The Lost Landscape (32 page)

NOW IT IS NOVEMBER
1988. And I am listening to my father playing piano in a distant room in our house—now, Erik Satie's elegant
Gnossiennes.

(This isn't a piano composition from the old days of Millersport, but a piano piece which I play myself, sometimes—Daddy has found the sheet music on the piano.)

When I think of my parents, I think of Colette's remark—
Happiness is a kind of genius
. How true this is! And yet, where genius is concerned, we become speechless, inadequate; we have nothing to say, for we are not able to understand what genius is.

In the case of Fred and Carolina Oates, no one would claim “genius” for them but only rather a kind of wisdom, as much acquired as instinctive. The quality of personality they embody, their magnanimity of spirit, the ways in which they enhance the lives of others around them—how oddly matched it is, with their origins and with the harsh and unsentimental world in which they were born.

I have taken it as a challenge, to evoke that world in its myriad complexities. And—how to write a memoir of Fred Oates? How even to begin?

           
Dear Mom,

              
I have always meant to tell you.

              
I have long rehearsed telling you.

              
I have meant so many times to tell you.

              
How the world divides, seemingly, into two: those who speak without hesitation saying
I love you—
and possibly not mean it; and those too shy or constrained by family custom or temperament to utter the words
I love you—
though they mean it.

HOW DIFFICULT IT HAS
been to speak these simple words. To heave my heart into my throat—
I love you.

WE CARRY OUR YOUNG
parents inside us, so much more alive than any memory of ourselves as infants, children. We carry our young parents within us through our lives. No wonder is ever quite equal to
that first, speechless wonder—gazing at the mysterious individuals leaning over us unable yet to say
Who are you? Why do you care for me? What does it mean, that you care for me? What does it mean, we are here together? Only feed me, only love me forever.

“I GUESS WE WERE
poor but it didn't seem that way. Somehow, we managed.”

FROM MY PARENTS, A
love of being busy,
at work.

When we are not working, when we have nothing to do except entertain ourselves, we are restless and not so happy.

How many books dedicated
To my parents Carolina and Fred Oates with love.

In memory of that landscape, now vanishing, that continues to nourish like an underground spring.

DAFFODILS, NARCISSI, TULIPS GROWING
from bulbs you'd planted in the beds around the house. Scarlet peonies, pale pink peonies, bridal wreath, zinnias. Lilac bushes, azaleas.

Growing wild along the fence beyond the old hay barn, morning glories, sweet pea, and hollyhocks.

Wild and resilient as the tallest of weeds, sunflowers beyond the chicken yard.

Your favorite flower, roses. Your favorite rose, Double Delight.

Your favorite garden vegetable, tomatoes. Your favorite tomatoes, First Ladies.

AN INVENTORY OF OUR
lives.

The lost world of (rural) laundry: clotheslines, clothespins, sheets, towels, trousers, dresses and underwear, socks flapping in the wind, a ceaseless wind it seemed, how crude by present standards, how primitive; yet there was pleasure in it, in the very repetition, familiarity. Each item of laundry lifted by hand, shook out, smoothed and affixed to the line by wooden pins. From my small narrow child's room on the second floor, at the rear of the house, I could look out at any time when the laundry was hanging on the line and see a reflection of our household, our family, like ghost-figures glimpsed in water.

Take me, take me with you! Don't let me go.

I am not a patient person but to the degree that I have been taught the virtues of patience, it is because of you. The consoling and comforting rituals of housekeeping. The very thought of
keeping house:
that there is a place, a
home
, that must be actively, ceaselessly
kept
. It cannot be neglected, or slighted.

For what is
housekeeping
but small simple finite tasks executed with attention, care, love. Pushing the carpet sweeper. “Vacuuming”—a thrilling task involving high-volume power. Clearing the kitchen table, helping you with the dishes—just the two of us in the kitchen after dinner.

You tried to teach me to knit, and to sew, without great success. For such (feminine) tasks I did not demonstrate much talent if, at the outset, energy and hope. You had more luck teaching me to cook, or at any rate to prepare meals.
This is how you prepare a baking pan. This is how you frost a cake with a knife. This is how you make bread stuffing. This is how you peel an orange without making a mess and getting the rind in your fingernails. This is how you stir the spaghetti sauce—with a wooden spoon.

SO MANY BEAUTIFUL THINGS
! Today here in Princeton I will lay them out on a bed, I will bring them out of closets to position in this room, and I will make an inventory.

All these, and more, you've made for me. How many hours of effort, concentration, skill in those things so delicately fashioned, exquisitely sewed or knitted. What infinite patience in such creation. What love.

An inventory of our lives.

THE OLD FARMHOUSE WAS
demolished years ago (in 1960) and the very site of its foundation filled with earth, all trace of its existence obliterated. You'd lived there for virtually your entire life—how strange it must be to you, that it has vanished, to be replaced with a large patch of seeded grass grown thick as a shag rug.

Yet the house remains vivid in my mind's eye. And the small lilac tree that grew by the back door, a child-sized tree into which I climbed, in a crook of whose twisty limbs I sat, a dreamy child given to solitude in places near the house, near you.

Beneath this little tree chickens pecked in the dirt. Happy Chicken might be lifted onto a lower limb, to flutter his/her wings in sudden bird-panic.

For so many years, it seemed that I was rarely out of the range of your voice.

Joyce! Joy-ce!

In memory it is a misty-hazy summer day. That peculiar translucence to the light that means the air is heavy with moisture though the sky appears to be cloudless, a pure remote blue, and the sun dazzling overhead. In this place south of Lake Ontario and west of Lake Erie the sky is ever changing—this is the “lake effect”—so that a clear sky can be riddled with clouds within minutes; this too is deeply embedded in memory, a sudden crack of thunder, a dispirited darkening of the sky, pelting rain like bullets.
Joyce! Where are you, come inside!

The houses of our earliest childhoods are houses of recurring dreams that are yet subtly altered, as if approximations of memory, or
interpretations of memory, and not memory itself. In such dreams, the childhood houses are likely to be larger than the reality had been, with more rooms, mysterious doorways leading—where? Always there is the promise, alarming, yet tantalizing, of rooms not yet discovered, through a rear wall, in the attic perhaps, or in the earthen-floored cellar, places yet to be explored, beckoning. Your presence permeates the house, you are the house, its mysterious infinite rooms. You are the hazy light, the rich smell of damp earth, sunshine and grass, pears that are no sooner ripe than they are overripe, lightly bruised.

You are the humming buzzing not-quite-audible sounds of the orchard, and of the fields beyond the orchard. You are the uplifted cries of early-morning birds. I see you pushing me on the swing that Daddy built for me out of a six-foot pipe positioned between tall trees in the backyard, I see your hair reddish-brown, so wonderfully curly; you are wearing a shirt and pale blue “pedal pushers” and sandals. I am a lanky child of eight or nine gripping the rope swing with both hands tight, my legs stretch upward straining higher, higher, squealing with childish excitement, flying into the sky. It is like my airplane trips with Daddy: except this is Mommy pushing me, and we are safe on the ground. So often wanting to tell you how in patches of sudden sunshine hundreds of miles and thousands of days from home I am pulled back into that world as into the most nourishing of dreams, I am filled with a sense of wonder, and awe, and fear, sadness for all that has already passed from us and for what must be surrendered, in time.

What we imagine as life but cannot explain, cannot “put into words” for all our vocabulary; cannot utter aloud, dare not utter aloud, this succession of small perfect moments like the movement of the red second hand on the sunburst General Electric clock in the kitchen, moments linked together as pearls are linked together to constitute a necklace, linked by touch, invisible string, the interior mystery. We were lucky, and we were happy, and I think we've always known.

       
My father was killed and I never knew why.

       
Then, I was given away. By my mother.

       
I was so little—not a year old.

       
There were too many of us, ten of us,

       
my mother had to give me away.

       
When I was old enough to know, I cried a lot.

       
I wasn't always an old woman—this age that I am . . .

       
I was a girl for so long.

       
I was the youngest for so long.

       
I was nine months old when my father died

       
and there were too many of us to feed, and my mother

       
gave me away.

       
My mother gave me to her sister-in-law Lena who

       
didn't have children. This was in 1918.

       
It was a shameful thing then, not to have babies.

       
This was in the Black Rock section of Buffalo,

       
the waterfront on the Niagara River.

       
Germans, Poles, Hungarians—immigrants.

       
We were Hungarians. We were called “Hunkies.”

       
I don't know why people hated us.

       
I would learn one day that it happened often,

       
in immigrant families in those days.

       
In poor immigrant families.

       
They said he was a “heavy drinker,” he liked to

       
get into fights.

       
The Hungarians are the worst, they said—the

       
drinking, and the fighting.

       
There is the moment of conception—you don't know.

       
There is the moment of birth—you don't know.

       
There is the moment your life is decided—you don't know.

       
Yet you say, “This is my life.”

       
You say, “This is me.”

       
Elizabeth my mother never learned English.

       
She spoke Hungarian all her life.

       
She never learned to read. She never learned to drive

       
a car.

       
My Aunt Lena never learned to speak English well.

       
She never learned to drive so the two women didn't see

       
much of each other

       
though they were from the same street in Budapest and

       
lived only a few miles apart.

       
That was how women were in those days.

       
I loved my big brothers and sisters.

       
There was Leslie, he was the oldest.

       
He took over when our father died.

       
There was Mary, I never knew well.

       
They were born in Budapest.

       
There was Steve who'd been kicked and trampled

       
by a horse. His brain was injured, he would

       
never leave home.

       
There was Elsie who was my “big sister.”

       
They are all gone now.

       
I loved them, but—I

       
am the only one remaining.

       
Sometimes I think: The soul is just a burning match!

       
It burns a while and then—

       
And then that's all.