The People in the Trees (6 page)

For my father she would bring something whimsical—a bird whistle one of her patients had carved, a container of maple syrup in its pebbly jug, a book on rock collecting. For Owen she brought books, puzzles, sheets of drawing paper so thick with cotton they were fibrous.

But as much as Sybil liked us all, I was clearly her favorite. Although Sybil loved Owen and he her, they never had the sort of relationship that my aunt and I enjoyed with each other. In fact, I have always suspected that Sybil regarded Owen as a bit facile, and although she highly praised all his artistic efforts (the epic poems, the abstract sketches of farm life), she did so with only a sort of diffused general enthusiasm; she could never offer him any specific criticism or praise. She did not have a disdain, exactly, for art, or artists, but neither did she make much of an attempt to understand either.

To be fair, I should here add that Owen never felt about Sybil as
I did, chiefly for two reasons. The first had nothing to do with Sybil herself, even. It was simply that Owen had always attributed a sort of mystique to my absent mother and torpid father—against the backdrop of an American culture he would eventually declare vulgar and excessively ambitious, he considered their lassitude radical and even rebellious. (To me, however, inertia does
not
constitute rebellion.) Of course, Owen too had phantom parents, but where mine were impaired, his were, for lack of a better word, countercultural. I have always thought that Owen’s greatest regret was that he wasn’t born thirty years later to a pair of Beatniks.

The other reason Owen never cared for Sybil as passionately as I did
did
have to do with Sybil. Although he respected her mind and was fond of her, he also considered her inelegant and untaught in all things cultural. But while that may have been essentially true, it doesn’t negate the fact—as I have argued with Owen many times in the past—that she was still the most
vital
adult in our lives. Were it not for her, we would not have been given an alternative model of adult behavior and might have applied ourselves toward less challenging vocations.

At any rate, Sybil always saved the best presents for me: a small microscope; an old stethoscope; a hand-lettered resin model of the heart. She brought me cases of African dung beetles mounted on pieces of stiff white cardboard and encased in black leather frames. There was a ball and bat, which came with an early physics lesson; an old radio she lugged down from Rochester, only to show me how to disassemble it; a thick slab of magnifying glass and a lecture to go with it, after she discovered me crouched on the hard dust road, roasting ants to death.

Sybil’s gift the year I turned eleven was a book that seemed initially something of a misstep.
The Lives of the Great Scientists
was unimaginatively written and childishly illustrated and the text insultingly cheery and simple, as if for a dull six-year-old. Really it was no more than a sort of “Who’s Who” of the scientific canon, in which all the “top” scientists (their names, their important contributions, etc.; I half expected to see their height, weight, and extracurricular interests listed as well) were given a short entry, as if scientists, like baseball players, could be ranked in some sort of
definitive fashion. I must say, though, that as absurd as this concept seemed at the time, it becomes more appealing by the year. (In fact, I was given my own entry in the most recent, 1994, edition. The text was of course extremely reductive, but no less inaccurate than many biographical sketches many times its length.
⁸
The entry also includes a picture of me with Philip,
⁹
who was around ten at the time. The photo’s quality is so poor that Philip’s face appears merely as a round dark circle with a gash of white for his smile. I myself appear hulking, awkward, a gently bumbling circus act.)

But to continue—the book, of course, was hardly my introduction to the possibilities and workings of the natural world, but it was, I suppose, my introduction to the personalities of science, with whom I found myself deeply fascinated. For it was then that I realized there is a certain sort of mind that turns to science, and this, I decided, was the sort of mind I admired.

II
.

I have already mentioned the curving staircase that ran up the center of our house. It was incongruously fancy for such an architecturally modest place and always seemed to me something like a visitor, destined to return one day to its proper and glorious permanent state, joining two floors in a Fifth Avenue town house. This affectation had been installed by the previous owner (a fledgling architect who had attended Columbia and had never quite overcome the humiliation of having to leave the city to return to his family’s property in Lindon), and although the construction was sound and the wood solid, the staircase had fallen into disrepair in the fifty years it had endured our family. My father spoke often and halfheartedly of tearing it down and replacing it with something simpler, but he never did, and so it was that by the time he died and I returned to the farm, the staircase had all but collapsed, and Owen and I were forced to use a ladder to access our old bedrooms on the second floor.

But in 1935 the staircase, while not especially aesthetically pleasing, was at least still functional, and at any rate quite suitable for my needs. I decided to begin my project from the top stair and paint my way down. The staircase’s carpet had been removed some years before, and because the steps were so shaggy with dust and splinters, each one needed a few layers of paint before the grain of the wood was obscured. I made my way down the twenty steps, painting the front, bottom, and sides of each with varying colors in turn. After a few hours the paint dried and I once again began at the top of the stairs. Working my way down, I painted on the front and top of each step the name of a different scientist. By the time I had finished, the staircase was a blaze of color and words: Curie at the top, Galileo beneath her, Einstein beneath him, Gregor Mendel, James Clerk Maxwell, Marcello Malpighi, Carolus Linnaeus, Nicolaus Copernicus, and so forth. I had listed the names in no particular sequence, only as they occurred to me. But before I could complete my project, I was interrupted by Owen, who began yelling at me for not including him in it. Our ensuing fight brought my father and Lester ambling in from outside, and after gaping at the staircase for a long, silent moment (during which even Owen and I held our breath),
Lester began screaming that we needed to be beaten, the harder the better. And then, unexpectedly, my father began to laugh.

The three of us—Owen, Lester, and I—froze, all of us in mid-speech. Until that day, neither Owen nor I had ever heard our father laugh before. It was an unremarkable laugh, wheezy and rusty, and, I thought, irritatingly lacking in much enthusiasm or mirth or energy. The laugh lasted for only a few seconds, after which my father concluded this uncharacteristic expression of emotion by saying, “See, Lester, I can’t destroy the staircase now—the boys have taken it over.”

Lester scowled, disappointed that Owen and I hadn’t received a proper punishment (he didn’t think much of my father’s parenting skills), and I too was angry, although for different reasons. Somehow my wonderful tribute to the mind of the scientist had been co-opted by my father to be employed as another justification for his idleness! But interestingly, the staircase—which my father left undisturbed not from any respect for my work but, as I have said, from his own laziness—would become much more significant than any of us then realized.

I have already noted that Owen and I returned to the house upon my father’s death. In his last year, my father had, not surprisingly, taken to living in absolute squalor, and the house had transformed itself into a barn of sorts, with small rodents and untamed, unclaimed cats rummaging through the sticky kitchen cupboards. By the time we returned in 1946 (since leaving for college four years earlier, we had proved almost wholly successful in our resolve never to return to Indiana), the house had gone without cleaning for at least four years, and I do not embellish when I say that it was a disaster—peeling floorboards, rusted door hinges that screeched so gratingly we tried never to open them, furniture that choked out great vogs of dust when we sat upon them. And then there was the debris, which had been vomited throughout every room—papers, crumpled boxes and cracked bottles, various neglected gadgets. My father hadn’t, presumably, been upstairs in some time, because the ladder, when Owen and I finally discovered it under the house, was rusty and unyielding after what must have been years of neglect. (Upstairs there was a mess of such proportions that contemplating it still exhausts me. We found a family of bats nesting in the beams
above Owen’s bed, whole dynasties of mice, balls of dust as big as human heads, replete with snarls of unidentifiable hair.) But it was the staircase, its crude, old-fashioned primary colors deadened from age and dirt and the canopies of glittering spiderwebs that covered it, that gave us both pause.

This was a massive staircase, and its collapse meant that my father was allowed only a small space—perhaps less than two hundred square feet—in which to live. It had bisected the living room, so that in order to enter the kitchen, one would first have to go outside and around the house to the kitchen door. In the summertime this was merely inconvenient, but in the winter, with its harsh winds and buffets of snow, such a trek would be arduous for even a young person. Because there was no makeshift bed in his small living quarters, and because my father had been discovered lying facedown in the grass some yards from the house early that March, we concluded that he must have been attempting to stagger to the kitchen—which was dismayingly ill-stocked: just a few tins of tomatoes and a can of mushroom soup—when he had his heart attack. (We later discovered a sad little bed constructed from some deteriorating quilts and an old sofa cushion in the little lean- to formed by the outside wall and the screened-in sunporch attached to the back of the living room.) It would therefore not be too great an exaggeration to say that the staircase was responsible for killing my father, although ultimately he killed himself with his own laziness. Even his suicide was an act of characteristic passivity.

I was torn between sympathy for and annoyance with my father’s pathetic end. What can you say of a man who neglects his house until his house destroys him? Really, though, I was sorrier about my staircase, although it was purely a nostalgic reaction. As I had grown older, it had only irritated with its childishness in both conception and execution, and although I always said I would, I never did find the time to paint it over. Shades, I suppose, of my father yet.

Neither Owen nor I placed much value on funerals, but partly from a sort of guilt at the humiliating way in which our father had died, and partly out of guilt for not having attended our mother’s funeral, we found a small church and convinced the local pastor, a
man whose name I no longer remember (Reverend Cunningham having long since died), to perform the services.

Only a dozen or so people appeared at the funeral to mourn my father’s death. Lester Drew had been institutionalized by his niece after he had had a severe stroke some years before, and so the only people in attendance were curious townsfolk, most of whom we didn’t recognize, and some former employees of my father’s, farmers and sharecroppers mostly, of whom we had dim recollections. I think some people were there simply to see how a rich man dies.
¹⁰
I imagine that the whole affair must have been a great disappointment to them—the shabby church, the pastor’s vague and tentative sermon, the unenthusiastic expressions on my and Owen’s faces, the scarcity of people and the absence of friends and family. If this was how one of the richest men in town was laid to rest, they must have thought, what bleak ceremony (if any at all) awaited them? Had we not been so young and callous, we would have thrown a more impressive and festive funeral, if only to reassure them. At the time, though, we were not in the habit of attempting to assuage others’ insecurities.