#168 – ADRIFT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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.