Driver's Education (10 page)

She'd prod and poke and become better acquainted with the bulb, the thing that'd taken refuge in her chest. She'd tell herself it was shrinking, maybe, that it was smoothing into the soft folds of her body. She'd tell herself that it was growing, that in intervals of expanding centimeters it was overtaking her breast.

I remember now that there were fights, too. During the slight moments when she'd step out from the bathroom, there would be arguments between her and my father in the family room. I'd listen to them as I lay in my room. My father insisted that she see a doctor, though my mother always refused. Toward the end, when she finally did agree, they were told that the cancer—as my father had feared and as my mother well knew—had become metastatic and had hit stage 4. It had reached its desperate arms outward, taking hold of her lymph nodes and the surrounding tissues. This was in 1957 before chemotherapy and radiation and commonplace lumpectomies and five-kilometer fundraising walks. They were told by doctors in New York, Connecticut, New Jersey—by
at least one man in Boston—that the only option was a radical mastectomy, which was then a gruesome procedure that would not only remove her breasts, but the surrounding lymph nodes and muscles, and likely a chunk of her ribs. There was no telling if it would work, and when it was finished, she would be left looking like—for lack of a better comparison—a question mark: hunched, deformed, depleted of significance or certainty.

From the family room my mother shouted, “I won't let them carve me away,” and the floor of my bedroom trembled.

•  •  •

The service was on a Saturday in June that was hot, and happy, and bright. The night before, my father and I had gone to the Avalon to see
The Incredible Shrinking Man
with Grant Williams, and as we'd done at the theater, we left a vacant seat between us in the front row of the church. And also as he'd done in the theater, my father tried to reach across to me, though only once, but he stopped before he fully took hold. There was a slight brushing of skin as he grazed my shoulder. I remember very clearly that I wanted to feel him for longer. I wanted my hand to be smaller. I wanted to hold on to one of his thick knuckles with my five tiny fingers.

•  •  •

After that, my father stopped accompanying me to the Avalon entirely. It didn't matter if the theater was showing
Peyton Place
or
Sayonara
, he stoutly and stubbornly refused. In the preceding weeks, his problem with any given picture had grown beyond the unsatisfying endings. Increasingly he took issue with how stories began. Likewise, he said their middles—their guts—weren't strung together appropriately. They unraveled at the wrong times, at points of minor interest; the consequences they precipitated meant next to nothing. No one was heroic enough.

I don't know where my father went during those nights when I sat through movies with two empty seats beside me: whether he drove directly home, or whether he and the Buick wandered, itinerantly, along the soft curves carved by the roads of the Lower Hudson. There were other women, I knew: there were dates, flings, affairs, fleeting flirtations,
but they never amounted to much. In retrospect, I don't know how I would've reacted if they had—whether I would've slipped into some new sort of arrangement or simply rescripted a version of my life in which this person didn't exist. It doesn't particularly matter, though: my father would never truly get over my mother. He believed—for better or worse—in the singularity of love.

In June of 1958, my father left me at the Avalon to see a movie alone. The picture slotted for the week was
From Hell to Texas
—the first Don Murray film the Avalon was premiering since
Bus Stop,
and a movie my mother would've liked. I was still trying to convince him to accompany me to films at that point, and so I brought it to his attention when he pulled up to the curb alongside the cinema's entrance in the old Buick.

“It's supposed to be good,” I told him. “The best, even.”

“Yeah?” He didn't bother putting the car in park as we idled. He unlocked the doors and pressed a nickel into my palm, saying, “Call me when it's through.”

He gave me a weak smile, a quick tilt of his lips' corners. He told me that if I didn't hurry I'd miss the preview reel—which, two years earlier, we'd designated as a film's best part.

“Really,” he told me, shooing me out of the car, “you're going to be late.”

Incidentally, the movie wasn't all that good. It wasn't horrible, but it wasn't all that good. Don Murray was wonderful—I still think my mother would've liked that—but I'd argue that the rest of the cast wasn't as compelling as it could have been. Dennis Hopper seemed stiff, and as much as I wanted to, I couldn't buy Diane Varsi as Juanita Bradley. Something to do with her hair.

When I phoned my father and he arrived to pick me up, I told him he'd really missed out.

Also, I asked, “Where's the Buick?”

He was leaning against a parked car that wasn't ours: a used '56 Bel Air. It was yellow, the color of wet straw, and it was laced with scratches. The side-view mirrors winged out in awkward, unhelpful angles; there was a gash in the paint along the passenger's side door that looked like some sort of flesh wound. One of the rear windows was missing.

“This is the new Buick,” my father said. He had seen it in Kingston, New York, he explained—he'd driven by it accidentally in a lot, when he took a wrong turn—weeks earlier when he was scouting a site for a new bridge he'd be constructing. He'd traded in our old car and paid an additional two thousand dollars for the Bel Air. He told me he'd decided to call it Lucy, on account of the paint job matching the color of my mother's hair.

“So?” He raised both his palms upward, as if preparing to accept my praise.

“I think I liked the Buick better.”

Finn

The road is relentless, but so are we. After we leave the garage on East Broadway, Randal and I press on valiantly, skidding out of New York and past New Jersey's grey industrial fields, its bucket-sized lakes that pool at the base of its warehouses. There's U.S. Route 22 and U.S. Route 9 and U.S. Route 1 and New Jersey Route 21 and exits 57 and 58 and 52 and the Garden State Parkway. There are sixteen-wheel semis that, despite their size, seem to spawn, then vanish, then be next to us again, running in herds like buffalo. Hay trucks that I think are driving faster than they should be—faster than we are, at least—that'll disappear into the black space of the encroaching night.

“Maybe she's dead,” Randal says. Since hitting the road, Mrs. Dalloway has been corpse quiet. No scratching, no gasped meows. Just the gentle shifting of her loose skin and bones whenever we hit a bump.

“Stop that,” I tell him.

“New Jersey could kill anything.” He sets his ear against his pack, which is shoved between his feet. “No luck. She just hacked.”

Next—Pennsylvania. We merge onto I-81 and the highway stretches in front of us, cutting through the land's fat. Lucy's headlights illuminate the sides of the road in wide arcs, projecting images of the uneven grass and the dead split trees and the truck bays that make up the state's jumbled insides. There's that airy sense you get when you're driving that maybe you're flying; that you're floating on nothing toward a vanishing
point, out where the road gets swallowed up by the sky, or maybe the sky funnels down to the road.

Everything is black by the time we reach Blue Mountain. We're beginning the slow, gradual climb through the foothills, barreling through the countless tunnels, when Randal asks, finally, what my granddad did in Pittsburgh.

I say: “He saved this guy from getting crushed into a million bits.”

“Really,” he said.
“Really.”

“True story.”

My eyes are tired from staring at the same four colors that make up the western stretches of Pennsylvania. I stretch my arm out the window and I make a wing with my hand, diving it up and down into the wind, feeling the current push my palm skyward, then—with just a tiny shift—my knuckles down.

A minute later: “How did he do that?”

“You're not going to believe me. It's the honest-to-God truth, but you're not going to believe me.”

“Try me.”

So I tell him.

•  •  •

The first time my granddad went to Pittsburgh, it was for the bridges.

He designed them for a living, great reaching things that spanned rivers and abysses and all other species of bottomless chasms. You've seen his work, undoubtedly. You've driven across it, or strolled on its footpaths, or spit from its slick railings into the infinity below, and each time, the whole time, you've never known it's his. No one's known, probably, unless No One was the sort of person who researched these things. Because while my granddad was a great man, he was also greatly humble. He was always content to let other folks take the credit, to let them slap their names onto square bronze plaques while from a distance he observed his work, connecting two worlds for the first time.

He told me that in 1963, when he and Lucy slipped into Allegheny County, Pittsburgh was laced with more than four hundred bridges, more than any city in the entire world. He'd been driving through the
night and when he entered the city, it was from the south. In the waning dark he slipped through Dormont and Green Tree and so many other sleepy, leafy suburbs. It was as he climbed the back side of Mount Washington to overlook the city center, its steely innards, that dawn—pink and miraculous and explosive—broke.

It tossed its eastern light onto the Liberty Bridge's curved spine and across the Smithfield Street Bridge's famed trusses; it weaved between the Three Sisters and tickled their matching backsides; it bent the Fort Pitt Bridge's bowstring arch till the whole thing glowed red; it hit the West End Bridge last, naturally, plucking its suspensions like guitar stings till the hum of it all finally woke the city.

Or at least that's what he'd expected to see. The Pittsburgh he'd
dreamt
he'd see; the Pittsburgh that, twenty years earlier, during the height of World War II, had been the nation's number one producer of steel. The Pittsburgh that cranked out the materials necessary to make the tanks and the planes and the guns that'd squash Hitler and
zee Germans. A million tons of it in one year alone,
my granddad would say.
Try to imagine that, Finn.
I'd tell him I couldn't imagine seeing a million tons of much of anything.
Oh,
he'd say.
Oh, sure you can.

But this wasn't twenty years ago—this was 1963—and Pittsburgh had turned into a stinking shithole. The industry that had once bellied the city was now shriveled; the government contracts long expired, Big Steel was now racked with labor strikes and infighting. And there were other problems, too. For starters, the region was in the throes of one of its worst droughts on record. The waters of the Allegheny, of the Monongahela and the Ohio—they all ran uncertain and anemic. The currents would mill in shallow puddles around the pilings of the bridges, they'd cling to the grooves in the concrete and rusted steel, collecting dust, waiting to dry up. My granddad told me that the streets were so baked and dry that the asphalt would crack if you managed to stand in one place for too long. (And he would know—it happened to him. Right there on top of Mount Washington. There was a snapping sound, then a plume of black dust—and
bam,
his left foot was four feet under.) He told me how there were ladies who had no water for their gardens, so they fed
their roses milk; how there was a man who'd trained his dog to lick dirt off his car, because there wasn't any water to wash it.

And also, he said, there were the fires. They'd started in January, when twenty five-alarm blazes leveled seven city blocks on Pittsburgh's Northside. Then, in April, when my granddad arrived and the embers in the sad empty lots were just beginning to cool, there was a new batch, set by a never-to-be-found arsonist. New rooms bubbling with ash, new flames licking singed shingles. Ignited roofs that, from where my granddad stood on Mount Washington, looked like torches in a mob.

The fire department did what it could, of course. It erected its ladders against the buildings' half-burnt walls; it pulled folks out of burning doorways. But remember, there was this drought—there was only so much water the rivers could afford to give—so the men didn't have enough juice to run their hoses. Instead, they used squirt guns. Honest to God. The colored plastic sort you'd find at a five-and-dime store. They had a whole arsenal of them, I swear. My granddad saw the whole thing go down.

From where he parked Lucy he watched the smoke as it wafted upward, bleeding into a sky that was already blanketed with a mix of smog and soot. Fires or not, the pollution in Pittsburgh was some of the worst in the country, my granddad said. While the steel industry was on the outs, its factories still managed to cough up toxic clouds daily. The city's residents did what they could: insisting that the street lights be turned on at noon; stumbling to the grocery store with a flashlight; smoking cigarettes for a reprieve of fresh air. Still, not much of it worked. It was for this reason, I think, that the old man wasn't able to see the bridges. He wasn't able to see a goddamned thing at all.

It was midmorning when he finally decided to leave his perch at the top of the incline. My granddad began winding down Mount Washington's north face toward the city, flicking on Lucy's headlights to see the road in front of him, to cut a path through the smog and soot. More than once he had to stop in order to wipe her clean; he used a white handkerchief to clear peepholes in her windshield. He told me it was a ghost town on that day: a city with four hundred bridges that led into it, which—then—were only being used as escape routes out.