Ghost Dance (8 page)

“Where are we?” Fletcher gasped, opening his eyes, sitting straight up in his seat.

“We’re approaching JFK, my friend. We made good time, clear visibility, we’ll be able to watch lots of planes before your mother’s lands. You can hear them already,” my grandfather said quietly.

“Are the planes bigger than houses?” Fletcher asked.

“Much,” my grandfather said.

“Do they have lots of windows?”

My grandfather nodded.

“I bet you can see inside the clouds,” Fletcher murmured.

My grandfather patted Fletcher’s dovv nv head.

“I’d like to be a pilot, Grandpa,” he said. He started up his motor as my grandfather pulled the large soundless Oldsmobile into the parking lot.

“Sure, Fletcher,” my grandfather said, taking his tiny hand, “you can be a pilot if you want.”

The airport whirled around them. Everything seemed to be moving: ticket lines, conveyor belts, escalators, clouds. Fletcher, dizzy with excitement even before seeing one plane, dashed around madly, taking off and landing, taking off and landing until he collapsed in a plastic airport chair in a section where people were waiting to board.

I imagine the travelers as Fletcher saw them: adventurers, embarking on unknown voyages in these fantastic machines; all faith, all wonder. Fletcher must have studied them closely, the lucky children who got to go with their parents, the old people en route to warmer climates, those from other countries, the lost, the disoriented, those who had begun their trip at one time and ended up twelve hours later at the same time, somewhere across the world.

My grandfather and brother stepped onto the motorstairs and were taken to a large observatory window. Over the intercom announcements were being made, “Eastern flight 107 to Miami departing from gate 19.” “National flight 53 arriving at gate 12.” “Aer Lingus,” my grandfather read off a flight bag which raced by. Al Italia, Air Canada, Lufthansa, Pan Am—the various stripes and colors of the airlines blurred together. The announcements continued. Propellers whirred.

My grandfather and brother were not part of the group that hurried. They floated around the airport in slow motion, it seemed, and watched stewardesses fly by, ticket agents, anxious travelers.

That day my mother’s plane, Air France flight 446 from Paris, was delayed eight hours. Luckily, my father, always the one to imagine the worst, was not there. My grandfather and his small student of flight did not mind the wait at all. All day, then evening, then through the starry night, they sat in front of the large airport window pointing at the sky, getting up now and then to have snacks in the snack bar, then returning to watch the sleek bodies of planes, noting the particular angles of arrival and departure.

“There’s Mom!” Fletcher said, suddenly pointing to a gigantic silver and blue plane, all lights, that seemed to appear out of nowhere.

“Yes, that’s her, all right!” my grandfather shouted. Their faces glowed like the runway’s guiding lights. They possessed the exceptional beauty of those who wait purely, out of love, outside the body, ready to meet the other some where halfway.

My grandfather thought, as he watched my mother’s plane make its descent, that it was wonderful to love like this. His son in the kitchen, moving towards my mother also as he peeled the ends of the asparagus, had the same thought and for one moment in time father and son were united through love and it made each comprehensible to the other.

Inside, my mother collected the miniature jellies, tiny liquor bottles, air sickness bags, and numerous pamphlets for Fletcher. Fletcher took my grandfather’s hand. “She’s coming!” he gasped. The wheels came down. They took a deep breath and watched her land.

A most unlikely line will come into my head when the cockroaches gather force around the toaster or a new hairline crack appears in the plaster of my tiny, crumbling New York apartment. This is when I need Fletcher most: when an anonymous sigh, as loud as if it were my own, floats in on the breeze through an open window or a car screeches to a sudden stop, when I must face the dark water at the bottom of the kettle. Then the first sentence of a speech my brother gave at a rally here in New York returns to me. “It is no secret,” he says, his voice like a trumpet, “that, with every breath, we are taking toxins into our bodies; it is no secret,” he says, “that we and everything we love will die from it if we don’t do something now.”

My brother still believed in change then. The quality of his voice, the conviction of his meter, his simple faith prod me on when I am in trouble. Fletcher always believed that we might live in a different way and, judging from his voice as he spoke in the afternoon light to a crowd of thousands that had gathered in New York’s Central Park for Earth Day, I think the dream must have seemed attainable to him, still within his reach. His voice does not falter; it does not back away.

“Look,” he said, “even here in our largest city, the earth is more eloquent than I,” and he pointed to the various trees and named them, the hardy wild-flowers, the wonderful rock formations. I looked to my mother, who sat on one side of me, and then to my father, who was on the other side. I looked back at Fletcher. In his adultness I could see the little boy I had grown up with. I could see what propelled his words, gave them their shape and color and momentum this day. It was the blueness of the lake, it was the woods around our house that early on he had learned he could not do without.

His voice had the clarity and depth of the lake itself. Had I been up closer, I would have been able to see that lake still sparkling in his blue eyes. There was no dispelling that first childhood notion of beauty; it persisted, against all odds, like the wildflowers around the band shell, it lived, like the city trees girdled in cement. It lived. That tiny lake, not more than a mile wide, had played a big part in shaping my brother’s life, the contours of his concerns. We both doted on it, we both loved it, but it spoke to Fletcher.

A large and various crowd of people had assembled under the dark, dramatic sky. In the distance we could see the shape of the city, all rising geometry, all energy, quilted, patterned; beautiful, too, not as hard to love as one might have thought, abstractly, from a greater distance. It was beauty that united us that day. Though vastly different, we were all lovers of beauty, lovers of a place called home. An old woman several rows in front of me, trembling with emotion, began to cry. “This is our home,” Fletcher said, “and despite everything we must find the way to love it, to care for it, to claim it for ourselves—to make it ours.”

A division of the Gray Panthers, an activist group of senior citizens, had been bussed in from Long Island. They wore straw hats and buttons that said, “Save our children.” Students, professors, lawyers, doctors, housewives, children—all these people were there. Way, way in the back, the Socialists from Union City stood on tiptoe with the curious dog walkers and the joggers who had just finished their runs. I imagine they could only see a blur where my brother stood, but they could easily hear his voice, hooked to an elaborate sound system, and they were compelled to stay.

There was a confidence in Fletcher’s voice that made it irresistible, I think, to those less sure, to those whose convictions were less grand or were harder to articulate. His voice transcended language, for even the French tourists who sat next to my mother and kept asking her beforehand about “les boutiques et les cafés Américains” fell silent when my brother began, caught in that voice. And to me, who knew him, and to others, who did not, it seemed that he alone might purify the air with his tone. There was such command there that we thought he single-mindedly might take the clouds and shake them free of their filth.

We were so happy that day. It was one of the last times we would all be together. Dutifully we had dressed in white as we had been asked to “for the visual effect,” Fletcher said, “something the media might easily comprehend.”

The visual effect was stunning. Father dragged the television from the closet so that we could watch the coverage of the event. We wanted to see what it looked like to the world. It was eerie to have a flash of Fletcher flickering blue from the TV set, if only for a second. And in the black and white dots of the newspaper I saw for the first time the strange resemblance between my brother and my mother. I was shocked that I had not seen this resemblance before. Maybe everyone doomed to newsprint, trapped on the page, in some silent way looks alike.

“Look,” my mother said, pointing to the sky just before my brother reached the podium. “A dove—a beautiful white dove.” But when I followed her arm into the air I saw nothing, just the ominous gray clouds my brother was about to address, hanging like symbols in the sky.

Had a common city pigeon turned into a dove before my mother’s eyes that day in the park as Fletcher got up and walked to the stage? Yes, I imagine it did. She had gasped with delight as she pointed up into the air, and it had reassured her in some way about the world. Watching her sitting there happy, content, I thought despite everything I would be privileged, I would count myself lucky to see what she saw, to be like her. I needed that dove, too, but when I looked up I saw only gray and no beautiful white bird intersecting it.

Had I missed the dove my mother saw so clearly as Fletcher walked to the stage? Had it flown away in one instant as I turned my head to see it? Or had she at that moment invented that bird as her contribution to the day? Often, I knew, she altered or remade the world, revising it, making it a more habitable place, a more bearable one, or sometimes just more complete.

“A dove,” she said again, this time softer. For an artist like my mother, there is no rest from perception. It does not stop when the body is raised from the typewriter, when the hands are folded safely in the lap, the canvas left to dry, the dance steps passed to the dancer, the whole rest placed on the final staff. It does not stop. There is no rest.

She could not make it stop. “Look,” my mother had said, and she seemed exhausted as she spoke. This dove accounted for her fatigue, I thought. Her head seemed so heavy she could not hold it up and her shoulders quivered as they supported the weight. No hard laborer, no farmer, no fisherman looked as weary at the end of the day as she sometimes did. It frightened me: the idea of no rest ever. Must the sky always fill with lovely birds or blossoming trees? Even beauty becomes intolerable to the lidless eye—even pleasure. She had no rest in sleep, no break. Where we saw gray, she saw shapes. When we listened to people talk, we just listened, but she changed syntax or tone or the end of the story. Those of us who loved her would have traded volumes of her work for her serenity. I looked to her. But no, it was not true that I would have traded her work. I put my arm around her and looked to the stage.

Would it all go on forever? I asked myself, and she seemed to look at me and nod. My mother accepted her life as children do, knowing no other one. She never complained. Don’t cry for me, she said with her eyes, filled with wonder, for she w as thrilled today by the w hite, the dramatic clouds, and her son, w ho now approached the podium. “Look,” she gasped. Her voice was high and light. “Oh, look,” she lifted her arm.

“There is no better life,” her arm said. No, that was not it. “There is no other life.” That was the terrible thrill in her voice, I thought. That is what the outstretched arm pointing to the sky said. She was frightening, I thought, this wild-haired, uncompromising woman. She was irresistible. And the words stayed with me.

“There is no other life.”

But here was Fletcher. And there was Father. It was not true. People lived other lives. And then I heard it, the whole sentence, as Fletcher opened his speech and looked out at his audience: “There is no other life
for
us.” And I knew she was right.

“It is no secret,” my brother said.

As he spoke the sky seemed to take on a surreal hue, purplish, as if it were serving him, through some prearranged agreement, as a visual aid. It could not have done a better job had it received a copy of the text of the speech in advance. It looked suitably treacherous and, when it was supposed to, it gradually lightened and shone bright for the finale. In those days the whole world seemed to accommodate my brother, taking its cues from him. In those days he was capable of anything. People knew this somehow, and they trusted him.

My father seemed to be studying his son. It was as if he had never seen him before, as if he were going to paint a portrait of him and wanted to see his subject in motion, from afar, so as to comprehend his true nature, so concentrated was his look. Perhaps looking at Fletcher from a distance, he understood something about himself. He felt proud of him, without quite knowing why.

“This is our home,” Fletcher said, “and we must ask for it back—back from Hooker Chemical, back from Johns-Mansville. This is
our
home.”

As he finished his speech, an elderly couple behind us remarked that if this young man were on their side maybe there actually was a chance. And even those way in the back, the stragglers, the joggers, the onlookers, the Con-Ed executive out for a stroll with his family, mumbling under his breath, even he knew that my brother was someone to be dealt with. For Fletcher’s plea was for common sense, for respect. People relied on Fletcher. They stood up and clapped. My mother’s eyes clouded.

Fletcher looked tired and pale as we neared him through the crowds. Maybe we all asked too much of him, talked too much, leaned too hard, expected far more than we should have. He was my little brother. Maybe we wanted more than anyone could have possibly given, asked him to be strong once too often.

“Fletcher!” I called to him.

“Vanessa? Va-nes-sa!” he cried. “Mom! Dad!
There
you are! Over here! Come this way! Over here!” he shouted, flapping his arms around his head. He looked suddenly revitalized.

“You were great!” I shouted to him.

He too was dressed in white. He beamed at me.

Someone tapped me on the shoulder. I turned. A little Gray Panther squeezed my hand tightly. “Good luck to you,” she said, “and to that fine young man.”