A Third (and for the moment, final) Installment of the Fauxtobiography

 PRIDE OF FOUR WINDS

Reality takes many forms, few of them expected. Speak to me of ‘reality’ and I see a red and white cow bearing the grandiose name, “Pride of Four Winds” (or ‘Pridey’ for short.[1]) In fairness, she was a beautiful animal, with perfect dairy cow conformation. She gave gallons of milk every day--but she was far from contented.

There has been little research on bi-polarity in cows, so it is difficult to say whether her unhappiness was genetic—or whether it might be traced to social causes—the ever recurrent problem of “nature versus nurture.” Certainly there was a disquieting genetic component—she was the product of a misalliance between a Guernsey cow and an Ayrshire bull.

She had the Ayrshire build and temperament, stronger, ruder and more active than the Channel Island breeds,[2] a classic demonstration of ‘hybrid vigor’, superior in appearance and performance to either of her parents. In our present world she would be recognized and welcomed as a precursor of the future American cow, but post-war Litchfield County looked askance at half-breeds. Neither the Guernsey nor the Ayrshire registries would have anything to do with her. She was a cow without a country, admired by objective judges of cow flesh, but with no place in the increasingly purebred herds of the neighborhood.

As a calf she had been a 4-H project. A 12 year old neighbor bought her for five dollars—intending to raise her for beef, but like lots of 4-H projects she became a pet. When she was old enough for slaughter, he found he couldn’t do it, so she was sold to the new guy (who had studied dairy farming under the G.I. Bill)[3] a beginning farmer, not so choosy about a cow’s lineage.

A local joke referred to his herd as a ‘gang’ (reserving the word ‘herd’ for those bovine collectivities whose uniform beauty was the result of seven or eight carefully planned generations.) The new people owned a bunch of unregistered Guernseys, a few grade Jerseys, a possible Brown Swiss, and ‘Pridey.’

They hired me to help with the haying, and to milk the cows after school. The haying was pleasant, and if the milking was a little boring, I could, at least, see that for the farmer it offered measurable and immediate rewards (each cow’s production—was weighed on a scale and marked on a daily chart.)

I thought seriously of becoming a farmer.

My mother, who also had ‘notions’ about education,[4] agreed. She arranged for me to take Agriculture at the Regional High School—a joint effort of the six most Northwesterly towns in Connecticut. But once again, I was too late. The school had been established in the 1930's to provide practical ‘vocational’ education for the children of local farmers, gypsum miners and factory workers. It was hastening to catch up with post-war Litchfield County, increasingly populated by exurban retirees, former New Yorkers, dermatologists, artists, and writers, all of whom wanted the high school to offer a stronger college prep curriculum.

Who needed Vo-Ag? Why was ‘Industrial Arts’ still required? Post war America needed people who could puzzle their way through a quadratic equation, new and better children, able to read “Ethan Frome” and write a well punctuated book report. However, the Vo-Ag and Industrial Arts programs lingered on—as government programs do, but they had become a holding pen for losers, destined to quit school at sixteen. Indeed, this may have been the reason they lasted so long. Boring and pointless, they encouraged early school leaving, thereby saving the district hundreds of thousand of dollars every year. And yet, I was romantic enough about my agriculture heritage, and my ancestral connection to the land, that I might still have persisted—except for Pridey.

By the time I went to work for Mr. Duncan, the ignominy of Pridey’s associations (as part of a cow gang, run by an ex-hobo) combined with her prickly sense of her own worth, had turned her into a slut. Like many a bastard child, if she was not to be valued for her inherited virtues, she was determined to be noticed for her behavior. More robust than her peers, she pushed them around unmercifully. In the barn she took up twice her allotted space, never sitting placidly with tail and legs tucked under. Instead, she slept with her legs splayed into her neighbor’s space, her tail soaking up manure from the drop.

I hesitate to assign human traits to animals, but malice is malice wherever you find it. 

In the three years I worked there, I must have milked her about 600 times. I tried to cozen her, giving her extra grain and the choicest alfalfa. I used fresh, warm water to wash her teats—attentions that (at 14) I supposed any female would appreciate. But she was not appeased. For her, any encounter between man and cow was exploitation, my first contact with militant feminism. To take anything of hers, especially her sacred milk, was a declaration of war.

Given her restricted circumstances—her head locked in a stanchion—she was surprisingly ingenious in her attacks. If I wasn’t quick she’d stamp on my foot. When I leaned against her flank to attach the milking machine, she’d swat me in the face with a urine soaked tail. She often stepped into the milk bucket, thereby wasting both our efforts, and if I was not alert to prevent it, she’d piss in any milk bucket left standing in the center aisle.

I was slow, but thanks to her, I gave up my Jeffersonian ideals, quit farming and sent away for college catalogues.

CIVIL DEFENSE AGAIN

When President Truman announced that the Russians had “the Bomb” we all got re-excited about Civil Defense. The wooden claxon had been confiscated by my mother who had a low tolerance for noise, and the white helmet had been lost in some post-war game of “soldier”—but no true patriot would shirk his duty. As a recently licensed driver, I jumped at the chance to meet my friends at night, spotting aircraft.

The nearby town of Cornwall built a wooden shack on an isolated hill. It had a direct line to Civil Defense headquarters in New Haven. Whenever a plane passed overhead, volunteers called in their observations, which were plotted on a map at headquarters. The early watches were taken by high school volunteers. Between planes we smoked and joked. Reliable adult spotters took the late watches, when (it was thought) the Russkies were more likely to test our mettle.[5]

On the third of December, 1951, I borrowed my father’s Hudson and drove the eight miles to the spotting shack to meet my buddy, Jack Coughlan, who later became a priest. At the time, his career choice seemed unlikely. He arrived with Susan M. a classmate reputed to have far more sexual experience (and a greater zeal for instruction) than was usual among high school girls in those days before birth control pills.

Three patriots in a spotting shack was one too many. I offered to return another evening. No, no! they insisted. Procedure required that two spotters sign the log upon arrival, and that the same two should turn the early watch over to the senior volunteers. Susan might have been imprudent in some respects, but she knew better than to sign anything. It would be wiser, Jack suggested, if he and I signed in, then the two of them would retire to observe the fly-overs from a different angle. He’d be back in time to sign out. “I’d do the same for you,” he promised, as fervently as he ever said Mass afterwards.

O.K. Why not?

They drove off in the direction of Mohawk State Park while I lit a cigarette and, squinting the smoke out of my eagle eyes, binoculared the night for Russian bombers.

None appeared.

At 9:30 I reported a West-East flight, probably a New York to Boston passenger plane, and, the skies being clear, I retired to the shack to work on my algebra homework. I meant to check every ten minutes, and having twice interrupted my pursuit of the meaning of ‘x’, it must have been between 9:50 and 10:00 pm when the shack was lit up like daylight. I thought it must have been Jack returning, or even one of the occasional inspections by the local CD Commander.

I stepped out to greet whomever it might be, but instead of vigilant friend, or even dastardly Russian, I was confronted by a short, greenish man who invited me, by gesture, to follow him up a ladder to a circular spaceship, suspended some twenty feet over our heads (by what means I know not.) Thinking it rather short acquaintance for social visiting, I declined. He shrugged and pointed a device at me. There was a flash and I was paralyzed. My mind remained alert, curious and calm. (I do not attribute this to my innate heroism, but rather to some feature of the disabling ray.)  He slung a rope around me (note the absence of tractor-beams) and I was hauled up into the spaceship by two fellows indistinguishable from my captor.

Although I felt relaxed I was totally rigid, my hand raised to fend off his Buck Rogers’ death ray, exactly the position I had assumed when zapped, so it was not completely surprising, once I was aboard, to find Jack and Susan locked together in an embrace that could only have been achieved by particularly enterprising and supple teen-agers, he on the bottom with his trousers about his ankles, and she with her skirt hoicked up, impaled on his (perhaps forever to be) turgid organ. How the green fellows had extracted them from the back seat of a 1946 Nash I cannot imagine, and indeed, there is very little about alien ways and means that is readily comprehensible.

The captain of the aliens released them from their catatonic straits and gestured for them to continue. Alas for Jack—perhaps suddenly reminded of his priestly vocation—he could not. At the captain’s impatient command, Jack was defenestrated. Susan shrieked. I would have hastened to her side, but I was still as brittle as a pretzel.

The aliens, whether biologists or pornographers, gestured to me to carry on. Suddenly I too could move freely. I wish I could say that I responded to Susan’s intelligent appeal, “Don’t be a fool, AJ! Do what they want!” but lacking experience myself, I was too modest to instruct others; nor did I wish our species to appear inept. Who knows what the consequences might have been?

I too was flung overboard and the ship departed at what we later learned to call ‘warp sped’, Susan still on board. I believe I heard her despairing, “NO...oo...ooo!” as the hatch closed, although (to be honest) it could have been me, for although alien researchers are experts in the science of gravity, they are curiously indifferent to its effect on falling earthlings.

Happily, both Jack and I landed in a mossy bog and regained consciousness quickly. We had an anxious discussion about whether to report the incident to New Haven. If this sounds callous, remember that no matter how distressed we were by Susan’s plight, filing a report was all we could do, and if this feeble expedient was our only recourse, what was the point?

By arguments that might have impressed Ignatius Loyola himself, Jack persuaded me that since nobody knew that he and Susan had been together, and nobody could possibly believe what had happened to her, it would be better for everybody (somehow, Susan included, although I forget the details) if we kept silent. So it was decided, a decision whose consequences would be discovered years later when Susan reappeared. But of that, more later.

HAPPY COLLEGE DAYS

Correctly betting that ‘pickelhaube is to porkpie as helm is to hat’ [6] I was granted a scholarship to Colgate University. It was not, in the fall of 1953, a real University (it had no graduate departments) but rather a pretty good liberal arts college, and a pleasant place to spend one’s advanced adolescence.

My intellectual pretensions were suitably modest, but the college was not demanding. It was an all male institution with a ‘rah rah’ sports tradition.[7] Campus life was dominated by fraternities and their attendant idiocies. The football team had a consequence to which the Philosophy Department (although quite fine) could not aspire.

People migrate toward their interests. Those who care least about the ambient culture form tumors within the greater body.  Colgate’s sports programs were of no interest to me,[8] but I soon found a home at Phi Tau, the fraternity that disdained football and basketball.  Allowances were made for intramural tennis, and competitive swimming—but none of us played golf, or anything we thought likely to connect us with the ‘bourgeoisie’, or even the Phi Delts. In retrospect it seems comic, but we thought of ourselves as intellectuals, and may even have been considered such by others. We weren’t, and would never become ‘real’ intellectuals, for we lacked the temperament to dig deeply into a subject, or to love discovery for its own sake—but we could mention Wittgenstein with a solemn expression, and if Mort Sahl said something witty we (a) got the reference, and (b) knew enough not to clap.[9]    

Nevertheless, Colgate was a much larger and more exciting intellectual world than I had previously known, and it was in the Freshman survey course, ‘Philosophy and Religion’, that I first pipped the shell of my parochialism. Those excerpts from the great texts[10] were like meat and potatoes to me, and tartar sauce too. I wolfed it all down, half chewed, and looked around for more. I gobbled history for lunch, philosophy for dinner, and late at night, snacked on Tolstoy.

But eager as I was, the ambient atmosphere was ‘doubt’. We were taught to read critically, to spot each lapse of reasoning, to pounce on irrelevancies and false analogies. Everything was served cum granum salum, and nothing was easier in ‘bull sessions’ lasting through the long, cold nights of upstate New York, than to talk ourselves into despair—not the morbid sort that tempts one to step off a bridge, but a brittle cynicism that discounts any hopeful suggestion as soon as it is proposed.

As the years passed I accumulated such toxic levels of skepticism that by my Senior year, although I knew everything,[11] I believed nothing. Somewhere along the line I sensed what was happening. I tried to fight back, to maintain a manly and upright character—to yet remain someone capable of heroism. But my vital forces were so badly reduced that (like a Thomas Mann character entering a sanitarium) I applied to Law School.

CANNONEER

But first I had to do what I could to save Western Civilization.

Part of the purpose of going to college was to postpone military service which was (in theory) mandatory. Colgate was an all-male institution in those days. However cheerfully we pursued knowledge, football glory or Northampton girls there was a penumbra of anxiety around all our lives—not caused by the more or less hypothetical Mongolian hordes conjured up by the CIA to persuade Congress to increase its annual budget, but the annoyance of the draft—lurking, lurking, lurking somewhere in the future, to be dealt with whenever we had finally run out of deferments. 

It was my fortune to be too young for the Korean Conflict, and too old for Vietnam. Who knows to what heights of military glory I might have risen had I been born in 1932 instead of miscarried in 1935—or what lugubrious death I might have achieved at Inchon.[12] I have little doubt that if I had been born in 1940, I would have been one of those artillerymen whose lonely courage stymied the NVA for months at Khe Sanh.

As it was, I drove to Albany to consult the recruiter for the Naval Officer Candidate School—but with no war then in sight (where being a junior officer might be desirable) I decided, on second thought, to join the Army as an enlisted reservist for six months.[13]

---

[1] In the 1880’s and ‘90’s, when farming in Litchfield County began to change from a survival strategy to a gentleman’s hobby, it was fashionable to give farms romantic names, as if they were proper British estates. This must not be blamed on the farmers, or on any woman who ever actually lived on a farm, but rather on sisters and aunts who lived in town. They came ‘home’ to visit in the summer, to read novels on the terrace, paint watercolors in the meadows, and embroider cushions with the names they had concocted for the old homestead. Thus Uncle John’s farm became “Hickory Hurst” and Grandma’s was dubbed, “Windy Walls”. Along the Post Road, north of Miss Striker’s place (which, as far as we knew, was called, ‘Miss Striker’s Place’) the newly arrived Duncans—whether in ignorance, or displaying a citified taste for irony, called their dairy farm by its 19^th century name, ‘Four Winds Farm’.

[2] I hasten to state that both her parents were exemplary representatives of their respective breeds, carried away, I have no doubt, by a youthful excess of passion. Perhaps her mother, a genteel, upper-class Guernsey, suffered morning after remorse, but we can be sure that her father (no moral philosopher) did not. Ayrshire bulls aren’t. They don’t.

  

[3] Let’s call them ‘Arthur and Martha Duncan.’ At first they seemed mismatched. He was quite old to be starting life as a farmer. It seemed that before the war he had had many ‘adventures’ in the WPA, and riding the rails as a depression era ‘hobo’. A powerfully built and rudely handsome Scot, he had a wealthy society wife. The much younger Marty had been a Red Cross lady. They met over a doughnut. He was as  impulsively affectionate as an Ayrshire bull (and nearly as well endowed.) The winsome Marty (in a war zone, five thousand miles from Montclair) was as game as a Guernsey heifer.

[4] For instance, that education should be practical first, and decorative later. But Vocational Agriculture was one of her less successful ideas. Aside from the fact that we had no capital, and I had no talent for business, dairy farming was dying in New England. It only survived at the sufferance of malingering bureaucrats at the Department of Agriculture, whose regulations were meant to “stabilize” the family farm. When someone finally realized that there were more consumers voting Democratic than producers (who voted Republican) price supports were dropped and farming in New England came to a screeching halt.

[5] Regulations called for two volunteers per watch. Patriotism knows no gender, and the exigencies of the Cold War were such that married persons often felt obliged to leave husbands or wives at midnight, to join other people’s wives or husbands, in protecting the American way of life. The Civil Defense roster became a matter of considerable local interest, and the volunteers, who ought to have been honored as minor heroes of the Cold War, were obliged to endure innuendo and obloquy along with sleepless nights. They should have been grateful when the Distant Early Warning Line was finally stretched across the Canadian wilds. Not at all! “Can we rely on Eskimos?” they wondered aloud. However, once the telephone line to New Haven was disconnected, the shack was removed to the First Selectman’s farm, where it served for several years as a chicken coop.

[6] By such subtle multiple choices did the Scholastic Aptitude Test separate future Harvard men from incipient Yalies, and so on (by degrees) until the ultimate sheep was selected from the last of the goats (doomed to attend State College.)

[7] It now admits women, to its great benefit: the usual case of social progress at feminine expense.

[8] I had been milking cows while my high school classmates learned sports, and as much as I rued my relationship with Pridey it never occurred to me to envy someone throwing a ball through a hoop.

[9] The correct (cool) response was to snap your fingers (no more than three times.)

[10] Yes, yes—the same fellows who created what so proudly we hailed as ‘Western civilization’ (now universally mocked as ‘the Dead White Males.’)

[11] So I thought at the time, and in fact, I knew everything I was expected to know, which was a little bit about quite a few things. The mission of a private, liberal-arts college was (and still remains) the production of ‘well rounded’ graduates likely to succeed in business and contribute to the Alumni Fund. I had a positive genius for guessing right on multiple choice exams, so it was no trouble at all to achieve an excellent GPA. If one achieved some skill in country club sports, golf or tennis, so much the better.

[12] For, as it was at Cold Harbor, it is always the best who are deemed fittest for sacrifice.

[13] An unfortunate decision for I ended up serving two years chasing around the boondocks of North Carolina and Oklahoma, shooting howitzers at junked cars, hoping never to hit downtown Lawton or Fayettville. This potential error, known as being ‘180 out’ was surprisingly easy to make and was deemed a serious breach of military courtesy. Being ‘180 out’ meant that you were firing in exactly the opposite direction from the one you intended—and thus stood for a whole range of stupidities to which novitiates of St. Barbara (patron of artillerymen) are prone. The phrase originated when circles had 360 degrees. Ours were marked into 6400 parts. Hitting Lawton actually required a 3200 ‘mil’ error (still easy to make.)

A Further Excerpt from the Fauxtobiography

Benign Neglect

It was not that year but the next that that I spent the summer in a sleepy daze with mononucleosis (called ‘glandular fever’,  another case of diagnostic innocence) interrupted by occasional visits from the doctor, and by my mother’s insistent efforts to make me drink beef tea. By Labor Day I was up and about, but happily, I was granted a reprieve from school to compensate for my lost vacation. Grandma suggested that she and I could remain at the farm.

On the Tuesday morning after Labor Day we waved goodbye to the rest of the family without much grief. For two months she and I lived in great harmony and mutual satisfaction, each of us leaving the other to do entirely as he or she pleased[1], a highly satisfactory arrangement.

She made excellent company for a child. She was crammed with information that happened to interest her, chiefly involving song birds and botany. She could infallibly distinguish between a hairy woodpecker and a downy woodpecker. She showed me a secret patch of trailing arbutus discovered by her Aunt Jane in 1912.[2] I was not to tell anyone, as it was an endangered species. She had total recall for family gossip and local history from the end of the Civil War until FDR was elected (after which she lost interest in current events.) She was happy to share her information if I cared to listen (or not, if I didn’t.) She demanded nothing from a grandchild. There were no rules to be transgressed. There were no lessons. Nothing needed to be done. There were no heroes but myself.

She served dessert whether or not I cleaned my plate.

Visitation

On Friday nights my father would drive to Goshen in his 1939 Plymouth to bring us groceries and to be sure I took a bath (unlike Grandma, my mother had no notion of laissez-faire, in child rearing or anything else.)  He arrived late for on Fridays the bank stayed open until 8 p.m. and they had to ‘balance’ before they could leave (a mystery to me—I imagined tellers on tight ropes and rolling barrels, while Uncle John, dressed like P. T. Barnum, cracked a bullwhip.)

We were eager for his visit, his mother as much as his son, the only time we had him to ourselves. At 8:30 we went out to sit on the stonewall in the dark, watching for headlights on Route 63. There weren’t many cars out at night during the war. You could see lights on the horizon long before you could see the actual headlights. There would be a flash as a car rounded the corner near Breakell’s, then the lights would disappear, and reappear when the car came out of the little dip near the Forgey’s driveway. 

“Will this be him?”

“No,” she said. “It’s too soon. I think his will be the ninth car.”

I was disappointed but brave. “I think five,” I predicted.

The stars were spread over us in patterns. They had names. “You can see why that one is called The Big Dipper, and upside down from it is The Little Dipper—or the Indians called them The Big Bear and The Little Bear.”

“Were there Indians around here?”

“Oh yes. Pequots, mostly. They weren’t very brave. When the Mohawks came to visit the Pequots ran away and hid in the woods. My father often found arrowheads when he plowed the north meadow.”

“Were there Indians when you were a girl?”

“No, no. The Indians were all gone by then, except for Ben who lived in a shack north of the swamp, just where John Third dumps his trash. (I do wish he wouldn’t.) And those are the Pleiades. The very bright star, just to the right of the moon, is actually the planet Venus.”

I suppose she thought I hadn’t noticed the two cars that passed while she pointed out the constellations. According to her count, I was exactly correct; my father’s car was the fifth. However, I knew he was the seventh.

While I bathed, my father read me a chapter of The Prisoner of Zenda.  As I cautiously soaped my hair I asked, “Who is John Third?”

“That’s Johnny’s father, John M. Wadhams, the Third---and Johnny is John M. Wadhams, the Fourth.”

“How come everybody is named John?”

“Who knows? I suppose because in the old days every new baby was named after somebody else, and since there were so many Johns already, after awhile there wasn’t anybody to name a new boy after except somebody else named John. It’s like compound interest. Wash behind your ears, your mother is sure to ask.”

Tucked into bed I was treated to a few more pages of The Prisoner of Zenda, then given a gruff hug, smelling of pipe tobacco, and sternly admonished to “sleep tight and don’t let the bedbugs bite.” For a few minutes before I fell asleep I could hear them talking in the kitchen. I desperately wanted him to come back upstairs, for I had forgotten to ask about compound interest, how the bank could balance, or whether we could plow the north field and find some arrowheads.

In November I returned to Torrington, and to school. By then (aged 8) already marked by a kind of melancholic nostalgia, from which I have never entirely recovered. I wished that I might have been born in the 19^th century, to have been one of my grandmother’s brothers (so much more admirable than my own) to have known her grandfather, the man  who exercised such command over his family and their neighbors. I longed for their oxen and horses, and above all, for the austerity of their lives.

However, I did not envy Grandma her choleric father, for although she never spoke ill of him, I could sense, from the omissions in her memoirs, that he was not as nice a man as my own father, a droll fellow, fond of the mild exaggerations by which New Englanders beguile outlanders.

CIVIL DEFENSE

Back in Torrington I soon forgot about my two extra months of vacation. My next younger brother bragged that while I had wasted my youth collecting maple leaves at Aunt Angeline’s, he had been holding the archfiends of the Luftwaffe at bay.

Torrington was a choice target for the German air force, or would have been if Goering had ever succeeded in building a transatlantic bomber. Its factories produced precision parts for aircraft engines, bearings, bombsights, brass for munitions, and the machine tools required to build similar factories elsewhere. These “shops” (as we called them, actually large factories with acres of machine tools and thousands of workers) were spread throughout the town. We did not presume to guess the range of Hitler’s air force—but were determined to be ready, no matter what. 

My parents were “block wardens”, part of the great network of volunteers whose real task, whether or not they recognized it, was to keep the public’s attention focused on the war effort. Although the nearest actual Nazi depredations were submarine attacks, hundreds of miles from us, we were on alert for whatever might come.

My brother and I served as victims upon whose broken bodies my father’s First Aid class practiced bandaging. Periodically the factory whistles would signal an “Air Raid”, a kind of city-wide fire-drill. In case any of the neighbors ignored the sirens, the block warden (or one of his sons) swung a wooden claxon to remind them of the urgency. My brother and I would then take cover under the piano, hoping that my father would allow one of us to wear his white helmet and carry a message through imaginary smoke and flames[3] to Mr. Goodwin at the other end of the block. In favor of my selection I argued my greater maturity, while my brother claimed longer on-the-job experience. Opportunities were few—my father was not one to send a boy on a man’s errand—but he always remembered which of us had been sent last time, and carefully alternated.

And then it was over. As usual, the family had moved to the farm for the summer—but on VJ Day my father, a gregarious man, could not bear being isolated in the country while his neighbors were celebrating in Torrington. He took me along for the street party.  It was a revelation. I had never in life seen public exuberance, or ever witnessed a woman drinking alcohol. I remember my panic when I lost him among the wild celebrants.

DEATHS  IN THE FAMILY

I do not know what happened to the ‘firm and robust’ constitutions of those ‘laborious’ South End ancestors who founded our fortune. Perhaps they not only exhausted themselves, but their descendants, with their compulsive rock moving, wood chopping and sheave garnering. Or it may be that the four Wadhams killed at Cold Harbor were the strongest, most energetic members of the Wadhams’ family line[4]. Then again, Great-great Grandmother Hodges may have introduced some genetic deficiency into the family, for not only did she die young (the expected fate of 19^th century farm wives) but so also did most of her male descendants. 

Her only son died at 61.[5]  Of his two sons, the Banker lived a normal but unremarkable 75 years before toppling over with a sudden and massive failure of his heart. The Colonel’s life had ended just as abruptly, and from the same cause, at age 61. Later still, my father and his brother would pass away with equal unexpectedness—active and apparently ‘healthy’ one moment, dead the next. 

But none of those deaths was as important, from the perspective of childhood, as that of my father’s cousin (the John we called Uncle John.) There was a subtly feudal element in the relationship of the cousins. I believe they liked each other, and could have been good friends, but they could not help being family. The elder could not escape the obligations of his prosperity—the younger could never extricate himself from the burden of gratitude. They lived next door to each other in two houses that had been owned by their grandfather, but in the 1940’s Uncle John owned both. 

Like all of Grandma’s male relatives, they were both quite handsome, but Uncle John had a certain gravitas, appropriate to a second generation banker, which my father lacked entirely. In addition to the two houses in town, Uncle John owned a gentleman’s farm with a herd of purebred Guernseys, horses (including a riding horse for his daughters) bonds, bank accounts, and a couple of late model Buicks. His three daughters attended excellent colleges, and their marriages to Yale graduates (or the cash equivalents) were noted in the New York papers. Above all, he was president of the bank founded by their grandfather, in which Dad toiled like Bob Cratchit, a perpetual assistant.

Although we imagined that the bank’s success was due to Dad’s hard work, Uncle John might have taken pride in the fact that he had kept a family member employed throughout the depression.[6] Maybe they were both right. 

By calling him “Uncle” we claimed a closer tie than the rules of consanguinity allowed, but, on the other side of the balance, Uncle John enjoyed the psychic benefits of being the squire. By keeping his younger cousin employed, providing him a home at below market rents, and overlooking occasional missed payments (for my parents were dogged by illness, excess children and other catastrophes) Uncle John cultivated his avuncular image as the undoubted head of the family. 

And then he died. He went to bed one night, and did not waken in the morning. He was 58 years old. It was the most shocking of all the family deaths until then, upsetting our domestic world more than the great depression or the Second World War, for although our economic situation improved in the post-war boom, our claim to any social distinction was permanently deflated. It had depended on the connection between the cousins. Once the ‘other half’ of the town’s leading family, we were now unrelated to anybody who counted.

His widow, Aunt Sela, sold both houses. She and her son, Johnny, moved to their farm down the road from Grandma’s farm. Salt and Pepper were put out to pasture, the Buicks, were replaced with newer models, and although they still lived “next door’ (now about a half mile away) the connection to our side of the family gradually withered to the minimum that politeness and convenience required.  Our dynastic pretensions had ended. Now we’d have to invent ourselves.

A TENSE SITUATION

Aunt Sela offered to sell Dad our house in town. In retrospect, it seems odd that he did not accept. In 1950 the house couldn’t have been worth more than five or six thousand dollars, an amount he might easily have borrowed from his mother, if not from ‘the family bank’. But he, and through him his children, had so often imagined the day when we would move to Grandma’s farm (and have a pony) that I do not believe he gave it a single thought. How much better things might have been if he had.

It turned out that my mother and grandmother did not care much for each other. Perhaps Dad hadn’t noticed. He got along with everybody, and as long as the two women had lived in separate houses, they too had gotten along. Summers at the farm had never been a problem, for neither of them were confined to the house, and at worst, it was ‘just for the summer.’ Then too, they both subscribed to the New England credo, “Mind Your Own Business,” so their antipathy may have been dormant, waiting for an occasion to spring into life.  It did not take long.

On the appointed day I rode to Goshen in the movers’ van, deputized by my mother to make sure that her furnishings were put where she wanted them (never mind that the house was already filled with my grandmother’s furniture and the sacred relics of her family.) Thus began their long, tight-lipped struggle, not so much to dominate each other, but to avoid being subordinated.  Both women were of that New England temperament that can endure anything as long as necessary. Or so they thought. When we moved in with her, Grandma was 78. How could either of them have imagined she would live to be 99—that twenty years of their lives would be spent in lip biting silences, and irritated asides?

Neither of them got what they had hoped for. Grandma imagined that by re-occupying her home she was re-entering her life—that the future would be a pleasant stroll along the Post Road—a Frost poem, lilacs in a forest clearing, enigmatic foundation stones—where pebbles dropped in a well evoked her sacred dead.  

My mother, I think, must have imagined a life free of the oversight of her in-laws. Oh sure, she’d have to live with her mother-in-law, for a year or two—but then she would be free. Free to run things her own way. Nobody to say (or whose raised eyebrow might suggest) “that’s not the way we do things.”

Freedom (for her) encompassed the happy notion of bondage for others. She meant to have exclusive jurisdiction over her children’s lives (in their best interests, of course.)  She imagined a sort of family kibbutz (what the Hawaiians call a hui—she’d read about it in a Michener novel) where, under the benign supervision of the family matriarch, family members contribute their earnings to the family pot, so the Mama can spend it for their collective benefit, perhaps sending the worthiest child to medical school, or buying land to raise pineapples (or whatever Mom imagined might grow in a stony pasture.) To look at them you would have imagined my father was the more fanciful of the two partners—but this was far from the case. Mom had all sorts of ideas.

In his History of the Town of Goshen, Connecticut, published in 1897, Reverend Hibbard lamented:

The young men, sons of those who established its churches, schools, factories, and places of business, have been leaving the town during the past sixty years. Farms that for a century had been in the possession of the same family are now occupied by aliens. Houses once filled with life and activity...are now desolate and falling in decay, or their places marked by clumps of lilac shrubbery...

I thought we were coming home—but we were aliens.

---

[1] There was no television, of course. There was a huge Zenith radio, but it stood in the corner, silently awaiting post-war production of a critical tube. We had no daily newspaper, nor even mail delivery. We had to find our amusement in the fields and woods, in conversation, and among the miscellaneous histories, biographies and old-fashioned novels that had drifted to rest on the bookshelves of the summer house.

[2] It was in the woods just off the abandoned Post Road, near a granite foundation she called “Aunt Angeline’s”. Just to the west of Aunt Angeline’s the road crossed a stretch of rocky ledge where the Albany stage coach was upset one day in 1877 or 78. At the one-room schoolhouse, just down the hill, the students laughed to hear the coachman swear. Their teacher (her Aunt Jane, but of course, called Miss Wadhams) scolded them.

“But what did he say, Grandma?”

“Oh, I shan’t repeat it, but I remember he called one of his horses a ‘lop-eared jackass.’ Or perhaps he was speaking to a passenger.” While we collected fallen leaves, the coachman’s curses rang through the woods, as bright as the paint on my dump truck.

[3] For putting out any actual fires we had two five gallon water pumps. These were kept ready to hand in a little closet under the front stairs. No wonder Hitler lost! We boys contributed to his defeat by singing “...Hitler only has one ball...Tojo has no balls at all...” At the time I thought this was due to rationing. Certainly it was difficult to get a new ball, or replace a bicycle tire, but I couldn’t see how this affected Tojo, whose army had control of the Malayan rubber plantations.

[5] The self induced death mentioned above—maybe it’s unfair to count it against her. On the other hand, she may have injected melancholy into our inheritance—for it is both a genetic and a situational malady.

[6] Known to us as “FDR’s depression.” In our family it was an article of faith that President Hoover had been unjustly maligned. In fact, among mother’s relatives, it was thought that FDR, Pius XII, the Irish, and other worshippers of graven images (the gravest of all being FDR) were in diabolical concert to subvert American liberties. The details were uncertain, but their theory was largely confirmed by the arrival in Torrington (during WW II) of a couple of  Soviet engineers (sent by Stalin, and no doubt warmly welcomed by FDR) as liaison to local shops engaged in war production. These proletarians worked in the factories during the day, and (probably) conspired with the UAW, or sent coded messages, at night. Sometimes, on summer evenings they strolled along Forest Street wearing baggy pajamas and sandals. (Yes! Incredibly! The very street where I had once, in my innocence, driven my dump truck!) We sat on our porches and watched with wary eyes. They nodded and smiled to us in a touching, rather goofy, effort to build Antifascist solidarity.  

Beginnings, Ends—and the Stuff in the Middle

Jack Chambers, hero of my uncompleted novel, RAQUEL [or] The Visiting Professor, is Writer in Residence at Portland State. He is ‘in over his head’ both in his job and his love life. He doesn’t pretend to understand Reality, but he thinks he understands Fiction, which he calls the Template of Reality.

Without Aristotle’s boundaries, he says, Reality would be too large, too random, too diffuse for human understanding. It is the cosmic noise upon which we impose Aristotle’s elements of narrative: Beginning, Middle and End. Without them Reality remains Unreal.

Well, it might not sell in the Ivy League, but the young lady writers at Portland State find him interesting. They gossip about him and his hapless affair with Rachel, a hot-shot Portland trial attorney.

Jack’s confusion in love and literature is compounded by the arrival of Professor Raquel Balabuena. She is from Buenos Aires and has complex literary theories of her own. We need not go into them here. Of more immediate concern are the diabolical fellows trailing behind her.

Her adoptive father runs Argentina’s mysterious Bureau 37. These evil fellows might be her father's agents, sent along to protect her, but more likely they belong to his enemies, the Archbishop, or possibly to an angry female politician. Neither of them like the prospect of Raquel loose in Portland, so far beyond their control.

Gosh. No wonder she’s nervous. Jack dubs her The Professor of Ambiguity and Uncertainty, and begins a novel in which she is the scarcely disguised main character—the very same meta-fictional masterpiece which I once thought was finished, but which I now realize I am unlikely ever to finish, and which (alas for you, dear reader) you are unlikely ever to read, because, after eight years in the making, it still lacks a pleasing Middle.

It occurs to me, however, that if I furnish a beginning and an end, you might fill in that blank to your own satisfaction—an expedient preferable to slogging through a tale told by a remote, provincial, and uncertain novelist.

Just for the heck of it, here is the 'Front matter' I am thinking of using, once I finish writing the middle, if ever. 

RAQUEL

Anyone who has ever been told that her toes were ‘piggies’ should understand the difference between Reality and Fiction. As tiny as they may have been, the Reality of her toes was assured by mama’s pinch. The charming creatures who go shopping and eat roast beef exist only to beguile the innocent.   

It seems ridiculous to have to assure the reader that this story is also Fiction, concocted for the amusement of the author, and to beguile any readers willing to be beguiled. And yet, my lawyer, Ms. Abigail Flinch (not the model for ‘Rachel’, the wholly fictional lawyer you are about to meet) assures me that this is so. 

Well then:

All rights are reserved. Without limiting the foregoing, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced to a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (whether electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the express written permission of the author and copyright owner.

The author has undertaken to ease the transition from  scepticism to suspended disbelief, by tying the story to a few locations in the City of Portland, including the State University, the South Park Blocks, some of the city’s nicer restaurants and cafės, as well as to its goddess ‘Portlandia’.  Although real, these places (and the goddess herself—embodied in Raymond Kaskey’s  handsome statue, ‘Portlandia’) have been used fictionally.

The looseness of these ties to Reality will be apparent to anyone looking for a corner office in Neuberger Hall. There are none.

From sheer laziness, the author has set the story in the known Universe. Do not be fooled. All the characters and the events depicted, are, at best, passing fragments of plausibility dipped from the dimension of imagination.

Notwithstanding the implications of Everett’s Theory, none of the characters bear any intentional resemblance to any real persons now living or who have ever lived, and their stories have no relation to any real event, whether in the Portland or elsewhere.

This is, in part, a story about story-tellers, so all of the foregoing is but a boring substitute for the magical invocation,

“Once upon a time...”