Villages Read online

  Willow during the war, as Owen went from eight to twelve, was like a prairie village brushed by black clouds that sweep low overhead but do not discharge their tornado, though at the Scheherazade there were newsreels of airplanes turning cities into fields of fire and of GIs storming sandy island beaches strafed by fanatical Japanese who had to be burned out of their caves with flamethrowers like nests of insects. While the great Eurasian continent from end to end seethed with moving masses and vast death and the oceans drank torpedoed ships, North America held its breath, a land of women and children and old men and price controls and rationing tokens and war stamps and Hollywood comedians on the radio. Yet the tingle of global gambles filled the air and enthralled their island of peace: there was a speeding-up, a sense of stakes higher than the old proprieties. Carol Wisniewski let herself be fucked by Marty Naftzinger standing up, and Momma took a job at the parachute factory and did plane-spotting on the roof of the fire station, playing solitaire with a special deck of cards, and Grampy came out of his retirement to work on the borough highway crew, and Daddy put on a warden’s helmet in air-raid drills looking for light leaks from the windows along Mifflin Avenue. Owen took the paper off of tin cans and jumped on them, flattening them on the cement floor of the chicken house for the war effort, while the chickens rustled and cackled on their crusty rungs, or in the cubbyholes where glass eggs lured them into laying more. The eggs—brown, speckled, dabbled with dung—Grammy sold in reused paper egg cartons to her many relatives, and the flattened tin cans piled up on the school grounds, making a shining mountain which only Chub Kroninger, the three-star general of fifth-grade scrap collection, was allowed to climb. Promotion was achieved by weighing the metal turned in, and Owen’s family was too small and poor to furnish enough scrap metal to raise him in the ranks. Daddy had taken to rolling his own cigarettes on a clever little machine; the store-bought packs had been a main source of tinfoil, along with sticks of chewing gum.

  When Owen suggested to Buddy Rourke that he donate his braces to the scrap drive, Buddy didn’t think it was funny. Buddy was a serious boy, headed for a career in engineering or construction or electricity. He could fix lamps, knowing how to insert and screw down hook-shapes of copper wire into the terminals of a switch and how to splice the wires of Christmas lights when a bad socket made the whole string dark. He taught Owen how to tame a current which would flow one way with magical, instant results but which with contacts reversed would balk and melt the wires. Buddy subscribed to Popular Mechanics and had sent away for a make-it-yourself radio kit that he had assembled to the point where you could hear static and a faint voice pulsing in and out. Though the two boys could achieve great rapport working on projects in Buddy’s cellar—not quite a rumpus room but better-lit than Owen’s, with a well-stocked workbench that had been created and abandoned by Buddy’s absent father—there was a potential awkwardness in the relationship because of Buddy’s being a year and a half older. Once, anticipating Buddy’s coming to his house one afternoon to play Monopoly—a game the boys for a season were passionate about, between their passions for gin rummy and chess—Owen had set up the board on the living-room rug with a loving elaboration, arranging the Chance and Community Chest cards in a spiral, like the staircases in Hollywood musicals, and setting out the red hotels and green wooden houses in a formal pattern, a perfect Christmas-colored village as if seen from an airplane.

  Buddy, coming into the room, said with limpid disgust, “Oh, Owen!” and scrabbled the cards into the usual rough stack and dumped the hotels and houses back into the box. Owen was stung, and tried for the rest of his life not to risk showing how much he cared for somebody and then looking foolish. Make sure the circuits are established before plugging anything in: otherwise, meltdown.

  After a fight over something soon forgotten, leaving the basement in tears, Owen heard himself yelling at Buddy, the crowning insult: “At least I have a father!”

  To taunt his friend with this, his lack of a father—he was appalled at himself. Shame bubbled up like mucky black water when his foot went through thin ice in the swamp beyond the high-school grounds. Though he tried to apologize the next day, he was not sure the easy trust between him and Buddy was ever quite restored. Besides wiring things and gluing airplane models together, they used to spend hours making childish artifacts of no clear utility—plywood cutouts of Disney characters, for example. Owen would hold his breath as he delicately steered the thin blade of his coping saw around some fragile protuberance like Goofy’s muzzle or Mickey’s ears. Creatures from all the animated Disney cartoons, plus green-skinned gremlins invented to illustrate wartime slang, populated hundreds of armed-forces insignia; it almost seemed that Disney and Hollywood were running the war, with its cast of millions. Buddy wanted to be in the Corps of Engineers, making bridges for armies to cross on; Owen wanted to be a test pilot, pulling out of dives at the last second. He had met Buddy, in fact, while playing with a rubber-tracked toy M-4 tank in the playground sandbox, and this taller boy had come over and offered to show him his collection of model airplanes—P-51s and Zeros and Spitfires and Messerschmitts, some lead models and some he had carved himself out of balsa wood—in his basement, which was just up beyond the cornfield, a mere six odd house numbers from Owen’s house, and three beyond the ill-fated Hoffmans’. The Rourkes—Buddy and his mild-mannered mother and twerpy younger sister—lived not exactly in a house but in the first floor and basement of a double house, of yellow brick, fairly new. It held four families all told, people who couldn’t afford a house of their own, and this was a little like living on Second Street, or having a father who was not nice to your mother.

  Owen was grateful he did not live in an apartment, just as he was glad not to be a girl or left-handed. Imagine having to write in that contorted position to avoid rubbing your hand in wet ink! He was a lucky person, he decided early. He was certainly lucky compared with the children of London or Leningrad or, later on, Berlin and Tokyo. When his family turned out all the lights and crouched on the stair landing to be away from flying glass, it was a mock air raid, a pretense, and when a plane droned overhead, and he waited with his heart pounding for the bomb to fall, it was of course one of our planes, and no bomb fell. But, then, why would Tojo and Hitler want to bomb Willow? Because of one little parachute factory?

  His parents took walks on Sunday afternoons; decades would pass before Owen could see this custom as their way of asserting themselves as a young couple, escaping from a house that wasn’t theirs. But he, their child, was theirs, and they dragged him along, though the very prospect made his legs heavy, and he would lag behind more and more until his father would eventually double back and lift him up onto his shoulders. It felt weirdly high up there, and his father’s head seemed so strangely large and hairy that after a while he was happy to return to the earth on his own legs.

  There were several routes the walk could take. One way was to turn left down the nameless alley beyond their hedge and walk across Alton Avenue and through the newer section of Willow to Shale Hill and climb it. There were Victory Gardens along the base, but at the summit paths wandered between pines and flat rocks that reminded him of sliding stacks of newspapers getting dark and wrinkled in the rain. From up here the whole town was open to view: the newest section was closest, composed of curved streets planted with buttonwoods and poplars, and then an older, rectilinear section in darker-leafed, denser Norway maples, and, beyond the Alton Pike, the oldest, southernmost part. Mifflin Avenue was conspicuous, lined on both sides with tall horse chestnuts. He saw his own house—his grandfather’s house—the bricks painted custard-yellow and the wood trim parsley-green, and Mifflin Avenue becoming in the haze a road winding through the Blake farm and heading toward Philadelphia as the river ran and glinted beside it. The view always interested his mother, but for Owen it was worth about two seconds of looking. What could you do with a view? He would rather find a dead stick and try to hit pebbles like a baseball.

  Or, emergin
g from under the grape arbor by the side porch and walking out the brick walk, past the pansy bed, to the gap in the hedge, they could turn the other way, right, and walk up Mifflin Avenue, past the spooky Hoffman house and Buddy Rourke’s sad apartment building, past where the Bakers’ barn had burned down, past the smelly pigpens and the fenced pastures for cows, past the creek, in slow spots solid green with watercress that Grammy sometimes gathered, to a road that led up to Cedar Top, opposite Shale Hill, across the valley that held Willow.

  Beyond the town bounds, the road climbed. Unpainted houses held rusting cars in their slanted yards, and mangy dogs barked and barked as the three Mackenzies trudged past. Then came a stretch of pure woods, and a hilltop intersection where a Dairy Queen ice-cream stand had been abandoned. He never learned where the other two roads, the one straight ahead and the one to the left, went. His parents would turn right and head back downhill, through more woods, past the spiky sandstone wall of the Pomeroy estate. Once or twice Owen heard the sound of tennis balls back and forth, and the splashing of a swimming pool, but usually nobody seemed to be home. The lives of the rich were hard to imagine; they involved a lot of not being home. On the other side of the road, on the upper edge of Willow, the cemetery appeared, its granite stones, pale pink and pale gray, sharp-cornered and bald in the sunlight. The road, heading farther downward, became Washington Street, a street of houses with narrow side yards and terraced front lawns, which after three blocks gave way to the commerce at the center of Willow: the movie theatre, the savings bank, a bicycle shop, and, at the five corners where the street met the Alton Pike, Eberly’s Drug Store, the Lutheran church, the Hess Funeral Home, Borough Hall with its little park, and Leinbach’s Oyster House, a restaurant on the first floor of the old sandstone building that had once been the inn called The Willow. Owen’s heart always lifted, and the weight fell off his legs, when he and his parents would come into this downtown, which he walked through every school day, and which he could reconstruct store by store, house by house, in his mind’s eye sixty years afterwards.

  It was on this Cedar Top walk, one day, just after the forsaken ice-cream stand, that Owen had noticed in the grit at the side of the road a milky-white thing like a collapsed balloon; it had the glossy look of a toy. He bent down to look closer and his mother, behind and above him, said, in the voice she reserved for extreme urgency, “Don’t touch it!”

  What could be the danger? It was not alive but her voice suggested it somehow was. “What is it?” he asked.

  “Something batsy,” she said.

  “Batsy” was a pretend word, a private word, which Owen had coined when he could not yet pronounce everything and made words up without meaning to, like “odduce” for “orange juice” and “nana” for “banana.” “Batsy” had to do with food that he didn’t like, that he thought too runny or mixed-up or too much like guts to eat. He must have meant “bad” mixed with “nasty”; the word had stuck, as if describing a reality that couldn’t be touched by the tongue with an actual word. Fresh bird doo-doo on the rim of the stone birdbath and earthworms that had dried out crossing the hot sidewalk were also batsy.

  “What was it for?” he asked, his past tense showing an awareness of something discarded, of something whose mysterious moment of use was past.

  Both his parents were silent as the three of them walked onward, leaving the fascinating rubbery thing behind in the roadside grit. They were the kind of parents, unlike some, who thought it wrong not to answer a child’s questions. He could feel guilt nagging at them.

  “It was for tidiness’ sake, Owen,” his father at last said. “Like a Kleenex.”

  “It was a stork-stopper,” his mother added, her voice better-humored now, laced with a girlish complicity. He could feel his parents, behind him, drawn closer in their secret knowledge. Usually it was he and his mother who had the secrets, in all those hours when his father was absent at work. Her unhappiness was the main secret, though what exactly she was unhappy about he could not quite guess. Being a daughter, wife, and mother all in the same house was stressful, she let him know, though he wasn’t sure why it would be. He was himself a son and grandson, a classmate and playmate, all at once, and could easily have been somebody’s brother. It was as if just being a woman by itself was enough to cause unhappiness. There were days when his mother went to bed with her eyes shut; it frightened him when she was like this, and he stayed away from her. There were days when her whole being said, Don’t touch me.

  Owen’s little room was next to his parents’, and their exchanges unignorably seeped into his ears—the brisk thrusts and counterthrusts of a quarrel, the sighs and groans of weariness in the evening, the playful chatter that began the day. He was happy to have her love him more than she did his father, but he wanted things to be friendly and cozy between the two grown-ups, so that after one of his nightmares they could comfort him by letting him into the warm space between them in their bed.

  As he grew, he discovered more places in Willow where sin cast its shadow, which did not slide away like most shadows but had a sticky, pungent quality. On top of the equipment shed at the playground there was a triangular space, under the pavilion roof, that you could boost yourself into only by jumping and grabbing a crossbeam and swinging your feet up, dangerously hanging in midair for a second, and then leveraging your body onto the top of the shed. As Owen’s eyes adjusted, he saw there were more drawings, never painted over, and written messages and allegations involving girls and boys too old for him to have known. Ginger Bitting sometimes scrambled up here after playground hours, and it was pleasant to stretch out imagining her beside him—her wiry, energetic, fearless body—and to look down the perspective of beaded boards to the macadam pavilion floor, where a stray lost jack or red checker could be seen like a secret beside a leg of one of the heavy trestle tables.

  In the seventh grade, Owen left the elementary school and went to the high-school building half a mile down the Pike toward Alton. Though girls and boys could enter any of the doors and use the grounds without the sexual division enforced on the elementary-school playground, a whiff of scandal clung to the lower windows on the side of the high school toward Alton, under the corner classroom. They were the windows of the girls’ locker room, reinforced with chicken wire and painted black on the inside. Yet cracks in the aging paint appeared, and small holes were mysteriously scratched in it, from the inside. Though there was no written prohibition, teachers shooed boys away from these windows, and the space here, with its mowed grass and narrow sidewalk, gathered such a thick patina of rumored glimpse and determined spying that Owen emerged into adult life with a memory, as luminous as an Ingres seraglio, of naked girls seen at an angle, past foregrounded asbestos-coated pipes and the dusty green tops of metal lockers—girls with shining shoulders and shower-wet flanks, Barbara Emerich and Alice Stottlemeyer and Babs Dolinski and Grace Bickta but somehow not Ginger Bitting, girls he had grown up with, moving slowly in their budding nudity, oblivious, as if underwater.

  Though his mother, a great believer in Nature, often walked around naked on her way to and from the bathroom, and when he was a toddler shared the bathtub with him, Owen had curiously little idea of what a woman’s body looked like, as if, she being his mother, a thick veil intervened. It was only females of his own generation he could see, and who could guide him. Once, wrestling on the baked late-summer playground grass, after Miss Mull had gone home, with Doris Shanahan, a square-faced tomboy from the B-section of the eighth grade who whistled riding her bike and liked to hang around shooting baskets with boys, Owen looked up her shorts as she stood triumphant over him, straddling his face, and he saw, thanks to her underpants hanging loose, a few curly black hairs: it was as if he had never seen pubic hair before. He himself still had none. His seeing Doris’s was a sin, he knew, but it made him happy, and was real. It was knowledge, and knowledge, all the elders of Willow agreed, was good to have.

  iii. The Husband

  When Owen awakes and d
iscovers that Julia is out of bed, he goes forth in search of her, the two of them enacting semi-comic routines in which they consciously—as if this will placate its advance—flirt with senility.

  “Where are you, sweetness?” he calls.

  “Here, darling,” she answers, from some far-off room; but the deteriorating quality of his hearing is such that he cannot tell if she is upstairs or downstairs.

  “Where’s here?” he shouts, growing irritated.

  Her hearing too is not what it had once been, nor her need to respond to him. She falls silent, like a car radio in a tunnel. What a child she still is, he thinks to himself, to believe that “here” explained everything, as if she is the center of the universe. How amazingly selfish!