I remember wandering into the barn one night very late and seeing him, lit by the moon, kneeling in the hay. Was I just sleepwalking? Was I only dreaming? I still do not know for sure. His arms were bent to his chest, and he held something gently, carefully, close to his heart. At first I could not see. And then he laid them down in the hay. They were two white eggs. Anyone might have thought my father crazy then. But I understood. He thought they were his own father’s fragile testicles.
My grandmother shook her head the way horses do, trying to cast something off, and peered at my father as if he indeed were some stranger, not her child at all, some madman, some insult.
Although my father could never stand the slaughter of hogs, now he cried. He thought he heard his father wailing in their throats.
“I don’t know where we went wrong with him,” my grandmother sighed one day as we weeded the peas. “I’m afraid there’s not much sense to your father.”
He had perplexed her from the very beginning. She remembered the nine months he lay inside her. “In all that time,” she said, “he never moved, never gave one kick, never turned. Not even I knew whether he would be born dead or alive.” And then there had been, after the final contraction, that awful silence. So it was over, she thought, before it had ever really begun. My father had taken one look at the world through his mother’s blood and decided he did not care to live here. Given one moment, he knew he did not want to take air into his lungs and breathe. But the young doctor, bent on preserving life no matter how reluctant his subject, saw this right away and spanked my father repeatedly until finally he gave a small yelp, then a cry of protest, and then a long full-bodied scream.
After his tentative start my father was a quiet, brainy child. He could spend day after day working on a single problem of mathematics or lose himself in a dream of fission. He could entertain himself for weeks with the details of the big bang theory or the concept of black holes. By age ten he had mastered geometry; by twelve, algebra; by fourteen, advanced calculus. He grew bored with it after that, though, and did no more — no algorithms, no studies of number theories. Mostly, he listened to music alone in his room in the farmhouse attic: Poulenc, Mahler, Rachmaninoff, Stravinsky. “Music saved my life,” he confessed to me on one of the rare occasions he allowed himself to reminisce.
“He could have been a pioneer in genetics,” my grandmother said.
“No, Grandma,” I said, giggling at the thought of my father in pioneer clothes, sporting a rifle or a bear trap.
“He could have worked in aerospace. He could have found the cure for something.”
The dream of my father’s greatness was the only dream my pragmatic grandmother had ever cared to keep. After all these years, it still shone in her eyes like a light, but it served no purpose except to make the reality of my father’s life almost unbearable to her. She had wanted to be intimately related to greatness and not just a mother-in-law to it.
“He could have been a chemical engineer,” my grandmother whispered, “had she not been so beautiful.”
“I don’t think so, Grandma.”
“Don’t ask me why he chose to study philosophy, of all things, in college! Imagine! Philosophy! But by that time there was no talking to him.” To his parents my father was a walking mystery.
And indeed, had my mother not been so beautiful, my father might have had a very different sort of life, but the minute he saw her across the hall at a college dance, he had already dedicated the rest of his life to her. Good-bye, Kierkegaard; good-bye, Nietzsche. The problem was solved. He would love her even if she would not love him back. He would love her despite everything — before she said one word, before he knew one thing about her and her tremendous talent and the sadness that wore everyone out. In his mind he saw himself closing the Investigations of Wittgenstein, Heidegger’s Being and Time, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Au revoir, Jean-Paul Sartre; farewell, Aristotle. Good-bye — no need for philosophy anymore, no need for any of it. As he glided across the college hall he pictured himself beside the girl in the organdy dress forever.
“That dress was quite simply hideous,” my mother once told me. On another occasion she said, “If only my mother had lived, I would have known how to act, what to wear.”
“It was a beautiful dress,” my father said. “You could never see a dress like that today. Its sleeves were like wings and blew in the breeze, and it was the color of the sky at certain dusks.”
“He could have been a nuclear physicist,” my grandmother said. To her, my mother was the worst sort of person you could be, a selfish one, for, as far as my father was concerned, she kept what could have been from being.
“He said he was happy,” my grandmother said, “but I never saw it. It was as if your mother was dragging him further and further into her own private world.
“I don’t think your father was ever really happy until you and Fletcher were born.” Then, for a minute, my grandmother told me, things changed for him. Our small lives asked to be loved and he loved them. He left his job to care for us. He fed us, he changed our diapers, he sang to us, he made us toys, he played Vivaldi and Mozart for us.
“Your mother, it seemed, never had any time for you,” my grandmother said, as if I was hard of hearing. “She was always too busy, though she never seemed to be doing anything.” My grandmother kept talking and talking, but I couldn’t exactly hear her.
“Yes,” I finally said, wiping my brow and clenching the weeds in my fist, and responding in the best adult voice and language I could manage, “I already know that. For your information, Grandma, I’m already aware of that fact so you don’t have to tell me anymore,” I said, tears in my voice. “Just stop telling me that.”
The pea plants looked like veins that led to some invisible heart in the ground. “Daddy,” I whispered into the porous earth, “help me.”
“Don’t make a scene,” I thought I heard my grandmother say, but when I looked up she was far down the path, her back turned away from me, guiding some plants up a fence. I was glad she had not seen me. Excess emotion always embarrassed her. She didn’t know what to do with it.
At night my grandmother stands over my bed and repeats things she thinks I should know — useful things like when to sow vegetables. “Sow hardy vegetables when apple blossoms show pink, tender vegetables with the first color in lilacs. Some cucumbers retard the growth of weeds.” Life is understandable was what my grandmother was trying to say. You can understand your life.
“What good are your dreams?” she asked, pushing the hair from my face. “You dream you are the water and then cry when you cannot do what the waves do, when you cannot fill any container. I don’t want to see you hurt, Vanessa. It’s the last thing in the world I’d want to see.” She paused. “You and Fletcher — you kids are everything to me — everything. I love you kids. I do.”
I nodded. “I know, Grandma.” I looked into her pale eyes. Her hands were shaking. In one way or another we would both disappoint her.
Life is comprehensible: it is the clothes flapping in the wind on the line; it is how the cat bristles when frightened, how steam rises from the kettle. That was the only truth to my grandmother — the observed life. She gathered her strength from the sunlight reflected on the bread pans, the cheese grater, the butcher block, the beehive. She collected her observations like rain in a barrel and used them when she needed.
“It’s so hot, Grandma.”
Tiny beads of sweat form on my grandmother’s forehead. Her hair is damp and sticks to her head. It’s so hot.