Marsh’s Field:

A Novella and Introduction

A Thesis Presented to the Honors Tutorial College, Ohio University

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for Graduation

from the Honors Tutorial College

with the degree of Bachelor of Arts in English

By James Chrisman

This thesis has been approved by

The Honors Tutorial College and the Department of English

______

Patrick O’Keeffe Professor, English Thesis Adviser

______

Carey Snyder Honors Tutorial College, DOS English

______

Jeremy Webster Dean, Honors Tutorial College

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Table of Contents

Introduction: 4

Works Cited: 46

Marsh’s Field: 49

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Introduction

4 1—Inspiration & Influence

Roth. As a young writer, his record draws me to look up to him as Nathan

Zuckerman and his peers looked up to The Suede: like I am a few classes after he has graduated, and his name is still here on the plaques in the halls, to be compared to, to define oneself against, to be discovered when one takes the time to wonder where the awards went. Twenty-nine novels. Two memoirs. Two works of literary criticism.

Two National Book Awards (1960, 1995), two National Book Critics’ Circle Awards

(1987, 1991), two Pen/Faulkner Awards, the National Medal of Arts, the Pulitzer

Prize, the Frances Medici Foreign Book Prize. His works are collected by the Library of America—one of only three living writers with that particular honor. Timothy

Parrish suggests, in the Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth, that “Roth has been perhaps the most critically significant and consistently controversial American writer of the past 50 years” (Parrish 1). This essay will address both parts of this claim as it traces Roth’s usage of the Bildungsroman throughout this long career, but before doing that, it is worth acknowledging that the reason Roth’s career is so tempting to study and to emulate is that he wrote for all of those years; unlike, say, Thomas

Pynchon or Marilyn Robinson, he took virtually no breaks until the retirement he opted for just a few years ago. Today Roth is heaped upon those awards, dormant, above America’s living writers, dead writers, and would-be writers like me. This work ethic, this commitment to one’s craft over half a century, through controversy, commercial success, and acclaim is—to me as a young writer—truly inspiring, something to aspire to. And so I admire him for this, and I wonder how he kept going,

5 and I consider in this introduction the controversial and acclaimed career of Philip

Milton Roth.

Faulkner—whom Roth called “the backbone of 20th century American literature” (Roth, “Acceptance Speech”)—is probably the primary influence on the novella you are about to read, more so than any other single writer. (This may be why his name is never mentioned.) With this influence in mind, along with the influence of other writers like Melville and Roth, I consider Marsh’s Field a work of American

Literature.

Roth considered Bellow the other vertebra in 20th century American literature’s backbone, but I think that Roth has taken his place. Roth and Bellow have many similarities, and they fill a similar role, with many of the same faults and omissions

(depth of female psychology and exploration of other minorities’ experiences) and many of the same strengths and themes (depth of male psychology and exploration

Jewish-American experience). With their weaknesses in mind, it seems that Roth and

Bellow have fallen out of favor and out of syllabi, and this is probably for good reason.

To study the development of 20th century American Literature without studying Roth, however, would be a mistake, an omission. One would miss experiencing his rhetorical power, his inventiveness—but, from a more scholarly perspective, one would also miss what America has considered its top caliber writing for half a century, and one would not consider the influence that Roth has as a writer both serious and successful, and one would miss “Roth’s multifacetedness, the

6 constant reinvention, that is at the heart of his extraordinary career” (Parrish 2).

Further, I believe that Roth is one of the main links between Faulkner and I—a father, if Faulkner is by now a grandfather. And like any child to parent, figurative or otherwise, in equal proportion to the way Roth supports and nourishes me, I strain against him.

Marsh’s Field is a part of this process. When I read Goodbye, Columbus over a summer early in my college career, I was struck by it, its craftsmanship, the perfection of its narrative arc; like many of the books I read at that time, it shaped me as a writer, a reader, a person; it may have even been the first novella that I ever read. That could be why the novella you are about to read, Marsh’s Field, resembles it so much (even if, unfortunately, I seem not to have absorbed its humor).

The novellas resemble one another in that they are part of the same tradition:

Marsh’s Field and Goodbye, Columbus are both Bildungsromane. Other than

American Literature, this is the main tradition that my novella participates in and is in dialogue with. As I will argue, Roth has served as the torch bearer for this genre in the later half of the 20th century. He has worked within it, played with it, expanded it, mastered it; he has kept it alive. He has proved, as W. Clark Hendley asserts in his article on Roth’s The Ghost Writer,” that “the form is not moribund in the right hands” (Hendley 99). People often say things like this about the Bildungsroman: it is

“moribund,” dry, lacking freshness and relevance. This, as I will show, is a misconception about an essentially dynamic and elastic genre. The Bildungsroman has been kept alive for hundreds of years by people who take it into their own hands, who

7 reshape and resuscitate it. Roth has actively (re)made the Bildungsroman, that seemingly antiquated genre, a living American tradition.

Let us note, however, that for all of his impact and for all of his accomplishments, one does not celebrate Roth without reservations. Aggressive and apt criticisms have been leveled against him since the beginning of his half-century career (remember that he is both “critically significant and controversial”). One can counter some of these criticisms as surface readings: what may seem to be Roth’s misogyny could be, upon closer inspection, Roth’s investigation of misogyny and male psychology. As Debra Shostak aptly observes in “Roth and Gender,” “Where a female character in Roth’s early work appears flattest, she is presented almost exclusively through the male character’s point of view . . . Roth’s work can appear as much a prescient critique of misogynistic attitudes as a purveyor of them” (Shostak

112). This is true of virtually all of the texts we will look at, but it also true that the original criticism can be leveled against them to begin with. Shostak’s lens may correct many unfair criticisms of Roth, but it does not absolve him completely. Many of these criticisms are fair and deserve an honest assessment.

As Julia Keller put it in her aptly titled article, “Philip Roth Hates Women*

(*Is that true? And does it matter?),” Roth’s female characters function as “things against which men can sharpen themselves, or dull themselves. Women flirt, they flit, but they do not really live, if by living we mean making moral choices and owning up

(or not) to responsibility” (qtd. in Gooblar 8). It is striking how similar this description is to how one might describe the way women have traditionally functioned in the

8 bildungsroman. Women are, as Castle puts it, “instrumental” (Castle 4)—before the rise of the female Bildungsroman—never subjects of Bildung themselves.

The question for me as a young writer becomes, then, what do I take from this genre and this writer, and what do I leave behind? How do I keep my affection for

Roth while distancing myself from what I find deplorable in him? This—the question of influence—is a major theme of Marsh’s Field. I hope, taken together, that this novella and this introduction will form in part a kind of mediation on that question— even, and especially, if neither lead to a clear answer. This introduction will survey

Roth and the Bildungsroman and finally will discuss briefly my departure from both the genre and the writer that I admire and reject.

2—A Genre in Crisis

I have neglected to define exactly—if one can claim to speak exactly about so nebulous a genre—what I mean when I use the word Bildungsroman (following

Gregory Castle’s lead in Reading the Modernist Bildungsroman, I will not italicize

Bildungsroman nor Bildung throughout this introduction, unless the passage from which I am quoting does so). In this section, I will discuss the development of the genre and the problems with discussing the genre that came from those developments.

Put simply, “there is no consensus on the meaning of the term Bildungsroman”

(Hardin x). Scholars and critics struggle to settle on a definition that is both specific enough to avoid over application and broad enough to encompass a German genre that has radically evolved over its 220 years and its life on multiple continents.

9 James N. Hardin, in his introduction to Reflection and Action: Essays on the

Bildungsroman, bemoans our country’s misunderstanding of the genre in asserting, “in spite of the efforts of a few scholars of German literature, American literary criticism in general failed to inform itself about the nature of a type of novel more talked about than understood . . . hardly any other term is applied more frequently to a novelistic form and scarcely any is used more imprecisely” (Hardin ix). Hardin is not the first, and will not be the last, to make this observation. Essentially, critics use the term assuming that they and others understand what it means; people then come to understand the term through this cavalier usage; and this leads to a nebulous understanding of the genre’s history and characteristics. I do not intend to make this mistake, nor to perpetuate this state of affairs by applying the term without discussing it.

To begin at the beginning: the Bildungsroman was birthed in 1795 by Johann

Wolfgang van Goethe, who at the time was enjoying a kind of Rothian fame (sans the infamy). The novel was Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (in the German: Wilhelm

Meisters Lehrjahre). It tells the story of an idealistic young man, his first heartbreak, his aspirations to join the theater, the tensions between him and his family, and the resolution of those tensions. It traced, as the classical Bildungsroman of which it is the prototype does, a movement toward “dialectical harmony, toward reconcilement of the self and the external social world that is preserved as utopian vision in Goethe” (26).

This reconciliation is the process of Bildung, a loaded term that is equally as important to understand as the genre itself. Hardin quotes an unnamed English critic as stating,

10 “Any generalisation about the ‘Bildungsroman’ as a genre is apt to be bedeviled by the variant meanings of the word ‘Bildung’ in German” (xii).

This bedeviling term refers to the process of becoming a self. Keopke, quoted in Hardin, defines it thus: “Bildung, in an 18th c. context, is a verbal noun meaning

‘formation, transferring the formation of external features to the features of the personality as a whole” (Hardin xi). After quoting Keopke, Hardin goes on to explain,

“In the early nineteenth century . . . it implied ‘cultivation,’ education and refinement in a broad, humanistic sense, certainly not merely education with all the current institutional connotations of the word. It also strongly implied ‘formation’ or

‘forming’” (xi). It is important to think about this image of “forming.” It implies pressure put from the outside—“an initially imperceptible harmony from disharmony”

(Martini 17), as Martini puts it in his investigation into the origins of the term. Note that this harmony comes from disharmony; there is tension between the self and society. In other words, the Bildungsroman is the novelization of the dialectic between self and society. In the classical generic ideal, the protagonist (thesis) has certain characteristics that are in tension with the protagonist’s society (antithesis)—for instance, his optimism or idealism or artistic ambitions—and the novel ends with the hero finding some balance between these forces (synthesis), maybe having become more pragmatic, having formed a stable identity, a self. As Castle summarizes thus:

“The Bildungsheld of the classical form breaks from familial and social authorities in order to experience the world freely; but youthful rebellion turns out to be a forgivable, even necessary interlude before a symbolic reconciliation with those same

11 authorities” (Castle 9). This classical form of the genre is anything but radical and critical of society, as it “simultaneously valorizes existing structures of power and prevailing models of socialization” (9). The prevailing model of socialization was

Bildung and this genre (“roman” means “novel”) was the enactment of that model, a nationalist genre that grew out of German sentiment and philosophy.

One learns about the values of the nation as the subject of Bildung is formed by them. As Martini observes, the Bildungsroman “encourages the cultivation of the reader more fully than any other type of novel” (Martini 18). This form of cultivation

(a form of “Bildung”) results from aesthetic and spiritual education but also an adoption of the ideals of the prevailing culture. If the novel is encouraging this in the reader, it is not a stretch to call the genre at least in part didactic.

Goethe, as is pointed out in the introduction to Reflection and Action, had never heard the term Bildungsroman, had no idea he was writing in or creating this genre. The term would not be coined until 1819 by an obscure professor of German

Literature named Morgenstern and would not be popularized until 1870 by another

German professor named Dilthey (Hardin xiii). Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship was extremely popular, however, and other Bildungsromane were written because of its influence, even if the term describing it had not yet entered the vernacular. As

Goethe’s novel and novels influenced by it left Germany, other countries and value systems began appropriating the genre, borrowings its skeleton, filling it with their own flesh. To the German scholars who watched in horror as a nationalistic genre was corrupted and coopted, these novels resembled Frankenstein’s Monster: it’s alive, but

12 is it human? If the humanist element of Bildung is absent from the novel, how can it be a Bildungsroman? As the genre emigrates from Germany, it begins its true history, what Castle so aptly calls the “the history of a genre in crisis” (30).

Gregory Castle explores in his book Reading the Modernist Bildungsroman what he calls the Bildungsroman’s “generic resiliency” (Castle 4, emphasis his). As he traces the genre’s journey from Germany to France, to England to Ireland, he outlines the various ways in which the dialectic of Bildung is corrupted. This begins at the dialectic’s societal component (the antithesis), simply through changing the society in which the novel is set. The ideals that the subject of Bildung takes in and struggles against shift, along with what being a member of the forming society would look like.

Whereas the German Bildungsroman often dealt with spiritual apprenticeship and aesthetic education, the English Bildungsroman, for instance, dealt with social conformity, the process of becoming a gentleman (Castle 8). This is a result of that culture’s ideal of social mobility and status.

The ideals of the culture impact the Bildungsroman, but one must also take into account the status of the nation—for instance the Irish nation as a British colony.

Castle observes that via the “transculturation” of the genre, “Irish colonial writers . . . were able to translate their disempowerment into Bildung plots of survival and triumph—even if survival means exile and triumph means death” (Castle 6). Though this new manifestation of the genre, the subject of Bildung can even die; the genre can be used to critique as much as to reinforce. Castle asserts that “it is precisely the breakdown of traditional forms of identity and of normative, harmonious socialization

13 that gives the Bildungsroman a new sense of purpose” (5). This new purpose, this new life for bildungsroman, paradoxically, was a Modernist Bildungsroman, a “failed

Bildungsroman.” In this manifestation of the genre, the dialectic malfunctions; the society the genre reinforced is now critiqued—a genre tied up in nationality but no longer a nationalistic genre.

The focus, however, is not only upon the societal component of the dialectic.

With the advent of Modernism and the abandonment of Enlightenment ideals, the genre necessarily mutated. Castle explains that “as the sonnet succeeded, despite resistance, in continuing to be relevant for modern poets long after Petrarch and

Shakespeare, so the Bildungsroman continues to be relevant for novelists who may generally repudiate the values of the German Enlightenment, but who embrace its core value of Bildung” (Castle 4). In this case, the main convention to consider is the deep structure, the dialectic between self and society, even if it fails. Castle goes on to assert, “The aim of the modernist Bildungsroman is to put into play a Bildung process that harkens back to the classical mode, in which the goal is inner culture but that also inevitably confronts the impossibility of either a unified harmonious consciousness or a unified harmonious relationship with the social world” (66). This is the

Bildungsroman as a fundamentally Modernist genre; a genre, as the dictum went, made new.

While this is where Castle leaves off, one can extrapolate his points into the next great societal/aesthetic shift: Postmodernism. What happens to the genre of

European self-formation with the rise of the American Empire, when writers and

14 scholars (and acidheads) really start asking, well, what’s a self anyway? And do I have one? And a citizen of what? And what’s a novel? Various and strange answers are given. Certain Postmodern novels (masterpieces at that) are described as

Bildungsromane that bear only the slightest—and, more importantly, the most ironic—imaginable resemblances to the genre. Whereas in the Modernist

Bildungsroman, the “generic rudiments are not only retained but embraced with new vigor—a vigor often ironic and stylized, but vigor nonetheless”—these

Bildungsroman ironically trace the form, as a gesture meant only to suggest the absence of its possibility.

For instance, Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, with its lack of any society and culture, and its deliberate lack of psychological content, traces the development of

“The Kid” to “The Man”—and he’s shortly thereafter murdered. One could hardly claim that one is instructed about society and the self, other than being instructed to be disgusted. In Amy Hungerford’s reading, Blood Meridian “has no moral content at all, has only made claims about the material of the universe and not the spiritual quality of the universe, and . . . persuades [us] entirely by the sound of rhetoric and the structures that are familiar to us from the narratives of our tradition” (Hungerford). The narrative of our tradition that she refers to in this reading is the Bildungsroman, hollowed out, a mere point of reference. In this example, postmodernism strikes out the self, society, and any hope of synthesis between the two, and all that remains of the dialectic is dust and violence.

15 There have, however, been other paths for the Postmodern American

Bildungsroman. Chief among these are the paths blazed by ethnic American writers and women, neglected populations in a tradition so often focused on bourgeois young men. Hardin asserts that the genre is “the most popular form of feminist fiction” (xvii), and most articles on the Bildungsroman today seem to focus on the female

Bildungsroman as a neglected though fully flowing stream of the genre. For instance,

Cisneros’ House on Mango Street (very fractured) tells the story of an inner city

Chicana girl and her unconventional formation. Marilyn Robinson’s Housekeeping tells the slightly more straightforward (though still anthologized in Norton’s

Postmodern American Fiction) narrative of two Midwestern girls becoming themselves, raised by a series of women, with virtually no appearances by men in the entire novel. While less suspicious of Bildung than Blood Meridian, these two novels reveal a dialogue with that tradition is alive and as aggressive as ever.

Roth has had one of the liveliest dialogues with Bildingsroman tradition of any

20th century writer, and yet this aspect of his career has gone largely unnoticed. Only

The Ghost Writer has received attention in this regard, and at that only two articles have been written on it in this light. In my next section I will transcribe Roth’s fifty- year-long conversation with the Bildungsroman and its practitioners.

But before moving on, let us settle finally on something like a definition of the genre. Castle lays out the “rudiments of the form” as follows: “a biographical narrative, problems of socialization, the influence of mentors and ‘instrumental’ women, the problem of vocation—even when such rudiments are pared down to their

16 essence, then to their absence” (Castle 4). Many of these appear and disappear throughout the history of the Bildungsroman and throughout Roth’s usage, but their absence is a felt absence. To reiterate, beyond these surface conventions is its deeper structure: the Bildungsroman is the novelization of the dialectic between a self and its society. It has great generic resiliency, such that even when the process of Bildung fails, a novel may still be said to participate in the tradition and to have used the genre.

Roth is one of its major contemporary practitioners, and his innovations and experiments, though mostly unnoticed thus far, reveal its flexibility, vitality, and viability as a genre in the 20th century and beyond by utilizing, ignoring, and reclaiming its generic demands throughout his formidable and dynamic career. By tracing that career, we trace the Bildungsroman post Modernism, through

Postmodernism, and on into our current moment, where I attempt to join him.

3—A 20th Century Bildungsroman

The four Bildungsromane Roth wrote over his 51-year career are best understood as in dialogue with previous Bildungsroman traditions. Goodbye,

Columbus (1959) is primarily in dialogue with the classical and socially pragmatic

Bildungsroman. In this, it is not as formally inventive as some of the other texts we will examine; however, it is an excellent case study of the genre and provides a fine example of an American Bildungsroman. In the next two novels we will examine,

Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) and The Ghost Writer (1979), Roth is in dialogue with the

Modernist Bildungsroman and in particular James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a

17 Young Man. Roth’s final foray into the genre is Indignation (2008), in which he extends the reach of the failed Bildungsroman to craft a deeply pessimistic, Absurdist

Bildungsroman. Each of these novels marks a unique contribution to the

Bildungsroman tradition, particularly as a subgenre of American literature, and taken together they reveal the ways in which the genre is evolving still, in a new century and a new continent.

3.1—Goodbye, Columbus: American Bildungsroman

Goodbye, Columbus is the title novella of Roth’s first book and also marks his first foray into the Bildungsroman. In it, Roth approaches the genre somewhat conventionality. This conventionality, however, will make it a useful sample to compare with his later, more experimental work. Roth describes the novella, in an early interview, thus: “You get someone dealing with the question, ‘What kind of man do I want to be?’ More broadly, ‘What kind of person am I going to be? What kind of life am I going to live?’” (CWPR 6) This is the fundamental question the subject of

Bildung asks him- or herself.

Tellingly, in Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus, this is a question of class. In this, it harkens back to the 19th century Bildungsroman, in which “the hero’s conflict with social authority (typically a real or symbolic father) ultimately leads to an affirmation of that authority in the social sphere and in the choice of vocation” (Castle 8). And indeed, the story does end with a choice of vocation and a reconciliation with what our protagonist Neil rebelled against, namely his background as a lower-middle class Jew.

18 Neil desires to move up in the class structure of America, to marry into a family that has escaped the trappings of minority Jewish life.

Brenda Patimkin, his youthful infatuation, is his ticket there. As Neil feels her shoulder blades he feels “a faint fluttering” as if there were wings. He says, “The smallness of the wings did not bother me—it would not take an eagle to carry me up those lousy hundred and eighty feet that make summer nights so much cooler in Short

Hills than they are in Newark” (G,C 10). In this Brenda’s function and Neil’s deeper ambitions are clear. Brenda to him represents a chance at ascension to a place that

Jews were so recently forbidden. And one can feel his class based resentment in that line, the “lousy” matter of feet. Why should he not be up there? I do not mean to make

Neil sound calculating. The power of the novella is that it shows that we do not know why we love each other, or if we love each other. Class difference is a factor in Neil’s infatuation but Brenda is not the entirety of it.

Goodbye, Columbus focuses primarily on their brief time together, as Brenda pulls Neil away from his lower middle class origins to the upper crust of the upper middle class, however briefly. Through this, the reader is shown a snapshot of the

Jewish socioeconomic experience in the 1950s. Indeed, the novella dramatizes a time when there were “only two people” in Neil’s life: “Brenda and the little colored kid who liked Gauguin” (G,C 33). The two of them are the mooring poles of middle class life: moving up and staying up, versus descent back to the Jews’ very recent status as a lower-class minority.

19 This is brought into focus when Neil visits Patimkin Kitchen and Bathroom

Sinks, which “was in the heart of the negro section of Newark. Years ago, at the time of the great immigration, it had been the Jewish section . . . Now in fact, the negroes were making the same migration, following the steps of the Jews” (64). One sees exactly the status of the Jews: able escape a lower class area for living but not for work. Mr. Patrimkin says to Neil, in that shop, “You know more than my own kids.

They’re goyim, my kids, that’s how much they understand” (67). Mr. Patimkin takes a perverse pride in this, their assimilation. To him, this represents movement out of ghettos and into the main stream of American life. In this scene especially, Neil’s status as middle class, and our understanding of middle class as transitional—a place to stop on your way up or down, and the only way anyone was headed was up—is plain. And I think this novella shows many things about America, whose ambitions are middle class ambitions—the white picket fence, etc.—very clearly. It also sheds light on the American connection of class and race, and the sense of self-worth tied up in both. If the novella is not formally innovative, it is a very successful implementation of the Bildungsroman as a lens through which to examine American life.

This takeaway is sociological, not psychological. This is a major distinction I would like to make between the “coming of age story” and the true Bildungsroman: the Bildungsroman is sociological, about the culture, the economy, the country—not merely the strict psychological development of the protagonist. Though the

20 development of a consciousness is often present in a Bildungsroman, it is the means through which the society is explored, not the exploration entire.

Part of this exploration involves a protagonist’s self-reflection. But as Hardin explains in the introduction to Reflection and Action, “It is not sufficient for the protagonist of the Bildungsroman to reflect, though this is essential . . . action is also important” (xiii). Neil certainly does act in Goodbye, Columbus: he pursues Brenda

(as Abe pursues Linda in my own novella) from the opening of the book, and his pressuring her to purchase the diaphragm and his class-based resentment of her lead to their downfall. This is how women are “instrumental” in the bildungsroman: they draw the man into action; then, the differences between the two of them and the heartache that the Bildung subject must absorb push the protagonist to reflect.

Consider the ending scene of “Goodbye, Columbus.” After having his final fight with Brenda, which is his fault, and having had his character and his morality attacked by her parents, and before his final return to Newark—Neil literally reflects.

He stands before “the Lamant Library, which Brenda had once told [him] had

Patimkin sinks in its restrooms” (96), a reminder of how both his current job as a librarian and his potential class climbing through marriage into the Patimkin family had lain before him. Staring at his reflection, he engages in the following extended musing:

“From the light of the lamp on the path behind me I could see my reflection in

the glass front of the building. Inside, it was dark and there were no students to

be seen, no librarians. Suddenly I wanted to set down my suitcase and pick up

21 a rock and heave it right through the glass, but of course I didn’t. I simply

looked at myself in the mirror the light made of the window. I was only that

substance, I thought, those limbs, that face that I saw in front of me. I looked,

but the outside of me gave up little information about the inside of me . . . I

looked hard at the image of me, at that darkening of the glass, and then my

gaze pushed through it, over the cool floor, to a broken wall of books,

imperfectly shelved. I did not look very much longer, but took a train that got

me into Newark just as the sun was rising on the first day of the Jewish New

Year. I was back in plenty of time for work” (97).

One would be hard pressed for a better example of “reflection” on oneself as a young man, as a subject of Bildung. The passage is also as rich symbolically as you would like it to be. He looks into the library, first seeing himself as through a glass darkly, and then breaking through to find his vocation, however disappointing it is. Instead of becoming the supplier of sinks in these buildings, he resigns himself to his status as a worker in them, settling into his social position, into his class status. Indeed, the last word of the novella is “work.” This is very much in line with the 19th century

Bildungsroman, which “ultimately leads to an affirmation of [the symbolic father’s] authority in the social sphere and in the choice of vocation” (Castle 8). This father in the story is, interestingly, his aunt. Through all her—well—nagging, she turns out to be right about the Patimkins, that they are not Neil’s type of people. The novel ends with this affirmation. Neil finds this identity as a Jew, as his aunt defines them (“Since when do Jewish people live in Short Hills? They couldn’t be real Jews believe me” (G,

22 C 41)) on the first day of the Jewish New Year. Neil is, at novel’s end, a middleclass,

Newark Jew. He is not the man he was at the start; he is not a pure embodiment of his society. Rather, he is a synthesis of the two, a subject of Bildung. Neil, as the hero of classical Bildungsroman does, “returns to the fold, still young but a little wiser—a prodigal son, artistic rebel, and good bourgeois” (Castle 9).

For all of this conventionality, it should be noted that many of the insights of this novel are specifically American insights, particularly about race and class. I do not mean to suggest that this novel is a lesser aesthetic success than his later work. Like a perfect sonnet, it may be conventional, but it also quite an achievement.

3.2—Portnoy’s Complaint: Alternate Bildung

Portnoy’s Complaint, published ten years after Goodbye, Columbus, is hardly recognizable as a Bildungsroman. It certainly contains some of the elements of

“biographical narrative, problems of socialization, the influence of mentors and

‘instrumental’ women, the problem of vocation”—and in this it has been identified previously as containing elements of the genre (Hendley 100). It is, however, a radically new approach to the tradition. As we have discussed, the Enlightenment idea of Bildung was inseparable from the classical Bildungsroman: the idea of formation and acquisition of a self came directly out of that philosophy, that model of the self.

Portnoy’s Complaint continues a tradition started by the Modernists, in which “the

Bildungsheld (hero of the Bildung plot) fails to achieve inner culture or harmonious socialization” (Castle 2). However, the Modernists sabotaged the genre in order to “to

23 assert its integrity in powerful new ways, to exploit the formative and transformative power of failure in order to effect a rehabilitation of the Bildungsroman genre and a justification of . . . Bildung (Castle 2). Like the Modernists (?), Roth’s Bildungsheld fails “to achieve harmonious socialization” because the model of self and the development of a self has changed. However, the unlike the Modernists, the Bildung project is not to be mourned and is inapplicable to Roth’s new worldview—heavily influenced by Freud, the modernists themselves, and cultural shifts the Modernists did not experience. In this, his project is similar to theirs, though taken farther.

In this novel, the dialectic has failed, the crisis is moved to the present moment as the Bildungsheld, in his 30s, tells the story of his Bildung process. By combining this movement of narration and formation in the present, with the hero trying to resolve his disharmony in real time, Roth has sabotaged the genre. Alex Portnoy ought to have moved on from these things; he has failed “to accept [his] role in a dialectic of personal desire and social responsibility” (Castle 9), and yet the story has not ended.

In putting Alex Portnoy in a psychoanalyst’s office, Roth fundamentally shifted the genre’s dialectic: adolescence is protracted; one carries it with one throughout one’s life, instead of leaving it behind and becoming an adult, a fully formed citizen.

Through this move, the Enlightenment model of the self is replaced by the psychoanalytic.

Castle says of the influence of Freud on the idea of self, its necessary impact on the genre of self, and the Modernist Bildungsroman:

24 “The idea that the subject or ego is a problematic, dehiscent entity,

operating as much through unconsciousness as through conscious

means, had a profound effect on how the self was portrayed in literature

and how self-development was reconceived. Equally profound was the

knowledge that early childhood experiences played a decisive role in

sexual and social identities; this knowledge could not help but

complicate the symbolic value of youth in the modernist

Bildungsroman.” (Castle 67)

As with the Modernist Bildungsroman that Portnoy resembles, the shift to privileging early childhood experience is obvious from the opening of the novel: “She was so deeply imbedded in my consciousness that for the first year of school I seem to have believed that each of my teachers was my mother in disguise” (PC 3). Note that the character uses the word “consciousness,” and that Alex Portnoy is operating off of a received model, in starting with the mother. In this way, Roth lets inform Freud his own understanding of his character’s consciousness, but also that character’s understanding of their own consciousness. In this direct dialogue with both Frued and other writers influenced by Freud (which we will touch on momentarily) he overhauls both the form and the content of the Bildungsroman. The difference between

Portnoy’s Complaint and the Modernist writers whose technique influenced it, however, is that Modernist texts still mourned the loss of Bildung; they had interest in

“rehabilitating” the genre. Roth does not; his character does, but for comic effect. Roth gives himself over in this novel completely to a new conception of self, even more

25 chaotic than the Modernist self: the self is aware of itself as a self, the self that has read Freud on the self. Roth’s self is a postmodern subject.

Consider the following quote: “Doctor Spielvogel, this is my life, my only life, and I’m living it in the middle of a Jewish joke! I am the son in the Jewish joke—only it ain’t no joke! . . . Bless me with manhood! Make me brave! Make me strong! Make me whole! (37). First, note Alex’s insistence that he is not whole. He is outright denying that he is a subject of successful Bildung. There is no “initially imperceptible harmony from disharmony” (Martini 17); disharmony still remains. Alex does not consider himself a man, either. But there is a kind of hidden optimism in this: that a failed Bildung is not a lost cause; even at thirty one can begin the process. Alex explains and undergoes Bildung simultaneously, if by that we mean simply that he undergoes the process of finding a stable self. In Alex’s request to the therapist to

“bless” him, note that in place of the aesthetic spirituality, of great import for the

German Bildungsroman (Castle 8), Alex positions the therapist, the unblinking ear and eye alike, as absolute. The shrink, however, is merely a mirror and grants no absolution. We should note the manic quality to all of this, the absurdity and irony.

This is all meant to be funny, both funny and sad, and this saturation of irony and

Alex’s awareness that he is in a joke (the novel ends with a “PUNCH LINE”) gives the novel its Postmodern tinge.

This is a far cry from the book’s main influence, that austere Modernist novel by James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, in which the Bildungsroman was introduced to stream of consciousness. In stream of consciousness writing, one

26 experiences formation along with the child, through sense and thought modeled as if they are happening in real time. In Portnoy’s Complaint—in place of conscious and deliberate retrospection, as in Goodbye, Columbus or my own Marsh’s Field, and in place of Joyce’s technique—Roth introduces the Bildungsroman to what he calls

“blocks of consciousness”: “chunks of material of varying shapes and sizes piled atop one another and held together by association rather than chronology” (“PR’s Exact

Intent” 35). Roth is consciously in dialogue with Joyce as he riffs on the phrase used to describe that technique. In this, I see Roth as consciously [staging himself as ] extending that inherited Modernist technique, continuing a dialogue. It should also be noted that in early drafts, Portnoy’s Complaint was titled A Portrait of the Artist

(Roth, “On Portnoy”).

Through all of this, Roth has moved on from the 19th century Bildungsroman and is now fully in dialogue with Modernist attempts at rending self-formation on the page. Joyce’s stream is solidified, randomized. The author does not dip into the character’s mind; the character spills (the sippie cup of) their mind for the reader and analyst to sponge up. The question becomes: how does a self form when it is not only aware of itself, but convinced and aware of its limits? That we ask this question reflects Roth’s movement from a fairly traditional novelist into an experimental novelist, one who reinvents both genre and form.

I would like to touch briefly on the end of the novel now. As Alex Portnoy undergoes a fantastical death in an acknowledgment of the absurdity of some aspects of his guilt, the analyst finally speaks. Under the heading of “PUNCH LINE,” the

27 analyst says, “Now vee may perhaps begin. Yes?” (PC 274). Consider that if this were a Modernist failed Bildungsroman the character might have actually died or would in someway or other way would have undergone an irrevocable failure of Bildung. In this new version of the failed Bildungsroman, Roth leaves open the possibility that

Alex Portnoy might find a stable self, may yet “accept [his] role in a dialectic of personal desire and social responsibility” (Castle 9). Roth maintains, however, a

Postmodern sensibility in leaving it both ambiguous and humorous.

Portnoy’s Complaint is undeniably an innovation generically and formally, but the content of the novel is a different discussion. I will save this discussion for my final section; however, it should be noted that the women in this novel are even more

“instrumental” and outrageous than in Goodbye, Columbus. The Monkey drives Alex

Portnoy to new depravities and insanities; with a random Israeli woman he hits rock bottom and attempts rape. This will change as he matures. In his later work, like

American Pastoral, his female characters become genuinely complex and developed.

But the women in Portnoy’s Complaint,, like most women in the male dominated tradition, are merely “instrumental,” if not worse.

3.3—The Ghost Writer: A Postmodern Bildungsroman

With The Ghost Writer, Roth finally receives some attention as a writer of

Bildungsromane. However, W. Clark Hendley, in his article “An Old Form

Revitalized: Philip Roth’s Ghost Writer and the Bildungsroman” suggests that the novel “has been read as if it is several different books; in fact, the variety of comment

28 it provoked upon publication may qualify the novel as Roth’s most misunderstood work” (99). This is especially interesting in that Hendley’s reading of the novel suggests that it is a revitalization of the form, and the only other article reading the novel as a Bildungsroman is Stanley Trachtenberg’s “In the Egosphere: Philip Roth’s

Anti-Bildungsroman,” which, as the name implies posits that the book is an anti-

Bildungsroman. Hendley goes on to explain the books variety of reception:

“Reviewers saw it as a roman a clef and dutifully identified the

characters and places for readers unfamiliar with the landscape of

contemporary Fiction . . . What The Ghost Writer has not been read for

is Roth’s contemporary treatment of the Bildungsroman, yet in many

respects this novel is his most traditional work . . . The Ghost Writer,

by following many of the conventions of the Bildungsroman,

demonstrates conclusively that the form is not moribund in the right

hands; it may, perhaps, be now in the process of change.” (Hendley 99)

While I am grateful to Hendley for drawing attention to the Bildungsroman in Roth’s oeuvre, and for highlighting Roth’s innovations within the genre, I feel that there is some misunderstanding about the history of the Bildungsroman, the ever misunderstood genre, in his comments. As I have stated, and hopefully shown by now, the genre has always been in the “process of change;” it is necessarily evolving, combusting, reforming. Hendley is also right to point out that this is new territory for the genre; however, it seems absurd to suggest that this is Roth’s “most traditional work.” The Ghost Writer is an experimental, Postmodern Bildungsroman. One that

29 remains recognizable, unlike say Blood Meridian, while remaining more conspicuously playful than, say, House on Mango Street or Housekeeping. In its extreme usage of intertextuality and self-awareness, or irony and metafiction, this novel is a part of the third stream of Postmodern American Bildungsromane that I feel scholars have neglected.

It might be useful at this time to again review Castle’s rudiments of the

Bildungsroman: the problems of socialization and vocation, biographical narrative, influence of mentors and instrumental women (Castle 4). When Hendley says that this work is traditional, he is referring to the presence of everyone of these elements in the novel, not to mention that the dialectic between self and society is fully intact, along with the classical Bildungsroman’s element of aesthetic education, which has arguably been absent from the last two novels I have discussed.

Consider the opening sentence: “It was the last daylight hour of a December afternoon more than twenty years ago—I was twenty-three, writing and publishing my first short stories, and like many a Bildungsroman hero before me, already contemplating my own massive Bildungsroman—when I arrived at his hideaway to meet the great man” (3). From the start we have a biographical narrative; from the start we have the influence of mentors. A few sentences later in the same paragraph

Zuckerman mentions his “unliterary origins,” setting up the tension between him and the novel’s “father figure” and “problems of socialization;” from the start we know that he is an aspiring writer, so we have “the problem of vocation.” All of the components of the Bildungsroman are in play.

30 But in play, they are played with; they are accompanied with a wink. In his anti-Bildungsroman article, Trachtenberg usefully observes: “Roth . . . significantly alters some of the principal elements of the genre by adopting an ironic posture toward art, as well as toward social realities as measures of self-definition. The tone of the novel, then, blocks the hero’s movement, preventing him from the realization of his art or the acceptance of his heritage” (328). This is evident in the first sentence quoted above. Note the “like many a Bildungsroman hero before me.” Zuckerman mocks his own optimism and ambition. In this, he mocks his ambitions as a subject of Bildung, his pretentions to “cultivation.” Through the use of this tone and its self-awareness, the novel differs greatly from its “traditional” antecedents. Through this mockery of

Bildung—which, as we have already established, the Modernists mourned—it differs from the Modernist Bildungsroman, as well. Consider again Castle’s assertion that the

Modernist Bildungsroman’s failure “in terms of genre . . . only serves to articulate more effectively its singular triumph, the abstract affirmation of Bildung as a cherished ideal . . . from the perspective of the subject who, in the final analysis, can feel only its absence” (Castle 28). Let us note, however, that as McCarthy moved the

Bildungsroman (too far, arguably) forward into Postmodernism by corrupting all parts of the dialectic, Roth’s protagonist “can only feel [the ideal of Bildung’s] absence,” but Roth does not affirm that ideal. Rather, he maintains the dialectic while saturating it in irony.

For an example of this we can look to Trachtenberg again:

31 it is [the young Zuckerman’s] preference for imagination over actuality

and for the self-dramatizing and pretentiously literary posturing that

accompanies it which leaves him vulnerable to the overriding irony to

which the narrative voice retrospectively subjects him . . . Rather than

establish the authority of the novel, then, the ironic voice preempts it.

In both a literal and figurative sense, Zuckerman disinherits himself,

not in order to arrive at a definition of either personal fulfillment or

social values, but to punish himself with their loss. (Trachtenberg 339)

The loss is not of the possibility of Bildung as in the Modernist Bildungsroman; the loss is the loss of optimism, the blissful ignorance of the young and earnest artist.

Instead of being indirectly celebrated, the pretentiousness of the subject of Bildung is mocked. Zuckerman can only function, as the section title “Nathan Dedalus” suggests, as an ironic counterpart to Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus. He can say and do the same things, but via his own retrospective ironizing, the meaning of those sentiments and actions change.

The Ghost Writer, then, is neither a traditional Bildungsroman—as it neither celebrates humanism nor affirms the paternal culture—nor is it a failed

Bildungsroman, seeing as at the story’s end the protagonist is “left . . . to make [his] feverish notes” (179), an act that cements his vocation as an artist and subject of

Bildung—nor is it a Modernist bildungsroman, as the subject of Bildung is mocked in that same sentence, when the wife of the elder novelist is “five minutes now into her doomed journey in search of a less noble calling” (179, emphasis mine). The self-

32 seriousness of Bildung is mocked with the word “noble,” and the idea of vocation is undercut with the ironic usage of “calling” as the final word. With this saturation of irony at all levels, Roth moves the genre toward maturing into a Postmodern

Bildungsroman.

The other portion of The Ghost Writer’s Postmodernity is its metafictionality.

In Derek Parker Royal’s exploration of Roth and Postmodernism, Royal defines metafiction thus: “While not solely a postmodern phenomenon, metafiction is . . . a mode of writing wherein texts are aware of and refer to themselves as constructed narratives—and as such are usually considered an expression of postmodern writing”

(Royal 26). Zuckerman has been Roth’s portal into the Postmodern since he first appeared in My Life as a Man, and through this portal and throughout the evolution of

Zuckerman and Roth’s relationship to Zuckerman, “Roth’s fiction stages a metamorphosis, but it is one in which transformation is never completed: opposing selves, original and successor, coexist as competing claims to an identity” (Kartiganer

37). For the mature Roth, this means that Bildung is never truly completed; rather,

Roth constantly complicates instead of resolves, continuing Zuckerman’s story into alternate lives, opting for Postmodern incoherence and complexity in place of humanistic actualization.

Royal continues on to say that “the postmodern implications of metafiction are quite significant and indeed underscore the ‘fictionality of the world’: reader expectations are shattered, traditional narrative modes of understanding (as in genre distinctions) are thrown into question” (Royal 26). In The Ghost Writer, many

33 expectations are shattered, particularly through subversion and ironic comment on the

Bildungsroman; but also in that while Roth is working within the Bildungsroman tradition, he takes a giant narrative and generic detour to spend time crafting several variations on the idea that Anne Frank might be alive in Lonnoff’s house, or that this woman in Lonnoff’s house might be impersonating Anne Frank, and then abandoning the idea all together. This is an example of “traditional narrative modes of understanding (as in genre distinctions) [being] thrown into question.” The

Bildungsroman is dropped for a time to explore alternate history.

Let us also note that through this saturation of fictional worlds, Roth reminds us that we are reading fiction. As Trachtenberg puts it, “Though allowing fiction to draw upon still other fiction as a frame of reference creates the illusion of an internal reality, it reminds us of an enveloping set of conditions that counts both fictive levels as part of its inventory” (Trachtenberg 240). Roth, however, has many more than two layers of fiction as part of his inventory, as we will discuss momentarily. As he adds more layers, he draws more attention to the structure’s fictionality.

The Ghost Writer is about the status of fiction; but it is equally an exploration of the status of writers and their relation to fiction, including their own fiction. As

Kartiganer puts it in “Zuckerman Bound: The Celebration of Silence,” “The Ghost

Writer deals with shifting conceptions of the writer at work: from the high modernist heroic figure redeeming the real, at times appearing to abandon it for the sake of some imaginary coherence, to the postmodern comedian eager to violate clear-cut divisions of life and art, particularly if that means offending the self-appointed arbiters of both”

34 (Kartiganer 35). This irreverence is certainly a key to understanding Roth; and he often shows equal irreverence for himself and others; I see this fundamentally mischievous and playful streak in Roth as definitively Postmodern. A part of this is, as

Kartiganer points out, how Roth offensively, “violate[s] clear-cut divisions of life and art.” In doing this, Roth questions both, puts pressure on both. This questioning is one of the major projects of The Ghost Writer, as evidenced by the “Femme Fatale” section about Anne Frank, but also one of the major projects of Roth’s general intertextuality.

In addressing this centrality of this project, Derek Parker Royal explains, “one cannot thoroughly read Roth without taking issues of intertextuality into account.

There are countless references to other works and, innumerable examples of intertextuality within Roth’s corpus, where characters and events in earlier Roth texts are cited in later volumes” (Royal 25). A work by Roth always relates to Roth the writer, Roth the man, and the many things that Roth has read, his characters have read

(real or imagined), and the ways that people have traditionally read Roth. This status as an remarkably complex aesthetic object, in its connections to so many worlds of fact and fiction, makes The Ghost Writer a true innovation in the history of the

Bildungsroman and a fascinating case study of Roth’s developing technique. Let us close, in a testament to the work’s many meanings, by remembering that we opened this discussion with Hendley calling this novel Roth’s “most traditional work.”

3.4—Indignation: An Absurdist Bildungsroman

35 For his final foray into the genre, Roth revisits the failed Bildungsroman. Let us remember that in the Modernist Bildungsroman, so often a failure, that

“experimentation emerge[d]as the novelist employ[ed] new artistic means to translate the longing for wholeness and harmony” (Castle 2). In Indignation, Roth pushes away from Joyce—as in Portnoy’s Complaint and The Ghost Writer—and runs into the mangled arms of Kafka and absurdity. His previous concern, it seemed, was finding the way forward after Modernism—primarily through form with Portnoy’s Complaint and his development of “blocks of consciousness,” primarily through content and intertextuality in The Ghost Writer. Indignation does not share these goals; it is not a bold leap forward. Rather than expand, it contracts.

Of those two previous novels, Indignation shares the most in common with

Portnoy’s Complaint, both because Indignation is a failed Bildungsroman, and because it could be read, as Royal suggests in his review essay, “as an alternate reality for Alexander Portnoy. Had Alex not waited until he was thirty-three-years old to express his heated frustrations, and in the safety of a psychiatrist’s office, he may have ended up on the battlefields of Korea, as Marcus does” (“What to Make of Roth’s

Indignation” 135). Indeed, it would a much darker alternate reality. Not only does our indignant protagonist end up those battlefields, his life ends there, tragically, early, brutally. In this abrupt end to his life—in this abrupt and irrevocable end to his process of Bildung—this Bildungsroman is a failed Bildungsroman without the hidden optimism of Portnoy’s Complaint.

36 Granted, this failure has much precedent. Castle explains the origins of the failed Bildungsroman in the classical Bildungsroman, in which the failure was not an indictment of society; rather, “such failures remind the hero (and the reader) that social maturity involves knowing one’s limits and accepting one’s place in the order of things. Failure must therefore be understood as a failure to participate or to accept one’s role in a dialectic of personal desire and social responsibility, of ‘reflection and

‘action” (Castle 9). Alexander Portnoy internally did not accept his role “in a dialectic of personal desire and social responsibility,” and his inability to fully reconcile the two led to his outrageous internal state. In Indignation, Marcus actively and externally refuses to do this. As the ending reflection on the tragedy of his life puts it, “If only he had gone to chapel himself! If only he’d gone there the forty times and signed his name the forty times, he’d be alive today and just retiring from practicing law” (230).

In other words, if only Marcus had, like a successful subject of Bildung, been able to subject his personal desire to his social responsibility, he would have lived. Notice, too, that the passage focuses on Marcus’s vocation: if only he had learned to balance the two, he would have become a working member of society, the successful subject of Bildung. Roth does not seem, however, to be suggesting that this is entirely

Marcus’s fault.

Roth does seem to be carrying on the legacy of the Modernist Bildungsroman, which, “in the 1890s . . . [began] to critique the very society it was meant to validate and legitimize” (Castle 23). Certainly Roth is critical of institutions, not to mention

“Our Folly, which art in Heaven! The disgrace of religion, the immaturity and

37 ignorance and shame of it all! Lunatic piety about nothing!” (230). The way Marcus is singled out as an Atheist resembles the marginalized Modernist hero, who “refuses socialization and assimilation into social institutions that do not advance his or her artistic designs” (Castle 24). In the case of Marcus, it is not his artistic designs but his rational designs—his entrance into what he sees as adulthood and formation, assentation to rationality.

Before we explore this, let us consider what Roth is departing from in the

Modernist failed Bildungsroman. As Castle puts it, “If Stephen Dedalus must flee his native land in order to achieve his native goals . . . if Rachel Vinrace dies before she can even find out what her goal is, the failure is not that of Bildung, which remains an ideal for all of these young people, but that of the specific social conditions of their development” (Castle 23). In Roth, the failure is that of the Bildungsheld, who just needed to keep his mouth shut, and it is also the failure of society that is founded upon something as silly as religion—moreover as absurd as religion. And this is Roth’s major point of departure from previous Bildungsroman: his Bildungsroman is a work of Absurdism. This is why it is so important that Marcus emphasizes rationality and

Bertrand Russell: rationality is incompatible with the absurd world that Marcus inhabits.

The Modernist Bildungsroman, though often a failure, was a eulogy, an “the abstract affirmation of Bildung as a cherished ideal” (Castle 28). Indignation does not long for Bildung or any ideal; on the contrary, it is opposed to idealism. Marcus’s rationality is opposed to all idealism, except his ideal of rationality; that idealism

38 literally gets him killed. Indignation mourns only the loss of rationality in the world of war and religion. Consider the novel’s closing reflection: if Marcus had been able to accept that he lived in an irrational, unfair world, if he would have gone to chapel, he would have “postponed learning what his uneducated father had been trying so hard to teach him all along: of the terrible, the incomprehensible way one’s most banal, incidental, even comical choices achieve the most disproportionate result” (231).

Consider Roth’s audacity here: he ends with a moral. And the reason he gets away with this is that it is an absurd moral; one that recalls Kafka’s parables. In Indignation, there is no, “Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race”

(Joyce 247), as in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; there is no, “Now Vee May

Perhaps Begin” (PC 274), as in Portnoy’s Complaint—there is only the absurd death of a young man, a young man brutally murdered in an unnecessary war.

In Indignation, the Bildungsroman is neither Modernist, Postmodern, classical or any other previous kind, all of which have manifested themselves as failed

Bildungsromane in the past. Indignation is an absurd Bildungsroman in which “the struggle no longer resembles the dialectical process so elegantly narrativized” and subverted in pervious manifestations of the genre. In Indignation, the ghost of that dialectic hovers about the Bildungsroman like Marcus’s ersatz ghost did, pointing to what could have been.

To view of how this innovation fits in with the rest of Roth’s career, let us look again to Royal:

39 Beginning with [Portnoy’s Complaint] and following through to the

most recent Indignation, Philip Roth has been experimenting with the

ways his stories are told and the means through which his subjects are

revealed . . . Much like Zuckerman’s idol [who turned sentences

around], Philip Roth . . . turns subjects around. He creates a fictional

self, and then turns it around. He begins another novel, and then gives

his narrative voice another twist. He takes on another narrating subject,

and gives it a spin. And so on. (“What to Make of Indignation” 136)

I would suggest that before “and so on,” we add: “he turns the Bildungsroman around.” From the classical to the Postmodern to the absurd, through these four novels spanning roughly fifty years, Roth has found new forms for a genre that has been used, subverted, and expanded upon since the 18th century. It is precisely the destruction of the process of Bildung, the genre’s combustion, its abandoning of what came before that saved it from “follow[ing] the Edwardian family romance into obscurity” (23

Castle), that allows it to still function in 2008, to still be used by writers like me in

2015.

As a young writer, I can only hope that I am revising the genre, pushing it forward bit by bit into the 21st century, hoping to do the same for the genre, in a small way, that Roth did in the 20th.

4—The Bildungsroman Revised

40 In a sense, I wish I could have ended with the last section, that I could end celebrating Roth’s inventiveness and determination. However, as I have said before, one does not celebrate Roth without some reservations. The same flaws that I see in

Roth appear historically in the Bildungsroman. The novella you about to read,

Marsh’s Field, is my contribution and correction to this tradition that Roth is complicit in. Its contribution is slight but important.

Marsh’s Field is a fairly traditional Bildungsroman. If we look again at

Castle’s list of the genre’s conventions—biographical narrative, problems of socialization and vocation, the influence of mentors and “instrumental” women— virtually all of them are present and pressing in the text. The novella almost exclusively follows Abe’s development from age 12 to 18; in this, it is biographical.

Problems of socialization manifest themselves in Abe’s sense that he does not belong in Sharon and as he further ostracizes himself through his pursuit of Linda Daniels.

David Peterson and Pastor Robert are important mentors for Abe, and the question of influence—how people, books, and traditions affect us—is central to the novella.

Admittedly, the problem of vocation is slight in Marsh’s Field, but I have restored the classical Bildungsroman’s element of “aesthetic education,” and this I think is a fair trade.

This leaves one component: “‘instrumental’ women.” Before I explore this concept in my own work, let us briefly survey the way women have historically functioned in the Bildungsroman and then specifically in Roth’s work.

41 As I have stated previously, if the Bildungsroman is centered on “reflection and action,” then women traditionally draw the man into action, and the differences between the man and the woman, and the turmoil caused by those differences, push the protagonist into reflection. Trachtenberg puts this slightly differently when he says, “the hero’s education often requires experience with a woman, who appears alternately in a maternal role, which nurtures and protects him, or in a sexual one, which initiates him into life’s mysteries” (Trachtenberg 329). This is what Castle means when he says that the women in the classical Bildungsroman and beyond are often “instrumental;” they are the means, never the ends; they serve their role, and they fade into the background of the tale as our hero becomes a man. She may hurt him, but it is his story.

In Goodbye, Columbus, Brenda appears in the first sentence of the book and reflections on her remain until the last paragraph. However, as Debrea Shostak sums her up, she “can appear to be little more than a spoiled Jewish American princess, a delectable dish tempting Neil Klugman much as does the cornucopia of fruit in her family’s refrigerator” (Shostak 112). She is the entry point to tension and theme in the novel. Their relationship leads finally to what is summed up in the final word of the novel, “work” (97)—to the Bildungsroman problems of vocation and class.

In Portnoy’s Complaint we have “The Monkey” (!) and the Isreali woman whom Alex Portnoy attempts to rape—not to mention the mother, whom Shostak describes as “a nightmarish Jewish mother, self-denying, overprotective, and castrating. Indeed, Roth’s male characters project their fears upon women who seem

42 to threaten their performance of masculinity” (112). Part of what makes Shostak’s reading so great is that she acknowledges that Roth knows that he is doing this. It is

Alex Portnoy himself who aptly summarizes his relationship with women as he laments, “What I’m saying, Doctor, is that I don’t seem to stick my dick up these girls, as much as I stick it up their backgrounds—as though through fucking I will discover

America. Conquer America—maybe that’s more like it” (235). Women for Alex are instrumental on two counts: as sexual objects to satisfy his desire and as cultural objects as a means of legitimizing his transformation from an American Jew to an

American. Both Roth and Alex Portnoy understand and acknowledge the absurdity of this position. It is important, however, that we note that this position is still present, and for the purposes of this survey note that Portnoy’s vision never allows for a more balanced female character to enter the frame, both limiting the fullness of his characters and increasing our understanding of the absurdity and mania of Portnoy’s world view.

In The Ghost Writer, Zuckerman uses Amy Bellete/Anne Frank to pry open his imagination. As Kartiganer puts it: “Both Anne and Amy . . . become the fictional guises through which Zuckerman breaks out of the writing block—the threat of silence—that he experiences in the chapter ‘Nathan Dedalus’” (39). By impersonating them in his writing, he is able to have a breakthrough about his own identity, as a Jew, as a writer, as a son. Amy is the catalyst for both the narrative conflict and the novel’s narrative innovation.

43 Finally, in Indignation, it is Olivia—whom Marcus fauns over, receives oral sex from, hurts, and then is seemingly abandoned by, before the terrible truth comes out—who serves as the instrumental woman. Like all of the other women in these stories, she disappears after she has served her function. She ends up in a hospital, pregnant and suffering from a nervous breakdown (191). We do not know her fate after that; her tragedy is only a portion of Marcus’s tragedy.

I am not suggesting that Roth deliberately uses women as instruments.

However, I do not believe that any of these women are shining examples of what a good female character can be, especially not a strong female character. (That said, I do not believe that a female character has to be strong, nor do I believe a male character has to be strong: one follows the internal logic of the story.) I do think that female characters can be written more fully than Roth has written them. This is both an ethical and an aesthetic failure.

Let us revisit Julia Keller’s apt criticism of Roth: his female characters function as “things against which men can sharpen themselves, or dull themselves.

Women flirt, they flit, but they do not really live, if by living we mean making moral choices and owning up (or not) to responsibility” (Keller). Almost this exact claim could be made about women in the Bildungsroman. Through my revision of the genre

I see myself as addressing both Roth and the male manifestation of the genre itself.

Some of the major questions of Marsh’s Field are: how have society and literature treated women in the past; how can we do it better? How do these instances and the traditions that are made out of them affect us? At what cost? To whom?

44 Marsh’s Field’s failure in this regard is that it does not break entirely out of this pattern. Linda Daniels is an instrumental woman: she draws Abe into action; she hurts him, and he reflects because of that. She “initiates him into life’s mysteries.”

And yet, at the end of Marsh’s Field, it is Linda who writes her history; the world knows only her memoir. Our self-absorbed narrator is not a part of that. He is denied his part in the story, just as women have been denied their part in the majority of

Bildungsromane. This may be a small gesture, but it is my attempt to let Linda “live.”

One may retort that if this was my goal, why not just write Linda’s story?

There are two reasons: one, I do not choose in that way what I write. This story came alive for me, from a paragraph written in a diner to the 40,000 words you are about to read. I cannot help that Abe’s story was the one that did. Two, this novella is, like

Roth’s novel’s, an examination of those who hurt, not those who are hurt. This novella shows the selfishness, the shortsightedness of those who think that they are the good ones. This is the other central theme of Marsh’s Field: there is no way to tell who, in the final analysis, was the good one, who was the hero, who was the villain, who the story was even about. We have only the way that others have influenced us, the stories that are told of them, and the stories that they tell about themselves. We have— whether in fact, fiction, or a blend of the two—only reflection, action, and influence.

In fiction, at least, that is everything; that is all.

45 Works Cited

Castle, Gregory. Reading the Modernist Bildungsroman. Gainesville: The University

of Florida Press, 2006. Print.

Gooblar, David. “Roth and Women.” Philip Roth Studies 1 (2012): 7. RAMBI. Web. 6

Apr. 2015.

Hardin, James. Introduction. Reflection and Action: Essays on the Bildungsroman. Ed.

James Hardin. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991. 1-25.

Print.

Martini, Fritz. “Bildungsroman—Term and Theory.” Reflection and Action: Essays on

the Bildungsroman. Ed. James Hardin. Columbia: University of South Carolina

Press, 1991. 26-45. Print.

Hardin, James. Introduction. Reflection and Action: Essays on the Bildungsroman. Ed.

James Hardin. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991. ix-xxvii.

Print.

Hendley, Clark W. “An Old Form Revitalized: Philip Roth’s Ghost Writer and The

Bildungsroman. Studies in the Novel. (1984): 87. RAMBI. Web. 6 Apr. 2015.

Kartiganer, Donald M. “Zuckerman Bound: the celebrant of silence.” The Cambridge

Companion to Philip Roth. Ed.Timothy Parrish. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2007. 35-51. Print.

Parrish, Timothy. “Introduction: Roth at mid-career.” The Cambridge Companion to

Philip Roth. Ed.Timothy Parrish. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

2007. 9-21. Print.

46 Roth, Philip. “Acceptance Speech by Philip Roth for the Saul Bellow Award.”

Associated Press. 31 May 2007.

---. Goodbye, Columbus. Boston: Bantam Books, 1959. Print.

---. Indignation. New York: Vintage Books, 2008. Print.

---. “On Portnoy’s Complaint.” Reading Myself and Others. Ed. Philip Roth. New

York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975. 15-22. Print.

---. Portnoy’s Complaint. New York: Vintage Books, 1967. Print.

---. “Philip Roth.” Conversations with Philip Roth. Ed. George J. Searles. Jackson:

University Press of Mississippi, 1992. Print.

---. “Philip Roth’s Exact Intent.” Conversations with Philip Roth. Ed. George J.

Searles. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1992. Print.

---. The Ghost Writer. New York: Vintage Books, 1979. Print.

Royal, Derek Parker. “What to Make of Roth’s Indignation; Or, Seriousness in the

Fifties.” Philip Roth Studies 5.1 (2009): 3. MLA International Bibliography.

Web. Apr. 2015.

Royal, Derek Parker. “Roth, literary influence, and postmodernism.” The Cambridge

Companion to Philip Roth. Ed.Timothy Parrish. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2007. 22-34. Print.

Shostak, Debra. “Roth, literary influence, and postmodernism.” The Cambridge

Companion to Philip Roth. Ed.Timothy Parrish. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2007. 111-126. Print.

47 Trachtenberg, Stanley. “In The Egosphere: Philip Roth’s Anit-Bildungsroman.”

Papers on Language & Literature 25. (1989). 326-341. Humanities Full Text

(H.W. Wilson. Web. 6 Apr. 2015.

48

Marsh’s Field

49

Our death, the Tree of Knowledge, grew fast by— Knowledge of good, bought dear by knowing ill.

—John Milton, Paradise Lost

50

I

51 We were in Marsh’s field in the beginning of spring, 1963, and she, Linda

Daniels, had buzzed off all of her hair. I was 18 and she was 22. We’d met formally at my uncle’s drugstore the month before, though for nearly six years I’d been hearing about her or straining through windows and taking detours to see her, since the rumors had started when I was twelve, since all of Sharon had started saying that Saul’s father had impregnated her and paid for her abortion.

In the drugstore, the day I met her, I didn’t see her come in; the door’s bell was broken. I was dealing with another customer, but I glanced, and then glanced again after I saw her. Disheveled, dark strands of hair rising over the candy, setting below the household medicine. She wandered through the back near the milk, hair veiling the overalls she’d taken to wearing. Those overalls had been the source of a lot of gossip in Sharon since she’d come back.

Linda placed a box of candy—not the kind my aunt made and sold in plastic baggies, but the cardboard, mass-produced stuff—she place the candy on the counter and made herself busy by looking around the store. She slid behind the candy, after a moment, like she thought she should be embarrassed, a copy of Milton’s Poetical

Works—huge, crimson, with gold lettering—and I smiled like I thought was charming then, and I said, “Some light reading?”

Neighborly, she said, “How are you?”

“I’m good. Thanks,” I said and started to ring up her candy. “Can’t say I’ve read it.”

52 “Not even a short poem?” she said. “Well, it’s great, all of it. But that goes without saying, I suppose.” She dug her thumbs into the pockets of her overalls.

Taking my time with my words, I said, “I’m Abe. You’re Linda, right?”

She said, “Yes. I’m Linda.” She screwed her thumbs further into her pockets.

“It’s nice to meet you.”

“It’s nice to meet you, too.” I held her candy, close to my body, like my uncle did when he had no intention of letting me leave till I’d heard what he had to say.

“You were out east, right?”

“For school, yes.”

“You like it?”

“I’m fond of it enough that I’d like to go back. This is how I remember the trees; I’m glad this was the time of year that I came back.” She gestured out the window. “They look so pathetic without leaves on them.”

“My friends and I used to tear as many off as we could, fast as we could. I’m not sure why.”

I waited for her to speak.

“I guess it’s not so unbearable to be in Sharon. I have half a million memories to uncover.”

“Yeah,” I took a risk, “well, we maybe could walk around sometime.” I slid her bag to her. “Tell me about them. It might make your sentence back in Sharon zip by a little quicker.”

She took the bag from me.

53 I said, “I’m serious.”

Miss Diane, an old woman with dyed hair that was always covered by her hat and always had between her garments a terrible collision of prints and colors, entered the store. I said, “If you’ll excuse me I’ve got a lot of folks to serve, though, so we’ll have to resume this conversation at your earliest convenience.” I handed her her receipt, smiled again, and she sort of nodded and left.

Miss Diane trickled to where Linda had been and smiled—obviously she hadn’t recognized Linda, though most didn’t since she’d come back to Sharon. Miss

Diane seemed overjoyed at what she assumed to be young love. And she clearly longed for that: you could see it in the way she fussed at her hair and in the way she looked at me, longed for it and maybe even thought the earth was void of it since she’d cowered from it, long before Saul’s father and my father were young, before that drug store was built. This was Miss Diane’s reputation, and the only thing I really knew about her.

I rang up her cigarettes, and work went on like it did if my uncle wasn’t around, me messing with customers in a friendly way, stealing my aunt’s candy when

I was hungry, trying to keep my mind on task enough to give correct change. My mind kept coming back to her, to Linda. For the next few days every time someone came in

I was disappointed that it wasn’t her.

And then, three or four days later, it was.

*

54 Strangely enough, or maybe appropriately enough, when I first heard Linda Daniels’ name, it was my mother who said it. She’d asked me to go on a walk with her, which was not unusual at that time. I was twelve.

A slow walker, older than my friend’s mothers, I often ran up ahead of her to hang from one of those trees standing small all around Sharon, waiting for her to catch up with me. With patience I was incapable of appreciating at the time, my mother would pick me out of the tree, cooing that I was the sweetest fruit for which she could wish.

Though when I went to run ahead this evening, she put her hand on my shoulder, looking to the turn we were about to make and shaking her head, so I trudged with her until we’d left off our street, like she didn’t want the talk or its content contaminating our home or anything near it: this conversation was not a part of the world she’d worked so hard to forge for me, active as she was in the neighborhood. This was something I needed to understand, but something that had no relation to me—like our past war in Korea, terrible and real, but far off and of no direct consequence, for me.

“Abe,” my mother said, “I don’t want you to spend any more time with Saul.”

I reminded her, as if it were something that had slipped her mind, that Saul and

I went to school together.

“Saul’s father,” she said, “has done something very bad. Abe, I’m not sure how much of this you’ll be able to understand.”

55 This idea, that there was some secret, some world, of which I could not be a part was incomprehensible, infuriating, so I pushed her to tell me as maybe she hoped

I would, because she did want me to know, all of it, I think, though modesty prevented her from telling it straight.

Finally she said, “I’m not going to pretend you don’t know what these words are, what they mean, Abe. I’m sure you’ve heard it from your friends, if not someone else, maybe even your father. I don’t know.”

She placed her hand on my shoulder. I wouldn’t hit my growth spurts for a few years, so it was at a comfortable height for her, and she leaned on me for support, which made me feel important, useful.

She went on. “But Saul’s father and a girl not much older than you. A girl of sixteen. He’s made her pregnant. Some say that he had the baby removed. I’ve heard about all of these things in the past few days and, Abe, I can’t in good conscience allow you to spend time with a family like that. Saul will not be coming over to our house anymore, and you will not be spending time with him, either.”

Something in this seemed wrong. I wasn’t sure that I should or could fight it, though.

“My age?” I said.

“No. Sixteen.” She pulled at her dress, where it had bunched on her leg. “I’ve seen this young lady on Elm Street, as well. Linda Daniels. Not that I think you would, but you are not to speak with her either. That girl is not good.”

“Saul’s good, though.”

56 “Maybe. But his father’s not a good man, hun. There are things in this world, in Sharon even, that you can’t imagine right now. And you shouldn’t have to. And you should not have to be exposed to those kinds of people.”

I didn’t say anything back to that.

We had walked two blocks, and now rounded our second left, tracing the domino we always did. School was coming soon. It was warm, and my mother wore a sundress that was unusually high for her. She indulged, which isn’t saying much, in the last warm days. Of course my mother didn’t know that in that year I would see the first woman I ever saw nude, besides her, in the basement of a house not far from there, and she didn’t know that I’d have my first sexual experience at that same moment, and she didn’t know that six years later I would be asking Linda herself to meet me, and end up in Marsh’s field with her, watching the bones inside her pale shoulders slide beneath the blue straps of the overalls she’d taken to wearing, nor of the kiss I would bury beneath the strap, while running my hand up her thigh, against the denim. I tasted the gum in her mouth. I felt long grass caress my back, and I came in a world collapsed into a field with a possessed girl and the sun like an iron on my back.

*

The night after my mother told me about Linda Daniels, I lay in bed alone, under more covers than needed. The moon wouldn’t let me sleep, framed exactly by the window.

57 I could always walk out the front door of my house after eleven; my parents were heavy sleepers. That they were never concerned about me leaving at night remains a mystery. I zipped up my jacket and walked three blocks in the opposite direction of where my mother and I had been walking, to Saul’s house. He lived in a two-story place, double the size of ours, at least, a sky-blue house with white shutters like clouds. His bedroom was in the lower half, and I knocked on his window a few times, trying to balance discreetness for his father and urgency enough to wake him.

The window slid up first and then his head appeared, his red hair, same as his mother’s was, apparent even in the dark, and the ever-prevalent bones in his face. He said, “You’re not here to rip me limb from limb are you?”

I’m not sure he knew it was me; I wasn’t the only one who came at late hours to wake up Saul and talk or do something that needed darkness.

“It’s Abe. Come on out. I’ve got to tell you something.”

“This better be good. Trying to sleep.”

“Get out here.”

Saul climbed out the window, wearing dark blue shorts. It was warm enough that he could be comfortable in them.

“What?” he said. We walked away from the house, staying in the shadows of the taller trees.

“How are you?”

Saul rubbed at his eye. “I’m swell.”

58 The moon made his pale skin glow. I had the urge to hit him or bite him or pull his hair.

“You heard anything about ball this week.”

“No.”

“We should get something together.”

“Sure. What the hell time is it, Abe?”

“I’m not sure. I came out and it took me a second to get over here.”

“Yeah.”

“What day would be good for you?”

“I don’t know, Abe, judgment day I’m free, I guess.” He turned to home, walking in his long strides toward his grand horizon of a house.

“Saul.”

“Yeah?”

“My mom says we can’t hang out anymore.”

Saul looked confused. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“She says cause your dad.”

“What about my dad, Abe?”

I started to say something but he cut me off and asked again. Not liking being cut off, I said, “Come on, you don’t know?”

“Know what?”

“Quit it, Saul.”

He stopped walking and turned toward me. “What about my dad?”

59 Then he put his hand on my shoulder, but not in the way my mother did, in the opposite way, like he was opening the path to my stomach for his small, hard fist. I did sit-ups at night to keep fit for track. I flexed my stomach in anticipation of the blow, if it came, excited to try out my new body, which I’d only been able to admire in the mirror after baths, and from above when I was changing before bed, before school.

Saul was never fit, though.

“Something about some girl. Our age.”

Saul swallowed at me as I said it.

“Abe, you’re full of shit.”

“I’m not allowed to hang out with you anymore. Ma told me today.” I said matter-of-factly.

“She’s a bitch and you’re a liar.”

“Shut up, Saul,” I said, louder than he. I paced, and it was my turn to consider hitting him. Then I said, “Alright. We won’t hang out then.”

We looked at each other, each scared, each hoping it might really come to blows, to killing, to winning.

“Get lost,” he said and walked away, which was worse than his cursing at me, because I was used to that, given that he said every curse word I knew, more than anyone else I’d then encountered. But he just said that, quietly.

Then after a few days we were friends again; we were boys.

*

60 News spread. School started and you can’t keep things like that down for long.

Teachers noticed and so did the students. Saul became harder than he was. He hit another kid, Williams or something, in a classroom, in front of everyone. The teacher didn’t say anything as Williams interrupted her lesson to make a crack about Saul’s father, and it’s not that she laughed, but that she didn’t chastise him in any way, so it came down to Saul’s responsibility. He got up and we thought he must have been going to the bathroom to cry or something, but he turned and pushed Williams’s chair over and Williams fell back, and when his head hit the tile it was like a gavel struck, and he gave a cough and then nothing. Saul stood above him, watching him and waiting for him to get up and the teacher, God knows if anyone remembers her name now, stood watching him, and when the kid didn’t get up Saul still had aggression left yet, I guess, so he flipped the kid’s desk and started shouting over and over again the kid’s name, and he picked up the desk and threw it at the wall, now shouting for his father, the veins in arms filled to capacity, and his arms, too, like the bags of leaves my father and I filled every autumn, and as I watched from the back of the room,

Williams was taking in none of it, cold, and Saul was in utter rage—absolute stillness and complete commotion, before the woman whose job it was to keep us balanced in between, just watching.

Saul didn’t come back to school after that. The truth is they were probably hoping for any excuse to get him out anyway, and this was more than they could have asked for. The kid, Williams, turned out to be fine, but there was talk of the teacher losing her job, and talk about, in an auditorium filled with concerned parents, ‘the

61 safety of our children.’ But none of it was about Saul or Williams; it was all about that young whore Linda Daniels and the dragon—reigning in his big sky blue house, waiting for everything to blow over, they assumed, so that he could come out again and pluck whatever innocent creature he wished from the earth—but more likely that he just wouldn’t be chased with torches and killed in the very streets that his father built.

From what I gathered he, David Peterson, had always been there. Like the roots that broke through the sidewalks of our town, he both preceded the institution and forced his way in through it. He was head of the company his father’d built—the one that built the city—when all of this happened. If not respected, he was at least honored by the community for his contributions and success. If he had been mayor or something, there could have been fall out; he could have resigned—but there was only rumor, and he was just another man. If a powerful one. On walks he’d told Saul and me about when he grew up on the streets we walked on, about how much harder things were, about the time his father beat him for etching his initials into the cement they’d been pouring: their name was in the town already; they were a part of it; the cement had been poured by them and that was a kind of ownership that having your name on something couldn’t come close to, whether it was honored by the community or not.

The king in his castle, the pope in his great wonder, the pyramid and the pharaoh who lies in its bowels with ten slaves and lovers and the weight of all of them in gold— they might own it, but the man who designed it, the man who organized the men who willed it into the world, dragging blocks up ramps they themselves built, they birthed

62 something. A different kind of pride and a different form of ownership, and not a lesser one either: they had built the town, David’s father and his men, and nothing would take that away, not the mayor and not his disgrace, and not the rupturing, or even the death, of the town and its community.

That community was stronger than ever then. Things to hate have a way of uniting folks. Saul’s father was that thing. Everyone spent so much time wrestling with the urge to castrate or hang or stone or tar and feather the man who now would never leave his home, except to go on walks on the rim of town, staring at the moon or the river—they said, contemplating suicide. And many of them, I suspect, prayed for that. They sure talked about it, from home to the bank, to church.

David Peterson was also an educated man. His father wanted him to be learned even if, or because, he would be working in the field that dealt in the least abstraction, literal concrete. Saul’s grandfather forced David to go through college, but when he died two years into his son’s education, David dropped out and took over the company, as Saul’s grandfather, so David claimed, would have wanted him to. Under

David, it grew even past what his father had done with it, and it shifted to accommodate a changing town. He never stopped studying, though. He bought a new set of encyclopedias each year, donated the old sets to the library. Sometimes in his home I would stare at the spines of the books on his wall-long library or swing across the rolling ladder pretending I was a musketeer with Saul.

We once stole his copy of Marquis de Sade and read it in Saul’s room and returned it in the morning. Saul had been opening books at random one day and

63 found it. We took turns reading it in a whisper and burst out laughing at the mentions of flatulence and sodomy and the breasts of women. But when they began sodomizing young men, I wanted to put the book away and worried we had stumbled onto something that would get us into more trouble than we’d realized. Saul laughed and read on. I asked him to stop, but he kept reading until finally he was out of breath. I made him promise, this long before the rumors about Linda Daniels, never to mention the book, because I knew my mother wouldn’t let me talk to a man who had such a book in his house.

But David lent me books, Treasure Island, The Count of Monte Cristo, and then early Melville, and then later Melville, long before I was ready for it, telling me, with sternness and his hand on my shoulder, that if I went after the whale I’d have no trouble with the bluegills. He would read to the two of us while we lay at his feet like dogs, and he sat in his overstuffed red chair (sometimes when I went to the bathroom at night and I knew they were both asleep, I would curl up in that chair, maybe even take out one of David’s books). Whatever it was he was reading to us, we caught little of it—lyric or narrative, modern or antiquated, epic or journal.

*

A week after I’d gone to visit him at night, I walked home from school with

Saul and went back to his place. We lay on our bellies on the floor of his room, talking about what we’d like to do with the limitless time we had that afternoon, like all other afternoons.

His father came in wearing khakis and an undershirt. He was clean-shaven.

64 “Boys,” he said, looking around the room, his hand not leaving his face, as if he were hiding something embarrassing. “How comes the learning?”

We muttered something about it being fine, more interested in our plot to terrorize the lanky girls who lived up the street, or joining the other boys for baseball.

David nodded and sat in the corner, muttering something in affirmation. The chair he sat in was made for a child and painted a shade of light blue that almost matched the house. He’d made it himself out of local wood as a present to his son, when his wife, Saul’s mother, had been pregnant, and alive. Saul’s father watched us talk and we censored ourselves. Then he stood, pacing the room.

“How’s your family, Abe?”

“They’re fine, sir.” I had enough sense not to say anything about my mother, but less because it would be rude than because I thought he might respect her wishes.

“Good. Will you be joining us for dinner?”

“No, sir. I don’t think so.”

Saul cut in: “We’ll be heading out, anyway, Dad. There’s a game soon.”

Saul’s father didn’t answer but still looked at us. Then he sat back down and said, “My father told me that one could—actually, my father didn’t care much about pronouns. He said, ‘you can never have too many fathers.’ Meaning father figures. Do you think that’s true?”

Saul said, “I don’t know, Dad.”

“Abe, what do you think?”

“I think you might be right, sir.”

65 “I didn’t say anything; it was my father who said it. Not I.” I looked to Saul for help but his father went on. “I’m thinking maybe he was wrong. I’m thinking, I’ve been thinking, that maybe one should be more selective about whom one’s influenced by.”

“Maybe you’re right, sir,” I said.

“Maybe,” he said, standing. “Well, it seems I’ll be cooking for one, then. Saul, you can have leftovers.” He bent and unbent his legs. “You know where to find them.”

“Yeah, Dad.” I could tell he just wanted him gone, and I did too. You couldn’t talk openly or curse or anything in front of adults, even if they were the Devil himself according to everyone you knew.

We got humiliated at the diamond at Peterson’s Park and came back dejected.

Saul’s father was in a button up and the same pants, even wearing polished shoes. He was sitting at the table, eating slowly, a quarter of a bottle of red wine in front of him.

The thick cream napkin to the left of his plate was stained pink. The room smelled of cooked meat.

“You told me you weren’t going to be home for dinner,” he said, wiping his face with the napkin.

“We got beat real bad,” Saul said, “so our team just left.”

“Really badly. And don’t ever do that.”

“What?”

“Don’t ever just leave like that. You’re lucky I made extra, sit down. No. Go

66 wash your hands. Abe,” he didn’t turn to me, “I apologize, I didn’t make enough for both of you.”

I said, “It was good to see you, sir.”

Saul had already walked off to the bathroom, quickly and with his head down, so I turned and left to the sound of Saul’s father’s fork scraping the plate, as he killed the last of the meal he’d made.

*

My mother was sitting at the dinner table when I came home, her face tilted downward, toward where we had stuffed matches under the leg of the table. She stared like it was the key to something. One day my father had noticed that table wobbled and he’d shoved in the packs of matches, which had Daren’s on it, the name of the bar he went to some weekends, so maybe that’s what she was reading. My father spent most nights with my mother. Now and then they would go out with another couple or to a party at another couple’s place—the neighborhood made up almost exclusively of little units of threes and fours, and in rigorous cases of religious observance, tens—but there were few single parents in the neighborhood.

My father greeted me, a full glass of milk and our local newspaper, closed and upside down, in front of him. “There are leftovers in the oven for you.”

Without looking up from the matches, my mother said, “Why don’t you take them into your room, hun.”

I nodded and fixed myself a plate. The table rocked from her bouncing knee. I walked to my room.

67 “I’ll bet he was with Peterson’s boy,” my mother said.

“Could be.”

“I saw him in the grocery store today. And you should have seen the way he smiled at me. How can a man like that smile?”

“Could be he doesn’t feel he’s done anything wrong—“

“Oh, he knows. No one could do that and not know. I spoke to him—”

“You could have approached me about this first.”

“I said, ‘David, I don’t want my boy at your house anymore.’ He just stared at me, so I said it again, and he had the nerve to defend himself, which is more than I can stand to believe.”

“Did you lock the car, Martha?”

“He said that our boys were friends, and he’d hate to see their friendship torn asunder by his sins. I told him that this was just starting, that if he felt he could get away with something like that, if he felt he could buy off an entire town by just sending the girl away, buying off her family, sending her to some private school, as if it was some selfless act of his, he did it for her benefit, throwing money at the problem. Out of sight, out of mind, is all this is. I left after that.”

“It’ll stop him having Abe over. He has that much respect, I imagine.”

“Don’t think I don’t see you giving him the benefit of the doubt. What he did was evil.”

“I’ve known him for years. Years. Anyway one thing doesn’t make a man.”

“How long do we know it went on? We have no idea.”

68 “Just the same, whether it was evil or not. But we can’t have Abe over there.

You’re right about that.”

“I’m right about all the rest of it, too. Aren’t I? Say it. Say it.”

I heard a chair scrape across the floor, the sound of a kiss. I quietly shut the door to my room.

*

My father had met Saul’s father when he moved to the town of Sharon twenty years before. They were not good friends. David had been kind to my father, and I think the two of them respected one another enough. My uncle had lived in Sharon for about five years before my father did, and after their mother passed, and the family was gone except for the two of them, my uncle proposed to my father that they reestablish the family in Sharon, where my uncle had found work and was beginning to establish himself, relatively. Being poor in one place was about the same as being poor in another, during the 30s, so my father moved down and as his brother worked they made enough to purchase a failing drugstore, which flourished under them, even if their partnership did not. They did not work well together, and it was decided that my uncle would run it while my father moved on to other ventures, though he would be consulted for major decisions and keep a percentage of the profit.

In the days before the split they needed to renovate the building and so enlisted

David Peterson’s construction company, which by that time was in a sort of golden age. The three of them found each other to be good company, all about the same age, and they went out for drinks after five a few times, but never completely took to one

69 another. My father didn’t care for the level of abstraction with which David went through the world. But he found his company novel enough. When the contract was finished, so was the friendship. Though when they saw one another about town they stopped to greet one another and talk about how their families were holding up, drifting about the time both of them were proposing to their wives and entering a new stage of adulthood.

He sat midway back in the rows of my father and my mother’s Methodist wedding, and my mother and father in the very back row of his—relative to the town—secular one. Both laughed at the jokes of those who made speeches at the receptions, but neither felt comfortable contributing an anecdote or a toast, though

David’s would have been accepted warmly, as a sign that my father was truly a member of the community, even if the owning of property and his contribution of new business had long established him as such.

After I finished my dinner that night the three of us sat on the couch, my mother’s head against my father’s shoulder, her feet dug between the couch cushions, her one drink of the night in her hand and with a look that was contentedness if I’ve even seen it, my father with his glasses on—a rarity, as he felt it made him look too much like an academic—and finally myself on the floor in front of them, on long passages his hand creeping down to my head and resting in my hair—as he read scripture to us.

*

70 Church was a big event in Sharon. There was a Methodist church, a Baptist church, and a Catholic church all within two blocks of one another, the Protestants on one block and the Catholics on the other. Jokes were made about this sort of thing and people generally made light of it. As long as you went people didn’t mind your affiliation, and since the town was somewhat spread out between the three, there were people who got away with not going at all, lost in the mix. David Peterson was not one of those people. Being a pillar of the community, he had to attend—and he did, the

Catholic church. After word got round about Linda Daniels he stopped attending, which was just as well because the sermons became somewhat pointed.

There was talk about sin. Not that there wasn’t normally talk about sin, but during this period there was talk of resisting urges, and the corruption of great men: biblical kings and patriarchs invoked, even Moses disobeyed the Lord. But no one—it seemed to me as I sat in the pew between my father and mother, my father’s arm around me, and my mother’s legs tightly crossed—reflected on the way we still invoke these figures for their accomplishments and the time they did spend on the Lord’s path. When I thought of King David I did not think of a lecherous man; I saw a great man; I saw the Star of David. Bathsheba didn’t cross my mind. I didn’t even know her name.

Linda Daniels’ family attended the same church as we did, First Methodist.

Her father was one of the few men in the town who wore a mustache, a little oddity.

But it had become a shameful eccentricity; he had no right to distinguish himself; he ought to keep his head down and let the community forget what famine he’d brought

71 upon it, in sowing his seed. Surely it was his parenting, his neglect or abuse or overbearingness or his wife’s neglect, abuse or overbearingness that had led Linda down that path. He was sitting in the back row with his wife, Linda’s mother, Mrs.

Daniels. She was an overweight woman, who, it seemed, and people said, used to have a figure that bordered on plumpness, but manifested itself in curves beyond her years.

After early childbirth and letting her guard down, it quickly became plain plumpness.

When one looked at Linda one could see her mother’s beauty and the potential for her mother’s figure. But of course Linda wasn’t there; by then Mr. Peterson had sent her away to a premier private school without any attempt to cover up that that was what’d happened. She was just gone and the news spread and it didn’t take much to put it together; I had figured it out before it had been said in front of me and told to me a dozen times and then a hundred times—before it was just something that emanated from the town, like how you knew it was a small religious town: upon entrance you could just tell that David Peterson had knocked up Linda Daniels, maybe paid for her abortion and sent her away to that expensive private school. And just as the town’s religious roots were not an idle fact—it propelled all of us into the pews every week— so this bit of Peterson-Daniels history was not an idle fact, and dictated all conversation, including the contents of the sermon that week.

“Friends,” said our skinny, jittery preacher, “it is an easy thing to do, to condemn others. And it is an easy thing to do, too, to slip into temptation. But it is a hard thing, a very hard thing, to reserve judgment about those who have strayed from the path. I’m not suggesting that we take the wicked into our arms.

72 “Paul asks that we do not allow the drunks into our congregations. Fine. Fine.

But he does not ask us to drown them. He does not ask that we hang them that put themselves above others either. He asks, he commands us, to help them find their way back onto the path, back onto solid ground. And what ground is more solid than this rock of the church?

“Many of you think that action must always be taken. That justice is always owed to us—to us. But how can these people walk the path of righteousness, if they are strung above it, knotted rope round their necks? And tell me how they can drink from the Lord’s cup if they’ve been drowned in the river? If we do not clear a path for them, if we burn the very bridge to salvation, they will never cross, will never find their way. But think, think for a moment that maybe this message applies to all of you, that it applies to myself. That we have all wandered. That we all need the grace of God and the grace of others to keep the path clear of the branches and the roots of evil, and the like—for us.”

I turned to look back at the Daniels family. Linda’s sister was there. She was very young, and in her mother’s arms. Linda’s mother was looking down at the child.

Her husband looked to his left, out through one of the three stained glass windows. Then he turned and made eye contact with me. I didn’t turn away. He kept looking at me, just looking at me. He must have been in his mid 30s, maybe, his wife the same. I felt this adult had no power over me; I felt that I could look at him and his wife and his child with impunity, and I took full advantage, giving him the same

73 neutral look back. But he looked back out the window and turned his mouth up in a way that somehow wasn’t a smile.

Mrs. Daniels must have been 16, maybe 17, Mr. Daniels, 18, when they eloped. This sort of young marriage was not uncommon then, but the community did not appreciate the clandestine nature of the arrangement. People shook their heads, and though there were not sermons pointed at them over the affair, it did stir up conversation, and people said no good would come of it. Those same people now felt themselves vindicated, which encouraged them to speak even more boldly, their powers of prediction and moral judgment proven sound, about the affair of Linda

Daniels and David Peterson.

Mr. Daniels could provide for his family. That they waited over a decade and a half before having another child allowed them to save, to make their younger child’s life more comfortable than Linda’s had been. His wife worked the counter of a clothing store in town, as well. Their second daughter would have a comfortable life, those self-appointed community prophets agreed, but only because they regarded

Linda as a kind of failed experiment, from which the Daniels family had learned what honest parenting looked like. For Linda there was no hope.

“There are those in this community that need us,” the preacher hissed at his congregation, “and it is our role, our privilege, to be there for them.” My mother switched which leg she had on top. The preacher, her expression told me, had overstayed his welcome at the front of the room.

74 Mr. Daniels put his arm around his wife. Now the preacher had his attention.

But he soon wrapped things up and we sang together and then clumped together like the church was the scrapings of a bowl of oatmeal. I watched Linda’s father shake hands with the preacher and lock eyes with him for a long time. The preacher put his hand on Mr. Daniels’ shoulder and smiled.

The two had been meeting. It had come as a shock to him when he found out about his daughter and David Peterson, but that probably goes without saying. He had not known David well, though David said hello to him when they passed on the street, and would make brief, meaningless conversation with him when one was behind the other in line at my uncle’s drug store.

His daughter told him, I guessed, because God knows Peterson wouldn’t have.

This man, Linda’s father, drove to the church immediately, left his wife to talk to his daughter about it, if she liked, and he banged on the door of the preacher’s house.

They spoke for a long time, and he came home late, and he dealt with it. People said they saw him there, twice a week. He would stop on the way home from work. The two of them would talk things over.

Because of this, community opinion on the preacher had gone down sharply.

His constituency was conservative. And, yes, it was his job to be there for the grieving man, but if one considered the things that kept happening, his daughter was impregnated by that lecherous man, and his daughter was sent away to a private school on that lecherous man’s money—and this so-called father hadn’t confronted that

75 lecherous man, much less shot him. All of this, by affiliation, was taken on by the preacher. It must have been, they reasoned, his influence that led to these decisions.

But as someone who got to know the preacher in my mid-teens, and spent a lot of time working through my guilt over topics like self-gratification and premarital sex and anger, I think I can speak to what was probably going on in his house. This is the way I imagine it: he would sit the man down, give him a glass of water without asking, tell him to drink and then tell the man just to spell out what was bothering him, no prettifying it. He would listen to Mr. Daniels and tell him what he thought. But he wouldn’t command him to do anything. And whatever decision Daniels made, the preacher would keep listening, and he would keep listening and keep telling him what he thought, but he would never be turned away. So Daniels would have told him that he thought about letting her go through with the abortion, sent out east to have it taken care of and while she was out there, just let her take that opportunity, attending that school only Peterson could pay for; Peterson could even pay for her college; maybe that would be best; maybe this was the good outcome of a terrible, sinful, repulsive situation. Maybe it was better to have her across the country in a private school, the lot of good he had done her as a father. And the preacher would try and explain that abortion was out of the question. I know he sure wasn’t sitting there advocating the end of a life, like some of the women said. Some of these men and women, those self- appointed prophets, even left our church.

So when I, and the rest of the congregation, saw Mr. Daniels shake the preacher’s hand and the two of them smile at each other like they were the best of

76 friends, in a way that he didn’t smile or laugh or talk to the other people in his congregation, we knew that the sermon had been written for the benefit of his friend, and for himself maybe, that it was his way of doing what he could for this man with whom he spent so much time.

My father was up. He shook the preacher’s hand. The man smiled at my mother and father and asked if I had been a good boy.

“He certainly has,” my mother said.

“I hope you enjoyed yourselves.” He looked confused as to why we were still standing in front of him.

My mother nodded. She wanted the same treatment and familiarity as that sinner, by association, Mr. Daniels.

“Yes, well—” The preacher greeted the next person in line.

We moved on and my father said, “Martha.”

She ignored him and stopped by a neighbor of ours, on the steps of the church.

“How are you?”

“Oh, I’m fine. I’m fine. That was an interesting sermon, wasn’t it?”

“Oh, it was. It was. I’m surprised they can stand hearing about themselves like that in a room full of people, everyone knowing it’s about them.”

My father put his hand on my shoulder. “We ought to get going,” he said.

Our neighbor said, “It’s a marvel. But I suppose I’d rather have them here than not. Like the preacher said.”

77 My mother turned to me and said, “Abe, get up. You’ll ruin your tie leaning over like that. Get up.” She put her hand around the back of my neck and directed me over to the car, bidding the neighbor goodbye as we went.

It was a hard time for her, my mother.

*

“Don’t say that, Martha.”

“It’s what I think. It is what I think.”

“It’s not even legal.”

“The rest of what he did was legal?”

“Don’t say it if you know it’s not true. And don’t think it either for that matter.

God dammit—“

“That’s exactly what I am talking about. Use that language? Yelling it, even.”

“You will not continue down this line.”

“I will. Believe me. This community does not deserve, our son does not deserve an affliction like that man.”

“Who made you mayor, Martha?”

“If you had your way Abe would be over in that house, wouldn’t he? Who knows, maybe he’s done it before. I shouldn’t have to put up with this. It’s not right.

In this country I should not be forced into being in the same room as that man, breathing the same air, having his smile inflicted on me. I can’t stand it longer.”

“He barely leaves the house as it is.”

78 “He shouldn’t have left his mother’s womb either. Poor woman. Thank God she’s not here to see this.”

“I said you will not continue down this line, and I mean it.”

“Hands off me. I mean it.” The hush of furniture pushing into the wall. “God damn you. God damn you.”

“I meant it. Stop.”

The scrape of a chair across the floor.

“Martha, sit down. Sit down! This is not your job, it’s not our job. It’s between him and their family.”

“He rapes that girl, and—“

“Rapes! Rape?”

“She was, she is, sixteen. Sixteen. That’s four years older than Abe. Go look at your son.”

“Look. Martha. Look.”

“Yes?”

“I understand. But calm down, is what you need to do.”

“You need to care a little more. That’s the only thing that needs to happen.”

“What do you suggest? We string him up? Shoot him? Bring the dogs too?”

“I suggest we don’t just let him walk around like he didn’t do anything. We need to let him know somehow. It’s not right. It’s not.”

“You want me to stop talking to him then?”

“Goddammit I do!”

79 “You want me to beat Abe if I find out he goes over there?”

“Yes, I do.”

“You want me to encourage the other fathers to do the same?”

“Yes.”

“Fine. Fine.” I could hear the furniture being straitened. “I’m telling my son goodnight.”

I heard the steps approaching my bedroom. They knew, on some level, that a fight like that couldn’t be contained in the kitchen of a one-story house, but just the same they pretended otherwise. My father’s breathing outside my door couldn’t be muted, let alone the two of them shouting. When he entered the room he was smiling.

He’d just combed his hair with his hands.

“What’re you reading, Abe?”

“Tom Sawyer.”

“Tom Sawyer, huh? For school?”

“No, Dad. Someone lent it to me.” I tried to cover this up quickly, knowing he’d make me give it back if he found out. I placed the book on my chest and looked at him. “It’s about this boy. I just started it. But it’s good.”

“That’s good. That’s good.” He sat down on the side of the bed, not really listening, but I didn’t care. I was just glad that he was in the room with me. He took off his glasses and put them in his shirt pocket and stared at me. He pushed my head gently, and I made a noise like I didn’t like it, which wasn’t true. My father was like the men with their names on those books: great and huge, with their name only

80 attached to what they gave me inside their covers; beyond that there was a whole history and person that just wouldn’t be revealed to me. All I had was prepared lines, a name. “Don’t mind me,” he said.

I kept reading while he watched me. He shifted the shade of my lamp to give me more light. Finally he got up and went to the light switch.

“We’ve decided you’re not spending any more time with Saul.” He flipped the switch. “I mean it. Goodnight, son.”

As I sat there staring at those filled pages, not understanding a word, who was to blame, in my mind? Was it lecherous David Peterson? Or was it my parents, who fought, and who forbid me from spending time with my good friend? Of course it was my parents, and that’s not to make any claim about who really was the villain, only to say that at that moment when I threw my book against the wall loud enough that my father came back in and I started yelling, it’s not fair, it’s not fair, dammit, that it seemed only reasonable and that they were being absolutely unreasonable and as I shouted at my father that none of it was fair at all and that Saul was my friend, and I pushed against his immovable chest—I might as well have been trying to move the earth itself or our house or push down our thin walls, thin walls that let our little arguments run through them—it didn’t help his case that he struck me. I looked up at him, and he glared at me, and any sympathy he’d had was gone, because the pity he’d had came from forbidding me from something when I hadn’t done anything wrong.

But now I’d transgressed, now this was an affront to his authority, and it was down right offensive and in his eyes it would have been wrong of him not to strike me. My

81 mother’s eyes didn’t blink, her head stuck into the doorway as if it were a periscope, and my father struck me again. She told him to stop, and she told me that I’d gotten my just desserts, and I spit on the floor. So my father slapped me again, and my mother didn’t say anything that time. She worked hard to clean that floor.

Later, through those thin walls, I heard the two of them making love without consideration. I could hear the bed move against the wall; I could hear whispers and I could hear moans, and I couldn’t sleep. I read the book David Peterson had given me and even when I finally got to the point where I’d go a full page before realizing I hadn’t understood a word, I kept reading the book the demon had given me to spite them, as if my parents would know, though they were long asleep and the only thing that would come of it would be irritability in the morning.

*

On that night or one of the others like it, I did finally slip into sleep and dreamed of my father and mother on a beach. I was the ocean, extending myself toward them again and again, till I collapsed into myself, only to try again, because it was a serious project trying to swallow the earth, and my parents along with it. They would keep moving back, the closer I got. And they were digging these holes, or moats, and I would throw myself into them until I overflowed and went rushing toward them. But then they’d move back. I could hear myself shudder, over and over again. This was the way of the world. And then Linda Daniels, with long grey hair rode upon a horse to my parents and circled them, and it was high tide and my waves became larger, white-topped; my shudders grew louder. The horse was small, and her

82 hair was so long that it reached past the horse’s hooves, down to the sand. My parents were gone and the horse was a whale, before they returned back to the ocean, so halfway between a beast of the land and a beast of the sea, and I was sure that it was

David Peterson, and I rushed out to submerge the two of them with greater ferocity but

Saul was the moon and he held me back, and he pulled me onward, and we were all very small, including Saul, and God was very large, and he came to us out of the sea, out of my waves, as a giant whale, a sea dragon, and said we were all wasting our time, that we needed to get back to the sea. We needed to get back to the sea. And I watched as David Peterson and Linda Daniels submerged themselves in me and as they drowned themselves they laughed as Saul fell from the sky and into me without disturbing my great placid surface, and finally only God was left, the Leviathan, floating and feeding off the dead inside me.

I was calm.

I got out of the bed to go find Saul.

*

I moved past long Cadillacs and thick Buicks, fenders beefy and chrome. If it were lighter I could have seen my humble reflection, blue and red and white, roofs up and roofs down, each one a flag for the house, marking the place, telling you a bit about them. But only one car was running, and I hid behind the bushes and let it rush past me, drawing the light away with it. There was no moon but I knew where I was going.

In the window of his office on the second floor David Peterson turned on each light. He stood by the window looking out. He wore a thick robe. I lay down like the

83 soldiers I saw in movie theaters, flat on my stomach, resting on my forearms. He dropped the needle onto whatever record he had queued up. From the way he moved the song was slow, and he held his drink at a distance as he danced. From the way he moved he must have been drunk, which was unusual for him, from what I had seen.

But everything I saw had been, like the books I read, carefully gone over and approved for my consumption; it was all planned. So when David removed his robe and kept dancing I didn’t turn away; I watched him dancing there alone for a long time.

Eventually, without turning the lights off, he went to another part of the house.

Lights came on. Saul’s room was dark, so I crept closer, still in an army crawl. The door hit the wall and David stood above Saul, now wearing a tie and slacks and shoes.

His son shook below him. David hugged Saul. Saul looked out the window over

David’s shoulder. I thought about waving. David pushed his son down, his hand on the center of his son’s chest and held him there. He held him down, and he didn’t move. Saul didn’t look afraid; he didn’t look anything. David kissed him on the head and then left, turning out the lights as he went.

I knocked on the window after a minute, and Saul climbed out immediately.

“You alright?” I said.

“Yeah, I’m alright.” He said, as if it were a ridiculous question. “Where we going?”

“Marsh’s field.”

Saul spat in the neighbor’s yard, and we moved low and fast.

84 He led, and when cars drove by we dropped into the same army crawl I’d used back at his place. I imagined we were like Tom and Huck, which maybe we were. But

I couldn’t decide who was who. Maybe both were both. Or neither was neither.

It was starting to get colder and Saul hadn’t thought to dress warm, but he pretended he wasn’t as cold as he was, even if he bounced constantly and was clearly stifling his shivering.

We arrived in the field, where kids would often go, as it was too big for Mr.

Marsh to keep track of. The length of several football fields, and his property went far beyond that. He had invested in Sharon somehow, had been rich before he got there, had supported Saul’s grandfather’s building ventures, or had thrown his life’s savings into those building projects and gained his wealth on them. Either way he had more acreage and the nicest house of anyone in Sharon and when kids snuck out or wanted to neck or wanted to get drunk or play tag or anything, they would come to what we called Marsh’s field, because that described it about as well as any two words could.

The grass wasn’t as rank as when Linda and I visited six years later, but it wasn’t well kept. Picture like a Saharan plain. Marsh knew kids and animals would trample anything he tried to grow in it anyway, so he let what would come come and every now and then he burnt the tall grass down and started again, same result, new kids.

The stars were out even if the moon wasn’t, and you could see them even clearer out there, especially if you lay on your back.

“I feel like Mike Hammer sneaking around like that.”

85 “Yeah.” He sat up, and he broke off the little branches of a stick. “That’s more like it,” he said and pointed it at far off trees and shot it. “Hammer would have a gun.”

“And a girl.”

“Yeah.”

He continued to shoot stuff, and I held out my hand for him to hand it to me.

He ignored it, so I made my own and started shooting. Eventually I shot him, and he slumped over, his face in the grass, tongue out.

After he lay there dead for a moment, I said, “You guys aren’t gonna move are you?”

Saul put his arms behind his head. “Shit no we aren’t.”

“He doesn’t care.”

“Well if he does he won’t let them know that. Snakes.”

“My mother is one of those snakes.” I broke apart my gun, bit by bit. “She’s got it out for your dad, bad. They really don’t want me with you anymore.”

“Snakes.”

“Does your dad ever talk about it?”

“Not straight he doesn’t.” Saul cracked his neck, itched his back. “But you can get what he’s really saying. And maybe he drinks more than he did. I guess. We’re gonna be fine, though.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah. But I guess business is, you know, slowing down. Or something.”

“Really?”

86 “I hear people talking, and I hear him talking to people in the house, or we have dinner with them—he lets me come along,” I could tell Saul was proud of this.

“And they say things like that. That business is slow. I guess it’s their way of punishing. But he says that they don’t have any other choices. That he’s the only man they got to do the work, his men, I mean. And he’s still got his men—that’s what matters, he says. That he’s got his men.”

“That makes sense.”

“Yeah.”

You could hear cars every now and then driving by. The field wasn’t as far from the world as we liked to think.

“Hey you want a cigarette?” I said. I had stolen a pack from my uncle’s store, about a month ago and was about four into it.

“Shit, yeah.”

He took one out and put it in his mouth. I realized I didn’t have any matches so

I just didn’t say anything, and he didn’t either, so we sat there with the unlit cigarettes in our mouths, knocking them back and forth with our tongues and spitting occasionally.

“You ever chew tobacco?”

“No,” I said. “I’d like to try, though. Next time we play ball.”

“Yeah, do that. Do that. Shit.”

“Shit.” I laughed.

87 “When we’re older, Abe, there’s gonna be nothing we can’t do, you know that.

Stay out as late as we want, come here, go over a town and drink, move to another town, whatever girls.” Saul took the cigarette into his hands and rolled it between them like it was clay. “Whatever.”

“Like Mike Hammer. I can’t wait to have my own house. No wife, no kids.

Just a big new house where I can listen to the radio, loud.”

“I know.”

“You going back to school in spring?”

“School? My dad’s smarter than any schoolteacher. Are you kidding? He’s teaching me math, and I’ve got books that the high schoolers haven’t even started yet.

I don’t have to [?] get up so damn early.”

“Yeah. That sounds good.” I nodded though he couldn’t see me, since we were both lying down again.

“It is good. My dad says I got to get a job, though. When I get older, I mean.

He says he can’t support me forever. That I have to be a man. He says as soon as I’m old enough I better be working, which is coming soon. Money’d be good. Working. I don’t know.”

“Can’t all be good, I guess.”

Saul put the cigarette back in his mouth. “I might be leaving soon.”

“It’s still early.”

“No. Leaving Sharon.”

88 “I thought you said you two weren’t leaving?” I pulled out grass with the hand my body hid from Saul.

“We ain’t. I said, I might be. My dad’s never leaving. And I’ll come back. He just thinks, maybe, a private school.”

“Oh.” I bit off some of the long grass like I saw country people do in illustrations and photographs. I chewed it, waiting for Saul to speak.

“I think it’s just cause he thinks it’s unfair. Unfair because, you know, he sent that Daniels girl to school. His own boy’s in public school. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But you know. Fair is fair.”

“Oh,” I said.

Saul spit again but got a little on himself. He wiped his sleeve in the grass.

“Fuck her.”

“Yeah,” I said, though I wasn’t sure what to think. To be honest, no one said much about Linda Daniels, just that he’d sent her away to get her out of our minds, which apparently had worked, because that was the only context in which people spoke of her. I thought about the kind of man Mr. Peterson was. I didn’t know: that’s what I figured out; I figured out that I didn’t know what kind of man he was, or what kind of man my father was, or who my mother was. I only knew what they said and what I heard through the walls or saw through the windows. And that wasn’t much, or wasn’t enough to make a real judgment on a man’s character. All I had were names.

Names and some phrases that they all spit out. It wasn’t like with Christ or Judas. We knew what kind of men they were; they told us straight out. This was a good man, and

89 that was a bad man. And I guess the same happened with Saul’s father, but Judas didn’t help teach me to read, or help me read better; and Judas didn’t make me dinner so much, and Judas didn’t father my best friend; and Christ didn’t dance naked in a window, and Christ didn’t sleep with sixteen year old girls. It was like trying to make out if that was your neighbor or the preacher coming late to service through the stained glass window: everything was distorted, colored, obscured by stories that didn’t seem to have any relation to the man whom you saw out in the air, out on his lawn, tending his garden, putting in fence posts, playing catch with his son, playing catch with me.

“Let’s get out of here,” I said. “It’s late.”

*

A car crept up on us, and we bolted out to the left, into some bushes, but the driver had seen us. The lights came to a halt and the car with them. A man got out, holding his hat to his head.

“Boys,” he called.

Any suspicion that it was Saul’s or my father was gone as soon as he spoke.

While neither had an unmanly voice, this man’s was deep, like when you struck a long strip of metal; it got up under you and in you and shook slowly. I knew from services that it had to be the preacher, and Saul knew because everyone knew the three senior preachers in Sharon.

I tried to pull Saul away, but he stepped out into the light, so I followed. The preacher didn’t react for a moment, just looked at us as if waiting for an explanation.

So we explained.

90 “We were just out walking, Father,” Saul said.

“’Sir’ is fine. Get in.” He stepped into the car. “I’ll give you a ride home.”

“Yes, sir.”

I hoped that if I didn’t look him in the eye he wouldn’t recognize me, which was stupid, I know.

His car wasn’t very nice; the seats were torn up, and it was years old. It could be that the car just struggled to get by, or it could be that he wanted time to speak with the son of the notorious David Peterson, but either way he drove slowly, with one hand on the wheel and the other hand twirling what hair he had, his elbow resting just above the window crank. He put out his cigarette as soon as we got in.

“Boys,” he said, “you’re David Peterson’s boy, aren’t you? And you’re Abe

Larch?”

“That’s us,” Saul said.

“Boys’ got some biblical names. Yes, they do.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well.”

No one said anything for a moment. Mailboxes and cars came and went with our headlights.

“How’s your father, Saul?”

I sat in the back seat. Saul was up front. I could tell he felt important. I hadn’t been spoken to yet besides my name.

“He’s fine, sir.”

91 “Getting along alright?”

“Yes, sir.”

The preacher took out another cigarette, though the one he’d put out still had at least half its body left.

“Jesus,” he said.

We both snickered.

“Think that’s funny?”

We kept laughing.

“I see. Well it’s not funny exactly,” he tapped his cigarette. “What it is is unprofessional. And so. Not telling your parents about this wouldn’t be professional either, would it? Yeah, that’s not as funny, is it? Now I’m not sure if I’ll do that yet.

But I could, I should. Not sure why I feel the need to defend myself to you boys. But the mysteries of the faith are many.” He drove with only his left hand. “A regular maze.

“When I was your age, I wasn’t a preacher. Sure you figured that out. Sure you’ve not thought of me as anything but. There was this girl we knew, all the boys did. It was all boys in this school—up in New York, you understand, I’m not from around here. Anyway all the boys knew her. We’d go to see her. You get it?” He turned to face me after facing Saul. Eye contact. “We’d go see her, this girl. Jess or something. Maybe fourteen. Maybe we were fourteen, too. Didn’t matter. Sometimes there’d be sixteen year olds. Eighteen year olds. 1300 year olds.” The preacher laughed. “Yep. We were not a good bunch. Any of us, the whole town. I was a

92 Catholic and confessed this stuff and, this priest, he went beyond repentance here, and penance, and all that; he told me straight up, you gotta stop and he’s gotta stop and he’s gotta stop,” he pointed at invisible young men with his right hand, the free one,

“or something terrible is going to happen. It cannot sustain itself. It cannot. She cannot.

“I said, ‘okay father,’ and all that. Somebody went over there one day and she wasn’t there. Where was she. She was split in half on the subway tracks. No one even said what it was, never called it a suicide, never called it murder, just said she’d been split right in half, torn really. Torn in half.

“The point is,” he pointed at us in turn, “be a good boy. Be a good boy. And

Saul, I’d like you to come on out and talk to me sometime. You know where I’ll be.

Now go on and get inside your house. Abe, why don’t you hop up front.” I got out and

Saul and I made eyes at each other as we met. I shook my head and mouthed something. He looked at the ground.

In the front seat, the car looked less sinister. I looked out into the light of the headlights and could see everything. In the back I’d only seen the shadows of the car and the silhouettes of those two up front. We were driving much faster now.

“Police wouldn’t be too happy to find you two out wandering around.”

“No, sir.”

“No. No, they wouldn’t. That your best friend?”

“Yes, sir.” I felt important, but I also wanted to get out as quickly as possible.

“You need to be careful.”

93 “I do, sir?”

“I’m not gonna tell you who to be friends with and who not, but just keep in mind. I don’t know. Abe, I’m a tired man. We are all tired men. This hasn’t been an easy time on the preachers of this town.” He dropped the cigarette out the window. “It hasn’t been an easy time for anyone. A lesser community might be totally torn apart by something like this. It does give me hope. There are places in this country where that man would have been strung up, in this very county, hanged and beaten or beaten then hanged. Something. He would have been beaten at the very least. And you got

Mr. Daniels, poor bastard—listen, listen, Abe, I shouldn’t be talking to you like this.

You just go ahead and tune all that out, ‘kay?” He winked and smiled at me. “But hey, how’re you doing?”

“Well, sir,” I said, “It’s been hard on my family, too. It’s not been easy.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Come on, I’m not your neighbor, I’m a preacher. Spill.”

“My folks don’t want me hanging around with Saul or his father. And I think my mom might’ve yelled at Mr. Peterson. I don’t know, at least talked to him. Not nicely.”

“A lot of people angry with him.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Your mother and father doing well?”

“Yes, sir.”

94 “Good. Good. Look, I don’t want—well I guess you’d be in as much trouble as me if you told people about this. Just watch yourself and mind the curfew, Abe.

Chugga-chugga-choo-choo.”

I got out of the car and held the door open and looked at him, waiting.

“You need anything, you know where I am. You know where I am.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Yes, sir.”

I shut the door and walked through the front door of my house and fell asleep, to dreams of the beach and of girls my age.

*

A few weeks later Saul and I walked in the creek just outside of town, near Marsh’s

Field—maybe part of Marsh’s property still—Saul leading, the water leaping barely to the bottom of our cuffed jeans. The water was cold but that made for more of an adventure. He looked determined, his red hair hidden in a blue cap, shoulders thin as ever. He said we were looking for a villain, maybe a mobster, maybe a communist; either way we’d find him.

We came upon a frog. Saul decided that this frog knew something. We carried sticks ripped from trees for blackjacks. Saul asked where he was—we didn’t bother making a name, “he” was enough—and when the frog fled he held the stick behind his head like he was chopping firewood and brought it down on it, and said, “Come on,” so I did and the both of us smashed the thing into paste. We kicked and scraped its remains into the creek. We wanted more. We tracked down whatever animals we

95 could, went after rabbits and squirrels. The best we could do was insects after the frog; anything else was too fast.

It wasn’t long before Saul led the charge and yelled that a doe was ahead of us, some femme fatale out of a Mike Hammer book, we decided. Twigs broke under our canvas shoes, pricker bushes drawing thin red lines across our shins as we charged bearlike through the foliage. We chased the doe for minutes. We wouldn’t have known what to do when we caught up with her anyway. I think we would have been scared to really strike it. Deer are a lot bigger than frogs and who knew if some buck would come after us, antlers pointed toward our hearts, four legs like pistons, the pricker bushes dragging us down.

I stopped, held my knees while panting as I watched Saul continue on, arms pumping like he was on the track at school rather than wet leaves and shifting mud, but he didn’t stop or slip, and finally he was out of sight.

I continued to breathe heavily. Even as an active kid I wasn’t accustomed to being out of breath like this. My breath quieted, the forest grew louder, the stream shushing the rest of the woods. Light came broken through the trees, sometimes in streaks and sometimes circles. I walked on a bit and didn’t see Saul. I became scared a little, for him, and then for me.

Finally a crack or a pop, the hollow sound of a struck tennis ball. There was

Saul striking a tree with a stick without rhythm, piece by piece breaking off until all that remained was the hilt, which he threw toward the stream.

96 He picked up his cap and I walked toward him. He turned away when he saw me.

“Kinda cold,” I said.

He was sawing at the tree with another stick he’d picked up. I think he was crying.

“I’m not sure I wanna go home,” he told the tree.

“That stream and the wind are killing me,” I said. I moved closer toward him. I could put my socks on the heater before putting them on.

“There was a letter from that girl on the table at home today. Without school

I’m always there.”

“It’s cold, Saul. Tell me on the way home.”

If we didn’t leave soon we’d miss whatever it was I watched on Thursday nights.

“God,” he said, shivering from the cold or the crying. “I can’t stand it here.

Any of it.”

“We can—“

“No, Abe, you’re like them, too. Your mom and you and your whole family. I can’t wait to get away from these people. Dad says there’ll be kids and teachers— cultured, smarter. People who don’t treat people like this. People who aren’t ignorant.”

“Are you calling me stupid, Saul?” I said.

97 “Now I am: don’t know the difference between someone stupid and someone ignorant.”

“I know the difference between a jerk and someone I want to be around. Just go if you don’t like it here.”

“I will.”

“Good, Saul.”

“I can’t wait to never talk to any of you again. You’re all gonna die here. Dad says—“

“You’re dad’s a dirty old man, Saul.”

Saul rushed me and we both slid onto our backs on the leaves and I sort of slapped him and sort of punched him and he’d started crying again and I called him a girl and hit him more. He wasn’t bleeding or anything, just still crying, not even bothering to defend himself now. The back of his jacket and jeans must have been filthy.

I hit him again and said, “Go.” And said it again and he put up his hands again.

I hit him and said it again. “Go then, you brat.”

“Okay,” he said, whimpering, “okay.”

I got up off him. He stood in such a way that he didn’t have to look at me and walked away till I could only hear him stomping on twigs and the occasional hiccup- like catch in his breath, then nothing.

98 There was still light out, some of the leaves caught in it, red, yellow, orange, glowed like Christmas lights, and I sat with my back against the tree catching my breath. Eventually more animals came back. But once I stood again they fled.

And that was it.

*

Saul was gone soon after that and never really came back. His father had finally sent him off to school to start with the new quarter, and my parents were the happier for it.

After he first left, I wrote him often. I found this draft of one, in the last year, in a torn cardboard box with STUFF written on the side.

Dear Saul,

I hope private school is good. Back here things are same as ever. Maybe quieter. People talk less about it. Normalpeople school is stupid as ever. The kids are dumb, and the teachers. They always think this is stuff you never heard of, but with your dad, like you said, we read harder books than all these and twice as long.

You should visit. I had my thirteenth birthday party the other day. It was good.

I didn’t get a bike or anything but Mom let me have friends over. That was good.

You’re the only other person I’ve ever written to besides my grandmother. Sorry if I’m not good at it. Her letters kind of ramble on and on.

Remember Karen? That’s a stupid question but I didn’t know how else to get to it. I hear she does, you know. And we’re supposed to go over there later tonight. I think I will. We is Scotty and Josh and I. It would be easier to talk about this in person

99 and I’m afraid someone else might read it. But I think you get what I’m saying. I hope it goes well and like we want it to.

Your dad gave me a present on my birthday in secret. Nothing dramatic, there was just a package by the door, with my name on it. Didn’t have an address, just a box wrapped. My parents weren’t home when he dropped it off and he wasn’t there when I found it. It was a book. What else? The Odyssey of Homer, it said on the cover, with a real fancy cover and fancy writing. There was a note in it too.

“Dear Abe,

I’m regretful that I’m not able to give this to you in person, or prepare

a bountiful meal for you and my son. I’m certain that he misses you. But he’s

doing very well and the school is working out nicely, if you are curious.

You’re getting closer to manhood. That’s a wonderful thing.

I’m proud.

Sincerely.

There was an x under sincerely. And that’s all it said. No name, but who else? I started the book and it’s hard, no I, The Jury, but I’ll read a bit a day until I get through it. I think maybe I’ll write him when I’m done, but Dad would get me good if he found out and Mom would thank him for it too. Maybe I won’t.

I feel kind of bummed sometimes. Lonely. It’s nice to be going over to Karen’s house tonight, and the guys are good and can both pitch and field and hit pretty good.

I hope you visit soon.

Your friend,

100 Abe Larch.

There were other attempts at that letter in a box. I don’t know if that was the final one or not. A lot of words were crossed out where I guess I got nervous about sounding too much like I had too many feelings, or maybe I’d just misspelled them. These letters—there were more I remember—were like a diary, a censored one, if that makes any sense.

He never wrote back.

*

With my hands down Karen’s shirt, she put her hand between my legs. But not for long. I remember thinking, that’s it? In the times after she’d do it for much longer but for that first time it was enough to say that it’d happened.

We came out of the closet and the other two young boys and young girls looked around, maybe out the window, all of us in ties or dresses. Karen and I were both thirteen and everyone else was close, but still officially twelve. This gave us power. I sat on the couch with the boys and she sat far away on a chair, and we didn’t talk.

Soon her parents brought down more punch for us, and then the boys and I walked home backwards, scarfs and several shirts donned, backs to the wind.

I tried to read David’s book that night, but couldn’t concentrate. I’d get a scent of that girl coming back into me. And that nervousness. I came back to it again and again, like you do with sour candy.

*

101 After a few months and a little too much talk, my mother broke from jealousy, and invited the preacher over for dinner. From what I had gathered through the walls of my room, it was either that or my increasing distance.

“Thank you, Lord, for this bounty. We surely appreciate it. Thank you for the generosity of the Larch family and thank you for this time you’ve given us to spend together. We pray for all the families in our congregation who are hurting and all those who aren’t and all the other congregations in this country and in this world. Amen.”

“Beautiful, father. Beautiful.”

“Thank you, Martha. But ‘Robert’ is fine. Let’s leave formality where it belongs; I’m in your home, aren’t I?”

“So, Robert,” my father forced a chuckle as he said the preacher’s name, “is this a busy time of year for you?”

“If I’m being honest, no.” He took a piece of bread as he responded.

“Generally people don’t feel terribly repentant in fall. But further into winter. And around Christmas time.” He took a bite of the bread and smiled at us. “That’s another story. No. Things have been calm, which I’ve enjoyed thoroughly. It gives me more time to do things like this” he gestured at us with hands and half-eaten bread. “The things I enjoy, really enjoy. Not that I don’t enjoy the other things, preaching is fulfilling. But, to be in the homes of my congregation, and to have them in my home.

It’s a blessing. I’m sorry, I’m rambling, I apologize. And Martha, Al, is this a busy time of year for the two of you?—Abe don’t worry we’ll get to you soon.” And he winked at me. My foremost concern was disemboweling my potato, so I was struck

102 that he even bothered to address me. It could be that he mistook it for a pointed display of boredom, or maybe he just relished the opportunity to toss attention to us one by one, in the order he saw fit, like we three were his dogs.

“Oh things have been about how they always are. I stay active with the school, helping out. And, well, Al’s always busy.”

“I try to be anyway.” My father smiled at the preacher. My mother had impressed upon us how important this was.

“Sure. Sure. Idle hands—but let’s not get into that. How’re you holding up,

Abe?”

“I’m fine, father—I mean, I’m fine, sir.”

He supported his chin with his hand like it was so heavy he had to. And he gazed at me and nodded. It was like he didn’t remember taking me home that night.

“It’s been quite a year,” my mother said.

“Anything in particular got you saying that,” said the preacher, a little too quickly maybe, turning to her.

My mother blushed and took a bite of her food. My father rescued her by saying, “Well, you know. It’s always quite a year.”

Apropos nothing my mother barked, “I don’t know how you keep yourself fed without a lady in the house.” She watched him.

It was the preacher’s turn to look away. “Well I try to stay out of trouble.”

“When we ladies grow up we’re less trouble. It’s just the young ones. They get in all kinds of trouble.”

103 “Sure, sure. But just the same,” he took another piece of bread. He hadn’t touched anything else on his plate. “No special someone for Pastor Robert.” He winked at me. “When I grew up in New York—” he started.

My mother’s eye visibly twitched. She was born and raised in Sharon. “I’d forgotten you were from out of town.” She said this ironically but subtly enough that the preacher might not have caught it.

“Yes, ma’am. Still adjusting to the little town life I guess, in some ways. Other ways I’m just at home. But when I was growing up in New York there’d be lines longer than the length of this town, and with a higher population. For soup and bread like this. Rough times.”

“We had our fair share here, too,” said my father, straightening himself.

“Your unfair share, no doubt. Well we’d wait in these lines all day, my father and I would, and we’d get our soup or bread or whatever it was and we’d go and sit on the wall and watch the people go by and eat and they’d watch us eat and we’d watch them hate us for eating.” The preacher crossed his legs at the knee. “I’m not sure why my father did that. We could have eaten anywhere. Maybe he just wanted his food to be warm when he had it. Maybe he liked having and having’s not as good unless others don’t have and it was something like luxury watching those others not have and want—you could practically hear their stomachs growling like George—my bulldog— from that far away. My father, he wasn’t a cultured man. Didn’t even go to church actually.”

104 We all had stopped eating and were watching the preacher. Jazz soloists, and I saw many of them in New York when I finally got out there, keep building that tension, and every one in the audience is waiting for the resolution to come, without even knowing that’s what it’s called or that that’s what they’re waiting for—so we were and so the preacher was.

“It might have been in that very line that I decided I wanted to preach. Who knows. God does, I suppose. Damn if that wasn’t a rhyme, maybe I missed my calling.

But maybe that’s what I’m deprived of now, a woman. Maybe I’m the one in line, or not even in the line or on the wall, just sitting opposite you all—there it is again—just sitting opposite you all, my stomach growling. Or maybe I’m on the wall and you’re all looking at me, and I’m the one who’s got it right!” The preacher laughed and laughed, surprisingly high pitched for his low voice. I was the only one in my family smiling. “We haven’t seen much good come from these kids lately, have we?” He roughed up my hair as he stood up and said, “If you’ll excuse me, I need to visit your restroom. My apologies.”

We ate in silence. My mother stared at her food and my father tried as hard as he could to make eye contact with her but couldn’t so he settled for me and smiled and shook his head and I smiled and shook mine. Robert was a strange man.

When he came back his face was red and wet. He’d calmed down. The rest of dinner passed more or less uneventfully.

105 After we’d all finished my mother offered that she and my father would clear the plates. The preacher said, “Well generally I like a pipe after a meal. Think you could excuse Abe from kitchen duty so he might accompany me?”

My mother smiled and said that’d be fine, that she’d like that.

He packed his pipe clumsily and struck several matches to get it lit. We started walking and he said, “I understand you had a birthday recently.”

“Yes, sir. I’m thirteen.”

“Wow,” he said, “Wow. Did you get anything grand?”

“Some stuff.”

“Well, I won’t push you.”

It was cool outside but we were both wearing light jackets—his black, mine brown—and the leaves must have turned a long time before, and without my notice.

They were everywhere, scraping across the cement. The preacher tripped in one spot where the concrete had been forced up. He muttered, “Get thee behind me, concrete,” and laughed to himself as he blew smoke.

“How well do you know your scripture?” he asked.

“I do my best, sir. But I’m not expert. I have friends, they can recite whole chapters from memory. I can’t do that. But maybe. Maybe I’d like to. I don’t know.

It’s hard you know. With baseball and all. And maybe cause it’s getting colder I’ll be less distracted. And I can do that, learn a bit more.”

“I’ve not seen you so talkative before,” he said, taking a preacher’s tone, which made me regret having been open like that, made me feel a little seduced or deceived.

106 “Well.”

We didn’t say anything until we’d gotten off my street and he said, “I understand your friend Saul is gone.”

“Yeah.”

“Have you talked to him much?”

“No, sir.”

“Abe, when I asked you to go on a walk I’d hoped to gain a partner in conversation. I could be filling in for you just fine. Watch: Do you miss him? Yeah.

You going to contact him. Not sure.”

I laughed because he’d pitched his voice up into falsetto when he imitated me.

“My parents wouldn’t be happy about it if I did. And I don’t see his dad much anymore either. Mr. Peterson.”

“Not a lot of people do. He comes out more now. But. I’ve spoken with him a bit actually. All of us have.”

“How is he?” I asked, probably letting too much show in the question.

“He is fine. But how have you been, Abe? Your parents tell me you seem different. Out more. I tell them it’s your age.”

I did feel a little betrayed now. “I’m fine,” I said, kicking at the leaves, which had no color in the fall dark.

“Don’t lose me now, Abe.”

“I feel guilty sometimes.”

“About what?”

107 “I don’t know,” I said, surprising myself by looking at him. “Things I’ve done.

With a girl. Or myself. Or. You know. Sometimes I wish bad things on my parents. I tell God I won’t do things anymore if he gives me this thing, a grade or something. A present.” I kept kicking at leaves as I walked. “And even if God does, I keep doing those things—that thing, you know, anyway.”

“I see.”

“Yeah. And. Sometimes I yell at my mother. And it’s not even her I’m mad at, but it feels like it is. So maybe it is.”

“I wonder that, too, Abe. Feeling something and not. Think we can have fake feelings? That are covering up the real ones. Psychologists say so. And which does

God care about, which feelings, the fake ones or the real ones? These are good questions, Abe.” And he slipped in, like it was nothing special, “I’m proud of you for asking them.”

“So what do I do?” I said.

“Just try and do better I guess. What do I do? That’s a good question. I’m supposed to say, pray. So I guess I’ll say that. Pray. Try not to have illicit relations with Karen down the street anymore. That might be a good start.”

I could see his smoke in the street lamps. Hanging there.

“Have you talked to Linda Daniels,” I said.

“Yes.”

“How is she?”

“Is that what you want to ask? Do you know her?”

108 “No.”

“She’s a very troubled girl. A very troubled girl. There’s things inside of that girl that aren’t her. I can tell you that. There’s things inside that girl that aren’t your problems. The way she talks sometimes, like she’s got ten years on herself—but I shouldn’t be telling you any of this, should I? Probably not. You’re going to be okay,

Abe.”

“Is Mr. Peterson going to be okay?”

We were stopped before crossing onto Maple Street. “Sure, Abe,” he said as he too kicked at the leaves. “We all are.”

*

I’d been out walking for hours. That’s what it felt like. I’d start wearing a watch soon, but not yet. These walks weren’t like the ones mother and I took, tracing that domino.

I liked to think of them as rambles; they’d take me all over—no worries on my part, it was chance in charge, not the rambler, and not God, just the road and the weather. It being winter, I wrapped myself thoroughly. I’ve always had more a fear of cold than heat. My aunt—wife to the uncle who ran the drug store—had knitted me a hat and at my mother’s prodding, I was to go thank her and show it on me, if I was to go out walking at all.

“Abe,” she’d said, smiling, “there’s no reason for you to be acting like this.

She was nice enough to do that and now you’re going to thank her, why wouldn’t you?” She was smiling, I assume, because she knew she’d already won.

“Can’t I just write her a card?”

109 “Then how would she see you in it?”

“We could send a picture with it. I’ll dress up.”

“This is insanity.”

“Mom,” I took her hand like I was trying to make her understand, which I was, that she was old, the world was new—how do you break that news to someone?

“Mom, it’s nuanced.”

Now she hit the table laughing, almost throwing me off balance. “Nuanced, huh?” I looked at her calves, straight down to the ankle, no calf at all really. It’d have been better if she yelled at me. She took my face and kissed me. Now, it’s a good memory of her. “Complicated will do just fine, honey. And I’m sure it is. But I’ve made up my mind.”

My father came in and the discussion was ended.

Naturally, I’d tried to make the walk last as long as I could, working past

Marsh’s Field, past the houses still being built. I was out in the opposite direction of

Saul’s house, and there it was—Linda Daniels’ place. At the time, I considered it nicer than ours, but I suspect that was because I thought everybody’s things were nicer than our things. It was pale green, the house. David Peterson’s company had built it. The shutters were faded. And I suspect at some point that they were a shade similar to the house. That point was not then; the wind and all types of weather had seen to that.

I went around the side of the house, bit the puffs of skin on my hand just before my fingers, as was my habit. Through the window: the things one expected to see in a house. Some stuff for Linda’s sister.

110 I walked to the back and there was Linda’s mother, plump, dressed in pink, looking at me. I kept walking—boys cut through backyards all the time. Maybe it was my sorry hat (the aunt was new to the craft) but she called out to me, “Hey.” I didn’t turn so she said, “You’re tromping through my yard and crushing my flowers, you could at least respond to me.” This was absurd as it was winter, but I didn’t realize that. “You look like you’re ready to freeze to death. Let me fix you some hot chocolate.”

“I’m alright, ma’am.”

“Leave your boots out the door, please.”

She turned and went, so I followed her. She didn’t seem to be wearing enough clothes, not for her modesty but for the cold. As I’ve mentioned before, Linda’s mother was not a thin woman, and yet as she walked in front of me I noted that her calves had a very clear curve to them; they made me think of dancing; they made me wonder about what was coming. This only added to my embarrassment when she said,

“You know I was serious, what I said about your boots. Go on.”

I had to sit down to take them off. They laced up, an old pair of my father’s, too big for me, which made me look bigger, yes, but also made me walk drunkenly. I was glad to have them off, and I walked through the hallway to where I assumed she’d gone. Of course there was nothing I could have done, I’d tell my mother, if I had to: she made me come in, didn’t give me any choice at all.

She was at the sink fiddling with a mug and she pointed to a chair at the circular dinner table. On the table was a book. Virginia Woolf. The first time I’d heard

111 of her. I fingered the edge of the cover. Most of the books I owned were paperbacked, except for that copy of The Odyssey of Homer. I’d gotten halfway through at this point and enjoyed its violence. But I was utterly lost.

“That’s Linda’s, my daughter’s.” She didn’t look up from what she was doing as she said this. “She loves those books. Tries to tell me about them. It’s lost on me.”

“Oh. I like books, too.”

“That’s good. And have you read that one?”

“Well, no. I mostly like books by boys, I mean, men, anyway.”

“That’s good. That’s good.” She inhaled and rubbed at her neck before the sink. “You in school?”

“Yep.”

“Go on, then. What do you like?”

“Gym class the most.”

“Not books?”

“I like books.”

“Good.”

She put the hot chocolate in front of me. It burnt my tongue and I said, “Well there goes that. Had to burn it at some point this winter. There goes my taste.” I smiled at her.

“Did I make it too hot?” She scratched her arm and looked down the hall.

There was noise down there, a bump or a bark.

“No, ma’am, not at all. I was just dumb.” I was feeling happy.

112 She sat down, still looking down the hallway. “You get along with your folks?”

“Sure.”

“Go on, tell me.”

“Yeah, I do, I guess. My mom can be—a lot.” Because I knew my mother despised this woman, I could say whatever I wanted; there was no chance of it getting back to her. “She doesn’t see the nuance in things.”

Mrs. Daniels bit her lip and brought her eyebrows toward her eyes. “What’s your last name, now? Oh, I haven’t asked: what’s your first name, dear?”

“Abe Larch.”

“Larch.” She tried not to let her expression change. “Okay.”

“And you’re Mrs. Daniels.”

“I am.”

“Thank you very much for the hot chocolate, ma’am. Maybe I should get going.”

“Not at all. Not at all, not at all. You go to our church, don’t you?”

“Yep.”

“Our preacher is a great man.” She got up to get her own mug, which I assume had coffee in it. She sat back down. “A real Christian.”

“Certainly.”

She gave me the same look, and bit her lip. “Some days I wish I had a boy like you, little Abe.” That grinded on me when she said that, little Abe. If there was one

113 way to get off my friendly side it was being condescending. “I’m sure my husband would enjoy it. Catch.”

“We’re not so bad,” I said, to say something.

There came another sound from down the hallway and she looked up. She walked down the hall without saying anything and I watched her calves as she went and put my hand in my pocket and touched myself lightly with the tips of my fingers as she went like you would a kitten or an animal you’d just met—which is not an inaccurate description. It occurred to me that I might ask to go to the bathroom and take care of myself in there and defended this to myself with the idea that I’d be more focused on the task at hand, a better conversation partner, if I didn’t have my mind on being alone with Mrs. Daniels.

But just as I was realizing how ridiculous I was, there came Mrs. Daniels around the corner, and Linda Daniels followed with her. Her hair was long, dark, and her skin was tan. I stared openly at her and she looked at me and then didn’t and then did again.

When they finally got to the kitchen she opened a drawer near the sink and took out a hair tie. While she was still searching for it, she said, “And who might you be?”

“I’m Abe Larch,” I said.

She turned from the drawer abruptly. “It’s nice to meet you, Abe.” She turned back to the wall, and she put her hair up, and I could hear her chewing gum. She stared at the wall still after she’d fixed her hair. I studied her newly exposed neck.

114 Mrs. Daniels clicked her nails in triplets on the table, as if to remind me of my rudeness. I realized I was still wearing my hat. I took it off.

“Mother.”

“Yes, Linda?”

“I think I might walk around a while, it’s nice out. Maybe I’ll get some hot chocolate too. Read. I might be out a while. If that’s fine with you, I mean.”

“No, Linda.”

“Mother, please?”

“Linda?”

“Mother, that’s not fair.”

I rubbed at my crotch again. Linda looked at me as if to let me know I was not being subtle. She turned back to her mother. I had a terrible habit of thinking I was invisible.

Her mother said, “You leave tomorrow for school: it’d be nice to have you around. And besides if you stay out you’ll be grumpy travelling and that’ll be much worse for me than for you.”

“Mom. This is absurd.”

“Goddammit.”

Her mother looked at me abruptly but then—I had my eyes lowered so she didn’t see how terrified and excited I was by all of this—looked back to Linda and said, “You get to talk like that out there, at your school, but not here. When you’re

115 here you’re here. Especially not in front of guests. I’m your mother. Absurd or not.

Now get to your room.”

Linda took the tie back out of her hair. It fell messier than it’d started out, and she dropped the tie back into the drawer. She shut it very carefully, didn’t say a word.

Her mother was gnawing on the inside of her cheek. Linda left the room, and I didn’t speak with her again for another six years.

*

I was happy to be outside the Daniels’ house and on my way home. But I couldn’t go home without visiting my aunt. Mrs. Daniels had given me some bread to gnaw on as I went, though the fabric of my gloves left bits of fuzz on it so I had to take them off and weather the cold or eat fabric. I chose a combination of both.

As it happened my aunt had stepped out when I got there, but my uncle invited me inside. We talked for a bit and he told me that I’d have to come work for him once

I was a bit older. How old was I anyway? I told him, and he laughed knowingly. I could tell he wanted to make a dirty joke but just patted me on the head. Had I ever had a drink? No, I hadn’t. A lie. Saul had stolen us sips from both of our parent’s alcohol supplies. Never a real one, though.

“It’s so cold,” he said. “This’ll help.”

My uncle poured us both a brandy, and we sat in the large apartment on top of their drugstore, in chairs by the fire, and he asked me about school and about family. I told him. He called my mother a bitch and laughed and I laughed too, though it hurt me. I could hear the drink in his laugh. Maybe what happened there isn’t particularly

116 relevant to this story. But nothing really happened. He just held me close to him for a long time. It wasn’t anything. And when his wife came in, he hid the drinks and told me not to tell anyone he’d ‘fed’ me alcohol. I nodded yes. I didn’t even remember it till about five years later. He told me I was a good boy.

“Well it’s very becoming on you,” my aunt said about the hat.

“Thank you. And thank you for making it.” She was a woman more beautiful than my mother. And not related by blood. She held me against her breasts, which were small but I felt them against my cheek all the same, when she hugged me. I could smell sweat, salty and wet, from how bundled up she’d been. I didn’t link my arms around her, to make it seem like I didn’t like it as much as I did.

“I was just telling Abe,” my uncle told her, “that when he gets a bit older he’ll have to come work for us.”

“That’s a great idea. He can help me make the candy.”

“I was thinking he could help at the counter. And with stocking. He’s going to be strong, you can see that.” He was wrong about that. But I wasn’t weak either.

My uncle sat up from his chair and put his arms around the two of us, his drink floating in front of my face, like we were a little family. They’d never had children.

They never would. She’d be dead before I turned twenty-five. But my uncle, that bastard became an old bastard, he’d outlive his whole generation, until dripping onto the bib they made him wear while he ate his soft meals in the hospital, he finally managed to choke to death. They told me about it over the phone. I didn’t have to come identify the body because he was already registered in the hospital, and I was on

117 the East coast by that time anyway, in New York, living on close to nothing and losing all the muscle mass I’d put on growing up, doing push-ups in my bedroom at night.

He let us go and went to fix himself another drink. As my aunt asked me about my mother (people never asked about my father it seemed) I heard him drop new ice cubes in his drink, a sharp clink and then another, with the same whole rest between, and then another and then another. Outside, moving against the wind, homeward, I was happy to be out in the cold again.

*

My mother said she’d been worried about me. I said the walk had been nice and long and our family was well. My mother fixed me two sandwiches and my father read the paper. My mother had been too tired to hear scripture that night so she went to bed.

My father played with my hair and said, “You know, your mother is a wonderful woman.” I kept fiddling with whatever I was fiddling with. “Hey, do you hear me?” He slapped the back of my head lightly. I cried out, though it didn’t really hurt. “That’s why I married her. She means what she says—does that make sense?”

“Yes?”

“I wouldn’t have married her if that wasn’t true.”

“Okay.”

“There are a lot of people in Sharon. And none of them have any principle.

They all—did my brother give you liquor?”

I shook my head no.

118 “I don’t believe you. My brother doesn’t have any principle. And Lord knows your mother and I have had plenty of wine tonight. Then I’ve had some liquor. Maybe

I don’t have much principle either.”

He rested his head against the back of the couch, his hand still on my head. I expect this arrangement (along with being drunk) allowed him to speak more freely because there was no risk of us making eye contact. “Everybody drinks on Sundays,” he said. I think he said it just to say something. “When David Peterson and I were younger we’d go to Daren’s, and we’d talk to all kinds of women. That’s an exaggeration because there were a lot less people in Sharon then, but we’d talk to a lot of women. And one day that stopped because we got married. But before it did. I don’t know, Abe. We talked to a lot of women and got drunk. Those are good memories.

Maybe if we talked about him you’d get over it. So there: David Peterson and I used to go out and drink and talk to women.”

I figured silence was the best way to go about this. I was right.

“I don’t know what to do about it either. I contradict your mother because I feel a sense of duty. Or just because, I don’t know, I feel the need to do it so I do it. I do. But who knows what David Peterson was thinking. David probably doesn’t know.

I’d like to ask him but I can never speak to that man again in my life if I want to stay married. Not even Robert knows, and that man is pretty smart. Knows a lot. Even if he is a creepy, potentially communist, bastard. Get to bed, kid.”

He tapped my head again.

119 That night I stayed up until my father went to bed. Pastor Robert talked about principle in his sermon that morning. His sermons stuck with you. As my mind wandered toward the end of my third visit to our echoing cell of a bathroom that night,

I thought about his ideas of commitment. They sort of matched up with what David

Peterson had said about building the town, the things his father had told him. That it took a lot, you couldn’t back down. You had to follow through on what you started. A few minutes later, I fell asleep, but before that I did follow through, for the third time, though my parents might have heard and it took a while.

120

II

121

David Peterson came across the lawn to greet me, hand extended, beard grown thicker than I’d ever seen it, the scent of whisky as if it were cologne hanging around him. His lawn was cut. His car, dark blue, mirrored the trees that grew above it and would have been pelted gently with leaves if it were fall. It was spring then, though.

David Peterson and I shook hands.

“I hear your birthday’s coming up,” he said.

“Thank you, Mr. Peterson.”

“Saul’s turned 18 not long ago. And ‘David’ is fine.”

“How’s he doing? Making the adjustment?”

David nodded. “Fine.” He knelt down. Brushing the grass with his knuckles, he said, “You off to work?”

“Yes, sir.”

“That’s David. I’d like you to come by soon, if you can. We could have a drink.”

“I’d like that, David. Serious.”

“Wonderful. How’s your father?”

“He’s good. Busy as always. You said Saul’s doing good though?”

“He’s well, very well. And he enjoyed his birthday. Enjoyed it maybe too much, as is becoming his custom.”

122 Cars passed. The air was cool and I breathed it where I wanted to breathe it, which happened to be David Peterson’s lawn right now. Having met Linda, something felt different around David, too. I could laugh at him.

“You look good,” I said.

He watched a squirrel that’d whipped into his yard from a tree in the next, maybe fifteen feet off. He nodded. He was thin, that was the truth, wearing no hat, in a white dress shirt buttoned all the way up. No tie, no smile.

“You headed into work yourself?” I said.

The squirrel seemed to be digging.

“I suppose I ought to. But maybe not. Anymore it seems like they can handle themselves pretty well, very well, and I just need to keep myself occupied or I get overbearing. A useless man can become something worse if he sticks around where he’s not needed.”

“I doubt you’re useless.”

“I genuinely hope not. But in this situation, I tell them where to go, and they can take care of it. I take pride in that, Abe. I think you will, too, someday, with your employees at that store.”

“That store?”

“The store you work in, son.” He was still studying the squirrel. “Someday that’ll be yours and you’ll be hiring ruffians like yourself to do the labor.”

“Ain’t college for me, huh?”

123 “That store will wait.” The squirrel shoved itself between a car’s tires. We witnessed an everyday miracle as made it to the other side of the road. David stood and gave me his attention again. “As a matter of fact, you ought to go to college. It’s good for you. Build character in the store, the mind in the school. How is school?”

“Same stuff.”

“With that attitude, I’m sure.” He nodded. “I write to a professor of English sometimes.”

“Yeah?” I put my hands on my hips, thumbs downward like he did. He didn’t seem to notice my irony.

“Yeah. We had a dinner last time I was out East.”

“How long you been back?”

“Two weeks. I didn’t want to die without seeing what Frost, poor glorious dead bastard, was always on about. It was beautiful out there. I wrote to him once.”

“Frost?”

“Frost.”

“I should probably get to work.”

“He didn’t write back, as they say he doesn’t.”

“Let’s have that drink, yeah?”

“Of course. I’ll be in the store soon, I’ll check my little book, and we’ll figure it out.”

We shook hands. My hand was bigger than his.

*

124 I ran into Linda later that day after work and we set up a coffee date. Now this seems like life rushing through the divine funnel, but then it was the drip of small town life: you saw people who lived in the town you lived in; some of them happened to have slept with one another. Though that’s probably not the best description of what went on between them.

When she’d returned from school, it made a splash, but not as much as [?] you’d expect. Other waves were rocking our pond by then—troops were increasing in

Vietnam, tripling the previous year alone, the Civil Right Act would be passed within a year—so maybe the waves weren’t coming, but they were building and our water had receded—and finally when Linda was tossed, learned, arrogant and grown, back into us, there was hardly anything left. Some of those elders had died, a few other scandals had taken place. David’s work came back.

My mother knew, though, and made it known that Linda was back.

My father, trying to avoid eye contact along with the subject, as things hadn’t been great with them, said, “Who?” and went at the dinner she’d made us.

“You know who.”

I, sly, jumped in with, “When’d she get back?”

“Last week. They tried to keep it quiet, I think.”

“Were they supposed to give her the key to the city?”

“I’m not terribly fond of that tone—“

“And I’m not either. Well then, have you seen her?”

“No.”

125 “It’s been years since I heard that name.”

“They toss it around sometimes at school. It’s—a derogatory term. Something people that—“

My mother said, “That’s disgusting.”

“Do we know what’s she’s doing?”

“I’ve heard that she’s staying out East for school. One of them.”

“Well that’s great.”

“What do you think she did to get in there?” I, regrettably, jealously, said.

They looked at me, looked at one another. I looked at my food.

“Get up,” my father said.

“Where?”

“Out of the house, to your room, to a job. Go.”

I stood. Part of me had said it because I meant to meet up with Scott. Scott was

18 and bought us beer, and as I was only a few weeks away from drinking age, I was obsessed. I stood in my room and looked at myself in the mirror a moment, touching at my hair, listening to them talk. But I heard only mutters, the ring of a wine glass tapped on a table. I didn’t say goodbye. I walked straight over to Scott’s place and into two weeks of drinking and bitterly exchanging rumors with Scott about Linda—whom

I was hoping I’d run into constantly, hoping to see her, and then finally did, asked her out and she sort of dodged it, so I used a lot of harsh words to describe her to my friends, and exaggerated what it was like in her house when I was twelve; I wanted her more and thought about her more and took care of myself to the thought of her, three

126 times a night at times; though I knew my parents could hear, I didn’t care. I was lost inside myself and was, if there’s no better way to put it, obsessed with her. I kept a look out for her as I walked through town.

*

“Linda!”

My voice cracked as I shouted her name. She turned to me. I’d recognized her from behind, despite her umbrella. I thought I was tough, so I didn’t have one.

The umbrella had eclipsed her hair, but now she turned: short, shorter than mine, buzzed. In most women this would turn me away. A shock but if I place my hands on her head, the side of my fingers nudging her ears, the phrenology of love will be there, unobscured by hair: that she will be with me, pecks planted under her cheek bones will bloom into orgasm, I will say more to her, I will have the many things I want, she will want me. I wanted her to not want me—but to charm her into wanting me—I wanted to sit across from her and look at her—I wanted to read to her while she lay in the bathtub.

She turned to look at me, and she looked confused.

“I’m Abe,” I said, a little deflated. “We met at the drug store a week or two ago. You’ve been in a few times since.”

“Oh.” She looked nervous.

“How are you?”

“I’m fine. How’re you?”

“I heard you’re headed out to college? Congratulations.” I stepped a bit closer.

127 “Thank you,” she said. “I appreciate that.” She twirled the umbrella and rain spun off it. It wasn’t raining too hard. I thought that she could probably see muscle through my t-shirt, as it was a little wet. “It’s actually graduate school. I’ve graduated from college.”

“Hey, what are you doing right now?”

“Walking clears my head. Helps me think, I mean.”

“Can I walk with you a second?”

She nodded in eighth notes. I stepped under her umbrella, which she tilted toward me. I stepped under, and we started talking. I started talking and laughing a lot.

She said, “What’s your name, again? Your full name?”

“I’m Abe Larch.”

“I’m pleased to meet you, Abe Larch.”

“I’m pleased you’re pleased, Linda Daniels.”

We waded through and leapt over puddles. She had rain boots on and overalls under her raincoat.

“I don’t mean this to be mean, so please don’t take it that way,” I said. “But

I’ve never met anyone who dressed like you.”

“You mean you’ve never met a woman who dressed like me?”

Concealing any annoyance I said, “Yeah, maybe that’s what I mean.”

“I just think it’s kind of silly.”

“What’s kind of silly?”

“It.”

128 “Is that why you cut off your hair?”

“That’s a part of it,” she said in a singsong, mocking way. “Will you be attending college next year?” Her voice pitched up through words of more than two syllables.

“I’m thinking about it. We’ll see.”

“And what subjects do you like to study?”

“Well—and I hope you know you’ve taken on the tone of an aunt right now—I like books a lot.”

“Oh? What kind of books?”

“Not sure. All kinds of books. I think it’s expected I take over the drug store.

Where we met the other day.”

“Have you read Virginia Woolf?”

“No,” I said. But I added quickly, “I’ve heard of her.” I didn’t say, ‘on your kitchen table.’

“You should, Abe. She was a sad woman, but brilliant. A really brilliant woman.”

“I mostly read the books Mr. Peterson gave me. And others.” I sensed it was unwise to mention Mike Hammer. “Maybe that’s what I’ll study.”

“You know David?”

“I know David.” I turned and smiled at her.

“How old are you, Abe?”

“I’m 19.” I’d told worse lies. “How old are you, Linda.”

129 “I’m 22. You’re 19 and just about to start college?”

“I waited a year, early in school.”

“You seem smart enough to me.”

“Well let’s just say you’re one of the first to accuse me of that.”

She laughed when I said it. I wanted to kiss her. We kept walking. I asked her about boarding school and she told me. There were all girls and she’d actually liked that for a while. For sure it got old but there’s a reason they do it.

“It keeps one focused. Instead of obsessing about boys, we memorized—were forced to memorize verse.” She said this self-mockingly, but I could tell she was proud of it. “I’ll recite some for you sometime.”

“How about now?” I assumed short lyrics—love, nymphs, euphemism, innuendo, rhyme, iambs, feet and hair—little things like that was what she meant, or would recite to me in that climbing voice of hers.

“But we’ve only just met Abe.” She winked at me. “Maybe once we know each other a bit better. It’s unbecoming of a lady to recite verse upon a first meeting”—a habit of hers which annoyed me, slipping into heightened speech. I got the sense that she’d used it so much ironically that it’d become a characteristic of hers without realizing it. She probably couldn’t tell that there were times when she wasn’t being ironic at all.

“Well I suppose we better set up a second meeting now, then. And then you can memorize a poem when you get back for when I call your bluff.”

130 “Thou art my father, thou my author, thou my being gav’st me; whom should I obey but thee? Whom follow? Thou wilt bring me soon to that new world of light and bliss, among the gods who live at ease, where I shall reign at thy right hand voluptuous, as beseems thy daughter and thy darling, without end. How’s that for a memory?”

I didn’t respond at first. “Biblical?” We’d officially traced a rectangle. We weren’t literally walking in circles, but might as well have been. I wasn’t sure if she’d noticed this.

“Close. Milton. From Sin to Satan.”

“Charming.”

“Impressive.”

“A distraction.”

“From?”

“When will we meet?”

“But we’ve already met.”

I stopped. The rain was settling but the puddles were still there. My canvas shoes were soaked through. Linda came up to my shoulders, maybe. At times like these I would take a lock of a girl’s hair between my thumb and finger, rub it like a poker chip, maybe work my way toward her cheek. I didn’t have this option. She seemed to shrink a bit, but she looked up at me, which was a good sign. Cars pushed water in the road.

“I’d like to see you again,” I said.

131 She mumbled something I couldn’t hear.

“What?”

“Your wish’s, Abe. You’re alright company. Young, to be sure.”

“And a liar and wanting to see you. I work tomorrow. How about Sunday?”

“The lord’s day?”

“He’s eternal. He can wait.”

“Sunday.”

On the walk home, I muttered to myself made up poems, thought about her, worried about myself, how I came off to her. My mind skipped like a rock thrown across her: even if floating free of her a moment, it was bound to come back, hard, and out again, and to be submerged completely, inevitably. When I wrestled Scott who had fifty plus pounds on me, I’d rarely be on the attack. I’d wait till he came, and try to get a punch or a throw in, but because I was outweighed, even if I gained an advantage I was still on the defensive. That’s how it was talking to Linda.

*

I can’t say the same about my family. At the table I felt above them. I felt like a spy: I feigned ignorance, thought I knew more than I was letting on. My power came through withholding: when my mother spoke of Miss Diane’s ramblings and loneliness or Scott’s new trophies, or when she and my father spoke of Kennedy or

Civil Rights maybe being a little optimistic, that the country was maybe getting ahead of itself, I always had the knowledge that in this very house I’d done things my parents couldn’t have imagined I’d done or done themselves. So I thought. And when I came

132 home that night for dinner, still wet, still grinning stupidly, I had the knowledge that

Linda and I had talked, that I’d instigated it and sustained it and had every intention of continuing to do so.

When David got around to inviting me over it was in part that power that I wanted more of, if not just to learn a little more about Linda. The irony of his respecting my drinking age was not something I pointed out, but it gave me satisfaction to notice it.

I would have shown up on time if he’d named a time; all he said was “after dinner.” I arrived in a tie and that mixture of self-confidence and self-consciousness which accompanies dressing better than one is accustomed to. I would have brought drinks myself, but it seemed that being dressed up was a stretch enough toward adulthood, enough for our first real time spent together since Saul and I were kids.

A few days after I’d met Linda, David placed on my shop counter a newspaper. He was wearing a tie. His were usually simple, nothing to draw attention to them. The tie asserted itself as a fact. So David looked respectable or venerable or sophisticated, or all three, but it was definitely meant to mean something. He realized he was getting older. He didn’t have kids around, and he had a reputation like that of the lake he used to stare into: it was nice in that it was a lake, good to look at, but we all knew it was filled with algae and muddy water. It was fine that it was there; you just didn’t swim in it.

As David placed his items on the counter, he asked about my birthday and invited me over. I accepted, and I played down my excitement, both because I had a

133 compulsion to act in control, and because I didn’t want anyone in the store to take notice of our conversation. As much as he’d become a part of the landscape, that landscape becomes more present when another person tramps in or out of it.

So when I approached in my tie, I had the feeling of discovery, of danger, of coming into contact with reality, that move from his abstraction to the concrete man walking toward you, his hand extended again, a tie on, his beard grown out and yet not quite connecting despite his age, and if it hadn’t connected at this point it never would—and that is the difference between the abstraction and the man, a beard that doesn’t connect, a handshake that’s just a little too firm. In my mind his beard was full. I felt disappointed by this, and I didn’t wonder why.

“It’s good to see you, Abe.”

“You too, sir.”

“David will be fine. You’re a man now—right, Abe?”

I pushed my tongue in the gap between two of my back teeth. “Sure.”

“Come inside,” he said, watching a neighbor drive by, without waving. It wasn’t yet dark, and in a collared shirt it was warm for early spring, almost enough to make you want to stay outside. “Let’s have a drink.”

We went into what had become of his library. There was still the same short rolling ladder, but the room had become a marvel, overgrown as Marsh’s Field. One had to wonder how many of those books he’d read. But that was a philistine’s question, I figured, so I didn’t ask it.

134 “So how are you,” he asked me, sitting down in one of the two red overstuffed chairs. I can’t imagine he had too many guests in there, but I suppose it made more sense to have two chairs than one.

“I’m good. I’m good.”

He nodded but pulled at his beard a bit. “That’s good.”

“And how are you, David?”

“I’m well. I’ve been trying to keep busy.”

He smiled at me and I smiled at him, in our ties, in our overstuffed chairs.

He sat up with a mock groan and said, “I’ll get us some drinks.” He left the room.

I looked at the titles, opened one of the books. It was a Torah, in Hebrew, which I was sure he couldn’t read. When he came back in, glasses pinched between three fingers, a bottle of rye in the other, I asked him about it.

“No, I don’t speak it, regrettably, but I can’t help myself. These books are like dust, or weeds. So’s my speech sometimes, I apologize.” He grinned boyishly.

I nodded as I took the glass from him. Both had three ice cubes. He poured a bit of a pour, and then he filled the glass halfway, and then he did the same in his.

“To maturity,” he said. We toasted. My face crumpled of its own accord. I pretended I was biting my lip. He was making a face as if he were in ecstasy at the taste, so he didn’t notice either way.

“You’ve been reading a lot, then?”

135 “As much as I can. I worry sometimes I’ll lose my eyes.” He winked at me, and then closed his eyes. “I’ll have to pay someone to read to me then. But yes, reading enough to make myself feel like I’m not not reading enough—Jesus, that couldn’t have been a worse sentence—reading enough to make myself feel like I’m reading enough.” He sighed and looked to the Torah. “That wasn’t much better. In any case.”

“I never did finish The Odyssey, if I can be honest.”

He nodded. “Was it the rhyme?”

“Could be.”

“Pope’s rhymes, but they aren’t all that way. Funny that we can say that, they.

Though it was always they. That book was a tale told by a million people a million times, and now we’ll have a million translations of it, over a million years, and millions won’t finish it and millions will, but that book will be read and given forever,

I think.”

I tongued the gap in my teeth.

“You’re honest, though. It’s good that you’re upfront. That’s a good thing in a man.” He poured more in my glass, though I’d only sipped it, and then we toasted again, to truth.

“We’ll have to do beauty next,” he said.

“Sounds good.”

“So how’s your father?”

“He’s about the same as he’s always been.”

136 “How’s he always been?”

“Well you’ve know him longer than me,” I felt smart for saying that so I added, “funny.” I drained the whiskey back to the first pour. “But you know him, happy, angry.”

“You think he’s an angry man?”

“When I make him angry, yes.”

David laughed at that.

“Millions of sons have thought of their fathers as angry men. Saul probably does. It only seems right.”

“It’s right because they do it?”

“It’s right because I don’t want them to get off easily when I had to suffer through my angry, angry old man.” He laughed even harder at that than at what I’d said. Then he finished his second drink.

“No,” I said, “but he’s happy, I think.”

David nodded. “That’s how he always struck me. When he, your uncle and I would get together, he would always crack jokes. If your uncle and I disagreed, one of us condescended to the other, it was your father who made peace between us. Not in a dramatic way. He’d just wave the conversation along.” He nodded to himself. “Unless it was him you were coming after.”

“You all did that often?”

“Often enough. I did a lot of work for them, helped them with that building, helped them with the city and getting licensed. Helped them talk to women. They

137 could be a little timid, and a little bitter when things didn’t work out because they were so timid. You wouldn’t believe some of the things your uncle said after we left

Daren’s. But I’m probably saying too much. I guess the two of them had some sort of falling out. Weren’t cut out to be business partners. And the three of us had trouble because, well, I wasn’t concerned enough with earthly matters.”

After he said it, he fathomed his drink. You’d think he was being prideful, mocking them, but looking at him there seemed to be some sadness over it, and if sadness is too strong a word, at least it was a weight to him.

“For their taste, anyway,” he added.

“Do you still go to church,” I said.

He looked to his books and back. “Do you?”

“I try to get out of it whenever I can.”

“As many young boys have before you.”

“I thought I was a man, now? You’re telling me you want to be there?”

“I like reading scripture and hearing about it.”

“It’s okay.” I said, emboldened by the rye. “I’m not a Christian either.”

“That’s enough of that, I think, Abe.”

In our house, you could hear the rush of cars outside. Not in David’s.

I’d finished my drink. I clicked my tongue against the roof of my mouth. I stood up and looked at more books. A significant portion of them belonged to the

Harvard Five Foot Shelf, red and gold, hardcover, winding to one end then starting at the other, which made them seem valuable, but also somehow trivial: Augustine

138 several books away from Milton and on the shelf below were scientists, Darwin among them, all in the same dress. This said they were great, but it said they were merely great, not loved. Which books did he own beyond these, on their own, where were the books that he’d turned to on the nights when people thought, six years earlier, that he’d kill himself. I looked. The de Sade was nowhere to be found. Twain was prominent. I touched Huckleberry Finn to the sound of David pouring me another drink.

“Mind if I use your bathroom, David?”

“You remember where it is.” He studied the bottle while he said it, and it wasn’t a question.

I didn’t exactly. But I paraded down the hall as if I did. Art hung on the walls, some depictions of saints and some other things, at least one looked as if it might be an original, but who knows who made it and if that meant anything. What I didn’t see were pictures of his former wife, of his son. I stopped in the kitchen when I made a wrong turn. There on the table, there recently taken, without time having done much for his looks, was a picture of Saul, a school portrait presumably. Red hair combed to the side in a way that made him look consciously wealthy. Acne on his skin. Thin. If I still had it, I’d look at it. But I don’t. Lost in a move, maybe. I took one; I’m certain. I stuffed it into my pocket, though, so it must have been wrinkled and ruined even then.

There were Playboys in David’s bathroom. I looked at them to pass the time.

Coming back in I was ready, and I asked, “So how’s Saul doing?”

139 David was filling up his drink, so he must have had a glass while I was gone.

He had a book in front of him, something from the Five Foot Shelf. “Who knows why

I pay the tuition at that place. He’s pretty fond of drink and not very fond of class. I’d threaten to stop paying but he’s so damn close to graduation. And I assumed at a certain point they’d just kick him out.”

I nodded. What do you say to something like that?

“He has some close friends, which he always did. So it’s not like I can’t, shouldn’t, be proud of him. Maybe not the best sort of friends. I’ve been out there and—“

“The guys always liked him.”

“Maybe he’ll be a leader,” David said this profoundly. I wanted to ask, a leader of what? But I didn’t.

He went on. “You don’t need people to like you or approve of you to be a leader. Look at MacArthur. Look at anyone who’s a great leader. They know what to do, inside of them, beyond that data or the outside opinions foisted on them. So maybe it’s alright that Saul doesn’t get along with the guys as much as he should.”

I kept eye contact and nodded. Better not to speak once people are going.

“We talk on the phone sometimes, you know, and every now and then he’ll send me letters.” David pointed through the wall toward wherever his collection was kept. “In these letters he tells me about how well things are going over there, the friends, things like that. And he mentions the drinking, normal amounts, a social thing.

Nothing out of hand. So I think, fine, a little drink is fine.

140 “Abe, he doesn’t remind me of me. He’s not me, that’s alright. But would he were not me in that”—David belched silently—“he had a great interest in sports or in his country or something substantial. He wants to move to California after he graduates, wants nothing to do with this town, happy to see me if I go out there but no interest in coming back here. Alright. But I talk to him on the phone. Short answers to any question, the barest details about anything, about his interests.”

He said, “I love my son.”

He rubbed the neck of the stout glass bottle but didn’t pour anything.

“I have these two accounts, one where he seems so alone but has no interest in coming back to his home, and the other where everything is fine, in long sentences with semicolons, everything is fine for my son. But then I get calls from the head master—and I make calls to him, too—and he says, ‘Your son is floundering.’ That’s the word he used, I promise, Abe. Floundering. ‘He’s been caught drunk. He’s approached me personally while drunk. As if flaunting that he’s drunk.’ And bear in mind that he’s just come of age.”

To break David’s mute reading of the bottle’s label, I said, “Has he got a girl or anything?”

“No, they keep them locked down. No girls. I assume sometimes they slip out, but not that he’s told me. And I’d assume he’d tell me. The stuff we would get into, your father and uncle and I. But we were a bit older. Abe, I don’t mean to make it sound like I’m not proud of my son. I am.”

“Natural to worry.”

141 “He understands that I didn’t abandon him.”

“Certainly.”

“A child doesn’t try and hurt their parents. I think about my father—”

“You dropped out, though, right?”

“Let me finish.” David opened his eyes wide, sucked in his lips. They disappeared under his beard. Anger apparent though its object not clear, maybe me or himself or his father or all structured education. “Granted, I left school against his wishes. But after he passed. And to continue what he started. I never said anything to hurt or inflame him. If anything I did my best to keep him calm all the time, my mother and I both did. That was her main occupation, for God’s sake. Not that my father was bad to her. For God’s sake, am I nattering?”

“Not at all.”

David went back to reading the bottle.

He didn’t say anything, like he wanted me to really consider the question, consider if a man like him was really reduced to nattering, what did that mean? A king of this town, as close as we could get in a country led by Kennedy, a democratic poet like Frost reading at his inauguration, David loving both of these (though he wasn’t truly Catholic he wasn’t such an atheist that he couldn’t take pride in a Catholic president—picking up Catholicism, another rebellion against his upbringing) and that pride in democracy and in mobility didn’t stop David from forging himself as something like a king, like a lord—and here I am the king of Sharon, unshaken by this town’s disapproval, now broken by a rebellious child, a spiteful child, worse than

142 Lear’s daughters, here I have Edmund for a son—and it was his own fault too, he didn’t say it but he had to think it—here I am before you, child, a broken king, a great man reduced to revealing himself to a child, to a fool—we two on the edge of town, exiles awaiting something, insanity, tragedy, an act of God.

“Your son will be fine,” I said.

“That’s the kind of talk we don’t need. Abe, I think we both can handle ourselves without pretty condolences like that. If we can’t, we’re as bad as the rest of them.”

Returning to the shelf the book that sat on the bar, he added, “But could you do something for me, Abe?”

“Sure, David.”

“Write to him. See how he is.”

I didn’t say anything.

“I know you two lost contact. You were close though. That means something.

It would mean a lot to him, I’m sure, to have someone reach out to him.”

“Okay, sir,” I mumbled, though I was sure I wouldn’t.

“Good. Thank you, Abe.”

He stayed standing while I stayed seated, his hand on his hip, his other hand holding his drink. He looked out the window, out into Sharon, and I looked into him and I saw vanity like I’d never seen before in my life.

We shook hands at the door after a period of silence.

*

143 As Linda walked up to my table that Sunday—and it was starting to feel like the good kind of spring, warmth and water in the air without rain—I was glad I’d kept her a secret. A part of me wondered if my friends would think it disgusting, if they would call her a whore and think less of me, if they would think it was cool. That didn’t matter when she approached the table, in her inevitable overalls.

“Hi,” she said, sitting down, denim inaudibly scrunching and loosening.

“How’re you?”

“I’m well. The weather’s better than the last time we met.”

“Yeah, it is.”

She smiled in what looked like friendly disbelief that we were sitting there together.

“Tell me about your family,” she said.

I looked around the shop for anyone I knew. “They do their best. My dad is a bit of a hard-ass.”

Linda laughed. “Not mine.”

“No?”

“No, he’s sweet actually. If,” she searched for our server, “weak willed at times.”

“My mother has no problem with that. She’s got the will and my father’s got a way of--”

“Making it flesh?”

“If by that you mean beating my flesh, then yes.”

144 We both laughed. Then she said, “It’s strange being back.”

“How’s that?”

“I guess it has to do with my parents.”

The waitress, who was younger than me, looked to me to order first. I told her I wanted coffee and creamer; Linda said black.

“Anyway, they want me to have my freedom but they want to know what I’m doing at all times, too. If it was one or the other I could acclimate. But this back and forth stuff is trying, really trying.”

“I think what you’re describing is the condition of being young-ish. Neither old nor not.”

She nodded. “You grew up here, right?”

“Yep, born here. So was my mother.”

“My parents both were born here. It’s got its charm, I suppose.”

“Charm, huh?”

“Well when you’ve been a way awhile it just looks different, seems different.

Smaller most of all.” She took her cup from the waitress and thanked her. “Small things are always charming.”

“That’s a big claim.”

“Probably an untrue one, too.” She lowered her voice and locked eyes with me.

“How’s this: that which may be considered small in many cases may be considered charming, as well. Notable exceptions being needles, feces, and Napoleon.”

“Charming.”

145 “But not small?”

“But not small. But, Linda, what were these big things you saw that made

Sharon look so small?”

“Well, as you may or may not know, I was in a private school. The building was big,” Linda raised her hands like you’d show the size of a fish, “and the campus was about the space of all the parts of this town worth being in. I spent a lot of time there, and I’ve gone to visit other cities, too. Boston, New York.”

“What did you like most?”

“Which did I like best?” She hummed a bit. “That’s a tough one. Probably

New York. I might want to live there.”

“I’ve never really left Sharon.”

“Not at all?”

“I guess I saw Chicago once.”

“And. What did you think?”

“It had its charm.”

“Clever boy.”

“Had you left Sharon before you went to boarding school?”

“No. I hadn’t.”

“You glad you left?”

She gulped at coffee that must have been very hot. “You know, I still can’t believe you’ve never read any Milton.”

146 “I’ve been busy reading the labels on cereal, things like that. But what do you see in him?”

“He’s grand.”

“As in big?”

“As in monstrous. He really is incredible, Abe. But not without his flaws, like anyone. They’re people, too, Abe. People forget that. I mean, people who read things besides cereal boxes. It is terrible, some of the things Milton says, and it bothered me, still does. Virginia Woolf—do you know her? No, we talked about that.”

I tried not to spill coffee on my white t-shirt.

“Well anyway, she’s grand. You can read her diaries, and she says some things about Milton in there which made me feel okay—“

“But hold on, what’s actually wrong with the guy.”

“Basically the way he’d treat me is wrong with the guy. He says terrible things about women, where they belong. Things properly educated people—a category from which I am excepting you, young Abe—know better than to believe now.”

“Got it.”

“You will if you don’t already. But anyway she says something about how human perspective is absent from the book, just the divine, the heroic. You would almost think he wasn’t even a human writing it.”

“Does that miss the point?”

“How do you mean?” She unfolded her napkin but kept it on the table.

147 “Nothing. Just growing up Mr. Peterson was always talking about art being from the heart. Like the most human thing. It should be human. Melville was who he was talking about.”

I was nervous not to say anything stupid about things like that.

“David.” Linda methodically tore the napkin into equal strips.

“I used to know his son, Saul, when he still lived here.”

After she’d properly ordered the napkin strips, she said, “That does sound like something he’d say.”

“Do you agree with it?”

“Obviously not. I just contradicted it. I’m not going to change my mind because David made some random assertion. That’s stupid anyway, we should be trying to break past that stuff, the grubby stuff we put up with everyday.”

“I’ll keep that in mind when I’m writing sonnets for you.”

She looked up from her pile to me. The skin around her eyes scrunched.

I said, “You’ve limited my subjects, though, without the hair.”

“Yeah. I actually do need to get going. Thanks very much, Abe.”

I’d tried to save face, play along.

“You’ll give me that Milton next time I see you?”

She dropped money on the table, enough for both of us. “Sorry,” she said. She left.

I stared at it, stared at the light brown of my heavily creamed coffee, the near black of hers. We were seated in the back; I’d hoped to keep her out of sight, had even

148 picked my side of booth to make sure she was obscured. I checked out the other customers, of which there weren’t too many, to make sure she hadn’t drawn attention to us. There was enough there to cover the tip.

I followed her.

But I should have said that I spent a moment looking at the other customers, hating all of them, finding all of them repulsive, at the other girls who were closer to my age, who all seemed young and lost and stupid, and that was how I felt in that moment too when I hit the table and knocked the sugar packets over, including the ones already opened for my coffee on the table, so it then spilled out across the black table in something like Sharon’s night sky.

I stalked through Sharon hoping to get a glance, saw nothing, and finally made up my mind to go see the preacher, Robert.

The church was a humble building, and Robert had told me he liked it that way. After that night walk we took after dinner, he had me on his line, and I didn’t put up much of a fight. I went to his office every now and then, some months more than others, sometimes multiple times a week. Other times I wouldn’t see him, except for leaving church, for two months. Even when I lost the faith I still went to see him.

I’d sit down and he’d say, “Hey Abe,” take his feet off the desk.

“Smells like booze in here, preacher.”

“I don’t have the slightest idea what you’re talking about, Abe,” he’d say. I never actually saw him drink; it was just the way he acted that made me suspect it. It’s

149 possible he really was straight in that way. But he was an odd guy, and the oddness was made more prominent by his position.

Self-gratification and anger. I think that’s a fair summation of most of our conversations. At first I’d use euphemisms but we got to being pretty straight up with one another, and that’s what I liked about him. With how regularly I was coming and with how open I was with him he’d make jokes about how I ought to just go to confession. I’d ‘no’ him, act like we were joking around, but that really did hurt me and made me stay away for a bit, not wanting to overstay my welcome.

Anyway I’d gone less and less as I got older—excepting a few rough spots at fifteen where I stopped going completely, but I came back—and anyway I hadn’t seen him since my birthday, and I wanted to see him, and I wanted to feel better about everything, less stupid and less young.

I knocked on the door to his home, a small place behind the church, with a little yard fenced in white that neighborhood kids would play in when he had a barbeque. Never any kids of his own.

I knocked again.

The door opened. He stuck his head out.

“Hey, Abe.”

“Hey.” I stood there nodding rapidly.

“Listen, I got somebody in here, right now.”

I nodded some more.

“Everything all right?”

150 “Oh, you know.”

“Yeah. Yeah. Listen, I want you to come by. I hear you’re something of a man now. I want you to come by and we’ll celebrate. You sure you’re alright?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, come by soon. Or call and we’ll set up a time.”

I told him I’d do that. He still hadn’t opened the door much beyond his chest.

*

Just angry. Angry at him and at her. Angry at my parents. A few days passed and it didn’t subside. And after those few days I went for a walk in Marsh’s Field and threw the stones that I could find into other parts of the field. A path had formed from all the kids sneaking around, so you could make your way through. I did this and kept walking, past where Saul and I had lain that night and past where the grass grew high like paintings of the Sahara, and onto some trees. I kicked stones when I wasn’t throwing them. The ground was dry and breaths of dirt came up with the stones. I wasn’t any less angry.

Trees grew along the perimeter, and in the middle of the field sometimes a tree or two would sprout up. There under one of those trees sat Linda Daniels, reading— though you might think she was a boy from far off, with her hair cut the way it was, and the overalls.

She was concentrating on whatever tome she was reading, but soon enough she heard my footsteps, maybe saw the dirt rising. She looked up in surprise, and then hid her surprise and said, “Hello.”

151 “Hi.”

She brought her legs to her chest and crossed her ankles. “Hi,” she said.

She looked up at me because I didn’t sit down. I looked out across the field, at the grass, into the sun for as long as I could take.

I said, “Kind of pissed me off there.”

“My sincerest apologies.”

“You’ve got a tone, you know that?”

“I say again—“

“Cut it.” I chewed my lip.

She took out a cigarette. She didn’t offer me one. She lit it. I sat down in front of her, about to the point that our knees were touching.

“I like you, Linda,” I said.

She smoked and looked at me. Then she said, “You sure I’m not too manly for you?”

I nodded but not exactly at her question. I traced squares and crosses in the dirt with my finger.

“David always told me I had beautiful hair.”

I grunted.

“He’d play with it, and he’d stare at it, too. He told me he loved it. He, no exaggeration, wrote poems about it. He wasn’t manipulating me, Abe. Don’t nod like that. You don’t know what happened.”

152 “No.” I said. “You don’t get it. I was—” I repeated myself but didn’t go on. I looked at her, and I scrunched my eyes like I was looking at the sun, though it was over my shoulder. I exhaled. My breath hit her face.

She breathed in deeply.

“You’re not listening.” She said, “People don’t listen to this. You don’t know what happened. He didn’t rape me, and he didn’t seduce me. David doesn’t know the first thing about seduction, and he doesn’t know the first thing about half the stuff he goes on about, despite all of his books, his brandy. Suffocating pretension. All of it.

But David loved me, and that doesn’t seem possible, maybe, to you or to anyone else.

But he loved me.”

The sun was getting lower but it’d still be a while before dark. The trees rocked, their leaves shushed. I felt calmer but emptier, like I was a glass soda had been poured into and was all fizz, but now that had subsided, so mostly I was just empty, with a lot less substance than it’d appeared.

“Abe, you’re the only person who approaches me. Are you aware of that?”

I shook my head.

“Abe, you’re the only person who speaks to me at all. Not even David anymore, that ass doesn’t even speak to me and this whole thing is his, this whole thing is our fault but here I am dealing with it, by myself. My parents pretend it never happened. They smile and my sister may not even know at all. She’s cute. And growing up.”

153 “I’ve seen her,” I said. I tore out some grass and handed it to her. She played with it and went on.

“She’ll be pretty. And I hope she’ll be smart. At that boarding school, Abe, it was like nothing even happened. I just became another person with the same name.

And when David sent me letters I was that person, but only when he sent me those letters, and when I sent him letters back.” She took her legs out from under herself and lay back against her palms, still holding my grass against the grass of the field. “And when he’d send me books even then I was that other person, or I was the person I was before David. I was only that other person with him. I never even told the other girls about it. The only people who know are this entire damn town.”

She did a pretty good job hiding that she was crying. Scratching her head, smashing a tear with her palm. Swallow hard to cover up a sob. She looked striking in a way that I thought a girl without hair couldn’t.

She went on. “But now he won’t speak to me. He once just walked out of a building, shook hands with whomever he was speaking to and left as fast as he could, as soon as I walked in. No eye contact. So I come out, walk wherever and read. And that’s about all I do, Abe. I honestly can’t wait to leave.”

She looked over my shoulder at the sun. “I didn’t even think about the baby at school. I didn’t even think about it at all. I didn’t even really think about boys; there weren’t even boys there. Just David’s letters. And my sister’s about the age that she— you know, the baby. Isn’t that strange? Isn’t that really strange? They might even look alike. I thought about killing myself.”

154 She stared at me.

I kissed her, and she didn’t stop me. I kissed her more.

Inside, I put my face all the way behind her shoulder, into the grass, and thrust rapidly. I moaned, hoping to hide the way my mind wandered back to our conversation.

I rolled next to her, into the dirt, and we looked at the sun together. She let the grass I’d given her drop from her hand. After a while the sun went down and it had started to get cold. I could hear the wind; I could smell dirt. I looked at Linda’s breasts, which weren’t large. I still wasn’t breathing normally.

“When I was in school,” she said, “the other girls would talk about how they imagined it would be with boys. Some even referred to it as, ‘on their wedding night.’” Linda made a sound that was supposed to be a laugh. “I just kept quiet,” she said.

After a bit she got dressed. I pulled my jeans up. She rested her lips against my cheek, just before we stepped back onto the cement and pavement of Sharon.

*

A week later my father and I were moving a couch, green and large, into our living room and he asked how I had been. I said, “fine,” wanted to focus mostly on getting the couch through one of our narrow doorframes. He tried to get earnest with me, and he asked again. I gave him the same response.

“Seems,” he said, lifting the couch with his back, carefully, “that you’ve been—I don’t know—something—lately.”

155 “I’ve just been busy, I guess.”

“Busy.”

“Busy.” We’d made it through the doorway and were stagger-stepping into the living room. Even from their bedroom the drone of my mother’s vacuum forced us to speak a little louder, enunciate a little more. “What was wrong with our old couch?”

“Been busy with what?”

“Christ, don’t you have to read me my rights?”

My father dropped the couch. I hopped back to avoid permanent damage to my toes. He moved across to me quickly for having struggled so much with his share of the lifting. I could smell meat on his breath from lunch. His gut was getting bigger. He struck me.

“Don’t get smart. Because you’re not being smart. You think people haven’t seen you?”

I pushed my chest up against his trying to get room. “The hell are you talking about?”

“Of all the—the tail in Sharon, you have to go after her? How long—no, how at all?—did you think that wouldn’t be noticed? You do realize that you’re our son, right? Abe Larch is not someone out there walking around, straight from the dirt. Your actions reflect on us. Us. Your parents. And on you. What the hell are you thinking?”

“I guess—“

“By God, if you get smart again—just shut up.”

156 He pushed his forehead into mine. His glasses flexed against my nose. He coughed, but didn’t move, coughed into my face.

“What the hell?” Now I was shouting.

Now he pushed me back into the wall, but there was no room for me to move so the back of my head smacked against it. I whimpered a bit.

“Don’t whine, kid. You’re not a dog. Do you hear me? You are not a dog.

You’re your mother’s son, you’re my son, so don’t go chasing tail like a dog and don’t whine like one. Don’t forget how old you are.” He breathed through his nose. “That doesn’t mean you do whatever you want, it means you deal with what happens.

Sharon might burn you alive, son. Are we clear?”

“Hun,” my mother gasped in what I don’t believe was genuine shock. My father didn’t turn to face her. “Get off him. Get, get.” She brushed him away. She rubbed my back. “Are we done,” she said. And then when everyone was breathing normally, “This couch will look great in here. Don’t you think, Abe?”

I nodded.

“Your mom doesn’t have too bad of an eye,” she said. “It was a great price, which made your father happy. Didn’t it, Al?”

“Let’s finish up,” he said.

We placed the couch as my mother watched. She sat down on it. Then nodded and left the room.

My father told me Pastor Robert had called for me, and then he followed her out.

157 A couple of hours after that I went to see Linda. We met out closer to the streams where you could see flashes of fish if there was day light still, which there wasn’t, only the bubble of the water.

There was no need to see Robert; I had gotten what I wanted. When I went to talk to him that day, it was only to feel better about myself and not being able to get

Linda; it wasn’t for any spiritual guidance. Robert was naïve that way; he thought everyone was trying to get better. But I didn’t want better, and I don’t think most of us did either. We wanted to feel better. And we did, sometimes.

Linda and I would lie in the grass after, and she’d tell me about what she’d been reading, in a whisper, and I’d listen and I’d learn. She’d talk about her plans, what she’d do once she got out to the city, what she’d do for scholarship, for women in scholarship. The differences between her mother and her, the way they thought about what was important. Her mother didn’t get Linda’s passion for words. I think she associated it with David, so she distrusted it, even though Linda had loved books long before David entered her life.

I didn’t mind this, though maybe I should have: most of our talk was about

David.

*

Linda was reading. She was sixteen, and she’d asked a teacher for more to read. That teacher suggested the epics. So Linda was laying in the sun, in the grass, her already thickening legs exposed, reading The Aenied. There was a shadow, and she looked up,

158 and there was David Peterson: tall, older, somber. He asked what she was reading, and she told him. He said he was very impressed, and he was.

He’d been alone since his wife’s death. Saul was just a year old when she died—‘of illness’ is all anyone ever said about it—and he’d committed himself to his construction business, his books and his son. He stopped talking to most people around Sharon. Even after church it seemed that he barely spoke to anyone.

So when Linda lay there looking up at him, developed for her age, ironic in her responses to his questions, it gave David something he didn’t have. He ran into her again and again around town, and they’d talk about books. And David offered to lend her books, and of course she wanted that. When they had sex for the first time (Linda said, “the first time we made love . . . “) the events leading to it had been so gradual that any worries about it being inappropriate had been abated, they claimed, because they’d gotten so used to it. First the face dipping down to the shoulder, still and waiting, the sun hot on their backs and faces like breath, and then the face tilted with two fingers up into lips and the kiss, just the kiss, touching of her hair, all this proceeded by eye contact, the unmoving eyes to make sure, to know for sure, she said, that all parties were on board with what was happening, leading into that first kiss, spanning casually a few decades. And that had been all for that day.

I guess he always spent himself inside her. That’s a detail I’ll never understand, but that’s what she said. Neither worried about it; he’d just have her over, and they’d make love and then he might read poetry to her, or she to him, and he’d tell her about Sharon or his father. He didn’t like to talk about his wife.

159 She’d been curled up to his chest (can you imagine how small she looked against a man like David?) and said, “Tell me about her,” meaning his wife.

He stood, paced the room, clean-shaven, naked, like a bull from end to end of the ring, she his sole spectator. And he never responded. He went into his master bathroom, with its gold trim around the mirror and lights above the mirror, closed the door and came out some time later without acknowledging the conversation, or the lack of one.

The two of them would never drink either. He’d tell her he wasn’t going to serve her alcohol underage, I guess without deliberate irony. But there it is. Her parents would ask where she was going, and at first she lied, but she figured someone might see her so she told them the truth in a sense, told them that ‘Mr. Peterson’ (she’d let David slip a couple of times, much to the bemusement of whomever heard) had a lot of books and had read a lot of books and was something like a tutor for her.

One night he showed her some letters (the proudest she’d ever seen him) that he’d exchanged with a professor at Amherst, who’d taught alongside Frost. Nothing too elaborate or worth getting into detail about, but they corresponded sometimes and

I think it made him feel like life had become a little grander.

During the winter, when I was twelve, she’d come to him and told him about her symptoms, knowing, she told me, that she was pregnant but feigning some innocence; I’m not sure why. It might have been to protect herself. But she told him and he told her that she was pregnant, and he started pacing again like when she’d

160 asked about his wife. He paced and finally told her what they’d do. And he stayed firm.

When she told her father he went straight to Pastor Robert.

Linda’s mother held her, against her breast, calling her “baby,” calling her

“child.”

Looking back, it may seem strange if I say that I felt tenderly toward Linda, after what happened. But the world before and after orgasm were, are, different worlds.

At some point while she told me about their history together, maybe when she was telling me about her mother supporting her, I’d kiss Linda, palm her thigh. We—

Linda never called what we did making love, I noticed—had sex. And afterward at a certain point she’d wriggle out of my arms, and then she’d go on with her story, without a bridge between the two.

“The girls at the boarding school were actually fairly accepting,” she told me, leaning up on her elbows in the dirt in Marsh’s Field. It was dark so you couldn’t see the dirt on our arms. “None of them ever found out; I didn’t tell them. Sometimes I wondered about whether my parents told the head mistress, but as much as I could gather, they didn’t. I suppose I’m thankful for that.

“That was where I started taking walks and reading like I do now. I walked before, but there I started walking until I became tired, and then I’d read until it became dark. To me that seemed like a much more active way to read, that the author’s breaks don’t matter, you just go until fate intervenes. Does that make sense?

161 Either way, I’d always do that alone and I suppose that that was what separated me more from the other girls the most, how I’d separate myself from them. On these walks it’d come to me. Sometimes I’d just fall down. And breathe. And breathe. I might cut myself with thorns from roses, which is so sentimental and pathetic it makes me want to vomit and change my name, but that was when I dealt with it, her death, I mean. I always refer to her as her, but I never found out for sure. I called her ‘her,’ then. Even to David. If I can be honest with you, Abe, I thought up names for her sometimes, even though she was already gone. Years after I’d think up names for her.

Abe, you’re the first person I’ve ever told that to. It sounds just as bad out loud as I expected it to.”

I tried not to say much in these situations because every time I did she’d look at me like I was an idiot; I would just nod. I nodded then, too.

“And I loved all the reading and the ideas. That was where I first heard the term feminism; you don’t hear it much in Sharon. And I loved them for that. They made us learn all sorts of terrible domestic tasks and crafts, but some of the instructors introduced me to Ms. Virginia Woolf, and that’s the sort of thing that one would trade any amount of domestic tasks for. I’d take Woolf out there—and just for the record,

Woolf is absolutely right about Milton; I don’t want to give the impression that I think

Milton was right about anything; but he writes very prettily, and it’s best to know what you’re up against in these situations—I’d take Virginia out there with me and at times it made me think, yes, it’s good that I haven’t killed myself, what a waste it was for

162 Virginia, but other times I’d think, if Virginia could do it, I could, too. Does that make sense?”

I said, “Sure.” Then, “Did you ever talk to Pastor Robert?”

“Which one is he?”

“Skinny one, deep voice.”

“They all tried to council me. About moving away from the life of sin I’d started so early. Which in a sense I did, put that part of myself far from me, because there were no boys around at school anyway. Why do you ask?”

“I don’t know. I guess I talked to him a lot over the years. He’s been asking for me; I haven’t gone to see him.”

Our feet were touching, but nothing else. We lay parallel.

“I remember he was odd.”

“That’s a word for it.”

“I liked that about him.”

She struggled into her underwear, and then her overalls. She rubbed at her hair, which she’d recently re-shaved. She didn’t look at me; she looked out into the curve of the grass.

“Did you love him?” I was on my side, still naked, stayed that way. I looked at where the clouds gestured toward the moon. She didn’t say anything. I said, “Do you love him?”

“You know I can’t love you, right, Abe?”

I said, “That right?”

163 “That is right.”

I was shivering now, but remained naked, “Because you love David, then?”

“Tell yourself what you like, as long as you know that, Abe.”

“I didn’t know they taught you to see the future at college, too.”

She didn’t laugh, and she never did when I made jokes like that. She probably thought that sort of irony was beneath her, wanted not to confuse wit and intelligence.

“I’m leaving soon,” she said.

“Yeah.”

“I think I might write all of this someday, Sharon and David. High ceilings in his bedroom, how small he seemed in there. How big he seemed when he stared at me.

How right when he sent me away. How glad I was away.”

Linda wasn’t talking to me. She was talking to Sharon and to her future interviewers.

“Maybe I don’t love you,” I said.

She turned from her interviewers to me to say, “It’s possible.” There was just enough play in the conversation that I could tell myself maybe she wasn’t being serious.

*

And where was little Saul during their revelries? Curled into himself in his room, maybe halfway out the window as I stood out there, impatient, snapping and hitting my chest in rhythm as I’d seen blacks do in movies, Linda and David with no idea they need not whisper—the only ones in the house, as if they were a young

164 couple—his past, a child, a wife, erased—her future skipped, suddenly four years, eight years older once his foyer was crossed—and Saul and I a couple blocks away pretending to be killers, pretending to be, above all, older—and when I wasn’t there, what? Saul alone, the creak of his father’s bed maybe a ghost, maybe the truth slipping through from down the hall as she slipped through the front, as Saul slipped out the window, as I slipped out the window, all quiet as Linda and I never had to be out in that field.

Finally I asked, maybe that day or another: “What about Saul?”

“Saul?

“Saul—David’s son.”

“I’m sorry, I’m not sure what you mean?”

“Like, how does he fit into this? Did you see him? Talk to him?” My tone there was probably the first unironic edge I’d shown Linda.

“I don’t know, I guess I met him. He was little.”

“That’s the same age as I was.”

She turned over, unaware of how worked up I was and said playfully, “Don’t remind me. Gosh, don’t remind me.” She turned back onto her stomach, slipping her hand across my shoulder, saying, “Maybe I’ve had enough of you if you’re going to reward my open-mindedness with details like that. It is sort of unsettling, though.”

“No kidding. But did David talk about him?”

“Or his little friend, his second son?”

“Sure, or his friend. Linda.“

165 “Yes?”

“So what do you remember?”

She rubbed her bare scalp. “I guess he introduced me once. As if you introduce someone more than once. He said he was helping me with school. Gosh, it sounds terrible when I say that out loud. I don’t think he felt the need to explain himself to his son. That’s who David is.”

“Funny you think of him as his son and I think of him as Saul.”

“Yeah.” She put her hand on my chest. “He was a good friend of yours, though?”

“Best friend I’ve ever had, probably.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. At that age. You change each other. Or I guess, grow into each other.”

“I never had a friend like that at that age. Too much of a loner. Have you spoken with him? Letters, the phone? Are you curious about him?”

“No.”

“Well why not?”

“Well if I have to explain myself, mom, because I thought he’d reach out if he wanted to. I used to write him. Never heard anything.”

“You’re serious aren’t you? You seem, well, angry about it. Maybe it was lost in the mail.”

166 “Well it was him that left, not me. Seems like he should be the one to do something about it. Not act higher than a response.” Then I said self-mockingly, “He broke my heart.”

“But he did.”

“Not exactly, Linda. David, though, he asked me to write to him.”

“He did?”

“Yeah.”

“And will you?”

“What do I owe David? He said his son’s alone out there because he can’t make friends and his son left here saying he didn’t want friends like the people around here because he was turning into the kind of snob he turned into out there. So why?

Why if he’s getting what he deserves? If he rejects people, he doesn’t get them. You can’t have it both ways.”

“I think this is the most worked up I’ve ever seen you, Abe.”

“Can you blame me?”

The grass on the field was still. For once it wasn’t a windy day. She said,

“You’d think I would have seen you there at some point.”

“We snuck out a lot.”

“We wouldn’t know anything about that, would we?” An attempt to flirt, to bring the conversation down a bit.

“Well maybe he just knew when to bring you around,” I said.

167 I stood up, put on my underwear. Linda nodded and looked out to the still trees. She breathed in a controlled, loud way. We heard the voices of kids coming, so we dressed. We didn’t talk much on our way home.

*

I bought my own copy of Milton’s Poetical Works, made it through the first two books of Paradise Lost out of spite. I threw it against the wall and lost it for a while. School was wrapping up soon, and I cared less and less. I continued to do well enough; nothing more than the almost nothing expected of me. When I thought back on my education I felt only bitter toward the school—excepting a few teachers—and was annoyed, and I was sure that I didn’t want to go to college. The more I thought about

Linda and David, the more sure I was that I didn’t want any more learning.

This didn’t stop me from writing rhyming, malicious, horrendous, terribly feeling poetry. It was like puss coming out of me; I’d write them and never read them again, scrape it off. There were women whom I’d thought about pursuing, too—but what was the point? I continued to see Linda; I even told Scott about it. He mostly thought it was great because she was older, but that was incidental for me.

Sometimes I’d think of them together, David and Linda, while Linda and I were fucking and sometimes it would make me come quickly and other times it’d lose it.

Scott and I were drinking in Daren’s, one of Sharon’s few bars and one that also served food, the same bar my father, uncle and David used to go to, the night I brought up that side of things. I brought up de Sade but things like that were lost on

168 Scott, who mostly thought about fucking and running. We’d met on track, though I’d lost interest in it by then. Scott was one of the best on the team. There’d been talk about recruitment.

“But you never do it?”

“What slap a girl?”

“Not slap a girl. Just—well slap but not slap.”

“I wouldn’t hit a woman at all. Ever. That’s not something a man does.”

I didn’t say anything and followed Scott’s eyes to the thin dark haired girl that

Karen, whom I’d exchanged innocences with, had grown into. I sat in front of her in school and could hear her mumble her Silent Reading during class.

Scott didn’t take his eyes off of her, but went on. “No, a man doesn’t do that.”

“If a girl likes it?”

“If an addict likes something, you give that to them, too, I guess? We should’ve eaten before we got here.”

His sarcasm made me feel stupid, and I thought maybe I’d been wrong to do what I’d been doing. It had felt natural.

“Says something about a girl, who’s into that.”

“I’m the first person she’s slept with since all that,” I looked over at Karen, too.

“So she says.” Scott picked up speed and grew more excited, more confident.

“You think she wasn’t getting with the teachers at that school? Probably how she got

169 those grades. You need to get straight; that’s what you need to do, Abe. Straighten out.”

He winked at me, stood up and walked to the restroom. As he passed Karen, he let his hand brush her shoulder, moving around her chair. I imagined hitting, kicking, stomping, spitting on him.

Karen had blue eyes and black hair. I liked that. Linda had brown eyes—Linda had brown eyes and a better body. Linda was obviously smarter than Karen; I’d seen her in class. There was no knowing what Linda was like in class, but she absolutely wasn’t sleeping with her teachers. That was sure. Linda loved David.

Linda loved David.

I asked Karen how she was. She looked up at me.

“I’m good, thanks.”

“You waiting for somebody, I take it?”

“Yeah, a friend.”

“Cool.”

“Yeah.”

I nodded and Scott came out of the bathroom. He looked from Karen to me. I smiled without using teeth. She greeted him. The three of us listened to the others customers; Scott finally said we should be getting back to our table.

Holding his beer by the top of the neck, he said, “What was that?”

I watched him drink and said, “Thought I’d see.”

“She doesn’t put out.”

170 “Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“I need to get going soon.”

“Say hi to licks-it-Linda for me.”

I stood up and said, “Watch it, Scott.” He smiled and swished his beer in his mouth. I again thought of hitting him. I settled on, “I hope you drown in that,” and left without paying.

*

That Friday afternoon I planned on seeing Linda, but I figured I should get around to seeing Pastor Robert first. It had been over two weeks since he’d asked for me to come back and see him.

I took my time getting there, maybe to avoid it because of what I wouldn’t tell him, maybe because it was really starting to feel like summer. Either way, as I crossed the concrete and grass, black top and dirt, I felt like Sharon was my home; I felt a part of that dirt, hardened and dried into the town and that the longer I stayed the more a part of it I would become. Not that my roots would deepen; others roots would twist into me. Children would come and I could become their foundation, and my children would learn to walk on me and would learn to love or hate Sharon; either way I was aware of how connected I was to the place, and I hated the place for it, and I hated

Scott for it, and I hated myself, and I thought that if I didn’t get out soon I’d marry a girl like Karen, and if I didn’t get Linda pregnant all would go well—she was smart, careful, for sure, used a diaphragm, but still you had to worry. If nothing happened

171 with that, I’d leave Sharon and move to the heavenly elsewhere I’d heard of but never seen.

With all this in mind I walked down the black driveway of Pastor Robert’s house, and with these resolutions I knocked proudly on his door, knowing that I wouldn’t tell him about Linda, but that I’d tell him what I was going to do.

*

His hair had just been slicked back with water, his face was red from being rubbed. He said my name, once in surprise, once in greeting. The smell of grilled meat and onions was in the room, and as I stepped in it made me feel hot and sick; I’d eaten too much already.

“You’ve heard already?” he said, clearly alarmed.

“About what?” I looked into his apartment for some clue as to what he was talking about.

He looked relieved and annoyed, and he brushed my question away and swept me inside with the same motion. He offered me food, but I refused him. Instead I sat across his table, watching him scrape and fork bits of shredded meat into his mouth.

He ate quickly and unapologetically. Bits of pork fell off onto the bare table, and he scraped these off for his dog without looking.

Finally he sighed and said, “Abe, how have you been?”

“I’ve been well. Thank you. And how have you been? What’s going on?”

“Fine. Thank you.” He nodded but his eyes were glass. Stayed focused on me.

172 “Did you need anything in particular?” I said. “I heard you were asking for me.”

“I was indeed. A while ago. I’ve been wondering about you. You came by here, remember?”

“Now that you mention it, I do.”

“So what was going on?”

“The normal stuff. Wanted to—“

“Just cut it. There’s too much happening right now—and that doesn’t mean it’s not important to me, but I don’t have time for the whole routine of dragging it out of you. If you’re going to be straight with someone be straight with me. Linda Daniels.

Talk, go.”

I just looked at him. I’m not sure why I thought my father would keep it from him; maybe I thought it would save him embarrassment.

I said, “What about her?”

“You’ve been seeing her, yes? Your father asked me to talk to you. What are you thinking?”

“I guess we got to talking.” I wasn’t used to him talking to me like a parent.

“We hit it off.”

“That girl is—look, Abe, I shouldn’t have to explain this to you. Don’t do it; don’t see her. Don’t look at her.” He sliced the air with two fingers. “Only bad things.” Pastor Robert cracked his neck and took another bite. He said, “Well?”

“You don’t think people can change then?”

173 “Of course I think people can change. With God. If they’re repentant. Want to change.” He rubbed at some of the liquid left over from his meat and sucked it from his finger. “Sure people can change. The problem is neither she nor David—Mr.

Peterson—feel they’ve done anything wrong. That means that it’s inside Linda. It’s a part of her; she cannot see what happened and how—“ He tapped at the table with the next few syllables, “look Abe—evil—what happened was evil, and if they can’t see that, then that evil is a part of them. And terrible things happen when that’s the case.”

He waved my concerns away. “I know you don’t like that phrasing of it, but it’s a fact.”

I nodded slowly.

“And you’ve seen David, too. Yes?”

“Jesus, who are you Hoover?”

Robert raised his voice, “Cut the attitude!” The first time he’d ever done that to me.

I stood up and my chair fell over. “Don’t yell at me, Robert. Get it? Don’t do that. You’re not my father: you’re a drunk; that’s what Sharon thinks of you, and it’s the only reason I talk to you, because I figure you’re just as hypocritical as me. Don’t yell at me.”

Robert dug at his neck. “I think you need to leave,” he said, quieter now.

“No. I think you need to not creep around my life. You think you can follow me around, step in to correct me? I’m not learning to ride a bike, Robert; this is my life.”

174 “Abe. Sit down.”

“No, I’m not going to sit down. This is what I’m talking about. Six years you’ve been commanding me—“

“You know that’s not true.” He was speaking very quietly.

“I do?”

He stood up and raised his voice again, but this time I didn’t respond. “They found Saul, Abe, now stop it. His school found Saul, and you’re in here shouting because you have a crush?” He said again that they’d found him—

“Playing God all the time, just a cool neighborhood God, for all the kids to come around and trust and all the terrible people to come in here and tell you about their gossip and then you call them evil—“

He said it again, again.

I sat down. He continued standing.

“Alcohol. Too much alcohol. They were celebrating for graduation, and Saul had some ludicrous amount of drinks and passed out. And they found him. This afternoon.”

Knocking plates, glasses, pork, napkins, books, all onto the floor. He watches.

The chair strikes the cabinet. My steps against the floor just as loud as I leave the house to go find Linda.

*

175 Since everyone knew, apparently, there was no point in hiding it anymore. I went straight to the front of Linda’s house and rang the doorbell. It made a stupid, high, overly long chime, and Linda’s sister answered the door. We looked at each other. She was very thin, as I could tell Linda had never been. But she had hair like Linda’s before she got rid of it. Her eyes were the same, too, for sure.

She yelled in the loud and thin voice of a child that a boy was here. Linda’s father came around the corner and stopped for a moment. He had those same glasses still, but was clean-shaven. I imagine he recognized me from my uncle’s store, but maybe not.

“Are you okay, son?” he said, as he pushed his daughter gently back into the house. He pulled the door almost shut.

I said, “Linda here?” in something like a whisper.

“No, she’s not. I’m afraid.”

We looked at one another, and he smiled like he was trying to cheer me up.

This was an hour before we planned to meet. I told myself I didn’t know where she was, and I told myself I should go wait for her, because she might have gone early to read.

I did pushups in the grass at Marsh’s Field after I’d walked around the perimeter searching for her, for far too long to be reasonable. I did sit-ups then. And then pull-ups on the branches of the tree where we’d first made love. And then I lay in the grass a long time; though I knew I would itch from it later, I’d gotten used to that.

Eventually he’d burn this grass out, but not for a while. It still wasn’t quite tall

176 enough. He’d burnt it maybe once since Saul and I used to play here. Saul used to play here with me.

A half-hour past our meeting time, I gave up and decided I knew where Linda was. It took me another half-hour to get to David Peterson’s house and when I arrived all the lights were off. It was dark outside so I didn’t have to worry about being seen; I walked around the yard looking in windows. Today I get tired of holding rage; I calm,

I wait and even if it comes back later, I don’t burn constantly. Then I did. No amount of push-ups or sprinting would take away my need to know for sure. I needed to know for sure.

Eventually a light went on in one part of the house. I was lying on my side watching. I sat up. But it went out not long after. Cars still made sounds like they did when I was younger, the grass felt the same and I could’ve crawled across to the window and it would have felt natural still, but less like a soldier, more like a worm; and I was; to crawl was right for me. I consider sleeping out there, to watch and see if they’d come out in the morning, but eventually I went home, a little past 3 am. My parents were asleep. I didn’t get the chance to take my shoes off before I, too, was out.

*

My mother and father hadn’t heard yet, and I was in no state to tell them. Jealousy, rage, grief. I ate in silence, which they read as angst. I ate quickly and left. It was

Saturday, and I didn’t have work till later.

I traced the square blocks of sidewalk that made up Sharon. It was warm and sunny, as if someone was insisting on trying to cheer me up despite that if they just

177 left me alone, if they just let me hate the world for five minutes, five hours, five days,

I might come out of it, if I could just see that heaven was a place that took your best friend and then spit on you from a great height, that would be something more bearable than the dumb beaming of the sun and the deer running through yards and across roads with cars stopping for them, more bearable than seeing young couples walk by and believing that there was a perversion of this happening not too far, in the very house where I played, where I and my dead friend played, where the man therapeutically thrusting into the girl I love is doing it in the same room that he read to me and my dead best friend.

Stepping in front of a car, that might have done it. If the sun needed to shine, it could shine off my blood on the blacktop. No terrible conversations would have been needed then, no confrontation with Linda, no more in my mind seeing her limbs wrapped around David, no more of his face in her lap, weeping, no more of the talk my mother would give me, trying to comfort me, though it was her fault as much as anyone else’s: if she hadn’t turned against the Petersons, if she hadn’t been a part of the town that pushed them away—the wind picked up as I thought these things, at least there was that, at least there were branches scraping, little by little over a lot of years, the paint off houses—if the town hadn’t pushed them away, Saul wouldn’t have been so far away, so alone, allowed to do something so stupid, so void of meaning as accidently killing himself; it would have been different if he had just killed himself, I told myself as I thought of killing myself, it would have been different if his death hadn’t come from something like chasing pleasure, instinct, no better than the deer

178 struck on the suburban road. But no, it wasn’t my fault. It was David’s fault; it was

David’s fault for impregnating Linda, and it was David’s fault for sending her away so he had to send Saul away, and this was the second child David had killed, that was two children, both his own and both someone else’s, one mine and one Linda’s, but I couldn’t let him kill my mother’s child as well, three was too many. What can this man do but breed death?

I rounded the block and came home, though I expected to be out for hours. As

I entered the door I was crying, and there was no way I could have hidden it, so I waded into the living room where my mother sat reading and hung myself around her neck, knocking the glasses on the string around her neck down onto her breast, and I put my arms around her, coughing. She rubbed her hand against my back, drew her fingers through my hair, her nails pressing at the edge of pain though not quite there. I quivered, and she cooed. We took and gave animal comfort. She asked what. She asked what. And I told her and she hugged me and said she was so sorry, that she was so sorry.

We sat there for a long time, and I moved to her left and lay my head in her lap as she thought about what she ought to do. I was wet and hollow.

My mother left me on the couch and went to make calls. Through my own hiccups I could hear her talking quickly and lowly to people. The town of Sharon mobilizing. Eventually my father came home, and my mother told him in the kitchen as I stayed on the couch. He took it harder than my mother did, his knowing David.

*

179 People brought food and flowers. Things were left at David’s place like offerings, like he’d become Grief, and if we appeased him maybe Grief wouldn’t come see us.

Whatever David had done, this was something else; this was the lowest and the mothers found that when he loses a child, this devil too can have unimaginable pain, our very own dragon, too, can swoon with grief and weep.

David at first ignored them, but finally he opened the door as more and more gifts and people showed up, and he’d stand out there on the porch and thank them in a few words as they’d say, sorry for your loss, I can’t imagine—or sometimes even, I know how terrible something like this can be, it’s a goddamn shame, David, and we’re praying for you, David, you’re in our thoughts, David, and on and on like that, and it must have made him collapse with the weight of it or strengthen his foundation; it’s hard to say with a man like that, but I think I can say that he probably took the offers of prayer for what they were, genuine expressions of sympathy—but I don’t think this did anything for his faith.

What did David Peterson have left? Anger, maybe, or grief.

He had Linda, I felt sure of that. I was sure that in the night she’d sneak over, as she had for me not a week before, and she’d probably stay there and wake in the morning, kiss him, leave. And maybe they made love before she went and maybe they didn’t. Maybe they weren’t making love. Maybe they hadn’t even seen each other— this was paranoia, jealousy, I could have told myself that I had no evidence, but I didn’t; never; I was certain—it was bad enough, the idea of him holding her, it was no longer a turn on, it stopped my sleeping, and I oscillated between rage and pity and

180 such sympathy, sympathy I didn’t know someone as selfish as I could be capable of.

And other times I’d think of Saul. I’d see him soon.

I was lying in the dark when my father came into the bedroom, knowing I wasn’t asleep. He placed his hand just above my knee. I flinched a bit when he did that, and he loosened his grip. I could see he was disheartened.

I put my hand on his shoulder, twisted around to do it because I faced the wall, and I squeezed.

“I wish I knew what to tell you, Abe.” I looked at the wall. He went on. “But in times like this, I think the only thing you can do is just wait it out. You can huddle in the basement, or you can go on about your day, but it’s going to pass just when it feels like passing.”

“Feels more like a draught,” I said.

He sighed. “At the end of the day that’s all shit, Abe. Whatever spin we put on it, grief is grief. I understand that you’re going through a rough time.”

I nodded, which I assumed he saw, but maybe not.

He said, “Sharon is a strange place. I think people will talk about David differently now. Some people might be bitter still. But I think he’ll be remembered as the man whose son died. Maybe.” He crossed his leg at the ankle. “David used to have so much energy. He’d make these toasts while we were out, and you’d think, at the time, calm down, calm down. But I remember him toasting to strong sons and smart sons. Healthy sons and sons we could be proud of.” He patted my leg where he’d first

181 touched it, as if to tell me I was one of those sons. My mother moved in the kitchen.

“This’ll pass, Abe.”

*

The funeral was coming up on Monday. Despite David’s apparent allegiance to the

Catholic Church, he’d asked Pastor Robert to perform the service. He claimed that this was because Robert had been there in a very authentic and eager way, as he put it. And for his son, too. So Robert it was, and it’s hard to be offended by someone whose son has just died. The town moved with David.

In the mean time, I went on more walks. My parents assumed that I was just grieving, thinking about the walks I’d gone on with Saul. That was true, but I was also contriving to run into Linda. I hadn’t seen her since before Saul’s death. I walked through every one of the square units that made up Sharon, looping into some shape, which if you traced it might be evidence enough that I needed to be institutionalized— but if you’re looking for someone errant, you have few options, and one of them, certainly the most emotionally satisfying, is to be errant, too. I wasn’t ready to just show up at her house again either. So I walked out past Oak and Elm and Sycamore, on out to Marsh’s Field and to the creek Saul and I had given a new name for every time we’d been adventuring on it. Sometimes it was the Mississippi, and other times it was the ocean, and other times it was an underground river that cut all the way though

America. I walked in that creek barefoot, rolling up my jeans, holding my shoes in my left hand while I steadied myself or carried a book in my right.

182 These were the times, looking back, that I understood Linda best, and when I felt the most love for Saul, too, stopped worrying about abandonment. Only experienced. When Linda walked like this she was just doing what I did, what everyone did when we were children. She was restoring mystery; even if the mystery was where you were going, that was something. To feel cool water against your feet becoming too cold when the breeze came, just right when it left, and sticking it out for when that wind stopped—that was something I’d not so much forgotten as ignored while bagging strangers’ groceries and wasting hours in the basements of neighborhood girls for a peek at varyingly developed breasts. Sometimes walking along the creek I might even forget about Saul as I tried to track the same minnow as long as I could, a minute most times, or lay by the stream listening to the harmony of different banks on the creek. I’d be leaving Sharon soon, turning back time, undoing the western push, retreating back to the eastern cities which were only getting bigger and wilder in vain, because they’d never be as safe or as wild as a creek like this, fraction of Fifth Avenue though it was.

In this place I finally found Linda, and loved her again when I saw her, because I felt like I understood her. She was writing in a black-covered notebook, very quickly. I was far off. I watched her a while. She didn’t slow down; either she didn’t care about what she was writing or had total confidence in it. She went on and on.

Today she was wearing a sundress, and I may not have recognized her at first but for her hair, or lack of it, I’d become so accustomed to her overalls. From here I thought that maybe she was less attractive than I’d thought she was, and I let this thought stay

183 with me for a bit, turning it over in the light. She had a book to her right, almost in the water but not quite. That I thought she looked less beautiful than before didn’t make me want her any less, because I felt myself in such concert with her, the two of us wandering, the two of us reading, the two of us grown up in the same place. As I came to that conclusion I moved upstream, coming right up the middle, my shoes in my hand, stepping carefully through the water. She looked up at me and then looked back at what she was writing, as if I’d been a fish splashing.

I sat down beside her and lay back into the rocks, my head just reaching the grass again. A deer cracked sticks somewhere, and I listened again to the sound of the creek. I was so comfortable that I almost fell asleep. Then she closed the notebook. I opened my eyes and saw her getting up.

I said, drowsily, earnestly, “Where are you going?”

“Off.”

“Why?”

“Because I wish to.”

“That’s your wish, huh?”

“What makes you think you had the right to come to my house?”

“I like your dress, Linda.”

“I asked you a question, Abe.”

“Linda. What are you talking about?”

“I asked you a question. What makes you think you have the right to come to my house?”

184 I looked into the woods as if there were an answer out there. I settled on, “I guess I wasn’t in a great state of mind.”

“Right. So now that you’re in your right mind, please remember not to come to my house again.”

“Linda. Hey, listen to me, I’ve been looking for you.”

“Abe.”

I pulled at her arm and said, “Please sit down.”

She said, “No.”

I pulled at her shoulder, and she yanked her arm away, the strap of the dress slipping down the slope of her shoulder as she turned automatically to face me.

“Look,” I said, “cut it out.” I grabbed at her arm again and she stepped away. I said,

“Linda,” and moved toward her again. I thought we’d have made love by the creek, that I’d disappear for a while. This was unimaginable.

I moved up close to her as she glared, didn’t run, and I could feel her breath on my face. I moved to kiss her and, centering herself, she pushed me away, shoving my shoulders with her palms—and I did, I slapped her and when she didn’t fall I tackled her so she did fall and I said something cruel and she kept eye contact with me, which made me hate her more. I could feel her breath in my own nostrils. I had no name, nothing had names, only shape and body. She started to move again, so I took her shoulders, with my knee on her stomach, and I wrung her so that she fell to coughing and she couldn’t stop and any thoughts of sex left me as I watched her as she couldn’t stop—there was nothing outside of this anger when it was happening, like making

185 love, and like making love regret seeped in once the world was allowed to exist again, spread slow and steady through me as I left her there on the ground, first walking away, and my name came back and her name back, then running, as fast as I could, not to get anywhere but maybe in the hope that I might disintegrate, a piece here, a spec there, if I worked this body, this terrible body with a will of its own, hard enough.

*

I didn’t talk to my parents. They assumed I was grieving. I was grieving. I didn’t eat. I didn’t sleep.

Thoughts of killing myself didn’t stop. Didn’t stop for years, if I’m going to be honest. But my death then would have been thrusting myself into a place and time I didn’t belong, which was the opposite of what I wanted to do. The thing now was to disappear. Other thoughts of suicide, letting the blood out of me like pressure and steam—that’d been appealing since I’d been old enough to have those urges. But this was different. It was water I wanted; I wanted to be consumed, subsumed, silenced.

Cool water around me and inside of me. It would have been selfish to kill myself, more selfish than I’d already been, as if that were possible, so I continued eating and I continued breathing, despite the sobs, even giving my mother and father the smiles they needed to give me space, though smiling like that felt as though I were trying to pull my own jaws apart, to the point where they’d snap.

*

186 But where was David? Were they ever even together? Did he haunt his house, did his house haunt him? With the gasping laughter of Saul echoing in the crack of the door, the door to Saul’s old bedroom, where David buried his face in the sheets he hadn’t changed for six years? Did he stay in the darkness of his son’s bed and hate his son for acting so stupid, did he hate himself, blame his lust, blame the judgment of the town, blame Linda?

Probably not Linda. Linda probably rose gently with him, with the sun, up slowly and by the time she was gone she’d warmed his world, made it easier to go on living—but with the sun’s withdrawnness, too, her age making her inaccessible, and their obligations; a comfort to each other in body and in word and with the loving glance over books as they sat reading before David’s fireplace—Linda on a ‘walk,’ the parents asking no questions, her parents understanding that these were absolving circumstances, circumstances which the town saw the same way: maybe a little sin for a little while is what one needs, maybe if we close our eyes it’ll pass, like the night passes in sleep, and Linda will withdraw from David’s house and draw the night away with her—the two of them reading together until bed, until they sleep in David’s giant bed, the body unfamiliar, the body that once was his own, her own, but now is the body of years, the body with years, and now David’s was the body of grief, the body of years.

He’d done this before for his wife, for his father, it seemed like it ought to be different for a child but the forms and the signatures on the checks were all the same, the dirt and the grave, solely the first name changing. Peterson stayed. Saul had never

187 shared David’s baroque taste, so much of the funeral was reserved, the coffin unassuming but beautiful. I imagine David on the phone, his hand clamped around his neck and taking peeks at Linda while he spoke to whomever, to make sure that he wasn’t totally alone in the world, that the only people he had left were not the people with whom he exchanged money for services, for goods, for light and heat and things to keep him alive and sated, those services and those goods now for the dead, for his dead, his son.

Of course they didn’t ride to the funeral together, didn’t speak to one another at the funeral, maybe didn’t look at one another either—I focused on my black, shined shoes or on the grave, so I wouldn’t know either way—for the entire funeral. She wore black, like everyone else. A dress. Not the overalls, those stupid overalls. It even had lace. It’s possible that her mother had to take her out to buy the dress, but shopping for a funeral seems one of the vainest activities imaginable, so maybe she’d already had it.

We had to buy the shoes. The grass leaned against them. My mother next to me, my father next to her.

In our huddle there were most of the people we knew. A few of the most aggressive, the most religious, the ones who felt like they were owed the good behavior of others because of their own hardships, they didn’t attend the funeral. Most of our hearts were not so hard. Most of us came and watched them shovel dirt onto the grave, watched David stare at the grave, not at Pastor Robert, as he spoke, maybe even then thinking of Nietzsche, but words like that maybe had no place at the death of your son; you leave all the abstraction with your bright colored clothes, at home, and tell

188 yourself that, yes, this very body will rise in not so long—and then, no, this very body will not be above ground, a real loss has happened, not the decline in the moral values of a country or a town or of a young man in the Midwest—but the loss like leaving your wallet on the blue line: as it goes rushing out away from you, you know that wherever it goes amid all the noise and rest and movement and silence: it is not coming back here.

*

The letter came a week after we buried Saul.

Dear Abe,

I imagine you understand why it’s taken some time for me to write this, and why this has been the only contact we’ve had. It has been a hectic time, and it’s been hard to tell what’s right. So it’s taken me time to get to this letter. Understand that the

“Dear” that opens it is pure formality.

Firstly, what you’ve done is unforgivable. I hope you understand that. What you have done is unforgivable. I’m not ashamed to say that I hope you keep the knowledge of what you’ve done, what you tried to do, with you for the rest of your life.

Not all of our time together, Abe, has been bad. As I told you, and I’m not sure if you believed me, you were the first person I’d been with since David. In a way, I’m glad for that. But that’s not to say that it makes up for what happened. It doesn’t. It does not. But it is why I’m writing to you at all. I won’t say goodbye in person; this is my goodbye. But, as I’ve told you, you were one of the only people who spoke to me,

189 so I want you to understand what that kindness has meant—and more so what your cruelty has meant because of it.

I’m leaving for New York as soon as possible. Nothing would make me happier than being in a new place with people who don’t know about me or any of this. I’d like to be happy for a while. I need to be happy for a while.

I wish I could tell you to look after David, but that wouldn’t do anyone any good. I would tell you not to come see me, but I’m gone.

Goodbye, Abe.

Linda Daniels

190

III

191 I graduated high school not long after that, and I walked in the ceremony, and I didn’t have much of a plan. I’d never applied to college, and everyone was so wrapped up in rage or shame or sadness that no one seemed to notice. So I graduated. If I couldn’t kill myself, there was nothing to do but nothing.

I found myself constantly wondering who knew about what I’d done, what I’d almost done. Did Pastor Robert? Or did he just know we’d spent time together. Did

Miss Diane? Was it bad enough for someone to know only that Linda and I had been together?

I stayed in Sharon all through that summer, though I didn’t think I could. I went on long walks, all through Marsh’s Field and through the other parts of town, through the streets of Sharon to the streams far off from where anyone but children like Saul and I ever went, and I came to know the town better than I’d ever known it before. It was never a big town, and it never would be, but I became sort of proud about that, that I’d mastered it. But I never went back to the spot where it happened.

Eventually my parents started asking me what I’d like to do with myself, with my life. They began to discuss seriously, without me, the possibility of my taking over the drug store. On my walks I considered this. But the thought of being in the one place everyone came every week and wondering everyday about rumor and about resentment and whether their lack of response signified anything—that seemed too much punishment even for me, I thought. Though maybe that’s the wrong word. As punishment, and again maybe that’s not the right word, I read Milton.

192 I started to talk about New York. It came about when my parents were laying pressure on me about what I’d do with myself, more so than usual, and I mentioned it just for something to say. And after that they mentioned it again, calmly just asking, and it occurred to me that maybe it wasn’t a bad idea. So slowly it became decided that that’s what I’d do, so I stopped spending so much money; I started saving slowly and my parents seemed surprisingly alright with it, which worried me even more that maybe they couldn’t bear the sight of me.

I did my best to keep out of my mind that maybe it’d come up to begin with because Linda had mentioned going there. I just didn’t think about it, and when I did

I’d bite down hard on my lip and count or just think about whatever I could, whether

I’d forgotten to do inventory, anything. And this worked somewhat. I had momentum, and I kept it.

Word got around slowly, as it did in Sharon, and when it established itself as fact there was nothing I could do to back out: I was going to New York. Everyone I dealt with at the counter asked about it or gave their opinion on it.

I don’t know what you need to go to New York for. We’ve got everything here.

I heard you’re heading to the big city, how exciting!

You know I’ve been out East before. It’s cold. Better bring a jacket. But it’s hot, too. Better prepare for that, Abe.

I’d try to take all this in stride and be professional, but it drove me almost to violence hearing all these people give their opinions to me when they knew nothing

193 about what had happened in their own town; they knew nothing about Linda, me,

David, nothing about anything except what they’d decided was fact. I suppose it was a sign of divine mercy that the facts about me did not represent me.

Even though we hadn’t talked in six years, I still felt Saul’s absence. That was a door forever closed; maybe one day he would have reached out, but no more.

I’d see girls sometimes still. We’d drive and I’d talk and talk and talk. I only necked with one of them really and didn’t want to go beyond that. I’d decided that until I got out I would simply be an insane person, who passed off as an eighteen year old fed up with his hometown. Who cried in the stockroom sometimes and other times pleasured himself in the staff bathroom. Who handed your groceries to you with a smile and might even shake your hand if he knew you well. Who sometimes stared at the knife in the back, sitting on the floor staring at it between his legs with the door locked. Who’d recently buzzed his head.

*

David stood smoking a pipe, his back against the building he’d built, the scent of the smoke drawn in the wind as much as the smoke itself. His hat came off as he saw me come out of the door of the drug store, and I worried that he might kill me then. But he only tapped a few times at the head of the pipe, till it emptied, placed it in his pocket and started walking alongside me, neither of us speaking.

“Are you nervous about leaving, Abe?” he said.

“A little, maybe.”

194 “That’s natural. I’m leaving soon, as well, I think. Maybe Italy,” he said. “I can’t wait to get to Europe. I love these buildings here—call it a father’s pride—but a cathedral, have you ever seen a cathedral? Anything like it even? It’s something, Abe.

Art. Those priests live and work in works of art. Imagine.”

“That sounds great, Mr. Peterson,” I said, swallowing hard.

“This town doesn’t need us, I don’t think, Abe.”

People strolled past us, men by themselves, no friends of mine luckily, a mother and her kids, Ms. Diane on her way to be disappointed by a closed drug store.

Kids who darted across the streets. The trees were bigger then than when I was twelve.

And this was summer, so all the leaves were borne up to be rocked by the wind, giving voice to one big exhale. I hadn’t climbed a tree in years. Every now and then I’d see a kid swinging from one.

“I’d like to get away from this town awhile,” he said.

“Me too, sir.”

“My father always told me it was ours. But I don’t feel any ownership. He was living in a different country, it feels like,” he said. “Whom do I have left to care of but you, Abe?”

A red car passed. I didn’t say anything to him. Another car, blue, passed. Too dark now for the clouds to have true color. They were just the color of things aged.

“I’m working late enough to miss daylight even in summer,” I said. “Makes me feel older.”

“Thank God you’re not, Abe. You’re lucky you weren’t older.”

195 My mother wrote me when he died. She said it without any sentiment or embellishment, almost a postscript. He didn’t even make it till my first trip back to visit my parents. I didn’t make it back for the funeral. Dead a day or two before anyone found him. His employees. He hadn’t shown up to work. Died in bed. I didn’t have any grief left for David Peterson. It sounds like no one did.

“David, I’m gonna ask you something.”

He didn’t respond, only fussed with the pipe in his pocket.

I said, “Tell me that you loved her.”

He breathed sharply through his nose.

“Abe,” David said. “Abe, my son is dead.”

“I know, Mr. Peterson—“

“No, I don’t think that you do know. Maybe you will know someday, but you don’t know.” He whispered loudly. An older man passed us and we nodded and didn’t speak for a moment. The man nodded back to us. “Six years ago. Six. I told you I’ll support you, Abe, isn’t that enough? Can you be grateful for that?”

I considered this. I said, “I loved her.”

“Look at me, Abe.” I didn’t, but he went on with it anyway. “If you ever speak to Linda Daniels again—if you had been anyone else—you don’t want to know what

I’ll do. Promise me.”

I didn’t promise him.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t help your son,” I said.

196 We stopped, and he looked at me. He took off his hat again, held it by the brim at his side. “You have to wonder,” he said, “if Marianne had been alive.”

“Marianne,” I said, trying it out.

“Someday you might forget all this enough to remember it one day. You think you know what I mean, but you don’t, Abe. There are years of my life that come back at times. From the smell in our attic. You know I still have Marianne’s wedding dress?

I found it last week. That house is webbed so thickly.”

I never met Linda in New York, but I saw girls with short hair on the subway and on the streets of the city near where Pastor Robert set me up with an apartment, an old connection of his out there. Whenever they turned they were someone else. I even went out with a few of them, but I never had that treadmill feeling, working to stay abreast with her, with any of them. It wasn’t one of them that I married. It was a blonde girl, six years after I moved to the city, after a tour in Vietnam, so my second time moving there, really. She may have been pregnant before or after I proposed, we couldn’t be sure. I suggested that we name our first child David, on a whim, on our second bottle of wine, and I have never been treated as more of freak in my life than the way my wife treated me at that moment. Which was understandable when I thought back on it. Though she only knows about what David did. A bloodline cut is a terrible thing. Like a species going extinct.

David and I passed the turn for my street and walked toward his place.

“It’s like they’re all still there, the three of them. I don’t feel alone there.

Worse than that. I feel like I’m never by myself. So off to Italy, to Rome, to Florence.

197 Even at the grocery store people ask me how I’m doing, nod to me. You’d think I’d be happy about it.”

“Will you come back?” We stood just off his lawn. All the blinds were drawn.

The yard seemed big as it did when Saul and I played on it, six years, seven, ten years earlier. We would have looked small next to that house and that yard, David and I, but you couldn’t have seen us. We weren’t standing anywhere the street lamp next to his black metal mailbox, cast iron and ornate, which he’d once yelled at Saul and I for climbing on, pretending it was a ship’s mast. Or something.

“I don’t plan on anything past Italy,” he said. We shook hands.

Not long after, months, Kennedy died. Then David a bit after. He’d wanted to finish out the work year, and then shift the business out of his control. I imagine his house filled with maps and books, preparing for his ascension, the names of the hotels and the drinks, probably even trying to learn Italian. I would say for nothing, but that wouldn’t be true. Life can’t be that bad if you have some direction. A trip can be that.

Or a kid, as it was for me.

But in that moment, as he opened his front door and stepped inside, he really believed he’d make it out of there.

*

I heard Linda’s voice once more. After her memoir came out. She was on the radio, public radio, while I was taking a bath.

“Well, it did take me a long time to feel comfortable writing about this. And it was important for me to have a lot distance on it. I didn’t want passion seeping into it,

198 tainting it, you understand, I’m sure, as a journalist.” She spoke like she really wanted you to understand, and got away with the way she spoke because of it. “You want to hold the thing up to the light and examine it, not bash it, break the bulb, and burn the place down.”

“And that was the danger, that you’d burn the place down?”

“I had a lot of feelings about it. How could I not? And I was young for a long time. I needed time to get away from that feeling that back then I was in control of my actions. And I knew that but I also knew that if I wrote about it, I still wouldn’t have the distance to pull it off. But I’m misleading you. I’ve been trying to write it since it happened, or at least since I was eighteen. It wouldn’t come out right, so I left it alone for a while.”

“And that worked out for you, didn’t it? I mean, this book would have meant something different if it had come out in the 60s, or even the 70s. One review says, written right on the back here, ‘the perfect book for the moment.’”

“With where feminism is now, I think this book resonates with a lot of the concerns of girls, young women, women, old women. But also men, I hope. When you read about a girl brushed away like this—I mean, I hope—and excuse me if I sound arrogant here—but I hope the prose alone holds up enough to say to men that women can handle things on their own. But the content, I hope, shows the way women have been handled.”

“That’s all we have time for, but thank you, Linda Daniels, for being with us.

The book is, Jezebel: A Memoir. And remember, as we discussed here, this is an ironic

199 title, folks. It’ll make you change the way you think about these things; I know it did for me. Thanks again, Linda.”

“And thank you.”

I weighed whether to buy the book for a few weeks. On the way to work, in the bath, wherever and whenever I thought about it, and I finally caved and bought the thing in hardcover, black with red writing: they played up the marketing in a way I don’t think Linda would have liked, let alone the title.

And if I’m honest, I searched for myself so aggressively that all else was lost on me. And when I finally got there, it hit me that I should start again. This was three- fourths through the book. It mentioned that she, for a time, had a friend of David’s son for a lover. She didn’t meditate on why this might have been the case, explain who he was: it was a fact, trivia.

And it went on about him after that, David. Nothing else was said about me, a few sentences. Would you believe that I’d planned to read the thing and understand myself through the lens of someone else, smarter than I, older than I, someone who knew me, to have myself revealed, to find the truth between our accounts, and that to have read a line like that and know that I would never again be mentioned, that that made me decide not to write the letter I’d been drafting in my head since before I even started her book, that it made me throw the book against the wall like I’d done to the book she’d recommended to me all that time ago, never to pick it up again? That I went into the nursery and I played with my daughter, the game we always played, where I picked her up and threw her up into the air and caught her, and even laughed

200 at the look in her eye? Would you believe that I put her book on the bottom of my bookshelf, that I never opened it again?

201