We cleaned up for dinner. Somehow got it together. Took it easy on the whiskey. Prepared ourselves. It was a mild afternoon. No rain. Tess held onto my arm. Kept herself tight to me. I loved this always, but in particular then—for the surprise of it, for the pressure of her body against mine, the illusion of power it provided me. The illusion that I might protect her.
I think of us many years later, all of this long over, walking through Pioneer Square toward Elliott Bay, Tess holding onto me in just the same way—her fingers on my bicep, keeping me close. I remember pulling the door open for her, pressing my palm against the small of her back, guiding her over the threshold into that crowded haven of squeaking floors and crammed shelves.
What of these days? These brief moments of tradition and chivalry? Only that I liked them, and that they were not standard. I suppose that’s all. That I liked when she inclined her head and pressed her cheek against my shoulder. That there were moments when we moved through the world as that kind of pair. Of tradition. Man and woman. Protector and protected. That I loved her in this way too.
That over time we were many different things.
Anyway, this day in White Pine, we were descending the hill, Tess holding onto my right arm, and Seymour to my left. All of us sober. Or mostly sober.
We cross out of shade, out of the trees where the road flattens and the promenade becomes clear. We are stepping into sunlight and it is one of those moments impossible to extricate from the season itself and all its banalities of hope and rebirth. What can I do? Spring had sprung, buds were green, we were happy, and as my father would say, must have said, Put your hand out the window, you can feel it, the warm current of summer.
Out on the promenade we met him and Hank and then all five of us went down to the beach and walked it to the far rocks. Walked it to the meetinghouse. We sat in silence and contemplation while the sunlight cut through the glass and the waves rolled in.
There were no great revelations, I’m afraid. None beyond the simple pleasure of sitting with those four people. Tess’s thigh against mine, Seymour’s great shoulder bumping me, my father down the pew and, beyond, Hank’s white hair in and out of view.
But all this peace and simple pleasure, this silence and contemplation, did not change our course. It occurred to me, yes, and perhaps I even prayed for it then, but in the end, our hour together out on the rock on that fine day was only prayer before battle.
Afterwards we returned in a new formation. My father and Seymour far ahead, Hank and Tess and me behind. We came to my father’s house, the garden planted for spring. Inside, the table was already set. The living room smelled of ocean and frying onions.
There were bottles of his good Washington wine on the table. There was green salad and garlic bread and a tray of lasagna on the bar. Once everyone had been served we took our seats and my father stood.
“To families,” he said, “new and old and in between.”
When I leaned across Seymour, extending my glass toward my father’s, he said, “In the eye, Joe, in the eye,” and when I looked up, I felt a shock, a shot of pain or sadness or anger. Or love. I’m not sure. It must be a common experience. You must know it, must have felt it in the course of your life, that unsettling, visceral response, that distinct emotion we feel upon looking directly into our parents’ eyes. What is it exactly? I suppose it must vary. We must each of us see many things, many combinations—longing, love, disappointment, need, frustration, possession. Is there not some universal experience? Do the eyes of all parents contain some basic and common ingredient? I believe they do. I believe they must. At least when they’re turned directly on us, when they come in perfect contact with our own. Well, whatever the case, time slowed, and there were my father’s soft eyes full of love and warning, fear and reproach.
But this is all fabrication, an illusion, a trick. An eye is an eye is an eye.
And we were off. Seymour and my father laughing together, and Hank with his toothy cowboy grin, and I thought, Why not? Why not love him, too? Let my father be happy, grant him his new friend, his new pleasures, his new routines, his church that is not a church, his walks without me along the beach, his beatific smiles and shining eyes.
So peace was made official without war having ever been declared.
I was insatiable that night. I ate and ate. All three of us did. We’d been so cold all the time, half-starved, living on whiskey and peanuts, and here was hot food and a safe room.
I went outside to get some wood from the pile.
I looked in at the glow of our father’s home and I thought of you, Claire.
I thought of us at our table in Capitol Hill when we were kids, when Mom was a nurse and Dad was a carpenter. Outside, listening to the ocean, the sounds of Dad’s new life, our new life, and I could feel you. Can now. First your left arm around my shoulder while you dug your fork into my piece of pie. Then the way you smelled as a kid, which was the smell of your bedroom, which became the feeling of the floor where we used to play, the cream carpet and the lines we drew through it with our thumbs to create borders for battles, circles for marbles. And then I began to feel you not as a physical thing, but as a tone, the way all the absent exist within me.
And there was Mom too, laughing, and she was saying, “Are you crazy? Are you fucking crazy?”
I don’t know why. There is no secret meaning. It was one of those flashes. Another clipped from the reel. She is at the table leaning forward over her plate, shaking her head, looking right at someone, and she is laughing so hard, saying, “Are you crazy? Are you fucking crazy?” Then she too became tone, not the one I’d been carrying with me in White Pine, not the frozen milk color, not the unoiled metallic sound, not the smell of industrial floor cleaner, but the old one, the good one I took with me to school, the orange moon, the match light, the coffee, the gasoline.
I stood out there with my former family, waiting, drunk, watching the two worlds, cradling a stack of split logs in my arms until I heard my name and I came back. I built the fire up and we all moved over from the table to the couches and the brown corduroy chair and the worn-out rag rug. We finished off the wine, Hank revealed a bottle of scotch and everyone cheered.
“I guess you’re not much a Quaker, after all,” I said to him because I couldn’t help myself, because when I drink I’m no good, or wasn’t, or because I was still angry, or because I was still a child, or for some other reason I can’t explain or even understand.
Stupid for so many reasons, not least of which is that plenty of Quakers drink to their hearts’ content.
Anyway and as always back to the flow of time, and its dull markers: action and event. To the floor of my father’s house one warm spring evening in White Pine, Washington, where rape was in the news, and Anna Young flew through the trees while her father hurled his wife against kitchen walls.
“Leave it, Joe,” Tess said. So I did. I relented, gave Hank a break, and the band played on and the scotch was poured and I rested my head in her lap and listened to the ghosts.
They were everywhere that night. Singing and whispering from the branches, from the blood in Tess’s thigh, from the fire, from my father’s hands, which moved above me, from the rug beneath my back, from the floor lamps transplanted from my childhood to that foreign town no longer foreign.
And all night my father’s eyes appeared like entities separate from the man himself, singing: Do not debase yourself, Joseph March. Do not give in. Do not break.
Or they were only the blurred eyes of a drunken man, with no message, no meaning at all. But I will tell you this: Late in that cool night, we sat on the front step together and my father said, “I hope that you are smarter. I hope that you are gentler.”
And what he meant was, more gentle than your mother, more gentle than my wife.
“How do you know?” I asked. “What we’re planning.”
“Seymour,” he said.
He put his arm around me. “You think I don’t know what it is, Joe? You think you two are the only people who understand what it’s like to want to destroy someone, something?”
By two, he meant my mother and me.
“No,” I said, though at the time I think the answer was, yes.
“I’m asking you. I’m saying please, Joe.”
He was holding me too tightly. His hand on my shoulder. As so often, I wish I could tell you that it was a moment of tenderness and change. But what I wanted was for him to let me go.
The Royall Lyme, his wishes, his strong fingers, they all made me want to run. Made me want to fight. His admonitions, his pleadings. They made me want to go to war, not away from it. I do not know why. I do not know why I wasn’t gentler, why my father’s soft voice instilled in me a desire for violence and destruction. For the opposite of what he asked. I don’t know why that is.
Was it really so simple as an adolescent instinct for rebellion?
Before we went back inside, he said, “I love you, Joe. I love you very much.”
And I said, “I love you too, Dad.”
And I did love him. In spite of it all. In spite of the anger he caused me. In spite of the claustrophobia. In spite of knowing I would do precisely what he did not want.
If ever there’d been a doubt, now I was sure.
But I told him I loved him, and it was the truth.