My Father's Tears and Other Stories Page 2

  We only slowly became aware of the Arab in robes lying thirty yards away, his face turned toward us. His face—dark, pentagonal—stayed turned in our direction, staring with some thrust of silent pain, of congested avidity, out of the foreshortened rumple of his robes. Genevieve and Caleb fell silent at their castle. Judith drifted closer to us. None of us ventured to the inviting edge of the sea, across the waste of sand, through the silent shimmer of the Arab’s stare. So softly the children couldn’t hear, Mommy murmured to me, “Don’t look, but that man is masturbating.”

  He was. Out of his folds. At Judith and us.

  I stood, my knees trembling, and organized our rapid retreat from the beach, and that afternoon we located the private pool—admission a mere dirham—where all the Europeans were swimming and tanning safe from the surrounding culture. We went to the pool every day of our five in Agadir. The sun shone and there was little wind. We had found a small hotel run by an old French couple; it was wrapped in bougainvillea, with a parrot in the courtyard and a continental menu.

  Not ten years before, on February 29, 1960, an earthquake in Agadir had killed an estimated twelve thousand people and devastated much of the city. We saw no traces of the disaster. In Agadir we rejoined the middle classes. We had money again. I had cabled my London bank, and they had worked out one of their beloved British “arrangements” with a bank in Agadir. The bank building had a prim granite façade, erected since 1960, but inside it had more the flavor of a livestock close. Merchants in shepherds’ robes muttered and waited at a long chaotic counter. As each transaction ripened, names were shouted in Arabic. When my own was shouted out, evidently the amount of money cabled from London was called out with it. The muttering ceased. Astonished brown-eyed glances flew along the counter in my direction. I had swelled to immense size—a prodigy, a monster, of money. Blushing, I wanted to explain, as I stuffed the pastel notes into my worn wallet, “I have children to feed.”

  Genevieve liked to feed the dogs that haunted our hotel. Pets in foreign places are strange: to think, they understand French or Arabic better than you do. And they never look quite like American animals, either: a different tilt to their eyes, a different style of walking. Most of our slides, it turned out, were of these animals, out of focus. The children had got hold of the Nikon.

  We escaped from Agadir, from Morocco, narrowly. On a basketball-sized globe of the Earth, you can mark with the breadth of a thumbnail the distance we drove that last day. At the Air Maroc office, they told us there was no space for six persons on any flight from Agadir to Tangier, where we did have rooms at a hotel that night, and airplane reservations to Paris the next morning. There was nothing to do but drive it, the distance it had taken us days to traverse, five hundred miles, eight hundred kilometers, along the northwest shoulder of Africa.

  We set out at dawn. We had secured a big bag of oranges and bottles of Perrier water. Daddy drove, hour after hour; Mommy refused to drive in Morocco, or perhaps the car rental terms excluded her. You children, all four crammed into the back of the little Renault, were quiet, sensing, as children do, real danger, real need.

  In some dusty small city, perhaps Safi, I failed to see a red light and drove through it. A whistle shrilled, and in the rearview mirror, as clearly as I had seen the little flower girl stamp her foot, I saw a policeman in a white helmet calmly writing down our license number. His white helmet receded. His gaze followed us. My stomach sank. But the street continued straight, and the pedestrians in their dusty native garb continued indifferently to go about their business. In another day we would be safe in Paris; and the traffic light had been very poorly placed, off to the side and behind some advertising signs. Criminally, I drove on. The boys cheered; the girls weren’t so sure.

  “Maybe he would just have bawled you out,” Genevieve said.

  “Fat chance,” Mark argued. “He would have put Dad in some awful pokey full of rats and cooties.”

  “I saw the light,” Mommy said mildly, “and assumed you did, too, dear.”

  “Thanks a bunch,” I said, less mildly.

  “I didn’t see it,” said Caleb, our born consoler and compromiser. “Maybe it was yellow, and turned.”

  “Who saw it and thinks it was yellow?” I asked hopefully.

  Silence was the answer.

  “Who saw it and what color was it?”

  “Red,” three voices chorused.

  “What do you all want me to do? Turn around and try to explain to the cop? Je regrette beaucoup, monsieur, mais je n’ai pas vu le, la lumi—”

  “No!” another chorus proclaimed, Mommy abstaining.

  “You’ve made your decision,” Judith told me, in almost a woman’s voice.

  “Step on it, Dad,” Mark said.

  We were already on the outskirts of town, and no police car was giving chase. The empty green pastures, the smooth empty road reclaimed us. Our prolonged struggle down the coast was rerun backwards. Here was the little restaurant in the meadow on the cliff. Here was the place where everybody refused to eat the liver sandwiches that the one-eyed man had cooked for us on a charcoal burner set up beside the road. Here was Casablanca, which didn’t look at all like the movie. And here was Rabat. The red banners were down, the Russians had moved on. By now it was late afternoon, and Daddy’s neck muscles ached, his eyes felt full of sand, and he had grown certain that his license-plate number was being telegraphed up and down the coast, through the network of secret police that all monarchies maintain. At any moment sirens would wail, and he would be arrested, arrested and thrust deep into the bitter truth of Morocco, which he had tried to ignore, while stealing the sun and the exotica.

  Or the police would be waiting for him at the hotel desk in Tangier; already his name would have been traced from Restinga through a trail of one-night stops to the receipt he had signed in the bank in Agadir. Or else there would be a scene at the airport: handcuffs at passport control. Oh, why hadn’t I stopped when the whistle blew?

  Had my French been less primitive, I might have stopped.

  Had we not recently read, in a Newsweek at the hotel with the parrot, an article about innocent Americans moldering away in African and Asian prisons, I might have stopped.

  Had the United States not been fighting so indefensibly yet inextricably in Vietnam, I might have stopped.

  Had it not been for the red flags in Rabat, the masturbating man on the beach, the dead girl by the truck wheel… my failure or refusal or cowardice still exists, a stain upon my memories of Morocco.

  It was dark when we pulled into Tangier, and the hotel could be reached only through a maze of one-way streets, but the desk clerk had our reservation nicely written down, and no arrest warrant to hand me. The king himself could not have been more tourist-friendly; the gray-haired bellhop (who looked like Omar Sharif) smiled as he accepted my little salad of dirham notes; the waiters in the hotel restaurant bowed as deeply as if we were their only customers. Which, at that hour, we almost were; the trip had taken fifteen hours. We had consumed the full bag of oranges and drunk all the Perrier water. We parted sadly, the next morning, with our loyal Renault, which had never broken down and which we returned covered with dust. The people at Hertz, whose license plate had been so sinned against, scarcely looked up from doing the calculations that, a month later, were to arrive in London out of the ozone of numbers that blankets the globe. We had escaped.

  Remember Paris, children? In the raw spring cool of the budding Tuileries, we still clustered close. In the back seat of the Renault, there hadn’t been room enough for all four of you to sit back at the same time, so one of you, usually Genevieve, had to sit forward, breathing on my ear. Mommy, strapped in beside me, doled out oranges and water; Caleb and Mark tirelessly debated who was “squishing” whom; Judith, by the window, tried to dream herself away. We had achieved, in Morocco, maximum family compression, and could only henceforth disperse. Growing up, leaving home, watching your parents divorce—all, in the decade since, have happened. B
ut on a radiant high platform of the Eiffel Tower I felt us still molded, it seemed, forever together.

  Personal Archaeology

  IN HIS INCREASING ISOLATION—elderly golfing buddies dead or dying, his old business contacts fraying, no office to go to, his wife always off at her bridge or committees, his children as busy and preoccupied as he himself had been in middle age—Craig Martin took an interest in the traces left by prior owners of his land. In the prime of his life, when he worked ten or twelve hours every weekday and socialized all weekend, he had pretty much ignored his land. Years had passed without his setting foot on some corners of it. The ten acres were there to cushion his house from the encroachments of close neighbors, and as an investment against the day when these acres would be sold, most likely to a developer, the profit going to Craig’s widow, Grace, who was six years younger than he.

  The place, as he understood it, had been a wooded hill at the back of an estate until around 1900. A well-heeled, somewhat elderly man, marrying tardily, built a spacious summer house for his bride and himself on what had been a boulder-framed picnic spot, with enough trees felled to afford a glimpse of the Atlantic, a third of a mile away.

  There were old roads on the property, built up on retaining walls of big fieldstones, too steep and with turns too sharp for any combustion-driven car. Horses must have pulled vehicles up these hairpin turns, through these enduring tunnels of green; trees are shy, even after decades, of taking root on soil once packed tight by wheels. Standing on the edge of one of the several granite cliffs he owned, Craig imagined farm wagons or pony carts creaking and rattling toward him, the narrow spoked wheels laboring up swales, now choked with greenbrier, that he imagined to have been roadways, bringing young people in summer muslin and beribboned bonnets and white ducks and straw boaters up, past where he stood, to a picnic high in the woods.

  But Massachusetts land was, a century ago, mostly cleared, bare to the wind and sun, cropped by sheep and cows. Perhaps he was imagining it all wrong. The winding roadway ran head-on into a spiky wall of monoliths; how had it climbed the rest of the hill? Near the house, the granite outcroppings bore enigmatic testimony. There were holes drilled here and there, as if to anchor iron gates or heavy awnings. A veranda with a sea view had long ago rotted away, and Craig himself had replaced a dilapidated pillared porch on the front of the house, facing the circular asphalt driveway, once a gravel carriage-turn.

  The woods held vine-covered mounds of jagged rock that he took to be left over from the blasting of the house foundations. In the early years of the twentieth century, crews of masons fresh from Italy roamed this neighborhood, building giant walls that were gradually, stone by stone, collapsing. One night a section of retaining wall holding up his wife’s most ambitious flower garden collapsed, spilling not just earth and flowers but ashes, of the clinkerish sort produced by a coal furnace, and a litter of old cans and glass jars. The garden’s subsoil had been an ash-and-trash dump. When had the garden been created, then? Later than he thought, perhaps—the same era when the concrete wells for the cold frames were poured—sunken beds now roofed by frames of punky wood, crumbled putty, and shattering glass.

  In Craig’s mind, the property had four eras before his. First, there was the era of creation and perfect maintenance, when the enthusiastic, newly married rich man was still alive, and servants bustled from the stone sinks in the basement out to the bricked drying yard with baskets of steaming laundry, and the oiled cedar gutters poured rainwater down gurgling downspouts into fully functional underground drains. Then this happy man died, and the widow—much younger than he, preferring the society of Boston to her lonely house on the hill—imposed a largely absentee reign, in which one dining-room wall with its hand-printed pictorial French wallpaper was ruined by a winter leak, and the dainty verandas of the summer house, pillared and balustered appendages exposed to the weather, slowly succumbed to blizzards and nor’easters. There came an era when she, too, was dead and the house stood empty. Perhaps most of the neglect and damage should be assigned to this interregnum, which ended just before World War II, when a young and growing family took on the place as a year-round residence. Central heating was installed, and a pine-panelled study was carved from the grandiose front hall, and the brick chimneys were repointed and the leaky roof shingles replaced. Improvements were halted by World War II. The man of the house enlisted to sail the ocean, which was visible from the windows until they were covered with black-out paper.

  The hero returned as a rear admiral, and lived in the house until he was eighty and all five of his children had moved on to places and families of their own. From this long and busy era Craig dated most of the oddments he found in the woods—Mason jars, flowerpots, shotgun shells, rubber tires half sunk in the leaf-mold and holding a yellow oblong of scummy water, pieces of buried iron pipe, rusted strands of wire testifying to some bygone fencing project. Tree houses had been built and abandoned amid the rocks and trees. Porcelain insulators and insulated copper strands carried the ghost of electricity; parts of a motorcycle engine, filmed with blackened grease, remembered a time when the steep old roads served a young man’s racing game. These acres had absorbed much labor: stacked between pairs of still-living trees, logs cut to fireplace length moldered and grew fungi; Craig’s shoes scuffed into view beneath the leaves a sparkling layer of carbon, the charcoal residue of old fires. There were pits that looked dug, and mounds too regular to be natural. Above the railroad tracks, along a path trespassers had worn beside a once-impeccable square-cut wall that now leaned dangerously out over the eroded embankment, he picked up beer cans, plastic six-pack holders, shards of shattered glass, bottles of indestructible plastic. On the lower reaches of the land, where a broad path across pine needles wound downward toward a causeway that would eventually lead trespassers, through several private domains, to a beach, there had been a virtual snowfall of pale plastic litter—styrofoam-cup tops, flexible straws, milk containers. Craig was rewarded, in his occasional harvests with a garbage bag, by finding, hidden in the greenbrier and marsh grass, bottles of a nostalgic thickness, such as he as a child had drunk root beer and sarsaparilla from.

  Trespassers and owners and guests had trodden the land, craggy as it was—trodden and scarred it. In an incident that had been described to him by an ancient friend of the previous owner, an unsteady dinner guest, one icy, boozy night, had climbed into his car and promptly slid into the wall of great stones on a curve of the asphalt driveway. The bumper had knocked out, like a single tooth, a molar-shaped boulder that now sat some dozen yards into the woods—a permanent monument to a moment’s mishap, too massive, in this weakling latter age, to be moved back into position. When Craig inquired about bringing the equipment in to move it back, he was told the weight of the backhoe might break down the driveway.

  In a seldom-visited declivity beyond this great granite cube, Craig, picking up deadwood, found a charred work-glove, stiff as a dead squirrel, with the word SARGE written on the back in the sort of felt-tip marker that didn’t come into use until the 1960s. Who had Sarge been? Part of a work crew, Craig speculated, that had carelessly dropped his glove on the edge of a spreading grass fire. Or a woodsman who, while feeding brush into a blaze, had seen his hand flame up and flung the glove from him in pain. Nearer the house, raking up organic oddments in a spring cleaning, Craig spied beneath an overgrown forsythia bush a gleaming curve of white ceramic and, digging with his fingers, found it to be the handle of a teacup. He dug up six or so fragments; the delicate porcelain cup, gilt-rimmed, had been dropped or broken, perhaps by a child who in fright and guilt had buried the evidence in a shrub border. The quality of the cup suggested one of the early eras, perhaps the near-mythical first. Ceramic, unlike metal or wood, is impervious to time and moisture. But the earth, freezing and thawing in its annual cycle, can at last push up to the surface what the culprit thought had been safely buried and forever hidden.

  . . .

  Craig’s dreams, those that dist
urbed him enough to be remembered when he awoke, tended to return, like a dog to a buried kill, to a rather brief stretch of his life when he was embroiled in a domestic duplicity, an emotional bigamy. There was his first wife, who in these dreams had a certain ceramic smoothness, and his wife-to-be, whose discomfort seemed to occupy several corners of the dream’s screen while he scrambled to hold on to every human piece of the puzzle. Curiously, in his dreams he invariably lost the second woman—saw her flee and recede—so that it was with a soft shock that he awakened and realized that Grace, and not his first wife, Gloria, lay beside him in bed, as she had done for twenty years now. His confusion gradually cleared into relief, and he fell back asleep like a living bandage sealing over a wound. His children, now middle-aged, figured in the dream dramas indistinctly, shape-shifting participants in a kind of many-bodied party located halfway up the stairs; the party’s main ingredient, however, was not jollity but pain, a pain glutinously mixed of indecision, stretched communications, unexpressed apologies, and scarcely bearable suspense. Craig would wake to find that the party was long over, that he was an old man living out his days harmlessly on ten acres covered by a spotty mulch of previous generations. He rarely got invited anywhere.

  The parties had been vehicles for flirtation and exploration, a train of linked weekends carrying them all along in a giddy din; he and his friends were in the prime of their lives and expected that, as amusing and wonderful as things were, things even more wonderful were bound to happen. There were in fact two simultaneous parties, two layers of party—the overt layer, where they discussed, as adults, local politics, national issues (usually involving Richard Nixon), their automobiles and schools for their children, zoning boards and home renovations, and the covert layer, where men and women communicated with eye-glance and whisper, hand-squeeze and excessive hilarity. The second layer sometimes undermined the upper, and with it the seemingly solid structure of the closely intermingled families.