The Lost Landscape (30 page)

The old hay barn, that had badly needed repair when I'd been a girl, has long vanished. My grandfather's smithy. The mound of rubble that contained broken horseshoes, rusted spikes. The silo in which a child might have suffocated, the chicken coop and all of the chicken yard and the wire fence surrounding it.

All of that ghostly flock of Rhode Island Reds, vanished. Beloved Happy Chicken a fading memory.

Yet nearby, on the Tonawanda Creek Road in the direction of Pendleton, the ruins of the old Judd house remain on an untended lot as if in mockery.

(Where has Helen Judd gone? What has become of the Judd children? No one in Millersport will claim to know.)

The generation that preceded my parents has long vanished. First-generation Americans, many of them; or immigrants from Hungary, Ireland, Germany.

My grandmother Blanche died after a lengthy illness, a form of cancer, in 1970. So reluctant were family members to speak of my grandmother's illness, and so undisposed was my grandmother to speak of herself, I never knew that my grandmother was seriously ill until her cancer was advanced. Belatedly I learned that my grandmother had not wanted me to know about her illness—she had not wanted to upset
me.

In the hospital she assured me, with her calm smile: “I don't mind.”

Gently Grandma squeezed my hand, to comfort me. I was stunned, stricken to the heart. I could not even cry—yet.

I don't mind
. These words are so deeply imprinted in my soul, I think that a kind of anesthesia has overcome me; where I should be feeling strongly, there is a block, a cutting-short like a gentle rebuke—
I don't mind.

(And so, when people ask me the maddening, socially mandated how are you? how are you
feeling
?—I have no reply except a bone-chillingly cheery, “Fine! And you?”)

Of course, my grandmother was medicated. I know that. It was not my grandmother Blanche but the medication that spoke, to assure others what might have been true about her final hours of consciousness, or might not have been true in quite that way—
I don't mind.

Joyce's grandmother Blanche Morgenstern, Lockport, New York, 1917.

On a windowsill in my study, facing my desk, is an old, precious photograph of Blanche Morgenstern in her early twenties: a delicately beautiful young woman in a stylish winter coat with fur collar and cuffs, holding a small purse in her ungloved hands; she is wearing
a chic wide-brimmed dark hat; her stockings appear to be black, or black-tinged, and her legs and ankles are slim. Beside her is the rough wall of a stone house, behind her the front wheel of a bicycle. Tree limbs are bare and skeletal, the mood of the landscape is winter. Because it is black-and-white, and has no color, this image seems to belong to a time before time—certainly, a time before my birth—before even my parents' birth. Often for long minutes I stare at the photograph in wonderment: who took this picture? With what sort of camera, so long ago? What is the beautiful young woman in the picture thinking?
Is
she thinking? Her expression is somber, though she is half-smiling; a Mona Lisa–sort of smile; her beauty suggests a kind of antiquity.
This young woman—my grandmother-to-be!
How astonished she would have been, how disbelieving.

Everyone who sees this photograph, everyone to whom I have shown it, remarks how closely I resemble Blanche Morgenstern, despite the difference in our ages: the granddaughter now so much older than the grandmother in the photograph.

My Princet on friends also say, “But obviously, your grandmother was Jewish.”

If only my grandmother had acknowledged her Jewish background, and allowed us to speak openly of these family “secrets”—perhaps she would have been less lonely. (
Was
my grandmother lonely? It is possible that I am imagining an isolation that my grandmother didn't actually feel; it is just as likely that she felt, every hour of her life, a profound relief that her father had not murdered her, and that the gift of life was hers to accept without a backward glance.)

When Grandma died, her son Fred was deeply grieved, shaken. We had all been prepared for her death and yet—you are never prepared. My mother told me, “Dad is keeping what he feels to himself. He won't talk to me. You know how Dad is.”

It is the way of some families, to keep emotion tight, tight, tight
within—as if grasped by a fist. There is the fear that, if emotion is released, there will be no holding back, ever.

Especially for men like Fred Oates. The more “manly” the man, the more tightly restrained the emotion.

As the escalating notes of “The Erl-King” plunge forward.

FROM MY JOURNAL, 5/20/86:

           
(Another family secret revealed with a disarming casualness. Perhaps because of their ages my parents don't want to keep secrets? Not that they are
old
at seventy or seventy-one. My father told of how his grandfather Morgenstern tried to kill his grandmother in a fit of rage, then killed himself—gun barrel placed under his chin, trigger pulled, (his daughter) Blanche close by. My father was about fifteen at the time. They were all living in a single household . . . A sordid tale. Yet grimly comical: I asked what occupation my great-grandfather had, was told he was a gravedigger.)

What is unexpected about this unhappy memory of a long-ago attempted murder and suicide is that my grandmother Blanche had already married Joseph Oates, and been divorced from him; if my father was fifteen, and born in 1914, this would date the suicide of his gravedigger-grandfather sometime in 1929. (In my re-imagining of the incident in
The Gravedigger's Daughter
the daughter of the suicidal gravedigger is not an adult but a girl, and her father contemplates killing her as well as her mother, before turning the gun on himself. What had not quite happened in actual life, but had been intended, was fulfilled in fiction—in this way, the desperate vengeance of my great-grandfather Morgenstern was fulfilled.)

ONLY BELATEDLY DID MY
brother and I learn—my parents had had their fiftieth anniversary in 1987, and had not told us!

And, they had not celebrated the anniversary.

We protested: how could you do such a thing? Not celebrate your fiftieth anniversary? Not tell anyone?

My mother only smiled, and gestured toward my father.
He
was
the one, of course, temperamentally disposed never to
make too much of things.

(Was my mother's smile wistful? Would my mother have liked my father to have
made more of things
than he did, through their long marriage?)

When we were children my brother Robin and I had been astonished by our father's indifference to gifts. What meant so much to us, as children, meant literally nothing to him; Christmas and birthday presents for our father had to be opened by others (that is, by us) since Daddy thought so little of the ritual.

“Look, Daddy! This is for you”—my brother and I would plead with our father, who might be reading a newspaper, or involved in one or another household chore, and would barely glance at us.

We'd thought our father so strange, not to care—not to care about a
present.

For children, even for teenagers, nothing seems quite so exciting as a
wrapped present
. For days beforehand my brother and I would speculate on the contents of packages beneath our Christmas tree, though our past experiences must surely have curbed our imaginations. But there was our father as indifferent to the excitement of gift-opening as he was to the gifts themselves (invariably shirts, neckties, socks).

Of all writers it is Henry David Thoreau who most speaks to my father's temperament—
Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.

And—
Simplify, simplify, simplify.

From my father I have inherited my ambivalence about gift-giving. I understand that it is an ancient and revered social ritual and that, in human relations, it is, or should be, a genuine expression of love, affection, admiration, respect; yet, through my life I have rarely felt more anxiety than I feel at the prospect of being given a gift, and only slightly less anxiety at the prospect of giving a gift. For how grateful must one be, for a present which (probably) isn't at all needed,
or wanted; how can one reciprocate a gift, without making a social or personal blunder? Will my gift be wildly inappropriate, too costly/not costly enough? That gift-giving is so crucial to our society, the very wheel driving the capitalist-consumer economy, seems to me, as it seems to my father, unfortunate; the juggernaut of Christmas rolling around each year, overshadowing much else, invariably a season of apprehension and disappointment for many, seems particularly unfortunate. The very nicest “gifts” are those given spontaneously, without ritual or custom tied to a calendar, and these one can truly prize; the others, duly wrapped in expensive paper, part of a seasonal barrage of gifts, are likely to be dubious.

The gifts which I give to my parents now are more meaningful to Daddy than the perfunctory gifts of long ago—these are books, records, subscriptions to magazines (
Atlantic, Harper's, Hudson Review, Kenyon Review, Paris Review
in which from time to time work of mine might appear); of course, I've given my parents copies of each of my books, of which several have been dedicated to them. (Daddy has joked that he's had to build a special bookcase in their living room, to accommodate my books.) They have an ongoing subscription to
Ontario Review.

It is natural that children mythologize their parents. Even adults mythologize their parents as a way of mythologizing themselves. Some of us make our parents into gods, some make them into demons. After all our parents are giants of the landscape into which we'd been born; we cast our eyes up to them, as we lay in our cribs, or tottered about at their feet.

The greatest of infantile mysteries must have been the sudden appearance of these giant beings: Mother, Father.

Equally great, though tinged with dread, their disappearance.

Yet it seems to me, though my parents are not gods, that they are extraordinary people
morally;
not in their accomplishments perhaps,
but in themselves; in their souls, one might say. It has been a riddle of my own adulthood, as I contemplate my parents: how, given their difficult backgrounds, their impoverished and violence-ridden early lives, did they become the people they are? So many of my writer-friends speak wryly of their parents, or are critical of them, or angry at them; their adult lives are presented as triumphs over the limitations of parents, and rarely as a consequence of their parents. By contrast, I feel utterly sentimental about my parents
whose love and support have so informed my life, and who have become, in my adulthood, my friends.

The writer is driven to commemorate what is past, or passing, if not what's to come; some of us are fascinated by tracking the generations that have preceded us, that seem to us stronger than our own, and stronger than the generations to follow, because more cruelly tested, more wounded, forced to grow up while still young, and to know of life's vicissitudes while making no claim, as subsequent generations of Americans have done, of “rights”—“privileges”—“entitlements.”

Memory is a transcendental function. Its objects may be physical bodies, faces, facial expressions, but these are shot with luminosity like the light in a Caravaggio painting; an interior radiance that transfixes the imagination, signaling that Time has stopped and Eternity prevails. We are not able to perceive “soul” or “spirit” firsthand but this is the phenomenon we summon back by way of an exercise of memory.

And why the exercise of memory at certain times in our lives is almost too powerful to be endured.

THE PERFECT MAN OF
action is the suicide
. These words of William Carlos Williams have long fascinated me for I'd grown up in
a world in which men were likely to be men
of action
rather than
of reflection.