Dalva (11 page)

Andrew thought this was a major-league story. He asked Ted why, if I excited him so much, he had become homosexual? Ted was unnaturally thoughtful for a few minutes, then said, “It's not what turns one on, but what turns one on the most strongly.”

My three letters were all rather startling. Ruth wrote that her grocer had presented his financial statement, then asked her to marry him. He wanted her to see the statement so she wouldn't think he wanted her money. She was a little confused and wanted us to visit either in Santa Monica, Tucson, or wherever. Mother's note was an abrupt proposal which required a phone call. She had to know within a few days if I was interested in coming back and teaching for a year at the country school from which she was retiring. The members of the county schoolboard, all in their sixties like Naomi, had kept the school open for years due to her persistence. Otherwise most of the children would have spent a full hour each way on the school bus. The enrollment was down to seventeen in grades one through eight, but she had wangled one more year just in case I cared to come home. Between the lines this meant that Ted had told Ruth, who told Naomi, that my life might be in some danger. She didn't expect me to live with her. My own place, which had been Grandfather's, had been “house-sat” for over twenty years by a finicky Norwegian bachelor cousin of the Lundquists. He was supposedly retranslating Rölvaag's
Giants in the Earth
though no one saw any of the evidence. On my visits he moved into Duane's bunkhouse which had been nicely redone by a traveling hippie couple Naomi had befriended.

Part of Naomi's peculiar, hard-won sanity is that she doesn't think of her private quarrels as acts of heroism. Her strategies are quiet, her suggestions tentative. My first impulse was “Why not?” Her note ended with the tease that while I wouldn't find any drug problems, there were two seventh-grade twins who were potential drunks. One of them was sexually precocious and she was busy saving the virtue of three of the girls, also saving the boys from irate Lutheran parents.

Professor Michael's letter permanently changed my idea about the man. I was a little suspicious after the first paragraph—when someone pulls off a mask you are left wondering if the new face is yet another mask. The prose owned none of the acerbic, contentious quality of his scholarly articles or his public personality. The letter was a half-dozen pages, beginning with an ingenious biographical sketch. There was an occasional call for violins but the attempt was at naked honesty, albeit lyrical: born in the Ohio Valley to marginal farm-factory parents and relatives, fundamentalist Protestant, fair-haired student winning a scholarship to Notre Dame which caused a break with his family (a Catholic college!), factory work in summers, a year in a writing program at Northwestern with a failed, awful novel to show for it, long and arduous graduate work at the University of Wisconsin and Yale, ending with a Ph.D. in American studies, a couple of nonscholarly books, marriage and divorce, daughter in private school which cost him a full third of his take-home pay, six years of teaching at Stanford but still without tenure.

The bottom line was on the last page, in the form of a supplication and an offer. He had just returned from Loreto on Baja to meet with my uncle Paul in the hopes that my denial to see family papers could be circumvented. Uncle Paul, whom he “adored,” said it was still up to me. The problem was his sabbatical, for which he had been given a large additional foundation grant, would begin in the summer. Tenure depended on the book he would write during his sabbatical. The center of the difficulty was that a professor from the University
of Wisconsin on the grants committee had previously been denied access to our papers and had demanded proof of Michael's access as a contingency to the grant. He had to deliver this permission in a week's time to his own chairman at Stanford. At this point, if he couldn't do so, he would lose his grant, sabbatical, and very probably his job due to “moral turpitude”— i.e., lying—no matter that the students had voted him teacher of the year for his lecturing techniques, his wonderfully amusing oratory. If he lost his job his daughter would have to be withdrawn from private school which would break her heart. He rented an apartment and there was a loan on his BMW exceeding its current value due to a minor collision with his mailbox. In other words, his fate was entirely in my hands.

It was such a sorry mess I began to laugh, reminding me as it did of a more grotesque version of parts of my own life, and the lives of many of those I knew. His offer, however, brought me to despair; I lost my breath and wandered out to the balcony but my tears blurred the Pacific. “Remember that night,” he wrote, “when you ridiculed my mustache, or at least teased me about it? I grabbed your arm and you became justifiably angry. I don't think I have any violence in me or perhaps it all comes out my mouth, or is subdued in drinking! My ex-wife used to slap me and I never defended myself. Coleridge said somewhere that we are like spiders who spin webs of deceit out of our asses. Perhaps along with my scholarly bent I have the temperament of an unsuccessful horse-player, a binge gambler. My frantic quarreling with you over at Ted's was a signal of the depth of trouble I was in. Anyway, the night at your place you mentioned that you wanted to find your son, or you were going to write something to explain yourself and your background. You could monitor my project which would cover the background. And I could find your son. I know I could because I am trained as a researcher and have a great deal of credibility. This is all I have to offer and perhaps you would rather do it without me. I beg, I implore you to consider my situation. To be sure, I have lied repeatedly to my collective profession thinking I could bend your will. I truly care for you, but that's another matter. Frankly, I have wondered why you bothered with me in the first place, traveling in the circles that you do. Ted spends more than my salary in wine every
year. Finding your son is all I have to offer. Please call me the minute you finish this letter. I have given serious consideration to suicide but couldn't do it because of my daughter. Otherwise I would threaten you with it.”

Out on the balcony I thought that certain kinds of suffering are altogether too ambitious. I remembered childhood stories of abandoned dogs who found their way, after numberless torments of weather, bridges, highways, dogcatchers, a thousand miles back home. Their compass evidently was their longing to be there. It's a nice story but what of all the young people I've worked with who have run away from some impossible situation, then return to find the door closed? It is difficult to help someone who feels discarded. They think of themselves, finally, as garbage and are willing prey to all those who victimize them sexually, and later on, emotionally. Somehow the fact that there is no home doesn't decrease the longing. I'm not sure why. Of necessity we can create layers of activities to cover this longing but it is always felt beneath the surface. To become inert has always been to me the worst of survival tactics. The professor says that time is the most natural of artificialities, and that no one but a nitwit lives within its mechanistic specifics. An event of a few moments dominates years. Just now I was thinking of the precise moment I had to give up Duane's necklace.

On my seventeenth birthday, on October 10, my grandfather, with the grudging permission of Naomi, gave me my first car. It was a new turquoise-colored Ford convertible with a white top and looked desperately inappropriate in the Nebraska landscape, especially parked next to Mother's drab and muddy Plymouth. I stood embarrassed in the yard in front of everyone—Charlene and Lena were out from town—until I took my cue from Ruth who was jumping around wildly. We went for a ride, with me driving and Charlene and Ruth on the seat beside me. It was sunny though cool for October but we put the top down anyway and drove into town, stopping at the single drive-in which was a meeting place for young people. Everyone was friendly, even one of the boys that Duane had
beaten up. There is a haphazard resilience in young people that is not shared by adults, an ability to forget bitterness. Something as stupid and vulgar as a pretty car can be a tonic to all, at least for an afternoon.

I think the car hastened the death of my grandfather though he tried to absolve me of this notion on his deathbed. What happened is that the car equaled freedom to me, and naturally a longer-range freedom than that of walking or horseback. Perhaps this is less true of women than men, but in my upbringing the differentiation wasn't emphasized. On sleepless nights I would go downstairs, flick on the yard light, and look out at the car. Sometimes I would take an old road atlas and touring guide out of the parlor desk and study the possibilities. I began to slowly draw small amounts of money out of my savings account before I had a definite plan. For the first time in several years I counted my collection of silver dollars I had started as a little girl. There was also a stack of ten twenty-dollar gold pieces that Grandfather had found behind some books in his library in the summer. He had said “Spend these on a gewgaw or whatever.” It occurred to me that it would look suspicious if I tried to buy gas or a motel room with a twenty-dollar gold piece. I was on the verge of jumping into one of those holes in life out of which we emerge a bit tattered and bloody though we remain nonetheless sure that we had to make the jump.

One evening a few weeks after my birthday, when our part of Nebraska had entered a warm Indian summer, I was out in the driveway wiping the car windows with a chamois cloth. The insides of the car windows were covered with the nose prints of Grandfather's Airedales. That day, when I had driven to his house after school, he had suggested we take the dogs for a spin with the top down. The dogs sat in the backseat rather grave and self-important as we drove down mile after mile of gravel roads. Grandfather had bronchitis and sipped whiskey from a flask, talking about how in the fine, early years of his marriage he and his wife (this was in the late thirties) would jump in their car and drive all the way to Chicago in less than three days just to eat in a bona-fide French restaurant. At a crossroads he permitted the frantic dogs to jump out and chase a coyote—in a lifetime of chasing coyotes they had never
caught one save the pups in the den. This coyote had a sense of humor and ran in great circles, passing the car several times with the dogs kept at a consistent hundred yards behind him. When the dogs flopped in exhaustion beside the car the coyote sat down in the exact place the chase had begun, and continued to watch us until we left.

So in the evening while I was cleaning the car and the dusk disappeared into dark I heard a coyote. I walked out into the pasture into the warm darkness beyond the sound of Ruth's piano practice. My skin tingled and my stomach hollowed because I somehow thought it might be Duane who could imitate coyotes to the point they would answer him. Duane said the coyotes didn't believe his call, they were only curious and amused. But out there in the pasture I admitted to myself I was going to try to find Duane.

Mother had been cautious with me after the baby on the advice of something she had read, not to pry, not to submit my every moment and mood to scrutiny, and in exchange I offered as much honesty as I could muster. I slipped out of bed the next morning at 5:00
A.M.
and left a note saying not to worry, but that I was going to visit my old friend Duane. To make sure I wouldn't be stopped I woke up Ruth, gave her the note, and told her to give it to Mother after school. Ruth was reading
Wuthering Heights
at the time and thought my search for a lost love was “utterly thrilling.”