In Partial Disgrace (6 page)

In the courtroom, Felix “the Happy” learned that you can destroy any argument by taking the
a priori
one step backward, that the self and its opposite do not have to exist in mutual antipathy, and indeed that the day of liberation is most often the day of disappointment. Observing the inclination of human nature to crush the human spirit, he reluctantly became the advocate of the trial-and-error boys, reconciling warring factions by insisting that the other’s place does not have to be a fearful one. He often said there are only two sorts of people in this world—those who believe in the law when it promises to protect them, and those who don’t.

No graven portrait of my father’s family ever hung in our house. If there was a tradition operating here, it was that one ought to be forthright in pursuing and preserving one’s pleasures, but not be surprised if others found them repulsive. This quirky toleration always made a great impression in our fanatical part of the world, but was essentially misunderstood. For if a man had his absolute preferences, and yet could afford another’s right to take exception, this implied authority—and such authority could only imply hoarded money, dirty tricks, or a conspiracy at the highest level. An uncaused authority without political power and without money, together with an uncaused freedom without an enemy, is the most intimidating force in the modern world, and its bearers are inevitably punished for it. Felix was one of those men doomed to be more liberal than his class, and his political downfall was due to his not being as conservative as the radicals turned out to be.

Father clearly preferred the companionship of women, as he believed that everything is finally done either to impress or avoid them. “Men just walk down their own roads,” he used to say, “and talk about the things they happen to meet. How unbelievably boring! Women, for whatever reason, tend to do this less, and are therefore superior.” He also believed that the greatest gift you can give another person is self-control, and that the ability of men to hide their thoughts went largely unappreciated by women.

Life for him was clearly a beautiful woman on a beautiful horse led by a beautiful dog, and he felt the only possible justification for something as unattractive and exceptional as a grown man was that by wizardry and chivalry he might keep these unlike animals together in a parade—that gentleman’s paradise: tenderness without loyalty, violence without strife.

His male acquaintances found it strange that such an energetic man did not chafe in a house under female ownership, particularly given the airy standards of my mother, for married life was certainly nothing like a ballerina on a circus horse, but rather more a warren of untrained animals and mentally ill clowns. They also thought it imprudent for him to reinvest all of his earnings into the maintenance of a property which for all its strange beauty and uniqueness, had for a century been a wasting asset, producing less income each year. (Indeed, the whole of Cannonia would have doubled in market value had they shut down every single farm and factory.)

My father was a triple functionary—attorney, village notary, and investment counselor—with a triple soul: conservative, liberal, and left wing. He was not hard to fathom, not so much a giant of a man as three hard, distinct men who fought spiritedly among themselves. He was a worldly concrete man, adept at finance, ball games, and sex, contemptuous of politics and religion, but a spy for the spiritual, a secret agent for the sacred. He believed sincerely that his function was to play prime minister to the queen, bluff front man for the skeptical muse, to extract money from the real economy and cheerfully recirculate it into the inefficient, living part of the culture. As such, he objectively failed at everything except the high drama of marriage and as fiduciary for other people’s money. But it was in the fourth dimension of Dogmeister Supreme, Hauptzuchtwart of Semper Vero and Master of Our Floating World, where Father truly shone, and scattered the heaped-up mountains with the simplest of gestures. A man is nothing but a handful of irrational enthusiasms, and nothing in this world can be understood apart from them.

Yes, my father was an oral man, a primary type, who could not resist a smoke, a vowel, a puff, a sentence, a sweet, a scotch, a song, a smooch. Breathing, after all, was no less a project because it was involuntary, and the intervals between the breaths also required justification and refinement. This attitude, more than any gustatory prowess, accounted for Father’s eating habits, which went far beyond
gourmet
or even the
gourmand.

Family meals in Father’s view were an especial kind of torture, a fact borne out by his observation of the dogs when they were fed in the same cell. There, the bitches inevitably lost their appetite or became more aggressive, barking out commands which fell on deaf ears, though requiring ever sharpening levels of feigned attention from the brood. The sires sat proudly, horrified to eat from the same bowl as their progeny, insensitive to the alleged thrill of watching newborns masticate, and trying pathetically to nose their own dishes into a corner where they could be defended. When they were half-grown, the dogs ate just as sloppily, gulping their food without tasting it, and reverting to the pecking order they had displayed as puppies; indeed the same dogs who shoved each other out of the way at eight weeks continued to do so at eight years.

A line seemed to be crossed at our meals, from wonder to pride to habituation to vague resentment and finally colic. There was nothing like a repast to bring out the hierarchies that everyday activities so successfully blurred and dispelled, and Father came to believe that a true family could be kept together only by avoiding meals together whenever possible. But he had also noticed that there was better behavior at kennel dinner when a guest dog was being boarded. Were the hosts being well-mannered or falsely solicitous, wondering whether the guest was going to steal their dinner? Whatever the case, their own self-conscious roles were slightly submerged; they gulped more slowly, ate a bit less, chewed a bit more thoroughly. There was even a kind of comradely charm in the air, and occasionally a note of sincere thanks was struck, bringing a tear to a hound’s eye.

So it was that we almost always had an invited guest for supper. When we did not, our table was the severest form of regimen. Mother was obviously of two minds about food. Meat in particular, in all its forms, gave her the shakes. She would walk across a muddy street to avoid passing the window display in a butcher shop. She knew this was ridiculous but couldn’t help it. It was related of course to the way my father had eaten, was eating, and was about to eat. The appetites of men seemed to her if not exactly vulgar, driven by needs far beyond nutrition. The way men left the table particularly offended her, on whatever pretext, strolling over to the fire, or to walk in the starry moonlight, there to smoke, pass wind, and put the dinner out of mind. It brought out in her conflicting feelings of servitude and superiority, particularly when they thanked her with pointless magnanimity for the meal she had in fact nothing to do with. She was convinced that Father’s love of food was his most prurient of interests.

Mother’s attention to lettuce and other uncooked food struck Father as not only gratuitous, smug asceticism, but also willful self-destructiveness. He did not judge her, as he himself took no pleasure in the carving, nor certainly in the presiding. It was one of the few rituals he was not particularly good at, and he was embarrassed at his first reflex, which was always to carve the roast in such a way that the better cuts would be preserved for himself. Gazing with sadness at the selfishly severed loin, he would offer it shamefacedly to Mother, who he knew would refuse it, saying, “You know I just don’t care, dear”—the only words which truly threatened him. And then he would fork the filet on to me, and that was Judgment Day, where amongst the copious portions you simply cannot offer thanks enough. It is the smallest and the weakest of us who must get down on our marrowbones and give thanks, who must tally up with the Lord, his beneficence.

So our supper was not a pretty picture. Father with his huge knife raised in defeat, Mother staring at every plate but her own, and myself, who through murmurs of gratitude, personal growth, and
savoir gré
, was presumed to solve this impasse. Only the animals beneath the table enjoyed these coarse dog dinners, as my father’s shadow hovered over the roast, elbows sawing in and out, while mother withdrew from his shadow with an unmistakable air of superiority. In my nervous knowledge that my digestion was the only justification of the elaborate ritual, I must admit that I identified with the roast and rejoiced in its slaughter. But these meals drenched in ambivalence did not give us strength. No, this first festival of mankind made each of us weaker, occasionally exhausted—the family values of remorse, obedience, and guilty liberation, all sitting round the table in silence.

So it was not surprising that when there were no guests to take the edge off things, Father would invariably take his supper at that vegetarian’s nightmare,
White Wings, Black Dog
, an inn where the fare was certainly uneven but which had not been closed a single day in seven hundred years, and where no meal was really a meal without a seduction or apology. There in a booth in the private dining room known as
The Brainery
, one could draw the curtain and have an assignation with an oyster and one’s self, or perhaps the elk and bustard pie with orchid ice cream. And there Felix removed himself with a book and ate alone before the fire, his unembarrassed appetites on full display, and all of us grew fat and happy.

When earthbound, my father assumed three forms: at times a gentle bull who lay his full weight upon the fence of every friendship; at times a writhing, glittering serpent, mocking each blow of his adversaries; and at times a man with a lion’s head from whose laughing beard, unchecked by false shame, great torrents of water flowed. I liked them all.

At dusk, every summer afternoon, when the slow moving Mze turned from ocher to mauve, we stripped down on its banks, leaving my school uniform and his business suit in soft columns above our shoes, and began to wade aimlessly in our black alpaca bathing suits, which we always wore instead of underwear. Swallows swooped down, dipping their wings into the darkening waters, fish rose and rejoiced in its dusky surface, while between them all manner of insects emerged like living sparks and fell into the flowers of both banks. Then he would take me up in his arms and we would cross that river which the ancients believed to be bottomless.

He had the body of a gymnast, his frame developed by secret French exercises, low sloped rounded shoulders which concealed effortless strength, and the legs of a country gent, hard as a saddle but just as forgiving, which he toughened by rising at five each morning and walking for three hours before breakfast with a knapsack full of stones. I had my mother’s rapier-like body, designed for sleeping late, for sports not yet generally acknowledged. But when he picked me up, even for a moment, I forgot my body, forgot myself.

The incline of the river bottom was firm and fairly gradual, and soon we were submerged, only his head above the water, his beard like a dark water lily floating above my head, which lay upon his chest. I was aware of both the current and his stubborn resistance to it. Taking a breath, I went under with his heart. I felt no fear as long as he could breathe, as long as I could hear his breathing.

He walked almost casually, with the slight limp of the star athlete, negotiating the cylinder of water with short languid strides, suave and incorporeal, until we were both well beneath the surface. How many steps I do not know, across the bottom of that river which flowed away from history, where I first became aware of Time Out of Mind.

We moved deliberately in that sphere, out of our element but serene, moving gravely but never grimacing through the invisible currents. Down there, all the senses were equally irrelevant, in a normal weightless gait. Then in order to reassert our gravitas, he freighted, weighted down with me.

When his lungs close by my ear expelled, I knew we were coming up for air, that the incline was in our favor. There was nothing but blinding brightness as my own head emerged, and he permitted himself a slight stumble now that the hardest part was done. When we were in the shadows on the far side, my diminished senses returned one by one. I could hear the rivulets course about his calves, and as I was set down on the meadow embankment, looking back at the bent grass where we began, water cascaded down his beard onto my face.

The pretext, I suppose, was exercise, a kind of fitness. For surely, any fool can learn to swim, and in your mind’s redshot eyes one can just as well walk upon the water. But to walk
through
it, neither floating nor drowning, now that is a test—though the choleric Cannonian is sure to ask, what good is it to be a champion sprinter in a swimming pool?

I cannot recall exactly when this project began or ended, or how to factor in the crude determinants: my weight, his age, the velocity of the current as Time flowed back and forth. Read into it what you will. Read anything but comedy or dread. He cast me into the river which rose not over me; I was then what I was to be. As I saw the man pick the boy up, I was being picked up. From the water I saw the man carry the boy into the water. As the bubbles from my nostrils ascended to the surface, I saw the two beneath the riverine sheet, as if from a dirigible. From the far mountain bank I saw them clamber out of the river, then look back at the broken columns of their clothes. And from our clothes I saw the naked man and hairless boy turn to stare at me, then lay down like animal spirits in the mud.

How was it that in his arms, in that river, I was both behind and ahead of myself? Philosophers call this an affliction, and perhaps it is so. But I also know that no man can take leave of his father without it; I was where I had been for all time and where for all time I shall go.

From my father, who became a different man each day, I learned we have no choice but to be both hunter and prey. I saw that the bad boy becomes a good father as the best kind of cover. Even as the bad boy always remains bad, and gets badder still, the father’s guise is perfected. Like my father, I wanted desperately to be good. So I could be
really
bad.