The barrowfields, p.3
The Barrowfields, page 3
After another year of teaching during the day and writing into all hours of the night and slowly taking on the pallor and visage of an apparition, he had fifty thousand well-ordered words. This time, he was writing the story of his life. He was writing about his mother and his father, and the mountains of North Carolina, and a bright young man who had been born there out of place and out of time.
Somewhere just beneath the view of his awareness, purposely hidden, pushed down by him among all those acrid and forgotten memories of home, there lurked a self-poisoning notion that when he had written his book and it had been published to acclaim, he would return to Old Buckram and present it to Maddy as conclusive evidence of his worth. In moments of quiet, when he allowed himself to bring this demon into focus and considered his unconscious desire for this future reckoning, he would drive it back down again and tell himself that her opinion didn’t matter and that he wasn’t doing it for her. He knew, without knowing, that she’d never read a word he’d written, and this should have been enough to save him. But in fact her doubt would be a distant yet implacable weight upon his shoulders that would not abate. It diminished him. It drew away from his power.
And still he worked. Day after day, night after night, he worked. He wrote hundreds of pages but wasn’t satisfied with what he saw on the paper before him. Critical to him was to develop and hone a truly unique style of his own. He sought, in essence, a new way of writing, of storytelling—but it proved elusive. The thought occurred to him that perhaps he should spend less time writing and more time reading until he found this new voice. He revisited all the classics, studied them in microscopic detail, and kept journals of his thoughts about them. He read every book on the New York Times best-seller list to see what people were writing, but thought most of them largely homogeneous and consequently not worthwhile. Disturbed by a growing listlessness in his pursuit, he turned to and explored the full Roman index of expurgatories and enjoyed these a great deal more, but they lent little to his endeavor. Something told him he had more figuring to do; that the book he would write was inchoate in his mind; that it needed to cook awhile longer. So he set aside what he had written of the novel and the tide of his life carried him on. On a whim, he enrolled in the University of Baltimore law-school night program, expecting only to take a few classes and learn something new and challenging. On a Saturday he went to the library to pick up a Latin to English dictionary.
He’d been to this library almost daily since his arrival in Baltimore, and more than once a student assumed he was employed there because he was so frequently seen toting heaps of books up and down the stairs. It wasn’t uncommon, too, for paid library personnel to ask him for help in locating materials or making recommendations. He went in through the heavy wood-and-glass doors and the smell of all those books came to him and gave him the sense that wherever he’d been, he had just arrived home. The whole of the library was etched in his memory and he knew right where he was going. People came and went carrying books. A group of his students walked by, nodded with respect, and said, “Professor.” This pleased him. Then a young lady he didn’t know walked out of the library office in front of him. He watched as she pulled on a pair of white gloves and mounted the steps to the rare-book room, where she retrieved an antiquarian tome and returned with it to the library desk. He’d never seen anyone so beautiful. He forgot where he was going and why he was there. She walked past him and said hello, and he became instantly incapacitated (ponytail—legs—intimate familiarity with rare books). Every neuron in his capacious brain misfired all at once and went rocketing off in new and unfamiliar directions.
While her account of this encounter (reserved and understated) and his account (soaring hyperbole) differ in the telling, there are a few salient details the stories have in common. For example, they agree (more or less) on her attire and general appearance: her hair was blond, and she was wearing green clamdiggers. He described them as “viridescent capris”; she referred to them more modestly as “light green pedal pushers I’d borrowed from my roommate.” On top she wore a simple white blouse. This he said was “décolleté” and “years ahead of its time.” He offered an affidavit to this effect. She said it was conservative work attire, and more believably so, but in any event close enough.
It is undisputed, though, that he was unable to speak for several minutes. He eventually had to walk outside and come back in before he regained his composure. They agree he’d forgotten what book he came to the library for, and that when he recalled what it was and learned that the library’s only copy was checked out, she offered to call him when it was available. The phone number he left, however, was inadvertently in error by several digits. He said it was similar to when you begin a flourish of words on the typewriter but your fingers are all on the wrong keys.
She asked his name. He responded: “I’m Henry Aster. I’m a writer. May I ask yours?” She blushed and said her name was Eleonore.
He forgot about everything else and spent his days dreaming about her. He wrote her love letters filled with verse, but she was immune to his poesy, or nearly so. He had read of men who would recite Byron and Keats and (lesser) women would swoon as if in the hands of a conjurer, but Eleonore was far too pragmatic for this type of elevated approach. On their first date he took her to a production of Waiting for Godot and wasn’t allowed into her apartment later that evening. On the second date, he wised up and took her ice-skating.
She wasn’t much interested in academics or scholarly pursuits in the traditional sense, but make no mistake: She was far from being a dimwit. He readily conceded in the end that she outranked him in terms of native intelligence, but hers was applied to markedly different enterprises. She loved the outdoors and flowers and birds and cool spring mornings and warm summer nights. By her own training, and with only the close tutelage of Mother Nature, she was an equestrian, a botanist, and an ornithologist. She could tell you the name of every plant, flower, tree, and weed on the Atlantic Seaboard. She had learned, and if asked would recite, every known species of eastern bird, migratory or otherwise.
Her childhood memories were made in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania, south of Pittsburgh, one block away from Chartiers Cemetery, where she played as a child and learned not to be afraid of ghosts. She got her first horse, an indomitable Arabian named Kashmir, when she was twelve years old, and there was no looking back. She trained Kashmir herself after reading books on the subject, and he behaved with the dignity of a Roman horse of war. A girl of that age who learns to train and care for a majestic animal of such grace and stature all on her own without guidance of any kind (save her own instinct and initiative) has intelligence of a different kind than what is often brought about with a typical schoolhouse education.
She had three sharp-looking older brothers known for their academic pursuits. They each attended an Ivy League school—two at Harvard, one in a master’s program at Yale—and due to absurd, unstated chauvinism, no one in the family entertained the notion that she might have done the same. With her soaring siblings at institutes of higher learning in the northeast, the time came for her to move on from high school and determine the altitude her life’s trajectory would achieve. Her parents had not spoken to her of college and whenever she brought it up, her father pretended not to hear and her mother walked quickly into the kitchen. One night she sat down with them at the dinner table and told them she wished to go to college, and that she had a few good ones picked out that she thought would be affordable. Her father responded with an acidic laugh and commenced a fusillade of biting, unrestrained sarcasm. What would she do with a college degree? he asked. Did they have classes on horseback riding? Had she called the local community college? They had horses, he thought. Anyway, there was no money for this frolic. Every dollar for years to come had been pledged to pay for the boys’ educations, and they had scholarships. Did she think money grew on trees? It certainly did not.
Evenly, she said, “So you’re not going to help me?”
Her answer—the upturned palms of her father, which supplied the response: “See? We have nothing.” A year earlier their neighbors across the hill had been murdered by their own son. He was Eleonore’s age—the boy who did it—and until that one bright August morning after breakfast when he went to the barn to get the ax, he had been an exemplary child. After killing them, he sat for a while in the new-found peace and quiet and then called the police to report the crime. When asked why he did it, he replied, “I’d had about all the sarcasm I could take.”
Eleonore got up to leave.
“Where are you going?” said her father.
“To the barn.”
“To get the ax?”
“No—to tell the horses goodbye.”
That fall, she took her own money and her broken heart and enrolled in California University of Pennsylvania. In two years she had earned a teaching certificate and was ready for anything that life could offer. Knowing the time had come to strike out into the world, she headed south to Baltimore where she would begin her new life. She chose this destination for no particular reason other than the desire to go somewhere away from home and to show herself that she was brave enough to do it. She’d been working at the library for three weeks when Henry walked in and everything changed.
I am, I suppose, fortunate my parents met and were sufficiently attracted to each other to bear children. I realize now, though, that they would have been better off if this had never happened.
My father had come out of Old Buckram with grand plans. He believed he had the raw materials—the intellect, the instincts, the ear—to become, over time, a beloved American writer. By reading and truly understanding all that had come before, by advancing the craft in a way that only he could, he might one day ascend to the ranks of Wolfe, Faulkner, Fitzgerald. He would produce an unparalleled work of fiction that would attempt to redefine the very nature of language. Yet at last, he was only a man, who, like so many of us, had dreams that exceeded him.
And this man thus described met the shining soul of a woman who was to become my mother. Years would pass and life would be visited upon them, and its toll would be great. His unquenchable thirst for all things would deliquesce like phantom smoke; her indomitable spirit would resurrect itself only in isolation, only as she galloped fiercely through the fields, a solitary knight in battle, with only herself to witness the courage. They were indeed doomed. But this eventual destruction was foreseen by no one at the time.
—
In 1967, upon my father’s graduation from law school, they were married by the magistrate and moved into a second-floor apartment on West Fairmont Avenue in Baltimore in close proximity to and roughly equidistant from the Edgar Allan Poe house on the east and the H. L. Mencken house on the west. My mother had come to love him and couldn’t have been happier. I can see it in the photographs. There is a patient and sweet contentment in her smile.
And he began again to write in earnest. He wrote of Maddy. He wrote of Old Buckram. He wrote of the white mist rising and churning in the valleys, and the once-green mountains in the foreground fading to shades of magnificent blue in the distance. He wrote of wood-smoke from distant fires on early autumn nights as the Milky Way rolled into view. He could remember every detail. He told her time moved more slowly there, but not for him. For him, it was different. For him, Old Buckram carried a sadness that he didn’t think he’d ever get over and he didn’t know why. He called it a “stillness of disquiet.” At night, anguished, he would read to her what he had written and she would lie at the foot of the bed with eyes full of wonder.
He moved his typewriter a dozen times, trying to find the perfect place to write. The apartment they shared had a Juliet balcony in the main bedroom overlooking the street, and in the early evenings with some lingering light of day he would push his desk to the open doors and work, looking up from time to time to watch people moving up and down the lonely corridor. He was easily distracted and would become fiercely perturbed at just about anything that drew his attention away from writing. “Shostakovich wrote his music out in the hall,” he once said, “not to protect his family from the terror of the KGB when they came to take him at last, but because he was trying to concentrate.”
He lovingly called his new wife all sorts of oddly sweet names—“sonnet” and “rabbit” were two that I have heard (the latter taken from For Whom the Bell Tolls, no doubt)—and after a few fits and starts she allowed him to write and took good care of him while he was doing so. He would call to her from the balcony and she would take him another beer in a glass or a vodka tonic or some of whatever bottle they happened to have at the moment. When it began to get dark, or when the cold began to come in through the balcony doors, she would bring this fact to his attention. She would make simple dinners for the two of them, and on those nights when he couldn’t be bothered, she would set his plate on the desk next to him and eventually he would find it and eat.
One night two cars collided in the street immediately below the balcony, and when asked to recount the event to the police officer who arrived on the scene, he confessed that he had seen none of it. Another night a man walking by spotted him and, standing on the street below, called up and asked if the man at the typewriter could spare a cigarette and a drink, both of which it was apparent were being conspicuously consumed. So he took a break from writing and rubberbanded an opened pack of cigarettes to a half-empty bottle of vodka and tossed them over the railing to the man, who said he’d never forget it. Perhaps he never did.
On a Friday in the spring of 1968 he started writing early and drinking even earlier, and by late afternoon he’d become cataleptic with gin and the words were not coming. He drove Eleonore out of the apartment with his frustration, and she was just outside when she heard his typewriter crash like an airliner in the middle of the street. So it went. For a while, then, he just wrote by hand.
Soon thereafter he received a terse letter from Helton on a scrap of unlined paper. Helton had never gained a reputation as an epistolary, so just receiving an envelope in his father’s rarely seen hand suggested ill tidings from Old Buckram. “Your mother is not feeling well,” Helton wrote, “but I’m sure it will pass. I just wanted you to know.” On the back of the letter was this afterthought: “No reason for you to come home unless coming home anyway. Will manage.” Helton didn’t want to impose, but the implication was clear enough.
The thought of Maddy’s declining health began to weigh on his mind like an anchor. He hated to be so far from home, leaving everything to Helton, who could barely care for himself. A few weeks later he got another letter from Helton. This one said, “I’m starting to get worried.”
The night of the second letter the young couple sat in bed together with legs entangled. A string of Christmas lights ran high around the perimeter of the room, and the balcony doors were open to the warm outside. He drank wine and read Updike by the room’s one lamp and tried to fool himself into thinking there was nothing he could do about Maddy. Unprompted, he said to Eleonore, “I don’t want to go back.”
She had seen the letters. “I know you don’t,” she said, “but maybe we should.”
He got up and retrieved the wine bottle from their small kitchen, and then returned to bed. “It doesn’t feel like home to me. It never did.”
“It doesn’t have to be home,” she said, taking his hand. “If we don’t like it, we can leave as soon as—”
“As soon as what? We no longer need to be there?” As soon as Maddy dies is what she meant but didn’t mean to say, and he knew it.
“If I go,” he said, “will you go with me?”
“Of course I will. You know that.”
The act of saying the words, of imagining it as real, made it suddenly seem possible. In her mind, a move to the mountains of North Carolina in high summer seemed a happy and adventurous prospect. She had heard it described, and she longed for the simplicity and beauty it offered. A brief vision of Old Buckram’s green hills and upland fields washed over her, and what she saw was lush and eternal. A beguiling optimism is often the first step toward folly.
“If we decide to go,” she said, excited now and feeling the momentary enchantment, “do you think we could—”
“Get a horse? There are lots of horses in Old Buckram.”
“Are there any Arabians? You wouldn’t know. I’d be surprised if there were. We’d need a house with a fenced pasture beside it or somewhere near it, and a barn. I’d take care of the rest.”
“If we get a horse,” he said, “I want to be the one who names it.”
“Henry,” said Eleonore, resting her hands on her stomach, “there’s something else I’ve been thinking about. I don’t want to raise a child in the city.”
—
Before leaving for Old Buckram, my father visited the Poe house a final time to say goodbye to so many things. Eleonore found him there, sitting on the front steps, loudly and drunkenly reciting poetry she had never heard before. “ ‘Now, to me the elm-leaves whisper / Mad, discordant melodies, / And keen melodies like shadows / Haunt the moaning willow trees…’ ” He was three-quarters of the way into a bottle of vodka. This was not an auspicious beginning, but it was a suitable end. The next morning, after studying maps of three states while he slept, she loaded him into the car and they made their way to the misty mountains of North Carolina. He was going home.
In my father’s childhood, during the emerging spring when the dogwoods were blooming white and gold in the long blue mountains, his father would drive the family down a meager dirt road over and around the wooded hills to the farmers market and back. At the apex of one of the hills, the woods cleared away to the west and the hillside fell into a great valley and climbed steeply up again to reveal the stone-gray face of Ben Hennom, an ancient mountain worn smooth and dark by the weathers of time. On a high shoulder of the mountain, half hidden by a row of wraithlike trees as old as time itself, sat an immense house of black iron and glass. During the day, it was an odd architectural curiosity. Due to a subtle trick of the mountain’s folding ridges, it seemed always to be in shadow, even when the sun blazed in a cloudless sky above it. From morning to night, it was cloaked in a slowly swirling mist as thick as smoke from a fire. At night, it brooded in darkness like an ember-eyed bird of prey on the edge of the mountain. Never before had a house been built like it, and never would another be built. The children would scramble to the windows of the car to marvel in awed silence at the great and mysterious structure.
