The Lost Landscape: A Writer's Coming of Age Page 16

  I should have protested—But Clarence isn’t Millersport! It’s miles away . . .

  Still, Dr. Heike was essentially correct about my evasiveness. If the fire had been in Millersport, I would have told Dr. Heike that nothing much had happened there, to avoid speaking to him. Instinctively Dr. Heike knew this.

  The Heikes—Mrs. Heike, Cynthia, eleven-year-old Albert—were embarrassed by their father’s tone, as by the fierce look in his face, as if he’d been personally insulted. Adroitly Cynthia intervened telling her father that we had so much homework in just chemistry alone, we didn’t have time to read the silly newspaper. He had time for that.

  Dr. Heike chuckled at this riposte. Mrs. Heike tried also to be playful telling me that her husband was accustomed to commanding the nursing staff at Buffalo General, who could never live up to his high expectations. “There are too many females in the doctor’s life, he says. It’s not your fault, Joyce.” Mrs. Heike laughed as if she’d said something both witty and embittered.

  A few minutes later Cynthia became the brunt of Dr. Heike’s irritation when she (evidently) replied to a question of his with her mouth partially full. “Excuse me. Please do not speak with your mouth full, Cynthia. You are not an infant.”

  Cynthia’s face darkened with embarrassment. Then boldly, bravely she countered, “Infants don’t talk, Daddy. With or without their mouths full.”

  Dr. Heike surprised us by laughing at this lame joke. You could see that Dr. Heike was a man who had to be approached from an unexpected angle, to make him laugh; if you approached him head-on, and he saw you coming, he would be contemptuous.

  “And what does your father do, Joyce?”

  “My father is a tool and die designer.”

  Carefully I answered Dr. Heike’s question. There would be no ambiguity now.

  “A ‘tool and die designer’—is he? Where?”

  I told him: Harrison Radiator, in Lockport.

  “In Lockport! That’s a corrupt little canal city, did you know?” Dr. Heike laughed genially.

  To this I had no reply. I had no idea what Dr. Heike meant by corrupt little canal city, in such satisfied terms.

  “Your mayor has been indicted. Not for the first time. I mean—not the first time that a mayor of Lockport has been indicted.”

  Dr. Heike spoke with vague amusement. I had not reacted except to smile faintly and perhaps now he felt sorry for me. The doctor was accustomed to his more spirited daughter resisting him. Even a sadist may be disappointed when a victim fails to fight back.

  “‘A tool and die designer’—in a factory? Is that where?”

  I thought so, yes. Harrison Radiator was a factory.

  “Where did your father train?”

  Where—train? The use of the term “train” was unfamiliar to me. I was sure that I’d never heard my father use it in regard to his work. I felt that Dr. Heike was teasing me—tormenting me—hoping to make me cry, like the boys at the rural school. They had not stopped when a victim cried.

  Young I had learned that there is really no way to placate the cruel except by escaping them. If you resist, or if you acquiesce—they will not show mercy in either case.

  Quietly I spoke, so that the man should not know how miserable I was at his elegant dinner table, in his elegant home, and how I hated him. “I guess I don’t know, Dr. Heike.”

  “Don’t know? Probably in Buffalo, at the vocational school. It’s said to be among the best of its kind.”

  My father had not “trained” at any vocational school in Buffalo or elsewhere. My father had probably been an apprentice to an older worker at Harrison’s.

  A wave of faintness had come over me. I had set down my fork on my plate, I could not eat. My heart beat dangerously fast. It was only an exchange at a dinner table—it was, essentially, nothing—yet I felt threatened, disgraced. I felt that I had betrayed my father whom I loved. I had betrayed both my parents. Just being here, at the rich doctor’s table, was a betrayal of my parents.

  Next, Dr. Heike interrogated Cynthia about our chemistry course.

  He fired questions at her involving “combustible” chemicals to which Cynthia knew the answers but did not speak clearly. Her tongue seemed too large for her mouth. Chuckling, Dr. Heike said that, next year at Rochester, when she was taking organic chemistry, his “brainy daughter” would need to know a little more than she was getting away with in high school. Impudently I said, “Cynthia gets the highest grades in our class.”

  It was not exactly true that Cynthia Heike got the very highest grades in the class. There was a boy who, like Cynthia, had a doctor-father and intended to be a doctor, who often got higher grades than she did, scoring 100 percent in quizzes and tests.

  By saying this I was also saying Leave your daughter alone. Your daughter is plenty smart.

  Cynthia glanced toward me startled as if she had no idea who I was. Her left, weak-muscled eye seemed to be swinging loose. Dr. Heike seemed pleased by my remark but could not resist saying, “‘Highest grades’ doesn’t mean much in itself. Grades are relative. What sort of grades do you get, Joyce?”

  In fact, I get high grades too. So go to hell.

  “Not so high as Cynthia.”

  Nor was this true, overall. But it was the right move, as slamming a volleyball across a net, at the level of an opponent’s face, and “accidentally” into the face, can be the right move for the moment.

  Soon then, Mrs. Heike intervened with a query about the progress of Bach/Schumann and the conversation swerved, like a blind bull, in another direction.

  14.

  A WEEK BEFORE THE recital Cynthia told me suddenly that she’d changed her mind –“Lee Ann is going to accompany me, after all. It just seemed easier.”

  I was stunned by this information. It just seemed easier—what did that mean?

  Obviously it must mean that I wasn’t playing well enough, after all our practicing. I was not a “real” musician like Cynthia and Lee Ann—I could not be trusted with Cynthia Heike’s violin solo.

  Yet I stood mute staring at Cynthia as if I had not entirely heard. Or if, in another moment, there would be another phrase from her, that refuted the first. Seeing the look of shock in my face (which perhaps she had not anticipated) Cynthia murmured an apology of sorts, not very convincingly; for Cynthia could not lie convincingly. An individual of pride and dignity cannot lie.

  “It just seemed easier,” Cynthia said, evasively. “Lee Ann knows the piece pretty well. She can play by ear, you know . . .”

  I went away shaken. I did not hear Cynthia calling after me. We were at school, in the corridor outside our homeroom, a tunnel of slamming lockers, contorted faces. Yet soon, when I was alone, and calmer, I understood, and did not blame Cynthia. For one with my musical limitations, a “perfect” performance could only be a fluke. I could not play a composition identically each time; each time, I played differently; I could not “keep time”; I had not a sense of pitch; I could memorize notes, and repeat passages until I’d seemed to master them; essentially, I was untrainable and no amount of practice could remedy that. The fact that I’d had inferior piano teachers in Lockport (whose modest weekly fees my grandmother had paid, happily for years) could not be disguised, for fatally they had allowed me to play piano badly, as they had praised me irresponsibly, and a sharp-eared music student like Cynthia Heike or Lee Ann Krauser could detect such deficits, she had but to listen closely.

  THEY WERE FRIENDS AGAIN. Cynthia Heike, Lee Ann Krauser.

  They would perform the Bach/Schumann piece beautifully at the recital. And I would wear the navy blue jumper and the white silk blouse that my grandmother had lovingly sewed for me, seated in the audience, and it would not seem evident to anyone who knew the circumstances, even Cynthia herself, that I was disappointed to be seated not onstage at the piano, but in the audience.

  Long I would ponder the Zen koan—It just seemed easier.

  15.

  “WE’LL GO TO KLEINHANS. At Christmas
time.”

  Yet, soon after she went away to college, Cynthia Heike ceased to behave like a friend to me.

  If I wrote several letters and cards, Cynthia might be provoked into writing a letter—a lengthy, handwritten letter brimming with sardonic insights and witty observations of her sorority/fraternity classmates at the University of Rochester whom she seemed both to despise and envy. Her stationery was adorned with tiny caricature-cartoons in the borders, some of them so small I could not decipher their meaning. Often, she wrote of the “surreal” size of the Rochester campus; she complained of the “vast” lecture courses she was taking, and the “claustrophobic” science labs. If I’d asked questions of her in my letter, she rarely replied to these questions as if she had not read the letter closely but was simply writing to someone to whom she could write intimately, yet not personally.

  I hate it here. I think it was a mistake to come here. I don’t have any friends here. Just because Daddy got his medical degree here. My silly roommates whisper & laugh among themselves & when I come back late from the library, they roll their eyes and get very quiet. Everyone cheats! In the pre-med courses especially—the profs must know but don’t give a damn or don’t know how to stop it. C’est de la merde!

  Vaguely we’d made plans for mutual visits to our campuses but neither of us seemed to have time. My visit to Rochester, a bus trip of an hour from downtown Syracuse, was several times postponed, then forgotten. At Thanksgiving, when we were both back home, we spoke over the phone briefly; over the long Christmas break, when we might have seen each other, Cynthia didn’t call, and when I called her I was hurt by her affected coolness—“Who is calling?”—as if she didn’t recognize my voice. Half-accusingly Cynthia said that I didn’t sound “like myself” somehow. After the new year we stopped calling and writing each other. With the childish spite born of hurt I thought—If she does write to me, I won’t write back.

  From mutual friends whose parents were neighbors of the Heikes came rumors that Cynthia was having “emotional problems” away from home for the first time. Her classmate/rivals in pre-med at Rochester represented a very different sort of competition than our high school classmates; organic chemistry was a particularly challenging course in which Cynthia received the first C’s of her life. Even an advanced French course was challenging, to one who’d been so fluent in Madame Henri’s low-stress class. And there was the shock of Cynthia’s closest friend Lee Ann Krauser, a freshman at Wells College, engaged to be married to a young law student at SUNY Buffalo Law School whom she’d met only the previous summer.

  Not just why Cynthia Heike took her own life in February 1957 in her dormitory room at the University of Rochester but, for some time, how—this was part of the terrible mystery. Sleeping pills, slashed wrists, poison?—none of us knew, for the Heikes kept such information confidential. Rumors raged, but no one knew. This was an era when universities suppressed news of student suicides; newspapers and TV did not report such deaths unless the suicide was famous and press coverage unavoidable; obituaries were circumspect, and did not include such details. There was a private funeral for Cynthia at her church to which only family members, relatives, and the closest family friends were invited, which did not include me. From a distance I mourned my lost friend, but I made no attempt to get in contact with her family. It just seemed easier.

  SOME TIME AFTER HER death I would learn that Cynthia had swallowed a corrosive chemical taken from her chemistry laboratory, with the property of a powerful cleanser like Drano.

  There it is: I have typed that word at last, after fifty-seven years: Drano.

  “START YOUR OWN BUSINESS!”

  A PREVAILING NEED TO make money. For never was there enough money.

  Always the fear that we would lose the farm. This was a fear no less audible for being unarticulated.

  It was because the small farm in Millersport did not prosper, that my grandfather John Bush and my father Fred Oates worked in factories in Lackawanna and Lockport respectively. As John Bush died fairly young of emphysema, so my father too would be stricken by emphysema in middle age, but advanced medical treatments allowed him to live well into his mid-eighties—“Half a lung is damn better than no lung.”

  Clear-minded and cheerfully stoic to the end of his life. My dear father who lived in the country in his in-laws’ house initially to save money, and finally because he’d come to love the solitude of Millersport which was—indeed, is—no actual place but rather a mere intersection of Transit Road with Tonawanda Creek Road.

  In Millersport, farmland surrounded by a no-man’s-land of open fields and forests. And the wide creek (that is actually a small river) snaking through the countryside to join with the Erie Barge Canal and the Niagara River some miles away.

  It was no idle fantasy, to fear losing your house and property. For others whom my parents and grandparents knew had lost their land, and finally their houses; no one who’d lived through the Depression ever quite overcame the fear that everything can be lost virtually overnight and even minimal prosperity was a chimera in which one scarcely dared believe. To possess something is to be vulnerable to losing it: possession is audacity in the face of imminent loss.

  It was sometime in the late 1950s when my father was inspired to invest in pigs—to start his own business “on a small scale at first.” Very likely, Fred Oates had been talked into this adventure by a friend for, being city-born, knowing little of farm life and having little aptitude or enthusiasm for it, he would not have thought of so desperate a measure by himself. Whatever our farm had once yielded by the time I was in high school its primary products were chickens, eggs, corn and Bartlett pears; we also sold apples, cherries, strawberries, cranberries, and such common vegetables as peppers, tomatoes, and cucumbers, in small quantities. We had never owned cows, sheep, or pigs. (Long ago, my grandfather had owned a team of horses but these had passed into oblivion by the time I was born; only their badly weathered wagon remained, abandoned at the rear of the barn.) The saga of the pigs was not a happy one. Though decades later my father would fashion it into an entertaining anecdote there was nothing amusing at the time about raising pigs to butcher and sell their meat.

  Not only do pigs stink to a degree that makes the smell of chickens—droppings, wet feathers—seem quaintly “rural” but perversely, pigs are much smarter than chickens and try to resist their destinies as chickens do not; my father was no match for the sagacity of alert young pigs especially, who burrowed beneath the fence he’d built to contain them, and escaped into the countryside. Vividly I can recall my father chasing after pigs along the highway, shouting and cursing and trying to catch them by hand. (Though possibly I never saw this but only heard it described.) Perhaps some of the pigs were never captured. As my Hungarian grandmother had learned to cannily hide wounded or dying pheasants that had fluttered onto our property, shot by hunters in the woods adjacent to our property in the fever of hunting season, so surely our neighbors hid Fred Oates’s escaped pigs for their own purposes.

  Yet more ironically, after the pigs were slaughtered—not by my father but by a butcher in Lockport—their meat unaccountably spoiled and could not be sold or eaten, for evidently it had been inadequately cured. Fred Oates’s entire pig-project, a considerable expenditure of money, time, and spirit was a loss.

  Years later my father would transform this humiliating episode in his life into a bittersweet/funny anecdote like a scene in a comic movie, to make people laugh. “Better laugh than cry”—this came to be Fred Oates’s belief.

  And it was so: we never saw Daddy cry.

  ON A FARM EVERYONE works. Farmwork is seasonal and accelerates to a fever pitch in the autumn, at harvesttime.

  Harvesttime is the time of reaping what you have sown. Or, it is the tragic time when what you have sown fails to be reaped for it has atrophied, or died. Perversely, as if to spite the very persons who labored so hard to bring what has been sown to fruition, it has failed to thrive.

  Through the
summer and well into September we had a small roadside stand fronting Transit Road. Mostly it was Bartlett pears we sold, in season. I helped my mother at the stand, for my father had no interest or perhaps no wish to present himself as a merchant hoping to sell his produce to wayward and unpredictable customers among whom might be people whom we knew; it was Daddy’s more difficult, far more frustrating and occasionally dangerous task to pick the pears, climbing a ladder to reach into the higher branches of the trees.

  Bartlett pears! On the trees, the pears were greeny-hard as rocks for weeks as if reluctant to ripen; then, overnight, the pears were “ripe”—very soon “over-ripe”—fallen to the ground, buzzing with flies and bees. Apples are hardy and resistant to rotting, apples can be stored in a cool place for months, but pears seem no sooner pale yellow than they are bruised and softening, of no worth. Why did my grandfather John Bush buy a farm with a pear orchard, and not an apple orchard? We had only a few (McIntosh) apple trees, and still fewer cherry trees, both sweet and sour. But rows upon rows of Bartlett trees stretching to the very rear of the property.

  It is tempting to think that my grandfather John Bush didn’t know that pears are more difficult to harvest than apples. Before moving to the “north country” from Black Rock, in Buffalo, he’d had no experience as a farmer; so far as we knew he’d had little experience as a farmer in Hungary. But perhaps Grandpa thought that his experience with pears would be exceptional.

  In spring, the fruit orchard was ablaze with blossoms. Pearly-white pear blossoms, pale pink and white apple blossoms, rosier pink cherry blossoms. And out of these blossoms, fruits were to form, to be one day harvested; out of the luminous beauty of the field of blossoms, the practical matter of pears, apples, cherries to be translated into cash.

  Often I helped my father pick pears. I could climb the stepladder while Daddy climbed the taller ladder. The rough, vertically-striated bark of a pear tree is permanently imprinted in my memory: its texture is harsh, not pleasant to touch with your fingertips, very different from the smooth skin-like bark of apple trees. There is not much romance in fruit-picking for to reach continually overhead is to soon feel dazed, dizzy; and if you are scouring the ground for fallen fruit that isn’t obviously bruised, and so disqualified to be sold at the roadside, you are continually shrinking back from yellow jackets and other buzzing insects. How many bee stings! Filling bushel baskets, one after another. Your right hand begins to ache, then to cramp. Your right shoulder aches. In the heat of September, swarms of gnats, mosquitoes. Harvests of small young mosquitoes biting arms, legs, face.