My Father's Tears And Other Stories Part 1

MY FATHER'S TEARS.

and Other Stories by John Updike.

Morocco

THE SEACOAST ROAD went smoothly up and down, but compared with an American highway it was eerily empty. Other cars appeared menacing on it, approaching like bullets, straddling the center strip. Along the roadside, alone in all that sunswept s.p.a.ce, little girls in multicolored Berber costume held out bouquets of flowers-violets? poppies?-which we were afraid to stop and accept. What were we afraid of? A trap. Bandits. Undertipping, or overtipping. Not knowing enough French, or any Arabic or Berber. "Don't stop, Daddy, don't!" was the cry; and it was true, when we did stop at markets, interested persons out of the local landscape would gather about our rented Renault, peering in and offering unintelligible invitations. went smoothly up and down, but compared with an American highway it was eerily empty. Other cars appeared menacing on it, approaching like bullets, straddling the center strip. Along the roadside, alone in all that sunswept s.p.a.ce, little girls in multicolored Berber costume held out bouquets of flowers-violets? poppies?-which we were afraid to stop and accept. What were we afraid of? A trap. Bandits. Undertipping, or overtipping. Not knowing enough French, or any Arabic or Berber. "Don't stop, Daddy, don't!" was the cry; and it was true, when we did stop at markets, interested persons out of the local landscape would gather about our rented Renault, peering in and offering unintelligible invitations.

We were an American family living in England in 1969 and had come to Morocco naively thinking it would be, in April, as absolute an escape to the sun as a trip to the Caribbean from the Eastern United States would be at the same time of year.

But Restinga, where a British travel agency as innocent as we of climatic realities had sent us, was deserted and windy. The hotel, freshly built by decree of the progressive, tourism-minded king, was semicircular in shape. At night, doors in the curving corridors slammed, and a solitary guard in a burnoose kept watch over the vacant rooms and the strange family of pre-season Americans. By day, the waves were too choppy to swim in, and the Mediterranean was not so much wine-dark as oil-black. Walking along the beach, we picked up tar on our feet. When we lay down on the beach, wind blew sand into our ears. Off in the distance, apartment buildings of pink concrete were slowly being a.s.sembled, and there were signs that in a month vacationers from somewhere would fill the bleak plazas, the boarded-up arcades. But for now there was only the whipping wind, a useless sun, and-singly, idly, silently in the middle distance-Arabs. Or were they Berbers? Dark men, at any rate, in robes, who frightened our baby, Genevieve. Fantastic as it seems now, when she is so tall and lovely in her spangled disco dress, she was then overweight and eight. Caleb was ten, Mark twelve, and Judith a budding fourteen.

"Je le regrette beaucoup," I told the manager of the Restinga hotel, a blue-sweatered young man who wandered about closing doors that had blown open, I told the manager of the Restinga hotel, a blue-sweatered young man who wandered about closing doors that had blown open, "mais il faut que nous partirons. Trop de vent, et pas de bain de la mer." "mais il faut que nous partirons. Trop de vent, et pas de bain de la mer."

"Trop de vent," he agreed, laughing, as if rea.s.sured that we were not as crazy as we had seemed. he agreed, laughing, as if rea.s.sured that we were not as crazy as we had seemed.

"Les enfants sont malheureux, aussi ma femme. Je regrette beaucoup de partir. L'hotel, c'est beau, en ete." I should have used the subjunctive or the future tense, and stopped trying to explain. I should have used the subjunctive or the future tense, and stopped trying to explain.

The manager gave our departure his stoical blessing but explained, in cascades of financial French, why he could not refund the money we had prepaid in London. So I was left with a little cash, a Hertz credit card, four children, a wife, and plane tickets that bound us to ten more days in Morocco.

We took a bus to Tangier. We stood beside an empty road at noon, six stray Americans, chunky and vulnerable in our woolly English clothes with our suitcases full of continental sun togs bought at Lilywhite's and of Penguins for vacation reading. The sun beat upon us, and the wind. The road dissolved at either end in a pink s.h.i.+mmer. "I can't believe this," my wife said. "I could cry."

"Don't panic the kids," I said. "What else can we do?" I asked. "There are no taxis. We have no money."

"There must be some something," she said. Somehow, my memory of the moment has dressed her in a highly unflattering navy-blue beret.

"I'm scared," Genevieve announced, clutching her knapsack and looking painfully hot and rosy in her heavy gray overcoat.

"Baby," sneered her big sister, who attracted stares from native men everywhere and was feeling a certain power.

"The bus will come," Daddy promised, looking over their heads to the vanis.h.i.+ng point where the road merged in the pink confusion of the new buildings the king was very slowly erecting.

A thin dark man in a dirty caftan materialized and spoke to us in a lengthy nasal language. He held out his palms as if to have them read.

"Dad, the man is talking to you," Mark, then prep.u.b.escent and now a graduate student in computer science, said, very embarra.s.sed.

"I know he is," I told him, helplessly.

"What's he saying, Dad?" Genevieve asked.

"He's asking if this is the bus stop," I lied.

The man, continuing to speak, came closer, confiding a breath rich in Muslim essences-native spices, tooth decay, pious fasting with its parched membranes. His remarks grew more rapid and urgent, but a light was dying in his bloodshot eyes.

"Tell him to go away." This suggestion came from Caleb, our silent, stoic, sensible child, now a college junior majoring in zoology.

"I think he will," I hazarded, and the man did, shaking his skeletal head at our unresponsive idiocy. Our little family cl.u.s.tered closer in relief. Sand blew into our shoes, and the semicircular halls of the abandoned hotel, our only home in this foreign land, howled at our backs like some deep-voiced, clumsy musical instrument.

The bus! The bus to Tangier! We waved-how we waved!-and with an incredulous toot the bus stopped. It was the green of tired gra.s.s, and chickens in slatted coops were tied to the top, along with rolled-up rugs. Inside, there were Moroccans: dusty hunched patient unknown people, wearing knit little things on their heads and knit little things on their feet, their bodies mixed in with their bundles, the women wrapped in black, some with veils, all eyes glittering upward in alarmed amazement at this onrush of large, flushed, childish Americans.

The fare, a few dirhams, was taken noncommittally by a driver, who had a Na.s.seresque mustache and a jaw to match. There was room at the back of the bus. As we wrestled our ponderous suitcases down the aisle, the bus swayed, and I feared we might crush with our bulky innocence this fragile vehicle and its delicately balanced freight. Deeper into the bus, an indigenous smell, as of burned rope, intensified.

In Tangier, the swaying bus was exchanged for a single overloaded taxi, whose driver in his desire to unload us came into the Hertz office and tried to help the negotiations along. Allah be praised, his help was not needed: the yellow plastic Hertz card that I produced did it all. Had I been able to produce also the pale green of an American Express card, our suspenseful career down the coast, from Tangier to Rabat to Casablanca and then through the narrower streets of El Jadida and Essaouira and Tafraout, would have been greatly eased, for at each hotel it was necessary to beg the clerk to accept a personal check on a London bank, and none but the most expensive hotels would risk it; hence the odd intervals of luxury that punctuated our penurious flight from the Mediterranean winds.

The avenues of Rabat as we drove into the city were festooned in red. Any thought that we were being welcomed with red banners gave way when we saw hammers and sickles and posters of Lenin. A Soviet high-level delegation, which included Kosygin and Podgorny, was being received by the open-minded king, we discovered at the Rabat Hilton. The hotel was booked so solid with Communists that it could not shelter even the most needy children of free enterprise.

But a hotel less in demand by the Soviets took us in, and at dinner, starved, we were sat down in a ring on piled carpets, around what in memory seems an immense bra.s.s tray, while a laughing barefoot girl tiptoed at our backs, sprinkling rose-water into our hair. Mark, tickled, made his monkey face.

This sensation of being beautifully served amid undercurrents of amus.e.m.e.nt recurred in a meadow high above the sea, where, after miles of empty landscape and empty stomachs, a minuscule restaurant, scarcely more than a lean-to, advertised itself with a wooden arrow. We stopped the rented Renault and with trepidation walked across the gra.s.s, single-file, feeling again huge, as when we trod deeper into that fragrant bus. We halted when a man emerged from the shack bearing a table, and a boy emerged carrying chairs. With an air of amus.e.m.e.nt all around, this furniture was set on the gra.s.sy earth, in a spot we lightly indicated. From the shed were produced in time wine, rice, kebabs, and c.o.kes, which we consumed in sight of the Atlantic, of beige cliffs, and of vast pastures grazed by a single donkey. We were the only customers, for all we knew, that this beautiful restaurant by the sea had ever had.

Even on the rough back road to Tafraout, into the stony hills of the Low Atlas, with the gas gauge saying zero and not a house, not a sheep or goat, in sight, a little girl in a dip of the unpaved track held out a handful of flowers. The road here had become one with the rocks of a dry riverbed, so our Renault was moving slowly, so slowly she had time, when she saw we were truly not going to stop, to whip our fenders with the flowers and to throw them at the open car window. One or two fell inside, onto our laps. The rest fell onto the asphalt beside her feet. In the rearview mirror I saw the little girl stamp her foot in rage. Perhaps she cried. She was about the age of Genevieve, who expressed empathy and sadness as the girl diminished behind us and dropped from sight.

In Tafraout, Caleb could not stop staring at a man so badly crippled he seemed a kind of spider, scuttling across the packed earth on his arms, his little body dragged between them. He didn't beg; indeed, he moved about like a local figure of some importance, with urgent business to conduct.

North of Agadir, we were in our motel rooms watching the minutes to dinnertime crawl by, and became aware that the traffic on the road outside had stopped. Policemen had come quickly, and were talking to the driver of a dusty truck, a young man in soft-colored work clothes slumping against his cab with bowed head, nodding, nodding, as the police asked questions. Traffic was held up on both sides of the road. We stayed on our side, mere tourists, but interested. It was difficult to see what had happened. Some kind of bundle was eclipsed by a wheel of the truck. Under cover of the tumult when the police fetched the mother, Mark crossed the road and looked.

He was pale when he returned to our side of the road. He didn't make his comical monkey face. We asked him what there was to see. "You don't want to see it," was his answer.

"It was a little girl," he later told us.

The mother was short and wore black, without a veil; she raced up and down the bare slopes on the other side of the road, splitting the skies with her uncanny keening, her ululating, while men raced after her, trying to pin her down. As they failed to catch her, the excited crowd of them grew, a train of clumsy bodies her grief in its superhuman strength trailed behind her. No American could have made the noise she made; all the breath of her chest was poured upward into the heavens that had so suddenly, powerfully struck her a blow. Ancient modes of lamentation sustained her. Her performance was so naked and pure we turned our heads away. We had not been meant to witness this scene in Morocco. When two men caught her at last and pinned her by the arms, she collapsed in a faint.

We found the climate we had hoped for at Agadir. The beach there was a wide beach but, though the sun and sea were warm enough, almost deserted. We looked for other vacationers to settle near and, seeing none, spread our towels not far from the seawall. Judith wandered a little away from us, gawky and pearly white in her bikini, picking up sh.e.l.ls and gazing at the sea, aloof from the company of her parents and her siblings. Genevieve and Caleb began a sand castle. Mark lay back and scowled, concentrating upon his tan.

We only slowly became aware of the Arab in robes lying thirty yards away, his face turned toward us. His face-dark, pentagonal-stayed turned in our direction, staring with some thrust of silent pain, of congested avidity, out of the foreshortened rumple of his robes. Genevieve and Caleb fell silent at their castle. Judith drifted closer to us. None of us ventured to the inviting edge of the sea, across the waste of sand, through the silent s.h.i.+mmer of the Arab's stare. So softly the children couldn't hear, Mommy murmured to me, "Don't look, but that man is masturbating."

He was. Out of his folds. At Judith and us.

I stood, my knees trembling, and organized our rapid retreat from the beach, and that afternoon we located the private pool-admission a mere dirham-where all the Europeans were swimming and tanning safe from the surrounding culture. We went to the pool every day of our five in Agadir. The sun shone and there was little wind. We had found a small hotel run by an old French couple; it was wrapped in bougainvillea, with a parrot in the courtyard and a continental menu.

Not ten years before, on February 29, 1960, an earthquake in Agadir had killed an estimated twelve thousand people and devastated much of the city. We saw no traces of the disaster. In Agadir we rejoined the middle cla.s.ses. We had money again. I had cabled my London bank, and they had worked out one of their beloved British "arrangements" with a bank in Agadir. The bank building had a prim granite facade, erected since 1960, but inside it had more the flavor of a livestock close. Merchants in shepherds' robes muttered and waited at a long chaotic counter. As each transaction ripened, names were shouted in Arabic. When my own was shouted out, evidently the amount of money cabled from London was called out with it. The muttering ceased. Astonished brown-eyed glances flew along the counter in my direction. I had swelled to immense size-a prodigy, a monster, of money. Blus.h.i.+ng, I wanted to explain, as I stuffed the pastel notes into my worn wallet, "I have children to feed."

Genevieve liked to feed the dogs that haunted our hotel. Pets in foreign places are strange: to think, they understand French or Arabic better than you do. And they never look quite like American animals, either: a different tilt to their eyes, a different style of walking. Most of our slides, it turned out, were of these animals, out of focus. The children had got hold of the Nikon.

We escaped from Agadir, from Morocco, narrowly. On a basketball-sized globe of the Earth, you can mark with the breadth of a thumbnail the distance we drove that last day. At the Air Maroc office, they told us there was no s.p.a.ce for six persons on any flight from Agadir to Tangier, where we did have rooms at a hotel that night, and airplane reservations to Paris the next morning. There was nothing to do but drive it, the distance it had taken us days to traverse, five hundred miles, eight hundred kilometers, along the northwest shoulder of Africa.

We set out at dawn. We had secured a big bag of oranges and bottles of Perrier water. Daddy drove, hour after hour; Mommy refused to drive in Morocco, or perhaps the car rental terms excluded her. You children, all four crammed into the back of the little Renault, were quiet, sensing, as children do, real danger, real need.

In some dusty small city, perhaps Safi, I failed to see a red light and drove through it. A whistle shrilled, and in the rearview mirror, as clearly as I had seen the little flower girl stamp her foot, I saw a policeman in a white helmet calmly writing down our license number. His white helmet receded. His gaze followed us. My stomach sank. But the street continued straight, and the pedestrians in their dusty native garb continued indifferently to go about their business. In another day we would be safe in Paris; and the traffic light had been very poorly placed, off to the side and behind some advertising signs. Criminally, I drove on. The boys cheered; the girls weren't so sure.

"Maybe he would just have bawled you out," Genevieve said.

"Fat chance," Mark argued. "He would have put Dad in some awful pokey full of rats and cooties."

"I saw the light," Mommy said mildly, "and a.s.sumed you did, too, dear."

"Thanks a bunch," I said, less mildly.

"I didn't see it," said Caleb, our born consoler and compromiser. "Maybe it was yellow, and turned."

"Who saw it and thinks it was yellow?" I asked hopefully.

Silence was the answer.

"Who saw it and what color was it?"

"Red," three voices chorused.

"What do you all want me to do? Turn around and try to explain to the cop? Je regrette beaucoup, monsieur, mais je n'ai pas vu le, la lumi Je regrette beaucoup, monsieur, mais je n'ai pas vu le, la lumi-"

"No!" another chorus proclaimed, Mommy abstaining. another chorus proclaimed, Mommy abstaining.

"You've made your decision," Judith told me, in almost a woman's voice.

"Step on it, Dad," Mark said.

We were already on the outskirts of town, and no police car was giving chase. The empty green pastures, the smooth empty road reclaimed us. Our prolonged struggle down the coast was rerun backwards. Here was the little restaurant in the meadow on the cliff. Here was the place where everybody refused to eat the liver sandwiches that the one-eyed man had cooked for us on a charcoal burner set up beside the road. Here was Casablanca, which didn't look at all like the movie. And here was Rabat. The red banners were down, the Russians had moved on. By now it was late afternoon, and Daddy's neck muscles ached, his eyes felt full of sand, and he had grown certain that his license-plate number was being telegraphed up and down the coast, through the network of secret police that all monarchies maintain. At any moment sirens would wail, and he would be arrested, arrested and thrust deep into the bitter truth of Morocco, which he had tried to ignore, while stealing the sun and the exotica.

Or the police would be waiting for him at the hotel desk in Tangier; already his name would have been traced from Restinga through a trail of one-night stops to the receipt he had signed in the bank in Agadir. Or else there would be a scene at the airport: handcuffs at pa.s.sport control. Oh, why hadn't I stopped when the whistle blew?

Had my French been less primitive, I might have stopped.

Had we not recently read, in a Newsweek Newsweek at the hotel with the parrot, an article about innocent Americans moldering away in African and Asian prisons, I might have stopped. at the hotel with the parrot, an article about innocent Americans moldering away in African and Asian prisons, I might have stopped.

Had the United States not been fighting so indefensibly yet inextricably in Vietnam, I might have stopped.

Had it not been for the red flags in Rabat, the masturbating man on the beach, the dead girl by the truck wheel... my failure or refusal or cowardice still exists, a stain upon my memories of Morocco.

It was dark when we pulled into Tangier, and the hotel could be reached only through a maze of one-way streets, but the desk clerk had our reservation nicely written down, and no arrest warrant to hand me. The king himself could not have been more tourist-friendly; the gray-haired bellhop (who looked like Omar Sharif) smiled as he accepted my little salad of dirham notes; the waiters in the hotel restaurant bowed as deeply as if we were their only customers. Which, at that hour, we almost were; the trip had taken fifteen hours. We had consumed the full bag of oranges and drunk all the Perrier water. We parted sadly, the next morning, with our loyal Renault, which had never broken down and which we returned covered with dust. The people at Hertz, whose license plate had been so sinned against, scarcely looked up from doing the calculations that, a month later, were to arrive in London out of the ozone of numbers that blankets the globe. We had escaped.

Remember Paris, children? In the raw spring cool of the budding Tuileries, we still cl.u.s.tered close. In the back seat of the Renault, there hadn't been room enough for all four of you to sit back at the same time, so one of you, usually Genevieve, had to sit forward, breathing on my ear. Mommy, strapped in beside me, doled out oranges and water; Caleb and Mark tirelessly debated who was "squis.h.i.+ng" whom; Judith, by the window, tried to dream herself away. We had achieved, in Morocco, maximum family compression, and could only henceforth disperse. Growing up, leaving home, watching your parents divorce-all, in the decade since, have happened. But on a radiant high platform of the Eiffel Tower I felt us still molded, it seemed, forever together.

Personal Archaeology

IN HIS INCREASING ISOLATION-elderly golfing buddies dead or dying, his old business contacts fraying, no office to go to, his wife always off at her bridge or committees, his children as busy and preoccupied as he himself had been in middle age-Craig Martin took an interest in the traces left by prior owners of his land. In the prime of his life, when he worked ten or twelve hours every weekday and socialized all weekend, he had pretty much ignored his land. Years had pa.s.sed without his setting foot on some corners of it. The ten acres were there to cus.h.i.+on his house from the encroachments of close neighbors, and as an investment against the day when these acres would be sold, most likely to a developer, the profit going to Craig's widow, Grace, who was six years younger than he.

The place, as he understood it, had been a wooded hill at the back of an estate until around 1900. A well-heeled, somewhat elderly man, marrying tardily, built a s.p.a.cious summer house for his bride and himself on what had been a boulder-framed picnic spot, with enough trees felled to afford a glimpse of the Atlantic, a third of a mile away.

There were old roads on the property, built up on retaining walls of big fieldstones, too steep and with turns too sharp for any combustion-driven car. Horses must have pulled vehicles up these hairpin turns, through these enduring tunnels of green; trees are shy, even after decades, of taking root on soil once packed tight by wheels. Standing on the edge of one of the several granite cliffs he owned, Craig imagined farm wagons or pony carts creaking and rattling toward him, the narrow spoked wheels laboring up swales, now choked with greenbrier, that he imagined to have been roadways, bringing young people in summer muslin and beribboned bonnets and white ducks and straw boaters up, past where he stood, to a picnic high in the woods.

But Ma.s.sachusetts land was, a century ago, mostly cleared, bare to the wind and sun, cropped by sheep and cows. Perhaps he was imagining it all wrong. The winding roadway ran head-on into a spiky wall of monoliths; how had it climbed the rest of the hill? Near the house, the granite outcroppings bore enigmatic testimony. There were holes drilled here and there, as if to anchor iron gates or heavy awnings. A veranda with a sea view had long ago rotted away, and Craig himself had replaced a dilapidated pillared porch on the front of the house, facing the circular asphalt driveway, once a gravel carriage-turn.

The woods held vine-covered mounds of jagged rock that he took to be left over from the blasting of the house foundations. In the early years of the twentieth century, crews of masons fresh from Italy roamed this neighborhood, building giant walls that were gradually, stone by stone, collapsing. One night a section of retaining wall holding up his wife's most ambitious flower garden collapsed, spilling not just earth and flowers but ashes, of the clinkerish sort produced by a coal furnace, and a litter of old cans and gla.s.s jars. The garden's subsoil had been an ash-and-trash dump. When had the garden been created, then? Later than he thought, perhaps-the same era when the concrete wells for the cold frames were poured-sunken beds now roofed by frames of punky wood, crumbled putty, and shattering gla.s.s.

In Craig's mind, the property had four eras before his. First, there was the era of creation and perfect maintenance, when the enthusiastic, newly married rich man was still alive, and servants bustled from the stone sinks in the bas.e.m.e.nt out to the bricked drying yard with baskets of steaming laundry, and the oiled cedar gutters poured rainwater down gurgling downspouts into fully functional underground drains. Then this happy man died, and the widow-much younger than he, preferring the society of Boston to her lonely house on the hill-imposed a largely absentee reign, in which one dining-room wall with its hand-printed pictorial French wallpaper was ruined by a winter leak, and the dainty verandas of the summer house, pillared and bal.u.s.tered appendages exposed to the weather, slowly succ.u.mbed to blizzards and nor'easters. There came an era when she, too, was dead and the house stood empty. Perhaps most of the neglect and damage should be a.s.signed to this interregnum, which ended just before World War II, when a young and growing family took on the place as a year-round residence. Central heating was installed, and a pine-panelled study was carved from the grandiose front hall, and the brick chimneys were repointed and the leaky roof s.h.i.+ngles replaced. Improvements were halted by World War II. The man of the house enlisted to sail the ocean, which was visible from the windows until they were covered with black-out paper.

The hero returned as a rear admiral, and lived in the house until he was eighty and all five of his children had moved on to places and families of their own. From this long and busy era Craig dated most of the oddments he found in the woods-Mason jars, flowerpots, shotgun sh.e.l.ls, rubber tires half sunk in the leaf-mold and holding a yellow oblong of sc.u.mmy water, pieces of buried iron pipe, rusted strands of wire testifying to some bygone fencing project. Tree houses had been built and abandoned amid the rocks and trees. Porcelain insulators and insulated copper strands carried the ghost of electricity; parts of a motorcycle engine, filmed with blackened grease, remembered a time when the steep old roads served a young man's racing game. These acres had absorbed much labor: stacked between pairs of still-living trees, logs cut to fireplace length moldered and grew fungi; Craig's shoes scuffed into view beneath the leaves a sparkling layer of carbon, the charcoal residue of old fires. There were pits that looked dug, and mounds too regular to be natural. Above the railroad tracks, along a path trespa.s.sers had worn beside a once-impeccable square-cut wall that now leaned dangerously out over the eroded embankment, he picked up beer cans, plastic six-pack holders, shards of shattered gla.s.s, bottles of indestructible plastic. On the lower reaches of the land, where a broad path across pine needles wound downward toward a causeway that would eventually lead trespa.s.sers, through several private domains, to a beach, there had been a virtual snowfall of pale plastic litter-styrofoam-cup tops, flexible straws, milk containers. Craig was rewarded, in his occasional harvests with a garbage bag, by finding, hidden in the greenbrier and marsh gra.s.s, bottles of a nostalgic thickness, such as he as a child had drunk root beer and sarsaparilla from.

Trespa.s.sers and owners and guests had trodden the land, craggy as it was-trodden and scarred it. In an incident that had been described to him by an ancient friend of the previous owner, an unsteady dinner guest, one icy, boozy night, had climbed into his car and promptly slid into the wall of great stones on a curve of the asphalt driveway. The b.u.mper had knocked out, like a single tooth, a molar-shaped boulder that now sat some dozen yards into the woods-a permanent monument to a moment's mishap, too ma.s.sive, in this weakling latter age, to be moved back into position. When Craig inquired about bringing the equipment in to move it back, he was told the weight of the backhoe might break down the driveway.

In a seldom-visited declivity beyond this great granite cube, Craig, picking up deadwood, found a charred work-glove, stiff as a dead squirrel, with the word SARGE SARGE written on the back in the sort of felt-tip marker that didn't come into use until the 1960s. Who had Sarge been? Part of a work crew, Craig speculated, that had carelessly dropped his glove on the edge of a spreading gra.s.s fire. Or a woodsman who, while feeding brush into a blaze, had seen his hand flame up and flung the glove from him in pain. Nearer the house, raking up organic oddments in a spring cleaning, Craig spied beneath an overgrown forsythia bush a gleaming curve of white ceramic and, digging with his fingers, found it to be the handle of a teacup. He dug up six or so fragments; the delicate porcelain cup, gilt-rimmed, had been dropped or broken, perhaps by a child who in fright and guilt had buried the evidence in a shrub border. The quality of the cup suggested one of the early eras, perhaps the near-mythical first. Ceramic, unlike metal or wood, is impervious to time and moisture. But the earth, freezing and thawing in its annual cycle, can at last push up to the surface what the culprit thought had been safely buried and forever hidden. written on the back in the sort of felt-tip marker that didn't come into use until the 1960s. Who had Sarge been? Part of a work crew, Craig speculated, that had carelessly dropped his glove on the edge of a spreading gra.s.s fire. Or a woodsman who, while feeding brush into a blaze, had seen his hand flame up and flung the glove from him in pain. Nearer the house, raking up organic oddments in a spring cleaning, Craig spied beneath an overgrown forsythia bush a gleaming curve of white ceramic and, digging with his fingers, found it to be the handle of a teacup. He dug up six or so fragments; the delicate porcelain cup, gilt-rimmed, had been dropped or broken, perhaps by a child who in fright and guilt had buried the evidence in a shrub border. The quality of the cup suggested one of the early eras, perhaps the near-mythical first. Ceramic, unlike metal or wood, is impervious to time and moisture. But the earth, freezing and thawing in its annual cycle, can at last push up to the surface what the culprit thought had been safely buried and forever hidden.

Craig's dreams, those that disturbed him enough to be remembered when he awoke, tended to return, like a dog to a buried kill, to a rather brief stretch of his life when he was embroiled in a domestic duplicity, an emotional bigamy. There was his first wife, who in these dreams had a certain ceramic smoothness, and his wife-to-be, whose discomfort seemed to occupy several corners of the dream's screen while he scrambled to hold on to every human piece of the puzzle. Curiously, in his dreams he invariably lost the second woman-saw her flee and recede-so that it was with a soft shock that he awakened and realized that Grace, and not his first wife, Gloria, lay beside him in bed, as she had done for twenty years now. His confusion gradually cleared into relief, and he fell back asleep like a living bandage sealing over a wound. His children, now middle-aged, figured in the dream dramas indistinctly, shape-s.h.i.+fting partic.i.p.ants in a kind of many-bodied party located halfway up the stairs; the party's main ingredient, however, was not jollity but pain, a pain glutinously mixed of indecision, stretched communications, unexpressed apologies, and scarcely bearable suspense. Craig would wake to find that the party was long over, that he was an old man living out his days harmlessly on ten acres covered by a spotty mulch of previous generations. He rarely got invited anywhere.

The parties had been vehicles for flirtation and exploration, a train of linked weekends carrying them all along in a giddy din; he and his friends were in the prime of their lives and expected that, as amusing and wonderful as things were, things even more wonderful were bound to happen. There were in fact two simultaneous parties, two layers of party-the overt layer, where they discussed, as adults, local politics, national issues (usually involving Richard Nixon), their automobiles and schools for their children, zoning boards and home renovations, and the covert layer, where men and women communicated with eye-glance and whisper, hand-squeeze and excessive hilarity. The second layer sometimes undermined the upper, and with it the seemingly solid structure of the closely intermingled families.

c.o.c.ktail parties were lethal melees, wherein lovers with a murmur cancelled a.s.signations or agreed upon abortions. Craig could see in his mind's eye, in an upstairs hall, outside a bathroom, a younger woman, smooth of face and arm, coming at him with her lips shaped to bestow a kiss and saying, softly, "Chicken," when he backed away. But for every moment he consciously remembered from that remote time there were hundreds he had forgotten and that fought back into his awareness in the tangle of these recurrent party dreams. His sensation in these dreams was the same: stage fright, a schoolboy feeling that what he was enacting was too big for him, too eternal in its significance.

He woke with relief, the turmoil slipping from him, his present wife absent from the bed and already padding around downstairs. Sometimes he awoke in a separate bed, because in his old age he helplessly, repulsively snored, and was consigned to the guest room. On his awakening there, his eyes found, on the opposite wall, a painting that had hung in his childhood home-in the several Pennsylvania homes his family had occupied. The painting, a pathetic and precious token of culture which his mother had bought for (if he remembered correctly) thirty-five dollars in a framer's shop, depicted a scene in Ma.s.sachusetts, some high dunes in Provincetown, with a shallow triangle of water, a glimpse of the sea, framed between the two most distant slopes of sand. Had it been this painting which had led him from that common-wealth to this one, to this hilltop house with its discreet view of the sea a third of a mile away?

Various other remnants of his boyhood world had washed up in the house: his grandfather's Fraktur-inscribed shaving mug; a dented copper ashtray little Craig had often watched his father crush out the stubs of Old Gold cigarettes in; a pair of bra.s.s candlesticks, like erect twists of rope, that his mother would place on the dining-room table when she fed in-laws visiting from New Jersey. These objects had been with him in the abyss of lost time, and survived less altered than he. What did they mean? They had to mean something, fraught and weighty as they were with the mystery of his own transient existence.

"I'd give anything not to have married you," Grace sometimes said, when angry or soulful. She carried into daylight, he felt, a grudge against him for snoring, though he was as helpless to control it as he was his dreams. "If only I'd listened to my conscience."

"Conscience?" he said. Chicken, Chicken, he remembered. "I don't know about you, but I'm very happy. You've been a wonderful wife. Wonderful." he remembered. "I don't know about you, but I'm very happy. You've been a wonderful wife. Wonderful."

"Thank you, dear. But it was just so wrong. wrong. That time upstairs at the Rosses', the way you loped toward me in the hall, you were scary-like a big wolf out of the shadows. Your teeth gleamed." That time upstairs at the Rosses', the way you loped toward me in the hall, you were scary-like a big wolf out of the shadows. Your teeth gleamed."

"Gleamed?" He couldn't picture it. He had dull, tea-stained teeth; but he recognized that the gleam was something true and precious unearthed from deep within her, giving her past a lodestar, a figment to steer by.

She said, with a blush and downcast eyes, "I shouldn't tell you this, but at times I think I hate you."

I hate you: she did now and then proclaim this, and would disown the proclamation in the next breath; but Craig saluted the utterance as honest, gouged with effort from the compacted acc.u.mulation of daily pretense and accommodation. As well as love one another we hate one another, and even ourselves. she did now and then proclaim this, and would disown the proclamation in the next breath; but Craig saluted the utterance as honest, gouged with effort from the compacted acc.u.mulation of daily pretense and accommodation. As well as love one another we hate one another, and even ourselves.

One day after school his younger son had somberly told him that Grace's son, a year behind him at school, had confided that his parents were splitting up. Craig had sickened at the casual revelation, knowing the boy to be imparting news that would soon envelop him; his trusting child was standing on the edge of a widening chasm, a catastrophe his father was in the process of creating.

At the time he kept dreaming of, he had not had stage fright. Strange to recall, he had felt oddly calm, masterful, amid scandal and protest and grief. There had been a psychiatrist encouraging him. His mother, initially indignant, became philosophical, employing postmodern irony and a talk-show tolerance learned through hours of watching television. His children consoled themselves by thinking they would some day grow up and never be so helpless again. In abandoning his family, a man frees up a bracing amount of time. Craig found himself projected into novel situations-dawn risings from a strange bed, visits to lawyers' offices, hotel stays hundreds of miles from home-and reacted like an actor who had rehea.r.s.ed the lines he spoke, who had zealously prepared for this unsympathetic role, and played it creditably, no matter what the reviewers said. So why the stage fright now, in his sleep? It had been there all along, and was rising up into him, like his death.

Recently he had visited an old friend, a corpulent golfing buddy, in the hospital after a heart attack. Al lay with tubes up his nose and into his mouth, breathing for him. His chest moved up and down with a mechanical regularity recorded by hopping green lines on the monitor on the wall: a TV show, Al's Last Hours. Al's Last Hours. It was engrossing, though the plot was thin, those lines hopping on and on in a luminous sherbet green. Al's eyelashes, pale and furry, fluttered when Craig spoke, in too loud a voice, as if calling from the edge of a cliff. "Thanks for all the laughs, Al. You just do what the nurses and doctors tell you, and you'll be fine." Al's hand, as puffy as an inflated rubber glove, wiggled at his side, on the bright white sheet. Craig took it in his, trying not to dislocate the IV tubes shunted into the wrist. The hand was warm, and silky as a woman's, not having swung a golf club for some years, but didn't seem animate, even when it returned the pressure. Our bodies, Craig thought, are a ponderous residue the spirit leaves behind. It was engrossing, though the plot was thin, those lines hopping on and on in a luminous sherbet green. Al's eyelashes, pale and furry, fluttered when Craig spoke, in too loud a voice, as if calling from the edge of a cliff. "Thanks for all the laughs, Al. You just do what the nurses and doctors tell you, and you'll be fine." Al's hand, as puffy as an inflated rubber glove, wiggled at his side, on the bright white sheet. Craig took it in his, trying not to dislocate the IV tubes shunted into the wrist. The hand was warm, and silky as a woman's, not having swung a golf club for some years, but didn't seem animate, even when it returned the pressure. Our bodies, Craig thought, are a ponderous residue the spirit leaves behind.

One of his childhood homes had been rural, with some acres attached, and while exploring those little woods alone one lonely afternoon he had come upon an old family dump-a mound, nearly grown over, of gla.s.s bottles with raised lettering, as self-important and enduring as the lettering on tombstones. Many of the bottles were broken, though the gla.s.s by modern standards was amazingly thick, a kind of rock candy, the jagged edge making a third surface, between the inside and outside. Malt-brown, sea-blue, beryl, amber, a foggy white, the broken gla.s.s bore the raised names of defunct local bottling works. The liquids the fragments had held were evaporated or had been drunk. For all the good or ill these beverages and medicines did, not so much as a sc.u.mmy puddle inside an old tire was left. The pile had frightened little Craig, as a pile of bones would have done, with its proof of time's depths, yet in his rural isolation it had provided for him, there in an unfrequented corner of the woods, a kind of glittering, obliviously cheerful company.

On his own acres, wandering, garbage bag in hand, in the lowland beyond the stray rock and the burned glove, he found a number of half-buried golf b.a.l.l.s, their lower sides stained by immersion in the acid earth, the cut-proof covers beginning to rot. He remembered how, when first moving to this place, and still hopeful for his game, he would stand on the edge of the lawn and hit a few old b.a.l.l.s-never more, thriftily, than three at a time-into the woods down below. They seemed to soar forever before disappearing into the trees. He had never expected to find them. They marked, he supposed, the beginning of his his era. era.