The Lost Landscape (29 page)

TOOTSIE ROLL, MALLOW CUP
, Milky Way, Junior Mints, Snickers, Hershey Bar, Mars Bar, Oh Henry!

Juicy Fruit, Dentyne chewing gum.

Bubble gum. “Jawbreaker.”

Hostess CupCake: chocolate with “cream” filling.

Pies in crinkly waxed paper that fit into the palm of the hand, to be devoured rapturously on the sidewalk outside the store in which they were purchased.

Magical syllables—“
Tastee-Freez.
” Transit Road, Lockport.

Orange, chocolate, cherry Popsicles slow-melting at first, then rapidly melting. Fingers sticky.

Fudgsicles, Creamsicles. Front of shirt stained, bare toes sticky.

At
The Royale
on Main Street, Lockport: hot fudge banana split with maraschino cherries, whipped cream, crown of sugar wafers.

At
Castle's Dairy
on Main Street, Lockport: vanilla malt so thick you could barely drink it through a straw; strawberry milk shakes, double-dip ice-cream cones, chocolate ice-cream sandwiches.

At
Rexall's
counter, chocolate Coke.

Freddie's Doughnuts:
glazed, chocolate, frosted, cinnamon, sweet doughy filled to bursting with whipped cream/jelly and covered in confectioners' sugar that leave a guilty ghost-smile on your face.

MAYONNAISE SANDWICH

Mustard sandwich

Peanut butter sandwich

Baloney sandwich

Kraft American cheese sandwich

Grilled cheese sandwiches

Hamburgers/cheeseburgers/hot dogs

Ketchup, mustard-and-relish

French fries. Coleslaw. Salty, sugary.

Salty “buttery” popcorn sold at Palace Theater, Rialto Theatre hungrily devoured despite perennial rumors of rat droppings, cockroaches in popcorn boxes.

North Park Junior High cafeteria: (scorched) macaroni-and-cheese casserole, Chef Boyardee spaghetti and tomato sauce, grease-encrusted French fries.

Beef doves. Shepherd's pie. Texas hash.

(Canned) fruit cup.

Rice pudding, bread pudding. Chocolate pudding.

Shiny quivery red Jell-O in fluted mold.

Pizza: cheese, tomato, green pepper and coin-sized slices of pepperoni sausage glimmering with miniature pools of grease.

Tiny (canned) shrimp, macaroni with Kraft's mayonnaise on lettuce leaves.

Steaming-hot gluey oatmeal with milk, brown sugar.

Cheerios, Rice Krispies. Wheaties.

Gingerbread, fudge.

Triple-layer devil's food with fudge frosting.

Excitement of baking cookies: carefully placing Mom's cookie dough on baking tin. Chocolate chip, oatmeal, ginger, sugar.

Frosting Christmas cookies in the kitchen. Star-shaped, Christmas-tree-shaped sugar cookies with tiny sparkles like mica.

Excitement of coloring Easter eggs: carefully lowering egg into dye, on teaspoon.

PEPSI, COCA-COLA, DR PEPPER
, Sunkist. Royal Crown Root Beer.

Sip of Daddy's dark ale—so bitter! hurtful on the tongue!

Foods fried in lard. Thickly coated in bread crumbs.

Southern-fried chicken, glazed ham baked with (canned) pineapple slices.

Campbell's soups: tomato, chicken noodle, cream of mushroom.

Heinz's Pork-and-Beans.

Breaded fish sticks dipped in Heinz's ketchup.

Breaded cutlets, breaded chicken parts.

Mashed potatoes with gravy-pools.

Mashed potatoes with slow-melting wedges of butter cold from the refrigerator.

Roast turkey. Bread stuffing. Cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie, Grandma's gravy boat brimming with fatty gravy.

Shame of Planters Peanuts eaten greedily out of the can in the car en route home from shopping at Loblaw's, Lockport.

Salt/grease acute. Interior of mouth smarting.

Cheese omelets the size of automobile hubcaps, preferred rubbery to “moist.”

Iceberg lettuce wilting beneath spoonfuls of neon-pink “Russian” dressing.

From the dank earthen-floored cobweb-festooned cellar with its myriad odors, jars of canned applesauce, homemade—from the “fruit closet.”

Canned pears, sweet cherries, peaches swimming in syrup—from the “fruit closet.”

Blueberry pancakes. Waffles.

Vermont maple syrup in the sticky plastic pitcher.

Homemade spaghetti sauce, meatballs. Daddy's favorite meal simmering on the stove.

Wonderful lost foods of childhood, adolescence—where gone?

HOW COULD WE HAVE
eaten such heavy, unhealthful food?

Happily, mostly.

MY HUNGARIAN GRANDMOTHER LENA
Bush made thick goulashes with sour cream and paprika. She made her own noodles rolling stiff chalky-white dough into layers on a breadboard, sprinkled with flour; stacking the layers together to be cut, precisely, with a long sharp knife. On her stove was a continuous simmering beef- or chicken-broth.

My grandmother's most intricate specialties were Hungarian pastries that required such patience, skill, and single-minded purpose that my mother rarely tried to make them after my grandmother's death. One of these consisted of thin pancakes prepared in a large iron skillet, filled with fruit (pears, cherries, peaches) and sour cream; another, yet more complicated, was rolled to airy thinness on the breadboard, filled similarly with fruit and sour cream, then rolled up tight, baked, cut, and served in small dishes. (Years later I would learn that these were variations of the traditional Hungarian Almás palacsinta, Egri félgömbpalacsinta, and rétesek.)

I never learned to prepare any Hungarian dish. I never learned a word of Hungarian except by osmosis, curse words of my grandfather's which I would never have dared repeat.

MEATLESS FRIDAYS
. IT WAS
a mystery to me, how, when our family “converted” to Catholicism after my grandfather's death, we could no longer eat meat on Friday.

There were
venial sins, mortal sins
. Eating meat on Friday was blatantly disobeying a decree of the Church (since rescinded), thus a
mortal sin
punishable by Hell.

I did not strongly question these decrees. I was not a confrontational or rebellious daughter, except inwardly, in secret; whatever I was expected to believe, a small still voice in my head assured me
You will do what you want to do. Nobody can make you do anything you don't want to do.

Eating meat, not-eating meat—this issue meant little to me. But the idea behind it, the
Why?
—this was not so easily swept aside.

How strange and unsettling it seemed to me that my father, so skeptical by nature, had become mysteriously quiet, even passive, on this matter; as if to resist the strictures of Catholicism was in some way to betray the memory of John Bush, and to further upset Lena Bush and (for a while, at least) my mother Carolina.

And so on Fridays I would help my mother prepare “fish dishes” for us—salmon patties fried in a skillet, creamed tuna fish with peas on toast.

Except for the bread these ingredients were canned, of course. Packed in water and salt. Indeed, it would be years before I fully grasped the concept that “salmon” and “tuna” are in fact (large, beautiful) fish of the kind that swim in the ocean.

Does God care what we eat? Why?
—in the Pendleton church in a haze of boredom I would ponder such questions, to which no adult had any answer except
This is what the Church teaches.

Any young person will smartly counter
But somebody is making up these things, not the “Church”!

Yet it is true in some way, that there is holiness bound up with the
food we eat, when it is prepared for us with care and intention. And where there is holiness, there is the possibility of its reverse—the forbidden, the taboo.

By the standards of a world beyond Millersport these were crude meals—salmon patties, canned-tuna-on-toast. Also macaroni and cheese, “fish sticks.” And yet, how we loved them! The memory of such meals, and my family at the small kitchen table upstairs in the old farmhouse in Millersport, now leaves me faint with hunger.

NOVEMBER 1988
. IN MY
study in our home in Princeton, New Jersey, I am listening, as dusk comes swiftly on, to my father playing piano in another part of the house. Unhesitatingly my father moves through the
presto agitato
of Schubert's “Erl-King,” striking the urgent sequence of notes rapidly but firmly. There's a shimmering quality to the sound, and I am thinking of how the mystery of music is a paradigm of the mystery of personality: most of us “know” family members exclusive of statistical information, sometimes in defiance of it, in the way that we seem to know familiar pieces of music without having any idea of their thematic or structural composition. After a few notes we recognize them—that is all.

Neuroscientists can explain how such recognitions are instantaneously possible, or should be in a normally functioning human brain, but we who experience them have no idea of the astonishing circuits the brain has closed for us in a fraction of a second, a kind of learned knowledge that seems virtually instinctual. The powerful appeal of music is not easily explicable, forever mysterious, like the subterranean urgings of the soul; and so too, the appeal of certain individu
als in our lives. We are rarely aware of the gravitational forces we embody for others (if we embody any at all) but we are keenly aware of the gravitational forces these certain others embody for us. To say
My father, my mother
is to name but not easily to approach one of the central mysteries of my life.

How did the difficult, malnourished, frequently violent circumstances of my parents' early lives allow them to grow, to blossom, finally to thrive into the people they've become?—is there no inevitable relationship between personal history and personality?—is character somehow bred in the bone, absolute fate? destiny? But what do we mean by “character”? What roles do “environment”—“family”—play?

I am determined to memorialize my father, my mother. But—how to begin?

In families, facts often come belatedly to us. Rarely are we told the most crucial facts of our parents' lives when we are most intimate with them, as young children; such knowledge comes, if it comes at all, when we are older. And what exactly are
facts
, that we should imagine they have the power to explain the world to us? On the contrary, it is facts that must be explained.

HERE ARE FACTS:

My father's father Joseph Carlton Oates left his young wife Blanche when their son, Frederic James, an only child, was two or three years old, in 1916. Abandoned them, to be specific, in Lockport, New York. There was no question of child support or alimony: this was the early 1900s, and such laws did not exist; even if they had, it isn't likely that Joseph Oates, allegedly a “heavy drinker,” would have been willing or able to help support his family. My grandmother Blanche had to find work where she could (shopgirl? mill worker?
chambermaid?) in this small city on the Erie Barge Canal north of Buffalo; when Frederic was thirteen, he began to work part-time; at seventeen, he quit school to work full-time. Twenty-eight years after he'd left his family, one night in 1944, Joseph Carlton Oates reappeared in a country tavern in Swormville to seek out his son Frederic, now living a few miles away in the crossroads community of Millersport, not to ask forgiveness for his selfishness as a father, nor even to explain his abandonment of his family: he'd come, Joseph Carlton announced, to “fight” his son.

For it seemed that Joseph Carlton had been hearing rumors that his son Frederic had long held a grudge against him and wanted to fight him, so Joseph Carlton sought the younger man out to challenge him. (Since leaving Lockport he'd been living in the Buffalo area, not really far from his former wife and their son, but in those years twenty-five miles could seem distant, what one hundred miles might seem like today.) But when the swaggering and belligerent Joseph Carlton confronted Frederic, the elder in his mid-fifties, the younger a married man and father of thirty, it turned out that Frederic had no special grudge against Joseph, and didn't want to fight him.

How like a ballad or a folk song this story is, in the melancholy simplicity of its telling! Yet the story has an unexpectedly upbeat ending, a reversal of (Oedipal) expectations—the son doesn't fight the father, though the interior of a crude country tavern would be an ideal setting for such an encounter.

Said my father Frederic, now in his seventies, shaking his head with a bemused smile, “Jesus! I couldn't bring myself to hit anyone that old.”

THE IRISH WILL BREAK
your heart.

When I traveled to Ireland (to attend a literary festival) and made
inquiries, I was told that “Oates” was not a common name but that there were “Oateses” in the west of Ireland—somewhere.

The Irishwoman who told me this did not sound very certain. I recall that she frowned thoughtfully—as if there might be something about “Oates” that wasn't so very positive, which she did not wish to suggest.

Very likely, these Oateses suspected to dwell somewhere in the west of Ireland were relatives of Joseph Carlton Oates, distant relatives by the time of the late twentieth century. My father's father had been born in Ireland, I think; or, he'd been brought to the United States as a young boy, in the late 1880s. How, why Joseph Carlton Oates found his way to the small barge canal town of Lockport where he met and married Blanche Morgenstern, and became a young, presumably restless father with a weakness for alcohol and no great love for domesticity—there was no one to tell me, and so I do not know.

In my novel
The Gravedigger's Daughter
, written after my grandmother Blanche's death, I have tried to evoke the mysterious life of my grandmother in those long-ago years. But Carlton Oates is present only by analogy: the hard-drinking, abusive and treacherous man who, if you make the mistake of loving him, will break your heart; if you make the mistake of marrying him, he will abandon you and your child.

It was said in the family—(though never when my grandmother Blanche was within earshot)—that Joseph Carlton and Frederic resembled each other dramatically. Identical thick, cresting black hair with a widow's peak, heavy brows, strikingly handsome features. The identical air of the quick-tempered, easily insulted male of a shabbily glamorous era best embodied, in popular culture, in the menacing swagger of Robert Mitchum (one of the few Hollywood actors whom my father admired, perhaps because Mitchum was the antithesis of the Hollywood leading man). Though I resemble my
father, and so too this long-deceased Irish grandfather, I never saw Joseph Carlton's face, not even in a photograph.

And so, the “lost” Irish grandfather is an enigma to me. Never have I dared to ask questions directly, for in our family that isn't done, but by degrees I have come to form an impression of him from my father's offhanded remarks. This (seemingly) cruel, selfish, difficult and yet attractive man of whom my grandmother Blanche, who never speaks ill of anyone, will say only, stiffly, that he was “no good.”

Yet Blanche Morgenstern must have fallen in love with Joseph Oates, as a girl of eighteen or nineteen; if she revised her judgment of the man afterward, still the fact remains—they were married, and my father was their only child. And I am descended from him, the elusive Irish Oates.

In this way Joseph Carlton Oates has become one of those phantom family members, common in many families perhaps, whose very historical existence must be taken on faith.

A paradigm, perhaps, for the elusive Other—the very romance of prose fiction that is both the quest for this obscure object of desire and the apprehension that the object's existence may be highly “fictitious.”

THIS IS NOT FACT
, but theory.
If Joseph Carlton Oates had not abandoned his young wife and son in 1916 but continued to live with them, isn't it likely that given his drinking and his predilection for settling matters with his fists he would have been abusive to both his wife and his son; would (probably) have beaten my father repeatedly, so infecting Frederic (if we can believe theories of the tragic etiology of domestic violence) with a similar predilection for violence. What then of my father's behavior as husband, father? In my life in Millersport I'd observed many times my father's quick temper, and his smoldering anger, but I had never observed
him reacting violently, that is “physically,” to anyone, nor even threatening to do so. And so it is possible that abandoning his young family to poverty in Lockport, in 1916, was an unintended gesture of kindness: perhaps the most magnanimous gesture my mysterious grandfather Joseph Carlton Oates could have made.

But I won't suggest this to my father, I think. No one should try to come between a man and his memory of his father however embittered or bemused.

IN A MEMOIR OF
her early childhood the poet Alicia Ostriker describes her father, a pharmacist, as a “kindly” man; a man of the Jewish tradition of “kindly” husbands, fathers, community members.
Kindness
as a tradition! In the America of my family's past there was no tradition of “kindness” in men; indeed, “kindness” as a cultivated virtue would have seemed unnatural, unmanly. (In fact, unknown to him, Fred Oates's maternal grandparents were German Jews who had emigrated to the United States in the late 1890s, changed their name and so successfully remade themselves into no-religion, no-ethnicity, that no one knew their background. The time-honored American-frontier tradition of making yourself into
nothing.
) But for much of his life my father Frederic Oates belonged to another tradition, you might say, in which (male) violence, the American romance of (male) violence, was unquestioned.

In this tradition there were two kinds of men: those who were willing/eager to fight, and those who were not willing/eager to fight, thus “unmanly.”

The tradition has nothing inherently to do with guns. It is an American-frontier value of another kind, that has to do with male self-respect and male protectiveness of family. Despite my father's intelligence, talent (for art, music), and common sense, Fred Oates was no exception to the ethic of his time, place, and social class.

Though never stated explicitly, a code of ethics prevailed:

A man does not strike a woman or a child.

A man must maintain his dignity at all costs.

Except in special circumstances, a man does not back down from a fight.

Thus/and: A man
must always be prepared to fight.

For such men, boxing was the most profound sport, as boxing would not have seemed like a “sport” at all but rather something deeper and more primal, analogous to their own lives as sports involving play, teams, balls would not.

No man would not follow American boxing. No man would have to stop to think who the current heavyweight or middleweight champion of the world was.

One of my childhood memories is of my mother pleading with my father not to drive back to confront a hitchhiker who had (evidently) made an obscene gesture when my father had driven past him on Transit Road, my mother in the passenger's seat and my brother and me in the backseat. My father was furious, red-faced; it wasn't just that he had been insulted, but that my mother had seen the gesture too, and possibly, as Daddy thought, my brother and me. (Reading comic books in the back of the car, I hadn't noticed a thing.) Despite my mother begging him not to drive back, my father did—with what results, we never knew. (At least, my brother and I never knew.) Did my father challenge the hitchhiker to a fight?
Did
they fight? Very likely, the hitchhiker was astonished that my father had driven back to confront him, and probably, or possibly, he had apologized and there was no exchange of blows.

(As an adult now, I am most sympathetic with my mother. I am trying to imagine how she must have felt when my father drove back to confront a stranger who might have been mentally ill, might have had a concealed weapon, or might have been stronger than my
father, or more desperate—these possibilities my mother must have anxiously contemplated.)

A man never backs down from a fight.

It wasn't surprising to learn that my grandfather Joseph Carlton was a man who used his fists but it was surprising to learn that he'd sought out his own son to fight. And it was consoling to learn that my father, hotheaded as he'd been at thirty, had not cared to oblige him.

“We had a few beers together. That was it. My old man drove back to Buffalo, and I never saw him again.”

IT WAS A FEATURE
of his early life, with his (single) mother, that my father moved frequently in Lockport, from one low-priced rental to another. He worked at numerous jobs—Palace Theater organist, sign painter; machine shop at Harrison's—and soon became self-supporting. Eventually, his mother remarried, a man named Bob Woodside, whom my father did not like, or of whom he did not approve—I don't think we ever knew why. (When my grandmother Blanche came by Greyhound bus to visit us each week, my step-grandfather never accompanied her. My memory is of an older man, gray-haired, not unattractive, perhaps a factory worker, or an employee of a small Lockport business, who avidly read pulp magazines—
True Detective
, science fiction—and who smoked cigars.) For a brief while when my parents were first married they lived in Lockport, in “Lowertown”—then moved out to Millersport to live in the upper half of the Bushes' farmhouse.

At this time, in November 1988, my parents live on the same property on Transit Road, but in a small ranch-style house (built 1961) with white aluminum siding, neat brown trim, and an enormous front lawn which is my father's responsibility to mow with a
tractor-mower. Some of the pear trees remain, but the old farmhouse of my childhood has long vanished.