The Lost Landscape (6 page)

Years later, revisiting the Lockport area, giving a talk sponsored by the Lockport Public Library, I was approached by a woman of my approximate age who looked familiar to me, to a degree; when the woman introduced herself, I remembered her at once, as a girl who'd lived on a farm a few miles away on one of the creek-side roads; she spoke of how, outside the school at recess, I would sometimes “teach” her and a few other children, who hadn't understood our teacher Mrs. Dietz . . . What a pleasure to meet again, after so many years, Nelia Pynn! I love the name, out of that lost past, and must write it again:
Nelia Pynn.

FOR A LONG TIME
vacant and boarded up, District #7 school was finally razed in the late 1970s. And for a long time afterward, when I returned to Millersport to visit my parents, I would make a sentimental journey to the site, where a collapsed stone foundation and a mound of rubble were all that remained. Soon such one-room schoolhouses will be recalled, if at all, only in photographs: links with a mythopoetic “American frontier past” that, when it was lived, seemed to us, who lived it, simply life.

“DON'T BE AFRAID. DADDY
is right here.”

Yet, Daddy was not visible to me, for Daddy was behind me. It did not seem natural to me that my father, who always drove our car from the position of authority behind the steering wheel, was seated behind me in the Piper Cub that was a beautiful bright yellow like a butterfly's wings.

It was a summer day in the late 1940s. I would have been nine or ten years old. My young, adventurous father Fred Oates had earned a pilot's license a few years before, and this was my first trip with him.

Daddy had not been drafted into the army as he'd feared. He had not served in World War II due to deferments he and his fellow workers at Harrison Radiator had been given, since they were involved in “defense manufacturing.” And now, after the war, planes belonging to the government had passed into private ownership, and men like my father began to take flying lessons.

How and why my father took flying lessons at Lee's Airfield on Transit Road north of Buffalo, New York, I have no idea. There wasn't much money in any household in which he'd ever lived. To help with expenses my father not only worked at Harrison's but also painted signs for commercial businesses in the area. Yet somehow he'd been able to afford flying lessons as early as 1935 (when he was
twenty-one) and had acquired a pilot's license by 1937, the year before I was born, which enabled him to fly not only small planes like Piper Cubs, Cessnas, and Stinsons but also eventually the sporty Waco double-winged biplane, and even ex–Air Force trainers—a Fairchild with 175 horsepower, a Vultee basic trainer, 450-horsepower, with a canopied open cockpit that could fly at twelve thousand feet.

My first time in the Piper Cub would be one of the great memories of my life.

Initially, immediately, there was the strangeness of my father “dressing” me—(which he never did; only my mother dressed me)—as I was outfitted with goggles and a helmet, which were much too large for me. (My father wore a parachute, but I did not, which might have seemed ominoua if I had thought about it. But of course—I could not have used a parachute.) Next, I was half-lifted by Daddy into the single front seat of the plane, and buckled in; the door which seemed to be made of some metal much lighter than a car door was shut and secured. Next, the Piper Cub propeller was turned manually by a boy who worked at the airfield until it began to spin with a loud roar, and the motor kicked in. Next, I was being driven along the bumpy airstrip, past rows of larger planes, at an ever-accelerating speed, totally terrified, dry-mouthed and astonished as I stared through the windshield at a world that was rushing at me much too quickly, and without any adult to shield me from it as if I, and not my father behind me, were the pilot.

Suddenly then, and sickeningly, the quaking little plane was in the air—rising above a row of trees, and above open fields.

Like any ten-year-old I trusted my father, absolutely. As I trusted my mother. (And now I wonder what my young mother must have been thinking, watching us from the runway. Did she, too, have complete trust in my father? Was she frightened when he took her up into the air, and did she really want to accompany him?—or was she,
perhaps subtly, coerced? Should my father, with his newly acquired pilot's license, have taken up a ten-year-old child?) There was a daredevil recklessness to life in those days which seems in our more cautious era, in which children are likely to be over-protected by their parents, very remote indeed. Recall that this was a time when seat belts in vehicles were unknown and virtually everyone (including my parents) smoked.

Through his life my father would always say, “Flying is safer than driving a car.” Statistically, this is (evidently) true, yet not quite a consolation for some of us.

My most vivid memories of that first trip are the fields opening beneath the plane, the blur of the spinning propeller close in front of me, the buffeting rush of the wind, and the quaking of the plane. In small aircraft you are very conscious of the wind. You are very conscious of the sky. Below, every detail seems heightened. You have suddenly an entirely new, unexpected perspective—you are looking down, bizarrely, from above. It is something of a miracle to see the roofs of houses and barns not so very far below as you pass over.

Pilots of small planes invariably head for home to fly over their houses and property. My father never failed to do this, a quick trip of only a few minutes, since our farmhouse was no more than three miles away. What is more pleasurable than to “buzz” the houses of friends and relatives?

Such playfulness suggests the youth of my father at this time, as it suggests the youth of the era. “Buzzing” low over houses and property was viewed as a sort of practical joke and not a dangerous annoyance as we would be inclined to see it today.

In the Piper Cub my father was likely to fly us to Lockport, where we could see the Erie Barge Canal stretching out below; he was likely to fly us in the direction of Niagara Falls, and the Niagara River; we would never fail to see the Tonawanda Creek, that
stretched past our house on Transit Road and would enter my dreams for a lifetime. All these waterways were fascinating to me like the wind-buffeted airborne perspective itself.
Safety is a small price to pay for such a perspective!
—so my father might have said.

To be in the air—airborne! There was nothing like it for my father and his pilot-friends.

Returning to the airfield: that thrill in the pit of the stomach as the Piper Cub circles the runway and begins to dip down. (Sometimes, if the plane isn't in the ideal position, the pilot decides not to land. And so you sweep up again, rapidly up into the air again, the nose of the plane lifting into the sky so that for an unnerving moment there is nothing to see but sky.) Then, circling back, and trying again as the nose of the plane is lowered by a movement of the pilot's stick.

Landing is the most dangerous maneuver. A mistake at that time can be fatal . . .

A reassuring jolt as the plane's wheels strike the runway and within an instant the plane is on the ground, bouncing and bumping along the runway.

Returning to the hangar in a kind of triumph. And my mother hurrying forward to greet us with a tight embrace and a little sob of relief as if to say
Thank God! You are returned to me safely.

IN SUBSEQUENT YEARS MY
father would take me up in some of the larger and more intimidating airplanes at Lee's Airfield. There was at least one picture of Daddy and me in the Fairchild PT-19 with its cockpit open and both of us, in helmet and goggles, smiling and waving at the camera, presumably held by my mother—but this precious snapshot (for which I continue to search) seems to be permanently lost. It is embarrassing to recall that within a year or two of the first Piper Cub flight I had become so habituated to flying with my father,
and so utterly trusting of him, that I dared to bring a tablet with me into which I scribbled “stories” while airborne . . .

(What was I always scribbling in those days? My mother would keep a selection of my school tablets that were filled with drawings of chickens and upright cats like human figures; I have seen these, but through a haze of embarrassment I lost a clear memory of them. There seemed to have been in my life as a writer a seamless transition from pre-literate activities of vigorous drawing in tablets with Crayolas to my first childish “stories” when I'd learned to write as adults write; from there, a seamless transition to my first typed stories when I was fourteen, and beyond.)

Though my father could never afford to own his own plane he remained an avid flier for decades; eventually he would log over two hundred hours of flying time. Indeed, “Fred Oates” was famous in Millersport and environs for his love of flying. Only reluctantly, when his eyesight began to weaken in his late sixties, did he give up flying.

(In the mid-1970s when a West German film crew preparing a documentary on my writing career for public television came to Millersport to interview my parents, the director arranged for my father to fly him and his cameraman over the terrain of my childhood, in a Cessna 182 horsepower single-prop plane. How courageous these Germans were! Or did they not quite comprehend how courageous they were being to entrust their lives to a stranger, Fred Oates, who could claim only a pilot's license from a rural upstate New York airfield? And how truly bizarre it was for me to see the film footage of my father in the cockpit of the plane flying again over that familiar landscape!)

Many times Daddy has said that for the pilot there is nothing in life on land to quite compare with life in the cockpit, at his instruments, aloft.

IN LATER LIFE, MY
father and mother often visited my husband Raymond Smith and me in Princeton. On these trips they always flew, and sometimes they flew in a small plane to the small Princeton airfield about ten miles from our house.

Though
being flown
is nothing like
flying
—(as my father insisted)—these flights were exhilarating to him. Daddy never failed to comment on the pilot's performance and, if he had the opportunity, he congratulated the pilot on a “good landing.”

Sometimes, when I am alone, and aloft, in my window seat staring out at a sea of clouds, or at land or glittering water far below, I feel a sudden pang of loss—for what, I don't know.

For Lee's Airfield, perhaps. For the shining little Piper Cubs and the boys who'd helped to start their propellers. For my beloved father, a young father, with tufted dark hair and a widow's peak, laughing as he adjusted helmet strap beneath my chin, for I must have looked very silly in my flying gear, as a child. And for my beloved mother, scarcely daring to breathe until the shining little yellow plane returned to the airstrip, and made a “successful” landing.

The long-ago romance of small planes. Daddy as pilot.

But I have only to shut my eyes to see the airfield bumping and jolting outside the windows of the Piper Cub and to feel again how we are being lifted into the air, wind-buffeted but bravely continuing to rise . . .

DO ALL FAMILIES HARBOR
secrets? Do all families conspire in secrets, if not cultivate secrets? The family is the social unit that seems to depend crucially upon a clear separation of those who are
in power
and those who are
subordinate;
those wielding power are required to know more than those who are subordinate to them, and there almost seems, at times, a kind of taboo in sharing such knowledge.
Before you were born
is both a neutral designation and a way of shutting a door in your face which you would wish to open at your own risk.

Of course, all that children are not told, children somehow
know
. Not the words to the song but its melody, and its tone. A writer might be one who, in childhood, learns to search for and decipher clues; one who listens closely at what is said, in an effort to hear what is not being said; one who becomes sensitive to nuance, innuendo, and fleeting facial expressions.

And there are the abrupt silences among adults, when a child comes too near.

IN HIS PREFACE TO
What Maisie Knew
, Henry James ponders the “close connection of bliss and bale”—the irony of “so strange an
alloy, one face of which is somebody's right and ease, the other somebody's pain and wrong.” Nowhere is this paradox more true than in the matter of a premature and violent death, for example the murder of my mother's father which was also, in effect, the murder, as it was the irrevocable dissolution, of a family.

All this happened long before I was born, in 1917. In a Hungarian community in Black Rock, now a part of Buffalo, New York. My mother's father was in his forties at the time, a Hungarian immigrant from the countryside near Budapest, who worked in a factory in Buffalo; one night, in a tavern in Black Rock, he was killed by another Hungarian immigrant, allegedly “beaten to death with a poker.”

Beyond these blunt bare facts, nothing more seemed to be known. The killer must have been identified, maybe even arrested and charged, and very likely the killing would have been described as “self-defense”—possibly, this was true. All I would ever know of my mother's father was that he was, like other Hungarian males in the family, an individual of whom it might be said that he was not slow to flare up in anger, if not rage, and that he was a “heavy drinker.” The word
peasant
is a disallowed word, a shameful usage to contemporary ears, but
Hungarian peasants
is probably the most objective description of my mother's relatives who'd immigrated to western New York in the early 1900s. By contemporary standards these immigrants were desperately poor people of the class of those about whom Upton Sinclair wrote so compellingly in
The Jungle
(1906), set in the Chicago slaughterhouses.

The sudden death of my mother's father left her family destitute. Her parents had had eight children, the older of whom were already working. (Recall that this is 1917, when immigrant children rarely went to school but worked in factories, mills, and slaughterhouses, for wages much less than those of adult men.) My biological grandmother, whom I would never meet, nor even see a photo of,
gave away at least one of her children at this time, the youngest, my mother, who was nine months old.

The infant was given to the couple whom I would know as Grandma and Grandpa Bush—Lena and John Bush. (“Bush” was the name the immigrant couple had been given at Ellis Island, as it is an approximation of their Hungarian name “Bus.”) One day it would be told to me, or suggested, in the casual way in which such genealogical information was likely to be provided, that John Bush may have been a brother of my mother's deceased father—in which case, my mother had been sent to live with an uncle and his wife, which does not seem quite so desperate as being given away to strangers. There were no “adoptions” in those days—at least, no government agencies that were concerned with the fate of immigrant children of whom, in heavily Roman Catholic communities like Black Rock, there were many. My mother was taken in by a couple who not only wanted a child, but also needed another farm-helper in their household; as soon as she was old enough, she was given farm chores; for a few years she attended a one-room schoolhouse a mile away from the small farm in Millersport, across Tonawanda Creek in Niagara County—the very one-room schoolhouse I would attend years later.

Briefly too my mother attended a Roman Catholic school taught by nuns, in Swormville, from which she graduated after eight grades, at which time her education ceased. Eight grades were considered more than sufficient at this time in our history, in rural communities especially, where the designation “high school graduate” was a matter of pride.

When my mother Carolina Bush was eighteen or nineteen years old, and working part-time as a waitress in a restaurant on the Millersport Highway, she and my father Frederic Oates met. This would have been 1935 or 1936. Fred Oates was three years older than Car
olina; he'd been born in Lockport, a small city seven miles north of Millersport, on the Erie Canal. Like my mother's early life, my father's early life had been shaped by the premature and violent death of a relative, in this case his maternal grandfather, a German Jewish immigrant who'd tried to kill both his wife and his fourteen-year-old daughter (my grandmother-to-be) with a shotgun, and ended up killing only himself. My father, too, had had to quit school young, and began work in a “machine-shop” (Harrison Radiator) in Lockport. He would work at Harrison's for an astounding forty years before retiring, though by degrees he was to be promoted from the assembly-line machine shop to tool and die design.

Since such family secrets were shrouded in mystery, as in mortification and shame, I never knew, nor had I any way of substantiating, whether these two (very attractive) young people confided in each other, or commiserated with each other; both sides of my family were notable for reticence, and a stubbornness in reticence; these were not individuals for whom openness came easily, still less anything approaching “full disclosure.” The ardor of confession for which our era is known would have been astonishing to them, scarcely believable and in no way desirable. There seemed the fear among my adult relatives that something misspoken could not be reclaimed; if you spoke heedlessly, you would speak unwisely and you would regret it. In much of my fiction there is a simulacrum of the “confessional” but to interpret it in these terms is misleading. Not literal transcription but emotional transcription is the way of the writer.

While we were growing up, my brother Fred, Jr., and I had no idea of our parents' backgrounds. We had no idea that my mother had been given away by her mother, after her father's murder; we had no idea that my father's mother had nearly been murdered by her raging father. We had no idea that my father's mother Blanche Morgenstern was Jewish. (In western New York State of those days,
we had no idea what “Jewish” was.) We would be adults before we learned even the skeletal outline of these old, shameful secrets that had both altered the trajectories of our parents' (impoverished) lives but also made our births, in 1938 and 1943 respectively, possible.

It was fascinating—I suppose. To live among adults who must have frequently spoken to one another in a kind of code. (My mother's stepparents with whom we lived would certainly have talked about my mother's biological mother and her siblings, who lived less than ten miles away; there were Bush uncles and aunts and cousins who appeared at a little distance, and gradually became known to me in my teens.) Much of adult life was forbidden of entry to children—not just family secrets of this sort but financial crises, health crises, problems with work. Outside the brightly-lit “home” there is the murky penumbra of adults who don't especially care about you, and are not obliged to wish you well. It may be that the writer/artist is stimulated by childhood mysteries or that it is the childhood mysteries that stimulate the writer/artist. Sometimes in my writing, when I am most absorbed and fascinated, to the point of anxiety, I find myself imagining that what I am inventing is in some way “real”; if I can solve the mystery of the fiction, I will have solved a mystery of my life. That the mystery is never solved would seem to be the reason for the writer's continuous effort to solve it—each story, each poem, each novel is a restatement of the quest to penetrate the mystery, tirelessly restated.

The writer is the decipherer of clues—if by “clues” is meant a broken and discontinuous subterranean narrative.

I WAS WELL INTO
adulthood and living far from Millersport by the time the Bush family secret came to light, and even then it was a faint, glimmering light, about which no one wished to speak with
out averted eyes, an air of embarrassment and shame, and a wish to change the subject. Growing up in their household, on that farm in Millersport, my brother and I may have had a vague awareness that John and Lena Bush were not my mother's “real” parents—beyond that we couldn't know, and in the way of family reticence, which is a kind of dignity, we could not ask, any more than children of that era would have boldly asked their fathers what their incomes were and their mothers whether they'd really wanted children.

But here is the surprise: my mother's account of that traumatic time in her early life did not center upon the murder of her father (whom she had not known—after all she'd been an infant at the time) but on the mortifying fact of having been “given away.” When for a special feature in
O, The Oprah Magazine
in the late 1990s several women writers were commissioned to interview their own mothers, I learned of some of this old, sad story, still upsetting to my mother so many decades later. All my mother seemed to know was: her father had been murdered, her mother had given her away. Several times she said, “My mother didn't want me. I used to cry and cry . . .” I was stricken to the heart—my mother was eighty years old! This trauma of 1917 was as recent and fresh to her as if no time had intervened.

Of all the relatives on both sides of our family my mother Carolina Oates had the reputation of being the most generous, the most kind, the warmest and “sunniest”—I did not want to think that, in her innermost heart, Mommy thought of herself as a child whose mother had not wanted her.

Crimes reverberate through many years, and through many lives. It is a rare homicide that destroys only one person. And it is a paradox to accept that, had a Hungarian immigrant not been murdered in 1917, I would not be alive today; how many of us, many more than would wish to speak of so sordid a fact, owe our births to
the premature deaths of others whom we have never known but to whom we are linked by that mysterious shared fate called “blood.”

Here is the ironic equipoise of which Henry James wrote: this catastrophe that was for my mother, through her life, a source of acute sorrow and shame was for me, her daughter, the very genesis of my life.