Oh William!, page 7
And he said, “I don’t know what you do, either. Maybe you can just enjoy the scenery?”
He said that to me, that day. My father.
But I could not enjoy the scenery. I was too overwhelmed by watching the girls in the pool; they were so tiny and yet loved to splash in it, and Catherine had bought them blow-up rings that went around them and helped keep them afloat. Once in a while Catherine would get into the pool with the girls, and she would point to me where I stood nearby and say to the girls, “Swim to Mommy, swim to Mommy!” And she would laugh and clap her hands. And then she would get out of the pool and go back to the beach and read. If William was near the pool or, better yet, in the pool, I felt better, I felt safer from all the people who were sitting around the edge, wrists draping over their lounge chairs, eyes closed to the sun. But William would never stay in the pool very long, and I was left there alone with the girls—and I would be frightened.
On the trips back home the girls would be cranky, and (in my memory) their father would be silent as we waited at the airport. Once on the plane I would sit between the girls and try to keep them entertained, although I often felt angry. Because if one of them cried, other passengers looked over with scowls, and William and his mother would be seated somewhere else on the plane.
Since that time I have traveled the world with my work—my books come out and foreign publishers invite me and there are festivals in all parts of the world—and since that time I have traveled to so many places, and I have traveled first-class, where they give you the little kit of toothpaste and a toothbrush and a mask to put over your eyes—I have done all that so many times now.
What a strange thing life is.
I met Becka and Chrissy at Bloomingdale’s on Saturday; this is something we have done with frequency over the years. We go to the place on the seventh floor where they serve frozen yogurt and then we walk through the store in a desultory fashion. I have written before about doing that with my girls.
But I mention it now because when they showed up Becka said, “Mom! What kind of crap is Dad going through? His wife leaves him and he just found out that he has some half-sister? Mom!” She stared at me with her brown eyes.
“I know,” I said.
Chrissy stood there, looking serious. She said, “It’s kind of awful, Mom.”
“Yes, I should say so,” I said. And both girls said they were glad I was going with their father to Maine.
I took a close look at Chrissy but she did not seem pregnant to me, and she said nothing about it, until—as we were walking through the shoe section after our frozen yogurt—she said, “I’m going to a specialist, Mom. I’m not getting any younger.”
“Okay, good for you,” I said, and she slipped her arm through mine.
I know there are cultures in our society where a mother would be very pushy and say, Who is the specialist? Can I go with you? What is going on exactly? But that is not my culture; I come from a Puritan background, both my parents came from Puritan stock—which they were proud of—and we did not talk like that to one another. There was not much talk in my childhood house at all.
But when we parted I kissed the girls as I always do, and as is always true there is pain at my leaving them. A little bit, this time, my heart ached more.
“Good luck! Good luck!” they called out from across the street as they started to go down into the subway. “Stay in touch and let us know! Bye, Mom! Bye, Mom!”
Because I recently mentioned my father I would like to say something more about the man. He also had terrible post-traumatic stress. He had been in World War II, in Germany, and he had been very, very damaged by it. He never spoke of the war; my mother must have told us that he fought in it, because I was aware of that fact growing up. The way in which his post-traumatic stress (although I did not know that term at the time) manifested itself was an anxiety so great that it seemed to produce sexual urges in him almost constantly. Often he walked around the house—
I am not going to say anything more about this.
But I loved him, my father.
I did.
I think I have mentioned the business about my father because as I was packing for Maine, I thought of William’s father. He had been fighting on the side of the Nazis, as I have said. (And my father had been fighting against them.) There were letters between William’s father and Catherine, and she told us that he said, when he got back to Germany, that he “did not like the things the country had done.” But none of those letters are in existence—I mean that when Catherine died, William and I never found those letters—and so I guess we do not know what William’s father thought about the war, except for one conversation William remembered having with him when William was about twelve, and his father had said that about Germany—that he did not like what they had done. I thought about this as I packed a summer blouse; why had his father come over to America? Did the man just want to be with Catherine? Or did he want to be American? He had been picked up in a ditch in France by American GIs, and he had thought that they would shoot him, but they did not. And he said—according to William and Catherine—that he wished he could find those men and thank them. He probably did want to be with Catherine, and also to be an American. Probably both. He went to MIT and, as I have said, became a civil engineer.
But I was thinking about William’s night terrors: how he said that he pictured the gas chambers and crematoriums.
And I thought how when William came into money from his grandfather who had profited from the war, and Catherine was still alive at that time, she had said very little about it. But she did say to me, lying on the tangerine couch, not long after this had happened, “It’s dirty money. He should give it all away.”
But William did not give it all away; he became very rich. Although, as I have said, he does give money away. When I had asked William about the money—and what he would do with it—he was always closed off. “I’m keeping it,” he said. And he did. I have never understood this, but now I wonder if perhaps he thought something was owed to him. Was this because his father had died when William was so young? I know that people, when they have had a loss, sometimes unconsciously believe that they should then take something in return. But it was many years later that William got this money, although that sense of loss I think is always there. But I do think now there was—and still is—some sense William had that he was owed something.
Catherine and her husband never went together to Germany. And I thought about how neither of them—except when Wilhelm went back to Germany after the war—ever returned to the scenes of their childhood again. They had had that in common.
But it came to me, as I put a nightgown into my suitcase for our trip to Maine, it came to me suddenly that this is what William’s life rumbled over, like a train on loose tracks: the images from Dachau that would not leave his brain after he had gone there with me so many years ago. He had been petrified by what he saw there in Germany. He must have been deeply haunted by his father’s role in it. Unspeakably frightened. It had unmoored him.
This is what I thought.
Perhaps he felt—if he allowed himself to think about it—that this experience had changed him in some way more than any other, perhaps even more than his mother’s death?
And yet it was after his mother’s death—I think this, anyway—that he had started with the women, and with Joanne.
I am only saying: I wondered who William was. I have wondered this before. Many times I have wondered this.
I should mention:
I never told the girls about their father’s affairs. I thought: They will never hear about this from me. And so I never told them, even after I had left William, I still did not tell them about their father’s affairs.
And then one day—it was not even that long ago, maybe six or seven years now—we had gone to Bloomingdale’s together, the girls and I, and afterward we went for a glass of wine at a restaurant nearby. When we sat down they glanced at each other and then Chrissy said, “Mom, did Dad have an affair when you guys were married?”
For many moments I said nothing, I just watched them watching me with their clear eyes. Then I said, “Are you ready for this conversation?” And they both said yes.
So I said, “Yes, he did.”
And Becka said, “With Joanne?”
And I said, “Yes.”
And then I said—I wanted to be fair—I said that I had been having an affair when I left their father. I looked from one girl to the other and I said that at that time I had fallen in love with a writer from California and I was having an affair with him. I told them this writer had been married, and then I said, “And he had kids. So I did that. You should know.”
They seemed more interested than surprised by this—which surprised me—and Chrissy said, “What happened?” And I said, “Well, his marriage eventually ended, but—Well, I mean, I knew that I wouldn’t end up with him, and I didn’t. But I knew I couldn’t stay with your father after that.” What most surprised me about their response was how little they seemed to want to know about this. Chrissy wanted to know more about Joanne. “How long?” she asked, and I said that I did not know.
Becka said, “I used to like her.” And Chrissy turned to her and said, “You loved her,” almost angrily, and I said, “Well, why wouldn’t you, I mean you didn’t know.”
They sat there quietly and then Becka shook her head and said, “I don’t understand anything in this life.”
I said, “I don’t either.”
When we parted, the girls kissed me and hugged me and told me they loved me. I was terribly shaken by our conversation, and they did not especially seem to be. This is what it seemed like to me.
But who ever really knows the experience of another?
When William met me at LaGuardia Airport I saw him from afar and I saw that his khakis were too short. A little bit this broke my heart. He wore loafers, and his socks were blue, not a dark blue and not a light blue, and they showed a few inches until his khakis covered them. Oh William, I thought. Oh William!
He looked exhausted; there were darkish circles around his eyes. He said “Hi Button” and sat down next to me. He had with him a small suitcase with wheels, it was dark brown, two-toned. I understood that it was expensive. He looked at my wheelie suitcase, which was a blazing violet color, and he said, “Really?”
“Oh stop,” I said. “It never gets lost.”
“I should think it wouldn’t.”
Then he crossed his arms and looked around and said, “You ever been to Maine, Lucy?” A baby was crawling across the carpeted floor with its mother behind it; she was wearing a Snugli on her front and she smiled at us, and I saw William smile back at her.
“Once,” I said, and he said, “Yeah?”
“I was invited to that college in Shirley Falls to give a reading. I thought I told you about that.”
“Tell me again,” he said. His eyes were moving around the place.
“I don’t know which book it was, my third? Anyway, the chairman of the English Department invited me up—he was a short-story writer—and I spent the whole afternoon with him, listening about his mother, who was getting old, and all the trouble he was having about that— And as we walked around the campus, I kind of noticed that there were no ads for me that night at all that I could see. So he took me to dinner and then we went to this room with about a hundred chairs set up. And not one person showed up.”
William looked at me now. “Seriously?”
“Yeah, absolutely seriously. Only time that ever happened. So we waited about half an hour, then I went off to my room and he emailed me and said he was so sorry, he had no idea why that had happened. And it didn’t even occur to me until later that at least his students should have shown up. He must not even have told them, I think. I emailed him back not to worry about it.”
“Jesus,” William said, “what was his problem?”
“I don’t know.”
“I do.” William looked at me with almost anger in his face. “He was jealous of you, Lucy.”
“Really?” I said. “I don’t know about that.”
William sighed and then shook his head slowly, looking again at the baby crawling across the floor. “No, you wouldn’t know, Lucy,” he said. He tugged on his mustache. “Did they pay you?”
“Oh, sure. I mean I can’t remember. You know, something small, I’m sure.”
“Jesus, Lucy,” William said.
We arrived in Bangor about fifteen minutes before ten o’clock at night; there had been only a handful of people on the small plane. Walking through the Bangor airport—it was not well lit, and it was kind of eerie—I noticed many signs welcoming veterans home, and William said he had researched this, it had been an old Air Force base, and the runway was very long. It was the place that many people in the armed services overseas first stopped when they came back from wherever they had been. Or left from: It was their final place to leave from in the United States. He said that during the Iraq War this had been the place that so many had come into on their way home, and that the people of Maine had made a point of greeting them. There was a hallway that we did not walk down, but it said in large letters GREETERS HALL. It was almost like a museum in some way. And it made me think of my father. My father had come back from Germany on a ship to New York, and he had taken the train all the way back to Illinois. But was it possible that William’s father had gotten to Maine this way; had he been flown in here as a POW?
“No,” William said, “he took a train from Boston, after a boat from Europe, I’ve been reading about this stuff.”
There was a strange sense of something surreal.
And then I saw a man who (I think) was going to spend the night at the airport; he was not old or young, and he had with him many large white plastic bags, not suitcases, and he was alone in a section of the airport where the lights were turned down very low. I thought he saw me looking at him; he stopped eating from a big bag of potato chips he had on his lap.
Our hotel was connected to the airport: You walked through a walkway, and the lobby of the hotel—which did not seem like a lobby although there were two chairs—was right there. William checked us in—separate rooms—and I turned and looked at a bar immediately behind us. Men and a few women were seated on tall wooden chairs, all watching the television that hung above them. I stepped away from William and I asked the woman behind the bar if I could please have a glass of chardonnay. “Bar’s closed,” she said without looking up. “Closes at ten.” She was holding glasses under a stream of water from a sink.
“Please?” I asked. The clock on the wall indicated that it was not even five past ten, and the woman didn’t say anything more, but she was unpleasant in her manner as she poured my wine.
With my glass of wine in hand, I wheeled my violet suitcase behind William—we were in rooms next to each other—and when I went into my room, it was very cold: The thermostat was set at 60 degrees. All my life I have hated being cold. I turned the air conditioner off, but I knew that the room would stay too cold for me. In the bathroom was a small (tiny) bottle of mouthwash and also, wrapped in cellophane, a man’s plastic comb. I kept staring at it: This was exactly the kind of comb my father had had. I had not seen such a comb for years, so small and plastic you could bend it in half and make it snap if you chose to. I knocked on William’s door and he let me in and he said, “Jesus.” His room was cold as well. He had the television on; he muted it as I came in. I sat on the edge of the bed and saw an advertisement for The History of Button Collecting—there were three different ceramic bowls shown, filled to the top with a variety of buttons, placed on a woven piece of material on a wooden table—and then it was followed by an advertisement for Alzheimer’s Aid.
“Tell me the plans for tomorrow,” I said.
We would have breakfast on the way and then we would go to Houlton and drive past the house of Lois Bubar. Just to see. She lived at 14 Pleasant Street. Then we might drive to Fort Fairfield, because Lois had been crowned Miss Potato Blossom Queen there in 1961, and William had a photo of her he had found online as she was driven through the streets of Fort Fairfield. I stared at the photo on his iPad, but it was an old photo and I could not see if the woman (she was so young) looked like Catherine or not. But she had been pretty, I could see that. She was on a float, and the float had a great deal of crêpe paper on it, and the streets were packed with people and cars and some buses.
“Then, if we have time, I’d like to go to Presque Isle, because that’s where Lois Bubar’s husband came from, so we could just take a quick look around.”
“Okay,” I said. “But why?”
“Just to see it all,” William said.
“Okay,” I said.
“So we’ll take the turnpike to Houlton in the morning and we’ll just see what we see,” William said. He looked old to me. He was slumped as he stood by the bed, and his eyes were not bright.
“’Night, Lucy,” he said when I got up to leave.
I turned and I said, “How are your night terrors these days, William?”
William opened his hand and said, “They’re gone.” Then he added, “My life got worse, so they stopped.”
“I get it,” I said. “Good night.”
I called the front desk and asked them for an extra blanket and they brought it to me forty-five minutes later.
That night I dreamed of Park Avenue Robbie. In the dream he was agitated, and I woke up and went into the bathroom and then got back into bed and I thought about him.
After I left William, now so many years ago, I had a sort-of affair (I am not speaking of the writer I mentioned earlier; this sort-of affair was later) with a man I referred to—with my friends—as Park Avenue Robbie. I had met him at a class at the New School where I was studying World War II to try to understand my father better, to see what I could find out about the Battle of the Bulge and also the Hürtgen Forest, because my father had been at both places during the war, and he had remained a terribly distressed man, as I have said. My father had died the year before I took this class.
