The Other (3 page)

“Me, too.”

“Except for my parents. They can be unhappy and die.”

It sounded like something a rich kid would say, and since I didn’t understand it, I didn’t answer.

At the south end of Elliott Bay Park, under a roof overhang on Pier 70, we saw someone sitting against a creosoted timber, wrapped in a sleeping bag and wearing what looked to be one of those synthetic coonskin caps kids used to get for Christmas—an acne-scarred Indian planted between brown plastic garbage sacks and burlap bags—and when he asked if we could spare some change, we both put all the coins we had into his outstretched coffee tin.

J
OHN
W
ILLIAM HAD
a Chevrolet Impala with cream paint and a vinyl top. His parents bought it new in ’67 and drove it for five years before handing him the keys, and it was this Impala that we used, as frequently as we could, to light out for the territories—to light out with all the subtext of escape implied by that phrase from
Huck Finn.
Before we were nineteen, we had already climbed Mount Saint Helens (before it famously blew), Mount Rainier, Mount Baker, and Mount Adams—in short, we were mountaineers at an early and reckless age. We’d hiked beside the ocean from Point of the Arches to the Quillayute Needles, and we’d seen the Pickets in the North Cascades, and the range above the Hoh now known as the Valhallas but back then still called the Pleiades. That Impala served us well. Once, near Yellow Bluff, on State Route 109, along the coast, John William pulled over to face the breaking waves and told me that here, where we were now sitting, looking at the ocean on a summer afternoon, something had happened which he remembered in detail from five years earlier—from the year when his mother, Ginnie Barry, landed in a psych ward.

In the spring John William was telling me about—the spring of ’67—she’d become obsessed with Ralph Nader’s
Unsafe at Any Speed
and wouldn’t eat in restaurants because of DDT and BHC. She kept a copy of
New and Nonofficial Drugs
on her bedside table and became an expert on adrenal glands. She was forty-six, and she’d lost weight to the point where her blouses and jackets hung from her prominent clavicles like sheets. She stayed in bed a lot, with her face sandwiched between fat pillows, worrying, she told John William, that the prevailing winds had driven nuclear radiation toward Seattle from H-bomb test islands in the South Pacific. Examining the Impala one afternoon, she insisted that its windshield appeared pitted by an airborne pollutant no one talked about. The plants in the yard were dying, too—everything looked bleached to the wrong color, in her eye, especially the laurel hedges.

One Saturday night, John William explained, his father decided to weather-treat, in the basement, his sailing sloop’s teak hatch covers. Before long, his mother got her car keys, trapped a note under a refrigerator magnet—
RAND, YOU’VE POISONED US WITH VARATHANE
—and told John William to get his coat.

John William was eleven. His mother drove off after forcing him into the back seat, where he kept a stack of comic books. They made their way south on old 99, and by midnight they’d driven around Puget Sound and were speeding west, toward the true ocean of breakers and swells—the ocean as opposed to the inland sea near Seattle—which his mother believed was cleansing. She told him this. There were mythic overtones to the ocean, she said, that shouldn’t be underestimated. John William replied that from his point of view it didn’t seem normal to leave for the ocean so late at night without planning and without Dad. His mother struck back with a lecture on Varathane. The entire family of polyurethanes posed a threat to humankind, she told him. They reached the coast in darkness and knew they were there from the din of the surf and the line of white rollers in the Impala’s diffuse headlights. “Ah, love,” said John William’s mother, pressing the button that let down her window and quoting from Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” “let us be true to one another,” and then she began crying with a hand over her mouth while the ocean air funneled in. Next she sat listening to the waves with her forehead propped against the steering wheel. There was a long spate of nose blowing before she reached into her handbag for a scarf and tied it under her chin. “Well,” she said, drying her eyes, “that’s the melancholy, long withdrawing roar you’ve heard tell of, John William, retreating to the breath of the night-wind down the naked shingles of the world.”

“I don’t understand what you’re talking about,” John William replied.

“For the world,” his mother recited, “which seems to lie before us like a land of dreams, hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain. So now I think I’m going to take that beach walk I came all this way down here for.”

“It’s dark and it’s raining.”

“Ever more purifying.”

“Why are you doing this?”

“For its cleansing properties.”

“You’re acting strange,” John William pointed out.

“What’s strange,” answered Ginnie, “is what’s normal.”

She disappeared then. We have to imagine John William before 911 and cell phones getting out of the Impala every once in a while to lean into the darkness and yell for his mother—his voice disappearing into the Pacific—and honking the horn a lot, which was grating and hard to listen to for long, even switching on the headlights and then coming to believe that in the swirl of white water he could see her like a silkie from an Irish yarn, next calming down enough not to believe it, resorting to his comic books but not distracted by them, as he hoped to be, finally going out onto the beach, where he tripped on driftwood and cut his palm on a shell, though not badly, and got soaked in the dark. She could have gone either way, he knew, and the coast was long. He sat in the car again, in the front seat this time, thinking now of horror stories involving lone parked cars on dark rainy nights, and weaving these phantasms together with the creeping suspicion that his mother had committed suicide in the salty undertow of the ocean. With this intimation came a pang of guilt: Why had he let her stumble off, crying, into this ominous night landscape? And also anger: Why had she included him in her willed death by drowning? Why had she brought him along?

When it was light enough and the rain had tapered off, he went out onto the road and flagged down the first car coming down from Moclips. This was a desolate stretch of coast, so it wasn’t until noon that the hunt for his mother was in full swing, involving the Coast Guard, a search-and-rescue team, and volunteers with dogs. John William was given a cheese sandwich and a cup of hot chocolate. His father arrived with family friends, the Mitchells—the Barrys’ golf-and-boating partners—and with John William’s aunt and uncle, Sis and Walter. John William’s father got out of the Mitchells’ Lincoln Continental carrying binoculars and his Burberry rain slicker. “I’m sorry, son,” he said. “I’m sorry you’ve had to put up with this.”

What followed was a lot of stumbling over driftwood and a lot of talking into handheld radios. It began to get cold; the tide came in. At around six, John William’s mother was located, sitting under a tree on Yellow Bluff, and when she was brought down from there, wind-whipped and sea-sprayed, John William heard a search-and-rescue volunteer use the term “fruitcake.” At dusk, John William’s father put his mother into the back seat of the Lincoln and slid in beside her like a bodyguard. “That’s all,” he said. “We’ve all had enough, Ginnie. Just look what you’ve put John William through.”

“Move away, Rand,” she answered. “You’re poisonous.”

I
REMEMBER WHERE
John William lived with his father. It was a Tudor in Laurelhurst, behind trimmed hedges, from the outside staid, but inside modern. Matched suspension chairs, a tripod table with a smoked-glass top, a stereo console in bleached white birch, a sectional sofa with wedge-shaped cushions—it was the style once known as Contemporary Living, the House of Today from yesterday, the house trumpeted as futuristic at the Seattle World’s Fair in ’62. Laurelhurst is among our city’s most coveted neighborhoods, and the Barrys lived on the water there, with a fine lawn falling to the Lake Washington shore. Yet their Tudor, in its context, didn’t look immodest. To get there, you drove on East Laurelhurst Drive, underneath elms and past Spanish-style mission homes and grandly scaled Craftsman mansions. A lot of Laurelhurst is labyrinthine and claustrophobic, chiefly because every square foot of its real estate is worth so much, but from the Barrys’ east windows, giving out onto the lake, there was no hint of this urban density. What you saw instead was their L-shaped dock, and Rand’s sloop—the
Cornucopia II
—cradled and cleated, with bumpers out. Since Rand was gone a lot on sales trips, John William and I often raided his onboard liquor cabinet. In the house, we uncorked wine bottles and foraged through stainless-steel cupboards, where Rand kept, as I recall, green olives with pimientos and table water crackers. There was also very little in the refrigerator—Brie in crumpled cellophane, a lonely bottle or two of Heineken, herring in cream sauce, maybe a shriveled lime. John William was on the wing-it food program. He ate pot pies or pizza for dinner. I saw Rand maybe half a dozen times in over two years—like most teen-agers, I didn’t want to meet parents—because I made it a point to leave the house before he came home from work, or I went there only when I knew he was traveling, when his house was available for a free-for-all. I never saw Ginnie, since she lived in Taos, but I did spend time in her high-ceilinged study, the door to which had apparently been shut since she left for New Mexico and never opened again, at least by Rand. John William and I smoked dope from a waterpipe, sitting cross-legged on her Persian rug, and cranked up the expensive stereo system in her cabinet, which included a tape deck with UV meters and four audiophile’s speakers. This study was furnished artiste-style: a divan, a writing table, a small vintage typewriter, rarefied art books, poetry journals, and a fireplace with andirons and tongs. Ginnie’s private bathroom, entered from her study, was wallpapered with white-bellied nudes and decorated with half-melted candles in wrought-iron holders. There was a hammered-brass tub for toilet-seat magazines (
Art World, The Nation, Seattle
), and those nudes making you self-conscious while you tore off toilet paper. They were even on the ceiling, like Michelangelo’s Eve. There was also a very rough Georgia O’Keeffe pencil sketch, signed by the artist in a tremulous hand, but was it a man on a horse or an adobe hut?

Ginnie, apparently, was something of a poet. One of her verses had been printed as a broadside on antique parchment paper, and it hung in a frame behind her writing table:

Alki,
1851

They oared ashore through rain,

And though they were egregious in their long-distance purpose,

Kamogwa didn’t suck them under in his gyre,

And Thunderbird, on high, watched.

Their friends hanged Bad Jim.

At the Mad House, Sawdust Women plied for coin.

Eskimo Joe cut timber in a union shirt.

Ikt papa ikt sockala Tiee
—one pope and one God—or so it was proclaimed.

Next came the box-houses and lectures on phrenology,

Faro and Little Egypt, dancing nude,

Bunco, vaudeville, nickelodeons, ragtime,

Pantages, jugglers, graft.

Then donkey engines turned bull teams to beef.

The wool dogs of the Squaxin went quietly extinct.

It rained on the tree farms and on the monuments to loggers,

And the Utopian Socialists surrendered.

The
Minuteman:
they built it.

The engineers in the football stadium:

It’s they who dreamed up Dyna-Soar,

Awake beside sleeping wives.

So I cast this prayer on the Ocean of Compassion:

O rising phallus on the plain above the waters,

Be as you are, germ seed of the future,

Help me to count what cannot be counted,

World after world,

And anchor me in Anchorless Mind,

Until I cease.

Virginia Barry
1966
Seattle, Washington

When I asked John William what “Alki, 1851” was about, he said it was about his mother’s pretensions, like everything else in her study—the concertos on tape, the Kenneth Callahan landscapes, the framed Barnard diploma, the black-and-white photo of Ginnie with Ansel Adams at Taos Pueblo. To me, she looked alluring standing beside Adams with her Frida Kahlo unibrow and severely parted hair, her taut, exposed arms and undaunted expression, as if Adams was of no significance.

John William’s father was a Boeing honcho—first as a project engineer, and later as a vice-president in sales—and early in his career was quoted in the papers on a combination rocket and pilotless airplane, called BOMARC, meant to foil Russian bombers. His family was Irish but not potato-famine Irish, and his ancestors included the John Barry known as the Father of the American Navy. His grandfather, a railroad man, an associate of the financier and robber baron Jay Cooke, had made his fortune floating bonds, then lost it when Cooke closed his bank. His father had been a partner in Diversified Securities, a three-term Washington State legislator, part-owner of the United Exchange Building, a founder of First Seattle Dexter Horton National Bank, and a majority shareholder in the United Pacific Casualty Insurance Company, which underwrote automobile insurance. In other words, the Barrys can be found, consistently, in the lore of our city. The same is true on John William’s mother’s side, which goes back to the Denny Party—the twenty-two Midwesterners who went ashore in 1851 at Alki Point to start Seattle. A certain Hiram Post was a member of this Denny Party. In 1867, he married Eustacia Case Strong. One of their daughters was Lydia Strong Post—Anglo all the way, but with a Native American name. Lydia Strong Post married H. C. Best—founder of Seattle’s Best Trust and Savings Bank, and later of the United Bond & Share Corporation—and their daughter, Dorothy Post Best, married Cyrus Worthington. Moving one more branch down the family tree, we come to Ginnie Barry, née Virginia Best Worthington—in other words, John William’s mother. In sum, my friend came from westering pioneers on both sides, and from people with pressing material ambitions who made sure he had every advantage.