The Lost Landscape (17 page)

IT WAS TRUE, CYNTHIA
Heike was afflicted with a curvature of the upper spine severe enough to require (as she told me, with a bitter laugh) a brace. She'd worn a “goddamned brace like a harness” prescribed by a Buffalo orthopedist, intermittently for years, for part of each day; it had been her father who'd insisted, and who had taken her to a number of specialists; for a while, he'd considered the possibility of surgery.

“
He
knows a freak when he sees one. ‘A. Emmet Heike, M.D.'”

Once, I'd had a glimpse of Cynthia's naked back. It looked as if the upper spine had melted beneath the skin and fallen back upon itself. Cynthia had learned to compensate for the deformity by favoring her right side and by wearing oversized, boxy clothing
that hid too her flat chest, thick waist and thighs. Her arms and legs were covered in coarse dark hairs. On her upper lip was a faint dark mustache. Her left eye was weak-muscled and “wandering.” Her eyelids were prominent, giving her a languorous, sleepy look at odds with her sharp eye and sharper tongue; in the proper lighting, Cynthia was very handsome. Her mouth was small, perfectly chiseled. Her nose was wide at the tip, and her nostrils flared. Memorably Cynthia said, with a mock pout to make us laugh: “If I were a guy I'd be good-looking. But I'm not a guy. I guess.”

One day in swim class something terrible happened. A silly girl swam beside Cynthia in the shallower end of the pool and tried to “ride” her—pulling herself onto Cynthia's twisted back in a foolish prank that precipitated a panic attack in Cynthia causing her to swallow water, choke, nearly drown.

Why would anyone do such a thing, it was asked. Not in malice, not to be cruel, just “playful”—mistaking Cynthia Heike for a girl without a handicap, as Cynthia Heike took such pains to disguise her condition. (Cynthia could not swim except by placing her feet on the bottom of the pool and pushing off for brief, fluttering seconds when her strong arms flailed like windmills and her legs kicked frantically. Almost you would think, witnessing this, that Cynthia was “swimming.”)

Was I there that day? I think that I was, in the deeper end of the pool. I was one of the tireless divers in my high school swim classes for I'd learned young to swim and dive, at Olcott Beach. To
keep in motion
has always been an ideal. The commotion in the shallow end of the pool had been distracting but it hadn't been until afterward that I learned what had happened. My first reaction had been resentment, that that girl (who was not a friend of Cynthia Heike) could have presumed such familiarity with my friend.

13.

ASSIDUOUSLY WE PRACTICED THE
Bach/Schumann piece vfor the spring recital. Each alone, and at Cynthia's house after school. Weeks in succession.

At home on our dull-toned upright piano that made me impatient, its tones were so dull and shallow. Several keys stuck. I complained that the piano needed tuning and my father said affably that that was so, the piano needed tuning.

The implication being
So much else in our lives need tuning. And—so what?

Mrs. Heike sometimes listened to Cynthia and me practicing, for a few minutes at least; Dr. Heike, rarely. For Dr. Heike came home late, sometimes missing dinner. (That is, dinner at home. Obviously Dr. Heike was not missing dinner elsewhere.) Cynthia played the violin with a kind of anxious ferocity, biting her lower lip. She was impatient with me when I faltered at the keyboard striking a note too hard or too softly or hesitating, missing the beat. A true musician never “misses a beat”—an essentially untrainable musician has but a blind (or deaf) notion of what a “beat” is. Under the pressure of such practice, I'd begun to sweat inside my clothes. I had come to dread the practice sessions with my friend even as I yearned to please her. For Cynthia could be generous with praise—“That was perfect! Just the right tone, and volume.
Thank you.
”

Impulsively Cynthia hugged me. Her grip was hard, her breath against my face. I could not embrace her in turn, I was too taken by surprise. Yet I recall her twisted spine against my hands, so strangely. I am sure, I recall this.

Both my parents and my grandmother Blanche Morgenstern planned to attend the recital. My grandmother would take the Greyhound bus to our house in Millersport, and from there my father
would drive us to the high school. Grandma, who was a skilled seamstress, was sewing a navy blue jumper and a white silk blouse for me from a Butterick pattern.

In anticipation of the audacity of what I was undertaking to do, playing piano
in front of an audience
, I had begun to sleep poorly. I would wake in the middle of the night and lie with my eyelids shut tight and trembling. My fingers ached for I'd been playing the Schumann composition in my sleep like a frenzied automaton, unable to stop. My fingers were claws, cramped with pain. Just the other side of an assiduously executed piano piece by any young person lies madness.

At the piano, a mist came over my brain. I had difficulty focusing my eyes. My fingers were damp and numb; desperately I rubbed them together to restore heat and agility. The cruel thought haunted me—
You will make the same mistake you made in sixth grade. You will forget the ending and will just play and play like a robot. And they will all laugh at you.

I tried to take solace in the fact (many times told me) that an accompanist need only be adequate—“No one will hear if you make a mistake, Joyce.”

A mistake!
In the singular?

“HEL-LO! IS IT—JANICE?”

“Joyce, Daddy! You've met.”

“Yes! Yes indeed, we have met.”

Merrily Dr. Heike extended his hand to shake mine. His grip was hard, punishing. He seemed to take pleasure in making me uncomfortable as a way of teasing his daughter.

Dr. Heike was the first person with whom I'd shaken hands. The first adult. The handshake had been unavoidable.

Tonight Dr. Heike came to the dinner table a half-hour late. He had been expected at seven o'clock, now it was seven-thirty. He was a large man, jolly, hearty, but absentminded, smiling and indifferent. When he was in a good mood, he laughed. But when he was annoyed and irritated, he also laughed. A gold pin of some kind, small, sword-shaped, glittered in his left lapel.

A money person. What would he want with
you?

There appeared to be some tension between Dr. Heike and Mrs. Heike which no one wished to acknowledge for when Dr. Heike stooped to kiss the cheek of his wife, who was seated, Mrs. Heike turned her head away with pained pursed lips; but Dr. Heike merely laughed, and rubbed his hands together. Cynthia had said that her father was an oncologist: cancer? Those eyes gleaming with merriment, those fat hands—
cancer?
How was this possible? Invariably when Dr. Heike entered a room the air was stirred and roused as with many small whirlwinds. You understood that Dr. Heike was the father of the family and much adored. You had always to acknowledge the father at the center of the room for even when you avoided his moist merry staring eye, you were acknowledging him. And there was a woman helper in the Heike household with whom Dr. Heike was on teasing terms that made her blush and stammer in confusion: “Jad-wiga, please say hello to our guest, too! In English, please—‘Hel-
lo.'”
A Polish girl, thick-thighed, about twenty-nine years old, Jadwiga was the first household servant I'd seen in actual life though servants were commonplace in Hollywood movies where they were invariably black.

I had not told my parents that the Heikes had a
servant
. I knew that my father would make a cutting remark about this and that my mother would recall how before I'd been born she'd done housework for a well-to-do family on Washburn Street, Lockport.

“Jad-wiga” was a name that seemed to amuse Dr. Heike for he
used it several times, always enunciating it carefully. You would think that Jadwiga had no last name.

This was the evening when Dr. Heike asked me what was happening in the “north country” and when I told him that not much was happening he'd shocked me, and others at the table, by saying, “Hell, no. That is not true, my girl. There is much going on in your part of the county. In the
Buffalo Evening News
I read an article about a fire in Clarence, and two small children killed. And arson is suspected.”

I was so surprised by Dr. Heike's hostile tone that I sat unmoving at the dinner table, unable to reply.

Out of nowhere had come this attack. As soon as Dr. Heike had settled into his dinner, conversation had seemed ordinary, even dull; the Heikes had been talking together about some domestic incident, and I had scarcely listened. But now, I was stricken to the heart.

I should have protested—
But Clarence isn't Millersport! It's miles away . . .

Still, Dr. Heike was essentially correct about my evasiveness. If the fire had been in Millersport, I would have told Dr. Heike that nothing much had happened there, to avoid speaking to him. Instinctively Dr. Heike knew this.

The Heikes—Mrs. Heike, Cynthia, eleven-year-old Albert—were embarrassed by their father's tone, as by the fierce look in his face, as if he'd been personally insulted. Adroitly Cynthia intervened telling her father that we had so much homework in just chemistry alone, we didn't have time to read the silly newspaper.
He
had time for that.

Dr. Heike chuckled at this riposte. Mrs. Heike tried also to be playful telling me that her husband was accustomed to commanding the nursing staff at Buffalo General, who could never live up to his high expectations. “There are too many females in the doctor's life, he says. It's not your fault, Joyce.” Mrs. Heike laughed as if she'd said something both witty and embittered.

A few minutes later Cynthia became the brunt of Dr. Heike's irritation when she (evidently) replied to a question of his with her mouth partially full. “Excuse me. Please do not speak with your mouth full, Cynthia. You are not an infant.”

Cynthia's face darkened with embarrassment. Then boldly, bravely she countered, “Infants don't talk, Daddy. With or without their mouths full.”

Dr. Heike surprised us by laughing at this lame joke. You could see that Dr. Heike was a man who had to be approached from an unexpected angle, to make him laugh; if you approached him head-on, and he saw you coming, he would be contemptuous.

“And what does your father do, Joyce?”

“My father is a tool and die designer.”

Carefully I answered Dr. Heike's question. There would be no ambiguity now.

“A ‘tool and die designer'—is he? Where?”

I told him: Harrison Radiator, in Lockport.

“In Lockport! That's a corrupt little canal city, did you know?” Dr. Heike laughed genially.

To this I had no reply. I had no idea what Dr. Heike meant by
corrupt little canal city
, in such satisfied terms.

“Your mayor has been indicted. Not for the first time. I mean—not the first time that a
mayor of Lockport
has been indicted.”

Dr. Heike spoke with vague amusement. I had not reacted except to smile faintly and perhaps now he felt sorry for me. The doctor was accustomed to his more spirited daughter resisting him. Even a sadist may be disappointed when a victim fails to fight back.

“‘A tool and die designer'—in a factory? Is that where?”

I thought so, yes. Harrison Radiator was a
factory.

“Where did your father train?”

Where—train?
The use of the term “train” was unfamiliar to me.
I was sure that I'd never heard my father use it in regard to his work. I felt that Dr. Heike was teasing me—tormenting me—hoping to make me cry, like the boys at the rural school. They had not stopped when a victim cried.

Young I had learned that there is really no way to placate the cruel except by escaping them. If you resist, or if you acquiesce—they will not show mercy in either case.

Quietly I spoke, so that the man should not know how miserable I was at his elegant dinner table, in his elegant home, and how I hated him. “I guess I don't know, Dr. Heike.”

“Don't know? Probably in Buffalo, at the vocational school. It's said to be among the best of its kind.”

My father had not “trained” at any vocational school in Buffalo or elsewhere. My father had probably been an apprentice to an older worker at Harrison's.

A wave of faintness had come over me. I had set down my fork on my plate, I could not eat. My heart beat dangerously fast. It was only an exchange at a dinner table—it was, essentially,
nothing
—yet I felt threatened, disgraced. I felt that I had betrayed my father whom I loved. I had betrayed both my parents. Just being here, at the rich doctor's table, was a betrayal of my parents.

Next, Dr. Heike interrogated Cynthia about our chemistry course.

He fired questions at her involving “combustible” chemicals to which Cynthia knew the answers but did not speak clearly. Her tongue seemed too large for her mouth. Chuckling, Dr. Heike said that, next year at Rochester, when she was taking organic chemistry, his “brainy daughter” would need to know a little more than she was getting away with in high school. Impudently I said, “Cynthia gets the highest grades in our class.”

It was not exactly true that Cynthia Heike got the very highest
grades in the class. There was a boy who, like Cynthia, had a doctor-father and intended to be a doctor, who often got higher grades than she did, scoring 100 percent in quizzes and tests.

By saying this I was also saying
Leave your daughter alone. Your daughter is plenty smart.

Cynthia glanced toward me startled as if she had no idea who I was. Her left, weak-muscled eye seemed to be swinging loose. Dr. Heike seemed pleased by my remark but could not resist saying, “‘Highest grades' doesn't mean much in itself. Grades are relative. What sort of grades do you get, Joyce?”