Every time he failed to perform, or lost his job, or lost interest, he fell back into the Village or wherever he happened to alight. Right back into his old galvanic-twitch life. His personal motives were freedom and pleasure, and he misread them both.
Then a little less than three years ago, thirty-seven years old, with not quite a prep-school education but with a record of scorn for practically everything the human race ever thought worthy, he had another of those painful spasms of the refurbished will. Because his aptitude scores were high and friends of mine would still write letters for him, he got himself admitted to San Diego State College. He expected us to applaud, and we did. After all, we were penitent, we were clearly not good for him and never had been. Any college reckless enough to admit him had our gratitude, any, move he made that looked serious stirred our hope.
In September he drove across with a friend. Contrary to custom, and promptly enough to encourage us, we had a letter. The school was O.K., better than he had expected. Freshman classes were infantile, but he had goofed off so long he had something coming. He thought he could take an overload and go to summer school and so crowd the degree into three years. He had an apartment over a garage, pleasant and quiet. The weather was as advertised, the beach marvelous. The big thing around there was surfing: decrepit as he was, he was giving it a try. Mother would probably raise a cheer on hearing he had shaved off his beard—it hadn’t seemed quite appropriate on the beach.
He exaggerated our concern with trivial stigmata. I am no lover of facial hair, but I would have applauded a beard as long as Rip Van Winkle’s if I could have been sure that Curt was finally, after so much disastrous self-waste, going to pull himself together into a package, even if the package turned out to be a Southern California Natural Man.
There were no more letters. In November a friend, asked to look him up, reported that Curtis had dropped school and given up his apartment. After some detective work, he had found him living in a trailer colony near the beach, with a girl and a surfboard. Our informant said it was not a very attractive colony, more a motorcycle bohemia than a surfer’s camp: plenty of black leather, greasy jeans, long hair, late parties, and raids by the narcotics squad hunting backyard and window-sill weeds.
Well, so the more he changed the more he was the same thing. We swallowed the news without real surprise. If he was indeed a custard pie, he was not going to stay nailed to any wall. I suppose we finally gave up on him then, though we had given up on him several times before, and though one night Ruth, reading a magazine article about surfing, looked up at me and said, “You know, surfing sounds like fun. And it isn’t only kicks, it’s a cult. You have to have real skill and nerve.” Yes, I said, so I had heard. “It ought to be a healthy life, hadn’t it?” she said. “Healthier than that zoo down in the Village, anyway?”
“Ah, Ruthie,” I said. “Ruthie, Ruthie, Ruthie!” But I had had the same sneaking thought myself. At least there was nothing false or contemptible about surfing, even if it didn’t seem quite the highest end to which a man might devote himself.
That would have been about Christmas time. In February we had a call from the La Jolla police. Curtis was dead, drowned in a surfing accident, his body recovered.
Ruth was getting over an operation. I persuaded her to stay with her sister in Bucks County and flew out to bring Curt back. I saw his girl—a trifle, a tanned gewgaw, string-haired, ready to be defiant if I gave her a bad time. But why should I give her a bad time? She cried, saying he was the greatest guy she ever knew, he wasn’t satisfied with anything but the very best out of life; and looking at me out of her wet slightly crossed eyes she whispered, “Sometimes I wonder if he really slipped and got hit. Sometimes I wonder if he didn’t let go. He was capable of it.”
I had wondered the same myself, but I didn’t feel like joining in her speculations. When I left her she probably went off with one of the other great guys who lived in the clutter of trailers, campers, and converted delivery trucks scattered along that scabby little ravine. Or maybe she stayed on in Curt’s, which I sold on the spot to a couple of motorcyclists with sideburns clear to their jawbones.
They didn’t show me Curtis there. I saw him only back in Bucks County, at the funeral. It seemed I looked through a scald of tears at the total failure of his life and mine. I thought he had a manly face. Without the beard he had worn ever since beards emerged as part of the uniform of alienation, he reminded me of the bronze charioteer in Delphi. The beach life had been good for him. He looked fit and young, and his brown hair was streaked. Sun or peroxide? Inescapable as it was, the question shamed me. After all, he was thirty-seven years old.
I still can’t think of his face composed on the final satin without a clutch in my chest. The hair might have been as false an emblem as the beard had been, but the face had given up all its poses and looked merely young, incredibly young, far younger than it had any right to look, the very face of kicks-crazy America, unlined by thinking, unmarked by pain, unshadowed even by years of scrupulous dissoluteness, untouched by life—or by death either—except for a slight discontented droop at the corners of the lips. I could not answer the suggestion of resentment and dissatisfaction in it. Maybe, if the girl’s suspicion had any basis, he had sidled into death as he had taken up every job and project of his life, and then found that he couldn’t quit it as he had quit everything else.
Somehow Ruth and I had always had some groundless faith that he would come around. The boy having trouble becoming a man would eventually, perhaps late but eventually, overcome his trouble. These oats would be sown, he would get over having to sniff at every post where some existential junky or disengaged beat or criminal saint had lifted his leg. There would come a time when he wouldn’t have to snarl at his gentle humorous mother, and when he and I might talk, go to a ballgame, have a drink, discuss a book, without that miserable stiff-legged father-son suspicion and that un-sleeping awareness of our differences. Without admitting it to each other, we had counted on time, and now time was run out. Never never never never never. If Lear was an old fool, and he was, he was by the end a contrite and suffering fool. So was I, for I could not put aside the thought that perhaps, out in those glassy rollers inside the violet band of the kelp beds, Curt had looked it all in the face, himself in the face, and let go the board. There had been
no
wounds or signs of injury on his body. Most suicides, I believe, are spiteful. If Curt was really a suicide, did he go hating, or did he go hopeless? Either way, it meant he couldn’t bear any more. Neither, thinking about it, could I.
Sometime after the funeral, the girl—there was something human and touching about her little act of responsibility—sent on a box of Curt’s personal effects, including his books. I could have listed them without opening the box: Miller, Albee, Kerouac, Sartre, Genet, the Marquis de Sade, Ginsberg, Burroughs—a poison garland from the Grove. I could not have told you then, and I can’t tell you now, whether those books really corrupted him. I think they only corroborated him, without quite giving him the confidence of his convictions.
That ends Curt’s story. I think I must go on a little with my own. I felt that I had to be steady for Ruth’s sake, and for a while I seemed to be. But in the end she bore it better than I, for no amount of thinking could reconcile me to the way our only son had died, irresponsibly and frivolously, incongruously uniting in himself a sun-worshiper and a nauseast; and if unhappy, as he surely was, unhappy by his own asserted will. I judged him, yes I did, even in death and even while I was stricken with the sense of his unhappiness, and I judged myself for judging him, and could find no way of avoiding judging him.
February and March were a dull sad endless time for us both. I wasn’t sleeping, but when Ruth tried giving me sleeping pills I made a virtue of an old prejudice against tranquilizers. Probably I was punishing myself. I have already admitted that I believe in guilt, not as an indulgence but as an essential cautery of the soul. One of my troubles was that I felt guilty without being able to persuade myself intellectually that I could have acted any other way.
So I ground the coals to my breast in my private dark. I had exiled myself to Curt’s old room on the excuse that I didn’t want to keep Ruth awake, but what I really wanted was Curt’s ghost to myself. It was the worst time of my life. Night after night I went on composing dialogues, revising his life and mine, explaining away estrangement with reasons that I did not fully believe, being wiser in these fictions than I had ever been in fact, putting into clear prose this clash of values and the need for self-discipline, self-respect, clear purpose, all that. I said persuasively everything that at one time or other I had said angrily or hopelessly. And every time, I disgusted myself with my own mouthings, I never persuaded myself that I would have persuaded him. I felt that I couldn’t leave even his ghost alone to be itself as it wanted to be. Why? Because I couldn’t accept him, living or dead, as he had wanted to be. I wanted reconciliation, oh yes, but on my terms, because I couldn’t convince myself that my terms were wrong. I defined myself as bigot without shaking my convictions at all.
Within weeks his living face had begun to fade into a few waxwork expressions: an impish boy (what ever happened to him, where did he go?) caught in motion while he played with a terrier on a wide New Hampshire lawn; a, sandaled beat who leaned his head against a wall and raised his unclean reddish beard in contemplation; the athlete whose composed handsome discontented face burned upward from white satin under the carefully brushed streaked hair.
To the fading or frozen expressions that hid my son’s unreachable privacy I tried to speak my heart, and I had the advantage of endless revisions; but the dead listened no more than the living had. He would have none of my love unless it came unqualified and uncritical and in spite of every provocation—and it is simply uncanny how much of that spirit I detect in Jim Peck, who isn’t of course after my love, but who is certainly trying to corner me without losing any of his own men. It is not a kind of love I am ever likely to be able to give. I don’t think any human being is entitled to it, and anyway I can’t separate love and respect. Curt demanded what I couldn’t give, I insisted on what he wouldn’t accept. Never never never never never.
Trying to explain myself, I told him about my own life, including some shameful episodes, but all that did was revive a lot of unhappinesses that I had lived down and put aside years before, and remind me of old guilts that were not unlike Curt’s. Thinking filled my days with boredom and my nights with self-loathing. Out of my son’s death I plucked the conviction of my own imperfection and failure, and yet I’ could not name the ways I might have taken so as not to fail.
There were times in the office when, faced by some contractual quibble or other, I was drowned in disgust; times when dictating a letter I heard my voice like a twittering of sparrows. By the end of March, Ruth was saying to me, “Joe, you’ve got to take a vacation. You’ve got to get away for a while.”
I could easily enough have justified a trip to Rome or London or Paris. But I would have run into clients in any of those glamorous capitals on any afternoon. I found too that I didn’t want any two-week interim followed by a return to the office. I wanted to wipe the board off clean, not with a dusty eraser but with a kerosened rag, the way we did it every Friday afternoon in Northfield, Minnesota, when my mother was keeping house for a professor at Saint Olaf College and I was briefly a Danish kid, possessed of an unexpected identity between the Swedes who snooted the Norwegians and the Norwegians who scorned the Swedes. A blackboard as clean as Miss Tidemann’s fifth-grade room on a Friday afternoon, a mind emptied of all that could not now be helped, a full retreat of the soul.
Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura
...
Nel mezzo? Quasi alla fine. I was more than sixty, past the age when I should have had to settle ultimate questions. But ultimate questions were the only kind I wanted to ask, such questions as might divert my attention from Curtis, who was past hurt or help, and onto myself, who felt ambiguously but bitterly responsible.
It may have been only Ruth’s insistence on a trip that got me to believing the cure for my unease might lie in a place. I had never had a place of my own, I had spent my life in motion even while I persuaded myself I was domesticated. A housebroke vagrant. Call me Ishmael, but add, Jenny kissed me. I had an alley cat’s appreciation of stability without having a place either of origin or of domicile. We had camped in Manhattan for thirty-seven years, with at least one trip abroad during each of the thirty-seven. When I began to wonder if it might be possible to go back and find where the road forked
(Che la diritta via era smarrita!),
I couldn’t think where I might go.
If I had had a home town, I would have gone straight back to it on one of those middle-aged pilgrimages to search out the boy I was, the man I started out to be, and I might have half expected to find myself barefooted and with a fishpole, like a Post cover by Norman Rockwell. Young America, freckled and healthy, the finest crop grown in the soil of democratic institutions. But I had been raised on the run by an unfortunate woman whose first husband, my father, shot himself in the barn, and whose second, a drunken railroad man with D.T.’s and periodic paralysis, was finally backed over by a switch engine in the Saint Paul yards. After he died, when I was six, we moved from place to place. My mother, with a thick Danish accent arid no education beyond her twelfth year, had no skill to sell, and no beauty, only her hard hands. She kept other people’s house and tended other people’s children.
We lived in shallow, laborious, temporary ruts, and over their rims she was always seeing some dawn or rainbow, the kind of rainbow that had brought her to the States, only now it was one that always promised something better for me. Generally she waited until the school term was over, and then we were gone to where a letter or a rumor or a chance conversation over coffee had persuaded her she must go—another town, another house, another job, strange faces, strange rooms, strange smells, strange streets to be learned. Sometimes I have felt that I could smell my way backward down my life from stranger’s house to stranger’s house, like a homing dog, by little tokens left on maple or elm or light pole. I would know one place by the smell of crushed mulberries, another by the reek of trying lard, still another by the dampness of laundry hung on a clothes-horse under which I lay hidden and heard the surf of adult voices overhead. There is no plan or continuity or permanence. My first sixteen years of going to and fro in the earth were a passage from vacuum to vacuum.