A line seemed to be crossed at our meals, from wonder to pride to habituation to vague resentment and finally colic. There was nothing like a repast to bring out the hierarchies that everyday activities so successfully blurred and dispelled, and Father came to believe that a true family could be kept together only by avoiding meals together whenever possible. But he had also noticed that there was better behavior at kennel dinner when a guest dog was being boarded. Were the hosts being well-mannered or falsely solicitous, wondering whether the guest was going to steal their dinner? Whatever the case, their own self-conscious roles were slightly submerged; they gulped more slowly, ate a bit less, chewed a bit more thoroughly. There was even a kind of comradely charm in the air, and occasionally a note of sincere thanks was struck, bringing a tear to a hound’s eye.
So it was that we almost always had an invited guest for supper. When we did not, our table was the severest form of regimen. Mother was obviously of two minds about food. Meat in particular, in all its forms, gave her the shakes. She would walk across a muddy street to avoid passing the window display in a butcher shop. She knew this was ridiculous but couldn’t help it. It was related of course to the way my father had eaten, was eating, and was about to eat. The appetites of men seemed to her if not exactly vulgar, driven by needs far beyond nutrition. The way men left the table particularly offended her, on whatever pretext, strolling over to the fire, or to walk in the starry moonlight, there to smoke, pass wind, and put the dinner out of mind. It brought out in her conflicting feelings of servitude and superiority, particularly when they thanked her with pointless magnanimity for the meal she had in fact nothing to do with. She was convinced that Father’s love of food was his most prurient of interests.
Mother’s attention to lettuce and other uncooked food struck Father as not only gratuitous, smug asceticism, but also willful self-destructiveness. He did not judge her, as he himself took no pleasure in the carving, nor certainly in the presiding. It was one of the few rituals he was not particularly good at, and he was embarrassed at his first reflex, which was always to carve the roast in such a way that the better cuts would be preserved for himself. Gazing with sadness at the selfishly severed loin, he would offer it shamefacedly to Mother, who he knew would refuse it, saying, “You know I just don’t care, dear”—the only words which truly threatened him. And then he would fork the filet on to me, and that was Judgment Day, where amongst the copious portions you simply cannot offer thanks enough. It is the smallest and the weakest of us who must get down on our marrowbones and give thanks, who must tally up with the Lord, his beneficence.
So our supper was not a pretty picture. Father with his huge knife raised in defeat, Mother staring at every plate but her own, and myself, who through murmurs of gratitude, personal growth, and savoir gré, was presumed to solve this impasse. Only the animals beneath the table enjoyed these coarse dog dinners, as my father’s shadow hovered over the roast, elbows sawing in and out, while mother withdrew from his shadow with an unmistakable air of superiority. In my nervous knowledge that my digestion was the only justification of the elaborate ritual, I must admit that I identified with the roast and rejoiced in its slaughter. But these meals drenched in ambivalence did not give us strength. No, this first festival of mankind made each of us weaker, occasionally exhausted — the family values of remorse, obedience, and guilty liberation, all sitting round the table in silence.
So it was not surprising that when there were no guests to take the edge off things, Father would invariably take his supper at that vegetarian’s nightmare, White Wings, Black Dog, an inn where the fare was certainly uneven but which had not been closed a single day in seven hundred years, and where no meal was really a meal without a seduction or apology. There in a booth in the private dining room known as The Brainery, one could draw the curtain and have an assignation with an oyster and one’s self, or perhaps the elk and bustard pie with orchid ice cream. And there Felix removed himself with a book and ate alone before the fire, his unembarrassed appetites on full display, and all of us grew fat and happy.
When earthbound, my father assumed three forms: at times a gentle bull who lay his full weight upon the fence of every friendship; at times a writhing, glittering serpent, mocking each blow of his adversaries; and at times a man with a lion’s head from whose laughing beard, unchecked by false shame, great torrents of water flowed. I liked them all.
At dusk, every summer afternoon, when the slow moving Mze turned from ocher to mauve, we stripped down on its banks, leaving my school uniform and his business suit in soft columns above our shoes, and began to wade aimlessly in our black alpaca bathing suits, which we always wore instead of underwear. Swallows swooped down, dipping their wings into the darkening waters, fish rose and rejoiced in its dusky surface, while between them all manner of insects emerged like living sparks and fell into the flowers of both banks. Then he would take me up in his arms and we would cross that river which the ancients believed to be bottomless.
He had the body of a gymnast, his frame developed by secret French exercises, low sloped rounded shoulders which concealed effortless strength, and the legs of a country gent, hard as a saddle but just as forgiving, which he toughened by rising at five each morning and walking for three hours before breakfast with a knapsack full of stones. I had my mother’s rapier-like body, designed for sleeping late, for sports not yet generally acknowledged. But when he picked me up, even for a moment, I forgot my body, forgot myself.
The incline of the river bottom was firm and fairly gradual, and soon we were submerged, only his head above the water, his beard like a dark water lily floating above my head, which lay upon his chest. I was aware of both the current and his stubborn resistance to it. Taking a breath, I went under with his heart. I felt no fear as long as he could breathe, as long as I could hear his breathing.
He walked almost casually, with the slight limp of the star athlete, negotiating the cylinder of water with short languid strides, suave and incorporeal, until we were both well beneath the surface. How many steps I do not know, across the bottom of that river which flowed away from history, where I first became aware of Time Out of Mind.
We moved deliberately in that sphere, out of our element but serene, moving gravely but never grimacing through the invisible currents. Down there, all the senses were equally irrelevant, in a normal weightless gait. Then in order to reassert our gravitas, he freighted, weighted down with me.
When his lungs close by my ear expelled, I knew we were coming up for air, that the incline was in our favor. There was nothing but blinding brightness as my own head emerged, and he permitted himself a slight stumble now that the hardest part was done. When we were in the shadows on the far side, my diminished senses returned one by one. I could hear the rivulets course about his calves, and as I was set down on the meadow embankment, looking back at the bent grass where we began, water cascaded down his beard onto my face.