Chapter 14
Base men being in love have then a nobility in
their natures more than is native to them.
their natures more than is native to them.
Shakespeare, Othello,
selected by Guy for the Barra Calendar
for February 14, Valentine’s Day
selected by Guy for the Barra Calendar
for February 14, Valentine’s Day
He woke me every morning at 7:00 a.m., and I knew if his hug was brief and preoccupied that he was in a distant place. I always awoke feeling cheerful, wondering, as Piglet put it, “What’s going to happen exciting today? ” But if Guy was enclosed in his own world, a helpless feeling overcame me almost before I’d opened my eyes. Suddenly the day was off to a very bad start.
“What’s the trouble, Guy?” I’d ask as I stirred our oatmeal on the cookstove. I knew I wasn’t going to get very far with this question, but he was so obviously unhappy that I pushed myself to ask it.
He’d continue to grab cereal spoons and bowls with the kind of concentrated energy that told me he wasn’t going to talk. By the time we sat down for breakfast I’d be fighting tears. Since Guy didn’t like to cause me unhappiness, he’d stammer out a few sentences. This would lead to more questions from me, and by this time I’d have moved to his lap, and we’d be hugging each other, me trying to understand, him choking on words, in tears himself. Then, “Our cereal is getting cold,” Guy would say. This meant that we had work to do that day, and I knew how he felt about falling behind. So I’d get up and move to my chair, feeling less cut off than when he had awakened me, though also feeling that too much remained unsaid.
On the worst days, if we were not able to right ourselves during the course of our morning’s work, we sat in silence over lunch out at our handmade table and bench under the sheltering branches of the Gabriel Birch. Without words, we picked up the peanut butter jar and the remains of the bread and headed for the house and our ten-minute nap. We lay side by side on the bed, our bare arms not quite touching under the blanket. When we got up I put the mail in my pack and left for the relief of a walk and a brief chat about gardens with Nancy at the post office. As I stumbled, head down, back up our steep hill my mind was still in disarray. I could turn around right now and hitchhike to New York City and happier days. I imagined myself out on the side of the road, standing in the gravel with my thumb out, arriving at my friend Annie Barry’s apartment in the East Village and feeling her warm welcome. I just wouldn’t show up at our cabin. It would get dark. I wondered what Guy would do then.
Guy was splitting wood as I regained our clearing. His back was to me, and he had ten pieces set up on his long chopping block inside the woodshed. I paused to watch as he went systematically down the row, splitting each one in half with a precise and mighty crack. He was absorbed in his work, whaling away on the rock maple, and I sensed this gave him some relief from the pressures of his own internal maelstrom. I said,“Hi, Guy.”
He spun around and smiled, a somewhat downturned smile, a little shamefaced, but his eyes held mine. He set down his splitting maul and extended an arm.“Moley,” he said.“Is that really you?”
When I dreamed about Guy, he was whirling in the center of a group of people I didn’t know, and who didn’t know me. He was talking, eyes flashing, hands carving points out of thin air. The others’ eyes were riveted on him. I held myself to one side. The group revolved past me, Guy in concentrated conversation with a woman who looked at him with adoring eyes. He didn’t see me. He didn’t glance in my direction.
I think I was afraid Guy would stop loving me if I demanded too much of him. I thought of him as strong. I didn’t see then his emotional instability, his brokenness. What I saw was a valiant struggle to come back from the death of one son and the uncertain death of another. That was the side he was showing, the only side he wanted people to see.
Guy hated to dream. He told me that he had nightmares about his sons, though he never gave me details. Still, I knew he was preoccupied with how his sons had died. Or, if Bill was alive, what had happened to him? He went back and forth about Bill. Had Johnny died in pain? He wondered about the last thoughts of both his sons, and in the next moment he would say,“But I don’t know if Bill is dead.”
The calendar quote for April 1, the day Guy had chosen to mark Johnny’s death, was from George Eliot’s Middlemarch:
Intense memory forces a man to own his blameworthy past. With memory set smarting like a reopened wound, a man’s past is not simply a dead history, an outworn preparation of the present; it is not a repeated error shaken loose from the life; it is a still quivering part of himself, bringing shudders and better flavors and the tinglings of a merited shame.
And what about his youngest son? Guy had set money aside for Jim’s college education before we moved to Barra. When Jim came to draw on this fund, tuitions had skyrocketed and Guy’s contribution was meager. The fact that he could not have foreseen this was, as Guy saw it, no reason to let himself off the hook. Later I would wonder: If Guy blamed himself on the practical matter of Jim’s education, which he could talk about, what kind of self-blame did he put himself through over Bill and Johnny?
Not until Guy himself was dead did I come to see that he needed to feel the pain, to keep it throbbing and alive. Pushing his pain to the limit and beyond was a self-flagellation for transgressions he could neither atone for nor forgive himself. For January 16, Guy chose a quote from T. E. Lawrence’s Revolt in the Desert: “There can be no rest-houses for revolt; no dividend of joy paid out. Its spirit is accretive, to endure as far as the senses endure, and to use each advance as base for . . . deeper privation, sharper pain.”
A couple of things happened to help me.
First, Guy kept on telling me that I had nothing to do with his moods. It wasn’t me, he said. It wasn’t about me; it wasn’t my fault. It wasn’t anything I had done. I wasn’t making the problem for him. It took years, but finally I let that sink in.
And second, by 1983, two years after Johnny’s death, I woke up to the fact that my parents needed me more than once a year. In the late 1970s my mother had gone off the road on her way back from a cocktail party and ended up in the hospital. Guy and I came down to be with my father and help my mother when she got home, and it was on that visit that I discovered she hid her liquor in the clothes basket and stashed her empties in the dryer.
Since Johnny’s death, I had been concerned that my parents’ problems would only add to Guy’s difficulties. I thought he would regard them as another troublesome interference to the smooth running of his daily life. But the truth was that he could handle the shameful—and to me terrifying—drama of my parents’ alcoholism much better than I could. The Christmas when we arrived on their doorstep to be welcomed by my father falling down the stairs didn’t put Guy off. Nor did the scenes at the family dinner table, my father’s long pauses filled in by my mother’s neon-bright conversation as the great man slid into slurry inarticulation, his interior castle now fallen into ruins. “I’m just sorry I only caught flashes of that superb mind everyone talks about, Laura,” Guy said.
But my own coming to grips with my parents’ problems gave me something to focus on other than Guy. I needed his support; Guy saw this, and it no doubt helped to pull him out of himself. My parents liked him. I had known that from the beginning. Guy had a firsthand knowledge of alcoholism, so theirs was familiar ground. Most important to me, the scary, emotionally charged territory of my family had nothing to do with him. He couldn’t blame himself for this.
I stepped up my trips to Lawrenceville to every three or four months. This gave us a break from each other. I was aware that I needed the break from Guy, but I didn’t want to admit it. Thinking of it as a break implied there was something I needed to get away from. This was a wayward thought, tainted with disloyalty. I sensed on some unadmittable level that Guy wanted to keep the cracks plastered, so this was what I wanted too. This allowed no room for thoughts about taking a break from Guy.
If it was spring, something was happening that I didn’t want to miss, like the progress of the snowmelt or the first crocuses. If it was summer, I would return, only gone a week, to find the squashes filling in the garden with their tangle of sturdy, tube-like vines. If it was winter, Guy had my snowshoes in the car when he picked me up at the bus station, along with my windpants and the ice ax I used as a walking stick. On the drive back he’d tell me about the flock of chickadees that greeted him at the entrance to the woods when he went down for water every morning. “They always asked me: When is Laura coming home?” he said, with a glance at me from where he sat so solid in the driver’s seat, knobby hands on the wheel.
Guy parked in the winter spot and turned off the headlights. I was back in the kind of darkness that revealed the stars. The air felt cold, fresh, and clean against my face. Such a contrast to New Jersey. We strapped on our snowshoes and mushed the mile home, unable to stop talking.
As we crossed into the clearing, I’d see our cabin sitting there, secure and bathed in moonlight. I opened the door. “The house smells so good,” I always said as I breathed in the wood smoke, the dill and basil I’d dried that fall, the unnumbered loaves of bread. I could only smell this when I’d been away. I was home.
Often my trips allowed Guy to accomplish some special task, like cleaning out the cellar or building a new set of shelves. Or reorganizing the books, relocating the references to a handy spot near our table. Or putting up a new display of pictures sent by friends of a recent climb in the special frame he’d built from our wood.
I always found something. Some unexpected surprise he had kept a secret until I walked in the door. “Your trips away give me the chance to do these things for you, Laura,” he said.
On one of my visits to Lawrenceville, three years after Johnny’s death, I decided to talk with an old family friend, Sheila Morgan, who was a therapist. Her husband had taught in my father’s English Department, and Sheila had known me from my childhood. I wanted to tell Sheila—a professional, yet a friend—about Guy losing his sons and how his deep despair was affecting me.
“Take a walk. Visit a friend,” Sheila said. She helped me to see that I could best help Guy by taking care of myself.
I was already doing this with my afternoon mail runs and brief chats with Nancy at the post office. Just walking to the village brought me back to myself. Village life proceeded along, winter or summer, rain or shine, with a sweet monotony I found reassuring. I felt the contrast with my own life, where I maintained a twenty-four-hour vigil, silently checking in with Guy, feeling a surge of relief when he was fine, and something close to despair when his world was awry. On these walks out with the mail I could let down my guard. As I reentered our clearing I knew just by the way Guy was splitting wood—whether the sound was clean, even, and methodical or carried a frantic, jerky energy—how he was.
I never mentioned my half-hour talk with Sheila to Guy. For that brief time in Lawrenceville I had stepped off the Barra campus. A few times after Johnny had died I asked Guy if he wanted to talk to a therapist, but he remained dead set against seeking professional help. Perhaps this had to do with his unfortunate experience as a teenager with the psychoanalysts, but Guy’s feelings on this subject—that therapy would do him no good whatsoever—never wavered. Not telling Guy about my talk with Sheila felt enormously disloyal. I had put myself in the position of keeping a secret. But I preferred not telling to telling him. I was sure he would disapprove, perhaps heap scorn on what I had done. It would have been his view that I had shown weakness by seeking outside help. Moral weakness. I couldn’t reveal to Guy that I didn’t have the strength of character to handle my problems single-handedly. He would have been only too aware that he was the source of those problems. I couldn’t risk putting him in the painful position of thinking he’d become such a problem for me that I needed to seek professional help. Every day since Johnny’s death I’d seen the evidence of Guy’s mental discipline. I knew the strength of will it had taken to overcome his drinking problem. By sneaking off to a therapist, I had broken some code that had hardened into unstated law between us. The last thing I could do, because his reaction was literally too terrifying to think about, was tell him what I had done.
Guy wrote in his memoir, “If there is one strain in my make-up that has always been uppermost, it is my passionate insistence on my own (and anyone’s, if they want it) individuality. I will not be placed in any pigeonholes.” As Guy saw it, doctors of the mind turned you into a “type” and pasted on a label that placed you in a category, a box. But it went deeper. Guy could explore with no one the painful place within. He was unwilling to reveal the source of his shame and self-blame. Yet he was aware of how self-destructive this was. He knew that by holding tight to his worst secret thoughts he was in fact piling on more shame and digging deeper into the dunghill of blame. No wonder I sensed so strongly that he could not have stood to hear about my conversation with a therapist. This was a mirror he didn’t want to look into. But if I had been able to hold it up, if I’d been able to be honest and tell him, what might have happened then?
Jim and his wife Kathleen came to visit us in mid-October 1994. We hadn’t seen them since attending their wedding in Colorado nine years earlier. There had been little correspondence since then, and in fact very little contact between father and son. I knew this distressed Guy. Part of Guy’s wedding present had been money to hire a professional photographer for the wedding. He had never seen the pictures.
Although Guy saw his first wife at Jim’s wedding, he had had almost no other contact with Emily after the divorce—not over whether to look for Bill, or over Johnny when it became clear he was in an unstable mental state. Guy made a point after Jim’s wedding of putting something in the mail to him about once a month. He rarely heard back, and after a while his notes decreased to a handful of times a year. Jim suggested that his father phone because he didn’t like to write letters. Guy phoned a few times when we were staying overnight with friends and there was access to a phone. He found these conversations difficult. So Jim wouldn’t write letters, and Guy didn’t like to use the telephone. But Jim and Kathleen did finally come to visit in 1994.
They had brought the wedding pictures, and we spent all that first afternoon looking at them, as well as showing Jim and Kathleen our pictures, especially albums Guy had made of the Waterman family and taken down to the big family reunion held at his sister Bobbie’s house in Connecticut in 1989. Jim hadn’t come to that, and there had been much speculation as to why. Guy had been hoping up to the last moment that Jim would show up.
But at Barra in mid-October of 1994, everyone was trying to let bygones be bygones and just enjoy this visit. The four of us picked apples, walking up into the part of our land we called The Highlands, where we had three or four big old apple trees that could always be counted on to produce good cooking apples. Over the next few days Kathleen and I made over four dozen quarts of applesauce.
Jim and Guy worked on Twin Firs Camp. Jim had been a carpenter for six or seven years after he moved to Colorado and before he went to college. At supper Guy told Kathleen and me how Jim had figured out a way to get a key supporting log in place. Guy’s face was radiant. Jim looked pleased too. I felt a surge of relief. There was a lot riding on this visit.
The last morning Jim and Guy talked about John and Bill, which they never had done before. Guy had not seen Jim since Johnny’s death in 1981 except at Jim’s wedding in 1985. They talked about early family life, when all the boys were small. Kathleen and I listened, taking turns grinding apple pulp through my Foley food mill.
They left later that afternoon.
I wrote in my journal after they had gone: “Hard to describe the last two days, but enough to say this visit was GOOD for G + J, for me, for K, for all of us together.”
“I’m glad you and Jim could talk,” I said to Guy as I started the woodstove for supper.
Guy began pacing, nearly sprinting back and forth across the cabin, and I knew something was very wrong. “The other two must have felt the same. Oh, God, it’s worse than I thought.”
“Felt the same . . . ?” What had I missed?
“The hikes and the climbing. The part I thought I’d done right.”
Then I remembered: Jim had said that he felt the only way he could have a relationship with his father was to go hiking and climbing with him.
“I let people down. Don’t count on me.” Guy was shouting, waving his arms.“I let everyone down.”
He ran to the piano and threw himself into heart-wrenching blues. I worked on the potatoes, tears leaking onto the cutting board. I had seen it all wrong. I had so much wanted this to be a happy reunion of father and son that I had made it be that. I had blotted out the twinge I felt when I picked up that their conversation had turned hard. Guy’s voice had been clipped and metallic as he kept himself, for better or worse, from saying the things he was thinking—what he had just told me. Jim’s voice pushing, emphasizing, growing stronger, making his points clear, in his logical, lawyerlike tone.
They never saw each other again.
My brother Tom also made infrequent visits to Barra. After graduating from Williams College, he had moved back into his old room in our parents’ house. He found a job in nearby Princeton working with a computer. He took me to meet this machine he was spending most of his waking hours with one weekend when I came out from New York. It occupied one windowless room and was as large as a factory boiler.As we circled it my brother explained how it worked. I saw only its blinking red, yellow, and blue bars, the pinpoints of light, but Tommy saw into the potential and the mystery—he was an acolyte at the altar. He had wanted to go to Princeton and study engineering, but Dad had allowed him to apply to only one college, Williams, his own alma mater. For the first two years Tommy got by on what he had already learned at the Lawrenceville School. The last two years he spent checked out with alcohol.
His job with the fledgling computer company couldn’t save him. The police picked him up for drunk driving, and my brother lost his license for two years. He spent some time on Payne-Whitney’s psychiatric ward in New York, and when I went to visit him he was wearing his red plaid bathrobe, which I remembered from home. He introduced me to his new friend, an older, bald guy with pale, fleshy arms who didn’t talk above a whisper. The doors were locked, just as Guy had said. A month after Tommy got out he came to visit me in New York and downed my best bottle of Cutty Sark when I was at work.
But back home one evening he overheard my mother talking on the telephone to a friend about her husband’s decision to join Alcoholics Anonymous. My brother made the decision to do the same. As he put it to me later,“I didn’t want to end up like Dad.”
He pulled his life together and moved out of his old bedroom to an apartment in Princeton. Then, in the late 1970s, he jumped to southern California, where he worked with computers for the University of California for most of the next twenty years.
“Did you love Dad?” I asked him after our father was dead.
“No,” he said.“I respected him, but Dad scared me.”
Tommy had long periods of sobriety, he told me, then would nearly lose his job, or lose it and be granted time out to get himself together again.
After my father died in 1985 and I had helped my mother move to a retirement home in the New Hampshire town near where we had spent many summers, Tom and I had taken to meeting there about twice a year. It was easier for both of us. It was easier for Guy.
When Tommy visited us at Barra he arrived with his medications, vitamins, tinctures, ointments, and salves—and more every visit—which he spread out on the shelves in our guest quarters. On one of these visits Guy said, “I want you to see something, Laura,” and he took me around to look at the pharmacy. “Your brother told me one entire bag was filled with this,” he said, gesturing toward the shelves. This self-help stuff of my brother’s I knew Guy lumped in the same category as therapists.
Over supper Tommy gave us the details of what he was doing for his baldness. He had spent a lot of money. I knew Guy was disgusted by this conversation. Guy’s distaste for makeup on women amounted to phobia. My experiment with some fancy three-step face cream a New York friend had sent me precipitated the most serious disagreement we ever had because I refused to give in. But I finally did. I ended up mailing back the cream.
“In southern California you can fix anything you don’t like about how you look, if you’re willing to spend money,” Tommy said.
Guy didn’t reply to that. I managed a weak smile, but I wished Tommy would just stop talking about this. It was making Guy uncomfortable. I imagined him thinking that Tommy’s “pharmacy” and self-help schemes were a waste of money, showed a distortion of values, and implied a lack of willpower and mental and moral fiber and that talking about this at Barra was just plain inappropriate.
Tommy moved off baldness and onto astrology, which he treated as a serious science. Guy pooh-poohed planting by the phases of the moon and dismissed the age-old connection of late frosts with the full moon. None of this had anything to do with astrology, but astrology was in the same vague, speculative ballpark. Guy asked a few questions, though I heard in his tone that he thought Tommy was wasting his time.Astrology was incapable of solving anyone’s problems, and Guy would rather be out splitting wood.
Tommy changed the subject and asked Guy to give him a list of the top ten classics. He wanted to improve his reading, he said. My heart rose at this, and Guy launched into talking about authors and titles, pulling out a three-by-five card to write things down. As Guy was talking Tommy reached a book down from the shelf and started thumbing through it, glancing up from the pages, then down again. Guy scribbled out a few more titles and tossed the card over to my brother, who reshelved the book with a guilty look.
On the first morning of one of Tommy’s visits, Guy woke me and said, “I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
“About what?” I was alarmed. He sounded so desperate.
“Tommy came in at 5:30 and asked for a cup of coffee.” I knew what this meant. Guy would have had to start the cookstove and get water boiling—a half-hour interruption of his work.
“Then,” Guy went on in the same at-wit’s-end tone, “after the fire had died out, he wanted hot water for shaving.” He looked at me as if Tommy had moved in and this was going to go on forever.
I had heard their voices. Guy had perhaps sounded a little too controlled, not relaxed, but I had heard nothing alarming. Nothing that had prevented me from dozing off again. Now I realized that Guy’s morning had been completely disrupted—all the correspondence or book work he had planned didn’t get done—because of my demanding brother. Somehow I felt responsible for this. I should have been able to prevent this.
When Tommy brought up memories from our childhood—the Green Avenue Bulletin, for instance, the newspaper he and his friend Martin put together by riding their bikes around the neighborhood ferreting out stories, such as old Mrs. Satterswaite getting bitten by her cat—I kept thinking that these conversations were probably boring Guy. I saw how I was acting toward my brother and felt disloyal and mean.Yet Guy’s mental comfort came first; I would do whatever it took to ensure his peace of mind, even if it meant cutting myself off from my brother.
So my brother and I began meeting at my mother’s retirement home in southern New Hampshire. I hoped we would find again the easy pleasure in each other’s company that we had enjoyed as children when we played on the Oriental rug in our parents’ living room, constructing card houses as high as skyscrapers while The Magic Flute blasted out of our father’s hi-fi system. But too much had changed for Tommy, and though I did not see it, I had aligned myself with Guy.
The fall after our mother died, in 1997, my brother returned to Barra for a visit.
His letters preceding this event had told us he was taking early retirement. He didn’t have anything lined up—maybe he’d take a trip, he didn’t know—but he hated his situation at work.
“I don’t understand what’s going on,” I said to Guy. Tommy’s letters were often full of how much he liked his job.
The other news was that he’d just been handed a cancer diagnosis.
When he arrived I could see that he wasn’t doing well at all. He had been putting on weight for the last several years. His face was puffy. He would fall silent, as if it was just too much effort to speak.
Our twin cousins had joined us for this visit, and immediately they picked up that Tommy was in bad shape. I asked him about his cancer. Well, he’d probably made it sound worse than it was. It was slow-growing.
“Awful, Tommy,” someone said. “The radiation. Losing your hair.” His hand shot up to his hair that he’d spent a fortune on. He sent me a stricken look.
The last evening he broke down in the restaurant. I had Guy, he said, the twins had each other, and he had no one. “I’m concerned for my future,” he sobbed into his hands.
We all hastened to assure him we loved him. We encouraged him to seek help. He said he’d tried that route too many times. Most of his life. Nothing helped.
He left the next day.
I wrote him right away. I wanted to know if he’d made it back to California. I wanted him to know I was thinking of him.
He forgot my birthday later that month, and that was a very bad sign.
Ten days after that a neighbor walked in with a message for me to call the state police. They told me that my brother had been found on the floor of his condo, dead a week. The police asked if he’d had an alcohol problem. “Yes,” I said.
“There was strong evidence he’d been drinking,” they informed me.