Disturbances in the Field Read online

  “Enough, enough!” she said. “I’m tired. I’m going home.”

  “Home! Don’t you do it. You’ve said often enough it was no home for you.” I had a sickening premonition of Esther taking up needlepoint and cats, lying on a chaise in her green bathrobe, rising only to powder her nose. “You’ll be sorry. Please, Esther, you can move in with us again if you like.” I was offering her the same cot in the same small room with two babies now, a cluttered household, and my own sour fog, but even so, it was better than home. Her mother had lapsed into premature senility and didn’t recognize the members of her family. There was a young nurse who she decided was her only daughter. When Esther visited she had to introduce herself, again and again. “She won’t even know you anyway. What do you hope to gain?”

  “Oh, she knows, she knows.” She paced our drab living room, smoking passionately, while Phil nursed on my lap and Althea banged the piano. “She knows who everyone is, she knows exactly what she’s saying, believe me.”

  “Esther. Even the doctors say it’s an illness. The brain cells deteriorate.”

  “Brain cells my foot. She’s saying what she’s felt all along, only now she has the excuse of being sick. Who am I and what am I doing in that house? That was always her message to me. Nothing has really changed.”

  “All the more reason not to go, then.” I shivered inside, for I harbored those feelings too, in secret. Who are these two babies and what are they doing in my house? What am I doing?

  “The hell with it. It’s a place to relax. Nothing ever changes there, just like those Greeks said in Philosophy 101.”

  She went. She sat talking to her mother, who was having a lucid spell and seemed to recognize her despite her bound-up shoulder and the black patch over her left eye. In a moment of weakness, yearning for commiseration, Esther confided a little about her recent sufferings. Her mother was attentive; for once her twitching hands fell still. Esther waited, tremulous.

  Her mother looked up, her eyes cloudy. “But are you happy?” she asked.

  “What!”

  “Are you happy, dear?” her mother crooned in a soft singsong. “Because if you’re happy, then I’m happy too.”

  Esther flew back to New York. She began seeing a therapist. She began proceedings for a divorce. She had a bridge made to replace the teeth knocked out in the accident. She got a job in a shelter for emotionally disturbed children and enrolled in social work school. And for a while she did seem happy. For a much longer while, though, she was cured of her yearning for commiseration.

  Victor’s family dissolved too. His mother, Edith, died of bone cancer in 1972. His father, Paul, is still alive but cannot remember how many children we have or their names—Althea, Phil, Alan, Vivian. He cannot always remember how many children he has or their names, Victor and Lily. He lives in a well-appointed nursing home in Westchester—carpeting and beautifully upholstered furniture and large steel elevators decorated with colorful notices of discussion groups and hootenannies. Lily found it and Victor objected: his father was not going to end his days in an institution—he would live with us if Lily could no longer handle him. Paul was wandering through Scarsdale’s rusticities, leaving the door unlocked, gas jets on, bathtub running. And Lily said sensibly, in her smoky voice, But he wants to go there. Come and see it. He likes the idea, Vic. Lily was right. He sings and eats and strolls, and on the days when he can remember the sequence of cards, plays cards. He likes it more than he likes us, it appears. Victor was hurt at first. Unparented. Did he spend four unwilling years in college to please this man who barely remembers him, he muttered in bed, who, when we visit, keeps us waiting till he finishes sticking tiles in a mosaic ashtray? Oh, there was a time a few years ago, before the walls of Paul’s blood vessels got so thick, when he would try to put on a good show. We could see him forcing energy into the lax muscles of his face, straining for the amenities of greeting, casting around for the proper gambits of conversation, so visibly relieved when he found them, so bereft when he exhausted them. We came prepared to entertain him but he wanted to entertain us, as he had done in the days of his health, with a gracious wit. Then after a while he stopped trying. He lost interest in everything except his own maintenance. He retired from being a father, grandfather, adult, as he had retired from being a lawyer. We watched it happen, and Victor came home and drank Jack Daniel’s in bed, glared at television, and made love fast, without talking. Then he got used to it.

  Amid all this decay here we stand, enjoying our heyday. We are six, flourishing; like the amaryllis the children grow almost as we look at them—tall, lanky children except for Althea, who is small like my mother and perfectly made. Yet she too takes up a great deal of space: her voice carries, her pronouncements are assured. No major defects. The only profound scare was when the pediatrician, after listening intently and for a very long time to Vivian’s three-year-old heart, put her back on my knee and told me she had an “innocent murmur.” Innocent because it occurs in early childhood, then vanishes. A peculiarity of the heartbeat. “Of no consequence at all”—in his fatherly way, flat honest eyes peering over bifocals, veined hand dangling a rag doll at her. “Now don’t go worrying—I see already you’re as pale as a ghost.” She could play ball, skate, ski, whatever she liked—a perfectly healthy child. Okay, I nodded. Only arrhythmic. Come to me my syncopated baby. That was how she spoke, too, in an innocent murmur. I did what he said, didn’t go worrying. Each year when we visit him for camp shots I plan to ask if it is gone yet, that innocent murmur, but I forget—his office is so crowded, he bustles so heartily through the routine examinations.

  We are fortunate and we know it, but not being believers we do not know where to address our thanks. Awkwardly, we address them to the void, to some rich source in the void.

  It is August and the camp bus has arrived safely once more, bringing Alan and Vivian home from the Quaker wilderness where they slept all summer in open wooden cabins, fed pigs and goats, swam in a freezing lake and partook of a Utopian communal spirit. The literature of this camp is mired by virtuous platitudes in hip language, but it is a magical place. On visitors’ day the faces we meet on the stony paths are luminous. That is because they have the Inner Light, Alan tells us. Vivie says it is simply that everyone acts nice to each other.

  I am in the kitchen with the two open trunks and Alan, who is eating Mallomars and drinking Coke. The Quaker camp’s food is virtuous too, and he comes home starved for junk. With thumb and index finger, touching as little of the fabric as I can, I lift clothes from the trunk and drop them into the washing machine. Clinging to some items are twigs, dry leaves, small clumps of Vermont soil. They say the European immigrants, our forefathers, brought over clumps of soil to kiss, but I throw these relics in the garbage. A pungent smell slowly fills the kitchen—dark earth and greenery mingled with children’s unwashed clothing. I open the window wider. Alan is describing the various levels of achievement in woodsmanship.

  “The highest thing you can do is if you stay out alone in the woods for four days or maybe a week, I don’t remember, and you have to hunt and skin and cook your own food—and all you have is the basic equipment, what you can carry on your back.”

  “I hope you didn’t try that. I wonder what they cook.”

  “I guess squirrel. You don’t have to worry. Only one person in the whole history of the camp ever did it. Vivie did well this year. She got her first Woodswoman plaque.”

  “That’s great. Terrific.”

  As he pauses to eat I listen to Vivie’s song, coming from the shower in a pure soprano. She ran to the shower with glee, like a Bedouin to an oasis. In camp they had showers once a week, cold, three minutes long. I listen, because against the background of splashing water like vivid Romantic orchestration, comes the exultant, rising melody from Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring. Her voice always perfectly on key, the mystery of where she learned that melody, the pleasure of having them back, all suddenly swell in me—an instant of joy. The next ins
tant I notice a caterpillar crawling in the T-shirt I’m holding.

  “Alan, please remove this since you’re so woodsy.”

  He laughs at me and lets it creep around on his palm.

  “That song she’s singing. Where did she learn that?”

  “‘Simple Gifts.’ That was one of our songs.”

  “It’s from Aaron Copland. Appalachian Spring. A ballet by a famous American composer.”

  He is immune to pedantry. “It’s just a song. ‘Simple Gifts.’“

  Copland did use folk melodies, I remember. “Wait a minute.” I brush off my hands and go to rummage in my studio. The ancient record jacket of Appalachian Spring says, “Its simple beauty and fullness of heart lie partly in the use of Pennsylvania Dutch and Shaker tunes.” It mentions “Simple Gifts.”

  “You’re right,” I tell him, back in the kitchen. “An old Shaker tune.”

  “Of course I’m right, Ma. You should always believe me. But it’s Quaker.” He puts the caterpillar outside on the window ledge. “Maybe it’ll find its way to the park.”

  “Shaker, but what’s the difference.”

  “There is a difference.” He starts to explain it to me, a fine theological or maybe historical difference; but in the middle of the explanation Vivian enters, a blue and white striped towel wrapped around her like a sarong, her long dark hair hidden under a white turbaned towel, leaving bare and incredibly lovely her wide-boned face with its satiny, pre-acne complexion burnished by the sun, a face with the look of unearthly purity certain children’s faces have between nine and eleven—you have to catch it, it passes fast. I tell them how that is one of my favorite melodies yet I never knew it was a song that could be sung. Of course they don’t appreciate my wonder at this serendipity. Vivie plunges her wrinkled-clean hands into the filthy trunk, hunting for her Woodswoman plaque, which she shows me and I admire.

  “Would you sing me the song?”

  They shrug. Sure, if it’s so important. Alan plays the piano. He has played by ear since the age of four, like me. “It kills me that you can do that,” says Vivian. “How do you do it?”

  “I don’t know. I just do.” That is true. She thinks he won’t tell her the secret, but it cannot be told.

  They sing. Vivie knows how to deliver; she sings the words as if she understands what they mean, and who knows, perhaps she does:

  ’Tis a gift to be simple

  ’Tis a gift to be free

  ’Tis a gift to come round

  Where we want to be.

  And when we find ourselves

  In the place that is right

  We will be in the valley

  Of love and delight.

  When true simplicity is gained

  To bow and to bend

  We shall not be ashamed.

  To turn and to turn

  Will be our delight

  Till by turning, turning

  We come round right.

  It is like hearing the music of the spheres, for which Nina strained her ears in college on those early morning Pythagorean walks. That these two could be Victor’s and my children seems a miracle. The first two I recognize—subtle, urban souls. But these, close and alike, one conceived as an afterthought and one an accident, are simply gifts; their own gifts are simple too—grace and temperance and mildness. I want to possess the song, clutch it to me and drink it in, in a way I would not presume to possess them. I ask them to teach me the words and they do, as we disentangle grass from the dirty clothes and get the first load of wash spinning. They teach me willingly, yet puzzled about why just another camp song should mean so much, why I should want to keep them, their voices, close by in the kitchen after two months of absence.

  Later on I play the record for them so they can hear what Copland makes of the melody, what swirls of embellishment, what silvery, streaky qualities he gives it. Alan is interested and listens, but Vivie is not. Vivie goes to sit on Victor’s lap, hugging her Woodswoman plaque.

  And the next minute it is approaching April and guess who is arriving this time? Evelyn! From Switzerland. Since Mother and Daddy are both dead it must be me, my family, she wants to see. Unless her banker husband is sending her to transact secret business with rich celebrities. No, I doubt that he would use Evelyn for such missions. The children are excited, especially the younger ones. They have seen Evelyn only a few times but I have told them Evelyn stories—the sunflower, the lost kite, the sand woman we made and I kicked in. (Not that she fancied herself Princess of the Beach; that I have told no one.) The advent of the real Evelyn is like a mythical character coming to life.

  Alan says we must do something special. He reminds me she is arriving just around Passover. Spring springs and with it Evelyn, a sprite. We should have a Seder, he says. A Seder? I thought Alan had given his soul to the Quakers. The Inner Light. “You used to make them when Grandma was alive.” “I did it for her. The season wouldn’t seem natural to her without one.” “I know. Last year was the first time we didn’t have one. It didn’t seem natural.” “I didn’t think you cared. All right, if you care that much, we’ll do it.” We’ll do it right. It shall be a huge feast. Althea, faithful scullery maid, will be called in to dip her capable hands in matzo meal and roll balls. We will have our friends. Evelyn can look everyone over, as she did once before, years ago, when she came to Columbia to hear me play Schubert’s “Trout” Quintet with the Chamber Music Society. “Gabrielle’s family and Nina are not even Jewish,” says Althea. “Do you invite them to a Seder?” “By all means. You’re supposed to have outsiders at a Seder—it’s a tradition.” Who knows, this might even be true. “Maybe I should ask Darryl to come, then.” Darryl is her boyfriend of physics fame. “Sure, ask him if you like.” “But do you think people would think it’s odd to invite a black person to a Seder?” “I’m quite sure no one would gasp, Althea, if that’s what you’re worried about.” “But the Haggadah says all those terrible things about Egyptians. It might make him feel uncomfortable.”

  Often I wish my mother, who didn’t worry about the finer points, were around. My mother would be appalled at Althea’s having a black boyfriend, but once she got over being appalled, which she would in due time, having inspected Darryl, she would say: What’s all this fuss? You want him there? Then invite him. So I say that too.

  “I don’t know if I remember how to do it,” says Victor. “It’s been a couple of years.” “I can ask George to do it. He’s from a family of rabbis, you know.” “No, never mind, I’ll manage.” I knew any suggestion of George filling his shoes would bring him round.

  I have offered Evelyn a bed in the large room Althea and Vivian share, but she stays in a hotel. She is careful not to interfere, to maintain privacy. It is clear that though I am the main object of her visit, she has other interests too. What they are she doesn’t say, just disappears. But when she is with us she is one of us. She talks to the children as if she has known them forever; she is one of those people who can talk to children, who remember. She and Victor seem to appreciate each other. It strikes me that she and Victor are alike in some ways. They have little small talk. They speak the truth, their versions of it, directly, without elaboration or justification. They see by their own lights and are unaffected by trends of interpretation, cultural weather.

  When we are alone together I feel a touch of that old harmony. We could be in the bedroom downstairs at the brown house again, whispering secrets late at night.

  “You were such a good swimmer, Lydia. Weren’t you ever afraid of the waves?”

  “No. I was a little afraid up on the dunes, though. That height.”

  Evelyn smiles. Her smile is Vivian’s, wise, wide, full of marvel. We are walking, Sunday morning, on the broad mall down in Riverside Park. All around us, groups are playing volleyball on the grass; sweaty joggers pass by, roller skaters, bicyclists—some are little children learning to ride, wobbling, with a parent chasing behind, every few seconds gripping the back of the seat to steady it, shouting e
ncouragement in Spanish and English and French. On our left is the river. Whatever muck lurks beneath, the surface is sparkling cleanly in the sun. An early spring. Cherry blossoms are in premature bloom, their so brief life, and I am glad Evelyn has come in time to catch it. I point them out like a proud landowner; she nods and smiles at their beauty. Then I think, how can this compare to her Alps? Nothing I have to offer could make her stay. That family is over.

  Evelyn and I speak in shorthand, eulogizing. Evelyn does not make statements with subjects and predicates. She gives fragments—the missing pieces are inside her.

  “Those stringbeans,” she says, “at the brown house.”

  “Born in the soil.” I laugh.

  “Grew up in the sun. Remember Mother with that knife? She took it so seriously.”

  “Yes, the zucchini.”

  “Cut so it doesn’t hurt.”

  “I never liked zucchini. I ate them so I wouldn’t hurt her feelings. She was so proud. Seven ways of cooking zucchini.”

  “Remember when I lost that dragon kite?”

  “Oh Lord, Evelyn. I thought you’d never shut up about it.”

  “A man came along …”

  “You were always afraid of getting lost.”

  “The blue slipper on the umbrella.”

  “Sometimes when I said we were lost we weren’t really. I just wanted to …”

  “I know. Sometimes when I cried I wasn’t really crying, either. I figured I’d let you …”