The Monsters of Templeton (4 page)

At home, she stood looking out the parlor window at the lake. Snow devils were whirling around on the ice, and the pines were spiked with white on the hills. Vivienne thought of old Marmaduke Temple boffing his slave, and laughed.

Then, standing there at the window, she surprised herself. At one time, she had been a princess, an obedient Shirley Temple in patent-leather shoes and pink organza dresses. At one time, she declaimed to crowds of historians perched on the seats of antique parlor chairs, who sent streams of pipe smoke at her as they shouted "Hooray!" If she had done well with her declamations, her father would briefly press his hand against her cheek as he escorted her up to bed. "My girl," he would say. "My brilliant girl." Now watching the winter out of Averell Cottage's windows, words she remembered from when she was little just bubbled up from nowhere. "In the spring of 1785 I left my family in New Jersey and traveled into the vast and melancholy wilderness," she said aloud in a sort of half-murmur, "...all was dark at first, and the trees cast a midday twilight upon me. Then there was a rift in the darkness, a cliff where the trees dropped a hundred feet from the mountain's lip, and there I stepped into the light...There was no wind in this desolate New York wilderness, and all was calm. Suddenly before me rose a vision of ghostly buildings on the edge of the lake, a true city of spires and rooftops, a phantom bustle in the streets, smoke. I sank to my knees in the strange ferns."

The words of the man in question, Marmaduke Temple, at the epiphanic moment when he first laid eyes upon the place where he would build Templeton. This great, calm, heroic, rational man, now exposed as a base slave owner and philanderer among the unpaid help. What a lark!

For a second, Vi considered the stern portrait of Marmaduke over the mantelpiece. "I like you better now that I know that about you, old guy," she said, and laughed. Something about her laughter, how it echoed and echoed in the cold house, cracked her up even more, and she gasped, her ribs hurt, she peed herself a little. But then she stopped, positive that there was a moment when the face of the man in the portrait twitched into a smirk and a wink. A little complicit grimace.

Vivienne gazed at the portrait, amazed, and then considered. She had seen stranger things, though those visions were usually induced by fun substances. But also, as a child, she often saw a ghost moving through Averell Cottage. To Vi, the ghost took the form of a giant quivering dove that left great misty feathers strewn about the house. A wink in oil paint was not outside the realm of possibility. She gave the portrait a little grin, winked back. Then she felt sick and ran to the bathroom to heave up her breakfast of canned pineapple, all she could find in the kitchen cabinets that wasn't tinned pork or Jell-O. She had been feeling sick in the mornings. Her navel had swollen a little. Last month, she didn't get a period.

VIVIENNE, IT SEEMED, was pregnant.

The story of my conception was one I knew from long before I could even speak: Vi's eyes would always light up with joy and nostalgia when she described how she lived in San Francisco, in a commune, in what she liked to describe as "an experiment in free love," though to me it always sounded like rented love, albeit rented cheaply. There having been four men but only three women in this commune, Vi never went to bed alone; and, as there were also always yogis and painters and sitar players and organic yogurt makers staying over, everyone, of course, was cordially invited to take part in the love fests.

She was only seventeen, she always said, sighing. What did she know about precautions? Vi awoke over the next month with vomit already in her mouth, and felt lethargic and heavy and sick. Even before they injected the bunny with her urine and watched it die, Vivienne knew.

On the day of the pregnancy test, Vi sat in her paper hospital gown, feet growing cold on the floor. The nurse, a girl three grades older than Vi in high school, was blushing. "I'm sorry," she said. "You're pregnant, Miss Upton," and she could not look Vi in the eye.

Enter: me. Wilhelmina Sunshine Upton, called a hippie-dippie "Sunshine" until I was two and already stubborn and refused to answer to that name.

The moment Vi was told by that soft little nurse that she was pregnant, she knew she had to stay in Templeton. In the vague swamp that was my mother's brain, she knew that she couldn't kick the drugs if she returned to San Francisco, and that it would be almost impossible to find more in Templeton. Her heart was good, and she didn't want to retard her little cooking baby. Also, if she were going to go back to San Francisco, she would have no idea which of the commune's men had fathered her child; before I was born, any one of the four (plus) could have been my true father. When I was born, however, more than ten and a half long months after she came home--I was even pigheaded in the womb, she always said in explanation--she had pared my fathers down to three: she was fairly certain when she saw my pink skin that it wasn't the black man. This was what she told me later, even when I was two years old, and couldn't imagine what sex was. She was frank, my mother, always. And, until I understood the mechanics of the act, I loved the idea of having three fathers: if one was good, imagine being blessed with three!

I was once sent home from kindergarten for making this boast. Mrs. Parrot squinted down at me with pity as she pinned the note onto my jacket, and gave me a pat on the head. When my mother unpinned the note in our old Volvo, she chortled, then at home pasted it into my baby album. Dear Ms. Upton, it read. Wilhelmina bragged today of having three fathers, for which I send her home as chastizement. Be wary of speaking of your promiscous past before impressionable kids. Little pictures have big ears. Mrs. P.

"Can't even spell, that wench," my mother said as she applied glue to the back of the note, tears of laughter dampening her cheeks.

But at the moment she greeted the little pulsing me in the hospital, hands spread over her midsection, Vi knew she would stay to raise her child in a healthy way, far from hedonistic temptation. She would be a good mother in Templeton, she decided; I would grow up safely there.

To be frank, this part of the story always sounded a little fishy to me, but I could never figure out why. I just swallowed it. And, until I visited San Francisco later, I was grateful to have been raised in my small and beautiful town. Then, when I saw that gorgeous, gilded city under the fog, I regretted Templeton and its tiny ways, its subservience to the baseball tourists that came in hordes every year, its lack of even a decent movie theater. I regretted San Francisco's transvestites in their lovely clothes, the cafes, the furniture stores with imported Indonesian furniture; I thought I would have been a different person, a better one, had I only been raised in a larger place. Like a fish, I thought, I would have grown to fit my bowl.

Vivienne would probably have understood my desire for a larger childhood, had she thought about it at the time when she came home to Templeton for good. She may even have convinced herself to return to San Francisco, to give her child a larger life. But in the slow-warming spring that year, she was pregnant, poor, scared, jittery from coming off drugs, incapable of too much thought. It is easy to imagine the loneliness, the feeling of worthlessness from her lack of education, the solitude, the way the town turned on her. How she was even more isolated by her grand old house and her simultaneous poverty. As I grew, I would have a pool that my country-clubbing grandparents had put in, two in-town acres, a lake to play in all summer long, a short walk to the bakery or General Store. I would have enormous privilege. And yet I would have to pick my clothes out of a bin in the basement of the Presbyterian Church and during hard times run into the Great American grocery store to buy our cheese with food stamps. I would be Willie Upton, related to all those famous people, pet of every history teacher I ever met, the student NYSHA hired as a receptionist every summer and trotted out to show visiting writers, but also a girl who dressed in the bathroom stall during gym class, ashamed to let anyone see the state of her underwear.

This, too, Vivienne saw as constructive, however; her favorite pedagogical tool was the old carrot-on-a-stick-plus-a-dash-of-the-spurs method. "Nothing," she always said, "can be learned if you don't work a little at it," and so every (pagan) Christmas of ours, I had to smooth all the wrapping paper into reusable squares and roll the ribbons up into little nubbins before I was allowed to play with my toys, which were, for the most part, handcrafted wooden ducks from retired Vermont maple trees and puppets made by Guatemalan victims of domestic violence and other things of that ilk. Once, even, when I was six and learning to read big words by reading Anne Sexton's Transformations aloud, I stumbled on penultimate. I sighed and blew the bangs off my head and said, "I can't do it."

Vi smiled unperturbed over her knitting, and said, "Sure you can,

Sunshine."

I threw the book across the room. "No," I said. "I can't."

My mother pursed her lips, stood, went to the kitchen, made a whole plateful of whole-wheat graham crackers with natural peanut butter and local honey, and came back. She slowly began eating one with little moans of delight until I stood and reached for one, but then she held the plate away, and opened the book and put it back in my lap.

I knew what she was doing; I refused to read the word; no way in heck would I read it; that big fat scheming meanie. And so I watched Vi as she chewed on the snack, fluttering her eyelids and licking her fingers and muttering, "Oh, this is the best snack I've ever had," until she only had one left and I couldn't take it anymore and I spat out many different versions of it; pee-null-time-ate, penuliti-mat-ay, puh-newl-too-mat, until I hit it, and she smiled and handed me the cracker and I gobbled it down greedily.

She was right, though; it was the best snack I'd ever had. In those years, though I did chafe against her will, Vi was always right. I couldn't imagine her being wrong; in those first years my mother was my only friend, and I hers. But when I was at last off to kindergarten, she went to nursing school in Oneonta and took a job at Finch Hospital in town, and then her world suddenly expanded. Then she had friends, women who sat with her over coffee cake, rubbing their arches, complaining. Once in a while, in high school, I suspected a few of these women to be more than friends, especially the ones who were in Averell Cottage bright and early on a Saturday morning to eat my mother's omelets and watch cartoons with me. There would be something about their broad hips, their hungry, bitten mouths, the smiles on their faces when they didn't think I was watching, which would make me suspect things before I could even understand them. When my mother later called herself a pan-sexual when she was drunk and I was sixteen years old, it would be clear, then, like a period at the end of a very long sentence.

That was Vivienne's life in the years after I was born. She was a critical care nurse, soothing the last days of the hopeless cases with a depth of gentleness that I rarely saw from her but knew was in there, somewhere. And in the months before I myself returned to Templeton an outcast, she awoke some days grateful that she ever survived the 1970s. On others, she felt as if she had wasted everything; she had always poured so much of herself into me that she was afraid there was none left for her anymore. When she began her long walk toward Jesus, she prayed hours upon hours of fervent prayer trying to protect me from the terrible pitfalls she saw on my path. She sat at the kitchen table, head bent, trying to will me into success, deep into the night. She imprecated, she begged. At some point the prayer clicked, and she understood such a wispy thing as faith.

And on some nights on the opposite side of the country, I paused over my esoteric texts in a kitchen in San Francisco, and looked up, as if I had heard something. The enormous, pulsing world seemed so treacherous at that moment, sirens bursting up the streets toward danger, toward death, everything in turmoil. During the winter after the attack on New York City, the country was grim, gray, a wobble away from a headlong fall into apocalypse. The world as I knew it was always just about to end; we were fragile; I was fragile. It would take just a nudge for my own self to free-fall.

Perhaps with all this in mind one can understand why Vivienne reacted the way she did on the day of the monster, the day I returned. There were the strange parallels there: the pregnancy, the singlehood, the ambition suddenly curtailed. A return to Templeton in disgrace. Her own ambition lopped off, yet again, like a tulip beheaded by a stick. How she must have looked up at me that morning, as I stood there, twenty-eight years old and filthy from my trip, skinny, hair shorn, heartsore, miserable, eyes swollen from too much crying. How she must have seen only a failure, nothing like the elegant success she had always wanted me to be. A waste of all those years, squeezing herself dry. And how I must have been hateful to her, just about then.

George Franklin Temple Upton (Vivienne's father) 1935.At two years old, with orphan girls at Pomeroy Hall. See how they're dressed in antiquated clothing, long out of style. This was by design: his grandmother, Hannah Clarke Temple, who raised George, was the director of the orphanage. She thought such dress made potential parents for her orphans harken back to their own childhoods, and be more ready to adopt.

Chapter
4

The Running Buds (Big Tom, Little Thom, Johann, Sol, Doug, Frankie) Speak

WE RUN; WE like to run; we have run together for twenty-nine years now; we will run until we can run no more. Until our hips click and shatter apart, until our lungs revolt and bleed. Until we pass from middle age into old age, as we once passed from youth into middle age. Running. In the winter, we run, through the soft snow, slipping over the ice. In the Templeton summer, soft as chamois, glowing from within, we run. We run in the morning, when the beauty of our town gives us pause. When it is ours and ours alone, the tourists still tunneling into their dreams of baseball, of Clydesdales, of golf. Oh, the beauty of the town, oh the sunrise over the town as we crest the hill by the gym all spread before us like a feast, our hospital with its fingerlike smokestack, beyond, the lake like a chip of serpentine, and the baseball museum, and the Farmers' Museum, and the hills, and in the foggy hollow, our houses, fanned across the town, where, inside, our families sleep, peaceful. But we, the Running Buds, are together, moving, we behold this as we have beheld it for twenty-nine summers, twenty-nine winters, twenty-nine springs and falls.