Acts of God (27 page)

But still I liked the Indian Trail market with its wide aisles and everything you could imagine to eat, including lobsters in tanks and cereal from Switzerland, lemons from the South Pacific. All kinds of cheeses and peppers the color of the sky just before the sun goes down. All wrapped in plastic. Everything so orderly and neat that it just fit into my archival spirit, my love of objects and order. And I would almost always run into the mother of one of my friends, Mrs. Kahn or Mrs. LePoint, and she'd say to me, “Is that you? Tess, my God, you've gotten to be such a big girl. So pretty. I wouldn't have recognized you.”

Some might comment that they never saw me since the swim club closed last summer. We belonged to the swim club and the synagogue. We were members of other things as well. My mother was active in the PTA and my father went to meetings of the Chamber of Commerce. We were citizens of the community we lived in and I loved that community. We belonged here. When I popped into Larsen's after school for gum, Mrs. Larsen knew my name. People knew who we were. That's how I'd define it best. People knew my name.

And my business. But in a good way, mostly. If you were sick, someone always brought you a casserole, a pot of soup. Neighbors were always stopping over to borrow things so that it was hard to know which cups belonged to whom or whose baseball bat we had in our garage or whose jacket had been left in the mud closet. It could be anyone's who lived within a ten-block radius or farther, just counting my friends and my brothers' friends who rode their bikes or cars to our house. A jacket could have been left by any one of a hundred people.

These were our friends, our neighbors, our community. The people we lived among, the people who knew us but didn't know our secrets. Or if they did, they didn't tell. At least no one told me.

*   *   *

The store was a mile, a mile and a half at most from the house, but I took my time driving. I still had that bad taste in my mouth from the prom and felt as if I had two heads. The car smelled of cigarettes and kids. I liked driving the car with the list in my hand, going to the store like a grown-up. I parked as I always did, got my cart, and slowly made my way through the wide, plentiful aisles. Aisles that smacked of the good fortune that had befallen the people of Winonah. We have done well, this store seemed to say. We are a success. I picked up coffee, broccoli, and potatoes quickly. I was on my way to cereal, then chicken breasts when I ran into Vicky's mom, Mrs. Walton.

“Tess, is that you? I don't recognize you anymore.”

Mrs. Walton always embarrassed me, because she said it so loudly. I wanted to reply, But Mrs. Walton, I'm at your house every week, but I just said, “I've grown a lot this year.”

“You all have. You girls are getting so big.”

Perhaps it was then that I caught a glimpse of him out of the corner of my eye. Or perhaps not. Maybe I just remember it that way. But I slipped away from her, promised to be by to see Vicky soon. Already my hands gripped the cart too tightly, my list crumpled, sweaty in my palm. I made a right, then a left. Now the store was almost empty as I headed into its more remote wings—the bakery, the fish market.

Then I saw him, standing near aisle six, the dairy section. Right there on a Tuesday when he should have been no closer than Quincy. He had milk, juice, a package of hamburger in his hands. My father was shopping, picking up this and that at the store. But, of course, this made no sense since he wasn't due home till Thursday (he never got home before Thursday) and it was only Tuesday. And why was he shopping if I was the one doing the errands?

I stood there, motionless, watching my father select items from the shelf. He had no cart, but like a juggler was balancing them in his hands. It was odd to see my father picking cans off the shelf, reading labels. He took creamed corn. We never had creamed corn (or anything out of a can, for that matter) at home.

I didn't say hello. I backed up my cart and quickly slipped out of the store. When I got home, Lily yelled at me because I'd forgotten most of what I'd gone for. But I wouldn't go back to that store again.

35

All families have secrets, don't
they? So why shouldn't mine have ours? Why shouldn't we keep things from one another? Even when you grow up within four walls with about as many people, you can't really know anyone for sure. Even families are built on fragments, the bits and pieces we show the world.

Still, it is a terrible thing to keep a secret inside. So far inside. Tucked deep like a tapeworm that works its way through you. Now I had to tell someone. And I knew who that would be. Once I knew I could hold on to it longer than before. Little Squirrel, guarding her nut.

I'm not sure when it was that my father became a man of alibis, of duplicity, a man who lived a double life. It never occurred to me that he was spending half the week with us as he always had and the other half across the railroad tracks, just a mile or so from where we lived. But it was a world away, really, where he went, a place where he could put his shoes on the coffee table and laugh out loud. Where he could sing as he put up drywall.

It has taken me a long time, but I can see it now. The disaster I feared had already happened. While I imagined him in the path of oncoming storms, racing tornados, dodging floods, the threat was in fact much closer and more real.

Sometimes I have these dreams in which my father is looming over my bed, larger than he was in life. He has come with a story or a song, something he has to tell me. I always wind up telling him the same thing. “It's all right, Dad. I already know.”

*   *   *

“What're you going to do with your life, Trooper?” our father said to Jeb when he got home from Madison in June. Jeb was studying history and he unpacked his collection of books on the Crimean War, Central Asia, the Mongol empire.

“I'm going to figure out how the world works,” Jeb replied without an ounce of irony, because that indeed was what he thought he would do—know how the world worked and then rule whatever corner of it that was allotted to him.

“He'll run for president, just like Abe Lincoln,” Lily replied and Jeb nodded.

“I might. I just might.”

That night Lily cooked Jeb's favorite dinner—a dish of juicy chicken and au gratin potatoes, green beans with almonds—and Jeb told us all about college. Art had a million questions. He wanted to know all about colleges. I waited a day or two. I waited for Jeb to unpack, unwind, settle back into being one of us again, part of the family. And I waited for Monday, when Dad set off on the road. I watched as Dad packed his car and we all waved good-bye. I was studying touch typing that summer and was working at the swim club. Jeb had a job with a law firm in town and Art was going to camp, but none of it had begun.

“Can we go somewhere today?” I asked Jeb.

“Like where?”

“McDonald's?”

We drove out along County Line and picked up a burger special and Jeb flirted a bit with this girl and that because he was now a very big man, strong, with nice skin, and our father's gray eyes. I sat silently, watching the girls come up, pat my brother on the arm. He turned to me and said, “You know, it's not bad, coming home.”

I smiled and shrugged, but I felt shy, not like before when I always said what was on my mind and did what I wanted to do. Now it was as if there were a fence around me and somehow I was closed in. “You know, things have been a little strange since you left last spring.”

“Oh, yeah?” Jeb took a bite from his burger. Some ketchup clung to his chin. “How so?”

He didn't seem to be listening to me or even wanting to be with me very much but I knew I had to go on. So I told him about prom and how Patrick went with Margaret and how I'd gotten drunk and this boy, well, nothing had happened, but this boy had tried to take advantage of me and I stood up on the boat and shouted at him, “How can you take advantage of a girl who's drunk?”

Jeb gave me a little punch in the arm and a “way to go,” like brothers do, so I thought I could go on, I should go on, because he was the one person I could tell and I knew that Jeb more than anyone else would never, ever say a word. “But then a few days later this strange thing happened when I was at the market, you know, Indian Trail, Mom had given me a list of things to get.…”

Now he looked at me almost beady-eyed because he knew I was getting to the serious part, the real part, and something in his eyes told me that he wasn't going to be surprised with what I had to say, that whatever it was he already knew. And maybe he'd known for a long time, but I said it anyway. “… and Dad was there. He was buying things, but it was only a Tuesday and he shouldn't have been any closer than Quincy.”

Jeb shook his head, then held up his hands as if warding off a blow. “I don't want to know about it,” he said. “I don't want to hear about this, Tess.”

“But what is it? What's going on with him?”

He finished his burger, crumpled up the paper. “Oh, Tess, don't make me be the one to tell you.” He made a clean toss into the trash.

“But what about all his trips?”

Jeb shook his head. “Tessie, he hasn't been on the road for years.”

I was silent for a moment. “Jeb, have you known for a long time?” My brother nodded his head ever so slightly. “Does Mom know?”

“Tessie.” He looked me straight in the eye. “Everyone knows.”

36

If a life is said to have a shape, then certain events form the structure of that shape. Francis Cantwell Eagger has come down to us as a man of contradictions—a gentle poet of letters who loved the rugged out-of-doors, a sensitive man known for his violent temper. What were the elements that shaped him? What made him the man he was? In the life of Francis Cantwell Eagger three factors can be viewed as defining. The first was a boyhood episode involving lightning, the second his flight to the West, and the third his parents' painful rejection when he turned to them for help.

Until he was thirteen, Eagger lived a life of privilege. His family was extremely wealthy (his mother was a Sutton and they lived on Sutton Place) and no advantage was denied him. He toured Europe, studied music, had his own horse. However, he was a lonely, introverted child and his parents were often away, leaving him and his younger brother with servants to fend for themselves. When he turned thirteen, he spent the summer at the family compound in Maine. One night he got up to go to the bathroom and a violent storm erupted. As Eagger returned to his bed, he heard a loud crash and saw a brilliant flash. Covering his ears with his hands, he crumpled to the floor. When he dared look, he saw that above his bed the wall was seared where lightning had struck and the impression of the lightning was branded into the wooden wall, making a letter “Z.” (This episode is dealt with in his poem “Zorro,” one of the few surviving poems from the lost manuscript that helps define his hero quest.)

Eagger was altered by this bolt of lightning. Life seemed unpredictable, random. Anything could happen at any moment. He lost interest in his studies and it was at this time in his life that he began to wander. He would walk all over Manhattan and once he walked to Westchester and back. His mother, who had never noticed him much when he was there, grew frantic when he would wander and this seemed to make him all the more determined to go further and further away from home. In the end he would flunk out of prep school after prep school and finally when he flunked out of Princeton, his parents sent him west. He was reluctant to go, but they gave him no choice. He either had to make good for himself or they would no longer pay his way. They set him up with a friend in the shipping business, but Eagger soon lost interest in it. Instead he attended classes at UCLA, where he met Jillian Palmer, the beautiful woman who would soon become his wife.

Eagger had fallen in love with the West as well and intended to make it his home. He would have even if he had not fallen in love with Jillian, for he had found his spiritual home in the rough, rocky Coast as had artists before him such as Robinson Jeffers, Henry Miller, and Ansel Adams. Jillian was brilliant, beautiful, ten years his senior, and divorced. He loved her passionate outbursts, her fitful intelligence. And he predicted, and he was correct, that his parents would disinherit him for marrying her.

The third and final formative event in Eagger's life (outside of the mysterious death of his eldest son, who died off the cliffs of the beloved seaside house Eagger had built for his family) was his parents' rejection of him. He tried for years to write them, to explain his love of Jillian, his marriage, his determination to be a writer on the West Coast. Finally when all else failed, and when little Thomas, their middle son, was stricken ill with tuberculosis, Eagger and Jillian drove across the country from San Francisco to beg his family for understanding and to help them in their financial woes.

Eagger writes in his poem “Dark Window” of what happened that day. He and Jillian returned to New York to the house on Sutton Place and as they walked up the front steps, he saw the curtains drawn, the house darkened to him. He and Jillian stoically got into their car and drove back to San Francisco. Francis Cantwell Eagger would mourn the loss of his family in his poems for the rest of his life, but he would never attempt to contact any of them again.

While Eagger was always an avid walker, he became obsessed with it upon returning from this journey. He walked for hours, sometimes days, with a pad and pencil. On his walks, he wrote down his impressions, jotted lines for poems, scribbled whatever popped into his head. Taking a walk with him was no pleasure because of these constant interruptions and in the end he walked alone. According to the letters of Francis Cantwell Eagger, a “desire path” is what hikers or walkers have worn thin through finding a better way, or a shortcut, to a desired place. From his poems we know that Eagger loved nature, that he was tormented in love, that he sought a better way. Once Eagger quipped in a letter to a friend that he preferred the dangers of nature to the threat of man and in his later years he grew more and more reclusive. In all of this, it is safe to say that he is the West Coast Robert Frost and indeed deserves his place in American literary history.