The Uninnocent (18 page)

Let me finish up by saying I'm very aware I covered only six things wrong with me, not seven as we were directed. I also know that for each of these there must be countless deeper pitch-black defects backgrounding them, but at the risk of cheating—which would be yet another fault in itself—I'm going to skip my last failing, because I see our time has run out. Too bad, since it was a good one, as failings go, and had to do with my aunt Janice and uncle Arnie, whom I love as the cobra loves the mongoose.

THE ENIGMA OF GROVER'S MILL

I
T HAS SLIPPED BACK
into obscurity now, like a sun that rose out of nowhere in freakish glory before disappearing once more behind stone-gray clouds. But for a brief moment, Grover's Mill was the most famous town in the country. For it was in this quiet New Jersey farmland hamlet where I was born that the Martians landed on Halloween eve 1938 to unleash a surprise takeover of Earth with killing machines on tripod stilts.

Our family was no different than others gathered around their Philco radios, their Emersons and RCA Victors, their big Zenith consoles, listening in horror as Orson Welles's popular Mercury Theatre broadcast breaking news of the invasion from Mars. Except that my parents and my father's parents and I, forced by the Depression to live under one roof on a dead-end street off Cranbury Road, found ourselves at the epicenter of the attack. Like many in the audience, we had tuned in too late to hear any references to H. G. Wells and didn't understand this was all meant to be a dramatic sleight of hand. The horror-struck voices of eyewitness field reporters, the screams and state police sirens, the devastating sounds of extraterrestrial machines hurling hellfire heat rays, it was all so real that even in Grover's Mill we believed the world was about to end. My mother and grandmother rushed from room to room, whipping the curtains shut, turning off every light in the house, as news flashes of increasing desperation continued to stream in on our Philco Gothic cathedral. Seven thousand infantry, the grim newsman reported from the scene, were wiped out by the Martians in a matter of minutes. Pandemonium reigned. Fearing for their lives, people were fleeing, we were told, in cars, trucks, trains, and on foot up and down the Eastern Seaboard. The description of gigantic three-legged metal monsters wading across the Hudson toward Manhattan, like mere men might cross a shallow stream, was terrifying. Nor will I ever forget peeking between the drapes of our front-room window, my mother's trembling hand on my shoulder, as we looked for signs of these invaders from the Red Planet. The gunfire we heard outside was, in fact, very real, though it would later prove to be some panicked farmers shooting at a nearby water tower they'd mistaken for one of the Martian tripods.

As it turned out, the world didn't end on Halloween eve that year. But my father's life did, and so did mine in a way. His suicide would become a mark of solemn, mostly unspoken, shame for the Mecham family. Or, that is to say, for every other Mecham except me, his namesake son Wyatt, who felt only black despair. Not that I didn't understand their shame. Because who would want to admit that an otherwise sane, sober, solid man such as my dad—a decorated World War I veteran, forced by injuries and the stock market crash into early, straitened retirement—chose to sneak out the back door, leaving behind his family to the obscenity of alien violence, only to drown himself in Grover's Mill Pond with boxes of nails crammed into the pockets of his trousers and coat?

I was not quite eight when my dad died, but I have keen memories of him, memories as sharp as paper cuts. The pipe-tobacco perfume of his mustache when he tucked me into bed and kissed me good night. Watching him at the workbench in my grandfather's basement wood shop, where he taught me the craft of cabinetry—I write this sitting on a Windsor chair he turned on his own lathe. Nor did the prosthetic leg, which he himself fabricated after losing his real one to a grenade blast, slow him down when we used to walk into town on some errand or another.

Above all, we loved haunting the pond near our house together, fishing from the same bank where he had once seen Woodrow Wilson casting for bass with Walter Grover, whose family our town is named after. When the fish weren't biting we'd take a walk around its edges, him gimping along with me close beside, drawing strength from the many beautiful hemlocks, huge willow oaks, and mockernut hickory trees that grew along the shore. Sometimes we'd stop and pick flowers together, a damaged soldier and his fond son, to bring home a bouquet of wild herbs for my mother, a clutch of asters or tawny daylilies. It seems to me even now that Grover's Mill Pond was so much a part of my father that when he felt the world was coming to an end, his only recourse was to go embrace its watery soul, become one with it. And like him, I grew up understanding that the pond—at thirty-seven acres really a small lake—lay at the heart of my personal universe from as far back as my conception on its very shores.

In hindsight, it's clear that although after his discharge from the army my father was awarded a sack of medals, he was too deeply scarred by what he had witnessed on the fields of France to be consoled by some shiny coins dangling from pretty ribbons. Soft visions of mustard gas, of men with bayonets lurching at mirror images of themselves, of tank treads churning fallen soldiers into foxhole mud—these visited him often in shrieking nightmares that woke the whole household when I was growing up. So when Halloween eve came around, I guess my poor father had seen enough war that he couldn't face the big one, the unwinnable one, the one against the Martians.

The police found his wooden leg on a grassy beach where he presumably entered the water. At least he'd had the wherewithal to realize that keeping it on would have worked against his purpose that night. I still own it, my most cherished heirloom. And while I've heard it said drowning is the least painful way to die, the lungs filling with water just as if it were simply wet, heavy air, who would really know? In my father's case, it was the only conceivably meaningful death, so there's a dash of solace in that. And I'll take a dash of solace over a dash of salt on an open wound any day.

My mother would wind up in the pond, too. After Orson Welles had his little joke on America, and Grover's Mill in particular, and my family in point of fact, my mother, Mildred, changed, spiraled downward. Her dark hazel eyes behind those horn-rim glasses she always wore grew misty and vacant as Christmas approached. She would be in the middle of doing something, baking bread, say, and the cawing of crows in a tree would distract her so that she'd head outside to see what the fuss was about, only to return an hour later having no memory of why she'd lit the oven and what this batter was doing in a bowl on the kitchen counter. Our bedrooms were separated only by a door, and I could hear her talking to herself at all hours of the night. I cupped my ear to that door but never understood the meaning of anything she mumbled.
Native ear long nursery, peach. Tat sing, dat-tut-tat. Why the fall flow jigger?
Part of me wondered if she wasn't trying to communicate with the Martians.

What I did begin to understand, and quickly, was that I was in the midst of losing her as surely as I'd lost my father. She spent a lot of chilly evenings out in Van Nest Park studying the skies for saucers even though she, like the rest of the country, had been assured by the authorities, not to mention a contrite Welles himself, that the invasion was a hoax. I suppose my mother might have been looking for vindication of her husband's death, or else hoping against all odds that some real Martians would take her away to join him. I recall thinking, as I hid behind a big rhododendron bush one evening watching her pace back and forth across the long grass, glancing up, then shaking her head and staring at the ground, that she was becoming alien herself. On the other hand, to be fair, let me confess here that she and I both did believe we saw suspicious lights that infamous night, like moving and beaconing stars in the ghastly sky.

She started drinking. I imagine it didn't take much gin-mill hooch to send her, a wiry, nervous woman, off the edge. Drunk, she began saying things at the dinner table that upset my grandmother. Things like how she wished she'd never met my father and how she'd give anything to get away from Grover's Mill. How she hated its bleak bone-cold winters and furnace-muggy summers. How she couldn't stand being this tantalizingly close to Manhattan but not having one thin dime to go bathe in those bright big city lights.

Once when my grandmother Iris thought I wasn't listening, she confided to a visiting neighbor lady, “Mildred's gone and turned into Grover's very own
Mill Dread
. If it weren't for the boy, I'd set her out on her ear, for all that she's my own poor son's widow.” I cringed at her soft, confident chuckle and crept away to stalk the pond's edge.

My grandfather took a kinder approach. He was no less a carpenter than my father had been. Indeed, father had taught son. Because my mother said she'd give anything to spend the upcoming springtime days rowing out to the middle of Grover's Mill Pond to watch the skies for activity, maybe take a picnic with her son, he indulgently refurbished my father's childhood rowboat for us to use. It was so beautiful, that boat. I could never get enough of leaning my head over its side and watching reflected sunlight dancing off the water, making its varnished belly glisten with different ever-changing shapes! And I must admit it made me feel proud to take my father's place at the oars, even if I risked being seen by some of the whispering kids at school who already deemed my parents lunatics. After winter faded away, we kept it tied up at the nearby dock of a friend of my grandfather's and went out on the water often.

For a time, my mom did seem to improve. Less midnight babble. Less astronomical observation. Her hooch still flowed like the Passaic, but not so much that she couldn't start doing a bit of bookkeeping at Grandpa's hardware store while I helped with shelving of paint cans, drill bits, saws, glue pots, and yes, even boxes of nails after school. Rowing and fresh spring-into-summer air brought a bit of healthy glow back to her cheeks. Life seemed on the upswing.

It was an afternoon in late September, the first autumn colors blushing in the red maples and sweetbay magnolias, and the rushes and deer-tongue grass swaying in breezes that hinted of cooler days to come, that we rowed out for what would prove to be the last time. We'd made liverwurst and onion sandwiches together back at the house, her favorite. Some peanut-buttered celery stalks, along with dill pickles and potato chips, were packed in the small wicker basket with a couple of bottles of cream soda. This was to be a real feast. Also an important moment for me, since I'd finally got up the nerve to tell her, now that she seemed enough recovered from my father's suicide to act more or less normal, that our mother-son outings were going to have to wind down, maybe even stop. Some kids at school had indeed seen us together on Grover's Mill Pond enough times that I was now officially getting razzed as a mama's boy. Time had come for both of us to grow up.

What happened next happened so fast I can scarcely picture it, quick as when a lightbulb blows out and the room goes instantly dark. We'd been talking about heaven knows what, a V of geese migrating south, how the pickles from Miller's were crisper than the ones from Malory's. Then I blurted it. My concern about being seen on the pond too often with my mommy, and how I was catching unholy flak for it at school. She pulled a hidden flask from her jacket pocket, unscrewed its cap, took a deep drink from it, and lit into me. Something about cowardice, something about me being my father's son, something about how alone she was in the world and that I couldn't possibly understand her pain. In the sorry wink of an eye, she was back to being her old unhappy self, wagging that silver flask in my face as she made her points.

My grabbing at it, slapping it away, was pure instinct. When it flew out of her hand and splashed in the greenish water, she just as unthinkingly stood up in the unsteady boat, snatched one of the oars, and tried to fish her flask back. I shouted at her to stop, that she was going to fall overboard, but before she could even turn her head to respond, the boat tipped over, throwing us and our wicker-basket banquet into the pond.

Our immediate impulse was to save each other. That much I recall with total clarity. But since I was the only one of us who could swim well enough to possibly get to shore with heavy, waterlogged clothes acting as a full-body drag anchor, I flailed her over to the capsized rowboat and shouted at her to hang on until I came back with help.

“I'm gonna drown, just like him,” she gurgled, water running out of her mouth. Her face was as white as paint primer.

“No, you're not,” I shouted. “Just stay put, you hear me?”

Wriggling out of my coat and frantically toeing my shoes off, I swam like mad, frozen with fear as well as the water's chill. With every kick and doggy-paddle stroke I made, the possibility that my mother was about to die in the same pond as my dad became more and more real. Half drowned myself, I lurched into some sedge, covered in mud, slime, and a slick of slimy, decomposing leaves that had fallen on the pond. By the time I managed to summon help, and some men hurried out to where the capsized rowboat serenely drifted, my mother had vanished into the murk. The frogmen, one of whom I recognized as having been on the same team that retrieved my drowned father not a year before, had her up to the surface in no time. But it was all too late. Her narrow, pale face was already bloated, her lips gone purple.

So began a time in the house off Cranbury Road that degenerated from bad to awful. My grandmother and I hardly knew what to do with each other when alone in the same room. I think she blamed her son's suicide on my mother, my mother's death on me somehow, and also blamed me for having been the reason my parents were forced to get married in the first place. Much as I couldn't admit to personal responsibility in that matter—after all, I had no say in their out-of-wedlock lovemaking under spicy-smelling sweet pepper bushes on the pond's bank—I understood how she could see me as a living symbol of her precious Wyatt's downfall. As for my grandfather, he was truly heartbroken, and shouldered much of the blame himself.