Why-now?" For hadn't we faith in pure rationality, pure logic and language pruned of all sentiment, all tribal history; wasn't the dream of philosophy possible, even now? Vernor said, for even at such a moment Vernor Matheius was one to have the final word, "Yes, why should it matter? Yet it does." How strange to be sitting beside this man on these wooden stairs smelling faintly of rot, at such a time; gazing out toward the rain; a couple seated together gazing out into the rain; they live upstairs and have come outside for fresh air, the man smoking and the woman seated close beside him; a harsh, sibilant rain blowing along the pavement beneath streetlights, with a look of antic excitement. Another time we heard the remote sonorous tolling of the Music School bell tower; more chimes than I could count, it must have been midnight. How strange, how uncanny and how wonderful, what elation flooded my small gnarled heart on the eve of my twentieth birthday as I sat beside Vernor Matheius on the stairs at the rear of the shabby stucco building at 1183 Chambers Street, Syracuse, New York on the rain-swept night of June 18, 1963.
If you'd driven by, and noticed that couple, wondering who they were, they were us.
III. The Way Out
1
To show the fly the way out of the bottle? Break the bottle.
There was the shock of my brother Hendrick's call. One evening at dusk in June 1965. When I was staying in a rented cabin near Burlington, Vermont; living alone for the summer, immersed in my writing. The telephone rang and there was my brother Hendrick!- with news so unexpected, at first I couldn't grasp what he said.
Hendrick's deep gravelly voice and nasal upstate New York accent. Jarring to my ear, for I spoke with him rarely; I spoke with my brothers rarely; you might have thought that I was estranged from them, or that they'd cast me off, and forgotten me. And so my brother Hendrick's voice frightened me as if he were calling me to account for something I'd failed to do, some family obligation I'd failed to meet in my desperate flight from Strykersville one day to be construed as my career, my destiny. My voice went small and vulnerable, stammering-"Yes, Hendrick? W-What?" Not absorbing what Hendrick was saying with such urgency as if the distance between us, approximately three hundred miles, were compounded by a distance in time; for Hendrick and I hadn't seen each other since our grandmother's funeral and burial in the Lutheran cemetery eighteen months before; and in my confusion as I stood in a doorway of the rented and unfamiliar cabin at the edge of a small lake I struggled to recall Hendrick's adult face for his boy's face had vanished, I knew, it wouldn't be to that brash careless good-looking face I must appeal but to a face matured and thickened about the jaws, Hendrick now thirty years old and though the youngest of my three elder brothers no longer young; my only brother not yet married, my only brother not yet a father, yet Hendrick was mysterious and inaccessible to me as the others; at the time of my grandmother's funeral his eyes had drifted onto me, with baffled affection, perhaps not affection but a subtle resentment in which there dwelt some small measure of admiration, for Hendrick believed it was unfair, God-damned unfair, that I'd been the one to leave Strykersville on a scholarship to a highly regarded university while he, smart as I, maybe smarter, certainly better at math, and as deserving, had had to work at demeaning jobs to support himself through school; he worked now at General Electric in Troy, New York, and the few times we'd met in our new, awkward disguises as adults I'd felt the weight of his brotherly disapproval, his envy and dislike a hand shoving at me, backing me from him, I'd seen those mica eyes even as he forced a smile for his younger sister, I'd wanted to plead with him Please! please don't hate me, Hendrick, our lives are only luck. But I knew that such a remark would only embarrass him, as he sounded for some reason embarrassed now, and incensed, over the phone-"Jesus! What a trick. When we'd thought all these years he was dead."