Townie_ A Memoir Part 1

Townie: a memoir.

Andre Dubus III.

PART I.

QUEEN SLIPPER CITY OF THE WORLD.

1.

I DID NOT LOOK into the mirror, not yet, not in the morning. My body was still so small and I only looked at it right after the weights when my muscles were filled with blood. There came the tap of my father's horn outside. We were going running together, but what about shoes? All I owned were a pair of Dingo boots, the square-toed kind with the bra.s.s ring cinched in at the ankle. The horn tapped again. DID NOT LOOK into the mirror, not yet, not in the morning. My body was still so small and I only looked at it right after the weights when my muscles were filled with blood. There came the tap of my father's horn outside. We were going running together, but what about shoes? All I owned were a pair of Dingo boots, the square-toed kind with the bra.s.s ring cinched in at the ankle. The horn tapped again.

I stepped into my younger brother's room. Jeb was sitting s.h.i.+rtless in a chair, playing chords on his guitar in time to the metronome his teacher had bought him. His hair was wild and there was brown fuzz across his chin and cheeks.

"Jeb, you have any sneakers?"

He shook his head, kept playing, the metronome ticking, ticking, ticking. I ran into Suzanne's room. My older sister was just about to turn seventeen, and she was curled asleep, her back to me. Her room smelled like dope and cigarette smoke. There were alb.u.m covers spread on the floor at the foot of the bed: Robin Trower, Ten Years After, the Rolling Stones. In a swath of sunlight her blue sneakers lay side by side next to balled-up hip-huggers.

"Suzanne, can I borrow your sneakers? I'm running with Dad Dad."

She mumbled something, and I knew she wouldn't be up for another hour or two anyway. I grabbed her shoes, stole some white socks from her drawer, and ran outside.

It was a Monday in August, the sun almost directly above us in a deep blue sky. We only saw Pop on the occasional Wednesday when he saw each of us alone and on Sundays when he would drive to our house and take all of us to a movie or out to eat, but the day before, at the Carriage House just over the Merrimack line, he'd studied me over the table, his oldest son with his newly hard body I wanted to be so much bigger than it was. He looked curious about something, proud too. "You should come run with me sometime." Then he said he'd come pick me up the next day, his thirty-ninth birthday, and we'd go running together.

I waved at him behind the wheel of his old Lancer. He waved back and I stuffed my feet into Suzanne's sneakers and ran to the car and climbed in.

"Hey, man."

"Happy Birthday."

"Gracias." He pulled away from the curb. He wore running shoes, shorts, a tank top, and he'd tied a blue bandanna around his forehead. He didn't have much muscle, but he was trim. His chest and arms were covered with dark hair. He kept glancing at me as I leaned over and tied the worn laces of Suzanne's blue sneakers.

"You sure you want to do this?"

"Yep."

"It's gonna be long and hot."

I shrugged.

"Okay, man."

I sat back in my seat. I was hungry and wished I'd eaten something first, or at least drunk a gla.s.s of water. But what bothered me more were my feet. Suzanne's sneakers felt two sizes too small, my toes squeezed together, too much pressure on my heels. A few minutes later, when he pulled into the gravel parking lot and I got out and shut the door, I could feel each stone through the soles of my sister's shoes.

Pop and I were walking toward the woods and the five-and-a-half mile trail. Already there was an ache in both feet. I should tell him. I should tell him these aren't my sneakers. They're Suzanne's and they're too small. I should tell him. I should tell him these aren't my sneakers. They're Suzanne's and they're too small. But when I looked over at him, the sun on his face, his trimmed beard looking brown and red in that light, he smiled at me and I smiled back and we started running. But when I looked over at him, the sun on his face, his trimmed beard looking brown and red in that light, he smiled at me and I smiled back and we started running.

My father had been a runner longer than he'd been my father. When he was still living with us, he'd finish his morning writing, change into sneakers and shorts and a T-s.h.i.+rt, and go running. He'd be gone for an hour, sometimes longer, and when he walked back in, his s.h.i.+rt dark and wet, his cheeks flushed, it was the most relaxed and content he'd ever look. This was the sixties and early seventies. n.o.body jogged then. It was a habit he'd formed in the Marine Corps, and when he ran down the road, people would shout from their lawns and ask if he needed any help. Where was he going?

I had run with him once before when I was eight years old. It was at our old house in the woods in New Hamps.h.i.+re, one with land to play on, a clear brook in the trees. It was a summer day, when Mom and Pop were still married, and Pop had asked me and Jeb if we wanted to go with him. We said yes, though Jeb lost interest pretty quickly and walked back down the country road Pop and I kept running on. I lagged a few feet behind him, the sun on my face, sweat burning my eyes. At the one-mile mark, he turned around and I followed him home where he left me and set back out on a longer run. But I'd run two miles and when I stepped inside our cool, dark house, I yelled up the stairs to Mom, "I ran two miles with Daddy, Mom! I'm strong! I'm strong strong!" And I punched the wall and could feel the plaster and lath behind the wallpaper, though I had no words for them.

Now I was twice that age and hadn't run since, and even though my feet hurt with each stride, it felt good to be running outside with Pop on his birthday, spending time with him that wasn't in a restaurant he couldn't afford on a Sunday, that wasn't in his small apartment every fourth Wednesday. It was easier not having to look directly at him across a table, to have him sometimes look directly at me. me. And this was a part of town I didn't even know about. For a while it was hard to believe it was the same town as the one I spent all my time in; we were running on a wide dirt trail under a canopy of leafy branches. To our left, the trees grew on a slope and leaned over the water. To our right was a steep wooded hill, the ground a bed of pine needles and moss-covered rock, deep green ferns growing up around fallen logs and bare branches. I was in weight-training shape, not running shape, and fifteen minutes into it I could hear myself breathing harder than he was, but I didn't let myself fall behind him and I found if I relaxed my toes each time I lifted a foot, then tensed them just before it hit the ground again, the pain wasn't quite as sharp. I figured I'd have to do this another thirty minutes, maybe forty-five, just two or three times what we'd already done. I could do that, right? And this was a part of town I didn't even know about. For a while it was hard to believe it was the same town as the one I spent all my time in; we were running on a wide dirt trail under a canopy of leafy branches. To our left, the trees grew on a slope and leaned over the water. To our right was a steep wooded hill, the ground a bed of pine needles and moss-covered rock, deep green ferns growing up around fallen logs and bare branches. I was in weight-training shape, not running shape, and fifteen minutes into it I could hear myself breathing harder than he was, but I didn't let myself fall behind him and I found if I relaxed my toes each time I lifted a foot, then tensed them just before it hit the ground again, the pain wasn't quite as sharp. I figured I'd have to do this another thirty minutes, maybe forty-five, just two or three times what we'd already done. I could do that, right?

The trail dropped closer to the water and for a quarter mile or so we were running on flat ground, water on both sides of us, marsh gra.s.s and lily pads and waterlogged trees that'd been there for years. Then the hills came. They were short and steep, and Pop told me to run up them hard, that it was easier that way. I did, my heart punching my ribs, my breathing coming too shallow when I was inhaling as deeply as I could. Pop was eight or ten feet ahead of me now, and I put my head down, pumped my arms and legs and tried to ignore the stabs in my soles, the vise on my toes, the metal grater on my heels.

The hill leveled off in the shade, then dropped mercifully before another rose up like a rock-strewn wave, and now my eyes were stinging from the sweat and I closed them and ran as hard as I could, my thighs burning, the air in my lungs gone for good.

There were five or six more like this, and with each one we rose higher from the water down to our left. To our right was the rise of another densely wooded hill, so shaded it looked cool, and Pop was breathing much easier than I was, his bandanna dark with sweat. He seemed to slow himself so I could pull up beside him.

"The big one's coming up."

"Big one?"

"You'll see." He laughed, and soon enough the trail cut hard to the east, and he ran ahead of me. I followed, but this was the steepest hill yet, and when I looked ahead I saw only that it kept rising and rising before it curved into more trees where it rose again.

My mouth and throat were thick and tasted like salt, my thighs hurt almost as much as my feet, and even though I was pumping my arms and legs as fast as I could I seemed to be barely moving. I couldn't see my father anymore. I closed my eyes and kept running.

POP WAS waiting for me at the top, running in place, his beard glistening in the dappled light. He was smiling at me. When I got to where he was, we ran side by side down a long winding trail in the shade.

It wasn't until we were on flat ground again, water on both sides of us, maybe a mile and a half before we were through, that he said, "You up for the second lap?"

"Yeah." I a.s.sumed the second lap meant the homestretch we were running, the same trail we'd used on the way in. I didn't know then that on his birthday every year he would double or triple his normal running distance, that the second lap meant another another five and a half miles after I somehow got through these. five and a half miles after I somehow got through these.

The pains in my feet felt like some territory they now lived in. Way up ahead was the clearing in the trees, green gra.s.s under the sun, the short trail back to the parking lot and Pop's car and cool water, later a shower, a chair, more cool water. But when we reached the sunlit gra.s.s, Pop turned around and ran past me back into the woods. For a moment or two, I ran in place and stared at the parking lot, the glare of the sun on the winds.h.i.+elds, the smack and bounce of a tennis ball in the public court there, the glint of the sun off the chrome handle of the water fountain. I hadn't run even one mile since the two I'd run with Pop half my lifetime ago, and I'd just done five and a half. My own feet had become two weapons turned against me: How could I do it again? Shouldn't I just tell him about these shoes? That they were way too small, and I just couldn't do it anymore?

But my father was already disappearing into the shadows of the trail, the back of his s.h.i.+rt a dark V of sweat, his running shoes moving white b.a.l.l.s. I lowered my head and I followed.

IT WAS in the ninth or tenth mile that I'd begun to hobble, pulling my feet along, pumping my arms harder to keep up any momentum. Pop kept asking if I was all right. Did I want to stop? I shook my head no, I couldn't imagine giving up after so much pain. If I did, every bruising step behind me would be wasted, right?

Three days later, it seemed, the trail came to an end and I lay down in the sunlit field of gra.s.s, my lungs raw, my feet pulsing, sweat pooling in my eye sockets. I sat up and wiped my face on my forearms and untied Suzanne's shoes. My feet were swollen and it was hard pulling them off, the skin of my heels sc.r.a.ping, both socks wet and red. I peeled them away to see all ten toes had split open at the sides like sausages over a fire.

Pop squatted beside me. "Jesus."

"These are Suzanne's. I think they're too small."

"Where're your your shoes?" shoes?"

I shrugged, didn't want Mom to get in trouble. I knew he gave her a lot of his monthly pay, expected her to clothe us and feed us and house us properly, three things she'd said many times she just didn't have enough money to do.

I don't know how we got to the car. I probably leaned on Pop's shoulder and tried to walk as flat-footed as I could over the gravel. But first we stopped at the water fountain and drank. It was warm and tasted vaguely like concrete and metal, but it was a liquid angel come to bless us, and even though my entire body hurt from my lungs to my feet, I couldn't remember ever feeling so good. About life. About me. About what else might lie ahead if you were just willing to take some pain, some punishment.

THREE YEARS earlier, when Suzanne was thirteen and I was twelve, when our younger brother Jeb was eleven and Nicole was eight, our mother had moved us to Haverhill, Ma.s.sachusetts, a milltown along the Merrimack River. Before this, the five of us had lived in two other towns on the same river. The Merrimack originated one hundred miles north in the mountains of New Hamps.h.i.+re, and I imagined it was clean up there, not like where we lived where the wide, fast-moving water was rust-colored and smelled like sewage and diesel and something I couldn't name. Later, I would learn this was tanning dye from the shoe mills, that all fish died here, vegetation too. Posted down near the littered banks were signs that said NO SWIMMING OR FIs.h.i.+NG, not just because of the current-the yellow industrial-waste foam of it rising off in the wind-but because the water itself was toxic.

Decades earlier, Haverhill had been named "the Queen Slipper City of the World" because the town's Irish and Italian immigrants worked endless s.h.i.+fts in the mills along the Merrimack churning out a lot of the country's shoes. But in the early 1900s Italy started exporting cheaper shoes and one by one the mills closed and s.h.i.+ps stopped sailing up the river from the Atlantic. By the time we moved there in the early seventies, it was a town of boarded-up buildings, the parking lots overgrown with weeds and strewn with trash. Most of the shops downtown were closed too, their window displays empty and layered with dust and dead flies. It seemed there were barrooms on every block-the Chit Chat Lounge, the Lido, Ray and Arlene's-and they were always full, the doors open in the summertime, the cackle of a woman spilling out of the darkness, the low ba.s.s beat of the jukebox, the phlegmy cough of an old man born here when things were good.

Mom had gotten us a cheap one-story rental at the base of a hill on a street which curved around to Hale Hospital. Behind the hospital was a graveyard and there was a joke that the Hale was so bad you didn't even want to go there for a broken bone because in no time they'd put you in the cemetery out back. Our house used to be a doctor's office, and now he rented it to us. The two bedrooms and kitchen had been examination rooms, the dining room the doctor's office, and our living room was where patients sat and waited. We lived there two years. Once a month or so, in the middle of the afternoon, we four kids would be watching TV and a man or woman would open the door and walk in and sit down. One man in a trench coat and tie picked up a newspaper off the floor and sat in the chair in the corner and began reading. Suzanne was out with the friends she was making in the projects, and Jeb and Nicole and I looked at each other a while, the canned laughter of Gilligan's Island Gilligan's Island or or The Partridge Family The Partridge Family on the TV. The man was deep into his reading and we weren't sure what to do. Everyone else who'd walked in had seen right away this wasn't the doctor's office anymore-the scant furniture, the dusty carpet, no more receptionist or plastic plants, and there were these kids lying on the floor in front of a TV. I was the oldest. It was up to me, wasn't it? To tell this man to leave? on the TV. The man was deep into his reading and we weren't sure what to do. Everyone else who'd walked in had seen right away this wasn't the doctor's office anymore-the scant furniture, the dusty carpet, no more receptionist or plastic plants, and there were these kids lying on the floor in front of a TV. I was the oldest. It was up to me, wasn't it? To tell this man to leave?

Then he glanced up from his paper. He looked around the room. He looked at us looking at him. "This is is Dr. Deakins's office, isn't it?" Dr. Deakins's office, isn't it?"

"No," I said. "He moved."

The man apologized and stood and left in a hurry. I don't know why we didn't just put up a sign and lock the door. There was a lot I didn't seem to know.

LATELY SUZANNE had been going to parties in the projects on Summer Street. It was on the other side of the cemetery, and Russ Bowman lived there. He was only fifteen or sixteen, but he had long blond hair he kept tied back in a foot-long pony tail. He had sideburns and big arm muscles he showed off in the T-s.h.i.+rt and biker vests he wore. I heard kids say he stabbed someone. I heard others say he raped a girl and got away with it. One night in the fall, after nine when our mother was still at work, Jeb and I went looking for Suzanne in the projects. Nicole had stayed home alone. The projects was a cl.u.s.ter of concrete buildings that smelled like p.i.s.s and wine. There was a dark loud party, a bunch of teenagers in a hot room smoking dope while the Jackson 5 sang on the record player about ABC being as easy as 1, 2, 3. Jeb was tall for eleven, his hair long and frizzy. He put his arm around the shoulders of a cute Dominican girl, and Russ Bowman rose up out of the shadows and grabbed Jeb by the throat and backhanded his face. "She's mine, you little s.h.i.+t. Beat it."

I stood there. I stood there with my heart fluttering, a sick hole in my gut, and I wanted to do something, anything, but it was Russ Bowman, so I did nothing. My brother stared down at the floor like he was trying to figure out what he'd done wrong. Bowman shoved him out of the room, and I followed him onto the street.

WHENEVER THERE was a fight at school you would know it because dozens of boys and girls would be rus.h.i.+ng to one spot like they were being pulled there by the air itself. There'd be yelling and screaming. Someone would yell "Fight!" and kids would run into the crowd. You'd see some boy getting his face punched over and over, and soon a teacher or vice princ.i.p.al would push his way through to break it up.

One afternoon in late spring, the last bell rang and I was in a loud moving stream of kids pus.h.i.+ng out the front door and into the day. The air smelled like fresh-cut gra.s.s and sewage from the river. Rain clouds were gathering over it and the boxboard factory on the other side, and parked in the fire lane was a chopper Harley-Davidson, a man standing beside it, his hands on his hips. He was tall, his hair held back with a blue bandanna, his arms tattooed and sinewy. He wore ripped jeans and black biker boots and when Russ Bowman saw him, he dropped his book and turned, his face pale, his eyes as wide as a child's. He ran back through the crowd and into the school, this grown man chasing him. Somebody yelled "Fight!" And it was like watching the tide reverse itself, the ocean's waves pause, then push themselves back out to sea, all of us running back inside and down the corridors, shoulder to shoulder, some tripping and falling, chasing after the man chasing Russ Bowman.

He caught him in an empty cla.s.sroom. When the rest of us spilled into it, Bowman was already flat on his back and the man was punching Russ in the face again and again.

I liked seeing this. I liked seeing Bowman's head bounce against the hard floor, I liked seeing the blood splattering across his nose and mouth and chin, and I especially liked how tightly his eyes were shut against the fear, and the pain.

Then I began to not like it.

Some kids were yelling, "Kill him! Kill Kill him!" Others were quiet, watching like I was. Some of the girls covered their eyes or turned their heads away. Four cops plowed their way through us. The first one pulled his billy club and hooked it under the man's chin and jerked him off Russ Bowman. The second and third cops pushed the man face-first into a desk, and a fourth cop was reaching for his cuffs and yelling at us all to beat it. him!" Others were quiet, watching like I was. Some of the girls covered their eyes or turned their heads away. Four cops plowed their way through us. The first one pulled his billy club and hooked it under the man's chin and jerked him off Russ Bowman. The second and third cops pushed the man face-first into a desk, and a fourth cop was reaching for his cuffs and yelling at us all to beat it. "Beat it!" "Beat it!"

On my way out with the rest, I glanced back at Bowman. He was on his knees, his hair in his face, his nose and split lips dripping blood. He was staring down at the floor like he'd been waiting for this and now it had finally happened; he looked relieved.

2.

MY MOTHER AND father were each the youngest children of their families, and they were both raised in southern Louisiana. Mom had one older sister. Pop had two. His father had worked for Gulf States Utilities Company, and when our father was old enough he'd sometimes drive out to a bayou and go surveying with him, his French father wearing high boots and a .22 pistol strapped to his belt for snakes. Pop's mother was from a big Irish family in Lafayette. Her father was a state senator descended from the Irish statesman Edmund Burke. At one time my great-grandfather had been asked to run against Huey Long, but he refused because he feared Long's political machine would try to soil his family's name. His wife, my great-grandmother, was descended from Admiral Perry, Edwin and John Wilkes Booth, and Helene DeLaune, a lady-in-waiting to Marie Antoinette who, on the day of the queen's beheading, fled with some of the silver. Over the years, it had been pa.s.sed down through the male family line. When I was in my twenties, I would pull one of these spoons from my father's garbage disposal where it had slipped from the morning's cereal bowl and been mangled. "Pop," I said, "isn't this s.h.i.+t valuable?"

"Not to me, son."

OUR MOTHER'S father was Elmer Lamar Lowe, a man who'd never gone further than the third grade. At sixteen he'd been a foreman for a gang of gandy dancers, grown men laying railroad tracks under the sun, singing cadence as they swung sledgehammers and drove spikes into ties, fastening scalding iron rails that flashed brightly as they heaved the next length ahead of them. During the Great Depression, he was making sixty-five dollars a day setting bridge piers in the swirling depths of the Mississippi. He wore a diving bell suit, a thin air hose running from his helmet to the surface. A lot of men died doing this, but he went on to build power plants for big companies, bringing electricity to people throughout the south and even to Mexico. Our mother's mother had Welsh, Scottish, and Apache blood, a family of rice farmers and mule skinners, men who used their mules and rope to haul boats of supplies along shallow waterways.

I knew little of any of these things until I was grown. Nor did I know that in the late fifties my father's older sister Beth taught at St. Charles Academy, a convent school in Lake Charles, Louisiana, where she was a lay teacher. One of her English students was the freshman queen and homecoming queen, Patricia Lowe, a honey-haired beauty who was smart and polite and had so much presence that when she smiled at you it felt as if no one had ever smiled at you before: my future mother. As a junior she was already engaged to James Wayne, a piney woods boy from Rapides Parish, but James was in the army, and when he s.h.i.+pped off to Panama, Beth pulled my mother aside one day and said, "You can't marry James Wayne, you have to meet my brother Andre."

My mother had already heard of Andre Dubus. She'd read one of his articles in the local paper where he'd argued for integration, something she believed in deeply as well. She said she would meet him and when he called that winter told him she was going squirrel hunting up in Rapides Parish but that she could see him sometime after Christmas. He seemed intrigued by that, this pageant winner off in the woods with a loaded gun.

As a student at McNeese State College in Lake Charles, our father was small-barely 140 pounds-French-Irish handsome, but shy. On their first date, my mother told him she'd just gotten a new record player so they drove to Mueller's Department Store and he bought her two alb.u.ms, June Christy and Sammy Davis. She told him she admired his writing. He told her he wanted to see her again. That weekend, she broke her engagement with James Wayne, and the following Sat.u.r.day night she was sitting with my father at a restaurant that served inexpensive oysters on the half-sh.e.l.l, listening to a band of black musicians-who could only enter and exit through the rear entrance, who could not use the same water fountains or bathrooms as white people, who avoided looking directly at any of the white women while they played Dixieland jazz.

The summer of 1957 my father went off to Officer Candidate School. Like my mother, he wanted to get out of Louisiana, but that's not why he enlisted in the United States Marine Corps. He enlisted because of two things his father had said. On their quiet street in Lafayette, my father had spent a lot of time playing imaginary games outside. This was during the war, men dying over in Europe and the South Pacific. Once his father yelled at him, "G.o.dd.a.m.nit, all you're good for is shooting j.a.ps in the backyard." When my father was a teenager, my grandfather looked down at him and said, "When are you going to grow hair on your arms? You look like a woman."

Within a few months of meeting, my mother and father had eloped; she had married a writer and a Marine second lieutenant, he had married a bright beauty from the working cla.s.s. A few days after the justice of the peace had joined them for life, my mother's father said to her, "If you get divorced, don't bother coming home. There's been no d.a.m.n divorces in our family."

IT WAS the six of us: my young parents and all four of us kids born in a five year period beginning in 1958. We were each born on Marine bases, delivered by Marine doctors, Suzanne at Quantico in Virginia, me and Jeb on Camp Pendleton in California, and Nicole on Whidbey Island in Was.h.i.+ngton State. During these years, our father spent a lot of time aboard the USS Ranger Ranger off the coast of j.a.pan. When we did see him, it was for brief stretches in cramped Marine base housing. His head was shaved, his face smooth and clean, but he was a man who didn't smile much, a man who seemed locked into a car on a road he didn't want to be on. But then my father's father died in 1963, and almost immediately after that Dad retired from the Marines as a captain and was accepted into the Iowa Writers' Workshop in Iowa City. off the coast of j.a.pan. When we did see him, it was for brief stretches in cramped Marine base housing. His head was shaved, his face smooth and clean, but he was a man who didn't smile much, a man who seemed locked into a car on a road he didn't want to be on. But then my father's father died in 1963, and almost immediately after that Dad retired from the Marines as a captain and was accepted into the Iowa Writers' Workshop in Iowa City.

Though I didn't have words for it, I'd never seen him happier; he laughed often and loudly; he hugged and kissed our mother at every turn; he'd let his hair grow out long enough you could actually see some on his head, thick and brown. He'd grown a mustache, too. At night before bed, he'd sit me, my brother, and two sisters down at the kitchen table or on the couch in the living room and he'd tell us stories he made up himself-adventure stories where the hero and heroine were Indians defending their families and their people from the white man. One of them was Running Blue Ice Water, a kind and brave warrior who lingered in my imagination long after we'd been tucked in upstairs in a large room all four of us children shared.

My memory of that time is the memory of parties, though we were so broke we ate canned meat and big blocks of government cheese. Once a month Pop sold blood. But the parties went on. They happened at night, the house filled with talk and laughter and cigarette smoke. There were parties during the day, too. Blankets laid out on gra.s.s under the sun. Men and women eating sandwiches and sipping wine and reading poems out loud to each other.

Some parties were at the Vonneguts' house next door. All the Vonnegut kids were older than we were, but the father, Kurt, would walk down to our house every afternoon and sit with us four kids in the living room and watch Batman Batman on the small black-and-white. He smoked one cigarette after the other. He laughed a lot and made jokes, and once he squinted down at me through the smoke and said: "Who's your favorite bad guy?" on the small black-and-white. He smoked one cigarette after the other. He laughed a lot and made jokes, and once he squinted down at me through the smoke and said: "Who's your favorite bad guy?"

"Um, False Face."

He smiled, his face a warm mix of mustache and round eyes and curly hair. "I like the Riddler."

IN OUR bedroom floor was an air vent that overlooked the living room, and sometimes on party nights we kids would huddle around it and spy on our mother and father and their friends below, watch them dance and drink and argue and laugh, the men always louder than the women, their cigarette smoke curling up through the grate into our faces. I remember hearing a lot of dirty words then but also ones like story, novel, story, novel, and and poem. Hemingway poem. Hemingway and and Chekhov. Chekhov.

In the morning we'd be up long before our parents. We'd get cereal and poke around in the party ruins, the table and floors of our small house littered with empty beer bottles, crushed potato chips, overflowing ashtrays, half the b.u.t.ts brushed with lipstick. If there was anything left in a gla.s.s, and if there wasn't a cigarette floating in it, Suzanne and I would take a few sips because we liked the taste of watered-down whiskey or gin. Once we found a carrot cake in the living room. Its sides were covered with white frosting, but the middle was nothing but a mashed crater. I remembered the cake from the night before, a mouthwatering three-layer with frosted writing on the top. I asked my mother who it was for and she said it was for one of their friends who'd just sold his novel to a publisher; they were going to celebrate. And now the cake was unrecognizable, and when my mother came down that morning looking young and beautiful, probably in shorts and one of my father's s.h.i.+rts, smoking a cigarette, only twenty-five or -six, I asked her what had happened to the cake. She dug her finger into the frosting, then smiled at me. "Just your father and his crazy writer friends, honey." Did that mean he was a crazy writer, too? I wasn't sure.

It was another party at our house that confirmed it for me, though, one that began with jazz on the record player, a platter of cuc.u.mbers and carrots and horseradish dip on the kitchen table, gla.s.ses set out on the counter, and in his front room on his black wooden desk were two lit candles on either side of something rectangular and about two or three inches high covered with a black cloth. As my father's friends showed up one or two couples at a time, he'd walk them into his room with a drink or bottle of beer in his hand, and he'd point at what he told them was the failed novel he was holding a funeral for. He'd laugh and they'd laugh and one of his writer friends put his hand on his shoulder and squeezed, both of them looking suddenly pained and quite serious. I knew then my father was a writer too.

When our father's first book was published in 1967, he got a job teaching at a small college in Ma.s.sachusetts. We loaded up our rusted Chevrolet and drove east. For a year we lived in the woods of southern New Hamps.h.i.+re in a rented clapboard house on acres of pine and pasture. We had a swimming pool and a herd of sheep. There were fallen pine needles and a brook along whose banks Jeb and I found arrowheads, smooth pebbles, the bleached bones of rabbits or squirrels. We felt rich; we had all that land to play on, we had that big old house-its dark inviting rooms, its fireplaces, its fading wallpaper and floorboards fastened with square-cut nails from before the Civil War; we had that pool. pool.

In 1968 we moved again, this time to a cottage on a pond on the Ma.s.sachusetts-New Hamps.h.i.+re border. I was nine, and so it seemed like a house, but it was really a summer camp. Downstairs was the kitchen and its worn linoleum floor, the small living room with the black-and-white TV where we heard of the killing of Martin Luther King Jr.; it's where we saw X-ray photos of Robert Kennedy's brain and the .22 caliber bullet shot into it; it's where the following summer we watched a man walk on the moon, my mother sitting on the arm of the couch in shorts and one of Pop's b.u.t.ton-down s.h.i.+rts, saying, "We're on the moon, you guys. We're on the f.u.c.king moon. moon."

My father, thirty-two years old then, was earning seven thousand dollars a year teaching. He had a brown beard he kept trimmed, and he ran five miles a day, a ritual he had begun in the Marine Corps a few years earlier. My mother and father rarely had money to go out to a restaurant, but they still hosted a lot of parties at our house, usually on Friday or Sat.u.r.day nights, sometimes both; my mother would set out saltine crackers and dip, sliced cheese and cuc.u.mbers and carrots; they'd open a jug of wine and a bucket of ice and wait for their friends to bring the rest: more wine, beer, bottles of gin and bourbon. Most of their friends came from the college where Pop taught: there was an art professor, a big man who wore black and had a clean-shaven handsome face and laughed loudly and looked to me like a movie actor; there were bearded poets and bald painters and women who taught pottery or literature or dance. There were students, too, mainly women, all of them beautiful, as I recall, with long s.h.i.+ny hair and straight white teeth, and they dressed in sleeveless sweaters or turtlenecks and didn't wear bras, their bell-bottoms hugging their thighs and flaring out widely over their suede boots.

The house would be filled with talk and laughter, jazz playing on the record player-a lot of Brubeck, Gerry Mulligan, and Buddy Rich. From my bed upstairs I could smell pot and cigarette smoke. I could hear music and the animated voices of my mother and father and their loud, intriguing friends. Sometimes there'd be yelling, and there'd be words like Saigon, Viet Cong, Saigon, Viet Cong, and and motherf.u.c.king Nixon. motherf.u.c.king Nixon.

One weeknight on the news, there was a story about Marines killed in battle. I was lying on the floor under the coffee table as the camera panned over the bodies of soldiers lying on the ground, most of them on their stomachs, their arms splayed out beside them. Pop sat straight on the couch. His hands were on his knees, and his eyes were s.h.i.+ning. "Pat, those are boys. Oh, G.o.dd.a.m.nit, those are eighteen-year-old boys boys."

Later, sleeping in the bed beside my brother's, there was a weight on my chest and I woke to my father holding me, crying into the pillow beside my ear. "My son, my son, oh, my son." He smelled like bourbon and sweat. It was hard to breathe. I couldn't pull my arms free of the blankets to hug Pop back. Then he was off me, crying over Jeb on his bed, and there was my mother's whisper from the doorway, her shadowed silhouette. Her arm reached for our father, and he stood and looked down at us both a long while, then he was gone. The house was quiet, my room dark and still. I lay awake and thought of all the good men on TV who'd been shot in the head. I saw again the dead soldiers lying on the ground, and until Pop had cried over us, I hadn't thought much about Jeb and me having to go and fight, too. But in only nine years I'd be as old as the dead, and it'd be my turn, wouldn't it?