

With this new information about the role of the Klan in Indiana, so much fell into place. The Klan control has been recent enough that almost all the puffed up politicians I covered had to have been members to be in politics. Governor Craig, and cruel, taut senator William Jenner, who had taken over as inquisitor from the disgraced Senator McCarthy, and the obese Senator Homer Capehart whose family manufactured juke boxes that the mob insisted every bar purchase – all these bizarre men. And the Southern racist layout and traditions of the city. And the prevailing suspicion of foreigners, including denizens of the East Coat. And the ever widening use of the electric chair. It all fell into place with this information about the Klan.

And now 30 years later in New Hampshire on the search for what went so wrong that my cousins were coming to horrible ends, I thought back on that time in Indiana and wondered if there were not some piece of information, such as what came out when the prisoner was released in Indiana, that would be about something so awful that it would explain everything.

#166 - CONNECTED

2010-11-21T15:12:00.000-08:00

The anger in that sports bar had been connected. Not like the free flowing anger of the past. As in those mornings I would awaken in the first place purely my own, a room with a view over a clean, colorless avenue from a brick rooming house in Indianapolis of all places. Awake and tight and taut and shaking from extreme anger, an anger that could have no end, a floating anger though nearly focused on my parents, on being raised as the dumb bad twin with the bright twin brother, on being belittled.

But that part would come in and out of focus, for it seemed too flimsy to explain the intensity of my anger. And as I walked through the flat Midwestern city, breathing its unique flat air, on down past its black marble Roman or Nuremburg style national headquarters of the dread American Legion where the Commie hunters marched and schemed, on down past the lazy old Claypool hotel, wreathed inside and out by cigar smoke, where the politicians hung out, and then past small hotels where the small town assemblymen could find inexpensive short-time girls who poured into town when the legislture met, which was for two months every two years, and on down through on of the city’s skid rows, between missions and unsaved sidewalk drinkers, on to the old Indianapolis Times where I was in the United Press enclave, covering strange Hoosier world McCarthy era politics, some by phone, some from over at the grandiose state capitol.

By this time at 21 I was well beyond family expectations of me. Only my father’s patrician mother seemed to see what I was doing – first by proving to be bright in boarding school, than discovering that there were girls who could like, even love, me. And then I was filling up the school’s trophy case with brass, wood and plastic regional debating trophies that towered over the sad little things won for stupid ball games by my school enemies. And soon I was briefly in Paris, stepping into the paintings I saw there, and later in college finding I could write even though my brother was the chosen writer. But also so many down times when I froze up.

And this now was an original time, roaming in the unknown Middle West. But awakening under the shadow of the past, and filled with white hot but diffused anger – anger that drifted away as I stepped out into the flat air of Indianapolis and ducked in for coffee next door at a Toddle House restaurant where there was a gray woman behind the counter who had a concetration camp tattoo on her fleshy upper arm. I ordered a cheese omlette, and as usual there were bits of egg shell in it.

The anger left now that I was walking through the city, left as unexplained as it had arrived when I was sleeping last night. And it is seeming so strange that after all I had done and was doing that I could still be angry at those people I came from. For now I am enjoying this plain old middle America city that I ridiculed in letters to friends. For it is a place of my own. I have been meeting people, the father of a childhood Connecticut friend, this father out here in exile with his own best friend’s wife. And a Marxist couple – the man had been an organizer for the fabled Electrical Workers Union that the McCarthyites destroyed. He and my friend’s father are working for money now, both of them with new identities as machine tools salesmen. And I am writing a novel a night, though it leaves me time for the piano bars and the small hotels and the non-professional girls I meet. I am my own person, an actual reporter and writer and rewrite man in this place that no one I am related to has ever seen. And I am almost feeling at home on the weekends when I take one of the four parallel train lines to Chicago for jazz and Second City and the Art Insitute and big black Southside clubs.

Thirty years later in the summer of deep probing I was thinking of in this time when I was 20. Thinking over my life now that I was on a mission to rescue an abused girl. Thirty years later when the anger was finally becoming focused.

I thought that if I could get at the anger I would know what they did or did not do to me and/or her and/or those other cousins of mine who now were joining the dead.

#165-TODD BAINES

2010-11-06T08:16:00.000-07:00

I make a detour to drive over to the Profile Club. It is closed for the season but there is no gate to bar me. The old clubhouse, nearly as old as the even smaller clubhouse at the Sunset, seems unchanged in any way except a new roof that uses asphalt, rather than wood, for its shingles. Nothing of any importance different since my young days except for the installation of a small swimming pool on the other side of the dirt driveway that passes the clubhouse.

  I drive down to the old pond near the fairway where we used to swim. As in the summer, I am looking for memories. I want to play with the picture of myself at not quite 16 standing on a diving board the day Ellyse made her first appearance on a small rocky beach down to the left from where I was standing. I was wearing a brimmed canvas hat I had purchased at a hardware store in Littleton. Showing off, I dove into the water with the hat on, and I swam nearly to the beach underwater, shooting up out of the water to introduce myself to this new pretty girl.

  I see now that the pond is still there, but many years must have passed since anyone has been swimming in it. You can hardly see the water for the tall reeds that have grown up. It must have been abandoned when the swimming pool went in. Yet this is still the very pond that is always somewhere in my mind, and it does bring a vivid memory, though not the memory I had planned to conjure up. The scene in my head now is a different one from that same time that will never go away.   

Poor Todd Baines. He is here at our swimming place at the Profile Club. Terri in her sexy green two-piece bathing suit has just been making a gesture with her index finger and little finger that must be something sexual, since she, at 14, is so well developed she must be very advanced. And Ellyse is here, so young and beautiful. And some of the others, the younger Conrad’s and Colby’s, big families with big summer houses, who had been my childhood summer friends in the White Mountains and were now, in their stages of adolescence, as tall as their elders.

Their elders out on the golf course. Men with liver spots on their balding heads, gray haired women in long skirts, with bags of golf clubs each of which is protected by a little knitted sock. Some of the men are very old and here all summer, others not quite so old work in the city and come up on the weekends in Pullman sleeper cars on the overnight train from Grand Central.

It feels to me these old people are being eclipsed by our summer gang – Kyle and Larry and Tom and Ted and Ron and Daniel, and these girls I have known for so long who suddenly look like women. Terri and Ellyse and all the others, Nancy and June, and Cassie and Marge, and on and on, here as we are all coming into lives that I think I know will not be like the small lives of the often pretentious people we come from. I make allowances, but I know they are pretentious, for I am a big reader.  

And here is Todd Baines, with an ear-to-ear, buck-tooth grin, in a category by himself, not connected to the older people, and certainly not to us. We have all heard how he was wounded in childbirth by an incompetent doctor who wielded forceps clumsily. One of the many misfortunes to have overtaken the Baines family – right up there with Judge Baines dying before his pension was due, and so old Mrs. Baines, whom no one knew did not have family money, lives a small life in a cold little house, and confident, good-looking Karen Baines, her daughter, is doing something in the fashion business in New York that has tongues up here wagging. It does not take much to get the tongues wagging in this place which is grandiose but so tiny. It was a big subject when it turned out someone in one of the old summer houses had placed on each bed, of all things, an electric blanket. As if they were criminals.  

Todd goes out on the shaky little diving board near a sluiceway where water runs off from the spring fed pond. He is wearing old-time swimming trunks that seem to come down to his knobby knees. With a big smile, he leaps off, grabs his knees, hits the water with a loud splash – and from the far shore he is being applauded. Not applauded by people making fun of him. But really applauded by someone who is enthusiastic. A big floppy woman with ribbons in her hair and bright flowers portrayed on her summer dress. Acting way younger than her age.

She is clapping with all her might. And people are telling each other the news that this woman is, of all things, Todd’s wife.   I am amazed about the enthusiasm of this woman and amazed that the young people here are not making fun of her and Todd out loud. He seems as outside the accepted world here as I was when I started boarding school and found myself the most unpopular boy, and the slowest too, in my class. By now it has changed. Still, I am amazed to see Todd happy. At nearly 16 I have become a champion boarding school debater, and I have decided I am a socialist and a pacifist – and will never be like so many of these people I come from. And I will have beautiful women, like the women Ellyse and Terri are becoming, not like the ladies with socks on the heads of their golf clubs. I am not like these people. And yet I seem to hear myself saying to myself that Todd Baines can’t do that. Todd can’t get married. Todd can’t have happiness.

#164 - SMOKEY PLACE

2010-10-23T07:31:00.000-07:00

Her voice was not English, although that’s where she’d started out, and it wasn’t New Hampshire, though that’s where she’d wound up when her mother suddenly took her out of the Lycée and the ballet school and headed up to New Hampshire with her brother as a possibly last ditch attempt to keep Paul out of prison, he was wanted on so many charges, from carrying a sawed off shotgun to major shop-lifting, and it got worse in New Hampshire, going into kidnapping, I heard, and holding off police officers with his guns.

And then the brother was gone, first into the army – which a new Hampshire judge gave him as the only alternative by then to prison – a time when he had dressed up in special forces clothes, complete with jaunty green beret, had his picture taken and created a fictional story of being a green beret killer in Vietnam – which was not the first time a fictional story of heroism had appeared in this family. From what I had learned in this year of probing nothing seemed unlikely.

After the hero caper the brother had been killed in a mysterious motorcycle accident, which did not surprise anyone in the family except maybe his mother. But the story was not over.

Lauryn did say on the phone that the woman with the French accent was the mother of her new boyfriend, which was all news to me, but she had more boyfriends then the family thought I had girlfriends, though I had been with, and lived with, different women like she had lived with different men. We were the only family members to get divorced, not counting my mother's parents.

On the phone she said that the place to meet that evening was the Clam Shell. I had been there in the summer, this landlocked seafood restaurant in this New Hampshire mill town where right at your table there would be an aquarium with slimy bottom feeding fish and eels. (The slimy live water creatures right at the table where dead water creatures were being eaten was one of the best metaphors I had ever encountered.) She said she didn't mean the main restaurant but rather the Clam Shell’s sports bar upstairs. I had gone out of my way even in drinking days to never go into a sports bar not because I was against the drinking but because I had nothing to share with sports fans.

It was a big smoky room with a pool table and long bar. Linoleum tables. Everyone smoking except me – and I had been off tobacco less than a year. It was nice to see her smoke. She did indeed look just the way she had looked all those years ago. Almost 40 now but just like she had always been. And she still had that way of giving you a sympathetic and amused look. There was nothing like her in the family. I asked for matches so I could light her cigarettes.

And at first it was like we were getting together socially, as if it had not been four years since we had last met up. Since then, she had left one marriage and taken her son to Minnesota where she was studying landscape garden design, and quickly had another husband then another son. And then this lover who kept on beating her to the point where she was taken away to the shelter. Which explained why she left Minneapolis.

I mentioned that I had heard from her older brother Lawrence, who was in the theater but so correct he lived in Princeton, and his wife Margaret, who had been a dancer with Merce Cunningham. I had heard from them that when they were all visiting Lauryn and Lawrence's mother in New Hampshire last year she had suddenly gone berserk. They were watching a made for TV movie that was about a girl who was badly abused, and Lauryn, usually so pleasant, had started screaming. In their account the reason was that Paul had once raped her.

And now she was telling me that it was not once but at least hundreds of times.

But the talk wasn’t entirely about what had happened to her. For she seemed to hang on my every word as I told her about what I had been discovering in the past years – tales of fakery and intimidation – what I had learned from Mrs. Marsh, and the bigotry outbreak that had had so much to do with setting off my plunge into the past. And I talked a little about the long standing rivalry between me and my brother that I thought now had been set up, consciously or not, so has to keep us both in control. And then I spoke of this childhood rivalry coming into the present. I told her about how I could so easily have been killed.

She said that she herself took heart in her belief that “what goes around comes around,” which I took as meaning justice of the revenge kind in the end. But then as if I had explained nothing she said,

"You are so angry. Why are you so angry?"

#163- MORNING

2010-10-19T08:12:00.000-07:00

I have a bare room with a comfortable narrow bed on the ground floor of Terri’s wing. I look out on the field that separates White Wings from Davis Road. Across Davis Road there is another field, and then trees that have been allowed to get so tall they hide the lower two-thirds and part of the upper third of the mountain view. We would come out on this field when we walked with our grandfather Gaga. We would go beneath the sheltering long green pine needles, and over the brown needles on the ground on our way to check the level of the spring water wells that they called “reservoirs,” one actually on the path and one over near the Farm House. The reservoirs, big rectangular cement walled containers that rose above the ground and were protected with what looked like small houses, brown clapboard and roofs of weathered wooden singles. Gaga, with his cane and his floppy sun hat, would look inside and say the water level was getting lower, but I could never see the change. Every summer he said it was becoming an emergency, and ordained that baths at White Pines should not be run more than three inches deep.

Also on that path my twin and I built a wobbly little tree house with the connivance of two local boys. And then when we were into puberty this path was the route Peter and I took to visit Terri in the bright new children’s wing of White Wings.

For a number of years the presence of Terri seemed to change everything here where everything had seemed so set in place. In the years that followed our adolescent summers Terri continued to come to White Wings, this house in which I had spent summers when I was 3 and 4. Her parents spent less time here, but she would come up alone, or with a girlfriend from Grosse Point, as in the summer she had left her the General Motors husband her parents had decided upon for her. By this time she was an adult but still gorgeous and lithe, and by now busy rescuing animals. First a pet sheep who walked beside the pretty girl along Davis Road. Later a rescued cow, and then an amusing little pet pig, and of course rescued dogs.

Looking out towards Davis Road and the mountains from the window of my room now in Terri’s wing, I saw in the near distance what looked like a burgeoning low lying pine tree. I brought out my new pad and drawing pencils and I drew it as accurately as I could.

Terri was up and out before I awoke. I found the phone extension beside the refrigerator and called the number I had gotten from Rob. A woman with a French Canadian accent answered and put Lauryn on the line. “Fred, where are you?” The way Lauryn spoke it seemed like connecting with family the way family should be.

#162 - *BUT THE BEAUTY

2010-10-18T08:37:00.000-07:00

For so many years I looked at this place – the White Mountains of new Hampshire, the summer towns, Franconia and Sugar hill – the summer families who had always been there – looked at it just as if it was something set in place that could not be much tinkered with - even though I saw plenty wrong. I started going there in infancy. My first memory is one of threatening violence, not actually in the White Mountains, this first memory, but on the way up on a single track rail line built to bring vacationers. I am riding in a Pullman car in which you could smell the coal smoke from a black iron steam engine, and the smoke smell that might blend with the balsam smell from the pine trees all around outside – but on that train, in that drawing room, which was an outsize compartment at one end of a Pullman car, something horrible had happened. I was almost pre-verbal, not quite two years old, but the scene is there in my mind still, the despair of the mother, her head on a table, the sounds of the grandmother, the wailing of my brother peter, and another smell that cut through the coal smoke and the balsam. Many years later when I finally went back in like an obsessed detective I realized years the smell was of fresh blood. Realized

That scene on the train always there even as I looked for so long at that part of the world almost uncritically. Not completely uncritically. I was able early to separate far enough to be furious maybe about the area’s anti-Semitism. When a car stopped our grandfather on his walk and a nice looking couple asked for directions to a hotel he told them there were no hotels in the region. Furious. We were right at the turnoff to the Sunset Hill House. But when I objected, at the age ten then, he took me on another walk to explain that this was the way things should be. You have to watch these people, he said, for a Jewish fellow will work harder than anyone else and take some other fellow’s job away from him.

The unforgivable bigotry and the snobbery. Yes I was often furious even in this time I remember as a time when I was relatively unquestioning in my mind, though the questions were there, and in this new time of exploration I had spoken about how these people of my family past people should be prosecuted. But also always in my mind, whether there or not, was this haunting sense of the beauty of the place. These mountains laid out in the summer people’s principal view, form the Sunset Hill House and all the old time summer people’s places. Especially from White Pines, which was reached through pine woods by a very long twisting driveway on which you had to keep honking in case someone was coming the other way. And when you reached that house you had the best view of all: out to more woods and to the distant mountains, a view that did not have a sign of a living creature in it if you did not count one place in one of the bigger mountains where for just an instant a cable car would be silhouetted against the sky. The mountains rising at Lafayette to where only scrub pine could live.

These White Mountains that sometimes seemed warm , and sometimes gray and black, and are part pure granite and scarred by avalanches.

And yet such beauty. Even a rosy orange hue sometimes when at the end of a clear day the setting sun plays on them.

The sunset seen from a once perfect place, though in this year 1986 when I got to my own story, not the stories the summer people told, not the stories my novelist grandfather wrote, not the versions of my twin brother – but my own view from this once perfect place, the place where I began to see the possibilities of a life, and where I was mysteriously popular, and fell in love with girls and nature – though in this year 1986 so much of what I saw and felt is mingled with white hot anger.

I thought also in the past that it was something wrong with me that made me see death so clearly in that beautiful summer place, but when I began to look only with my own eyes I knew that among much else it had not been a place safe for children of any age.

FLASHBACK I - 1952

2010-10-12T08:57:00.000-07:00

The moment I met up with them the night before sailing I knew I was back in a horribly familiar place. From various parts of the country we had come to the Henry Hudson Hotel over by the West Side highway across from the ships’ berths from where a Holland-American Line student ship would depart the next day for Europe. A half dozen boys and girls were already there, congregating in one of the anonymous carpeted bedrooms, and the scene was dominated by this burly guy Bruce from Akron, Ohio who did all the talking. No chance for me to get a word in, hard as it was to speak at all, and I thought I might never connect with any of the girls there – the sad, puppy-like blonde from California, the olive skinned, sharp featured girl from New Jersey, the firm pug nosed girl from Boston, the intelligent New York girl who said her father was a state supreme court judge. Bruce never stopped talking. Saying the obvious. There we are, he said. Here we are, he said. Now you look very ready, he said. And the girls watched him, and the other boys, who seemed small and retiring, did too. A running commentary as if we are all part of nothing more than his own story. Annoying and frightening for he seemed to have power here. Like the ones who used to make fun of me before it became clear to me and the world that I was bright and that a pretty girl could love me.

Out of the blue Bruce started making fun of me, for I hesitated to speak and that seemed to tell him I was an enclosed intellectual. He leapt on my not being able to speak by asking why I was so afraid, asking it a way that did not require an answer.

Why was I here? The previous summer while in Europe with the family I had had this idea they all scoffed at that I would become a poet and live in Paris. I had been able to so clearly see myself in a small basement restaurant such as I so far knew only in fiction, a warm dark place with red and white checkered table clothes, glowing candles with cheerful congealed wax down the sides, me and a warm dark girl in black leaning in over the table, forehead to forehead, she making love close up with her eyes as we talked in shared intensity about something. Monet? Keats? Socialism?

And there I had been with this fantasy last summer while on the one hand in Paris and on the other back in the family. Which had opened up new worlds but also made it seem to me that I could never get safely beyond the family’s version of my life. In this past year in boarding school, I had in a world beyond the family, and my victories in school had been confirmed by my surpring popularity in summer in the White mountains. But back in the family everything else in my life could seem flimsy.

And then our Southern grandmother had offered Peter and me new trips to Europe. There was this outfit called the Experiment in International Living, based in Putney Vermont, that was popular with parents in our Connecticut town. It set up groups of young people for summers aboard to live in foreign families. Most of the groups were for college students, but they had this one group for just graduated secondary school seniors. Not for Paris. Rather for Holland, which I knew mainly from sappy children’s stories about blonde kids in wooden shoes, sexless little blonde girls in dumpy cloth hats. Hans Brinker and his silver skates. Funny little dog pulling little carts. But I jumped at the chance to board a ship again and leave an old life behind. Though I also thought that just maybe what I really wanted was back up to the White Mountains – despite this pull to sail away from whatever it was that bound me.

#161 - AFTERWARDS

2010-09-27T10:51:00.000-07:00

I thought it would be nearly dawn but it was not midnight yet as I came out of the Notch. The snow had stopped as suddenly as it had begun. I saw I had not been far from the Old Man of the Mountains, very near to where the trails up Lafayette began. I was not in the middle of the road but not so far to the side that I could not have been hit by some vehicle trying to get through.

  The road was of course slippery now. I had not even thought about getting snow tires, and did not even know if people in the north country still used chains. So I moved ahead very slowly. Almost immediately a big noisy plow was coming the other way with chains clanging. It was the first vehicle I had seen or heard since entering the Notch.  

There was a moon a few moments later as I passed Echo Lake and the turnoff for the Aerial Tramway. And then I was off the interstate and on the remaining segment of the old Notch road that came down Three-ile hill and went into Franconia Village. Gaga, who was not one of the family's alcoholics, had joked about drunk guys taking a car down Three-Mile Hill after skiing and one of them saying “But I thought you were driving.”  

On past Lovett’s Inn which seemed closed for the winter, on past the dimly lit Aldrich family’s supermarket that had replaced the old Aldrich IGA store. The supermarket had gone up in the early seventies, The old wooden store building, which looked abandoned now, had been rented in the early seventies to young people living communally while they went to a short-lived institution named Franconia College, which never got beyond the old summer hotel that had been meant to be only its temporary headquarters. When it folded, the hippies who had converged here quickly disappeared.

Past the old Esso station, then across the rushing Gale River and the turnoff to the remains of an old iron smelter, and up the hill towards Sugar Hill, passing old Iris Farm, which was clearly visible in moonlight, as was the mountain panorama behind it. And I am thinking not so much of death in a white out as of how this place is always as beautiful in sight as in memory.

   And I drive on, and if feels more like I am a passenger than the driver and I turn off into the woods and worlds of the past, Davis Road, on to the old family houses, and there is Terri’s mailbox with the silhouette of the murdered Greyhound, and the lights are on in the left wing of White Wings. This comforting sight in the early winter night. As comforting as our imagined inn by the side of the road. This wing that has been turned back to a time before family history.  

And Terri is awake and waiting, a bundled up house owner who may be as old as me but in whom I still see the young girl – despite the wear of the years. The young girl who had been here when it was first bright and white and shiny, so different from now with the dogs and the pot belly stove and the bare wood and the paintings – the sister of Milton Avery, who seemed to do only Milton Avery’s, and some watercolors by someone else, including one in which the birches and the snow and the shadows from the birches on the snow, the snow whose light has been captured, which is so very close to what I have just seen outside. And it is like the interplay between the Metropolitan and Central Park, and the Brooklyn Museum and the Brooklyn Botanical Garden. Like but not the same. For this is Sugar Hill.   

#160 - LUCKY OLD SUN

2010-09-17T11:12:00.000-07:00

Then I remember. The violence of the boarding school before I pulled my own version of power on the place.

A song from the boarding school time is playing. I have put Willie Nelson on the tape deck. He is from this summer, this time in my aqua Mustang, and he is singing a very old Frankie Laine song. A song that I have not heard since 1950. Nineteen-fifty when I was 15 and the song was everywhere. It was on the juke box in Edgar's Diner in the town. And in the school it was blasted out of dormitory rooms.

That song which was so stupid when my tomentors kept on playing it, and then seemed gential and sad when I heard it again this summer on a Willie Nelson tape. This new time in which all time sometimes seems to be the same time.

I am back shy but bullying them into respecting me by filling up the school's trophy case. I am awkward but causing them to be consumed with envy because my girlfriend is so appealing. Making them see that my new grades prove I am smarter than they are. When I had done all that I had thought nothing more could go wrong. And now I knew how much unfinished business there still was then, just as I have come to see how much unfinished business there still is now. As I remember where am going and how much is still at stake. 

Up in the morning, out on the job,
Work like a devil for my pay .
But that lucky old sun has got nothing to do,
 But roll around heaven all day.   

The family in Sugar Hill, so safe seeming with their popovers, Floating Island and Anglophilia. My grandfather with his distinguished walking stick. My grandmother orchestrating formal finger bowl dinners. Their compliant children. And their children’s children.

My generation. The dead or walking dead – suicide, drugs and incest. Me in peril recently, a foreign war zone enemy of my twin in the CIA. Now Cousin Lauryn, the youngest, my favorite, beaten and fucked before puberty, back now, sprung from a battered women’s shelter.

  I go for years without seeing those mountains but I know now they are always there in consciousness - even when I am in more honest war zones far away. And in this new time, 1986, I realize that also in consciousness, every day of my life, whatever might be happening, there were and are always songs in my head. Never sung aloud, for I do not sing yet – but always in my head. Songs. A parallel if hidden reality – a world beyond.

   Fuss with my woman, toil for my kids,
 Sweat till I’m wrinkled and gray.
 But that lucky old sun’s, he’s got nothing to do,
 But roll around heaven all day.   

So fine, this working man’s chant. In the Mustang I feel so fine, though driving into the belly of the beast. I fear for Lauryn, who has returned…  She was going to be a dancer. I drive north to do battle with the ravenous past.  Dear lord above, don’t you know I’m pining, Tears are in my eyes, Send down that cloud with a silver lining, Lift me to paradise.   The night is blacker than I had expected. I reach Franconia Notch, this mountain pass that takes you into those old summer places, as it has since some point in the early 19th century when pioneers found the way through it. I am deep now in the Notch, with Cannon Mountain rising on my left though it is too foggy to see the Old Man of the Mountains rock formation that juts out precariously high above the small, placid Profile Lake. On my right is Mt. Lafayette, taller and harsher. I am actually up here in the mountains, driving on this very dark night between these two landmarks of the Franconia Range, which you can see from a distanced in the center of the panoramic view from Sugar Hill. There is no starlight, no moonlight, no traffic except me. I sense more than I can see of the icy black granite that rises on either side.  

In a whirling rush, a fierce early mountain snow storm, like out of the past, it creates a full white-out. Opaque whiteness. I can see nothing in front of the car. I slow to a creeping crawl and pull over to what I hope is a safe shoulder. I stop.  

Once again, just the sort of thing so feared by the upright people who were my people in the rich houses – the way they feared lightning strikes on golf courses, and the larceny of poor people and brake failures on ill-kept mountain roads, and hunters’ bullets in the woods, and non-Episcopalians, including cute New Englanders who use the adjective “wicked.”  No way to tell in the white-out if I’ve stopped the Mustang in the middle of the Notch road where something might crash and crush me.

No way to tell if I’m on a shoulder at a ravine with no guard rail.  Am I to die here so near to where I began? Die listening to old music and remembering old scenes. Die in this whiteness just as the past is coming clear?   

Show me that river, take me across, 
Wash all my troubles away, 
Like that lucky old sun, give me nothing to do,
 But roll around heaven all day.  

#159 – ANOTHER ROUTE

2010-09-17T11:04:00.000-07:00

On the thruway I have a second thought about my route. Even though I am on a deadly serious mission, I want to make the most of the trip. It could be a mistake to not go up through Connecticut, as in the familiar route from childhood days. There would be a purpose to doing it that way, for surely new memories would appear.

Then I have a better idea. I pull in to read a map at the rest stop where Gillian had picked up vending machine trinkets. It has been six weeks but it seems like years – a familiar sensation in this time still in which a whole lifetime is moving along in compressed form.

The map shows I can take the Mass. Pike east to connect up with Interstate 93, which has exits for Plymouth where, before there were interstates, I had been in boarding school. And from there I can head up the dramatic way through Franconia Notch.

The bare trees and the now brown hills on either side of the thruway are still startlingly vivid in this late autumn air. It is as if I have never seen such a tree, such hill, before. The billowing look had been replaced by an eternal look. And the sky is as blue as remembered skies of winter.

It is getting cold. I turn up the heater. I play my tapes. I think of my days in boarding school. Of Kitty up for the school dances. I think of St. Mary’s. I think of bright summers, striped awnings, the vistas when you get above the timberline.

I think of the only recent time I was above the timberline. It was when my wife’s son had just arrived from the Philippines and I had taken the two of them up to the White Mountains, which at that time still seemed like a threshold to a full life. I had decided to take them up the car road on Mt. Washington, not the full experience they would have had in climbing Washington but a taste. There had been no warnings about weather, but when we were above the timberline it started to snow. There were no other cars. I managed to turn around, and inch back down the mountain. There were no guard rails
.
Mama bears and rusty nails and lightning and winter storms in summer.

In the evening my wife and I and her son went to a spontaneous gathering of the old gang. A number of us happened to be there. We were at a pleasant simple house that Terri had just rented. For the first time she was going to stay in the mountains year round, and her then husband, a vigorous and open man, would remain in Bedford. The reason was dogs. Terri had about a dozen rescued dogs, too many for Bedford, where her husban had a champion spaniel he took to dog shows. (Also in Bedford he kept a copy of the Social Register at hand. He said it was useful because so many of the people he knew were included.) 

My wife did not like it in the mountains. She kept saying she wanted to go back early. We stayed in the basement at my Aunt’ s House where on a long ago Christmas trip I had first made love to Christina. My Aunt, whose Anglophile ways included 1940s British cooking, had made a shepherd’s pie for us that seemed to be filled with sawdust rather than meat. We surreptitiously brought Burger King burgers to the basement. A bonding experience.

Thinking ahead, I go past the exit for Plymouth that would come out right at my old boarding school. Normally thought of Playmouth would set off sparks in my mind, for this school down here in the lake country of New Hampshire was where I had first realized I could go beyond what my parents and past schools seemed certain was the limited life I would have. But thinking ahead, I continue on to Franconia Notch. I am thinking of the notch now as a route into something soft and affirming though I have been billing this last leg of the trip as the entryway to the belly of the beast.

That feeling of hope and pleasure and excitement I had when pointing the car north is back again. Maybe I have been unfair to this influential old place.

These two places, the place of perfect summers, the winter place where I came to myself.

#158 - BACKTRACK

2010-09-16T09:34:00.000-07:00

As the past kept changing, in my head there were constant revisions not just of what I saw in my life up till this year but even in how it had been at the start of this new time. Just before everything began to change, I had had high hopes for a light, with some earnest overtones, non-fiction, personal experience book to be called Twins in the American Century. Which was someone else’s idea but seemed to interest my agent and a guy at one of the big houses who said they would be sure to take it after I went through the charade of writing a sample chapter that would convince their sales people that if they gave me money there really would be a book. So I had worked late into the night in my bright new apartment in Chelsea, trying to get started. It should have been easy. I had been through this before, these proposals to get advance money. Also, this was not the first time that I was making use of someone I knew. I had met the editor a few years before this in Singapore where he was a partner in a slick illustrated guide-book operation called APA that had volumes out on many Asia places. The editor was a conscious intellectual. He kept telling me then that Singapore was at a vortex. But there was another side to the man. He had this wife who was a lithe and lovely Balinese dancer with whom he had eloped, spiriting her out of her village in Bali.

Now the editor was in New York at the same time as me in this time just after my marriage when everything was changing. He had gotten a mortgage and taken the lovely dancer to live in Forest Hills, the ultimate haut bourgeois place. My wife, also young and from Asia, and I had been there for dinner before the dancer left.

The editor was still there. And I knew that even his publishing side in Singapore could not have been as unimaginative as it seemed. For I knew from a number of years in Southeast Asia that APA Publications may have held out but it would have been a struggle to not become a CIA front. Travel writing and photography were such good ways to move people around in foreign places. In Southeast Asia nothing was quite what it seemed, and it was hard to find a foreigner out there not working on the side in something devious for some foreign interest – the CIA being the foreign interest with the most money. Even backpackers were put on per diem by this octopus agency.

I had reason before this year of change to look at APA’s most recent volume, which was part of its recent move beyond Asia. This one was on Jamaica. The introduction was devoted to thanking and praising the recently installed prime minister, a right-winger named Manley who was as charming and evil as Ronald Reagan. On top of everything else Manley looked like a white man. Practically no one who wrote about Jamaica seemed unsure CIA money had brought him to power.

This was when I was searching around for things to do. The reason I looked at the Jamaica book was that my agent was hot in negotiations with Simon & Schuster for a series of little books on the West Indies that would be geared to cruise passengers who had only a few hours to look around. The idea was based on a lie that the West Indies had a brilliant and beautiful colonial history when in fact it had a grim slave worked plantation history. The little books would play up the remains of slave owners’ big houses, and an occasional dumpy fort, as being romantic vestiges of a grand and romantic past. Just the sort of travel writers’ lie I had sworn I would never propagate again. But I needed work, and besides there was this very stylish American photographer I would take along to these island places. She was willing to fly in from Rome to join me.

And nothing in my life was what it seemed.

And I had not quite realized that fakery in travel writing was the least of what I was about to leave, though it was a blow when the travel book project fell through. My agent called and said we had to drop it because this outfit APA was going into the same territory in a comprehensive way in a new joint venture with a New York publisher.

My FBI file from civil rights days? My CIA file from Southeast Asia days?

And meanwhile the editor was waiting for a sample chapter in this book about me and my adventures and my brother and his CIA work, this light book that would also honor our internationalist grandfather and would be called Twins in the American Century, this in 1986 which was about the last point when the American century conception was around, something the CIA did not seem to realize. And maybe the last time it was possible for me to go with my family’s white-washed history.

The editor’s office was in the Macmillan building which was the most characterless building I had ever seen. A far cry from the days when Macmillan was a musty literary place that published my grandfather. As you got out at a floor in the Macmillan building you were face to face with a receptionist. Every floor looked just alike, the walls always bare. The place had no more personality than the sad State Department building down in Washington. One day I got out of an elevator in the Macmillan building and a very serious receptionist was saying with pride to an apparent delivery person that “this building has many PhD’s in it.”

The CIA. Travel writing. The dullness of publishing. Twins in the American Century.

As my life changed I began to believe it was to my credit that I was completely blocked when it came to writing that sample chapter that could do so much for my career.

#157 – OUTRACING DEATH?

2010-09-10T07:38:00.000-07:00

They cheered when they saw me coming down Second Avenue and it was if I were outracing death on their behalf.

I talked that night about my trip the next day to see my favorite cousin who had just been released from a battered women’s shelter, which I said seemed to fit so well with everything I was finding. I called it a trip to a place where I would be in the belly of the beast – a Norman Mailer line. And I got all the sympathy I wanted here from these new people who knew more about me than I had known myself until this year.

In the Belly of the Beast was the title of a book of letters to Mailer by a prisoner named Jack Abbot for whom Mailer had won a parole. Just after the book came out Abbott murdered a young actor in an altercation outside a restaurant. The actor’s widow was a Filipina, like my then wife, who was hit hard. She spoke of how fragile the killing made everything seem.

To me the murder had also felt close because the site of the killing was the

corner of East 5th Street and Second Avenue in the East Village, just a few blocks down from the tenement where I had been when I was first living in New York, and just one block from my startlingly lovely artist girlfriend’s place. More immediately, the site of the killing was practically where my new friends had stood cheering last night as the Aqua Mustang came into view.

As I started out for New Hampshire I was thinking for a few moments about Norman Mailer trapped in his own words and getting everything wrong to the point where he was an accessory to a horrible crime. Though in my mind now Norman Mailer and the murder are covered by a picture in my mind of those big houses in the dark.

Then again Norman Mailer. Jack Abbott. A pretty Filipina left as a young widow. My empathetic wife. But mostly my mind is filled with scenes of the present, alternating with scenes of the deep past in the White Mountains, as I prepare to leave for that place. And as in my mind I continue to move back and forth between past and present it feels like I am indeed outracing death that the past ordained – though at the same time I am about to make a trip straight into that past.

I do not start early the next day. In past years I would pack in a flash when I was about to travel, but today I linger. I go outside. The air is late autumn air. The man who repairs bicycles is at work on the sidewalk. The Korean grocery across the way looks inviting. I see the buildings where Rita and Freddy live, and also Howard. It is as if I have known this place for many years, not just in this very recent time.

I decide to go to 23rd Street for falafel. Am I killing time? I walk down Eighth Avenue. To my left are stoop steps leading up to a Chinese restaurant, where a cardboard sign in the window says:

"BROWN RICE is here!

“And the people cheered."

To my right are the fifties style stores, and the big brick union houses, where I sat in my car on a curving street drawing buildings in 3rd grade perspective with comical hanging traffic lights and fine old wooden water towers. Before I reach 23rd Street I am walking past homeless people lying on the sidewalk. I have to be careful not to step on them. I am reminded that this is still the America of Ronald Reagan. One man lying out in the cold has a big festering sore on his arm. Another man has his hand in the pants of a man beside him. This is chaotic homelessness, and not at all like the organized and picturesque homelessness around the band shell in Tompkins Square Park.

As the day goes on I pack slowly, an item or two at a time, making sure I have a pad to draw on, and also that I put in that Woolrich sweater I had worn in Vermont. I bring the Mustang around to my block, put my old suitcase in the trunk. I throw in those new boots that look like work boots. I forget the soft leather boots lined with ersatz fur.

It is afternoon by now. I drive up a now familiar route, starting first where the elevated West Side Highway used to be before it was so deteriorated it was torn down. Then I am on the elevated part that is still in operation. I pass the docks from which ocean liners used to sail. From the George Washington Bridge I see that every detail of the river, even a lonely sailboat, is clear in the dry, cool autumn air. I cut over to route 17 through Paramus and its rows of chain stores and bargain stores, and turn onto the feeder road for the New York State thruway.

I have Judy Collins and then Roger Whittaker, then James Taylor, then Robert Flack, then Willie Nelson on the tape deck. It is great background music for this wave of good feeling that, I note, sweeps over me as soon as the car is pointed north on an open road.

#156 – COOLING SYSTEMS

2010-09-07T08:29:00.001-07:00

There is a laughing girl named Nancy, who has a heartbreaking smile and is so young she seems to still has baby fat. Nancy talks in the meetings about her controlling father. She tells of how on hot days he sets up a ridiculously complicated system for cooling the house – doors that have to be kept open, doors that have to be kept shut, windows open, windows shut, one fan here just so, another there just so, a third in some tryout position that does not seem to work and makes the father angry. And even as the father is attempting to control the environment he is remote from the family. For otherwise his life revolves around his AA meetings.

Nancy is in the city to take care of a baby. She says she loves babies. She is biding her time right now working as a nanny before deciding what to do next, which may mean college, but which college it might be is still unclear. And meanwhile she has these meetings. And her warm smile.

I think of our house in Connecticut on hot summer nights. My room was brought into my father’s cooling system, which was much the way young Nancy described hers. It did not seem important to me that her father would be my age or younger. It was all so familiar. It entailed keeping open the door to my room for the hall as well as the facing door from my room that opened onto a rickety outside staircase. And a fan was placed at the staircase door – those two doors an essential part of the complex and silly cooling system my father, like Nancy’s father, had set up.

Beneath the staircase there was storage space which had been turned over to my dog Moxie, who had a bed of old cedar chips in there, but whom at night I would bring up to my room.

This black Lab trotted along everywhere I went on my bicycle. He stayed with me on the banks of the Saugatuck river, where I had my favorite fishing places. He was with me dodging the warden when I went for bass in the Aspetuck Reservoir. A great place for swimming was a part of the river that ram deep, backed up by old waterfall.

The part just below the waterfall was deep too, but forbidding. I would stand at the top, my feet in moving water, and let my line down, and catch an eel from the dark place down there. Or a ferocious catfish place for eels and catfish down there in the dark, but in the sun sunfish and perch and sometimes a bass.

Once on a wide path coming back from the reservoir we had come upon a rattlesnake. Rattlesnakes, unlike copperheads, were very rare here. This one was coiled and ready to strike, like the “Don’t Tread on Me” rattlesnake of patriotic lore. Moxie wanted to confront the snake. I yelled for him to come with me, as we both ran away.

We spent much of our time on the river. The perch, with their dots of red, and the sunfish, with rainbow markings, each had little areas they had staked out, sandy bottom areas that they were patrolling, and I had to stay in denial about how they looked while free in the water when I was pulling one of them out of the water and later eating him.

Moxie had been the successor to my short lived first dog Brownie. He did not annoy them the way Brownie had, for he was quickly housebroken. He had been billed as the runt of his litter of the Cowen family’s Labs, the last puppy remaining after the others had found homes.

I could still see Moxie swimming in the deep part of the river behind the waterfall dam that once powered sharpening wheels in the ax factory that had abandoned long before my time, long before commuters arrived. Moxie looking happy and pleased as he swam

with a stick in his mouth. Like me he wanted to be in water all the time. He was a great swimmer. He had a lab’s equivalent in flesh of a duck’s webbed feet.

That summer before college while I was in Holland Peter had driven up to New Hampshire with Moxie, who had disappeared in the woods down below White Pines. They never found Moxie. I was given the news while being driven home from the student ship. But I did not let this get to me. I did not let it stop me moving towards Princeton.

Moxie was on my mind as I heard the pretty girl talking about her father, who was probably about my age, and also the age my own father had been when he set up his bizarre cooling system. The worse part of that system was that I had to keep my door at the end of the hall open, for it was on a direct line to the outside staircase door. And I also kept the door to my brother’s room open to make absolutely sure the air was flowing as my father thought it should.

Listening to this pretty girl talk about her father and her country house and what they did in hot summers… All time has become the same time – almost --- for there is something dangerous in the air ---

At the end of one meeting I am talking with Nancy. She says she has to get back to the brownstone just off lower Fifth where she looks after a baby. She says she loves babies. To continue talking we walk together from the Corlears School to the brownstone. At the door she says she is excited too about this trip I am about to make. Do I know Lenox? I have not been in the center of the village but I have been aware of the township for it is one of those places marked on the roads I have been wandering while heading up to or down form Vermont and New Hampshire. Nancy says she thinks Lenox is about halfway to where I am going. She will be home with her family. She is leaving in two days. Would I like to spend a night there in Lenox on my way Everyone in ACOA is privy to this rescue mission of mine. I say spending a night in Lenox is a good idea. In front of the brownstone we do a program hug.

But the day before I go, Nancy phones and says she has spoken to her parents and this is not a good time for a visit. And I think I know what that means.

In the evening I drive to the East Village. As I am coming down Second Avenue in the Aqua Mustang, I see familiar people gathered on the sidewalk of the church to which I am headed. They see the Aqua Mustang, which is now a part of ACOA lore. They see the happy chrome horse coming towards them. And they cheer.

The last time the Playhouse was in operation, the summer after my first year of college, boys and girls from our old gang were sprucing it up again, making last minute repairs in the French doors, giving the place a thorough cleaning. I had gone with a new young summer girl over to Littleton to get paint brushes and paint, and as I came back up past the Farm House, down below the House on the Hill, and onto the flat stones at the rustic entrance area to the Playhouse, I see could them there ready for me. For when they saw the car they all came to the front and actually cheered. The new girl, a northern version of a neurotic southen bell, was clearly so aware of her appeal. When the cheered sh said “Oh you must be so conceited.” It felt good and bad at the same time, good because this was like a line spoken by a pretty girl in an F. Scott Fitzgerald story.

#155 – DEATH ON 25th STREET

2010-09-01T07:27:00.000-07:00

One night I came back and found bright lights – like lights you see when a feature film is being made on location – such lights now playing on the four story building with the concrete Venetian-like facade where I lived at this time. On the steps leading up to the entrance there was a small man whom I had seen on the local evening news, and he is in the bright light holding a microphone and reporting something that has him excited, something about someone being stabbed. I make my way past the TV guy, wondering if I am on television, then enter to a downstairs partially roped off with those yellow police lines tapes. And there is a strange odor, this being the time that I identified the smell of blood so clearly that I knew I had smelled it before. This killing right her in my amusing building.

From TV in my apartment I learn the killing was done by a young male hustler who slashed up the elderly, and apparently kindly, retired teacher in the downstairs front apartment, this man who had tended the building’s back garden up to the point where he had to spent most of his life in a wheelchair. This man, the journalists quickly discovered, was in an organization called NAMBLA, actually one of it founding members, NAMBLA standing for North American Man/Boy Love, in other words an organization for men who prey on young males, which seems to explain the murder.

Already on TV the story is getting bigger and more awful, for the young guy who slashed up the old man is on the run, heading down the East Coast, pausing to phone in reports to the TV stations, telling whoever answers he is glad he did the killing, that all his life he had been molested, and now that he has killed once he feels so good that he will kill again. He called in from Pennsylvania, and Delaware, and they finally picked him up when his bus got to Baltimore.

And I flash quickly on a scene in a drawing room of an old Pullman car going up the single track to the White Mountains when I am not quite two years old. The drawing room, a big corner compartment, is in chaos. Moaning and screaming. My Southern grandmother is talking away, and my mother is sunk in despair, her head in her hands, and my brother the good twin is red-faced and horse from screaming. I am sitting on an upper bunk that was pulled down from the ceiling earlier. It feels very high up. My legs are dangling over the side. And on the wall behind me is a button that I somehow know will summon help if I push it, though I can’t, I am that paralyzed. And I smell what I now know was fresh blood before darkness closes over the memory.

And it does not feel particularly strange that there should be a horrible murder here in this gentle-seeming place where I now have a bright apartment with a view from above the back garden almost all the way down the Battery. This amusing apartment: lots of sun coming in from the south; you enter through a small kitchen and go down a step to the living room that, since it is virtually the same room as the kitchen, seems quite spacious. And I have this view to the south past the trunk of the tree growing up from the garden. This place that seems to perfectly fit the new life I am in that has come from questioning everything, this place where I made love to Gillian – it had felt like love – in the final hours of our time. The building’s front has what can only be a Venetian façade, small balconies on each floor. Seem from the street each balcony has what could be a Byzantine pattern in concrete that resembles iron or lattice work – the sort of stone or concrete simulated lattice work that you might see in Italy on balconies that get the intense southern sun, but the front of my building gets the far less bright light that comes form the north. The makeup of the building is a little like the makeup of my old Aqua Mustang, a car designed to simulate a sports car but though it convertible top can never come down since is a hard top, and though I have a gauge on the dashboard that shows me how fast the engine is turning over, a gauge essential for high speed shifting of gears, the Mustang has an automatic gear shift, meaning I could not shift gears to match changing speeds in a race even if I wanted to.

The TV correspondent that I recognize I remember well from four years back in life when my stepson’s public school middle school graduation was held for some reason in the awe-inspiring Riverside Church – which till then I had known only as a center for anti-war agitation in Vietnam days. This little TV guy was up there in what I took to be a pulpit giving the most mundane motivational advice that kids should be good kids and study hard and stay out of trouble. And that silliness seemed to fit with the murder and also the Venetian façade, and the Aqua Mustang too. And there was more.

I had wound up on this block at a time I was sleeping on people’s couches right after the end of a marriage that not only went wrong but in retrospect seemed to have been doomed for its entire seven-year duration. A very old friend of mine from many years back, who had been with me on a high school age summer exchange program in Holland, had a friend living on this block of 25th Street between 8th and 7th – a part of town I knew before now only from quite a few years ago when there was a big dark place on the corner called the Egyptian Garden and I had had one of those intense affairs – this time with a girl named Barbara who by day was a nice Jewish graduate student at Hunter and by night a super-sinewy belly dancer under the name Princess Aisha in a time still before the time that belly dancing was brought into the daylight as something entailing health and enlightenment. It was very near where I was living now, A stone's throw away was where there had been an upstairs after-hours place, where they looked at you through a small panel in the door before letting you in. I got in because I as with a locally well known belly dancer, and then you could spend the rest of the night drinking ouzo fast from tea cups.

The day after the killing I cross the street to speak with Lois’s friend Horace, the person who had sent out word that there was a room to rent in his building, a room that put me in the right place when the rent stabilized apartment I was now in became available. Horace worked all the time at home some sort of educational writing with which he and Lois were involved. Working all the time while his quite pretty wife Constance stood by, often with a glass in her hand. He had heard about the murder and the NAMBLA thing, he said. He said there was a lot to be said for North American Man/Boy Love, that these relationships were often good for the young guys.

#154 – LIGHT AND DARK

2010-08-30T09:52:00.000-07:00

My life was passing before me which, in an ordered life, was what was supposed to happen just before you died. And there was certainly death in what was running through my mind. And not always my mind. As these waves of sadness were passing through me.

This had been happening since I first started bringing the past to light without any deceptive guideposts in it. Death and something worse lingering in the past that I had avoided. I would be walking along, maybe 8th Avenue in the 20s, maybe familiar streets in the East Village that were now so different because of the galleries that had not existed when I lived there long ago, maybe the Upper West Side or the Upper east Side – or maybe along Irving Place beneath the French doors of that place where Anne Marie and I stayed for part of one August while I waited for a freighter. That place where late at night we would hear the sound of horses hooves on cobblestone as mounted police returned to their stables – like in a well scripted movie. But now while walking here or anywhere I could be hit by a heavy blow that was so soft it did not hurt physically but was far stronger than a physical blow and felt physical to the point where I felt like it might leave me sprawled on the pavement. This sadness, this physical sadness, that now seemed to have always been there but outside conscious feeling till now. Mixed with my life passing before me, but the sadness somehow an assurance to me that the past running though my head had to do with the chance for life, not with what was supposed to happen at death.

The light and the dark. My view almost to the Battery. My place three stories above a garden gone to seed but with a tree in it that went up past my window, a tree trunk right here. A new friend had looked at it and said this is not a tree, just a big weed, and this made me angry, for it touched off the sadness and I went for the anger to stop the sadness. But mostly I am welcoming such sadness. Not depression, not emptiness, just sadness. It proves I can feel.

As I let darkness in, I was so often in my mind back where my conscious life had begun, back in or heading towards those big formal houses, the anti-Semitic summer people’s places, in the White Mountains of New Hampshire – the White Mountains to which almost every summer person who has been there when young returns to again and again, that place that served as a scale for people in my family to weigh whatever they saw anywhere else – so like Switzerland they said, though now it seemed so strange to me that the craggy granite mountains set in rocky rural poverty could ever have seemed like any place so tidy as Switzerland. And so unlike Mexico, they said – just as if they were saying something.

And the darkness of empty subway stations. Mixed with the darkness of places I had entered when actually looking for darkness – old Kuala Lumpur in a race war when you knew that behind any dark window there might be a Malay sniper waiting.

And yet it also feels like false construction to put so much in terms of the places I had been. For the dark and the light seem forces beyond any construction of the past that I can put in place, though not beyond the scenes I hold in memory. This open sadness something new. It had to have been there in the past, I thought, and I must have held it at bay when there was too much darkness and danger to let down my guard to the point where the sadness could come in. Before I admitted that the lurking danger was a family matter.

The strength of danger was on my mind one day as I walked down Sixth Avenue seeing things I had never seen in all the time I had gone this way, such as a Greek temple high atop a near sky scraper – and something strong to counter danger: those wonderful round wooden rooftop water towers that now seemed like part of a warm life I might have.

#153 - FASTER

2010-08-28T05:39:00.000-07:00

I have a feeling of calm, almost as if this is really a stopping point here with these new people, these people I had not met a year ago, these people who understand, who have escaped the myth of family. Some have tried it in searching for comprehensive spiritual situations that go beyond family, some, like me, by keeping on the move, always new places and new lovers too. But now I and they are escaping the myth by bringing our stories to consciousness and speech in these meetings in which anything could be said, and also acted upon, without having to stay within family lines. Those lines that are often enforced with violence, actual and in words. The ties so strong that long after the decision has been made to expel the family, the family claws its way back over and again.

Moving fast. Not only meetings, for I have just spent the summer carrying my investigations to the actual places of the past, including sex with a stand-in, and now there is this situation wilth this key figure from the past, Deirdre. New Hampshire. I call Littleton and in a cool exchange with Aunt Betsy learn that Deirdre is out of the shelter and back in Littleton, though not in the house up behind the movie theater. This has all happened quickly. She is living with a guy she knew in high school, a French-Canadian guy. I call her there and she greets me in a way that sounds like a clever replication of the way people in mythical ideal families would sound after a long absence.

I call Mickey. I know she needs money so I say I would like to rent a room. She says it cannot be in the formal wing now, for there have been some problems there, but she will give me a room in her more personal wing, which has become more like a farm house than a summer house,with all the dogs and local art work on the bare board walls, and the pot belly stove.

So the plan is taking shape. Faster and faster. In meetings and in diners afterwards I am with these new people who are now my friends, and they have just been in my apartment for the World Series and Iran-Contra. Faster and faster, back again to the Whitney and then the Modern to follow Gorky’s route into sex turned to horror, and on to death, and Matisse’s trapped boy at the piano beneath a gray taskmistress. But there are still the bronze girls, which I look at too, and out in the garden of the Modern the bronze relief backs of life-size Matisse women, and the voluptuous larger-than-life reclining Maillol girl, “The River,” lying there soft and lazy, and also the big bursting standing woman of Gaston Lachaise’s art and life obsession. And in the Met, the spring days of Corot, the tangible sensual days of Courbet. Then back to Gorky, and after that to the dark Hobbema woods, and then into a world just holding together in Cezanne, and almost what it should be in Courbet. And I see it all quickly in a series of flashes as I dash from room to room in the museums, retracing my year and my life and looking for the future.

And new old ground to in Chelsea, with the fifties era places along Eighth Avenue, and the long low Bronx style building where Rita lives and keeps tabs on the whole neighborhood, and the stoop building next door with Freddy with super who was born on this block, and the new –grocery/florist/salad bar/hot food takeout place where the Koreans greet me. Through the union houses, and past high brick buildings of something called the Hudson Guild, which advertises programs for children and the elderly.

And the Venezuelan guy on my floor and the little round couple above me who had always just gotten back from the country.

I am wearing the Dockers’s version of Jeans, and I have Timberland shoes that are a little like Boy Scout shoes and a little like the new running shoes, and I have my green plaid pullover flannel shirt from Sak’s, and a denim shirt and also demin zipper jacket that came from Lord & Taylor, and the blue Lord & Taylor scarf. I am still restricted mostly to the two stores for which I have credit cards left over from marriage – these stores that have something of the same role in my life as the Aqua Mustang, which is not quite up to its appearance since its convertible top cannot be lowered, and its gauges are no help in sports car style driving since the gear shift is automatic. This vehicle for freedom that is not tied to anything more substantial or darker than the life I want to have as I move around in it – like these new clothes.

I am going to the mountains and I think of the work boots we used to use for our hikes up the mountains and above the timberline. They don’t having anything at Lord & Taylor that look to be real winter boots to use in the snow and cold, except for one pair, maybe meant to be stylish for not very stylish people, but looking to me like an exact duplicate of the work boots I used to buy in Littleton. And they also have a pair of soft leather or imitation leather with ersatz fur inside, boots for lounging rather than walking, but I need these too for wherever it is I am going. I think I know exactly where I am going though not knowing exactly what I will find there.

One day I drive up to Bear Mountain, and I stop at dusk at a small lake surrounded by woods, and I draw it, not worrying about whether anyone will see what I see, and as I am finishing the water is broken by little cartoon creatures – these must be muskrats – swimming along. That evening I go to dinner with Tina and her mother, who is in recovery in AA, at their place on 14th Street. The have rented Bergman’s “The Seventh Seal” which I have not seen in the 30 years since I had my first place in New York. This old man who keeps going back in his head to the perfect summer place his big family had in high country in Sweden, and the pretty girl he romped with there. And I realize that when I had first seen it I had made very little of the fact that in this perfect family place of perfect northern summers this perfect girl was cruel and flighty, and betrayed him.

I am talking in meetings now of how I have to go back to the mountains one more time. As the drama of Lauryn unfolds I am giving a blow by blow account to these people whom my family would have called the very sort of people with whom you should never share what is really on your mind.

#152 – RECALLED TO DUTY

2010-08-27T05:38:00.000-07:00

This Reagan thing, this Iran-Contra thing. This Reagan government in power only because of anti-black racism in the South and in parts of industrial states too. Maddening. It feels personal. Like my mother voting for Nixon and saying he had to be good for America because he was so intelligent. Like my mother saying, after I was drafted, that at last I was doing something worthwhile, for the army people are the backbone of our country – which was something she said about just about anybody who did not take chances and had no aspirations – like the people at places where I sometimes worked only for ready cash – all these people were the backbone of America. Something like all of them back then saying why couldn’t I stop causing so much trouble, why couldn’t I be more like my good twin brother?

And is was these pictures from the past that were coming in that seemed to have more reality than the pictures I usually dwelled upon – the exotic times abroad – the erotic women at home and abroad – never mind long lonely times between times of high excitement. Never mind that there were dead-end places far from family – fake British versions in Hong Kong, fake French versions in Beirut.

Maybe, I am thinking, I still need the foreign adventures to give myself credentials as a person of non-family substance. But it is these people of the present, all of whom I know only from this past years who are my world now, I think. Again this dedicated band of people who understand the darkness of the past. Maybe the only people I should deal with now.

And yet I also knew is was a balancing act, holding together these moments with these people, holding together my new version of the world.

It was a cold November now. This aunt of mine in the White Mountains who had been calling, I had picked up the phone thinking it would be someone else, and I had gotten her – and it was about what she had been calling about while I was away, the awful thing that happened to her, which was that her daughter Lauryn, my favorite, had wound up in a battered women’s shelter in the Midwest, and she thought Lauryn probably deserved it, for she was just too appealing for her own good, and besides the aunt had always liked the guy who wound up beating up her daughter. This mother, my Aunt Alice, who had been my favorite aunt.

Yet again making me wonder how I could ever have thought these things would ever happen otherwise in this family, this family that had once seemed if not completely safe at least a place that should be safe. After the phone calls she had written me saying she would be in the city in the winter and was looking forward to all the things she would be doing with her favorite nephew. I am hearing this at 50 years old.

And now I write her saying I will not see her when she comes to the city. I don’t want anything to do with her – with someone who blames the victim this way. And I felt relieved, for this was my first direct hit at the family in these days I was annihilating them in my mind and in my program rants as I moved in and out of a personal past that got darker and darker. But even though relieved, I also feel that in writing that letter I have done something violent.

And now I hear from Lauryn’s brother, my Cousin Rob, who is an actor but so careful he lives in Princeton. He says that Lauryn has returned to the White Mountains. And isn’t it awful what happened, and he is sorry he is too busy to go see her. And I know I have to turn my probe on Rob too, and I also know that very soon I must go to New Hampshire again.

#151 – THE ENEMY

2010-08-26T08:26:00.000-07:00

If there were some paid athletes who were no longer just dumb bullies, there were still no right wing politicians and soldiers who were anything except the enemy. A week to the day after the end of the 1986 world series, where people who were never meant to win had won, we are gathered again in my apartment. These women and men I had been with me all year and who were closing in on nearly forgotten scenes from their own lives, as crucial as anything we could see anyone else going through on television. All of us here joined together with a sense of mission that is as focused as that of a Jesuit, or a Navy seal, or a bomb throwing Quebec or Basque Separatist.

Right now a smug looking golfer type is on the TV in a lineup of devious and frightened looking little people who turn out to all be Republican congressmen. The smug golfer, is named Trent, which sounds like a good ole boy name though he looks more like someone who might be found getting drunk in the Yale Club, or on a golf course wearing crimson trousers. Trent says not to worry, everything is all right. And he is echoed by the others. But not even the docile TV news people seem to be thinking it was all right to turn big national security measures over to a nasty guy named Oliver who has been supervising the illegal sale of arms to our enemy, Iran, and using the precedes to illegally finance the awful things being done by sadistic, right-wing militia thugs who use an American client state as a safe place from which to conduct bloody raids on Nicaragua. A Ronald Reagan war against uppity impoverished people who bucked his will. I know Nicaragua, which has a leftist government now, the Sandinistas, named for a leader killed in the 1930s by the Americans the first time Nicaragua had tried something different.
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And since the TV commentators qualify what they say be adding that Reagan is an honorable man, it looks like the shoddy adventurers in Washington are going to get way with it.

So I am here with new friends looking at these awful people on television but I am also, in my mind, back in a long afternoon in the mid-seventies with the then Nicaraguan dictator, the last of the old American backed Somozas, Anastasio Somoza, a tall, obese old crook who had a private army of murderous, drunken, looting national guardsmen at his disposal. In the mid-seventies I had, for devious journalism reasons, spent a long afternoon with Somoza in his office, which by then was an actual bunker built into a hill next to Managua’s principal edifice, which since an earthquake had been an Intercontinental hotel. That day Somoza talked and talked in fragments of English he had learned while being raised in Miami, mixed with some of the fragments of Spanish he had picked up later. Despite having no real language, he managed to tell lie after lie, such that as his National Guardsmen, whom he called "my boys" – were so clean cut they could not possibly have taken part in all the rapes and murders and killings, the torture and the looting, that the opposition attributed to them. He kept saying that any Nicaraguan who said otherwise was “a fucker.” His most used words being fucking and fuck and fucker. He would tell me that this person or that was a fucking fucker. After each lie he would lean forward, fix beady black eyes on me, slap his enormous thigh, and say, like the heavy in a movie comedy but in all seriousness “That is true as sure as my name is Somoza.” And while he talked I was thinking of the previous night when I was in the hands of priests and other underground figures right out of a Graham Green novel, speeding from interview to interview, changing cars frequently in case we were followed. And I was thinking of the bright afternoon when I talked with a sparkling girl, a girl coming into her own, in an above ground opposition organization, and the woman who took me there, a Maryknoll nun, who got off the subject of the need for radical change and said “Maybe while you’re here you’ll meet someone to marry.”

And although this was my first time in Central America, and my guides were mostly liberation minded nuns and priests, everything about Nicaragua seemed absolutely familiar. I was making connections with where I came from before I realized that that was what I was doing. I had not grown up in a slovenly Latin American dictatorship. Nicaragua feeling familiar, as over the years, when far away from the family, did tyrannies in Haiti and the Philippines and also Cyprus and Beirut and Sarajevo and Cuba, and even Brunei.

I had been more or less underground in the last days of Somoza, the way more recently I had been more or less underground in the Marcos Philippines, whose end was on TV earlier in the year, and also the way long ago when I had been hidden from the murderous thugs in the Haiti of the Duvaliers, the last of whom had finally fled this year at almost the same moment the Marcoses were fleeing. These scenes from the past on my mind, and on TV.

And now Reagan and his boys, using illegal arms sales money, were financing the Contras the slovenly old National Guardsmen who with American money had become slovenly militiamen.

#150 – THE WORLD SERIES

2010-08-24T05:12:00.000-07:00

This is my world and this has nothing to do with Gillian, who was not anyway what she seemed. Though our tryst had been a step beyond just testing through verbal discourse in the meetings. And now it seems like the world outside the meetings and the world inside are coming together in ways different from the trysting.

These new old friends were gathering in my bright airy apartment in Chelsea, this place I had not been in not for long but ever since this new life had begun. And they were gathering not for the purpose of ad hoc ACOA meetings but rather because there were things in the world we needed to check out together. They were gathering because I had a good location and a working television.

In late October they came for the 1986 World Series. And a week after the baseball game ended it was to follow the unfolding of the Iran-Contra scandal – the sociopath Ronald Reagan caught out at last it seemed. We sat around my television set watching the unfolding of a sports rivalry and then an actual war out in the world.

The world outside and this world I had been in for a year coming together. The New York Mets, perennial losers beloved by people who might not otherwise care about baseball, had somehow wound up in the World Series. When it appeared they might not lose, it seemed like the Mets players were our kind of people. Seemed this way, though team sports could be written off as institutionalized bullying. But a Mets star named Darryl Strawberry, who had had addiction problems but was now in the clear, looked happy and sad at the same time. One of us. A player named Ron Darling looked like a kid coming into his own. And as the series progressed, a Met would sometimes, when in their dugout, but his arm around another Met, like two boys on the playground – usually after something good happened – like some silly home run thing or double play thing. Two Mets would hug – just like people who recognize what is inside each other in ACOA.

The lead went back and forth until the final pitch of the final game when the Mets pitcher threw a final strike just when the Red Sox were rebounding. And on my TV we saw the pitcher toss his glove in the air, and the catcher run out and embrace him. And maybe the whole sorry team sports thing – the playground bullying – so like the horrors inside the family – maybe all that could be put away in some compartment – once the I got the goods on the real villains.

The closest I had ever been to a Mets game was passing through a room where my father was watching TV. Also, it was, now in retrospect, heart breaking that he had been so enthusiastic when for a brief time public television carried Ivy League football games.

#149 - THE ANNIVERSARY

2010-08-23T06:22:00.000-07:00

We are well into October now. And I realize that it is almost a year to the day from the time I made my way far enough out of deep darkness to go to my first ACOA meeting. It was the one on the East Side, where I felt no convincing identification. I had been so sure there was no way to connect with these people in this part of town I did not like, and at the same time it had felt like the turning point it proved to be. Precisely a year later made the anniversary date a Thursday.

The day after the East Side meeting I had gone to my second meeting, which was the Thursday meeting at the Corlears School, ten blocks down from my apartment.
I am now staying away from the Sunday Corlears meeting, which is Gillian’s. But the Thursday meeting feels like my home base. On this anniversary night I see people on I never thought I would connect with who are now like my oldest friends. The red-headed former nurse, and the former clinical therapist, and a Waspy guy who was looking for a wife but also had had sex with men, and the girl who talked of rolling around like a puppy with her lover, and the bore who bragged about drunken nights at the Players Club , and the pretty girl upon whom one night an addict had fastened his eyes, and the sentimental black man, and the art photographer, and the California girl whose sister has a 19th century art gallery, and a Southern guy named Rand who called me Philippine Fred, and the girl whose father is a therapist cult leader, and the actress who introduced me to the East village galleries. And there are more. I am one of the first to talk this night, and unlike what happens usually I do not speak from anger this time. It feels like more than a place to merely test out what I want to do. So I say what an important day this is for me, for it was this day a year ago that my life began to change. I pause. I see in the circle Janie, my companion in past months on foot and horseback in the parks, and I reminisce about how Janie was talking the first time I walked in.

Reminisce as if I am looking back years later on how my life had worked out.

#148 – ART SCHOOL?

2010-08-20T05:13:00.000-07:00

Thomas tells me about a painting class at the 43rst Street YWCA up by Grand Central. I was last there to meet a new Hampshire girl I knew from the old debating circuit, a girl who later married a New Hampshire guy who was my roommate one year at Holderness. She came to town for some sort of church meeting just as I started in my first apartment in the city. She was cheerful and pretty in a pale northern way. I found myself speaking to her in the manner of people in my family pretending with regular people that uninteresting conversations were fascinating. After lunch that day I never saw her again, and I’d never looked up the old roommate, or anyone else from debating days, and anyway she died young. Yet somehow coming here now for an art class is some sort of continuity.

The class is given by a sweet-faced, sweet-voiced woman who shows her work in a Soho Gallery. I had been returning to the East Village and finding that galleries there were closing. Landlord speculation, the possibility of costly gentrification, was driving prices up to the point where the small galleries were closing and some were being moved to Soho which was suddenly cheaper than the East Village

We started doing a still life with a baseball cap and baseball. I drew with a soft charcoal pencil in heavy outlines. She was so encouraging to me that I was sure she was faking it – for she seemed to like anything anyone did. The others in the class, besides Thomas and me, are studious looking, plain faced women or aging girls.

I am aware that this is the first time since school and college that I have gone to a class of any kind. Some frozen instinct tells me this nice woman cannot be very good, and I should not believe her praise.

She mentioned that she was also giving a life drawing class here at the YWCA. This might be more what I hoped would be my sort of thing. Young Christians aside, it seemed to fit with what I knew, mostly from novels and movies, about art students. And I did get a vague likeness of a short, fat, and not at all sexy dark girl who modeled.

#147 - BACK WHERE I BELONG

2010-08-19T05:47:00.000-07:00

There are some new faces in ACOA. A powerful young actor who was a cop and now plays a TV cop on Hill Street Blues, a show my wife and I never missed, one of the things that bound us, these stories of smart, reasonable police figures. The actor comes to many meetings now and talks, sometimes shouts, with theatrical annunciation, his strong voice sometimes projecting anger, sometimes intense charm – as he speaks about what it was like his real life to be in a family of unbending and violent policemen.

And I talk about this with my new friend in ACOA Robert, also from a cop family, who himself was thrown off the police force, something to do with cocaine, and is now a fireman. Sometimes he looks sad and questioning, sometimes he is confident and funny. He has been going with Julia, a sexy and popular member of ACOA who is a success in some business despite family opposition. She has wound up supporting her elders, though the only advice she ever got from her boozy father was “Don’t fuck up.” Julia goes to London on a business trip, at the same time an English artist friend of hers, Iris, comes from London to New York. Robert is suddenly smitten with the friend, who has that strong but vulnerable look that make her appear an almost cliché English beauty. Iris says she had been hearing about this fireman for a long time. She quickly gets a good job at an architecture firm making scale models. Robert and Iris set up housekeeping. They find a small house on City Island, which is something else new to me, a seashore village within the borders of the Bronx.

Robert talks of how he goes through flames and demolishes doors with his fireman's ax. He reveals that he is writing poetry, and also that he has just begun painting. Since he knows I was a writer he asks me to go with him and Iris to a poetry reading in a church, the only such event I have ever attended. It is pretty bad. A smiling guy reads without irony that “I see the world through rose colored glasses.” Robert, however, brings words to life as he reads about getting at his experiences in the violent family he came from, and about his life in 12-step programs.

In the daytime when I wander through the East Village galleries I start hearing about how landlords, expecting to make big money from gentrification, are raising rents and pushing the small gallery owners to to out of business or switch to Soho, which till now had been the more costly place. An era ending?

I stop by an art supply store east of where I live. A pretty black woman is behind the counter. I say I want to buy a drawing pad and some good pencils. I don’t actually say this is my first time, but she congratulates me.

I forget to take the pencils when I go out to draw, but I have the pad, and I always have a basic Bic black ball point pen with me. I have carried the exact same model of pen since I first started using them when I was living in Athens, 26 years before this time, writing novels on a tiny Smith-Corona portable and making manuscript corrections with these BIC pens. Novels that were unpublished but did get an agent's interest, I did not think entirely because the agent sometimes sold things to my father.

I go down to the street, cross 8th Avenue and go sit in the Aqua Mustang, which I have parked on a street that curves through the union houses. I bring out my pad and my pen.

I start by drawing other parked cars. To my surprise they actually look like cars, if a little anthropomorphic and cartoon-like. I draw a hanging traffic light, which looks really warm and amusing to me. I draw those round wooden water towers that are high over most rooftops in the city. They have always appealed to me, and I am not sure anyone else notices them the way I do. And then I draw box-like corner buildings up above the cars and behind the traffic light. I use what I know from maybe 3rd grade about perspective. I had not been one of the children selected out as a talented budding artist. I did not know till now that I had any worthwhile memories of art from past times. And now I remember sitting with my brother at a café around the corner from the Paris Opera, drawing in charcoal that wildly romantic baroque building. And then in Venice drawing the Doges Palace and a giant clock on which two iron men with sledge hammers hit a gong to mark the hours.

That was in the crucial summer that I was about to turn 17 but was back with the family. That time of discovery – the Impressionists in one direction, lively nude girls in another. But after the summer I had never tried to draw again. Like so much else that came to an end when I found myself back in the family again in that crucial time when I was 16 and went to Europe with them.

I go out to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, which now feels like a home I have found after years of searching – the botanic garden and the Brooklyn Museum and all the other museums and parks that have become my city haunts in this year of change. It is still sunny in early November. Sitting cross-legged beneath a tree are three little girls in a semicircle facing a protective seeming woman who is sitting cross legged with them.

My friend the former therapist said the little drawing of that group in the botanic garden was so good it could go in the New Yorker. And this felt awful – like writing only to be published. Like writing a false version of reality imposed by someone else. Then she said she would love to have one of my ball point pen pictures of buildings with a water tower and a hanging traffic light.

#146 – CLOSURE?

2010-08-18T06:45:00.000-07:00

I call her again to say would she like me to stop by her sidewalk place and I am met with haughty disdain. The lovey-dovey charge again. And anyway, she says, the sex wasn’t that good.

And Mr. Lewis is on the phone saying he wondered why I had canceled our next appointment. Did it mean I did not want to continue with him? If that was the case, we still needed another session for “closure.”

What an awful word closure, I thought. An awful word form this limited man.

So I go in to the Jewish Board again and we talk in circles. He wants to know what I had wanted to get out of therapy. I repeat again some of the things I had discovered over the past year. I tell him again about the encounter with Mrs. Miner. I tell about my aunt and what it raised in me. And I say again that what happened with Gillian had been flattering at first and then has seemed like a run-through duplicate of what had surely happened way in the past. I tell him that in my mind now these perfect summer places are places of horror. I tell him about Lauryn.

He nods and I could swear he is thinking that all my discoveries have come through him.

“We really should continue,” he says. “I believe I can help. I have been thinking about what you said last week. That was a very angry and aggresive thing you did when you asked me if I had read Alice Miller and the ACOA literature. Your anger is something we could work on together.”

I was writing a check at the window when he came out to pick up his next client, who had been sitting forward in a chair clutching a long aluminum walking stick. Then he was leading the blind man back for their session.

#145 – SHERLOCK

2010-08-17T05:40:00.000-07:00

It was comforting to be back in the waiting room at the Jewish Board. It had turned out I could have an almost immediate appointment. I went to the window and was told the name of the therapist.

George had said it took him a long time to get to the board and complete his internship so he could begin his practice. The reason, he had said, was that each time he started some training program he was horrified to find how badly messed up the budding therapists were. This new man I am assigned to looks about 40, older than George, so maybe he is a career changer. Unlike Yammer and George he looks like a therapist from central casting. He is a brooding man with black eyes. His first question is why am I here.

And it pours out of me in a torrent of words covering the torrent I have been in. The time not so long ago when I thought I was in a terminal depression. And the time, just a year ago now, when I stared going to ACOA meetings. And the death of Margaret, and the molestation of Lauryn. I ask him, as I had asked George, he if is familiar with Alice Miller. He isn’t. George was. I ask him if he has read the ACOA literature and he seems to have never heard of it. George had not read the literature, but he did after we talked.

Then I forget to wonder about Mr. Lewis. Wave after wave of words come from me. My cousins, the dead and the walking dead. The family bigotry. My childhood in which I was told I was hopelessly defective. My rivalry with my brother, the good twin – and how this year I had discovered how the rivalry was recently being played out in the Philippines where my brother had information that he kept secret though I could easily have been killed.

And I talk of the very recent high pitched sex with Gillian when we were in the north out to get the true story of what she was calling my magic kingdom. I mention the previous trip to New Hampshire when I saw Aunt Alice looking at me like a lover. I throw in an aside about their bigotry, about the English party, and rush on to tell of a childhood in which I was apparently written off as hopelessly dumb and gauche before I overtook my brother in boarding school. There was an aside about my drinking and my mother and father’s drinking. And an aside about the myths surrounding the great man, Gaga, the head of the family. An aside about the grandiosity of the Wasp world in the White Mountains. And the way they were casting Deirdre aside. And the memories about myself that had just come back. And then a quick run-through of the surprising turn into darkness again - a duplicate of past betrayal with Gillian back in the city - as if everything in my early life had just been replayed in the present.

I came to a point to pause. Mr. Lewis looked down, looked up, sat back, trained his black eyes on me and said, “Has it ever occurred to you, Mr. Poole, that what happened in your childhood could be affecting your relationships today?”

I spoke of this, not though not identifying Gillian, at the Thursday Corlears meeting.

“No shit, Sherlock,” the red-headed nurse said.

#144 – THE VISUALS

2010-08-16T06:32:00.000-07:00

The next day my phone rings and I pick it up without monitoring. It is my Aunt Betsy, who, with her stutter returning, tells me that the most awful thing has happened to her. Lauryn wound up in a battered women’s shelter in Minnesota where she had been living after another divorce. In an aside Auntie says, as she has said at recent stages of Lauryn’s life, that it makes here furious how young and pretty Lauryn looks. More like 20 even now when she is verging on 40. I thought at first that Auntie was being humorous when she said it made her furious, but by now I am not so sure.

And then she is saying “I liked the guy. I can’t really blame him. She’s too appealing for her own good.”

And a crescendo from the crescendo. As she talks I am seeing myself in that upstairs vacant servants' room where they had put me at White Pines. And I know why even long before I had sex, long before I knew sex was about anything except an unexplained feeling, I knew a woman’s body. A smooth, shiny woman’s body. Breasts and belly and between the legs.

Smooth shiny skin, of the sort that still drew me – smooth and shiny as opposed to the mat finish skin of all the other women in the family.

Now I had the visuals.

#143 – IN DAYLIGHT

2010-08-14T07:00:00.000-07:00

In the light of day she tells me again what a fine place I have, as if she is surprised. And she says there is something on her mind that she should tell me about. It sounds like something that might come to light in a meeting. She says it is my khaki trousers, which are hanging on a chair in the living room. “When I saw the khakis this morning I thought for a moment that they were my father’s."

But this passes quickly, I think. Maybe. We hug and we roll about. And then it is time for her to pack up and leave. She says she wants to settle in in her own place, and get to the Sunday meeting at the Corlears School. It is unspoken but I think it best that we not both be at the meeting, for in those meetings you are supposed to say anything that is on your mind. I go to the movies instead, but I hardly follow what is on the screen. And anyway I am exhausted, and tomorrow is another day.

I phone my old friend Max in San Francisco to tell him the good news about finding a girlfriend. I know what Max will think. He knows about how I handled the Far East, how before I got a contract to write a novel for an ultra-respectable mainstream publisher I wrote for a rich but disreputable publisher paperbacks like BANGKOK AFTER DARK and TAIPEI AFTER DARK (though after my respectable novel was published and I was in the Middle East in what might have been the terminal depression I could not fulfill the contract I signed to write BEIRUT AFTER DARK).

The next morning, Monday, I ride the E-train up to 53rd Street and Fifth and, assuming we had planned this without words, I pick up two cups of deli take-out coffee, one for her and one for me, and a bagel to go wither her coffee. I carry them to the street, where I expect to see her shining in her new yellow boots. But she is not there.

I phone her. She acts surprised that I expected her to be at her sidewalk post today. And even more surprised that I should presume to look for her there. She says, “I didn’t think you’d get all lovey-dovey.”

And back at my place there is note slipped into my mailbox by the dread Abigail who tells me once again how much I am hurting her. This is too much to bear this time, she says. She tells me about the girl talking last night at the Corlears school telling about going up to New Hampshire to look into a fellow ACOA member's "magic kingdom."

And now Linda with whom I fell in love in the Middle East is in town. She comes over to Chelsea for the first time since she told me about Alice Miller's The Drama of the gifted Child and Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia. The second time since we went to the Frick together and she did not see how I could ever not see the horror in the 17th century Dutch landscapes, not just Hobbema but the more conventionally appealing van Ruisdale too, in whose Frick painting there is a furtive figure scurrying into the woods.

I tell her what has just happened. I describe Gillian. I show her the letter from Abigail. This is serious, she says. She puts the blame on Gillian for taking our story public.

#142 – YELLOW BOOTS

2010-08-13T07:00:00.000-07:00

And time is timeless in the way I would have hoped. We drive short distances, we walk around the lake, we lounge. I hardly know what time it is. We stay in bed late but are as aware of the early light, intensified by reflections off the big lake, as early risers would be. We go from moment to moment with no plan except to keep this a time without plans until the gas tank arrives.

In Vergennes I check my answering machine in the city. There is another message from my aunt saying something has happened and that I should call her.

The garage calls. The gas tank is ready. We take the car over, and leave it to receive its new tank. While we are walking in Vergennes we agree that this is almost like leaving a child for some medical procedure.

It is getting late in the day, so we will leave for the city the next day. There is intermittent rain now, making the remaining colored leaves shine. We stop in Bristol, a picture postcard town that also has real people’s stores – for hardware and groceries and drugs and lunch and basic clothing – a place that always felt inviting when I drove through it alone in the summer. The opposite of Middlebury. We come upon a shoe store that has mostly winter boots in its window. Reminding me that this is such a crucial time in northern New England, this time when there is still a little time to prepare for winter. Gillian is drawn to tall yellow boots that you step right into, slick for rainy times on the outside, insulated for cold times on the inside. Perfect for the street, she says. And she wears them now, and looks so happy with them.

When we start back the next day I say I’d like to avoid the interstates this time. She says she thinks this is a great idea, and she smiles like, I think, a child who has been given a gift. I do not say it but I am as interested in retracing my steps from the summer as I am in showing Gillian these places along the way.

Down through the center of Vermont on route 100, down to the corner where Massachusetts and Vermont come together near Williamstown, which is antiseptic near replica of the fake town of Princeton, has its own unpleasant collegiate gothic buildings. But it also has a theater, and and just outside it – though we do not go there – is the Clark Institute.

Passing through without looking in at the Clark collection feels a little like passing through Rutland and not seeing anyone I know there, or going by my brother and Terri’s places without stopping to see if they are at home. We go down now through picturesque Lee and Lenox. When I found myself in a place called Lenox while driving in the summer in this then brand new old car I had fantasized about being with someone like redheaded Tina who would be handling the tape deck while I drove. And now I am with someone who is not merely like someone but is someone, this brilliant but tortured and lovely girl with the acquired British accent.

For the most part I do not even think of the way she talks as being the same as the pretentious fake British accents heard in Middlebury and in Sugar Hill and Franconia. Except when she falls back on sex again and says, in the tones of a school mistress, “I always advise young people to practice anal sex. The best way to avoid pregnancies. All you need is a little soap.”

It close to midnight when we are finally in my apartment in Chelsea. “Fred, you did not tell me it was such a wonderful place.” Gillian is seeing for the first time this small but spacious feeling place I have been in in this new time in my life.

In the morning we hear chattering outside my window, which seems strange since I am on the third floor. It is two workers on a scaffold cleaning the outside of the building. Their hanging platform is high over the gone-to-seed garden where the tree that passes my window grows. The garden that was tended by the old Namboy man.

They are talking about how you handle women, Gillian says. She says she had to learn Hindi in India. They are talking dirty about how you have to keep fucking a woman to bring her into line.

Then Gillian, this almost innocent appearing blonde, pokes her heat out the window and shouts something in Hindi that shuts them up. She does not tell me what she said.

.

#141 – HER BREATH

2010-08-11T05:00:00.000-07:00

And there is rolling thunder somewhere in the background of my mind, this time like in those fake soft core scenes where the camera pans up to the sky, but this is not a fake movie scene and the camera stays right here.

Missionary position sex in the night, and deep, unworried sleep, and sex again with Gillian on top in the morning. And we stay in bed. This young woman, real but like a dream from lonely times, her blonde hair hanging down tickling me. She takes my nearly bursting penis in her mouth. And as I am about to come again, draws back, leaving my penis wet, then comes down again, and gently blows on it.

We go out to the Aqua Mustang and drive again, aimlessly it seems. She is talking again. Telling me she was this eager young girl, who by the time she was 14 was hanging out at the Bethesda Fountain where she picked up boys to fuck. Later she is a Buddhist, and a well-known Tibetan monk, a lionized popularizer in the West of magic Buddhist ways, corners her and fucks her hard – not unlike what some of her mother’s friends, at her mother’s instigation, had done when she was growing up in that apartment that smelled of her mother’s serial masturbation. But this does not mean, she saying that she is against all Buddhist holy men.

We decide to go out of the country, drive into Canada again. The houses across the border on this day look particular eccentric, with inland widow’s walks or stained glass or colored tile, and they are set at angles that have nothing to do with the landscape. We stop at a dilapidated Canadian roadside restaurant where everyone is speaking French. A waitress at our table is trying to tell us something and neither of us understands her though I have a little French, mostly from Haiti and Africa, and Gillian a little more. The waitress motions that we should follow her, and she leads us to the Mustang and points to a puddle of fuel that has leaked from the gas tank.

We fill the tank at the next station, and then as the guage goes down, we stop for more gas to keep the needle up. The next morning we begin our most leisurely day. After sex she takes a bath in the old enameled iron tub that is on legs. The little bathroom becomes steamy and she is ripe and rosy. Don’t look at me, she says. I am getting too fat. But I look at her and she is just right.

We drive to a garage in Vergennes, leave the car a couple of hours, since they cannot get to it immediately. After lunch we come back and are told there is bad news. The leak is so big that those substances meant to plug it will not work. I will need a new gas tank. And it has to be sent for and will not arrive for several days.

I think that she is concerned about her sidewalk business, left in the hands of an undocumented Irishman. But before I ask, she says “It's fine with me if we stay here till the gas tank arrives.”

We still use the car for short laps, frequently adding more gas. We take it to Vergennes, where we buy balloons.

#140 – TRUST?

2010-08-10T07:00:00.000-07:00

A certain calm seemed to have descended as we drove back from the White Mountains to Lake Chaplain. I kept my side’s window open so that I could smell the pine. Through the night Gillian was asleep on the seat beside me. I thought of a John Updike story I had read that almost countered the careful literary fakery in his very safe writing, his New Yorker writing that started when he was a good boy writer in college and never stopped.

But there was this one story that seemed real, a person like Updike as a teenager driving in some suburb and the girl he is with falls asleep. A turning point for him, that someone could trust him this much. And what might have happened if he had let this scene in the car unfold in a non-constructed way into other scenes and other times. Something like right now on the road back to Vermont.

She slept until we had turned off on the road to the lake. She awoke in time to sleepily greet our cows, who always seemed be waiting for us. And then we were in the area of Waspy people’s lake houses. Back at our own borrowed lake house, we were too weary for conversion, too close to each other to have to force conversation when none same. Too friendly for me to question right now our using separate little rooms.

And the next day we did not travel much. We went down to the cove to feel the water. We followed the supposed Indian trail between these lake houses. We had the Fielding guide to trees in hand. The occasional neighbors we saw were unintentionally comically stereotypical, looking much like the dowdy models in the L. L. Bean catalogue.

I felt free of like the Sugar Hill/Franconia part of the White Mountains – free of a dark and fearful world where the most awful things could happen. Really not my world, even if it seemed to hover over me some of the time.

The pretty girl and I drove a bit, but just to look out over Lake Champlain from different vantage points. We had lunch at the diner in Burlington where we had gone for French toast. We came back to the lake house. We had dinner of hot roast beef sandwiches, mashed potatoes and apple pie a la mode at the counter restaurant in Vergennes. Then back to the lake house again.

Greeting and being greeted again by the cows at the fence on the dirt road cutting over to the lake.

At the house I go to start up the big old gas heater, and the gas meets my match flame with a small explosion. And we say this looks like our first really early night. And we go upstairs, and this time I follow her into her room. And she says, “What took you so long?”

#139 – DRIVE BY ATTACKS

2010-08-07T06:53:00.000-07:00

It is late in the day now and will be dark soon, but I want to swing back once more through the old summer places. And this can be done fast now on the interstate from Littleton to Franconia, where we get the road for Sugar Hill. We turn off to go up Davis Road, up again past White Wings and the Farm House and what had been the caretaker’s cottage, which after Mrs. Gilman’s death had been purchased by one of the many Mallory’s. And past the site of the Playhouse, which was above the Farm House and below the House on the Hill. The hill that now seemed to have a hanging tree. This time I turn into a narrow dirt driveway that starts on the other side of Davis Road from the Farm House. Old guard people don’t want to go down this long twisting drive because something unsavory is now at the end, though it is the same long driveway though the now high White Pine woods that Nana and Gaga planted. It is still so narrow that it seems like a good idea to honk in case someone was coming the other direction, though I do not honk now. This driveway had seemed to go on forever when the summer was beginning, with anticipation mounting till coming out at White Pines, stately and firm, stone and white clapboard, appeared. Gaga and Nana, who would have heard the honking, and would be out in front to greet us.

When I was in college, a few years after Gaga’s death, White Pines was sold to a rough youngish man that everyone hated, a rich man people somehow knew had been bribed by his family in Boston to stay far away from them. He had been married for a time to a local girl. Everyone said he abused her. And of course he had ruined the place. He was out to make money on it, so he divided the big house into apartments. And he let it go to seed so badly that now it needed paint and had an emergency tin roof where there should have been wooden shingles. And out the back, on the lawn above the wild blueberry field and beneath the panorama of the Franconia Range, the place Gaga had been wheeled out to each day after his stroke, the place with white benches and white bird baths and some white trellises, this new owner had done the unthinkable. He had put in a swimming pool. Something the wrong sort to people did, though there was one house on the way to Littleton that was inhabited by a big summer clan with close tiles to the Franconia and Sugar Hill summer clans, and they had a swimming pool, but they had had to do it because they were so rich, and anyway the other summer people vouched for their pedigree.

I do not honk, though I know this is taking a chance. I am using the headlights, for we are in twilight when I turn down the twisting drive and it is as dark as night under the pine trees. It is nearly that dark when we come out at the open area in front of White Pines. There used to be a circular drive here with a perfectly round lawn in the middle, but the owner has turned the lawn into a parking lot. On the end of the parking lot opposite to White Pines construction had begun on a rental house Stevenson was inserting here. In the dim light I was almost seeing the place before it has begun going to seed.

Quietly we talk around the house towards the mountain view, the now swimming pool, side. We pass what had been my grandfather’s study, a separate place with stacks of wood outside it for his Franklin stove. The Franklin stove has been by a circular iron stairway that let up through a trap door to his sleeping porch, where he could retreat if he saw someone coming to White Pines he did not want to see.

The big screen porch seems still intact, on a level below the house. We walk around to the screen porch. I wonder if the furniture is still white wicker, and what happened to a high indoor swing for children, and the skiing mural done on the blue inner wall by a dashing friend of Aunt Betsy’s when she was a teenager. I hear low voices. I see a glow beyond the screen which may be from candlelight. I hear ice clicking in what are surely standard highball glasses. So people from the apartments are out there having drinks. Time collapses again. I am a ghost passing through again. But I am not completely invisible, for in a raspy female smoker’s voice come the words “Who’s there?’

We retreat silently to the car.

On the way back to Vermont I tell her something I know but wished I didn’t. When we had our driver’s licenses kids from our gang – not me, not my brother, but kids from our circle – would drive over to the Notch and go into the souvenir stores for the Tramway and the Flume and Profile Lake, and pretend they were Jewish. They told us how they would finger the goods saying something that sounded like “Phee-yops” which was supposed to be something greedy Jews would say while fingering merchandise. And after that they would drive through Bethlehem and shout “Kike.’

Gillian says, “The kid’s from Bethlehem should have driven through Sugar Hill shouting things like ‘Your grandmother overcooks the vegetables.’”

#138 - LAURYN

2010-08-06T05:55:00.000-07:00

I am talking about Lauryn now, who through high school lived in that company house. I may not be able to match Gillian for sexual horror stories, but I tell her that Lauryn had been molested by her brother, and that later when she was pregnant at 18 and wanted an abortion her mother talked her out of it. Her mother had flown out to Minnesota where Lauryn was in a small college. “She is my mother,” Lauryn explained later. Lauryn was anyway in Minnesota against her will, for she had wanted to go to the University of New Hampshire with her high school friends.

Lauryn was the least likely person to be found in our family. An extremely popular high school girl. She had seamlessly made the shift from Lycée and ballet to life in a New England mill town, where she had been the most sought after girl in her class. Any trace of English accent – whether the family version or the England version – had disappeared forever.

Aunt Alice had adopted Lauryn in London shortly after she had adopted Paul. The family was horrified, as it was meant to be – irresponsible, pretty Alice, widowed young, now taking on responsibilities she probably could not handle. And anyway it was easy for her since in the years after the war in England there were so many children who needed adopting. Dad spoke about post-war adoption the way he would later speak of my Cousin Margaret’s art career as not amounting to much of anything since Margaret went to the Art Students League, which was a place where anyone could walk in off the street and go to classes.

In the city I would sometimes see Lauryn at formal dinner parties at Nana’s apartment. A picture perfect and polite little girl dressed in velvet. She had been a rising star in ballet school, and was said to be doing fine in Manhattan's high toned French Lycée, when her brother Paul’s troubles led to them to flee the city.

It had started with shop lifting, when Paul was in trouble partly because of what he took from Korvette’s but mostly because he called a security guard “nigger” and said he would come back with “teddy boys” and finish him off. And on top of that, he was carrying a switch blade knife of a length that a new city law made it a felony to carry. I got him a lawyer through a Princeton classmate who was in a corporate law firm where they had criminal lawyers on call for unsavory matters.

A police check revealed Paul had been arrested the previous summer for shooting guns in New Hampshire. Aunt Alice pointed out that he had only done it in the woods owned by his grandmother. The lawyer thought that this was something best not said to a city magistrate. As for the knife felony, the lawyer was proved correct that if he issued a constitutional challenge to the knife law, as he did, the magistrate would throw out the charge rather than get into something over his head.

Later, when I was out of the country, Paul was caught again with guns, including a sawed off shotgun. This time he was in Connecticut spending a week with my parents. It seemed only a matter of time before he was convicted of something big, so Aunt Betsy gave up her place in Washington Square Village and moved Paul and Lauryn and herself up to New Hampshire. She bought a narrow mill town house on a street up above Littleton’s movie house.

I think Aunt Betsy thought she could bide her time and would eventfully come into her own in New Hampshire, where she expected support. She was living on a small trust fund so tight she could not get at the principal. None of Nana’s friends made any effort to rally around her, which she found infuriating. Also she had thought she could get the Farm House when Nana died, but the family made sure it went to my responsible twin brother. I was not brought into the discussion. I was away, working on a novel while living in a deserted old colonial hotel in the middle of Java.

Paul’s troubles had mounted. Guns again, right down to a gangster style sawed off shotgun that he carried around at the Profile Golf Club . He was covered at the Profile by a long-standing family membership, but now the club banned him for life. He had kidnapped a girl in Littleton. His mother said there was more to the story, because Paul was so handsome that girls were always after him. He had taken his victim to the Profile Club, and had held her as hostage, keeping the police at bay with his guns. The final resolution was that a judge gave Paul, who had turned 18, the choice between prison and immediate enlistment in the army.

It was only recently that the family learned, for the first time, that Paul had raped his pretty sister.

I thought Gillian would appreciate the story. Then I didn’t care what she thought of it.

I did not drive up the hill above the movie house to see if my aunt was at home.

#137 – LITTLETON

2010-08-05T08:50:00.000-07:00

I take us back to the interstate to continue on one exit to Littleton. I am so distracted by past and present that I miss the turnoff and so when we first see Littleton we are looking down on it from the interstate. It looks naked, though everything around it is covered with fall colors. A grim and forbidding place, Gillian says. I tell her this is a town without shade trees, much less a village green. And yet I am ready to go down into it, for nostalgia is coming again, like clouds descending that contain nostalgia both for what was and for what had not been.

For this is a year-round people’s place. This is where we would be drive over from White Pines for shopping. The driver a man from the village, and beside him Nana’s maid. Gaga did not do shopping trips and Nana did not drive. It was not until she was in her 80s that she got a license. Then she decided not to drive anyway.

The family marveled at how her maid Evelyn could tell which melons were ripe by touching them and sniffing them. Nana and Evelyn and sometimes my brother and I would go to McGoon’s the quality store – a service outpost for the summer people’s towns right here in the middle of this mill town. A place to stock up on S.S. Pierce canned good from Boston, and fresh meat and fish and vegetables such at would not be found at the Aldrich store in Franconia or at Littleton’s supermarket.

We leave the interstate to drive into Littleton and suddenly past and present are intermingled again. We come into town crossing a shaky old iron bridge over the wild Amonoosic River which is right past the now unused railroad station which still, like the unused Sugar Hill station, has its RAILWAY EXPRESS sign. I point out the high clapboard building at the start of Main Street from which Gaga’s friend the old Littleton police chief surveyed the town. If you needed a driver’s license and did not want to take the test, Gaga would speak to his friend and you would get a license on the spot. Nana was proud that she had actually taken the driving test. And so too my brother and me, who got ours just after turning16 in Connecticut.

Seeing the place with Gillian it looks more like a parched Western town than like something in the heart of old New England. For there really are no shade trees at all. Cars are parked diagonally rather than parallel to the curb. One new place is book store. I tell her that Terri had shown me an application she got for working at the bookstore. It was like an application to a rarefied college, and it made me angry that a little store owner could get away with being so pretentious in a town that had so little culture in it. I see the old drug store, that used to be called Parker’s, and the White Mountain Restaurant, a counter place where you could get Cheeseburgers or pancakes as relief form the multi-course Germanic food cooked and served at White Pines.

We come to the movie theater – one of the movie theaters that sustained people over in the summer towns, the others in Lisbon and Bethlehem. I point to the steep road behind it that leads to the house where Aunt Betsy still lives most of the year.

#136 - BETHLEHEM

2010-08-04T07:26:00.000-07:00

Terri’s cow. It is like I see the cow without any context. Everything I see I see sharply, but everything is separate from everything else. And I know, though I cannot prove it, that really horrible things had to have happened when we were very young in these summer houses. I know it.

These cousins of mine who are moving into death or a death-like stasis now. Years after they were children in this place that now seems so clearly not safe for children. That must have been what Mrs. Miner had in mind.

It is a month since I was here last and Terri was videotaping Mrs. Miner and Gracie on the subject of buzzing, just after Mrs. Miner had said she always felt so bad about what had happened to me, which I think must be more than she told me, which was just that my brother lied and turned me in and I was frequently banished from the warmth of family to the greater warmth at the pantry table. I know there is more. I tell Gillian about Mrs. Miner, and tell her I know there is more, and she seems to know what I know. Everything around me is throbbing now, and I picture all these places in fearful darkness.

In Franconia village we pick up an interstate that did not exist when I was young, and we follow it to a point where we turn off for Bethlehem, the Jewish town. And I am talking about the rampant anti-Semitism, which is not news to Gillian, but I talk about it anyway. And I talk about my father’s anti-Jewish jokes – the guy says his middle finger is the pleasure finger because that is the one he uses to ring up his cash register, told while punching the air with the outstretched middle finger. Another sign that they are unsuited to modern times. And I talk of how Uncle Nick refused to wear a yarmulke, how Elka, my unusually attractive and quite new cousin by marriage who wrote me in Southeast Asia after she was married saying she was so pleased to know about me, so pleased that not all Fitz John's people were "standard issue Pooles." I wondered what they put her through because of her being Jewish. I sent Fitz and Elka as a wedding gift a Burmese lacquered tray I had recently picked up at the big shrine in Mandalay even though I rarely acquired things. Fitz John, whose sister Margaret’s death and her pre-death revelations had helped push me into where I am now – where what had been black has become white, and white is black, and none of the old stories stand.

I am not in physical pain but my head is throbbing and music is welling up and heading towards crescendo, and it is like those Wagner operas, that I never took seriously, with Wagnerian music accompanying the triumph of dark primordial forces from a past that never ended, along with fresh devastation in the present.

What I am going through does not seem overly theatrical to me.

We turn off the interstate and drive through dense woods for several miles to the summer town of Bethlehem. Its old summer movie theater, which had become a soft core porn theater in the seventies, is back to looking just like it looked in the fifties. Some buildings are vacant, some are occupied by small snack places and tourist knick knack stores, and there are still big old rooming houses for people escaping the city. On the outskirts still are the old pre-motel tourist cabins, including one complex that has what look like story book dwarf houses. Old hotels, not nearly so big as the old Sunset, still seem to be in operation, and also a big circular wooden building with large raised letters spelling out “CASINO,” which was apparently a place for catered banquets, not gambling.

It all feels soft and gentle to me. And although I know of it as a town for Jewish people, I have that feeling of nostalgia again for something that it almost seemed had been in my life.

This all so different from the family’s summer towns. “So soft and welcoming,” Gillian says, and she says Bethlehem is like the Bruce Bacon sky that is so off on its own in Jason’s lake house.

#135 – LIKE A GHOST

2010-08-03T06:46:00.000-07:00

So much in upheaval as we drive down the hill, between the Gibbs house, still standing, and the Pioneer, crumbling. I turn right on the main road, then right again at St. Matthew’s on the dirt road that we called Davis Road though I note a too-cute rustic sign that says now it is “The Birches Road.” We thunder down this dirt road, through the stretch where Peter and I plotted how we would leave the family parts of this world for an ultra-regular persons’ world with our log inn by the side the of the road. We go past a wide tarmac drive on the right leading up from the dirt road through birch woods to the Mallory’s, and I do not fail to tell Gillian that Otto Mallory was my grandfather’s roommate at awful Princeton. There is a chain across the tarmac drive, and a sign that says “Beware of the Dog.” The Mallory’s were not dog people “This is the unfriendliness thing I have ever seen,” Gillian says.

We pass a smaller drive leading, I think, to what was old Mr. Hamilton’s place. In my mind someone out of focus named Mr. Hamilton stands in for what may have been a number of old men – the man who buzzed old ladies, the man whose dead hands disturbed by father, the man with woodworking machines who invented a table-high shuffleboard game that was on the White Pines screen porch and in all the summer people’s biggest houses.

We are below the forbidding octangular brown House on the Hill that is now high above us on the left. I see on its lower field an apple tree that is probably long dead, and I see that the tree’s biggest branch goes out horizontally ten feet above the ground. It is one of those hanging trees you see in violent westerns. And I point out that just beyond is where the Playhouse had stood. And then we are at the Farm House. A yard sign from my brother’s time has the Poole name and the Farm House name on it. Across from the entrance, down below the House on the Hill and the Playhouse site, is a long flower garden, set up against a stone wall that holds back the start of the hill. In recent years tended by my brother’s wife, it is where Nana used to gather long-stemmed flowers for White Pines. Further is where the caretaker’s house and barn had stood.

The road passes below a screen porch at the back of the Farm House. My brother and his wife often sit there, I know, drinking, in moderation, correctly English Pim’s Cup concoctions. Because of the light I cannot see as I pass below if anyone is behind the screen, though I sense someone is there. Sometimes Peter and Rosemary stay in the mountains into foliage time. I do not stop – any more than I stopped in Rutland to see if Peter Cooper was home.

It is almost as if I am an invisible ghost here, even here traveling with a pretty girl. No one from this present and all these past times we pass through can see us.

Then, still close to the road, is a trim cottage that was the caretaker’s cottage, where I went to meet his young son who became my friend, and earlier where I saw the caretaker’s father dying. That family moved out when my grandparents began selling off houses and my family had no more need of a full-time caretaker. The cottage was moved here and refurbished as the summer place of a friend of Nana’s, Mrs. Gilman, the widow, we were told, of the Herald Tribune’s music critic.

I look to the left as we now pass the big field in front of White Wings. One of Terri’s rescued animals, an elderly brown cow, is in the field and I see that a pickup truck and her old Volkswagen convertible are parked at the house, so this means Terri is almost certainly at home. But I do not stop to see her, and don’t think she can see me. For I am this ghost returning to an old battlefield.

#134 – A PLACE IN TIME

2010-08-02T07:11:00.000-07:00

And there on the Sunset Hill House’s hill with Terri I am thinking how she looked when she was young and most boys fell in love with her. And then my mind is filled with Kitty, when I loved even the sound of her name. I would take Kitty to the Pioneer after one of the Saturday evening dances at the real Sunset Hill house where old ladies, none of them Jewish, would sit in a circle around the floor of the simple ballroom, looking at us with interest and sometimes disapproval. At these dances we were so bound up with each other that we forgot anyone was watching.

Once in the middle of a Saturday night dance there was a demonstration by a couple who did exhibition ballroom dancing, with acrobatic touches, on the summer resort circuit. She was a dark-haired woman with tight pale skin who could be quite old though she had this calendar girl body displayed in a spangled dress that left her back bare almost all the way down. He was a wily little man in a tight-fitting shiny tuxedo. Aliens in our families’ paradise. I knew the old ladies would be clicking their tongues. And maybe my contemporaries too. I thought the performance was pretty good, but could be better.
We never forgot what was going on outside between the waitresses and bell boys outside.

I am thinking now about the old Sunset and the old Pioneer, and then the small golf course with its old shingled clubhouse and caddy room. My mother learned to play golf there from a resident pro named Harry who was still around when Peter and I became caddies. We actually worked there as caddies for a few weeks one summer. Our jobs were arranged by our grandfather. Unlike the caddies from the village, we would work only half a day. Also, Gaga would match whatever we made.

Our Southern grandmother would send her friends down from the Sunset to hire Peter. It would give her friends a chance to hear his cute sayings.

The clubhouse has still not caved in. It is still in operation. I was aware during my brief caddying career that the golf course was where Mother first became aware of Dad. And now back at this very place again I speak to Gillian of how when our mother was young, she would spend her days playing round after round of golf, often by herself. In those distant summers long before I was born, when she was quartered in one of the Sunset cottages that her own Southern grandmother would rent. It was from this golf course that she first spotted our father. With Gillian I am starting out on this historic hill, where I started out on my first trip over in the summer. On this hill thinking of the lonely girl who would become my mother seeing a lonely boy in a pony cart riding up the hill and along past the fairway.

All time periods seem to take place at the same time. Here on this hill, stressing with my life and other people’s lives.

And now on this objectively calm day it as if there is thunder in the air and flashing lights and whirling winds, and steaming hot and freezing cold and I am outside it all, but also inside.

#133 – THE REAL MOUNTAINS

2010-08-01T07:42:00.000-07:00

I had learned in the summer that Vermonters born in Vermont often refer to outsiders as “flatlanders.” People who are not from the mountains. But we in New Hampshire, back when I was very young and distinctions were important, we knew that the green mountains themselves were flat. As when compared to New Hampshire’s White Mountains. The peaks of the White Mountains the coldest and windiest places in all of northeastern America and probably eastern Canada too. It made us proud. I once impressed Mickey’s mother by referring to the Rockies as “upstart mountains.”

Now when Gillian and I cross over for the first time from Vermont it feels not like we are going from one mountain area to another but that we are going from meadowlands into cold granite.

And now entering this place that haunts me I feel I am in a torrent, or cataclysm.

I take her first to the hill with the lookout point that is in front of what was the Sunset Hill House. That big old wooden hotel with its simple ballroom and its circular rocking chair porch, a part of everyone’s self definition in the these circles, in this place that everyone says never changes. The Sunset had burned down not long ago in one of the suspicious fires that strike old summer hotels that have gone out of fashion.

To our far left we can see the crumbing roof or the Pioneer, which had been a rakish dancing and necking place, going full swing when I was not quite old enough to buy alcohol on my own. Bottles would be passed to us by the older young people from the outside world who were our benefactors here. Pretty college girls, who worked as summer chambermaids at the Sunset. Confident young men who worked as summer bell boys.

Straight ahead of us is the rock strewn field that leads to the woods that lead to the mountains. Again I note the slight indentation remaining form the ring where we used to take English style riding lessons. Down to our right is a large clapboard building, three stories high in the front, and maybe five in the back, that clings to the side of the drop-off from the road. The older people spoke often of the time when this was called the Bachelors’ Quarters. When our parents were young, the right sort of young men could stay free in the Bachelors’ Quarters for they were so in demand as squires for the daughters, mostly from the South, of mothers who came to the Sunset Hill House, by tradition, in each summer’s long hay fever season. The fathers might make it too, but only for a week or so at the summer’s end. That was in my parents' day. In my day, which was after the Depression and after the war, the Bachelors’ Quarters had become the lodging place for those college boys, and girls too, who had summer jobs at the Sunset. These older kids, whom we sometimes saw at night necking with great skill in shadows on the Sunset’s porch.

But now the old Bachelors’ Quarters building has been spruced up and transformed. Freshly painted. Dark shutters and dark window boxes added where there had been no shutters, and certainly no flowers, before. The flowers in the new boxes seem more tidy than cheerful.

The place is across the road from the short nine-hole golf course that was part of the Sunset Hill House in the past and now goes with this miniature Sunset version. Yes, the old Bachelors' Quarters building now claims to be the Sunset Hill House. Two golfers, one in plaid, the other in bright orange trousers, are coming across the road back to what they may think is real.

This version is more formal than I remember the real Sunset as being. And now Gillian and I enter and it feels as quiet as death. Dinner tables with everything correctly folded and arranged. Heavy silverware lined up in the precise order, from outside to inside, in which it should be used.

In the lobby there are brochures promoting this new Sunset version. The brochures make us laugh. They say nothing about the beauty of the mountains or the pleasures of summer sport. They do say golf is good for you. And that the White Mountains is where you should go for your health. As if it is your duty.

#132 – GOOD-TASTE CAT

2010-07-27T08:22:00.000-07:00

We start the day in the kitchen area and it feels so natural it is as if we have not just come out of separate little theme bedrooms. We cook scrambled eggs and bacon and begin our day’s coffee consumption.

Outside we walk on the supposed old Indian trail that connects the Wasp places, then we go down to the rocky beach below the house, where Jason keeps his Boston Whaler. And I douse my face in the cold water. We are so alive. For some reason, I am not sure what reason, maybe it is anthropological interest in all things WASP, we drive down to Middlebury. Me and this summer girl in this time just past summer.

In the car Gillian is once again doing almost all the talking, and I find I am betraying myself, listening to an acquired – which by now to me means fake – British accent. Prim pronunciations, though the things she is saying are far from genteel.

She is naming famous New Yorker writers and cartoonists her mother would fuck when her mother was not masturbating. Then she switches to talking about herself and her just passed Buddhist time, telling me how in India she moved from the orchard cabin in Darmasala to an apartment in New Delhi where she was now with a hustling young America named Mark who oversaw sweat shops on behalf of his family in New York and who had a fixation on his mother who would phone long distance to tell him how awful he was. Maybe, Gillian says, this explains why Mark so cruel. She had been ready to do anything for him.

She describes how she would pinch the pimples on his back. And how he brought in other women. And how what she did was prepare things perfectly for him and other women, right down to putting jasmine petals in his bed before she went off to hide in a back room.

I was not talking, but of coarse I was thinking. I was thinking what a perversion this was on my own memories of how in my house on the Chao Phrya across form Bangkok Sunisar would spread jasmine petals on my bed. And then, as if she were a massage parlor girl rather than a night club singer, a find distinction, she would shake baby powder on me. Though it was never quite the dream time it was supposed to be.

We walk in Middlebury, which, though billing itself as a college town, seems to consist mainly of prissy upscale tourist stores – places that have extra consonants and e’s on the ends of words, as in tea shop spelled s-h-o-p-p-e. And I again have that feeling I first had early in the year when looking for memories on East 66th Street, the feeling that I am being smothered by powdered old ladies wearing fox furs.

We see a sign on a house that calls the place historic and gives times of tours. A pursed lipped ageless lady takes just the two of us through the house. Hooked rugs. Ceilings so low that I have to stoop. Spindly furniture that would break if I sat on it. A museum piece spinning wheel. Wallpaper that seems to bring the walls of the rooms close to each other. Bunches of dried flowers that may or may not have been dried in the 19th century as our tour guide says. She keeps repeating that everything in those days was in such good taste.

And then we have a cause to smile in this dead place, for a cat is lying beside a fireplace that has old iron cooking implements inside it. But the cat turns out to have undergone taxidermy. That’s what these good taste people did. Disemboweled their pets, and filled them with stuffing.

Out on the street we are laughing. We are in unseasonable summer sun again.

#131 – PAIRS SKATING

2010-07-24T10:01:00.000-07:00

And then I was back into a rhythm from the summer, and again the driving felt like gentle skating, up and down hills and along these enticing and now familiar shallow rivers that rush over smooth rocks, beneath soft mountains that still have green from pines and high altitude farm fields but are now mostly in yellows and warm russets and deep lavenders and bright scarlets. Skating again, but now as in pairs skating.

On the first morning it was cool enough for me to wear the patterned, muted blue and red Woolrich sweater I had purchased on 8th Street.

“What a neat sweater, Fred.”

We see in a local paper that people who come to Vermont in foliage time are called “leaf peepers.” They (we) are chided gently in the article. We drive half an hour to Burlington to get a book that identifies trees. I know Burlington has a Socialist mayor and I have seen its spacious pedestrian mall that has plaques celebrating great leftist figures from Marx to Mao. And of course I think of New Hampshire, whose one statewide newspaper is an infamous one called The Manchester Union-Leader, which attacks anything liberal and decent that somehow pokes it head into New Hampshire, promotes bigoted religiosity, celebrates capital punishment, sees Reds under every bed, warns that all decent government programs are communistic, supports fringe or triumphant right wingers in presidential contests. Like the 1950s never ended. But here in Vermont there is a sign that says “the People’s Republic of Burlington.” I tell Gillian get angry every four years after midnight on presidential election nights when a little town in the far north of the White Mountains becomes the first in the nation to report its votes and invariably goes for the most pretentious and reactionary of the candidates.

Back at the lake house we start identifying trees, and we hug when we find what we are looking for – an ash, a gray birch. We transform the downstairs of the Wasp camp with balloons we buy in Vergennes. We dance, just us, to the only music in the house, a cassette tape some out-of-context person has left here, the only music in the lake house. It is an overproduced tape that sounds like a loopy version of Musak. The cassette is named Wyndom Hill, billed as New Age, New Age being something else that had happened in the year I was abroad. I had very recently heard of it as the name of a magazine in which there was an article about Alice Miller, whom everyone I was dealing with these days was reading because Alice Miller really had the goods on destructive, narcissistic, borderline killer families. And her work did not seem to tie in with anything else I heard about the vague spiritual activities – Buddhist chanting and the lighting of magic white candles – that were under the New Age umbrella.

Coming and going from the lake house we always stop in Charlotte to be greeted by our cows. In the house she keeps looking at the Bruce Bacon sky and clouds painting, and repeats that this is the one truly human touch in this house whose downstairs is decorated with the sort of prints corporate lawyers would put in their offices – and the upstairs with the cheap doodads the old Foreign Service officer had placed in his little theme rooms. I tell her that I have known Foreign Service people who for their foreign postings have never had to figure out and buy their own plane tickets or rent their own gated houses, or hire their servants, much less do their own housework, they are so out of touch with where they live.

In Vergennes we get garbage bags and cleaning things. Gillian hangs a new washcloth on a jutting kitchen faucet, telling me earnestly that this is what one does in a kitchen – just as if her background were filled with normal places. We travel up to a beach place on another lake near the Canadian border. At several points along the border go in and out of Canada, sometimes at border stations so small and remote and lackadaisical that checking in with them is voluntary.

We drive up through an area called the northeast Kingdom, a self-contained far north part of Vermont. From the road we see strange dark rock formations that turn out to be bordering a body of eerie black water called Lake Willoughby, that looks like something from a parallel universe, We stop the car to look at the lake, then stop again after the car has been climbing. On a high hill we make ourselves dizzy turning and turning, 360 degrees, to take in the hills and fields and forests we view on all sides below – as if we are at the highest point in the world.

And that night I add a line to the guest book: “IT’S THE TOP OF THE WORLD.”

#130 - FIRST TIME

2010-07-23T13:46:00.000-07:00

And it began to seem natural, this roaming in a beautiful place with a desirable girl in a time I was coming into my own. Natural to move ahead with the knowledge that everything was changing and that I need not be bound by someone else’s maps. Move ahead in autumn air that carried memories mixed with summer air that had the past in it too. As natural as it had felt when I was first living in New York and was finding out how to be my own person in a life that was not bounded by family or school or college or army. When I was in my first place in the city, the East Village before it was so named – which I shared with the same old friend, Jason Bacon, who became the wealthy owner of this funny old lake house we are in right now.

  I am thinking of the powerful sense I had had when first living New York City that, though I had often been there before, everything was for the first time. As I started to learn how to navigate adult life. Small or big things, like how with a young married couple you could eat franks and beans on a floor in Brooklyn Heights. Or you could meet a college friend for lunch from the snack window of a Staten Island ferry boat. Or get drunk at Chumley’s or Diamond Jim O’Rourke’s. Or take a Columbia stacks girl to bed. Or fall deeply in love with a girl who was an action painter. As if the fifties had never happened in New York, as if no one here had ever had to go slow, much less pull back.  

That time back then that had felt like stepping away forever from family, and especially from the childhood that had rarely seemed like a childhood even when with child trappings.The first time, though not the first time on my own. I had already, at 24, had a quick wire service career probing sadistic right-wing recklessness in the Midwest, and Klan-backed horror in the South. I had had what seemed to be my one big love affair, which was with a olive-skin married girl whose husband had been stalking me. Love and danger.

I had been to the Cuba of the of Batista regime looking for this Robin Hood figure Castro who had recently been found to be still alive in the mountains – and after I was captured by fat, sweaty Batista men with tommy guns, I was returned to the bars and brothels and brothel-bars of Havana.   That first time in New York, where I continued to work in journalism but moved ahead anyway. Down to Haiti at one point, and then back in the city setting up shows of Haitian art. And then the Haitian women, Irma and Anne Marie. Between all the others. And the new off-Broadway plays down on Second Avenue and then East 4th Street, the theater block down where my serious girlfriend Vannie lived. And blintzes at Ratner's and Rappaport's, and stuffed derma where Hungarian gypsy violinists came to your table, and borscht at the Ukrainian places. And a constant party flowing from my tenement to uptown and then downtown again and over to Brooklyn and back to my next place, on East 11th, coincidentally around the corner from a basement place where in the college time I had lost my virginity to a powdered and pampered dance hall girl of call girl loveliness, and paid her by endorsing over a small Christmas check I had just gotten from my parents.   And in those first days living in the city I was not conscious that in the years ahead I would stay in the city for only a year or two at a time, and after a recurring down time leave whoever and whatever was with in favor of some foreign adventure in some unseen place that might bring me back to life.   That first time was 1959. This current year 1986 is a time for first times again. After these in-between years of traveling and living in sensual and dangerous war zone areas, and finally a marriage and many more affairs, and after dark and lonely and alcoholic times when life seemed to hold nothing, and happy times when it seemed that just possibly I was nearly where I wanted to be, as when my novel came out, or when I first stepped into Haiti or Thailand, or each time I felt so drawn as to be in love with a newly met accessible or inaccessible woman or girl. The first time now after the Middle East and Far East and Central America. And after jail for drunken things in Hong Kong and Los Palmas and a smuggler’s town in southern Thailand. But also jail for just the right reasons in 1964 Mississippi.

And now this new first time, stepping into the landscape of my life that I hope to chart, moving ahead on mysterious knowledge but without reliable maps. Ready now, as never before, to look into every corner of past and present and projected future with a fresh eye.

As I tour old New England with this apparently ready new girl, on this psychic journey that seems more daring than the literal journeys that had been so crucial to my self-definition – and as I wonder when and if ever the sex scene will come.

#129 - WHAT A TIME

2010-07-21T17:04:00.000-07:00

And now we leave the interstates and the Aqua Mustang is zigzagging east and north. The continued excitement of being in a car heading to the north country. With this pretty girl beside me. Just like I am young and she is younger than she must in fact be. As in a dream I used to have when I was a child and saw myself in sunlight on a green hill being married to a blonde girl as pretty as the girls in story book illustrations - and as unlike correct family women as she could be.

But this is a real girl or woman, a sort of an adult sitting beside the adult version of myself, and she is talking about her own past. Saying that they, her parents, used to go to Maine, though, she says, they did not own anything. They did not have anything like what she calls my family’s a “magic kingdom” in the White Mountains. That place she has not seen but has heard me describe in meetings.

It seems that somehow I have gotten something like love of the mountains into the dark stories I have been telling.

And now Gillian is talking about the celebrities her mother fucked in their cramped Fifth Avenue apartment, too far uptown to be true Fifth avenue, with the wilder upper reaches of the park on one side and Spanish Harlem on the other. And then she is back to Maine again and summer memories.

Memories well up in me when we stop after dark to look at a pond we saw from the car. We walk to the pond, stand on its rocky shore. And send flat stones skimming along its dark surface that is alive with insects and an occasional small fish that breaks water to catch them. This skimming of flat stones is just like what she and her brother used to do, she says.

Just like a perfect childhood, I think, and wonder how I could so quickly skim over something squirmy and dark that she has just told me in the car: that when she was a child her mother and father took her and her brother to a cold, deserted beach in Maine, told them to take off their bathing suits, and had the little girl suck the little boy's penis.

And then I am back on what has recently become familiar territory. We cross into Vermont and pass through Rutland, but do not stop there. We continue up through the state. It is dark but I know that on either side there are soft green mountains.

Just before Burlington we turn west to Lake Champlain. When I had driver up here in August I had taken a high old bridge across a narrow part of big lake to New York state. The car in front of me had one of the just issued new patriotic New York license plates, which were in red, white and blue with a picture of the Statue of Liberty, replacing the orange and black or navy blue that New Yorkers had always had. There was a small New York state park just off the bridge ramp, and standing guard was a state trooper, in one of those forbidding state trooper hats. I had turned around and gone back over the bridge. This was the other side of Vermont from the side that touches New Hampshire. It seemed nothing outside Vermont could be safe.

We pass now through an old-time village, with many vacant stores, called Vergenes. A welcoming sign says it is “the smallest city in the world.”

We are on very small and very old roads now. Pavement gives way in places to the old rural dirt surface. The air remains heavy with late summer and memories, including of things that were not directly in my experience. I have this feeling I have had often this year when hearing someone's story, or exploring countryside, that I have been here before. The way I had felt two weeks back, just after Labor Day, in Naples, Maine.

We head on a dirt road through a place with no stores called Charlotte. Jason had told me in the summer that when you say that name you should put the accent on the second syllable. We drive slowly by a long field where in moonlight we see many cows are lined up at a fence and looking at the road, as if they had been waiting there for us.

Then we are at the lake house on that bluff above the cove. There is a light on. It turns out one of Jason’s wife’s brothers is already staying there with his chubby wife. He is wearing those ultra-WASP L.L. Bean boots in which the foot is made of rubber, which may have been intended for duck hunters but seem to be used by the sort of fake cheerful men who have little ducks on their neckties.

The guy greets us as if it is perfectly natural for all of us WASPs to be sleeping together. He tells us three of the four little rooms are free. We take our bags up steep, narrow stairs and I feel like I am held up by strings being manipulated by a master puppeteer. The puppeteer pulls me to the left as Gillian goes to the right. Separate bedrooms.

The brother-in-law couple head immediately to the bedroom they had claimed. We go downstairs to unwind in the very plain living room/kitchen area. No need for the gas fed heater, for this is still an unseasonably warm night.

We see a guest book and sign it. Before my name I write “What a time we had!” – Which I realize is the sort of thing someone from another time would say in one of my grandfather’s period piece novels that I now make fun of.

In the morning Jason’s in-laws have departed and we have the place to ourselves.

#128 – AWAY

2010-07-12T08:26:00.000-07:00

But I talk fast, and she says come on over she will be ready.

And she looked so ready, waiting in that cramped little hallway for me, beside her and old fashioned looking overnight bag that somehow seemed more European than American. We headed off just as if we were deeply connected people at the start of a vacation, not people conducting some sort of ACOA exercise. A happy surprise. But more surprising was that the moment I pointed the Aqua Mustang north I felt a wave of good feeling that went beyond this present time with this girl. Time was timeless and this was just an inevitable trip to the White Mountains. We were going to Vermont and I had said I didn’t think we would get to the White Mountains. But it felt like I was going to the White Mountains. It might have been many years ago.

And if felt at moments like two children off on an adventure. This surprised me a little but not much. I thought it might have to do with there being so much emphasis in ACOA on going back psychically in time. We were going back physically now. Back into the darkness, but maybe looking for light. And I wondered if, as in psychic travel, the aim would be not just to get the story but also to revise or rewrite it.

Gillian did not drive. I decided to go by a faster route than I had followed in the summer. I took the old Palisades Parkway to the New York Thruway, rather than go by what had become my regular route, up the old Taconic and along small roads.

At the first thruway rest stop she came back to the car with an assortment of little things she had gotten from a vending machine in the ladies room – a comb, nail clippers, some sort of gimmicky little key chain. Nothing she needed or would have thought she wanted until she saw the machine. She explained that she had been back from India only since the start of the year, and thus was so fascinated by what was here in America.

We drove on and time passed and I started seeing thruway signs for places whose names I did not know. Amsterdam. Rome. And it dawned on me that I had wound up going west rather than continuing north. How like, Fred. How stupid. Even in this new present.

“The Gran Turismo, Gillian said. That’s what my father said when travel accidentally became wandering. The Gran Turismo.”

So different from my own distant family history in which it was so hard for anyone to live down making a wrong turn. I had almost expected that the wrong turn would make Gillian feel contempt for me. This present that made me as vulnerable as I had been in early life. As if the years in Asia and Africa and Latin America had been mere detours.

So I didn’t have to get to the lake houses fast. I could wander. Then she told me that when he was dying of cancer her father had married a woman from the Philippines. She said she thought maybe a lot of men did that when they needed someone to take care of them. And I knew that she knew that my ex-wife was a Filipina. But I did not react, except inside. And I could tell my rage was still around. I seemed to me that her typing of Filipinas smacked of familiar bigotry. Not to mention her typing of men who needed care. Not to mention opening up the possibility of sadness if I should think long about my marriage and the hope my wife and I had had.

Then quickly back to this present time again, the time of The Gran Turismo. We stop for sandwiches in the every old spa town Saratoga, which is looking particularly 19th century. She points out mansard roofs. Some of these four-sided slanting roofs are on what seems to be very old brick buildings. Others on big, nostalgia-filled clapboard houses, like in paintings by Hopper.

I had been passing through Saratoga for more than a year now, starting with that first trip to the awful party in Littleton. And again now while passing through I thought of costume dramas set in this place, of bare-shouldered ladies who looked liked Vivian Leigh or Gene Tierney, and gambling men with natty spats like Tyrone Power or Clark Gable.

Walking past a thrift store I took her hand.

#127 - KEEPING SILENT

2010-07-11T08:50:00.000-07:00

I didn’t tell anyone my plan. It seemed unreal. That night I had an early birthday dinner at a Kielbasa place in the East Village with the former therapist I knew from ACOA and I did not tell her what I was planning. I wondered if she liked me as more than a friend.

The next day I went to a clothing store on 8th Street that specialized in Woolrich and Dockers, clothing well beyond Brooks Brothers but modern only to me. I purchased a cool pastel bluish and reddish earth-tone wool sweater, the sort of thing until so recently I would not wear. There was something familiar about the design, though there were no reindeer on it. I knew the nights and probably days too would be cool or cold in the north.

I called Jason and arranged to use his place on Lake Champlain. He said hIs wife’s brother might be there but that with four bedrooms so there was plenty of room.

Before going to dinner with Gillian I stopped at her apartment, which I had not visited before. She shared it with someone she did not know but who needed a roommate and was rarely at home. A cramped but quite new and tidy little place over in the East 20s, not far from the Quaker meeting house where I would go on Saturday mornings, not for pacifist Quakers but for the often fierce ACOA people. Gillian had never been to the Quaker place. The only ACOA meeting she attended was the one on Sunday nights at the Corlears School. Only this one meeting a week of the many meetings that were available every day around Manhattan.

Her limiting herself to only one meeting felt tight and claustrophobic to me. But then so too did the fact of her English accent. Maybe this was my problem and not hers. And anyway the overall optimism and hope I felt included that I, and maybe she, could do anything I and maybe she seriously wanted to do. Optimism that felt like foreplay.

Her apartment was a couple of very small rooms and a kitchenette built around an area that was like an abbreviated hallway. No windows. A television set. I found she had been playing a video of the hyper-sentimental Frank Capra/Jimmy Stewart movie “It’s a Wonderful Life.” Which felt like Mario giving up Toscanini in favor of the positive-thinking Doris Day. I did not tell her that ever since I had first discovered poetry and serious entertainment I had had a horror of sentimentality. Again I kept silent and concentrated on her intelligence and looks.

And I did not tell her that I had once encountered Jimmy Stewart. He had been in my father’s class at Princeton and was the featured speaker at my own class’s pretentious senior dinner shortly before graduation. His hair was died almost yellow for his then current role, which was as Charles Lindbergh, a movie it seemed to me nicely timed to fit with the lingering days of McCarthy and the more subtly awful Eisenhower. His entire talk was about the evils of communism and the heroic figures in Hollywood who opposed it, including the heroic figures who betrayed their colleagues and friends.He practically had ready for sainthood the hack director of lavish, ignorant biblical epics Cecil B. Demille.

And I didn’t tell her how I felt about her her cramped little place that had no light in it, any more than I told her I hated Princeton, and fascists like the Nazi sympathizer Lindbergh and like Jimmy Stewart of cliché spouting roles and the budding inquisitor Jimmy Stewart of actual life. This betrayal by Jimmy Stewart whose cliché movie world had seemed, when I was a child, to offer me an alternative to the coldness around me. And I was glad I could contain myself here with this lovely women, and I wondered why it was usually so difficult, and I wondered why I was so angry.

On the morning of the trip. I call to make sure she is ready. She says she had been thinking, and it is seeming like this trip is not such a good idea. Why don’t we forget it?

This plan to enter the most beautiful place on earth and also the belly of the beast with this picture perfect blonde girl.

Like that time on the phone with Jacqueline when my anger at her went, click click click, back through my anger against so many people, mostly women, all the way back to my mother. This time it is going back click click click again, but only from Gillian to the blonde photographer and back to Jacqueline.

#126 - SUNNY DAY

2010-07-09T05:49:00.000-07:00

Right after that session with Mrs. Miner I had begun the drive by my usual side road routes back to the city. She had said I must come to dinner with her and Gracie the next time I was up here. I told her I would, though I was not certain I would ever need to see the White Mountains again. And though aware that a boundary between the people I came from and the people rooted in the place, had been breached. But this leaving was hauntingly familiar, my saying I would return and almost believing it but at the same time knowing I probably wouldn’t. All my life. Telling Sheila Ng I would come back to Singapore, telling Anne Marie in our borrowed room on Irving Place that though I was leaving on a freighter I would be back. Leaving Susi because I could not stop there. Or more like being thrown out, as with Bonnie. Judy too. But going away and saying I would come back.

Left and never saw again the Sekovanic’s in Ljubljana, the Megallis in Cairo, the Izards in Atlanta, the artists of Haiti, the singers of the Philippines. And maybe I did not need to ever return to the White Mountains again. Maybe what I knew now from Mrs. Miner, with great gaps still in my life story, maybe it would be all I would ever learn there. Maybe I would never see, never need to see, the White Mountains again.

And in New York a week after Labor Day it was almost as if I had never been back to the literal places of the past. Back in the city, the probing meetings, the amazing experiences finding my life in what I saw in galleries and museums, all these new people from the past year.

On a September morning that felt like August now down in the city I rode my bicycle up from Chelsea to the Modern Art Museum, aware that this sunny day was almost exactly a year from when the past came over me in a way that made me feel my life was petering out, just before my travels into that past, first in my head and more recently in the Aqua Mustang, had begun. And life had opened up.

I stopped just west of the museum, and as expected I found Gillian still there, cheerfully blonde in the light and warmth still of summer, doing her sidewalk sales of African fetish figures. I was telling her of my adventures in Vermont and New Hampshire, and then we were talking about fall foliage, which both of us knew but had rarely seen for many years, and would soon be at its peak up there.

And then I mention that in a few days it will be my birthday, and she says – as if we are very close – that we must do something really special for my birthday, and I say let’s go to Vermont, where I have this amazing place to stay and where the foliage is nearing its peak. I don’t say let's go to New Hampshire, but she knows my unfolding New Hampshire stories. I say let’s go to Vermont and she turns her eyes right on me and says, like the girl I take her to be, without the darkness I know because of what I have hard in those meetings, “Fred, what a super idea!”

Adult children plunging together into the past. The two of us both survivors of dangerous WASP places. On this girl’s face I saw, or thought I might be able to see, or maybe one day would be able to see, here or somewhere else, something I had just seen on those old faces from the past at White Wings – when I had realized Mrs. Miner and Gracie were looking at me the way in books and movies family people look at loved ones.

In the museum I go to the sculpture garden and look down on a sensual reclining, slightly larger than life nude by Maillol called The River. And then I am looking at a more wildly sexual woman, a huge woman of such energy that her burgeoning body alters the garden, a statue of this woman from his actual life that Gaston Lachaise cast in bronze with slight variations over and over again. And then the big stylized backs of naked women that Matisse did over many years. And finally I am upstairs looking at small bronze Matisse nude girls, and then the painting called The Piano Lesson, the boy at a piano who could be me, and is under the control of a grim, gray, taskmistress above him, but down below in his line of sight is one of those small, hopeful bronze nudes, right there in his space in the painting.

As I look the bronze girl in the painting again seems to stretch and wiggle. I hope that when I get outside I will not find that Gillian has changed her mind.

#125 – MRS. MINER

2010-07-08T09:19:00.000-07:00

Gracie, they say, has had cancer and survived it. She looks a little unfinished, a little disheveled, as opposed to Mrs. Miner’s finished, comfortable look, but she is alert and animated and as present as her mother. The two of them still live in the Miners' house in the village which they seem to assume I will know. One of those tidy New England village houses with the picket fences and neat plantings, in this village that looks just the way it did when I was a child except that the wooden sidewalk is gone.

They are full of memories. “You were forever being sent back to eat with us,” says Mrs. Miner. And I remember the round table with an oilcloth cover back in an open pantry area, with a door leading to steps to the outside, between the kitchen and the room for a nurse or governess at the start of the Boys’ Wing. And she says I ate many of my meals back there because I was forever being punished for something and banished to the back. And they did not much like my brother, who was forever turning me in. He lied, she said.   They also didn’t like our cousin Fitz John, who was billed as a perfect boy, a budding scientist, it was said, for he captured small snakes and put them in a jar.

Mrs. Miner and Gracie are now looking at me the way in books and movies family people look at one of their own.

And I flash on a sunny day when Peter and I, practically pre-verbal, had been left in the mountains all summer. We were sitting at that table with the oil cloth when Mother suddenly appeared. For long moments I did not know who she was.

Mrs. Miner and Gracie say they liked Gaga. He talked with local people. This year I had been building up my picture of the aloof writer around whose study you had to tiptoe, and I had been stressing the anti-Semitism. But also there were his songs and stories. And also present at Pines sometimes was old Gaga’s friend since early in the century, Harry Lorbor, a warm-hearted immigrant Jewish doctor who had been with Gaga in the settlement house movement. Harry Lobar, Gaga and also a social worker from the time when social workers were rare. The social worker, long dead, was an invalid named Fred King, for whom I had been named and who had taken my father to spend a winter in an Atlantic City hotel, in the year Dad was recovering from near fatal blood poisoning

Gaga always talked with people in the village, Mrs. Miner said. He was popular there. I knew he was popular from our almost daily walks that wound up at the Sugar Hill village general store/post office where Gaga seemed to know everyone. It was a window into an outside world. It was where I was allowed to browse through, and sometimes buy, comic books. Dick Tracy and his two-way wrist radio and comic villains like Gravel Gerty. L’l Lulu with Slugger the regular person boy who wore a sort of workman’s hat much like the brown tweed caps Gaga wore for walking and motoring when it was cold.

And now Mrs. Miner is speaking of a time Gaga and Nana stayed in the mountains all winter and one day she and her late husband Ray came upon them on the long winding driveway to White Pines. Nana was on a small sled and Gaga, exhausted, was pulling the sled. They felt such sympathy for him, she is telling me.

She is saying she did not like Nana. She did like Aunt Betsy. I had been told once by Mother that the reason Mrs. Miner had left White Pines was that pretty Betsy had lured Mrs. Miner's son, Ray Jr., who was to die young, into a torrid affair. But the reason she left, Mrs. Miner says now, was that Nana was too cold and domineering. “And I never liked White Pines. It was much better here at White Wings. White Pines was a cold place. Your grandmother would reject guests. She would stay upstairs in her bedroom, have her meals sent up there. She would send out the lie that she was not well enough to receive visitors.”

And Betsy had fun at her expense sometimes, Mrs. Miner said. Once flowers from some man came for Betsy but she redirected them to Nana, who thought they must come from an admirer not of Betsy but of herself. And this story led Mrs. Miner and Gracie to the “buzzing” word which they pronounced with sly looks, buzzing being, it was clear without further explanation, old time New Englandese for fucking. Something for which there was no word in the main part of White Pines. Buzzing right here at White Pines.

And now Terri has produced a video camera, just the sort of thing people from outside might have, and she is videotaping Mrs. Miner and Gracie, who are telling about Nana buzzing other men, particularly old Mr. Hamilton, who buzzed a lot of the old-time summer people.

It seemed to me I knew Mr. Hamilton. Once when Mother and Dad were up in the mountains they took Peter and me to one of the few family houses on Davis road to see an old man everyone here knew. The old man sat very still by his fireplace, his hands hanging down limp. Afterwards Mother said that was very hard on our father. Those dead hands. It reminded him of Fred King.

#124 – TERRI ON THE PHONE

2010-07-02T11:09:00.000-07:00

I see the Iris Farm again on my way back from breakfast. I try to keep this farm scene in my mind but still not forget those dark and dangerous corridors from the past. I turn off again onto Davis Road, pass the two small new houses just beyond the turnoff – the words “upstart houses” come in from somewhere nasty – then into the open field area before the big houses begin. And then the black silhouette cutout of the murdered greyhound that Terri had nailed to the post beneath her mailbox, and now I am on her quite long driveway that ends in a circle in front of the two wings of White Wings.

From outside I can hear Terri talking loudly on the phone. No more marijuana haziness. The happy, sometimes sweet, sometimes deep, strong voice of the Terri of many years back. The confident pretty girl of the past. As if nothing has changed in her rich childhood summer home.

Inside her wing there were paintings she had collected – including semi-abstracts by Milton Avery’s sister and deeply evocative scenes in watercolor of light and shadows on snow. The day I arrived she had told me something I had not heard before, that in the brief time between starting college and dropping out she had taken studio art courses and that all along her desire had been to be an artist, though she had not touched art materials in many years, and had none with her in White Wings.

And now she is sounding happy on the phone. She is laughing. And then she is saying, “You’ll never guess who’s here.” Then she is saying “Fred Poole.” And then she is saying, “Come right over.”

By this point she is out on the second floor connecting walkway holding her cordless phone. She gets off the phone and says “That was Mrs. Miner.”

Mrs. Miner.

I knew Terri had been staying in touch with Mrs. Miner some years back, and had actually, when broke, worked with Mrs. Miner closing down summer people's houses. But that was another time, and I had assumed that by now Mrs. Miner was long dead. She had been my grandparents’ cook and housekeeper, in charge of lesser servants and all practical household matters at White Pines, a woman I had assumed in childhood was my grandparents’ age.

And now a big old unfancy car, a car of a sort I cannot identify but I am not good at identifying most cars. This old unfancy car turns in at the greyhound cutout, and, in slow motion, it seems to me, comes up the driveway to the circle where Terri and I are now standing. And slowly it comes to a stop. And the door on the driver’s side is opened, and out steps, still in slow motion, this extremely comfortable looking woman who incredibly is Mrs. Miner, who is still fleshy and soft and moves like someone strong who would have to be much younger, she must be so old now. I have not seen her since I was maybe 12 years old, 40 years back, but here she is, mysteriously unchanged in this place where they always claimed that nothing ever changes. And from the passenger’s side the other door opens and a younger but still old woman steps out, and Mickie says you must remember Gracie, who had been Mrs. Miner’s tiny daughter, whom Nana insisted they seat at formal dinner parties at the long shiny dining table at White Pines if without this extra person present the number at the table would come to the number 13. This little village girl in a little girl dress seated there with mostly old people in tuxedos and evening gowns, Nana at the head of the table, dressed in one of her unique Chinese style pants suits, which were somehow formal and from a time way back before pants suits had not been invented and there had been a vogue in such circles for all things hinting of the Chinese. The silk suits making Nana, even with her perfect stiff posture, look more comfortable than anyone else.

Mrs. Minter looks at me with a wide open smile, holds out her hand, says, “It is so good to see you. I always wanted to find you. I always felt so bad about what happened when you were a child here.

#123 – IRIS FARM

2010-06-30T08:33:00.000-07:00

It is well after midnight when I get back to White Wings from this near-perfect 18-hour interlude over in Maine. I wake up in one of the old carefully preserved bedrooms of the formal wing of White Wings feeling simultaneously refreshed and groggy. I see it is nearly noon. I throw water on my face from an old bathroom sink with long nozzles. I dress quickly and step out to look at the mountains and, yes, breath in this mountain air that, like the light, has no equal anywhere. But whatever scent of balsam is there is smothered in the scene of Marijuana.

Mickie has come out of her more regular persons’ wing and is right on the connecting second floor walkway. She is holding out a roach. She has a vaguely blissful look on her face. And this, for me, is enough. Enough of the mountains. Enough of old memories. Time to leave. Not just for a side trip like yesterday’s trip to Maine but rather time to just leave. And anyway I have to get back to Vermont if only because I am leaving Vermont too. Driving down in caravan with Donna in her move to Union. And I am ready. The idea of staying on in Vermont had never seemed to have much reality to it. I have too much unfinished business in New York, which is control central in this war against family versions in which the stakes are getting higher and higher.

Something is new, though still circumstantial – this feeling I have of great darkness surrounding the old family places, this feeling of big dark rooms and corridors and stairways in which the most awful things can happen, especially to children. Dark places that say knife-edge secrets, incest and worse. Like in big houses in horror movies, I think, though this is only a constructed comparison since, although I am a cinephile, I have never at any age sat through horror movies.

It is time to get on the road. I won’t try to get breakfast here. So before leaving for good I drive into Franconia for scrambled eggs and home fries and bacon at the Dutch Treat.

Between Sugar Hill and Franconia I pass by the Iris Farm, an old dairy farm still in some degree of operation, sturdy barn buildings and old style wooden silos all painted white – picture perfect in a in way the sweetness of Vermont or Maine cannot equal. And moreover, in the not so distant distance, rising up behind the farm buildings, I see the Franconia Range mountains that are as familiar as blood relatives. And the sunlight is nearly horizontal.

Like all summer children I had been taken to the Iris Farm to see the inside of the high-arched main barn, meet friendly farm hands, and greet the cows being brought in for milking. And now forty years later I am passing this place and realize I can see it clearly wherever in the world I might be – the barns, the cows, the rocky fields and then woods and mountains. The light.

Seeing it before me right now, seeing it from the Aqua Mustang, I am so full I can hardly contain what I see.

This panorama of Iris Farm should, I decide, be my final view of the White Mountains.

#122 – MAINE

2010-06-29T08:41:00.000-07:00

On Labor Day I found myself standing with Terri on a small, now rarely used old lookout platform across from where the Sunset Hill House had stood before, like so many old style summer hotels, it had been destroyed in a mysterious fire. Also behind us across the road were the cottages, will intact, that went with the Sunset. And down to our left the remains of that rakish old brown shingled building called the Pioneer, the late night dancing and necking and drinking place. From the lookout platform Terri and I were facing the mountains that here are in the exact configuration they are in when seen from the old family houses. Down below us was a scraggly brown-green rocky field, with barely noticeable circular indentations in the dry grass where a riding ring had once been, where my brother and I and Terri and most of the others in our gang had taken riding lessons from a weather-beaten and happy Englishwoman who kept horses nearby and knew the ins and outs, knowing when to post, when to stand, of using English riding saddles, a confident woman who did not care about extraneous things like attitude and attire. This was as close as anything I had of sharing in a collective memory of youth.

And I was seeing something I had forgotten – how the sunlight already at Labor day came in long almost horizontal silver-sharp yellow winter rays – almost horizontal because we were that far north here. And although I was out to get the true story of what went on in the past, the light filled me with a feeling of nostalgia that nearly brought me to tears. I said to Terri, and it most have sounded like I was in awe, I said “No place on earth has light like this.” And then it seemed to me that I might as well have been saying that no place on earth compares to this place, which was something I heard so often in the past even from family people who hardly ever returned. No place on earth like the White Mountains. No other place that really counted. As if they could never see beyond or behind it. As if having had it once made up for their failures after they left. And I hoped I myself was beyond ever feeling smug about my connections here.

The next day, I was not quite ready to return to Vermont, as had been my plan. But I was not ready to stay either, so I decided to do a little exploring in a different direction. Terri had been talking about Portland, Maine and its art galleries and cultural life, which sounded strange to me, for my memories of Maine were from those winters in boarding school when I would travel, like an athlete with privileges, to take on and defeat other new England schools in the unlikely sport of debating, and Maine has seemed so barren and colorless and plain when rushing through it in those winters. Time now for another look.

I set out quite early, before Terri was up, cutting over to route 302 and following it through North Conway, which had been changed by outlet stores, and then by the Mount Washington Hotel, which, though in the old style, had been known to sometimes accept Jews. Past the trail heads where a dozen of us, plus some limber parents, would start out on our happy teenage hikes that we called mountain climbing – traversing the Presidential Range above the timber line and staying in the Appalachian Mountain Club huts, where we slept in separate boys and girls bunk bed dormitories. Our gang, my male friends and those girls I thought I would always remember, they were so pretty and flirtatious and open – always remember, I thought, long after I had gone on, as I planned in adolescence, to bigger worlds,

In twenty minutes across the Maine border I came to a lake with a town on it called Naples, the town on a bay with a dock that was the harbor place for, and this felt like something from a dream, a full-scale working replica of a big old paddle wheel Mississippi River boat. When I was very young such appealing tourist things – dismissed by family as things to be avoided, dismissed as what they called tourist gags – these tourist things filled me with warmth, like the souvenir shops at the Flume and at Profile Lake beneath the Old Man of the Mountains – things other people had and that our people looked down on. Wooden hatchets, funny hats and balsam pine pillows with the words “for you I pine and balsam.”

Naples, Maine, and a Mississippi river boat. This was my world. Here in the uncharted, unsanctified territory outside the White Mountains. God I felt good.

Everything I had heard about Portland from Terri was true. It was the new world in the same way that Vermont was the world now of art and love and sex and rebellion and sex and adventure – guitars and anti-war protests and interesting low fat and spice-filled restaurants built over a civilization that had had tasteless New England boiled dinners and swept sex under the rug.

After the galleries and coffee shops, I drove out of town, stopping at a roadside food trailer to pick up a lobster roll, then sat on a cliff with my Walkman listening to Judy Collins, looking out at the endless ocean, the ocean that opened up the world as opposed to the mountains that, as much as I loved them, cut off the sky. And after the cliff I continued on up the coast, which looked on the map to now have a series of small, jagged spits of land, but the spits of land of land turned out to be the big, sturdy walls of timeless fjords.

Driving back towards New Hampshire I stop after sunset, but still in twilight, in Naples for a hamburger and fries at the outdoor part of a one of a series of restaurants on the water close to the Mississippi paddle wheeler. There is more than a hint of autumn in the air. But the lake and its shore are alive still with summer smells. Summer trees. Summer lake water. And fish are jumping at insects in this place which will soon be frozen over.

But the chill in the air is not enough yet to mean taking in outdoor tables. A crucial touch of summer lingers. The handfuls of people eating in the outdoors and laughing together are not, I realize, summer people. They are all, whether resident or itinerant, men and women who worked here in the summer. And this is the day after Labor Day, and all the summer people, the good and the bad, have gone away and now the people who belong can relax, which was what they are doing.

Except I am thinking we, not they – we can relax, as I imagine myself into a world as connected as this one.

#121 – ALMOST THE SAME

2010-06-28T08:24:00.000-07:00

Almost everything was the same. I cut over from Rt. 10 through Bath by the rapid water that becomes a waterfall in a gorge below a very high and surely precarious looking covered bridge. I came along the edge of the old town of Lisbon with its stately street lamps and formal looking bridge and vacant stores. Past a lumberyard that was sometimes in operation. Followed a hill that dropped off to my left down to the Sugar Hill station, which had been tended so carefully by a station master they talked about him in a manner both admiring and dismissive as if he were just a silly little figure but also as if what he did was touching; he had kept flower boxes blooming, even by the old Railway Express sign. For a time after the railroad died the station had served as a hamburger place, and now it was deserted, but the frame was there and the open land around it was the same and this 1986 Labor Day could as easily, as eerily, have been another Labor Day back when the timeless-seeming trains were still running and we would all gather at night to welcome one of our gang up from some distant suburban place. The grownups tended to come by Pullman sleeper, which would arrive the next morning.

Once again, my third foray into the White Mountains this year, I realized that I had never completely gotten away, Sometimes there would be an urge to see the old places, more often there would be a counter-urge to stay away. I go now though Sugar Hill village where village people live possibly warm lives in neatly tended houses with shrubs and actual white picket fences, and there is still a general store that is also a post office, plus a cheese business run by a retired ad man from Boston who sells here New York cheddar that tourists believe is a local product.

I go past the turnoff to the Sunset Hill House, and then instead of turning down Davis Road at the little summer church I keep going around on the paved road that before turning toward Franconia loops around to the other end of Davis. I pass what has been Sugar Hill's Hildex maple sugar place, run by the Aldrich’s, who ran the IGA store in Franconia. And who for many years have operated a profitable tourist place called Polly’s Pancake Parlor on the site of Hildex, a tradition that started after my time.

Hildex maple sugar which was nearly white in color, was the official maple sugar of our childhood. I would have to sneak the more golden kind that came from across the border in Vermont. Both versions were the forms of maple leaves and little maple sugar men.

Then I hit Davis Road and it looks the same except for a couple of small summer places on it, one of them an A-frame, which must mean alien skiers. Despite these new near cabins the road is mostly deserted until I come to the big old houses of the old established summer people, meaning the Poole family, and a man named Mr. Hamilton and eventually the big place of the Mallory’s.

The first of our houses is White Wings, which was also the first to leave the family. It is set back from the dirt road by a scruffy field in which an elderly cow Terri had rescued from slaughter is grazing. Below her mailbox is a metal silhouette cutout of a Greyhound. I soon learn this is a hopeless attempt to make the current owner of our main house, White Pines, feel guilt, for he had shot one of Terri’s dogs, a rescued Greyhound, just for the hell of it, apparently. He had said it was to protect the deer, though he was the sort person who would tempt deer with apples and then shoot them. This rough man who had been given money by his family to stay away, and had put this money into what was generally seen as ruining white pines.

Terri was in the wing she had made her own when she moved back. It was filled with dogs and splintery wood walls now, and was a very dark place, in its regular person's way as dark as when this the wing had been the silent place where my grandfather wrote his books when in residence at White Wings. Dark in the past, and dark in the present, with that era in between when it was bright and open, polished light wood floors, white walls, the wing set up so that Terri and her brother would have a happy place to live and entertain their friends – that period in the past when it was not dark.

Terri has stopped drinking, not through AA but rather with the aid of marijuana. She told me more than once that she never forgot the kindness of my grandmother Nana, who had stopped her on the road one day when she was a young woman just out of a dull marriage to a man her Grosse Point family favored who worked for General Motors. After the divorce, prettier than ever, she was back in White Wings for a summer and had a pet lamb who would follow her along Davis Road. White Wings was in sight of the old Farm House, which was a summer house name as much as it was a description of what the core of the place had once been. From both houses you had a clear look at the dirt road. Nana spent her summers in the Farm House after White Pines was sold. It was from the Farm House, set above the road, that she saw Terri walking with her lamb, and Nana went down to speak to her. Terri said she never forgot the kindness of my grandmother, the kindness that consisted, so far as I could tell, of Nana's once spotting Terri on the road, and coming town to tell her she should be careful not to get to close to any of the local people.

Which Terri still seemed to consider a turning point in her life – “The best advice I ever had” – even though she played bingo at lodges, surely had sex with local people in the long winters, and when broke worked as a house cleaner – which of course were all things unheard of in this class-bound place.

#120 – NOT QUITE THE SAME

2010-06-24T09:13:00.000-07:00

It was the same but it wasn’t. I did not go to the Sunday evening meeting at the Corlears School, a fast l0-block walk down from my place on 25th Street. It was Gillian’s only meeting, the one she called “my therapy,” and I heard she had talked about me in it. Telling everyone about driving with that she called “a program friend” around his family’s “magic kingdom” in New Hampshire. Everyone in Manhattan ACOA knew about my search for what had happened in New Hampshire, and knew that I had recently gone back. They did not know until now that this sexually riveted, deceptively sweet appearing blonde girl/woman had been trysting up there with there me. I learned about what she had been saying in one of those syrupy threatening letters that my stalker Abigail sent me.

I did nothing. I hardly missed Gillian, though despite what she had said I did think the sex had rarely been better – rarely better neither with serious past girlfriends, nor with semi-pros and professionals in exotic countries. I did not miss Gillian after the initial disappointment. It was more as if I had escaped with my life. And now there were Janet and Melanie and Susan and so many more on this circuit I was on – no lack of women with whom I could flirt, with it maybe or maybe not being the surface of something captivating.

Then one evening Gillian came unannounced and rang my buzzer. I was not sure why. The ending had seemed so conclusive. She immediately saw that on a table in my living room were photographs of myself, some in infancy, all in phases of childhood, that I had assembled in the past year. One was a portrait from a time when I was 15 and our Southern grandmother had paid to have formal portraits of the twins done in a photographer’s studio In his, my brother Peter was looking ahead as if he saw an ordered future that would need his tending. His jaw was firm in the portrait just as it had been in life when he would stride into a room like a determined grown-up. The grandmother said she could see in his portrait that Peter was going to be such a man. All she said about mine was that it made me “look pretty,” and so it had made me cringe when I saw it displayed at our house in Connecticut.

Now Gillian said, “Look at that boy. The girls must have gone crazy. They all most have wanted to lap him up. I would.” And I knew she was good at lapping all over in the course of wetting a man’s cock in her mouth and then, just before he came, pulling back to blow on it gently.

So there was a quick sexual surge, but it quickly passed and I was feeling familiar creepiness in the situation – this woman in my apartment with this boy in the picture.

Then she told me that she was fucking an Irish street person who was helping out with her sidewalk sales. She said that was all she could handle because of her self esteem situation. And then she brought up Abigail, the grim, gray possibly homicidal woman who had been stalking me. She and Abigail were suddenly friends, she said. And then, sounding especially pompous, she said she had hired Abigail to help her with her what she called her business, meaning illegal street sales of mass produced wooden fetish figures. She referred to the business as if it were a major undertaking, and she said, her British accent thick, that Abigail was proving to be a talented “art restorer.”

And this news really frightened me, for I knew that Abigail would have hated Gillian if for no better reason than that Gillian looked so young and sexy. And surely my grim stalker would have wanted to kill Gillian after hearing her describe in such a public place as the Sunday night Corlears meeting what we had been up to.

#119 – WITH NEW STORIES

2010-06-23T09:11:00.000-07:00

When I was back at my place in New York in the autumn, with so many stories to tell the people I was associated with in these meetings, so much that had fallen into place, so much information, including the sort that Michelle called “visuals” – I didn’t have the entire story but I had perhaps enough, things put in place because those elements of the past now logically came together that way, but even more the images I had now, visual and otherwise, as if I had actually been back there in the past just now, actually felt blows to my groin and head, and also the softness of a young girl clinging, as in early necking that passed as dancing back then. But then something else from even earlier – actual skin on skin – the bare body from another generation but very smooth. And this explained why I knew so much about a woman's bare body, all of it, before, as far as I knew, I had actually touched one or even seen one. Now I knew why I knew. Or at least some crucial parts of it. Because of what had gone on these last weeks in the mountains. The case was no longer merely circumstantial.

And now moving into November it was back to where I had been before I drove up to Vermont in late June. I was still going to these meetings, which were as satisfying, and sometimes crazed, as they had been before the summer – which seemed to mean a new kind of continuity in life, a life that did not have be restarted every ten minutes.

I still wasn’t seeing much of people I had known before this year, but there was a little connection. Joan, the CBS producer who had been a friend since our UPI days, and whom I had last seen at her New Year’s Eve party. We had dinner me one night at the still very affordable Ye Waverly Inn near her chaotic place on Bank Street. I started to tell her about these groups of people leaping into the past and she started talking about her father, often drunk and always changing, one year a private detective spending his time in stakeouts across from seedy motels, the next year turning up in Arizona as a unformed member – “Whoever heard of a Jew doing this?”– of the U.S. Border Patrol. And an aunt had been turned out to do tricks, and, well, everyone was drinking all the time and you never knew what would be revealed. And although Joan was usually tough, like the women played by Barbara Stanwick, of whom she was a softer appearing look-alike, there were tears as she said what a wonderful thing it must be to sit in a room filled with people who are ready to at last get beyond the awful, addictive, hard-edged and in the current jargon dysfunctional lives they were meant never to escape. Like you are doing, Fred. She asked me for times and places of these meetings, but she never turned up at any of them.

And I told a friend from more recent days about my discoveries. He knew from meeting her 40 years later the skin-on-skin woman. First he said he couldn’t believe it. Then he said it was it was all okay. Saying he himself, when much younger, had molested his sister.

#118 – MORE GIRLS

2010-06-19T06:46:00.000-07:00

Terri was not the only young summer lady coming into her own in the mountains. All our lives we had known the children of old Mrs. Gibbs who were close to our age, and they too were now in puberty. At a swimming hole I gently teased Molly from Boston, who was stately and tanned, and I also flirted with a pretty, open faced blonde girl, Mary from Baltimore, who had been my favorite in our early days. Mary and I had been card carrying members of the Captain Marvel Club. Now Molly and I decided to write each other when we returned to our boarding schools. I was actually in the world – at last!

In the telephone room was that genealogy chart that, with a lot of “begats,” showed we were related to Mary and Molly. Above the phone there was that small framed reproduction of a painting of a naked woman rising from a huge clam shell. Something that, with all these new feelings, seemed urgent. A naked woman even in this house where sex was not mentioned any more than it had been in Gaga’s celebrated novels.

The phone, like so much else in the White Pines world, had seemed to be from another century. It included a polished wooden box attached to the wall above a desk-like shelf that held a note pad and the area’s tiny phone book. It had a crank handle on the side and what looked like a bicycle bell on top. You talked into a open cone on the front of the box, and listened with an ear piece that your took from a hook. You picked up the ear piece, turned the crank, which rang the bell and alerted the phone company, and the Sugar Hill operator would come on. She could get you anyone anywhere in Sugar Hill if you just gave the name, no number needed. Nana talked of how on any given night the operator knew who was having dinner at whose house.

There were other girls in addition to those on the genealogy chart. There were the Morris sisters, kind of pretty already but, unlike Terri, so undeveloped that they still had spindly legs. Nana invited the sisters to White Pines for an awkward lunch one day with Peter and me, the four of us being served by Nana’s garrulous maid Evelyn at the long table. We and the girls could not figure out what this was supposed to be about. But Terri! I knew what that was about. I had never in life seen a girl I thought so appealing, not even the gorgeous, precocious blonde girl in our 8th grade class who the previous winter had been exchanging letters with my more confident twin brother.

Up till now Peter had always been the focus of attention. One evening Terri’s father was giving us a ride back to White Pines from White Wings in their station wagon after we had spent a couple of hours with Terri and her little brother. I was in the back seat, and Peter for some reason in the area behind it. In the dark he began, in whispers, pleading with me, which was something new, and I could see he was crying. He was so justifiably upset that I had hogged Terri’s attention – though it seemed a fair balancing of our accounts in this hard world in which he had seemed so often to have all the attention, leaving nothing for me.

THE NEXT SUMMER.

Terri was not the only young summer lady coming into her own in the mountains. All our lives we had known the children of old Mrs. Gibbs who were close to our age, and they too were now in puberty. At a swimming hole I gently teased Molly from Boston, who was stately and tanned, and I also flirted with a pretty, open faced blonde girl, Mary from Baltimore, who had been my favorite in our early days. Mary and I had been card carrying members of the Captain Marvel Club. Now Molly and I decided to write each other when we returned to our boarding schools. I was actually in the world – at last!

In the telephone room I must was that genealogy chart that, with a lot of “begats,” showed we were related to Mary and Molly. Above the phone there was that small framed reproduction of a painting of a naked woman rising from a huge clam shell. Something that, with all these new feelings, seemed urgent. A naked woman even in this house where sex was not mentioned any more than it had been in Gaga’s celebrated novels.

The phone, like so much else in the White Pines world, had seemed to be from another century. It included a polished wooden box attached to the wall above a desk-like shelf that held a note pad and the area’s tiny phone book. It had a crank handle on the side and what looked like a bicycle bell on top. You talked into a open cone on the front of the box, and listened with an ear piece that your took from a hook. You picked up the ear piece, turned the crank, which rang the bell and alerted the phone company, and the Sugar Hill operator would come on. She could get you anyone anywhere in Sugar Hill if you just gave the name, no number needed. Nana talked of how on any given night the operator knew who was having dinner at whose house.

There were other girls in addition to those on the genealogy chart. There were the Morris sisters, kind of pretty already but, unlike Terri, so undeveloped that they still had spindly legs. Nana invited the sisters to White Pines for an awkward lunch one day with Peter and me, the four of us being served by Nana’s garrulous maid Evelyn at the long table. We and the girls could not figure out what this was supposed to be about. But Terri! I knew what that was about. I had never in life seen a girl I thought so appealing, not even the gorgeous, precocious blonde girl in our 8th grade class who the previous winter had been exchanging letters with my more confident twin brother.

Up till now Peter had always been the focus of attention. One evening Terri’s father was giving us a ride back to White Pines from White Wings in their station wagon after we had spent a couple of hours with Terri and her little brother. I was in the back seat, and Peter for some reason in the area behind it. In the dark he began, in whispers, pleading with me, which was something new, and I could see he was crying. He was so justifiably upset that I had hogged Terri’s attention – though it seemed a fair balancing of our accounts in this hard world in which he had seemed so often to have all the attention, leaving nothing for me.

#117 – COURTING

2010-06-18T01:43:00.000-07:00

Pretty Terri. The first summer they were there my brother and I took every excuse to walk up to White Wings, which meant going up our long twisting driveway through our pine woods, and then over on the dirt road, Davis Road, where the other big family houses stood – three of them in the family still, though not White Wings. In the bright white room her parents had designed, I showed Terri sleight of hand card tricks, something I had started developing even before boarding school, learning from books I ordered from the Johnson Smith novelties catalog.

I could do full waterfalls, cards in the air from one hand to the other like in a waterfall, just like slick gamblers in the Westerns. With a two-handed pass, I could restore a cut deck, faster than the eye could see, to its previous stacked form. And I could accomplish it with a rare one-hand pass too if no one was looking closely. And I could also flip a card around to the back of my hand while making a throwing gesture, giving the illusion that I had made it disappear. And then I would skim cards across s room to land in a basket or bucket. Suddenly it seemed like I was an expert entertainer in the summer, which seemed as mysterious as why I was a shy introvert in the winter.

That first summer Terri’s family had White Wings was also Gaga's last summer of life, at least sort of life. Mother said Nana was in denial, Gaga was in what she called a vegetable state. He had had a stroke the previous November, and this summer was in the part of White Pines called the Boys’ Wing, where my brother and I would normally have been. He was there with a male nurse, the last sort of person you would expect to see here, a leering former sailor, who would wheel him out each day and set him in the sun on the lawn that led to iron streaked boulders and below them a big blueberry field and eventually the woods that after many mile went up to the top of Cannon Mountain, which had ski trails and cable car, and to the timber line on Mount Lafayette.

Back on the lawn in his wheelchair, Gaga was motionless. His eyes were open but they were blank. He was wrapped up in a way that reminded me of how Peter and I were tucked in on either side of Gaga in a rolling chair in Atlantic City. He had been animated then, telling stories about New York, singing songs, including, to horror when I remembered it now, one that went “That’s why a nigger’s hand is white inside.” (The man of color who was pushing our rolling chair had not reacted.)

Out on the lawn Nana read to him from a collection of O. Henry stories that she said he liked, though I thought he might not know she was there. I wondered if the male nurse had come upon the dog-eared copy of God’s Little Acre that I had hidden in the Boy’s Wing the previous summer when I had learned to masturbate.

This summer Peter and I were busy trying to impress Terri. Often we would call her from the telephone room, where we competed to show which of us was the more clever. Which strangely seemed to be me, though in normal times I had not been the popular twin. At the start of each phone session Terri asked a question for which there was no answer: “How is Mr. Poole?”

Nana observed our eager comings and goings and one morning came up to the guest room where we were staying to give us a jar of something called Mum, to apply to our underarms. She told us that girls did not like the way boys could smell if they didn’t wash enough in summer.

#116 – TERROR

2010-06-17T03:38:00.000-07:00

While I was growing up and when real life seemed to be unfolding, I would not admit to myself that I knew that in some unspoken, unexposed place, that the White Mountains was not any ultimate place of safety for me. Once when I was in the worst time at boarding school, the time when the used to beat me, it seemed like going from being dumb to being the brightest in the class was not enough to change my fate. That having an actual girlfriend to neck with when we very occasionally got together for some dance or glee club concert with our sister school, that even these things were as not enough.

For there was something hard and impossible about the world, something that seemed tied to childhood dreams when I would see red snow come down and realize that it was deadly poison that was falling, or current dreams in which I was paralyzed and about to be stabbed to death by some looming figure, who might be my twin brother, and no comfort when it seemed that the dream was at an end, for at that point I was lying here on my dormitory bed paralyzed, the torturer coming at me. It was not the dream that was so bad but the apparent awake and paralyzed time afterwards – maybe another dream, maybe not.

I thought it had to do with torture in school, such as someone as unpopular as I was at the start would suffer in an old line place like this. In the school library I read a piece in the Reader’s Digest, between an article that seemed to me to be written in baby talk that was warning America about the evils of socialism and a series of too-cute pieces about happy people being amusing while wearing military uniforms. But the piece between these was deadly seriously. It was bout a special school somewhere in the country for boys who did not fit in. And I had this fantasy of myself making speech at a banquet celebrating this special school, thanking them for giving me what seemed like a new life. I wondered that the fantasy did not take me to the perfect world of the family places and to boys and girls who since early childhood had been friends of the sort I tdhought for a time now I might never have again. But I could not talk myself into believing that what I had via family was enough for a fantasy version of a happy ending.

I thought to this now, heading on the old family road to Terri’s place which had been my place in infancy, and where I had hung out when terry was into puberty and smooth and tanned and seductive, actually breasts that she wore in halters, unlike anyone else in that town, and what I though of as a loveable puppy dog face, though very aware that no puppy dog gave my hard-ons.

Through the years this place to which I was headed not had always been close to consciousness. At one point when I was verging middle age and see ed down on my luck I took a job as editor of locally produced English-language magazine called Chinese Foodworld, published in Hong Kong where I was living then in the early stages of a marriage in trouble. The magazine, like so much in the hands of Westerners in Asia in those days, when nothing ever seemed to be what it appeared to be, was some kind of financially tricky operation. I had to keep the job though, life felt that tenuous just then – though I had another dubious source of income writing pieces praising the Shahanshah (not mere Shah) and his wife Diba the Shabanu and his twin sister Princess Ashraf in a newsletter put out by National Iranian Radio and TV, for whom I also traveled and hired camera crews to do documentary films, something else for which I had no credentials. A strange nether life I was leading in a city that by now I did not care about. But what really puzzled me was what I put into my bio sketch in the first and only issue of Chinese Foodworld. It was that I was the son of a publisher and the grandson of a writer who won the first Pulitzer Prize for fiction. I looked at what I had written about myself and I was puzzled and astounded, and depression swept over me.

Just five years before this Vermont summer my wife’s 12-year-old son came to live with us from the Philippines. I wanted – how ridiculous it seemed now! – to make sure he got a really good start in his new life in America. I was broke again, but I called up someone I knew at a slick but very routine magazine called Travel & Leisure, and I sold them on a piece about the White Mountains, which I argued was this amazing scenic area that was not so well known as it should be. I drove up alone at first on a scouting trip, having picked up a quarter bag of pot on the corner of Amsterdam and 81st as a present for my old friend the summer girl Terri. She had not quite made the move all the way back to White Wings. She was still in a marriage, but she was going to live for a time now not with her husband in Bedford but up in the mountains, where she had just ranted a place for the winter for herself and about a dozen rescued dogs.

While on that scouting trip I went to a guy who handled publicity for tourism in the White Mountains, and got a pass that would get me and my wife and her son in free to all White Mountains attractions – caves and cable cars and such – something I had, not for the for the first time, sworn never to do again, this corrupt practice of taking free things with the promise of favorable mention. It was a complex few days, for we were staying with my Aunt Betsy, whose inedible food was snuck into outside garbage pails, and meanwhile half dozen people who had been kids when I was a kid up here were all assembled, mostly by coincidence right at that time. Separately they made me feel awful by telling me how wonderful my life was, as they saw by my having appeared not with some graying matron but with this lovely young looking Chinese looking girl I had married. One of the attractions our free pass covered was the car road, not to be confused with the old steam train that went to the rocky summit of Mount Washington. This long curving road had no guard rails. And as we drove one of those sudden off season winter storms came up, those storms I that I was warned in childhood could kill you.

This place that somewhere in my mind, and maybe somewhere in my nightmares too, seemed to me should be the place above all places I knew in the world where I could find safety and comfort.

Travel & Leisure liked what I wrote but an earnest editor said there was one gap. The piece really needed a paragraph or two evoking the beauty of the place I was writing about.

The beauty of the place. I was picturing myself at three years old, not in New Hampshire but with many of the same people, especially my twin, in New Rochelle, where my balls were swelled big and with a blue color from some painful blow. And another memory from that time: a doctor covering my head wound with some of clear substance that hardened like glass.

But I still wished that my evidence could be more than circumstantial.

I thought of a night in an old pension in Alexandria where lights from outside came through the big open window all night, while I was in a bed with mosquito netting. I came here on the recommendation of the man who stamped my passport and was ready to be on guard for some scam. A woman at the pension said they had to take my passport to be stamped by the police and that for this there would be a small stamp fee, which I angrily refused to pay. I was as angry as my father would have been. And then I found the room so comfortable, the gig soft bed almost womb like their beneath the mosquito netting. But I woke up in the middle of the night in terror. There was a man standing with folded arms right by the window, a man wearing a turban. And as I looked at him in the shadows I saw that under this Egyptian garb it was my brother. Again a dream that seemed to be outside dreaming.

#115 – WHITE WINGS PRESENT

2010-06-16T08:45:00.000-07:00

Images of White Wings remained, as they always did, clear in my mind as I drove. The two wings that gave the house its name are connected by an outside passageway upstairs, reached by stairs from a long connecting porch that follows a neat woodpile. The house is all white clapboard, as opposed to White Pines, which had white wood but also stately stone.

The smaller wing, to the left when coming up to the house, had been Gaga’s study when he was in residence here, and even as a very small child I knew it was absolutely forbidden to speak anywhere near it, nor to walk near it except very carefully on tiptoes. Even as a very small child I knew of his status in the world, which became the family’s status, the family of a famous writer.

Peter and I had gone as often as we could to the old, unused outbuildings behind White Wings where, we imaged, all sorts of livestock had lived. And also regular people in the past rather than people like our family people. And we found there old non-electric flat irons of the sort you heated on live coals, as in pioneer days.

The bigger wing to the right has a stately living room, though it was not nearly so long as the even more formal one in White Pines. Like in White Pines there is a very wide paned glass window, with a green and white striped awning above it, that frames the official view of the Franconia range of the White Mountains.

Terri’s family had bought White Wings when I was turning 15 and she was a blossoming tanned girl turning 14 who wore two piece bathing suites. It was the first of the houses to go. Terri’s people were from a reportedly rich place called Grosse Point outside Detroit in the raw Midwest. Their money, it was said, came from a big laundry Terri's father owned in Detroit. This must mean, it was said, that they were connected to gangsters – but things like this were always being said about everyone. The way it was said that Terri’s carefully dressed, good-looking but graying mother was so proper it must mean she was someone “on the make,” which was apparently meant to be a damning term.

Terri’s parents had had the very inadequate furnace replaced so that this was no longer purely a summer house. And in the bedrooms they had, of all things, these modern electric blankets. But they kept the downstairs of the bigger wing exactly the way it had been when Nana sang to us French songs about the terror. The same wallpaper. The same books, getting older and older, in the same old built-in bookcases. Including uniform old black first editions put out by Macmillan of my grandfather’s works. Also, they kept the same very old wallpaper, now slightly yellow, which was patterned with repeated dark green Chinese pagodas.

So her parents did clearly want to fit in, it was said. But look what they did to the other wing! It was now light and bright and airy and – white walls and new light wood floors – something of modern times and, moreover, they had done this so that it would be a good place for their children, Terri and her younger brother, and her children’s friends, which meant me and my twin. Summer families here often had special places for children, but nothing so at the center of their houses as was this renovated wing.

And now Terri, no longer a child, is back to stay after some failed marriages, grown boys living elsewhere, and no real career, back to live in the White Wings of her childhood. The larger wing is still almost a museum piece honoring my grandparents. The other wing, which had first been Gaga’s dark study, then a bright happy place, had by now, I knew, undergone another change. It was now dark and cluttered and homey, with work by local artists on the wall. It was the way Terri wanted it now, which included bare boards, and some works by local artists, and a pot belly wood stove. The sitting room was also the kitchen. And there a special door, hinged at the top, for the many rescued dogs she honored. Also, there was a rescued local farm boy apparently in residence. A regular person’s place.

And, moreover, for some years now the old outbuildings that had fascinated my brother and me were now in use again,. filled now with rescued farm animals. It all looked like how my brother and I had imaged it would have looked in olden days. And it also had the atmosphere of the roadside inn and store that in happy fantasy we decided we wanted to build by the side of the road.

#114 – WHITE WINGS PAST

2010-06-15T08:31:00.000-07:00

So I was on my way to White Wings where, in an airy upstairs bedroom when I was four Gaga had invented a bedtime game called “Throw the Baby.” You were supposed to hurl a stuffed animal as hard as you could against the wall and shout “Gosh” when it hit. And he also softly sang old songs, including one “The man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo, and “That’s why a nigger’s hand is white inside.”

But ours was not a musical family. Gaga had come close be becoming a concert violinist. but when still young, in this story, he had put away the violin forever, something for which I never heard an explanation.

On a perhaps related subject Nana told a story after Gaga died of how Gaga had once been in one of his clubs with an old man who had been a famous violinist, but after personal misfortunes had stayed too drunk to play. At the club one night the man decided to play one more time, though he had not played for many years. Someone found a violin for him. And this one last time he hit every note and phrase with such perfection that old clubmen were in tears.

There had been a little music from Nana downstairs at White Wings, which was where she had first played the piano and sung to us in French from a songbook that had drawings of soldiers slashing each other’s limbs off and people having their heads severed by a huge blade while they knelt. These pictures I could not forget of blood spurting of headless necks and the places where arms and legs had been.

“Throw the Baby” and the French mutilation scenes were part of the case I had been building up since the winter as I was looking for situations that would help me expose my supposed love ones, whom I had taken to calling “these people,” referring to them the way some bigot would refer to dirty poor people. Though even as I built the case against them, I could not deny that the these family houses had been in the most beautiful possible place in the world, and moreover it was the place where I could go beyond what was the failure expected of me in our family unit in Connecticut. I had taken inspiration from Gaga and Nana’s accomplishments and kindnesses, and most of all from how fact they seemed to take me seriously. The White Mountains had been for me a place where I could become the things I had been told in Connecticut were for my brother but would never be possible for me.

#113 – THE ROAD AGAIN

2010-06-09T07:59:00.000-07:00

August is coming to an end. At night from the kitchen in Rutland I phone in to check my answering machine down in the city. There is a message on it for Hal, who has been paying for use of the day bed. His message is a long stern lecture and plea from an apparent bank executive berating Hal for not completing a computer project. It looks like I can’t count on Hal’s rent money now.

I then call to the White Mountains, to my old friend Terri, who had once been the pretty girl of any summer and has now come back to live forever in a house called White Wings, which had been my family’s when I was very young and sometimes was where I spent those early summers. “Oh my god,” she says, “You’re in Vermont? Come right over. Come stay with me.”

I call my number in the city again and Hal picks up this time, and he immediately tells me he has decided he to move in with a girlfriend. And it sounds like he is angry with me. One more in this string of recently of severed relationships that included Donna, for awhile, and Mario and his wife, apparently forever, and even my old friend and host Peter Cooper, plus all those friends of a lifetime in the city whom I have stopped seeing this year. It is beginning to seem like now that I have interfered with the past and how it was supposed to be – not just the family past but the parts with friends and lovers of my own choosing – now the entire past will continue to get weaker, when not darker, the farther I go with my explorations.

But that’s not the whole picture of the past, I am sure, even the whole story in the darker areas. And anyway I came here to take a break in a beautiful and liberal rural place from what had been going as I pressed by explorations down in the city. And I came here also because Vermont, which I think of as the anti-new Hampshire, is so close to actual New Hampshire, where whatever went wrong led to so many awful things in the present. And ever so, I have not completely upturned memories in which the versions of the past were comforting. But I am making a literal search now, using my cheerful old aqua Mustang as a time machine vehicle to take me into the heart of what is there in that land where whatever it is I am searching for took place.

I start early in the morning and drive across Vermont again on Route 4, past the Killington Road and an hour later through Woodstock, the Rockefeller town with its sanitized model farm and crushingly genteel hotel, and strangely clean streets full of costly little non-New Hampshire boutique shops and aggressively understated white people in golf and tennis clothes that are not stained by sweat. And after this, I go through an old and somewhat decaying mill town, White River Junction, where regular people live but where there are also happy looking scruffy young people with guitars that I see on a green that also has an old-fashioned bandstand. And then across the line into the most un-New Hampshire part of New Hampshire, the pristine white brick town of Hanover, where I had so recently been to the Big Apple Circus, a town that held such memories from way back, including my first experience of fine music when driven over to Dartmouth from my boarding school to hear Artur Rubenstein and Marian Anderson. On childhood drives up to the White Mountains we would see an old ski jump ahead, which meant Dartmouth and the last leg of the trip.

And here I am driving out of Hanover and along a very familiar, and very rutted, old highway that cuts over from the Connecticut River to the mountains. I pass through through Orford, with its big square mansion-like white wood houses on a long green, one of these houses having been bought by the writer Charles Jackson, rich and famous then from The Lost Weekend, who quickly realized he was in a town where he could have no friends because he was Jewish. And with me still this picture of my Grandfather Gaga reading aloud at lunch in White pines what he had just written for a newspaper debate with Jackson, my grandfather actually saying there was no such thing as anti-Semitism in this part of the world, Gaga writing and then reading the piece in our summer town Sugar Hill, that had not a single Jew living in it, not and not a one permitted in its rambling old hotel.

But as I pass through tiny sugar Hill village, and go by the turn-off to the hotel, and at the small summer church turn down our old dirt road, I am thinking not so much of my grandfather but of this woman from the past I am about to see. This friend of nearly a lifetime who once set the standard for, in capital letters, Summer Girl.

#112 – LAKE HOUSE

2010-06-08T09:17:00.000-07:00

That house I was looking at on Lake Champlain had similarities to our old family houses. Ours had been more substantial, though they too were basically summer houses, and they too were in a rarefied setting – ours the tight little summer communities of the White Mountains, not so unlike this rarefied little segment of lake front with understated shingled houses connected to each other by a woodland path high above the lake. The path was said to follow an old Indian trail. It ended at a rustic tennis club which I could tell by its smell was a place for white protestants and no one else.

The bigotry of these places was always on my mind when I was in or near them, and this time there were even more reminders, for all week I had been hearing on the car radio about Senate hearings underway just now for that guy Rehnquist, who had worked early in his career against school desegregation and then when in the Nixon justice department, had nearly gone to jail for all the things he was doing to deny rights and punish anti-Vietnam War demonstrators, jailing them and denying them free speech and all the rest, also fighting to save brutal racist cops and Klansmen, and working behind the scenes to help Nixon survive his Watergate crimes. Rehnquist had been nominated by Nixon to the supreme court, and now there was news every day about how he was about to gratify the perverse Reagan by being promoted to chief justice.

Again there was talk about the “restrictive covenants” on Rehnquist’s houses, his promising never to sell a house of his to a Jew or a person of color. There was such a restriction on the deed to a house he owned in Vermont, which I heard about on my car radio in the midst of Vermont, this restricted thing just like in the New Hampshire version of home. And he did the same with a house in New Mexico, which I had innocently thought might be free of East Coast style cruelty

And now I am standing above Lake Champlain , my back to the water, looking at this shingled cottage that my old friend Jason, now rich in retirement from investment banking, owns in addition to his big log early retirement house in the center of the state. He had had the big house built to his specifications, but this one had been owned before him – surely with a restrictive covenant on it – by one of those thin-blooded Foreign Service officers to whom it was likely no one in the government ever paid much attention. The old man, keeping to Wasp cheapness, had decorated it with cheap do-dads – each of the little bedrooms set up to remind him of places he had been in his minor assignments, one of them filled with things like the laughing Buddha’s sold to tourists in Chinatown though I think he really meant it to be something more like actual Asia, and in the European room, cuckoo clocks and Bavarian figurines, women in peasant dress, men in lederhosen playing tiny accordions (like what I had seen once when I was in the army in Atlanta and renting a room in a house owned by the sad, boozy widow of a major).

Inside, an old propane stove for late summer nights, wobbly stairs leading up to the niggardly bedrooms high over the lake. No décor downstairs except a set of prints of comic, brittle men in white wigs from old copies of Punch such as American businessmen and corporate lawyers love – though also a haunting painting of summer clouds by Jason’s brother Bruce.

Jason whom I had known since we were 8, and who still drank nearly as heavily as I used to drink, and still was for some reason a loyal Republican, which was something I had never been, and also loyal to Yale, though he made fun of it, and still married to Nina, who spent his money and told everyone he was a Philistine. Jason had sworn he would never get divorced, sworn it way back when his parents broke up and switched partners with another boozy couple in Connecticut.

In the afternoon on the lake I had felt him out, wanting to tell this person from of my past what was going on in my life now. But when I said something about coming from an alcoholic home he got stern and said there had never been any such thing in his background, though he and I had been with his father and step mother when we had all drunk past the point of comprehension. And he must have known some the things his otherwise often kind father had done. But he would never get divorced and he would stay loyal, even, I thought, if he had to stay drunk to carry it off. And so I did not try to go into matters from the past that were worse than alcoholism.

Still, he was my oldest friend. We had traveled together. We had crossed paths in the draftee army. We had planned out a magazine that I was sure would take over from the declining New Yorker. We had shared an apartment on 13th Street off Second after the army, and stayed friends even after he, with help from the Yale placement office, veered sharply away from things like magazines and concentrated on things like houses and money.

So there was no connection here between my present and this past I had been probing and attacking – this past that I saw bringing darkness into the present and killing the people of my generation.

And I plunged into sadness again, sadness that again quickly gave way to this new cleansing version of anger. And then I smiled inwardly and outwardly as I breathed in the sweet, charged, chilled air of a late New England summer.