Lost Youth

The Fauxtobiography

A. J. BARKER

Ideally, we might have started with my birth in 1935, eight or nine years after Professor Heisenberg raised “Uncertainty” from a minor personal problem to a Universal Principle.

“Time” had also been severely damaged by Professor Einstein shortly after my father was born. We are still staggering under these Teutonic blows to ordinary good sense, but such questions were not much discussed or understood in Litchfield County in January of 1935. Nobody blamed Professor Heisenberg when my mother slipped on an icy step.

Today, a six-month fetus would be saved, its natural incubation extended artificially until it achieved a reasonable birth weight and prognosis. Not so in those days. I was “lost”. To put it bluntly, Mom miscarried, and my corporeal being was disposed of in the incinerator of the Charlotte Hungerford Hospital.

What a quandary for a biographer. And yet, what might be considered an annoyance can, with a little energy and imagination, be turned to advantage. For one thing, we need not truckle to the so-called facts. The pre-natal death of the central character, whether in biography or other forms of fiction, need not in the least diminish his importance to the narrative. Having mentioned the distressing theories of Heisenberg and Einstein, I should reassure the gentle reader by directing her attention to Hugh Everett’s thesis[1], which posits an infinity of universes, in some of which you are the empress of Rome, and in others a despicable whore. In all of them, you are the central character, so that—aside from all the realities perceived by an infinite number of Hugh Everetts—what you are now reading tucked in your bed (your toes so nice and warm under the down coverlet) is, in some alternate now, being whispered in your ear, the author’s hand upon your silken breast (or not, depending.)  

In any case, the truth of it—if not here and now, then in numerous else-wheres and else-nows—will be apparent to those with eyes to see, and minds to understand.

There were several doctors in our family. A great deal of medical mumbo-jumbo was dispensed, but Mom survived it handily. In a few weeks she was once again, to all outward appearances, a healthy woman of 27, capable of bearing any number of additional children. Nevertheless (and who can blame her) she remained despondent at her loss—her disappointment shared by her husband and even by their three daughters, who had been looking forward to my birth, their inquisitive ears pressed to her abdomen.

In those days “depression” was an economic, not a mental, state. Her friends and relatives soon tired of her failure to cheer up. They stopped reminding her that she was still young, that she could try again, etc., etc., and attended to other business. At last, perhaps missing their attention, she became pregnant again. It was an apprehensive pregnancy, not as joy inspiring as mine had been, nor (I am obliged to say it) as satisfactory in the result.

He was born in the fall of 1937, a boy, as they had hoped I would be.  He was a rather sickly, yellowish child, but in spite of his jaundice they were pleased with him. They gave him my name (after my grandfather, the doctor) as well as the toys and clothes that had been purchased in anticipation of my birth.

Well... Let’s be generous. He isn’t exactly an imposter, for in his world he exists and I do not. So, not an imposter, really, but a pis aller, his life but a faint shadow of what mine would have been, and has been in all those realities which those of you entangled in his dimension can view only indirectly, as in the broken mirror of time, perhaps in little flashes between sleeping and waking, or in puzzling moments like the time you saw your mother standing in the doorway, a mixing spoon in her had, a little flour on her cheek... but she’s been dead since... She fades before you can remember that question you always meant to ask her.

It’s all explained in Hugh Everett’s thesis, so I will not trouble you with the details. In any case, understanding Explanations is not quite the same as understanding Reality. It will become clearer when you step outside your present dimension.

For what it’s worth let’s take “your” A. J. Barker as a convenient reference point. We will simply repossess the few creditable facts and circumstances of his life (basically stolen from mine) to serve as the bones of our story, add meat and vegetables, then salt to taste. Some adjustments will be required by the two and one-half years between our birth dates, but the result should be “...close enough for government work...” as Dad used to say.

And how much more so for literary work! Let’s face it, the truth in an Autobiography (if any) is but slightly related to the events. Of course, we’ll take only the good parts of his life; omitting several boring decades and his numerous bad decisions, which need not be explained or excused here.

Birth Revisited

In the 30’s of the last century, before the advent of modern medicine, doctors had never heard of Rh factors. A typical prognosis for such a baby (puny, shriveled and jaundiced) was the tilted hand gesture (‘maybe-maybe not’.)

I vividly recall hanging upside down and receiving a couple of sharp slaps as the delivering doctor explained Galen to my parents. “Your son is of an aqueous humor, cold, lethargic, melancholy, unlikely to thrive. I’m sorry, but the hospital cannot offer any refunds or exchanges. You’ll have to make the best of it.”

As a favor to my grandfather, his colleague on the medical staff, he extended my stay in the hospital nursery for an extra couple of weeks. It was nothing—in those days as much space as a bassinet required was not thought to be worth a $1,000 a day. “Let the nurses take care of him while you rest. Maybe he’ll ripen a little, and at least it will give you a chance to get over the shock.”

My long suffering parents (I mentioned that I had three older sisters) nodded stoically and left me behind. Contrary to predictions, I did well, and soon found myself a favorite of the nursery nurses, lusty wenches of Bavarian and Liverpool extraction, who laughed heartily at their own risqué jokes as they changed diapers. “Gott im himmel! Look at this one!” says Greta.

“Ooh!” says Colleen, “And I think ‘ee fancies you, luv.”

“Jah, more than my Hans, maybe.”

“Well, too bad, Gretchen, I knew it would be a mistake to marry.” And to me she added, with a coy giggle, “I’ll wait for you, dearie—I promise.”

“Ach. Poor little mannikin. He’ll never enjoy the likes of us—nor any one of our sort is ever likely to enjoy him.”

“Oh? Why not, Gretchy?

“He’s a Protestant, silly.”

“Oh, poor thing.” The tender-hearted Colleen could scarcely suppress a tear at my limited prospects, “How sad that must be. Never to be able to confess, or be forgiven. How can they ever enjoy anything?”

“They can’t. It’s why they muck things up so much.”

Well, I did fancy Gretchen (Colleen too, for that matter) for they were both liberal with the baby oil and the powder, and perhaps by way of compensation for my unlucky future in love, clasped me to their comfortable bosoms, while feeding me (from bottles, alas). At least I got some sense of what fleshly delights might be about, and for that I don’t know whether to thank or blame them. At the time, I held on for all I was worth.

A Dump Truck

Two years old. I am driving my dump truck. I’m dressed in a yellow sun-suit. My chubby feet, packed into white baby shoes, propel the truck along the sidewalk. The truck is huge and powerful, fully two feet long and six or seven inches wide, made of steel and painted a creamy white with red trim. The driver’s seat is welded to the cab roof, the steering wheel comes up through the hood. The doors open and close, there is a sturdy lever by which I can dump a cargo of pebbles. If you want to see something charming, watch me drive it along the sidewalk in front of the Queen Anne houses (their porches decorated with sawn fretwork, turned pillars and curved banisters) June, 1937, Forest Street, Torrington, Connecticut (before the sovereign states were reduced to two letter abbreviations.)

Large maple trees grow in all the front yards. The sunlight sifts through the leaves onto my blond head and sparkles around my feet, rather like the adoration of my mother watching from the front porch. Such a fine little fellow!

Aunt Sela marvels from her porch next door.

Years later, when Uncle John died suddenly, both houses were sold and all of us moved away. Helping clean the basement, I found the truck in a pile of trash, its wonderful steering wheel gone and its ivory paint flaked off. In the intervening decade, the truck had passed down the chain of my male siblings—Vandal to Hun to Ostrogoth—and, broken at last, had been thrown on the scrap heap. In all that time I never gave it a thought, but now it scoots down the dappled sidewalk of memory, its paint as creamy as ever, past old Mrs. Ferry (her waggly terrifier barks at me) past Mr. Goodwin watering his lawn (he nods gravely) past Dr. Thomson’s Studebaker parked in the shade.

A man in a seersucker suit is walking home from work, his jacket slung over his shoulder. His hair is red, his tie is loosened and askew. I recognize him with surprise, the first time I have ever seen, or even imagined, my father outside the house. I raise my hands from the steering wheel to greet him. He carries us back up the street, boy on one arm, truck under the other.

Cicadas whine in the maples.

 

 

Grandma’s Farm

My grandmother was doggedly old fashioned in her vocabulary. She always referred to her late husband in the third person, “The Doctor would ride his wheel[2] to the clinic,” (no matter that she disapproved of all unorthodoxy) or, with greater satisfaction, “The year you were born the Doctor and I went to Miami on the cars.[3]”  She was 73 years old in 1944 when I lived with her for a season.

Pictures from the 1890’s show an attractive girl in her twenties, with the lushness of a Gibson illustration, her red hair piled on top of her head. She had lively, inquisitive eyes. You might have supposed (once you had crossed the threshold of thinking of your grandmother as a girl) that she had been a hot item at ice-cream socials.

I think not.

She was not exactly aloof, or indifferent, but she was absorbed in her own concerns without being in any way cold or unsociable. Something of a “bluestocking” and an early “career woman” she had been a school teacher in Florida, and later, a librarian in New York City. There she met Jacob Riis, and went to work in a “settlement”, walking fearlessly along the Bowery streets on her mission to instruct immigrant women. She was over thirty when she married a recent graduate of the NYU Medical School. She told me once that she had not much cared whether she married or not, although she supposed “it was the usual thing.”[4]

They moved from New York to Torrington where they lived a conventional married life. When the Doctor died, forty years later, she more or less forgot about him. A mere husband (especially one who had never been to Yale) could not compete with her admirable brothers.[5]

She owned a farm which she had inherited from her younger brother, Robert. It had been their childhood home. When their mother died,[6] Rob had taken the farm, leaving all the cash, the stocks, the antiques and everything of any use, to his siblings. It was a courtesy to them. In the midst of the depression the farm was nearly worthless, but he could afford white elephants. He was a fashionable New York surgeon—the man to see if you were a socialite with a thorax in need of an incision. He replaced the old barn with a three car garage, installed indoor plumbing in the house, and used the old place as a ‘summer home’. Otherwise it was left much as it had been when their father quit farming in the 1890’s.

Be patient gentle reader. The farm and all its ghosts (among whom, alas, I must count myself) are of the essence. Indeed, perhaps it was not her family (her mother, or her brother the Banker, the Doctor, or the Colonel) that Grandma loved, nor even the house and land, but its location in memory. Indeed, to call it a “farm” was an exaggeration. The house had not been regularly occupied in decades. The land had not been worked, or even grazed. Without making any use of it, except to pick the blueberries which had over-run its fields and pastures, she cultivated dreams as the aging Guinevere gardened in Camelot.

(Well, that was rather poetic, if I do say so, just a little glimpse of the transcendentalist lurking in every New England Yankee. But, as all New Englanders are aware, poetic           tendencies exist to be suppressed, or at least, like ankles, hidden under the skirts of practicality.)

So, she owned a farm, but it was ten miles from her home in Torrington. She didn’t drive. There was no real store within miles. She was over 70. The exigencies of the Great Depression had morphed into the deprivations of the Second World War. The farm seemed just beyond reach. How was she to make any use of it?

Her fatal solution was to invite us there to live during the summers. The air was better in the hills, she argued. Isolated from infectious lower class children, her grandchildren[7] would escape “infantile paralysis” (in those days, description served for diagnosis.) Also, it would be cheaper than summer camp. All good reasons, but the true explanation was that she wanted to live there during the pleasant season, and was willing to put up with grandchildren (and even a daughter-in-law) in order to do so.

Courtesy Mowing

She and I spent the summer of 1942 picking blueberries. She wore a blue house dress buttoned down the front and a blue hat with a slightly ragged veil, a hat which she declared to be “good enough for picking berries.” Over her dress she wore a pair of bib overalls, her spindly ankles ending in old lady tennis shoes. My part was simply to be there, to fetch help if she should fall. We were after the low-bush blueberries that grow wild on abandoned land. To pick them you must sit in a sunny spot and stretch out around you until you have harvested all the berries in reach, then move a little and do it again. It requires patience, a task better suited to grandmothers than to young boys.

To keep me amused, she talked about the past.

I hadn’t thought much about the past, and what I heard was astonishing. In the past, it seemed, my father had been a boy. Well, that was plausible, I had heard him say “When I was a boy...” But the past did not end there, for long before my father had been a boy, Grandma had been a girl, and she too had parents and even grandparents, who had once been children and had (apparently) picked blueberries in this same boggy pasture.

The past was also an heroic age, although a bit difficult to understand as most of the men who lived there were named John. Her brother (the Banker) her father (who had been Warden of the State prison) her Grandfather (the Senator) her great grandfather and seven or eight other ancestors were all named John, as well as one of her sons (my uncle) a grandson (my first cousin) a nephew (the current bank president, whom we children called “Uncle John” although he was really my father’s cousin) and his son, Johnny (my second cousin.) These descriptive tags might have served to guide me through the maze of Johns to the original John Wadhams who sailed from Boston, England, to Boston, Massachusetts in 1630—but, to be honest, I didn’t listen carefully, nor did she particularly mind.

It was enough that I understood that our family was unequalled in Goshen, and therefore in the world. The peerless ancestors displayed on a shelf in her parlor seemed to me all of an age, adults, dressed in peculiar clothes. I never learned which was which. The house is gone, of course, but I can still see the tiny daguerreotypes, arranged in a cabinet with curved glass sides, among her sterling place settings and lustreware tea cups. 

Only her grandfather, the Senator (a State Senator, I later learned to my disappointment) had ever had his portrait painted. He alone is life sized in my memory. This portrait hung over the mantle in Uncle John’s summer  house—the next farm down the road.

Our other painted “ancestor” was not actually an ancestor but a collateral, a miscellaneous Eggleston cousin. He’d had his portrait done about 1811, before sailing to Brazil to convert the Indians—a priggish fellow, dressed in black and holding a Bible. He was never seen again. My sister and I speculated cheerfully about his end. She favored piranhas, I preferred cannibals. It never occurred to us at the time that he might have been the one converted, but since then I have imagined him as a feral Evangelical, utterly un-Congregational, the cannibal king of Amazonia.

Having picked everything in reach Grandma got laboriously to her feet. She showed me her two baskets of berries—almost four quarts. Across the road I could hear the clatter of a horse drawn mower. I persuaded her that she had enough berries—that it would be more interesting to watch the horses. We walked to the edge of the pasture and sat on a stone wall to watch Mr. Walthier mow Miss Striker’s pasture.

“I wonder why he’s mowing with horses?” I asked.

“Oh well, it’s not real farm work. John Third must have told him to do it for Miss Striker, who is a sort of cousin of ours. The hay is useless, all goldenrod and daisies. The cows won’t eat it, but they can sleep on it. And mowing keeps the weeds down.” We watched for a few more minutes as he made another circuit of the field, “He’ll come and do our fields too. Next week, perhaps, or when he has time. It’s just courtesy mowing. ”

“But why is he using horses?”

“I suppose he’s conserving gasoline. There’s a war, you know, and most of the gasoline goes to the soldiers. Or maybe he just wants to exercise Salt and Pepper.”

Herman Walthier was Uncle John’s “hired man”, a farm manager actually, but the expression had not yet been invented, or was considered too grandiose for a shirt-tail relative. He was Swiss born, married to yet another Wadhams cousin. Both morose and volatile, he often swore at his employer’s children and nephews, saying frightening things like “Py golly! You poys better watch out!” We stayed well out of his way.

On this occasion he was quite cheerful. He waved from his seat on the mower. We waved back, then sat quietly on the granite wall as the mower clattered toward the far side of the field.

Grandma asked, “You see where he is mowing now? That’s where my grandfather had a terrible fright when he was your age. How old are you now?”

“I’m six, pretty soon I’ll be seven.”

“Oh well, perhaps he was ten. He would have been about ten when Uncle Jonathan married Miss Keeler. They lived in the house down there.”

“That’s Miss Striker’s house.”

“Yes, it is now, but in those long ago days it belonged to my great-great uncle Jonathan. He had just married Miss Keeler, his second wife. What? No, he didn’t have two wives. His first wife had died. It was quite common for women to die, in those old days.” 

She collected her thoughts and continued, “She was a pretty girl, they say, and kind, but not so sensible as his first wife. One day she ran out of molasses. She was upset about it, for she knew that wives were meant to keep track of molasses. Poor girl, all her neighbors up here on the Turnpike Road and all along the Post Road, were her husband’s brothers. And, of course, their wives—real wives, who wouldn’t have run out of molasses.”

Her voice quivered a little. I saw that she was laughing, although she made no sound. “Now it happened that my grandfather was visiting. He was just about your age, or perhaps nine or ten. She offered him ten cents to walk to the village and have the jug refilled. Now ten cents was a great fortune for a boy, so he understood that he was to keep quiet about it. He took her jug and set off, cutting across this field to go by the turnpike road, not knowing that the Billy-goat was loose. The goat began to chase him, and just as grandfather got to those rocks over there, he held up the stoneware jug. The goat crashed into it and fell over, insensible. What? Oh yes, of course, it broke the jug—so he went back to the house and got another. This time he went by the Post Road, as he ought to have done in the first place, and never said a word about it. But the next year, when all the brothers came with their scythes to mow they found the broken jug. Right away they guessed what had happened—so every year at mowing time they teased her about it, and even thirty years later when I was a little girl.”

“How could they guess?”

“Oh well, in those days neighbors knew everything. And really, there weren’t so many things that could explain a broken molasses jug in the middle of a field. Perhaps someone had seen him at the store, or walking along with the jar. They would have guessed.” She laughed again, silently.

“But what was so funny?”

She thought for a minute how to explain a joke whose iterations had been stretched to the breaking point nearly a century before. Nothing occurred to her so she said, “Well, perhaps it wasn’t so terribly funny. But the jar certainly cost more than the molasses. It must have been made at the Brooks Pottery, which was down at the other end of the Post Road. If we had it today we could sell it for fifty dollars.”

This was bad. Not only was the joke unfunny, but we seemed to have lost fifty dollars. “Well, what about the goat?” I asked.

“I’m sure he was fine, dear. You can’t hurt a goat.”

Dust motes gleamed in the sun. The horses stamped their feet while Herman gave directions to his helper, a fearsome derelict, part Indian I thought, plucked from the pages of Huckleberry Finn. The man nodded and began to rake the hay with vigorous strokes, stirring up the scent of goldenrod. Herman watched him dubiously, then flicked his reins and speaking to the team, said, “Go along, poys.”

They passed through the gate and down the road to Uncle John’s farm. Grandma started home but I lingered to watch the team. The helper watched too, his rake slowing in proportion to the distance between him and his boss. When the horses had passed beyond calling distance, he winked at me (a frightening wink, fraught with complicity) pulled a whiskey bottle from his overalls, and sat down to rest.

Turning to follow my grandmother, I thought I glimpsed my great great grandfather, a boy about my age, at the far margins of the hayfield, making a secret bargain with his aunt.[8]

As we walked home along the Turnpike Road, Grandma told me how her father, her uncles and their sons had worked on the roads with picks and shovels, oxen and horse teams. They did it between sowing and harvest. It was either grade the roads or pay the road tax. Sensible farmers paid their assessments in labor, and her grandfather, she said, was too shrewd to part with cash money.

I thought he was right.

I wondered what he had done with his ten cents.

---

[1] Guaranteed mathematically sound by the Physics Department at Princeton University. Anglo-Saxons have little truck with metaphysics, but dress your theory in equations, and we are as dogs unto a sausage, first a nip and then a gulp. The insidious authority of mathematics is such that quantum theory, and even the Everett Thesis (both as absurd as angels dancing on pins) somehow become plausible.

[2] Bicycle.

[3] She meant they had gone by train, i.e., Pullman cars.

[4] We rarely appreciate how close our calls have been. Suppose she hadn’t married? We’d really be hurting for a story in that case. 

[5] She had two brothers, both perfect in her eyes. The eldest (John) was a banker, high-minded and stiff collared. He was a Republican in politics, and frequently represented his fellow citizens at the General Assembly. In 1924, he had stirred up a minor rumpus as the “reform” candidate for Governor, but as he was the sort who would “rather be right than Governor,” nothing came of it. 

 

Her younger brother, Rob, (she usually called him “the Colonel”) had also been a paragon. A strikingly handsome man, as were most of the Wadhams men of her generation, he was a New York surgeon and professor of surgery. (More important to me and my brothers, he had commanded a mobile field hospital in France.  His cavalry saddle was still in the attic.) 

Alas for her husband (the original A. J. Barker) he was born to immigrant parents, in a state which was not Connecticut. He attended first and second grade in Maine, but when he and his family returned to England he stopped going to school. Apparently it wasn’t required—or perhaps the authorities had lost track of him. Much later, back in the States, he got a job tending the horse of a New Jersey doctor. His employer encouraged him to take the entrance exam at NYU Medical School. He graduated in the same class as Grandma’s brother, Rob (his brother-in-law to be.)

Rob greatly admired this astonishing achievement, but for Grandma, his accomplishments did not entirely cancel the deficiencies of his beginnings. Yes, he was “the Doctor”, and that was a good thing, but his family had not arrived in New England under sail. Nor was he a Congregationalist, stubbornly preferring the mildly papist rituals of the Episcopal church. 

[6] She survived her husband for many years. He had killed himself after a life of trivial, but reiterated frustrations. In 1902, any suicide was shameful, but his was so spectacular that the entire family was struck dumb with embarrassment. I never heard a whisper about it until decades later, and so it has no part in my youthful recollections.   

[7] She scarcely noticed us unless she needed to make a point. We vastly preferred her to our other grandmother who tended to fuss about us, and who expected to be kissed.

[8] Perhaps the first of many confidential transaction in his life. His meticulous discretion in matters of business came to be much admired by his neighbors. In due course they would elect him tax assessor, then tax collector, they choose him as executor of their Wills and Trustee of their trusts, and when he and his cousin set up a bank, they patronized it in preference to others. Finally, they elected him their representative in the State Senate.