1.
A geological cleavage slices through North Carolina from south to north, with sand hills on the eastern side of the divide and red clay in the Piedmont to the west. My great-grandfather John Abner Thomas lived right on the divide, in the hamlet of Cameron, North Carolina, and he made his living from both sand and clay. During the spring and summer he grew broadleaf tobacco in the white sand, and during the fall and winter he laid red brick among the farms and villages around nearby Sanford, the self-proclaimed Brick Capital, USA, where brick factories still line the perimeter of the city. Abner’s own father had been a bricklayer, and he taught his son, my grandfather, to be a bricklayer as well. It was, you might say, red brick all the way down.
Abner had a double house, artfully shingled in a fish-scale pattern and painted white. You entered by the wraparound porch supported by six slim columns. There was a creaky swing for two on one side of the central door and a ceramic whiskey jug on the other, gray with pebbled salt glaze. If you touched the jug’s surface, it felt like the skin of an orange. The two front parlors—living room and dining room—were for receiving guests and for show. Between the parlors was a central hallway, known as a dogtrot, which connected the front rooms to an identical structure of two rooms in the back: the kitchen and the master bedroom. Behind the house were outbuildings built of rough-hewn pine logs streaked with black pitch as if by a child’s handwriting: a smokehouse, a barn for animals—pigs, cows, and a mule—and farther away, the tobacco barn for curing tobacco.
Above the front portion of the house was an attic where my mother and her two sisters, Nancy and Velma May (known as Punk), and her two brothers, Alec and John Wesley, played when they visited on Sundays. There was a chest up there filled with old dresses and suits. My mother and her sisters would pull out the dresses and try them on. Then they would dance around the attic, taking turns twirling an old umbrella like a parasol—it was the only umbrella my mother had ever seen.
When we visited my great-grandfather Abner, when he was slowly dying from diabetes, he never left his bed. Both of his legs had been amputated by then, and the rest of him, truncated, lay hidden under thick dark blankets. I was only five or six at the time, but I can still remember the dark word gangrene filling the room like a suffocating smell. For me, the word still has the thick and cloying odor of tobacco leaves drying in the pitch-streaked barn.
2.
My mother’s father, Alexander Raymond Thomas, gave up the tobacco side of the business to concentrate on brick. He attended a vocational school not far from home and learned to build the great brick ovens in which bricks are fired in Sanford and elsewhere. He traveled as far as Texas to lay these ovens, kilns made of bricks for making more bricks. Late in his life, he teamed up with my dashing uncle Alec, whom he had taught the bricklayer’s trade. Together they established a factory for making handmade decorative brick.
One spring—it must have been around 1960—my grandfather packed the trunk of his white Cadillac with beautiful long bricks and drove to our house in Indiana and right there laid our mantelpiece. Carrying the bricks one by one from the big-finned sedan, I knew in my hands what bricklayers have known for a thousand years: that bricks are human scale, made by hand to fit in the hand. My grandfather showed me how to get the mortar, spread with a pointed trowel like icing on a cake, just right. He was a connoisseur of well-laid brick; he would point out to me, with his stub of an index finger, the shortcomings of certain walls and buildings. Graceless attempts to hide a careless alignment of brick or a shoddy mortar job were never lost on him. He believed—believed in his fingertips—that honesty in brick was as important as honesty in any other transaction.
My grandfather referred to his missing index finger as his “trigger finger,” and I always thought he had lost it in the war—I wasn’t sure which war, maybe the Civil War. Later, I learned that he had lost it as a teenager while feeding corncobs into a shredding machine. My grandfather was a mason of both kinds, a bricklayer and a Mason. He wore his Masonic pin to the Methodist Church on Sundays.
3.
Arriving at my grandfather Raymond’s house on U.S. Highway 1 in Cameron, North Carolina, was like some fantasy from Oz. Snaking up from the highway was a long driveway laid entirely in red brick, herringboned, like a winding signpost signaling my grandfather’s profession. As a teenager, my mother had helped to lay that driveway, couching the red brick in a smoothed bed of white sand. The driveway led up to the white frame house that Raymond had built with his own hands during the Depression, when no one could afford his services as a brick mason.
During those tough years of the 1930s, Raymond drove a truck loaded with produce from North Carolina to the Fulton Market in New York City, stopping only for gas. To stop for anything else, especially in a city, was perilous, for the crates of peaches and potatoes were fair game for thieves. When Raymond drove his truck through downtown Philadelphia, my uncle John Wesley would sit in the back with a baseball bat, threatening anyone tempted to steal a crate.
When our sky-blue Opel station wagon shifted gears for the slow crawl up the redbrick drive, my two older brothers and I knew our destination: the swing in the bamboo grove. A huge oak, big and strong as my grandfather himself, stood in the white sand by his house. Dangling from an upper branch was a thick rope holding a plank swing. At one end of the swing’s flight was my grandfather’s chimney, laid in the same red brick as the driveway and tapering artfully, with the stepped diagonal pattern you see in certain paintings of Vermeer and De Hooch. On the other end of the swing’s swooping curve was my grandfather’s bamboo grove, an exotic flourish of Asia amid the orderly tobacco rows of North Carolina.
My grandfather was a passionate fisherman, and he had planted the bamboo to supply the fishing poles he couldn’t afford during the Depression. He had dammed the creek down by the Old Route 1 roadbed, a ghost road of riven macadam overgrown with weeds, and he stocked the resulting pond with bass and bluegills. When he took me fishing, a highlight of any visit, he would deftly bait the hook with a fat pink night crawler, which wriggled on the hook like his missing finger.
My mother swam in the fishing hole with her sisters and brothers, watching out for water moccasins among the cattails along the stream. The old road was full of nooks and hideaways, inviting the resourcefulness of children. The three girls played with paper dolls cut from Sears Roebuck catalogs. They made furniture and cars from shoe boxes and pieces of paper. On the old road, there was a huge outcropping of quartz with moss and little plants growing in the cracks. There they built elaborate paper-doll houses from leaves and flowers.
Swinging on the swing in the bamboo grove, your reward for a good push off the chimney with your feet was to fly up into a spangled world of bamboo foliage and sunlight, green and gold. Then you had better twist your body immediately to get another push, or you might bruise your back against the hard brick. Between brick and bamboo—that was the journey and that was the return. You learned from the soles of your bare feet that these were two different materials, two different principles of strength: the solid red brick and the yielding green bamboo.
The swing was the source of complicated pleasures, especially if John Wesley’s four daughters were visiting at the same time that we were there. They lived in Richmond also, though their Richmond was in Virginia and ours was in Indiana. On Sundays, they wore white dresses with petticoats: Theresa, Debbie, Betty, and Sharon. The petticoats were fun to watch as they floated up like unfurling blossoms into the bamboo leaves.
4.
The bamboo grove had evidently been a romantic place for my parents, as well, for they had planned to have their wedding there. If bad weather is a good omen for a marriage, my parents’ marriage seemed destined to last forever. Their wedding took
First Methodist Church, Cameron
place during Hurricane Bess, in late August 1949. They had planned to hold the Quaker ceremony outdoors in the bamboo grove. Instead, on account of the weather, they were married in the First Methodist Church in Cameron, a narrow, upright white frame structure built on New England models. It was the kind of small-town Southern church that Walker Evans had photographed in rural Alabama during the Depression. As a teenager, my mother had accompanied hymns on the piano in that church.
My father, a refugee from Berlin, must have seemed an exotic figure in these surroundings. When my mother first mentioned his Jewish background to her parents, her father asked, “Does that mean he’s rich?”
If my father was a survivor of Nazi Germany, my mother was something of a survivor as well. She had been engaged to be married once before. During the summer of 1945, when the war was drawing to a close, she had met a darkly handsome young man named Sergei Thomas at a Quaker summer camp in Richmond, Indiana. Sergei was already a leader among young Quakers, a charismatic figure who urged them to follow in the footsteps of the radical founder of the Society of Friends, George Fox. Amid the religious conflicts of seventeenth-century England, Fox had defied the king and the Church of England in pursuit of his own spiritual quest. Fox and his followers worshipped in silent gatherings, spoke only when the “spirit” moved them, treated men and women as equals, and refused to doff their hats to superiors. For their tendency to “quake” in the presence of God, they were derisively nicknamed Quakers.
At the time that she met Sergei in Richmond, my mother was a scholarship student at Guilford College, a Quaker school on the outskirts of Greensboro, North Carolina. She herself was not yet a Quaker, but a sojourn in Richmond had seemed more inviting than spending the summer in sunbaked Cameron, picking the local crop of dewberries for a nickel a quart.
My mother’s maiden name was Rachel Elizabeth Thomas. She and Sergei had the same last name; their marriage must have felt somehow preordained. Sergei’s exotic first name came from his mother, Nadezhda Ivanovna, who had worked as a reporter in Moscow after World War I. There she had met an operative for the American Friends Service Committee, the Quaker organization involved in relief work, named Cleaver Thomas, and they were married in the Russian Orthodox Church in her native Minsk.
Nadya and Cleaver settled first in Brooklyn, where Sergei, their only child, was born in 1925. Sergei spoke Russian with his mother. Around the time he was eight, Nadya had a nervous breakdown, and Sergei was sent to Westtown, a Quaker boarding school outside Philadelphia, where he lived with a foster family. Separation from his family seems to have brought out in Seegar, as his friends at Westtown called him, a compensatory energy to excel. He was a star athlete in high school, playing on the varsity teams in track, tennis, basketball, and soccer. He was also the editor of the school newspaper, and he starred in the school play, Thornton Wilder’s Our Town.
Sergei played the wise and ruminative Stage Manager, who haunts the local graveyard, commenting on the inhabitants, the living and the dead, of a small New England town.
At Westtown, two convictions crystallized for Sergei. One was the belief that war in any form was wrong. The other was that Westtown was wrong to exclude African American students. He entered Haverford College during the fall of 1942 and was soon drafted. Men like Sergei who were “conscientiously” opposed to war could either serve in a noncombat capacity in the armed forces or, if they belonged to certain approved “peace churches” like the Quakers, they could perform some form of alternative service to the country. Instead of being shipped off to the South Pacific, Sergei headed for Tennessee. There, he was assigned to work in Civilian Public Service Camp 108 in Gatlinburg, in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. It was from the mountains that he traveled to Indiana during that summer of 1945, when he first met my mother.
After a two-week orientation at a Quaker retreat on the edge of town, Rachel taught children at a Friends meeting during the day and attended square dances and other social occasions during the evening. Once she and a friend hiked into Richmond to find some lime ice cream, her passion at the time. At some point in the two-week orientation, Rachel remembers, Sergei turned up. He was there to interview a Quaker who headed a movement called Back to the Land. Sergei was interested in this farm project. “He also,” as Rachel remembered, “became interested in me!” Back at Guilford at summer’s end, Rachel, as she put it, “sort of left the summer behind.” Then a letter came from Sergei saying that he was coming to Guilford College to visit her.
5.
The Appalachian town of Gatlinburg is in the heavily forested high country just across the state line from North Carolina. Camp 108, located deep in the woods outside the town, was one of the many Civilian Public Service work camps established in remote regions all over the United States during World War II. The camps were intended as much for internment as for work. They were meant to isolate men who had dangerous and subversive ideas that might contaminate the war effort.
President Franklin Roosevelt was hostile to conscientious objectors and had firmly opposed special accommodations for their views. It was only when the churches themselves—the Mennonites, the Brethren, and the Society of Friends—offered to organize and pay for the camps that Roosevelt relented. A military service bill in 1940 allowed COs to be assigned “to work of national importance under civilian direction.” Beginning in May 1941, approximately twelve thousand men served in the CPS in 151 camps. Many of these were forestry camps like the one in Gatlinburg, where men living in rude barracks cleared trails, built roads and bridges, maintained campsites, and fought forest fires as smoke jumpers.
The Gatlinburg camp was run by Quakers in a former Civilian Conservation Corps barracks. The CCC was a Depression-era program of the New Deal Works Progress Administration (WPA), and the conscientious objectors at Gatlinburg took up forestry work abandoned by the WPA draftees. The Gatlinburg camp was nicknamed Camp Rufus Jones after a well-known historian of Quakerism and mysticism. Gatlinburg was actually the second locale of the camp. It had started as Camp 19 at Buck Creek, near Marion, North Carolina, in the woods below Black Mountain. (Black Mountain College was a few miles away on the other side of the mountain.) The head of the camp was Raymond Binford, president of Guilford College. When work at Buck Creek was under control, the men were transferred to Gatlinburg in July 1943.
Initially, the term of service for the CPS camps was to be one year. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the American entry into World War II, however, COs were expected to serve, just like GIs, until six months after the war ended. During their service, they were not paid for their work, they received nothing for their dependents, and they had no medical insurance or workmen’s compensation.
6.
It was in the Friends Historical Collection at Guilford College that I first heard Sergei’s voice. A handsome elderly man with white hair and sky-blue eyes was sitting at the information desk. When I told him I was interested in the CPS camps he said, “You can talk to me. I was in the Buck Creek Camp.” When I mentioned Camp 108 in Gatlinburg, he told me that the men there had produced a newsletter, which he would be happy to show me. As I sat down to read the pile of mimeographed pages called the Calumet, after the peace-pipe in Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha, I discovered that Sergei had contributed a regular column called “Chips from a Double-Bit Axe.” As I read Sergei’s columns in the reading room, as quiet as a Quaker meeting, I could make out his voice across the intervening years, the voice my mother had heard sixty years ago.
The voice was clever and full of mischief and at the same time deadly serious about things that mattered. The jokes were about the privations of camp life: the food, the distant wives, the primitive sanitary arrangements. There were also cheerful updates about the CPS athletic teams, as well as a reminder of what a gifted athlete Sergei was.
The Smoky Mountain Soccer Club defeated the Knoxville “Royal Jay” Soccer Team at Smithson Stadium 6–0 last Sunday afternoon. The CPS team with a more solid defense and a sharper passing attack completely outplayed the home team in the second 45-minute period after scoring only two goals in the first half. Downing, Diehl, Koeppe (after a layoff of ten years), Probasco (on his first attempt at soccer), and Sergei Thomas, who scored all the goals for the Smokies, turned in good performances.
For the serious things, Sergei’s voice changed to a darker register. North Carolina was a Jim Crow state, and race relations were on his mind. Sergei used a furlough during the spring of 1944 to attend the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, where he lobbied hard for the admission of black students to Westtown. His eloquent plea carried the day. That summer, two CPS workers returned from Philadelphia and reported on the lukewarm race policy of the Friends Executive Committee. “One wonders,” Sergei wrote, “if racial equality is the unquestioned practice of the Society of Friends.”
Idealistic young Quakers like Sergei felt that the Society of Friends, with regard to race, was betraying its radical traditions. They wondered how the activist sect of John Woolman, who had traveled through North Carolina during the eighteenth century urging Quaker farmers to give up their slaves, could blithely turn its back on the descendants of those slaves. The CPS workers at Camp 108 felt a sharp identification with slaves of former times. There was a movement to unionize the camp workers and to demand the opportunity, as promised in the original CPS agreement, for participation in “work of national importance” rather than the routine maintenance of recreational facilities they were engaged in.
CPS men lobbied to work in hospitals and schools instead, but their views were considered too dangerous for local populations. Eventually, in June 1942, an exception was made for mental hospitals, as isolated from ordinary society as work camps deep in the woods. The duties imposed on Quaker volunteers in mental hospitals were extreme. One untrained man would be put in charge of a ward of a hundred violent male patients for a twelve-hour shift. CPS workers were appalled at the conditions they experienced in these hospitals, which were little more than badly run and worse equipped prisons, and they did what they could to make these shortcomings public. Reform of state hospitals owed much to the work of CPS men during World War II.
The most disturbing work performed by COs was to serve as human guinea pigs in medical experiments. As many as five hundred CPS men volunteered as human subjects for forty-one macabre experiments involving various communicable diseases as well as the effects of starvation—the latter billed as an attempt to gather information for relief agencies in war-ravaged Europe. In July 1942, men at a camp in New Hampshire were ordered to wear underwear infested with typhoid-carrying lice for several weeks, then were tested with an array of insecticide powders. Others ingested water laced with human excrement to contract hepatitis, or had malaria-bearing mosquitoes placed in glass bowls on their chests.
Sergei reported that several Camp 108 workers had volunteered as “pigs” for the Atypical Pneumonia Experiment at the posh resort of Pinehurst, in the central Piedmont region of North Carolina. Instead of playing golf and watching horse races, the volunteers contracted pneumonia by swallowing infected spit. “First reports from T. Pudge White of the Holly Inn”—the luxury hotel that housed the grim government-run experiment—“tell of excellent food, rooms, public relations, and hard work for orderlies at the A-P experiment in Pinehurst.”
During his final year at the camp, Sergei volunteered to go on several humanitarian “cattle boats” under the direction of the Church of the Brethren. On his ID card issued by the U.S. Navy, he is officially identified as a cattleman. These boats carried cattle and horses to areas in Europe decimated by the war. Sergei made one trip to Poland, where he saw the Warsaw ruins, and traveled twice to Trieste. My mother never forgot the names of the boats—the S.S. Plymouth and the Lindenwood.
7.
I have a photograph from the spring of 1948 that shows my mother and Sergei standing on the Guilford campus next to a huge pine tree. Sergei, taking a break from his job clearing trails in the Great Smoky Mountains, looks fit and youthful, like a young Jack Kerouac, with a plaid flannel shirt open two buttons down and a wildflower stalk in his hand.
My mother, smiling demurely, her bobbed hair framing her face, holds a sheaf of wildflowers, as gently as a baby. She looks like Demeter preparing for the fall. An ominous shadow encroaches on the bottom edge of the snapshot. On closer inspection, it appears to be the shape of the photographer’s head,
evidently a woman with hair sweeping upward. According to a note on the back in my mother’s handwriting, they had just ridden their bikes out to the Revolutionary War battleground on the edge of Greensboro, where the Quaker general Nathaniel Green defeated the British under Cornwallis in the Battle of Guilford Courthouse. It was there that they collected the flowers.
I have another snapshot from the same day, dated in my mother’s hand April 3, 1948, with three handsome young people taking a break on their bicycles, a white fence from a horse farm behind them and again a big tree nearby.
My mother is now wearing, it appears, Sergei’s flannel shirt; Sergei is in a sweater; and Sergei’s friend Brad Snipes sports a zipped-up jacket. It occurs to me that the photographer who took both pictures was Brad’s future wife, Inge, who was my mother’s roommate at Guilford. When these photographs were taken, Rachel Thomas and Sergei Thomas were already engaged.
8.
The wedding was scheduled for June 13, 1948, two months after the photograph with the bicycles. Sergei and Rachel spent the weeks before the wedding preparing for their summer jobs as camp counselors at a Quaker girls camp in the Poconos. Sergei, an experienced swimmer and lifeguard, was to be in charge of the water activities. He and Tom Snipes, one of Brad’s brothers, decided to take a canoe trip down the Delaware River below Philadelphia to hone their skills. The date was April 22, 1948.
The currents of the Delaware are deceptive. That spring day, when the two young men pushed off from the shore, the waters were high after a recent storm, and the current was swifter than usual. Near the pilings of the last bridge, just before the widening river enters the Atlantic Ocean, they lost control of the canoe, and it capsized in rough water. A paddle got loose and floated away. Tom Snipes clung to the canoe, but Sergei swam out to retrieve the lost paddle, letting go of the canoe. Tom lost sight of Sergei as the current by one of the pilings sucked him down.
Rachel was sitting with her friends Brad and Inge at the junior-senior banquet at Guilford College. They were joking about what they would do after graduation, when a teacher announced that there was a telephone call for Miss Rachel Thomas. “I still remember the ‘Miss,’” my mother says. Cleaver Thomas, barely audible, was on the line. “Something’s happened,” he said. “There was an accident on the Delaware River. They can’t find his body. They haven’t found Tom either.” Rachel went back to the banquet table to tell Brad Snipes that his brother might have drowned.
Brad got on the phone and learned that his other brother, Sam Snipes, had located the canoe. Tom, it turned out, was okay though badly shaken. A few days later, a fisherman thought he saw a body pulled downstream in the high water. “Until then,” my mother says, “I thought it was just a bad dream.”
It was six weeks before the wedding. Rachel’s mother canceled the order for invitations. “That was the only time I saw my father cry,” she said. He hired a private plane to fly Rachel up to see Nadya and Cleaver. Cleaver and Rachel then drove to Haverford to pick up Sergei’s belongings. Cleaver asked if she wanted any of Sergei’s things. She took the plaid shirt. She also took his tennis racket.
The drowning cut my mother’s life in two. She remembers nothing much from her sleepwalking graduation from Guilford College that May. Afterward, her parents drove their three daughters—Rachel, Nancy, and Punk—on a vacation trip to Canada, with stops at the Nabisco plant and Niagara Falls, like some honeymoon after all. That fall Rachel worked as a nanny for a wealthy family in Merion, Pennsylvania, near Haverford, and was an assistant teacher at the Haverford Friends School.
One day, about to board the Main Line train known as the Paoli Local, Rachel happened to see Tom Snipes on the Haverford platform and neither of them knew what to say. Years later, while living alone in a cabin in Vermont, Tom Snipes shot himself.
9.
During the fall of 1948, six months after Sergei’s drowning, Rachel was introduced to a young chemistry professor at Haverford named Otto Theodor Benfey, who had arrived in the United States the previous year, after completing his doctorate in London. For a long time, I had wondered whether Sergei’s death had troubled my parents’ courtship. When I asked my father what it was like to have Sergei’s ghost hovering around, he replied, to my surprise, that it wasn’t an obstacle to their courtship; rather, it was the occasion for it. “We met through Sergei’s death,” he said.
Ted (the name he had substituted in England for the Prussian-sounding Otto) was in his first year of teaching at Haverford when he heard of this promising young man, Sergei Thomas, who was to have graduated from the college and whose death had left his fiancée bereft. Moved by this tragedy, Ted wrote her a note. “And then she appeared at the Haverford Quaker meeting. An older physics professor invited us both to dinner.” Rachel remembers things slightly differently. Ted wrote to Nadya and Cleaver, she says, and appended a note to convey his condolences “to the fiancée.”
Ted slid into the space in Rachel’s life that had been vacated by Sergei. The two young men had much in common. They were born the same year; they were both Quakers connected to Haverford; and both of them had European names suggesting distance and exile and suffering. I wondered if Rachel and Ted’s shared fate as survivors of trauma—Rachel surviving Sergei’s death, Ted escaping from Hitler’s executioners—had brought them closer together. And then I asked again about Sergei’s presence during their courtship. “The death deepened Rachel,” my father answered. “There was no girlish silliness about her.”
After my parents’ wedding, in the Methodist Church rather than the storm-tossed bamboo grove, they borrowed a car from Renate, my father’s sister, and drove up into the Cherokee settlements of the Smoky Mountain National Forest. There, in the very woods where Sergei had cleared trails and repaired cabins for Civilian Public Service Camp 108, they began their married life.
10.
I grew up with Sergei’s ghost. He was frozen in time, like the freeze-frame of the photograph, there on his bike on the way to the Guilford Battleground, always young and handsome and strong, always twenty-two. For my mother, he must have stayed like that, and so he was for me. I learned to play tennis with Sergei’s tennis racket, a battered green and brown Dunlop, the handle worn smooth by his hand. I was a passionate tennis player as a child, spending endless summer hours hitting the ball against a backboard at the hillside courts at Earlham College, in Richmond, Indiana, not far from where Sergei and Rachel had first met. Somehow it was conveyed to me, through my mother, I can only assume, that Sergei had been a wonderful tennis player just as, I also knew, he had been a wonderful swimmer. Looking back on that monotonous discipline, hitting thousands of backhands against the unyielding backboard, I wonder what I was really up to, and what I was thinking.
One morning, when I was twenty-one or twenty-two and a student at Guilford College, I found my mother standing abstractedly, with a haunted look, in the kitchen. “I dreamed of Sergei last night,” she said, and then she told me her dream. Sergei was back, she said, among us still. Soon afterward, I wrote a poem:
To the Man Who Almost Married My Mother
There are things in our house, souvenirs
that keep you in touch with our family.
My hand has worn smooth
the handle of your tennis racket.
A drawing you made of a porch
with overhanging branches hangs
in the hallway by the door to my brother’s room.
Our mother rarely speaks of you.
Once, though, at breakfast, articulate
and bleary-eyed, she said:
“I dreamed of him last night. He was alive
and back. I didn’t know what to say
to your father, who walked up and down
in the yard, while Sergei
sat in the dining-room sipping black tea
and waited for my decision.
“I wanted them both to go away.
I wanted to be alone. I woke up
frightened and relieved
that your father had already left for work,
leaving the sheets on his side mussed.”
Sometimes I think that I invented
the circumstances of your death, planned
the canoe trip a month before your marriage, plotted
like a spiteful river god to twist
the currents around your boat
and suck you down.
Let’s say it was a knot that I had tied
to bring me luck, to bring me
into the world, as selfish
as any child.
Today, I wonder where,
in the long-limbed reaches of the Delaware,
your vulnerable body lies hidden.
11.
During the spring of 2009, my parents planted a Cryptomeria japonica (Japanese cedar) in memory of Sergei Thomas. It stands in the sandy soil near the entrance of the Whittier Wing of Friends Homes, the retirement community in Greensboro, North Carolina, where they now live. There’s a bronze plaque inserted in the ground, next to the tree. “In memory of Sergei Thomas, d. June 1948,” it reads. “Given by Ted and Rachel Benfey.” The evergreen cryptomeria is a sacred tree in Japan and is often planted at Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines. Its elegant grandeur somewhat resembles its cousin the sequoia. Its spiraling green leaves, closely packed like needles, play off handsomely against the red brick of the linked buildings of Friends Homes.
Friends Homes is situated next to New Garden Friends Meeting and its adjacent cemetery, directly across New Garden Road from Guilford College. The neighborhood is the old Quaker settlement of New Garden, a prosperous farming and brickmaking community surrounded by woods, dating back to the eighteenth century. It was during those years that Nantucket whaling families, as the eighteenth-century traveler Crèvecoeur puts it in his Letters from an American Farmer, “cheerfully quit an island on which there was no longer any room for them.” At New Garden, Nantucket whalers—those “fighting Quakers,” as Melville described them in Moby-Dick—married Philadelphia women, forming the gene pool of so many Quakers in North Carolina and Indiana.
Among the graves in the old New Garden Cemetery are prominent Quaker names like Mendenhall—one strand of my mother’s family—and Coffin and Hobbes. Here in a little brick schoolhouse, Levi Coffin taught local slaves to read. In the nearby woods, Coffin hid escaped slaves on their journey north. He established the Underground Railroad, which extended from this part of North Carolina across the Ohio River and up to Indiana. Once he was carrying escaped slaves under the false bottom of a wagon loaded with vases and straw. An official asked him what was in the wagon. “Earthen vessels, my friend, earthen vessels,” Coffin answered. Because the Bible says that we are all made of clay, Coffin wasn’t lying. He later settled near Richmond, Indiana, where he continued to ferry slaves to Canada and freedom.
New Garden was the most remote of the American Quaker settlements; early travelers thought of the North Carolina Quakers as the Church in the Wilderness. Even in the midnineteenth century, visitors described the lonely outpost of New Garden “upon the verge of the forest.” In 1845, an English visitor, James Hack Tuke, gave a vivid sense of the romantic and forested mood of the place in his description of the arrival of Friends for Yearly Meeting at New Garden, so many that “one is ready to believe that the very trees drop Friends instead of acorns”:
The shady wooded paths seem alive with the innumerable figures which are trooping down them, whilst as far as the eye can penetrate into the deeper recesses of the forest, one form after another is constantly appearing, now momentarily hid from view amidst the darker stems of the noble trees. There in the distance, a cavalcade on horseback might be seen gliding in and out, now lost amidst the thick branches, then emerging into some more open part, and thrown into strong relief by the bright sunshine. The pacing action of their tall bony horses, with high Spanish saddles and large saddle-cloths, adds not a little to their peculiar and foreign air.
13.
Near the old stone foundation of Levi Coffin’s school, there are more recent graves in the New Garden Friends Cemetery. The poet Randall Jarrell is buried here. His gravestone is a gray slab of granite laid flat beneath a spreading oak tree. I used to walk through this graveyard every day, going from my parents’ house a short path away to my classes at Guilford College across the street. I liked to linger at Jarrell’s quiet grave.
Jarrell was entranced by the New Garden woods, the Quaker woods, as he called them. He lived near the Guilford College campus on a quiet, wooded street off New Garden Road. It was there that he translated Rilke and the brothers Grimm, wrote children’s books, and composed his bittersweet poems, most famously about World War II, during which he served in the air force as an instructor.
Jarrell was a close friend of other poets of his postwar generation: Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Elizabeth Bishop. All four poets suffered from bipolar illness, alcoholism, romantic misery, despair. Jarrell died, an apparent suicide, in 1965, at age fifty-one, walking into the path of an oncoming car in Chapel Hill, where his wrist was being treated for an injury suffered in an earlier suicide attempt. His widow, Mary Jarrell, whom I got to know back in the 1970s, gave me his treasured copy of Rilke’s poems.
I visited Mary again, in May 2004, two days after she turned ninety. On the walls of her apartment, in a retirement home near my parents’ place in New Garden, there were photographs of Randall playing tennis. I asked Mary how fairy tales had entered their lives. I knew that Jarrell’s childhood had been a painful one, and that the breakup of his parents had left him feeling abandoned and alone, like Hansel and Gretel. He wrote many poems inspired by fairy tales, and I wondered whether the woods around their house had something to do with it. “Yes, they did,” she said. “Yes, they did. But it was also through Rilke.”
It is the fall of 2009. My mother is planning her wedding to Sergei Thomas. He has been dead for six decades but evidently not to her. A series of strokes following heart surgery has abolished the boundary in her mind between the living and the dead. She tells me that after sixty years of marriage to my father, she has decided to marry someone else.
“I wanted another life,” she says.
She lies in her bed at Friends Homes, hour after hour, and plans her wedding. There is an intent, faraway look in her eyes. She reminds me of Miss Havisham in Great Expectations, waiting for her bridegroom who will never appear. It is taking weeks to get the details right.
I ask her where Sergei is now. She tells me that he has been living in Russia for the past year, “studying history.” I ask if she has seen him recently. “We visited Nadya and Cleaver for two weeks last summer,” she says. “We played tennis.” I ask her about Cleaver. “A strange creature,” she says. “A cranky old man.” What about Nadya? “She lives in the past.” In Russia? “Yes, in Russia.”
A wedding is a complicated business, and my mother has many urgent decisions to make. Should it be held in Cameron in the bamboo grove? Would the Quaker meetinghouse in Montclair, New Jersey, where she and Sergei are members, be a better setting? She is leaning toward Montclair. What kind of wedding cake? Who will make it and who will order it? The bridesmaids! Who will be the bridesmaids?
One thing she is sure of. No punch will be served. Only Japanese green tea.
From time to time, my father asks her whether he should attend the wedding. “Of course,” she says. In what capacity? He will give away the bride. “Thus, I have become her father,” he says. “I have gotten older. She and Sergei remain eternally young.”
During the days that follow, filled with anxiety and obsession, the plans are beginning to overwhelm her.
Where is her wedding dress, her veil?
One night, she heaves a deep sigh. She decides, abruptly and with finality, that it might be simpler, after all, to remain married to my father. Her brief career as Miss Havisham, with all clocks stopped, seems to be at an end.
