White Noise (11 page)

We were halfway home when the crying stopped. It stopped suddenly, without a change in tone and intensity. Babette said nothing, I kept my eyes on the road. He sat between us, looking into the radio. I waited for Babette to glance at me behind his back, over his head, to show relief, happiness, hopeful suspense. I didn’t know how I felt and wanted a clue. But she looked straight ahead as if fearful that any change in the sensitive texture of sound, movement, expression would cause the crying to break out again.

At the house no one spoke. They all moved quietly from room to room, watching him distantly, with sneaky and respectful looks. When he asked for some milk, Denise ran softly to the kitchen, barefoot, in her pajamas, sensing that by economy of movement and lightness of step she might keep from disturbing the grave and dramatic air he had brought with him into the house. He drank the milk down in a single powerful swallow, still fully dressed, a mitten pinned to his sleeve.

They watched him with something like awe. Nearly seven straight hours of serious crying. It was as though he’d just returned from a period of wandering in some remote and holy place, in sand barrens or snowy ranges—a place where things are said, sights are seen, distances reached which we in our ordinary toil can only regard with the mingled reverence and wonder we hold in reserve for feats of the most sublime and difficult dimensions.

17

B
ABETTE SAID TO ME in bed one night, “Isn’t it great having all these kids around?”

“There’ll be one more soon.”

“Who?”

“Bee is coming in a couple of days.”

“Good. Who else can we get?”

The next day Denise decided to confront her mother directly about the medication she was or was not taking, hoping to trick Babette into a confession, an admission or some minimal kind of flustered response. This was not a tactic the girl and I had discussed but I couldn’t help admiring the boldness of her timing. All six of us were jammed into the car on our way to the Mid-Village Mall and Denise simply waited for a natural break in the conversation, directing her question toward the back of Babette’s head, in a voice drained of inference.

“What do you know about Dylar?”

“Is that the black girl who’s staying with the Stovers?”

“That’s Dakar,” Steffie said.

“Dakar isn’t her name, it’s where she’s from,” Denise said. “It’s a country on the ivory coast of Africa.”

“The capital is Lagos,” Babette said. “I know that because of a surfer movie I saw once where they travel all over the world.”

“The Perfect Wave,”
Heinrich said. “I saw it on TV.”

“But what’s the girl’s name?” Steffie said.

“I don’t know,” Babette said, “but the movie wasn’t called
The Perfect Wave.
The perfect wave is what they were looking for.”

“They go to Hawaii,” Denise told Steffie, “and wait for these tidal waves to come from Japan. They’re called origamis.”

“And the movie was called
The Long Hot Summer,”
her mother said.

“The Long Hot Summer,”
Heinrich said, “happens to be a play by Tennessee Ernie Williams.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Babette said, “because you can’t copyright titles anyway.”

“If she’s an African,” Steffie said, “I wonder if she ever rode a camel.”

“Try an Audi Turbo.”

“Try a Toyota Supra.”

“What is it camels store in their humps?” Babette said. “Food or water? I could never get that straight.”

“There are one-hump camels and two-hump camels,” Heinrich told her. “So it depends which kind you’re talking about.”

“Are you telling me a two-hump camel stores food in one hump and water in the other?”

“The important thing about camels,” he said, “is that camel meat is considered a delicacy.”

“I thought that was alligator meat,” Denise said.

“Who introduced the camel to America?” Babette said. “They had them out west for a while to carry supplies to coolies who were building the great railroads that met at Ogden, Utah. I remember my history exams.”

“Are you sure you’re not talking about llamas?” Heinrich said.

“The llama stayed in Peru,” Denise said. “Peru has the llama, the vicuña and one other animal. Bolivia has tin. Chile has copper and iron.”

“I’ll give anyone in this car five dollars,” Heinrich said, “if they can name the population of Bolivia.”

“Bolivians,” my daughter said.

The family is the cradle of the world’s misinformation. There must be something in family life that generates factual error. Overcloseness, the noise and heat of being. Perhaps something even deeper, like the need to survive. Murray says we are fragile creatures surrounded by a world of hostile facts. Facts threaten our happiness and security. The deeper we delve into the nature of things, the looser our structure may seem to become. The family process works toward sealing off the world. Small errors grow heads, fictions proliferate. I tell Murray that ignorance and confusion can’t possibly be the driving forces behind family solidarity. What an idea, what a subversion. He asks me why the strongest family units exist in the least developed societies. Not to know is a weapon of survival, he says. Magic and superstition become entrenched as the powerful orthodoxy of the clan. The family is strongest where objective reality is most likely to be misinterpreted. What a heartless theory, I say. But Murray insists it’s true.

In a huge hardware store at the mall I saw Eric Massingale, a former microchip sales engineer who changed his life by coming out here to join the teaching staff of the computer center at the Hill. He was slim and pale, with a dangerous grin.

“You’re not wearing dark glasses, Jack.”

“I only wear them on campus.”

“I get it.”

We went our separate ways into the store’s deep interior. A great echoing din, as of the extinction of a species of beast, filled the vast space. People bought twenty-two-foot ladders, six kinds of sandpaper, power saws that could fell trees. The aisles were long and bright, filled with oversized brooms, massive sacks of peat and dung, huge Rubber-maid garbage cans. Rope hung like tropical fruit, beautifully braided strands, thick, brown, strong. What a great thing a coil of rope is to look at and feel. I bought fifty feet of Manila hemp just to have it around, show it to my son, talk about where it comes from, how it’s made. People spoke English, Hindi, Vietnamese, related tongues.

I ran into Massingale again at the cash terminals.

“I’ve never seen you off campus, Jack. You look different without your glasses and gown. Where did you get that sweater? Is that a Turkish army sweater? Mail order, right?”

He looked me over, felt the material of the water-repellent jacket I was carrying draped across my arm. Then he backed up, altering his perspective, nodding a little, his grin beginning to take on a self-satisfied look, reflecting some inner calculation.

“I think I know those shoes,” he said.

What did he mean, he knew these shoes?

“You’re a different person altogether.”

“Different in what way, Eric?”

“You won’t take offense?” he said, the grin turning lascivious, rich with secret meaning.

“Of course not. Why would I?”

“Promise you won’t take offense.”

“I won’t take offense.”

“You look so harmless, Jack. A big, harmless, aging, indistinct sort of guy.”

“Why would I take offense?” I said, paying for my rope and hurrying out the door.

The encounter put me in the mood to shop. I found the others and we walked across two parking lots to the main structure in the Mid-Village Mall, a ten-story building arranged around a center court of waterfalls, promenades and gardens. Babette and the kids followed me into the elevator, into the shops set along the tiers, through the emporiums and department stores, puzzled but excited by my desire to buy. When I could not decide between two shirts, they encouraged me to buy both. When I said I was hungry, they fed me pretzels, beer, souvlaki. The two girls scouted ahead, spotting things they thought I might want or need, running back to get me, to clutch my arms, plead with me to follow. They were my guides to endless well-being. People swarmed through the boutiques and gourmet shops. Organ music rose from the great court. We smelled chocolate, popcorn, cologne; we smelled rugs and furs, hanging salamis and deathly vinyl. My family gloried in the event. I was one of them, shopping, at last. They gave me advice, badgered clerks on my behalf. I kept seeing myself unexpectedly in some reflecting surface. We moved from store to store, rejecting not only items in certain departments, not only entire departments but whole stores, mammoth corporations that did not strike our fancy for one reason or another. There was always another store, three floors, eight floors, basement full of cheese graters and paring knives. I shopped with reckless abandon. I shopped for immediate needs and distant contingencies. I shopped for its own sake, looking and touching, inspecting merchandise I had no intention of buying, then buying it. I sent clerks into their fabric books and pattern books to search for elusive designs. I began to grow in value and self-regard. I filled myself out, found new aspects of myself, located a person I’d forgotten existed. Brightness settled around me. We crossed from furniture to men’s wear, walking through cosmetics. Our images appeared on mirrored columns, in glassware and chrome, on TV monitors in security rooms. I traded money for goods. The more money I spent, the less important it seemed. I was bigger than these sums. These sums poured off my skin like so much rain. These sums in fact came back to me in the form of existential credit. I felt expansive, inclined to be sweepingly generous, and told the kids to pick out their Christmas gifts here and now. I gestured in what I felt was an expansive manner. I could tell they were impressed. They fanned out across the area, each of them suddenly inclined to be private, shadowy, even secretive. Periodically one of them would return to register the name of an item with Babette, careful not to let the others know what it was. I myself was not to be bothered with tedious details. I was the benefactor, the one who dispenses gifts, bonuses, bribes, baksheesh. The children knew it was the nature of such things that I could not be expected to engage in technical discussions about the gifts themselves. We ate another meal. A band played live Muzak. Voices rose ten stories from the gardens and promenades, a roar that echoed and swirled through the vast gallery, mixing with noises from the tiers, with shuf fling feet and chiming bells, the hum of escalators, the sound of people eating, the human buzz of some vivid and happy transaction.

We drove home in silence. We went to our respective rooms, wishing to be alone. A little later I watched Steffie in front of the TV set. She moved her lips, attempting to match the words as they were spoken.

18

I
T IS THE NATURE and pleasure of townspeople to distrust the city. All the guiding principles that might flow from a center of ideas and cultural energies are regarded as corrupt, one or another kind of pornography. This is how it is with towns.

But Blacksmith is nowhere near a large city. We don’t feel threatened and aggrieved in quite the same way other towns do. We’re not smack in the path of history and its contaminations. If our complaints have a focal point, it would have to be the TV set, where the outer torment lurks, causing fears and secret desires. Certainly little or no resentment attaches to the College-on-the-Hill as an emblem of ruinous influence. The school occupies an ever serene edge of the townscape, semidetached, more or less scenic, suspended in political calm. Not a place designed to aggravate suspicions.

In light snow I drove to the airport outside Iron City, a large town sunk in confusion, a center of abandonment and broken glass rather than a place of fully realized urban decay. Bee, my twelve-year-old, was due in on a flight from Washington, with two stops and one change of planes along the way. But it was her mother, Tweedy Browner, who showed up in the arrivals area, a small dusty third-world place in a state of halted renovation. For a moment I thought Bee was dead and Tweedy had come to tell me in person.

“Where is Bee?”

“She’s flying in later today. That’s why I’m here. To spend some time with her. I have to go to Boston tomorrow. Family business.”

“But where is she?”

“With her father.”

“I’m her father, Tweedy.”

“Malcolm Hunt, stupid. My husband.”

“He’s your husband, he’s not her father.”

“Do you still love me, Tuck?” she said.

She called me Tuck, which is what her mother used to call her father. All the male Browners were called Tuck. When the line began to pale, producing a series of aesthetes and incompetents, they gave the name to any man who married into the family, within reason. I was the first of these and kept expecting to hear a note of overrefined irony in their voices when they called me by that name. I thought that when tradition becomes too flexible, irony enters the voice. Nasality, sarcasm, self-caricature and so on. They would punish me by mocking themselves. But they were sweet about it, entirely sincere, even grateful to me for allowing them to carry on.

She wore a Shetland sweater, tweed skirt, knee socks and penny loafers. There was a sense of Protestant disrepair about her, a collapsed aura in which her body struggled to survive. The fair and angular face, the slightly bulging eyes, the signs of strain and complaint that showed about the mouth and around the eyes, the pulsing at the temple, the raised veins in the hands and neck. Cigarette ash clung to the loose weave of her sweater.

“For the third time. Where is she?”

“Indonesia, more or less. Malcolm’s working in deep cover, sponsoring a Communist revival. It’s part of an elegant scheme designed to topple Castro. Let’s get out of here, Tuck, before children come swarming around to beg.”

“Is she coming alone?”