The Lost Landscape: A Writer's Coming of Age Read online

  Though being flown is nothing like flying—(as my father insisted)—these flights were exhilarating to him. Daddy never failed to comment on the pilot’s performance and, if he had the opportunity, he congratulated the pilot on a “good landing.”

  Sometimes, when I am alone, and aloft, in my window seat staring out at a sea of clouds, or at land or glittering water far below, I feel a sudden pang of loss—for what, I don’t know.

  For Lee’s Airfield, perhaps. For the shining little Piper Cubs and the boys who’d helped to start their propellers. For my beloved father, a young father, with tufted dark hair and a widow’s peak, laughing as he adjusted helmet strap beneath my chin, for I must have looked very silly in my flying gear, as a child. And for my beloved mother, scarcely daring to breathe until the shining little yellow plane returned to the airstrip, and made a “successful” landing.

  The long-ago romance of small planes. Daddy as pilot.

  But I have only to shut my eyes to see the airfield bumping and jolting outside the windows of the Piper Cub and to feel again how we are being lifted into the air, wind-buffeted but bravely continuing to rise . . .

  AFTER BLACK ROCK

  DO ALL FAMILIES HARBOR secrets? Do all families conspire in secrets, if not cultivate secrets? The family is the social unit that seems to depend crucially upon a clear separation of those who are in power and those who are subordinate; those wielding power are required to know more than those who are subordinate to them, and there almost seems, at times, a kind of taboo in sharing such knowledge. Before you were born is both a neutral designation and a way of shutting a door in your face which you would wish to open at your own risk.

  Of course, all that children are not told, children somehow know. Not the words to the song but its melody, and its tone. A writer might be one who, in childhood, learns to search for and decipher clues; one who listens closely at what is said, in an effort to hear what is not being said; one who becomes sensitive to nuance, innuendo, and fleeting facial expressions.

  And there are the abrupt silences among adults, when a child comes too near.

  IN HIS PREFACE TO What Maisie Knew, Henry James ponders the “close connection of bliss and bale”—the irony of “so strange an alloy, one face of which is somebody’s right and ease, the other somebody’s pain and wrong.” Nowhere is this paradox more true than in the matter of a premature and violent death, for example the murder of my mother’s father which was also, in effect, the murder, as it was the irrevocable dissolution, of a family.

  All this happened long before I was born, in 1917. In a Hungarian community in Black Rock, now a part of Buffalo, New York. My mother’s father was in his forties at the time, a Hungarian immigrant from the countryside near Budapest, who worked in a factory in Buffalo; one night, in a tavern in Black Rock, he was killed by another Hungarian immigrant, allegedly “beaten to death with a poker.”

  Beyond these blunt bare facts, nothing more seemed to be known. The killer must have been identified, maybe even arrested and charged, and very likely the killing would have been described as “self-defense”—possibly, this was true. All I would ever know of my mother’s father was that he was, like other Hungarian males in the family, an individual of whom it might be said that he was not slow to flare up in anger, if not rage, and that he was a “heavy drinker.” The word peasant is a disallowed word, a shameful usage to contemporary ears, but Hungarian peasants is probably the most objective description of my mother’s relatives who’d immigrated to western New York in the early 1900s. By contemporary standards these immigrants were desperately poor people of the class of those about whom Upton Sinclair wrote so compellingly in The Jungle (1906), set in the Chicago slaughterhouses.

  The sudden death of my mother’s father left her family destitute. Her parents had had eight children, the older of whom were already working. (Recall that this is 1917, when immigrant children rarely went to school but worked in factories, mills, and slaughterhouses, for wages much less than those of adult men.) My biological grandmother, whom I would never meet, nor even see a photo of, gave away at least one of her children at this time, the youngest, my mother, who was nine months old.

  The infant was given to the couple whom I would know as Grandma and Grandpa Bush—Lena and John Bush. (“Bush” was the name the immigrant couple had been given at Ellis Island, as it is an approximation of their Hungarian name “Bus.”) One day it would be told to me, or suggested, in the casual way in which such genealogical information was likely to be provided, that John Bush may have been a brother of my mother’s deceased father—in which case, my mother had been sent to live with an uncle and his wife, which does not seem quite so desperate as being given away to strangers. There were no “adoptions” in those days—at least, no government agencies that were concerned with the fate of immigrant children of whom, in heavily Roman Catholic communities like Black Rock, there were many. My mother was taken in by a couple who not only wanted a child, but also needed another farm-helper in their household; as soon as she was old enough, she was given farm chores; for a few years she attended a one-room schoolhouse a mile away from the small farm in Millersport, across Tonawanda Creek in Niagara County—the very one-room schoolhouse I would attend years later.

  Briefly too my mother attended a Roman Catholic school taught by nuns, in Swormville, from which she graduated after eight grades, at which time her education ceased. Eight grades were considered more than sufficient at this time in our history, in rural communities especially, where the designation “high school graduate” was a matter of pride.

  When my mother Carolina Bush was eighteen or nineteen years old, and working part-time as a waitress in a restaurant on the Millersport Highway, she and my father Frederic Oates met. This would have been 1935 or 1936. Fred Oates was three years older than Carolina; he’d been born in Lockport, a small city seven miles north of Millersport, on the Erie Canal. Like my mother’s early life, my father’s early life had been shaped by the premature and violent death of a relative, in this case his maternal grandfather, a German Jewish immigrant who’d tried to kill both his wife and his fourteen-year-old daughter (my grandmother-to-be) with a shotgun, and ended up killing only himself. My father, too, had had to quit school young, and began work in a “machine-shop” (Harrison Radiator) in Lockport. He would work at Harrison’s for an astounding forty years before retiring, though by degrees he was to be promoted from the assembly-line machine shop to tool and die design.

  Since such family secrets were shrouded in mystery, as in mortification and shame, I never knew, nor had I any way of substantiating, whether these two (very attractive) young people confided in each other, or commiserated with each other; both sides of my family were notable for reticence, and a stubbornness in reticence; these were not individuals for whom openness came easily, still less anything approaching “full disclosure.” The ardor of confession for which our era is known would have been astonishing to them, scarcely believable and in no way desirable. There seemed the fear among my adult relatives that something misspoken could not be reclaimed; if you spoke heedlessly, you would speak unwisely and you would regret it. In much of my fiction there is a simulacrum of the “confessional” but to interpret it in these terms is misleading. Not literal transcription but emotional transcription is the way of the writer.

  While we were growing up, my brother Fred, Jr., and I had no idea of our parents’ backgrounds. We had no idea that my mother had been given away by her mother, after her father’s murder; we had no idea that my father’s mother had nearly been murdered by her raging father. We had no idea that my father’s mother Blanche Morgenstern was Jewish. (In western New York State of those days, we had no idea what “Jewish” was.) We would be adults before we learned even the skeletal outline of these old, shameful secrets that had both altered the trajectories of our parents’ (impoverished) lives but also made our births, in 1938 and 1943 respectively, possible.

  It was fascinating—I suppose. To live
among adults who must have frequently spoken to one another in a kind of code. (My mother’s stepparents with whom we lived would certainly have talked about my mother’s biological mother and her siblings, who lived less than ten miles away; there were Bush uncles and aunts and cousins who appeared at a little distance, and gradually became known to me in my teens.) Much of adult life was forbidden of entry to children—not just family secrets of this sort but financial crises, health crises, problems with work. Outside the brightly-lit “home” there is the murky penumbra of adults who don’t especially care about you, and are not obliged to wish you well. It may be that the writer/artist is stimulated by childhood mysteries or that it is the childhood mysteries that stimulate the writer/artist. Sometimes in my writing, when I am most absorbed and fascinated, to the point of anxiety, I find myself imagining that what I am inventing is in some way “real”; if I can solve the mystery of the fiction, I will have solved a mystery of my life. That the mystery is never solved would seem to be the reason for the writer’s continuous effort to solve it—each story, each poem, each novel is a restatement of the quest to penetrate the mystery, tirelessly restated.

  The writer is the decipherer of clues—if by “clues” is meant a broken and discontinuous subterranean narrative.

  I WAS WELL INTO adulthood and living far from Millersport by the time the Bush family secret came to light, and even then it was a faint, glimmering light, about which no one wished to speak without averted eyes, an air of embarrassment and shame, and a wish to change the subject. Growing up in their household, on that farm in Millersport, my brother and I may have had a vague awareness that John and Lena Bush were not my mother’s “real” parents—beyond that we couldn’t know, and in the way of family reticence, which is a kind of dignity, we could not ask, any more than children of that era would have boldly asked their fathers what their incomes were and their mothers whether they’d really wanted children.

  But here is the surprise: my mother’s account of that traumatic time in her early life did not center upon the murder of her father (whom she had not known—after all she’d been an infant at the time) but on the mortifying fact of having been “given away.” When for a special feature in O, The Oprah Magazine in the late 1990s several women writers were commissioned to interview their own mothers, I learned of some of this old, sad story, still upsetting to my mother so many decades later. All my mother seemed to know was: her father had been murdered, her mother had given her away. Several times she said, “My mother didn’t want me. I used to cry and cry . . .” I was stricken to the heart—my mother was eighty years old! This trauma of 1917 was as recent and fresh to her as if no time had intervened.

  Of all the relatives on both sides of our family my mother Carolina Oates had the reputation of being the most generous, the most kind, the warmest and “sunniest”—I did not want to think that, in her innermost heart, Mommy thought of herself as a child whose mother had not wanted her.

  Crimes reverberate through many years, and through many lives. It is a rare homicide that destroys only one person. And it is a paradox to accept that, had a Hungarian immigrant not been murdered in 1917, I would not be alive today; how many of us, many more than would wish to speak of so sordid a fact, owe our births to the premature deaths of others whom we have never known but to whom we are linked by that mysterious shared fate called “blood.”

  Here is the ironic equipoise of which Henry James wrote: this catastrophe that was for my mother, through her life, a source of acute sorrow and shame was for me, her daughter, the very genesis of my life.

  SUNDAY DRIVE

  ONCE UPON A TIME, the Sunday drive.

  In our succession of Daddy’s wonderful cars!

  (Were Daddy’s cars wonderful, or did my brother and I just imagine this? They were all American cars of course and all built by General Motors for my father worked for Harrison Radiator in Lockport, New York, an automotive supplier for GM. Though technically these were not “new cars” but “used” they were always “new” and spectacular to us.)

  Where are we going, I would ask.

  And the answer was enigmatic, Wait until we get there. You’ll see.

  Our car was our principal means of adventure, exploration, and entertainment; our lengthy, looping, seemingly uncalculated Sunday drives with sometimes my father, sometimes my mother, at the wheel were our primary means of experiencing ourselves as a family.

  Of course, we did not know this. We would scarcely have articulated such a notion, at the time.

  Where weekday drives were always purposeful, Sunday drives were spontaneous and improvised. If Daddy was driving it was not unlikely that we might drive south on Transit Road in the direction of Lee’s Airfield just to see who was there; if Mommy was driving it was not unlikely we might drive west or east on narrow curving country roads along the Tonawanda Creek, where Mommy knew who lived in every house. Our car was like a small boat, or maybe a small plane, blown like the perpetual cumulus clouds of the sky above the Great Lakes, in any of these directions, by chance and not choice; the drives were familial daydreams, dreams somehow made conscious and translated into landscape. Unknowing, we were enchanted by the mystery of the (familiar) landscape and our place in it.

  The writer is one who understands how deeply mysterious the “familiar” really is. How strangely opaque, what we’ve seen a thousand times. And how inconsolable a loss, when the taken-for-granted is finally taken from us.

  IT WAS A BEAUTIFUL landscape in some way haunted.

  Millersport Rapids Swormville Getzville East Amherst Clarence Rapids Pendleton Wolcottsburg Lockport Middleport Wrights Corners Gasport Ransomville Royalton Medina Wilson Newfane Olcott—a strangely comforting poetry these place-names of our Sunday drives. Open, uncultivated countryside; stretches of dense deciduous woods; pastures bounded by barbed wire in which dairy cows, beef cattle, sheep and horses grazed; fields planted in corn, wheat, potatoes, soybeans; miles of fruit orchards—apple trees, pear trees, cherry trees, peach trees; farmhouses that resembled my grandparents’ house, large hay barns, dairy barns, silos and corncribs. Single-span wrought-iron bridges over the Tonawanda Creek or the Erie Barge Canal whose planks rattled as we crossed high above the water; smaller bridges over narrow streams, only just wide enough for a single vehicle. (The particular terror of the larger bridge was the possibility that a wide vehicle—truck, tractor—might be crossing at the same time, in the other lane; the driver of our car might then be required to back up, slowly and laboriously, to let the other pass. The fear of the smaller bridge was that another vehicle might suddenly appear around a blind curve and collide head-on with us.) Two-lane blacktop roads sticky as licorice in hot summer; narrow rutted dirt roads winding like strips of fraying ribbon between plowed fields; those attractive and beguiling unpaved roads through dense countryside that dwindled into mere lanes bordering farmers’ fields, bumpy and eventually impassable ending in what my parents called dead ends . . . We learn our awe of the world as children staring eagerly out the windows of a moving vehicle.

  If we began our Sunday drive along the Erie County side of the Tonawanda Creek to Pendleton a few miles away we might cross the wrought-iron bridge at Pendleton and enter Niagara County; if the drive was to be a relatively short drive we might turn right, or west, onto the Tonawanda Creek Road, return to Transit Road a few miles away and cross the bridge into Millersport, and so to our house which was the first on the right, beside a small Esso gas station (operated by my mother’s brothers Frank and Johnny Bush). Or, we might drive along the creek to Rapids, a few miles in the other direction, cross the bridge there and so return to Transit Road along a more circuitous route following the curves of the Tonawanda Creek, past the single-room schoolhouse which I attended for five grades, and which my mother had attended twenty years before, and so home. (“Tonawanda Creek Road” is a confusing term because, in effect, there were four roads with the same name, that might more accurately have been designated “Tonawanda Creek Road
North-East”—“Tonawanda Creek Road North-West”—“Tonawanda Creek Road South-East”—“Tonawanda Creek Road South-West.” These were country roads narrow and minimally paved, bisected by the wider Transit Road running north and south.)

  When my father drove, my mother sat beside him in the passenger’s seat. But whenever my mother drove, it meant that my father wasn’t coming with us because my father would never have consented to be a passenger in any vehicle in which he was not the driver.

  (In this Fred Oates was the quintessential American male of his time. It wasn’t a question of “equality”—that my mother was a woman was not the issue; it was a question of who had authority in a vehicle, and this was likely to be the man of the family, in whose name the vehicle had been purchased.)

  These least adventurous/most familiar Sunday drives nonetheless intrigued my brother Robin (Fred, Jr.; born on Christmas Day 1943) and me, for our mother knew the inhabitants of virtually all of the houses along the Tonawanda Creek, if not personally then by reputation, or rumor; my fascination with people, as with their houses and “settings,” surely began with these Sunday drives and my mother’s frequent, often quite startling and elliptical commentary. Six years in the one-room schoolhouse containing eight grades of often unruly “big boys” had enabled my mother’s generation of young people to know one another intimately, if not always fondly; sometimes my mother’s reticence was all that was forthcoming as we passed a house. (“Yes. I know who lives there.”)

  This was an era memorialized by Edward Hopper of shingle-board houses with front porches and people sitting on these porches keen to observe people driving past in vehicles observing them. Narrow, winding creek roads were best for such sightings, for vehicles were likely to be driven at unhurried speeds on these roads; sometimes my mother would be stuck behind a slow-moving tractor or even a horse-drawn hay wagon.