Charley of course is of the decidedly other view, the one that believes a good structure implies a good structure (which is why he’s so handy with plain truth: he has the mind of a true Republican). It was fine with him, as I happen to know via discreet inquiries, that his old man owned a seat on the commodities exchange, kept an unadvertised pied-à-terre on Park Avenue, supported an entire Corsican second family in Forest Hills, was barely a gray eminence whom young Charles hardly ever saw and referred to only as “Father” when he happened to catch a glimpse (never Dad or Herb or Walt or Phil). All was jake as long as there was a venerable old slate-roofed, many-chimneyed, thickly pillared, leaded-glass-windowed, deep-hedged, fieldstone Georgian residence reliably there in Old Greenwich, reeking of fog and privet and boat varnish, brass polish, damp tennies and extra trunks you could borrow in the pool-house. This, in Charley’s view, constitutes life and no doubt truth: strict physical moorings. A roof over your head to prove you have a head. Why else be an architect?
And for some reason now, tooling along westward with my son in tow — and not because either of us gives a particular shit about baseball, but because we simply have no properer place to go for our semi-sacred purposes — I feel Charley might just not be wrong in his rich-boy’s manorial worldview. It might be better if things were more anchored. (Vice President Bush, the Connecticut Texan, would certainly agree.)
Though there’s something in me that’s possibly a little off and which I’m sure would make finding firm anchorage a problem. I’m not, for instance, as optimistic as one ought to be (relations with Sally Caldwell are a good example); or else I’m much too optimistic (Sally qualifies again). I don’t come back from bad events as readily as one should (or as I used to); or else the reverse — I’m too adept at forgetting and don’t remember enough of what it is I’m supposed to resume (the Markhams serve here). And for all my insistent prating that they — the Markhams — haul themselves into clearer view, I’ve never seen myself all that exactly, or as sharing the frame with those others I might share it with — causing me often to be far too tolerant to those who don’t deserve it; or, where I myself am concerned, too little sympathetic when I should be more. These uncertainties contribute, I’m sure, to my being a classic (and possibly chickenshit) liberal, and may even help to drive my surviving son nutty and set him barking and baying at the moon.
Though specifically where he is concerned, I dearly wish I could speak from some more established place—the way Charley would were he the father of the first part — rather than from this constellation of stars among which I smoothly orbit, traffic and glide. Indeed, if I could see myself as occupying a fixed point rather than being in a process (the quiddity of the Existence Period), things might grow better for us both — myself and barking son. And in this Ann may simply be right when she says children are a signature mark of self-discovery and that what’s wrong with Paul is nothing but what’s wrong with us. Though how to change it?
Spiriting on across the Hudson and past Albany — the “Capital Region”—I am on the lookout now for I-88, the blue Catskills rising abruptly into view to the south, hazy and softly solid, with smoky mares’ tails running across the range. Following his nap Paul has fished into his Paramount bag and produced a Walkman and a copy of The New Yorker. He’s inquired moodily about the availability of tapes, and I’ve offered my “collection” from the glove compartment: Crosby, Stills and Nash from 1970, which is broken; Laurence Olivier reading Rilke, also broken; Ol’ Blue Eyes Does the Standards, Parts I and II, which I bought one lonely night from an 800 number in Montana; two sales motivation speeches all agents were given in March and that I have yet to listen to; plus a tape of myself reading Doctor Zhivago (to the blind), given as a Christmas gift by the station manager who thought I’d done a bang-up job and ought to get some pleasure from my efforts. I’ve never put it on either, since I’m not that much for tapes. I still prefer books.
Paul tries the Doctor Zhivago, tunes it in on his Walkman for approximately two minutes, then begins looking at me with an expression of phony, wide-eyed astoundment and eventually says, his earphones still on, “This is very revealing: ‘Ruffina Onissimovna was a woman of advanced views, entirely unprejudiced and well disposed toward everything that she called positive and vital.’” He smiles a narrow, belittling smile, though I say nothing, since for some reason it embarrasses me. He clicks in the Sinatra then, and I can hear Frank’s tiny buzzy-bee voice deep inside his ear jacks. Paul picks up his New Yorker and begins reading in stony silence.
But almost the instant we’re south of Albany and out of sight of its unlovely civic skyscrapers, all vistas turn wondrous and swoopingly dramatic and as literary and history-soaked as anything in England or France. A sign by a turnout announces we have now entered the CENTRAL LEATHERSTOCKING AREA, and just beyond, as if on cue, the great corrugated glacial trough widens out for miles to the southwest as the highway climbs, and the butt ends of the Catskills cast swart afternoon shadows onto lower hills dotted by pocket quarries, tiny hamlets and pristine farmsteads with wind machines whirring to undetectable winds. Everything out ahead suddenly says, “A helluva massive continent lies this way, pal, so you better be mindful.” (It’s the perfect landscape for a not very good novel, and I’m sorry I didn’t bring my four-in-one Cooper to read aloud after dinner and once we’re staked out on the porch. It would beat being taunted about Doctor Zhivago.)
In my official view, absolutely nothing should be missed from here on, geography offering a natural corroboration to Emerson’s view that power resides in moments of transition, in “shooting the gulf, in darting to an aim.” Paul could do himself a heap of good to set aside his New Yorker and try contemplating his own status in these useful terms: transition, jettisoning the past. “Life only avails, not having lived.” I should’ve bought a tape of it and not a book.
But he’s locked down in a bit-lip sound cocoon of “Two sweethearts in the summer wind,” and reading “Talk of the Town” with his lips moving, and couldn’t give a sweet rat’s fart about what interesting movie’s playing outside his window. Traveling is finally a fool’s paradise.