I Hate to Leave This Beautiful Place (19 page)

On Vermont Public Radio, every forecast on the
“Eye on the Sky” weather report dedicates itself to elaborate language, which some of my friends suggested was overkill. I didn't feel that way at all. I loved descriptions such as, “Southern portions of Quebec province sponsored last night's rain, and the same can be said about today's light showers throughout the broadcast area. Late-afternoon and early-evening water spouts might hazard small craft on Lake Champlain. One farmer near Peacham reported geese had shown up in his barn. I suppose we shouldn't be surprised that even water fowl sometimes need to get out of the rain. Tomorrow, more rain. Temperatures will range between eighty and eighty-five in the lower elevations.”

I stopped at Jules and Helen Rabin's house to pick up two loaves of bread they had made in their medieval stone beehive oven. On my way home I listened to Tom Slayton's excellent review of the latest collection of poems by Hayden Carruth and a retrospective of Carruth's writing life, and then switched off the car radio the moment I recognized the insufferable voice of Willem Lang, about to deliver a sanctimonious editorial. Then I noticed an enormous, prehistoric-looking snapping turtle crossing Route 14. I stopped the car, broke off a small branch from a fallen tree ten yards from the road, and approached the turtle, which spun to face me, hissing. The thing to do was get the turtle to lurch its accordion neck forward and bite the branch, then drag the whole contraption into the wet gulley alongside the road and run like hell. This worked out fairly quickly.

Late at night, I ate strawberries and cream, then watched the “Better Angels of Our Nature” episode. And I thought, This summer I've experienced my better and worse angels equally, and the summer isn't over yet.

 

By the end of August the kingfisher was back on its tree. I contacted the state biologist who had originally captured it. She said, “Yeah, just as I suspected, it was a parasite. It should be fine now, except sometimes just a short time away from home like that disorients a kingfisher. It might choose to change its tree. Which might not sound like much, but for a kingfisher it's major. Keep me posted. I'd be interested to know what's going on there.”

Back at the millpond, I sat and watched both of the resident kingfishers. Splash to the west, then splash to the north, a kind of contrapuntal ornithology, and both birds were having much success. Then I saw that the kingfisher on the north side of the pond was in fact “teaching” a juvenile, perched on a nearby branch—I had read about but never observed this—to hunt. The way it works is that the parent bird will kill a small fish, then lay it on the surface of the pond. The offspring will then attack the fish, often missing it entirely, but occasionally spearing the fish successfully with its bill. This apprenticeship may go on for weeks and weeks. On this late-August day, the juvenile kingfisher was both picking up its mother's leavings and separately nabbing its own fish. I sat there for most of the afternoon. I wrote letters, read part of a friend's novel, took a nap, ate peaches. I hated to leave that beautiful place.

 

“I have only about three minutes,” my brother said.

“Put in some more coins, then. Or—go ahead, call me collect. I don't care.”

“No, I mean I'm
allowed
only three minutes. Get it?”

“Where are you?”

“Terre Haute, Indiana.”

“I was wondering why I hadn't heard from you.”

“There was a hearing. I didn't contest anything. They had me ass to ashes.”

“I'll visit.”

“It's for eighteen months. Definitely eighteen months.”

“I'm sorry.”

“I was wearing you down there, though, wasn't I? I could tell by your voice I was starting to work the magic. I mean, you'd agreed to take me to the border, if not across. Another week or two would've done it. I'm pretty sure.”

“Maybe so.”

“But be honest—you're kinda relieved it didn't come to that, right?”

“I don't know. What does it matter, anyway?”

“I haven't met your wife. I haven't met your daughter.”

“When you get out, I'll come drive you to Vermont. You can visit us. I'll take you across all the state lines between Indiana and here. We can drive at night if it makes you more comfortable. That's about all I can offer, given the present situation.”

“Time's almost up. I'm getting the look from the guard.”

“Okay. Call collect next time if you want. Hope you'll be all right there.”

“How
all right
can a person be in federal prison, ask yourself that. Though they do have—I mean, it's white-collar crime, minimum security. They do have therapists, priests, rabbis—they've got movies on one of those old-fashioned projectors. I'm thinking of doing some writing.”

 

I had one last therapy session. “Do you want to continue to try and figure out the whole thing with the Confederate soldier?” Dr. ____ asked.

“I think I've been a little sick all summer. I was seeing things differently. I was feeling things differently.”

“Did the confusion of it disturb you? It seemed to at times. The phone calls from your brother . . .”

“Not really. I didn't mind it. I got some work done. I got some bills paid. That well was goddamned expensive. I only fill up the bathtub halfway now, even though there's plenty of water. Saw a lot of friends. Saw five or six movies. I spent a lot of time with Emma.”

“A normal summer with a few extra added attractions—is that how you prefer to see it?”

“I wouldn't put it that way.”

“How would you put it?”

“The guy with the Confederate soldier's hat was . . . disappointing.”

“You mean you wanted a ghost. You mean you wanted your fever to have put you in touch with a reality nobody else was in touch with. You wanted a summer of illness to have earned its keep somehow. To have provided you with a once-in-a-lifetime experience. But you are always saying how just everyday things here in Vermont sustain you so much. Actually, you know what? I don't see any real contradictions there. Not really. Howard, life contains disappointments.”

“I know you didn't mean that to be as patronizing as it sounded. But the way you said it was kind of a dull platitude.”

“Still, I meant it. Disappointment is a subject to discuss.”

“I've always thought disappointment was in direct relation to expectations.”

“So if you lower your expectations, disappointments arrive less often, or something like that. That's got some humor to it.”

“I'm just saying I expected—fever or not—too much from the guy. It was enough that he looked very good in that hat.”

“I can see you prefer to end on a light note. How unusual. Anyway, our time's up.”

 

The night before I had to, and hated to, leave Vermont, because I had taken a teaching position in Maryland, I had a dream so vivid it made waking life seem a dream. Or something like that. I dreamed of all my friends asleep in their beds. Perhaps the influence was the fact that, before I'd fallen asleep myself, I'd read a poem by Mark Strand that contained the line “my friends asleep in their beds.” It was a poem narrated by an insomniac, the image informed by vicariousness and desire. The poem began with a nighttime tour of bedrooms and sleeping porches of the poet's friends on a hot summer night.

Michael and Jackie asleep in their bed. Rick and Rhea asleep in their bed. Roy and Gabrielle asleep in their bed. Denise and François asleep in their bed in Paris. Chet and Viiu asleep in their bed. Alexandra asleep in her bed. David asleep in his bed in Venice. Gary and Vickie asleep in their bed. Kazumi Tanaka asleep in her bed. Richard and Jane asleep in their bed. Susanna and Larry asleep in their bed. David and Rebecca asleep in their bed. Ed and Curtis asleep in their bed. Julie asleep in her bed. Jerry and Diane asleep in their bed. Tom and Melanie asleep in their bed. Rick and Andrea asleep in their bed. David and Ann asleep in their bed. Bill and Trish asleep in their bed. William and Paula asleep in their bed. Elizabeth asleep in her bed.

I woke up, put on the BBC, and stepped out onto the dirt road at five
A.M.
Crows calling and the scuffle of deer in the direction of the trout pond, hummingbirds at the fuchsia. Gertrude was just returning to the barn. Can you imagine what comprises an owl's night? Already things I love most every day had happened.

BOB EDWARDS

Morning Edition,
NPR

12-16-2003

 

Bob Edwards, host:
Imagine leaving home for the summer and while you're away, a terrible event occurs in the place you've left behind. That was the experience of some Washington neighbors of NPR special correspondent Susan Stamberg. Her Tuesday series, “No Place Like Home,” continues.

Susan Stamberg:
Novelist Howard Norman, his wife, poet Jane Shore, and their teenage daughter spend their summers in Vermont. This year they loaned their D.C. home to an acquaintance and her two-year-old son. This past July, in the dining room of that house, the woman committed suicide and took her little boy with her.

Jane Shore:
At first, I was thinking, and we were all thinking, if we could actually go back home, and if we could actually live in the house, because it had been violated.

Susan Stamberg:
So how was it? How did you then, Howard Norman, arrive at the idea that you, in fact, would go back to the house?

Howard Norman:
I think that happened fairly quickly, actually. We agreed relatively quickly that this was visited upon us. It wasn't something whose source was our life, and that you don't let someone else's demon, if you will, chase you out. I came down a couple of days early, and I will say that it was a powerful feeling, to step into the house. The sense of relief at seeing the familiar life was quite astonishing, really, because one doesn't always like where one's imagination goes and the projection of it.

Susan Stamberg:
And so it was so much more terrifying to think about it while you were out of town than to go back to what still was very much your house.

 

Truth be told, I scarcely knew Reetika Vazirani, and scarcely knew her son, Jehan, either. So if the word
healing
is applicable to working through the consequences of an act of unspeakable brutality, it wouldn't be associated with grieving. Grief is reserved for loved ones. In this situation, healing was about other imperatives, such as reclaiming the violated interior spaces of heart and home, and gaining some perspective, in order to temper, if not erase, the harrowing images of what a person, Reetika Vazirani, suffering the consuming rages and ravages of depression, was capable of doing to her child and to herself, and of visiting upon my house.

Years earlier, and just days after we'd begun living in that house, I was attaching a mezuzah to the frame of the front door when Monsignor Duffy, of the Church of the Blessed Sacrament, whose rectory was next door—the church itself was across the street—dropped by to ask if I'd give a lecture before his Catholic Book Club on the subject of “both real and delusional guilt in the novels of Graham Greene. I'd like a Jewish writer's perspective on a Catholic writer's philosophy, played out in the actions and thoughts of his characters.” I told him that my lack of comprehension of this subject could only fail his book club. He let it go at that.

The bells of the church rang every fifteen minutes, seven
A.M.
to seven
P.M.
, and of course more frequently on Sunday mornings, Christmas, Easter, and around weddings and funerals. I soon developed an antagonistic relationship with those bells. A friend described me as being like Quasimodo in
The Hunchback of Notre Dame,
up in the bell tower clamping his hands over his ears. The thing was, I was trying to get some writing done, needing several uninterrupted hours each morning, but the bells constructed never-changing allotments of time, often imposing a sense of anxiety on potentially meditative intervals. Jehan liked the bells, but they didn't always let him settle into a good nap, wrote Reetika Vazirani in a journal. Anyway, just now I'm thinking of something my therapist said: “Filicide strikes the deepest chords.”

 

I wish I didn't have this subject to write about; every word will come out awkwardly and not suffice. But the fact is, the medical examiner determined that on July 16, 2003, Reetika Vazirani, a poet and forty years old, stabbed her son in the neck, chest, and forearm, damaging his blood vessels, lungs, and heart. Therefore, this was not, as the Indian poet Kabir wrote, “a gentle transport into the next world.” And at that moment, too, a father, Yusef, lost his son—you wake up, as the Urdu poet Ghalib wrote, to find a demon standing on your heart. Next, Reetika Vazirani, by any definition, more gently transported herself.

How to talk about such a thing? Here I take as much inspiration as I possibly can from what Yasunari Kawabata wrote: “When speaking of those who take their own lives, it is always most dignified to use silence or at least restrained language, for the ones left most vulnerable and most deeply hurt by such an occurrence can feel oppressed by the louder assertions of understanding, wisdom and depth of remorse foisted upon them by others. One must ask: Who is best served by speculation? Who is really able to comprehend? Perhaps we must, as human beings, continue to try and comprehend, but we will fall short. And the falling short will deepen our sense of emptiness.”

And yet sometimes I could not use restrained language.