13

AS A BOY, I was fascinated by automobiles and longed one day to own a Rolls-Royce. Eventually I did, secondhand. I bought it in 1950 on Long Island from a fellow who collected all the fabled cars — Rolls, Isotta-Fraschini, Hispano-Suiza, Invicta, Lagonda and Bugatti — and lay in wait for eccentrics like me. My car had been the Rolls exhibited at the New York World's Fair, a jet black sedanca de ville with a price tag of thirty-six thousand dollars in 1939. It figured in a novel I wrote about a ruined man's search for perfection.

As a boy I could identify each make far up the road, long before it reached the ranch house where I lived with my mother and stepfather. I knew by heart the boxy outlines of the Essex and the Hudson, the swift profile of the Auburn, the horse-collar shape of the Franklin's radiator, and I knew that radiator was false, since the Franklin was air-cooled. The insignias on the radiator shells of almost every make were as marvelous to me as coats-of-arms. The Packard and the Pierce-Arrow were so obviously grand and expensive that the makers saw no need to place any insignia at all on the cars to identify them; I knew the Packard by the shape of the radiator and the Pierce by the headlights set into the fenders — not very difficult, I admit. I admired a rangy young rancher who drove a Stutz and who went broke some years later in the Depression. I think my sensible stepfather could have foreseen that, and that it was rangy young ranchers who drove Stutzes, so to speak, who had caused the Depression.

I did not expect my grandmother the Sheep Queen to own anything other than that old gray Dodge sedan. Impressive though she might be, she was, after all a woman. A woman did not feel as men did about the internal combustion engine, were not concerned with wheelbase and torque. She cared only to get from one place to the other, and in what she got there was of no moment. But I was puzzled that my stepfather, who could afford anything, drove only a Hudson.

I thought my mother who dressed as she did and walked as she did deserved a more elegant conveyance, for I thought automobiles reflected their drivers, and what a Hudson reflected was not flattering. A Hudson was neither one thing nor the other; the best that could be said of Hudsons was that bootleggers used them to run booze down from Canada. I put my stepfather's owning a Hudson down to his lack of imagination. I know now that he felt himself so aloof from rangy young ranchers that he had no need for their status symbols and thought of them as “boobs,” a word he sometimes called those who lurched carelessly through life.

My own father I scarcely knew except through letters and the posed photographs my mother kept a secret in the bottom drawer of her dressing table, a piece of furniture so feminine there was no possibility that my stepfather would approach it. It would never have occurred to him that anybody would hide anything from him.

Late one summer when I was twelve, my father wrote me on heavy paper in that distinguished hand of his that he was coming to visit, that he was driving up from California, and that he was driving a Roamer automobile. At the word “Roamer” I felt a shock of pride, for I knew that the Roamer was an “assembled” car, that the engine was a Duesenberg and that the radiator shell was an exact copy of the Rolls radiator shell. How proud I was of my father — if one can be proud of an abstraction.

What drafts of emotion must have moved through that vast log house as the hour of my father's arrival approached — my stepfather had never met my father and would not wish to. Now my mother was to see once again the man whose pictures she kept in a drawer, once again she would face the man she had married in spite of her mother's objections.

I can see her now, standing before the fireplace in that log house, the fire burning behind her. It had been a cool summer and the wind was whistling down from Black Canyon. She smoked a cigarette. I see my stepfather sitting with his legs crossed, reading the Saturday Evening Post, a journal whose opinions were his. He was reading because it was Sunday and he was not required anywhere else. Out in the bunkhouse beside the long, low barn, the hired men washed clothes, shaved, nursed hangovers brought home from town the night before and read Western Story magazine and Captain Billy's Whiz Bang. They liked jokes about privies; they laughed at the traveling salesman and the farmer's daughter.

I watched for the dust down the road at the top of a rise where any approaching car was first visible, where each morning the stage — at first a Lozier and later on a Cadillac — appeared carrying a passenger or two and the mail for Lemhi County across the hill, for by now the little train ran only once a week.

And then, there it was, there was the dust like smoke at the top of the rise, and out of it appeared my father in his Roamer. A few minutes later the Roamer glided into the driveway and stopped.

My father wore a tweed cap of the sort I'd seen on Englishmen in the movies, and a sleeveless sweater of tomato red, such a color as I'd never before seen on a man. From the car he turned on us a great smile as we stood on the porch. He leaped out of the Roamer without bothering to open the door and bounded up the steps. Douglas Fairbanks couldn't have equaled it. He shot out his hand to my stepfather as if in victory.

And then, “Tom, Tom,” he murmured. “It's been so long.”

So long? It had been six years since my mother had remarried and I was left with my father's mother in Seattle while my mother went on her honeymoon. There in Seattle my father appeared one morning to astonish me by squatting before me with lather on his upper lip carefully shaped to resemble a mustache. He pronounced “been” “bean” and he said “agane” for “again.” Somewhere along the line he had become an anglophile, maybe because of Shakespeare of whom he often spoke in his letters to me in connection with his amateur theatricals. To him, a person did not age, no: “The shadows lengthened.” A person, to him, was not happy or unhappy. Rather, a person attained “Olympian heights” or was sunk in “Stygian depths.”

Now on the porch he rested his hand on my shoulder. “And Beth, dear Beth.” He stepped back to survey my mother as if she were a painting that must be seen from the correct perspective. He slowly shook his head at the wonder of her. “And Charlie, Charlie.”

We went on inside after some awkwardness about who would open the door and who would step inside first.

“Won't you sit down, Ben,” my mother said as women have said since Eden, not so much to welcome as to relieve a situation. Seated people are easier to manage; they have relinquished a dangerous mobility. Now came tentative dispersals towards chairs and the couch that had a Navajo blanket draped over the back of it, part of a decorating scheme that included similarly patterned rugs on the floor, a harking back to the fundamental West that was catholic enough to include Indian themes of both north and south and the stuffed heads of mild-eyed deer and a stern buffalo, all victims of man's bloodlust and cunning. Since this scene had not been rehearsed, and since seating arrangements tend to be critical, the question of who would sit first and where was prominent: for when, where, and in what people will sit appears to be of atavistic concern and explains the protocol at lodge picnics, on occasions of state and in the parlor car.

My mother solved the problem by sitting down first, and in a chair that appeared to have been fashioned by a maker of snow-shoes of bent, varnished wood and rawhide thongs. Then my father, as guest, sat on the couch, first hesitating as if he meant to play host. I sat beside him, grateful that he had not committed the gaffe of sitting in the Morris chair whose back had been adjusted to my stepfather's lineaments and had been shipped all the way from Boston.

Conspicuous in that room was the absence of my stepfather's brother who rudely remained in his bedroom at the back of the first floor, lying (I knew) with his hands laced behind his head, lying on the brass bed whose twin had been abandoned by my stepfather at his marriage to my mother, lying there studying the imperfections in the plaster ceiling.

“Well,” my stepfather said from beside the Morris chair. He began many sentences with “Well,” as an announcement that he might speak further. “Well, how about a drink?”

My father's smile was warm. “Don't mind if I do, Charles,” he said, formal now. “A little libation seems to be in order.” He crossed his long legs easily and the gesture drew my attention to his two-toned shoes with wing tips. Like the impossible tomato-red sweater, they were one with the improbable California orange groves and make-believe horizons in movie lots. They were egregious and offensive in this land of sagebrush and reality in southwestern Montana.

The serving up of alcohol, like the carving of the roast, was thought in those days to be a man's prerogative, and both these duties were dispatched by my stepfather with the dedication and dignity of a priest. He now proceeded into the dining room where he removed glasses from the corner china closet. There he kept out of sight the only medicine, to my knowledge, on the ranch — a small bottle of oil of eucalyptus said to cure the common cold. Illness — even the common cold which spared not even my stepfather's family — was frowned upon, looked upon as a weakness, like a dependence on sex or religion which, if practiced, should be practiced in secret. The glasses he placed on a tray on the sideboard. Then he squatted before that huge, crouching mahogany piece; his crouching was somewhat at odds with his dignity. Behind a door was bourbon against the arrival of guests and cattle buyers in big cars who came to dicker for the cattle. It occurred to nobody that anybody but women or foreigners would want anything but bourbon, and anything in it but water.

“Thank you, Charlie,” my father said, casual again. He looked with approval at the glass and the liquid.

“Not a bit,” my stepfather said, and handed my mother her drink.

“Here's how,” my father said, and raised his glass, smiling as if at a memory, and then he raised his chin as if to the future. “Here's to old and new times.”

My mother and stepfather raised their glasses but not nearly so high, reasonably hesitant to commit themselves to either past or future. And then my mother glanced around the room. Her eyes, of necessity, rested at last on my father's tomato-red sweater. It shrieked for attention like a coat of mail or a vest of feathers. My mother cleared her throat, a little habit of hers. “What a beautiful color for a sweater, Ben,” she said.

My father looked down at the front of the sweater as if puzzled that it should draw attention. “Like it, Beth?”

“Yes,” she said. “Very much.”

“Charlie?” my father said.

I believe my stepfather was dumbfounded that anyone would require his opinion of any article of clothing, let alone that worn by his wife's divorced husband and a piece of so impudent a color.

“Yes, that's some sweater,” he said.

Now my father stood suddenly and tall. In a striking gesture he skinned off the sweater and tossed it to my stepfather who found himself with the thing in his lap, like knitting. It covered his hands. When he freed his hands of it, it moved like a living thing and clung like a leech. I think he had never in his life considered wearing another's clothing — even in an emergency, even after it had been laundered. You might as well have expected him to borrow another man's name, as I had borrowed his. But now, with my father in that room, I felt I had once again my father's name, Burton. My father's great gray car waited outside before the high, sagebrushed hill that shut out the sun long after the rest of the world was awash with light — that great car, that instrument of my pride, that machine whose swift lines suggested instant flight.

My mother glanced away from the sweater that colored and troubled the air around it. “How long can you stay, Ben?”

“Not more than an hour, I'm afraid,” my father said.

I felt relief descending upon her. “Only an hour, Ben?”

My father chuckled. “Yes, I thought Tom and I might drive over the hill and visit his grandparents. How are Thomas and Emma, Beth?”

“They're both well, Ben,” my mother said. “Are they expecting you?”

My father chuckled again. “I thought it might be a lot of fun to surprise them.”

I had caught a note of anxiety in my mother's voice. I knew that the moment we left for Idaho she was going to go to the telephone. This might not be a surprise that would be fun for my grandmother. I had never once heard her mention my father.

“So, then,” my father said when an hour was up, and he rose slowly as if reluctantly.

My stepfather largely depended on the weather for conversation. He saw change in the shape of clouds, in the shifting winds, in the smell of moisture. He was looked upon as something of a prophet; neighboring ranchers sometimes called him on the telephone to ask what he thought — should they plan a camping trip? Should they start to mow their hay, take a chance on driving into town?

“Looks like rain,” he said now, and turned to my father. “I expect you've got your chains with you.” I felt he was deliberately avoiding naming my father either Ben or Burton.

“Chains, yes,” my father said, and made an easy openhanded gesture towards the car out the window. “But we won't need 'em. That machine out there has four speeds forward. In first gear it gets right down there and digs.”

Four forward speeds! My heart leaped. Who but my father would own a car with four forward speeds? And who but he would speak of “first” instead of “low”?

“Chains are a good idea,” my mother said, and she hugged herself briefly as if she'd felt a chill. “Charlie's a wonderful driver, just a splendid driver. I hate slick roads. I'd rather get out and walk. It's so easy to slip off.” Skillful as she was with horses, she had never come to terms with automobiles; when she drove, she frowned, and seemed to listen for trouble.

“Now, Beth,” my father said, “don't you worry your pretty head. So now if you'd get a few things of Tom's together.” She rose and my stepfather rose. “I'll deliver Tom back here in a few days after we've made our sentimental journey. I long to see those old mountains over there again, the peaks of my youth, you might say. And then I've got to get back to the land of sunshine. There's always business, you know. Always business, isn't there, Charles?”

“Always, always,” my stepfather said, and moved to the barometer on the wall to one side of the skin of a white wolf he himself had shot; the skin was hung head down; the head itself rested on a triangular shelf, built especially; the mouth was open, the teeth intact; a red plaster tongue had been fitted. My stepfather tapped the face of the barometer. “Dropping,” he announced.

My father spoke. “We'll be well over the hill before it drops more, won't we, Tom?”

I remember my mother's face as we pulled out of the driveway. She stood on the porch hugging her shoulders as women do who are cold or worried. So you see them standing when husbands are changing tires or are about to kindle fires that may get out of hand and burn everything up. My mother was of course torn between relief at my father's departure and concern for me. Already the thick black clouds were rising fast from behind Black Canyon. Then the lightning began to stalk down over the foothills; thunder bellowed up and down the valley. My stepfather had not only predicted rain; I felt he had caused it. The first fat drops plopped on the dust just ahead, each one a tiny explosion.

My father slowed and stopped the Roamer. “Guess we'd better put the top up, Tom.” I had so longed to hear my father speak my name. “You get over on the other side.”

He now wore a trench coat with all those flaps and buckles that set apart British officers in the First World War, a dashing, insouciant garment, a costume for those to whom death itself is but a trifle. The wind had risen and the skirts of the thing flapped and snapped. Only with difficulty did my father remove the canvas casing that covered the folded top. As he jerked at the A-shaped structure of the top itself, I realized at once that he had never approached this problem before. His long, thin hands that the kindly might have said resembled a surgeon's fumbled with the simple contraption. His face twisted with pain as he pinched a finger. Aware of my concern, he grinned. “It's nothing,” he said.

Under the folded top were the side curtains. These, perforated with metal-encircled eyes like buttonholes, fitted over grommets in the frame of the top. He had trouble twisting the ends of the grommets to secure the curtains, and I knew he had never before either put up the top or fitted the curtains and therefore that he had owned this car a very short time, and since it was at least three years old, that it was second- or maybe even thirdhand. He had never said it was not. Nor had he said that it was. We had been left to believe whatever we wished.

We were soaked in the fifteen minutes it took to get that top up and the curtains on.

I now asked my father the first question I had ever asked him. “Hadn't we better put the chains on?”

I knew what you did with chains. You laid them out in front of the rear wheels, rolled the car just on them, pulled the far length up over the wheel, and fastened them with two mean devices that were the devil if your hands were cold. Somehow they always got bent.

“Good thinking, Tom,” said my father, man to man. He went around to the rear of the car, opened the hatch that revealed the rumble seat. In those days that's where the tools and jack were kept, and the Weed chains.

However, there were no chains.

“The devil!” my father said. “Isn't that the devil!” There he stood, the rain running down his handsome face. For a moment his eyes were blank and a second spasm of pain touched his mouth. The wind was in the skirts of his trench coat, the beak of his British cap wilting. “I was certain they were there,” he said. “Well, we'll just have to give her a try.”

The ranch house was hardly out of sight around the hill when the Roamer slid headlong into the barrow pit. My father bit his lower lip and spun the wheels for a few minutes while the car moved ever deeper into the oily clay that packed itself into what remained of the treads on the tires and rendered them useless.

Then he leaned forward wearily and turned off the ignition and sat looking at his hands. The throbbing silence was pierced by the rain on the canvas top.

I said, “I'll go back and get Charlie.”

For the count of ten, I thought he was going to let me do it. My father the protector. “No,” he said at last. “That won't do. I'll go.”

I remained behind in the now-sloping seat of the disgraced Roamer for more than an hour looking at an early road map of the state of California where the oranges grew and Jackie Coogan acted in pictures and was rich and famous and he was exactly my age. Yes, in those days I, like my father before me, longed to be a movie star. I was stagestruck, but had neither my father's nor my mother's looks. Perhaps I simply longed for a life that was totally different. I didn't know as I sat in that sloping seat, the rain roaring on the canvas top, what I was or who I was or even what name was mine, but with chilling clarity I saw the scene back at the ranch house: my father's approaching the steps quite differently from the first time, when he had leaped at them like a fractious Thoroughbred. Now he would hope not to be seen approaching them.

Then he would be explaining that something had happened to the chains, that they had been stolen in California, some place he had stopped, where he had noticed a suspicious-looking man. He might tell a little story about the place.

Then my stepfather would be taking his battered old Stetson from the top of the bookshelf where he kept it in readiness along with his gloves and field glasses, and he would be reflecting that he had thought he had got rid of my father and me and now here was my father with hat — or rather cap — in hand requesting a team of horses to pull the God-damned car out of the ditch.

And my mother remembering old failures, rented rooms, discontinued utilities, old bad judgments, interested neighbors. A vase of withering flowers.

At last in the rear-view mirror I saw a disturbance, a team of bays that would be Dolly and Molly, hitched to a cart — no more than an axle with wheels and the single seat of an old Deering mowing machine. On that severe and minimal seat sat my stepfather, serene as Caesar in the pouring rain, and beside the cart my father trudged in his wing tips that were far from wings, his silly cap and foolish trench coat.

He stood quickly aside, his feet unsteady in the mud, while my stepfather deftly hooked the log chain to the rear bumper of the helpless Roamer. Roamer, indeed.

I saw, rather than heard, my stepfather speak, and my father nodded at once and got in behind the wheel of the car and rested his long, thin hands on that useless wheel. Dolly and Molly strained and slipped and then the car moved slowly like an awakened beast up and out of the ditch and silently my father and I were dragged backwards to the ranch where my mother waited with the bright bandeau about her forehead and her jewels on her fingers, the sapphires and diamonds.

Next morning after a haunted breakfast and the speech — especially my father's — in single syllables, my father and I took the G&P over the hill to the Sweringen Ranch. There the Sheep Queen — waited.

No. I could not in all conscience write my father about a woman who claimed to be his daughter. At my age I knew well enough what humiliation was, and anyway, I had no reason to believe he would tell the truth. Whatever part he had in the story, he would allow others to guess as he had allowed us to guess about the Roamer and even exactly what he did in “the land of sunshine.”