The Almanac Branch (3 page)

“I like it here,” I said.

When I broke away to run upstairs and look out from the balcony to the sea, she said, “Grace, be careful,” and the way she said it made me realize that it was she who was afraid, and so I came back to her, looked at her, and saw she wasn't able to look at me, so I followed her through the front room toward the kitchen.

Here things were in no better shape. The faux-oriental kitchen linoleum was curling up around its appliances, the appliances were themselves in different states of disrepair—the impertinent Norge stove wheezing gas, the racks in the refrigerator hung with green, tobaccolike beards. The doors to the downstairs rooms would not stay closed, the silver “American”-emblazoned radiators banged and hissed. Even when it seemed like too much, there was more. The upstairs windows, where she went, me still gliding behind, whistled when she opened them, and their sun-grayed lace shook out the dust of who knew how many years of neglect.

“My God,” or something like that—and I said, “Mom, you'll see, everything will be all right.”

The place was, in a word, uninhabitable, “uninhabitable,” she said, “Scrub Farm my eyes!” What else was the poor woman going to say? We have no guarantee of Grace's improving in a funhouse like this, Charles, she might have said—and it would have been a logical response to the state of the place, its spinning spiders and beguiling noises—but she decided to keep her own counsel as best she could, and draw a curtain across her own thoughts, so that neither I nor any of the others would be able to scrutinize her. Looking back, I can see how it would be possible for her to have made up her mind that very first day, to leave us behind, all of us, for the shackles we had become on her. Sure, it is true she always worked hard to paint scenes of perfect motherhood on that curtain, so I, her daughter, and the boys would admire her, which we did. Lord knows, she must have told herself, for our sake, my dear stoic mom, doors can be fixed, windows can be refitted. But when she and I stood there alone in the kitchen, and she pulled back her hair, caught her breath, then pressed the knuckles of one hand tight upon her lips, the very tone of her being was changed. I saw it. She drew herself in, withdrew, retracted. She looked the same, but had become a different woman. When she—we—emerged onto the back porch, and she said, “Have you seen what this, don't those auction people from the government have some responsibility—” I could hear that it was something she said because it was something she was expected to say, and no more. She might as well have kept on walking, left the porch, left the house, taken herself down the beach road then and there, as go through those ludicrous (that's too harsh, call them pathetic, or better: overwrought) motions.

Faw knew none of this, of course. “What?” he said, and it was the kind of “what” that means, Spare me, I don't want to hear it, as he strained to lift trunks and chairs and mattresses down off the truck through the tangle of half-untied lashings.

Berg and Desmond were distracted. I wanted to find out if the sea-worn apples in the orchard, wrinkly as those pony's balls we saw in Central Park last year, tasted any good after a winter of dangling on the crooked limbs, and Desmond wanted to come, and so did Berg, but they helped their father anyway, because he had announced that “this is where you boys are going to become men, and you know what men are?”

“Grown up,” Desmond guessed.

“Men are responsible people, you know what responsibility is?”

“Jesus H. Christ,” Berg talked back, like he did sometimes, even then, and Faw heard him and told Desmond,

“Did you hear what your brother said?”

“Yes,” Desmond replied; he hated it when Faw did this, held him up to Berg as some behavior model, when in fact he didn't want to be either a good boy or bad.

“That's not what responsibility is.”

“Yes, sir,” with tardy half-closed eyes.

“And Burke?”

Burke, whom we called Berg because his fingers and toes had poor circulation and were icy to the touch, was twelve that year. He was trying to grow his moustache. He wore his shirts backward for a time, making me button them up for him. It was a look. As narrow-shouldered, narrow-waisted, and narrow-wristed as he was—all this made him appear, at a glance, a wispy bit of defiance—Berg was strong and limber. Buttoning his shirt on backward (he'dscissored slits in the front seams at the arm to allow for mobility) was one of the few things he allowed me to do with him. I was just his sister, and fully understood I didn't count for much. Why should I? How could I?

“Can we go back home now?” obnoxious as he could manage.

“Thank you for showing Desmond how men don't act.”

“Go to,” and Faw, who held the bulk of a rayon-shiny, unwieldy mattress, pushed Berg, who tripped over the path rocks shoving back against him. Was it because Berg was a man he didn't fall down?

Mother went back inside. She disappeared upstairs for an hour, and no one bothered her. Berg went over to the shore by himself, and so Desmond and I worked hard with Faw. By the time the large ocean stars burned between the running clouds that carried brief squalls of tough, short sprinkles, we had, after our own fashion, moved into Scrub Farm.

One footnote, about that first night, learned by me years later, in a letter from my mother. Rain as fine as pencil lead had begun to mark the yard. Mother was in front of the kitchen fire, too exhausted to eat dinner with the rest of us, her feet resting on the brick hearth. From where she sat she noticed a draft along the floor through the room, got up and walked toward the source of this damp, streaming air. What she discovered was that the glass in the mudroom door was broken. No one had gone in that room yet, a small cul-de-sac of a side room off the pantry. She came back into the kitchen, saying nothing, and gathered some sheets of crumpled paper from the heaps that lay everywhere from unpacking, and left, thinking to tape a sheet over the breach in the glass. She took the flashlight with her, as there was no bulb in the overhead light. Seeing the flashlight, Faw or Desmond or one of us asked if she needed help, but she said she didn't. Maybe she wanted to be alone again, we thought. When she entered the mudroom, and ran the beam of light over the walls and floor, she saw what had caused the glass to break. At her feet lay the carcass of an enormous bird—a heron, a black-backed gull, perhaps even an osprey, she wasn't sure—broken on the brick floor, its wings askew and its neck twisted, the sheen of life gone from its feathers.

The poor creature had been dead so long that the flesh beneath its feathers was decomposed and its death-scent was gone. She stood there, serene and silent. The reason she had said nothing was that she didn't want me to see. There would be no end to the nightmares it would set off, she had reasoned, not knowing how little such a sight would have affected me. But what was behind her serenity she couldn't fathom, her letter explained. She spread sheets of newspaper over it, trying her best neither to touch it nor to assign it much meaning—though it was her nature, just as it was Faw's, to assign every little thing meaning. She later put us children to bed, and went to bed herself after listening for a while to her husband, downstairs, in another of the unexplored places of the house, talking to someone on the telephone in his clumsy, confident German.

And, oh—about those orchard apples. They did look from afar like pony balls, but up close resembled the shrunken head that Faw brought back from Brazil once, only bald and without a bone through the nose. They were delicious.

Sometimes you believe everyone is a sphinx without a riddle, except perhaps someone you love, or strive to love, whom you view not as sphinx, because you know him and he speaks to you in ways you feel you can understand. The one you love says something, and you lean into it, and you try to understand, and if you can't you let it go at that, appreciating the riddle for what it is—the action of love itself—and not forcing on it the need for a solution. My father was surely full of riddle. Early morning, after we arrived, having gone to bed long after all of us had, he was back on the telephone. I could hear him, again in the German, and I guessed he was about to convert into one of his riddle phases.

I was right. Awake just in time, I heard him drive away. By afternoon he had flown to Munich.

“Dear Grace, poor Grace,” Mother might say—and she would not be wrong—and talk to the wall about the fact that here was Faw, all obsessed with this newest doctor's opinions about the megrims and the auras and getting us out of the city to somewhere quiet, and then, like that, he up and runs to Europe as if nothing were amiss, what kind of man is that? By what fricking design of distractedness or permutability could he tell himself that anything of the sort was fair or decent, she wondered aloud, walking back and forth down in the kitchen—wondering perhaps not in those exact words, moving around through the rooms with me following behind, and Desmond trailing behind both of us, getting the meaning through her tones and the way she flung her mane.

“It's okay,” I assured her, thinking Don't drag me into it. I didn't want her to believe that I minded, because I didn't.

What I thought then, in the childish terms that were available to me, is what I think now: his disappearances, which came often and often went unexplained, were the result not of distraction, but of absolute, untrammeled focus, of pure enthusiasm for the moment and what should be done just within its energy pool. Something on the order of, “The hell with long-range plans, the hell with tomorrow, just hone in hard on the paroxysm of the minute, whatever it might be, and count on the big picture to work itself out later.”

You should know I am not being charitable, or daughterly slash overdevoted, to assert that there was value in his methods, as he did have a way of making things work. The more unlikely, the more implausible it was, the more interested he would get in a project. He had built from scratch, with his own hands and head, the latter used as much for butting as reasoning, the vast entity of Geiger—referred to by us, who had to have special names it seems for so many things, as the Sprawl—and tended to its multiplying small subsidiaries as if he were pure radiant heat burning over a benign, creative, and corporate virus. Geiger was a masterpiece of sorts. Its own history was a history of the penumbra of that great dark shadow we cast across our land in the name of popular culture. It was a constellation of all those little unlikely and implausible ideas that become companies. The Sprawl produced everything from plastic boxing gloves to edible Halloween masks, from commemorative beer steins to limited-edition porcelain Presidents' Busts. The glowing yoyo, GloYo, was his—I still have one in its original cellophane package. Paper swimwear, see-in-the-dark playing cards, talking seashells, the last with drawstring and a small recorder planted in the conch and secured with glue; you would pull the string and the shell would sing Happy Birthday or Auld Lang Syne. The Pet Rock was an idea he considered genius and always wished had been his own; he was involved with packaging fragments of the Berlin Wall last year. Someone once called him the trinket king, and while that moniker fails, and miserably, to reveal him as the truly distinguished, complicated, impassioned, resolute individual I know, he would be the first to admit he adored trinkets, not for himself—he himself was quite ascetic, and loathed clutter—but for his customers. He still claims, although I have never seen any evidence to prove it (nor, it must be added, to deny), that back in the earliest days, when the company was spread to its thinnest and widest proportions, Geiger had a research and development man working on a program in plant and pet psychiatry, and another that might link up weight loss with astral projection. The thought was that if something, anything, could be cobbled up into a product that would satisfy FDA and FCC standards in either of these fields, they could take it out and market it. Market what? one might ask. Market anything. It could have been a manual of sayings you would memorize and then repeat while rubbing a special ointment onto your forehead, or on the leaves of your dying potted plant. It could have been an aluminum pyramid you balanced on top of your head for twenty minutes a day, seated in lotus, if somebody else hadn't got to that idea first. The point is, Geiger's range of products and ventures was wider than it was deep, was more whimsical than its profits would have led one to believe, and that was just the way Faw had wanted it to be organized, to spread the odds. Like the island starfish that Desmond and Berg and I would find in the foaming surf, the Sprawl had a way of self-generating new limbs with such ease that its very nature invited breakage, and multiplication. Indeed, whatever problem there had been in Munich he resolved, I would surmise, by splitting the company into branches, pruning it, thinning it, disentangling the disputers as he sliced away, putting Cato's maxim to work in such a way that everyone involved in being divided and conquered was grateful to have been of service. I know this because I have seen him do it any number of times since.

“Men,” he advised Berg, whom despite all his rebellious behavior Faw hoped to polish into a protégé, “are very often just like Grace's starfish”—I began to collect the starfish during my walks on the beach, bring them home to dry, four legs or five it didn't matter so much to me, and shellac. “They float around, walk around, cling to this and that, and hope for the best. It's when something goes wrong, they—men and starfish—react in different ways. The starfish never wants to lose his arm. He never wants to come under attack by a big ravenous sea snake, or a big greasy eel, say. But men, you'll see when you get older, a lot of them go out of their way to lose their arm.”

“Yeah?”—Berg was always more attentive when Faw resorted to this type of imagery to illustrate his points.

“And why?”

“Why?”

“I'll tell you why. The starfish grows his arm back, he has no choice. Maybe he even likes it better with four arms instead of five. Maybe he thinks, Hey this is better for walking around on the coral, or whatever. But his genes tell the wound to grow back the arm, because starfish are supposed to have five arms, and starfish do what nature wants them to do. Men? They don't play by the same rules. Men are not simple servants of Nature, but servants of their own will as well. Sometimes they go in and let themselves be attacked by the sea snake just so they'll lose that arm, just to see whether they have the ability to grow it back.”