Erasure

9

I grew up an Ellison. I had Ellison looks. I had an Ellison way of speaking, showed Ellison promise, would have Ellison success. People I met on the street when I was a child would tell me that they had been delivered by my grandfather, that I looked like my father and his brother. Father’s older brother had also been a physician until he died at fifty. When very young I enjoyed being an Ellison, liked belonging to something larger than myself. As a teenager, I resented my family name and identification. Then I didn’t care. Then the world didn’t care. Washington got bigger and all the people my grandfather had delivered died. I knew Father’s father only through stories, but there were many. His nickname, one of them, was Superdoc, as he apparently had been able to start his battery-less car and drive it home from a house call.

My mother’s maiden name was Parker and they lived on the Chesapeake Bay, south of where we summered. A couple of Parkers were farmers, others worked in plants of one sort or another. Mother’s brothers and sisters were considerably older and were all dead before I was an adult, leaving me with a herd of cousins that I never saw, never heard anything about, but kind of knew existed out there somewhere with names like Janelle and Tyrell. Mother had become an Ellison. As a child, I saw some Parkers only once, visiting a farm house near the bay. They frightened me. Big-seeming people with big smells and big laughs. Had I known more of life then, I would have liked them, found them thriving and interesting, but as it was, I found them only startlingly different. Lisa, Bill and I stood around the house, which smelled of coal fire and stale quilts, like frozen carrots.

Mother seemed apologetic for her family. She seldom spoke of them, though I am sure that they did not summarily write her off. She was the only Parker to go to college and, as so often happens, education functioned as a wedge between them. Perhaps my mother understood better than I gave her credit my feelings of alienation and isolation. I believe that much of her life she felt self-conscious and somewhat inadequate. There was no particular event I recall that substantiates that belief, no habit or anything I heard her say that might serve as evidence. But maybe there was a look here or there, a physical attitude just this side of cowering that I noticed without knowing what I was noticing.

Mother and Father never seemed terribly close to me. They formed a unified front against which we kids collided and bounced off. They were not outwardly affectionate, though the three of us were evidence of some touching. Indeed, I thought they were decidedly distant, cool to one another. An attitude that would seriously impair my attempts at relationships later. I of course would be taking a convenient turn to have that alone cut as any kind of excuse for my interpersonal failures. My mother saw her life as a wife and mother as a service, a loving service, but a service nonetheless. My father saw his station rather as one defined by duty, and discharged said duty with military efficiency.

In the garage, I looked at my table that was now a stool, and not a very good stool, and considered my mother’s discovery that all those years of somehow feeling she was not quite enough were in a few minutes made valid. The wood of the piece of furniture I had mutilated to make safe was still beautiful, the touch of it, even the smell of it, but it was inadequate. I imagined that my mother discovered the letters just after Father’s death, when he’d asked her to burn and not read them. But he of course knew that she would read them. I found myself angry with him, a stupid enough feeling with a live person. Then I wondered which was more confidence-killing: believing that you should not have felt inadequate when in fact you were, or discovering that, all along, you were actually smart enough to see things clearly, that you were correct in your fears. This suddenly explained the newfound serenity and composure of Mother after Father’s death. Perhaps he knew that was what she needed. Now what she needed was to have her nerve fibers unlooped and her newly detected brain shrinkage stopped.

Yul was doing his level best to contain his glee, but doing a piss-poor job. He was paying lip service to my vexation and indignation at the completely nonironic acceptance of that so-called novel as literature, but I could hear him counting the money. I could also hear him telling me, without saying as much, to grow up. What he said was, “We’re talking about a lot of money here.”

“I appreciate that, Yul,” I said.

“The editor wants to discuss the manuscript with Mr. Leigh. What do I tell her?”

“Tell her I’ll call her.” After he said nothing, I went on. “Tell her Stagg R. Leigh lives alone in the nation’s capital. Tell her he’s just two years out of prison, say he said ‘joint,’ and that he still hasn’t adjusted to the outside. Tell her he’s afraid he might go off. Tell her that he will only talk about the book, that if she asks any personal questions, he’ll hang up.”

“You’re sure about this?”

“I’m sure.”

“Okay then. I don’t mind telling you this is weird.”

“Well, Mister Bossman, I’se so sorry dis seem so weird to ya’ll.”

“You’re a sick man, Monk.”

“Tell me about it.”

I was seven.

The drive to the beach took us along Route 50 which was the slowest straight shot on the planet. We would take two cars, my brother always riding with Father. My Mother drove slowly, Lorraine in the front seat with her, staring at the map, and so we always arrived twenty minutes later. Still, Father would wait for us all to be there before opening the house for the summer. He and Bill would have pulled the bags out of the Willys wagon my father loved so much and have them arranged neatly, ready to be taken inside.

It was June 16, a Saturday morning. I remember that so clearly. It was sunny, but not terribly hot. I was wearing long khaki trousers and a striped shirt that I always hated. It seemed no one had come to the beach yet. The only car parked in a drive was Professor Tilman’s. As soon as Howard let out, he was at the beach. He had no children and his wife had died years earlier, but still he seemed to be able to take or leave company. I couldn’t understand why he came at all since he never left his house except for groceries. Sometimes I would see him sitting at the corner of his porch taking in his sliver of a view of the bay.

“Get that box,” Father said, pointing.

I picked it up and carried it into the kitchen. Lorraine was already sweeping, Mother was putting away dishes and Bill was wiping dust and leaves from the sills of the breakfast porch.

“How do the leaves get in here?” Bill asked, as he always asked.

Father could be sudden. I thought of him as generally a kind man, perhaps because of the way his patients adored him, but living with him was like living on the crater of Vesuvius. Perhaps the comparison would be better made to some dormant or rather sleeping volcano. He wouldn’t exactly erupt, but rumble or hiss, and sometimes you’d miss the event altogether and find yourself detecting a burnt smell, sulfur or just seeing some vapor in the air. To Bill, upon his asking the question, he said, “No house is tight.”

It was not until Father had gone out the front door, to collect the last of the boxes, that we all exchanged fearful glances.

But, in part, that quality of my father’s was one reason I felt so close to him. I admired his intelligence, his sagacity and his convoluted message delivery system. Bill kept his secret that was no secret, Mother kept no secrets at all, Lisa kept secrets that remained with her and Father kept secrets and talked about them all the time. I am convinced of this. I am certain that he told all of us any number of times that he was married to the wrong woman and probably that he had another child someplace.

Later, after a meal of sandwiches, Father and I walked down to the beach. I had to skip every few steps to keep his pace. We waved to Professor Tilman.

“Why doesn’t Professor Tilman go anywhere?” I asked.

“Perhaps because he doesn’t want to,” Father said.

I thought about that and I suppose my silence was a bit loud.

“Is that hard to imagine?” Father asked. “Not wanting to go out?”

I said I guessed so.

We walked out the long pier and looked down at the water. A jellyfish swam by. A small boat motored by well away from us, a crabber checking his traps. I slapped a mosquito and flicked it from my arm.

Father laughed. “They take the blood and leave the itch. It’s a tradeoff. She gets to feed her eggs and you get to remember how good it feels to scratch an itch, how good it felt to not itch.”

“All I know is I hate them,” I said.

“The bluefish will be running in a few weeks,” he said. “That will be fun. Do you think you and your brother can get the boat into the water by yourselves?”

“No.”

He laughed. “I’ll help you in the morning before I go back.”

Rothko: I’m an old man.Motherwell: You’re not so old.Rothko: And I’m a sour old man. I’ve taken to this house painter’s brush I found. It makes the edges almost feathery. Funny, eh? A house painter’s brush. I’ll bet that devil Hitler used the very same thing when he was a nasty youth. And here I am with one. I have all these powdered paints and I mix and mix, but are my colors really so different? Are people sick of my panels? I like my early work. This stuff I’m doing now has me depressed.Motherwell: Work depressed us all.Rothko: A nice homily from a nice young man.Motherwell: Not so young myself.Rothko: And steady. I’ve noticed that about you. I’m planning to take my own life, but you’ve no doubt surmised this. And you fathom that you understand the feeling in some way. Yes, you’re a steady one. Of course, your paintings stink.

In considering my novels, not including the one frightening effort that brought in some money, I find myself sadly a stereotype of the radical, railing against something, calling it tradition perhaps, claiming to seek out new narrative territory, to knock at the boundaries of the very form that calls me and allows my artistic existence. It is the case, however, that not all radicalism is forward looking, and maybe I have misunderstood my experiments all along, propping up, as if propping up is needed, the artistic traditions that I have pretended to challenge. I reread the paper I claimed to dismiss summarily and realized that epiphanies are like spicy foods: coming back, coming back.

Paula Baderman had a smoker’s voice, but she sounded young and spirited enough. She came to the phone quickly when I called.

“Mr. Leigh,” she said.

“Yes.”

“I’m glad we could get together, even if it is over the phone. I just wanted to touch bases with you. You know of course that I love the book.”

“So I understand,” I said.

She paused, leaving a blank between us, then said, “How long did it take you to write it?”

“It took me just a little over a week.”

The quality of her next silence was clear to me. She was surprised, if not put off by my diction, being not at all what she expected. I was not going to put on an act for her.

“A week. Imagine that.”

‘Are there any changes you’d like me to make?”

“Not really. In fact, I think it’s about as perfect a book as I’ve seen in a long while. But I just want to get to know you right now. If you don’t mind my asking, what were you in prison for?”

“I mind your asking.”

My abruptness was apparently pleasing to her, if not downright exciting. I detected a change in her breathing. “Certainly, I don’t mean to pry.”

“Did you read a lot in prison?”

I didn’t say anything.

“Well,” she said. “We’re hoping for a spring pub date. I think this is just perfect for summer reading.”

“Yes, white people on the beach will get a big kick out of it.”

That sent walking fingers up her spine and if I had been in her office (looking the part), she would have been tearing off her blouse and crawling across her desk toward me, perhaps not literally, but at least literarily.

“Do you think I might take your number in case I have any further questions?” she asked.

“No, I don’t think so. You just tell Yul that you’d like to speak with me and I’ll call you. Everything will work better like that.”

“Well, okay. Oh, and Stagg? May I call you Stagg?”

“You may.”

“Stagg, thank you.”

“You’re welcome, Ms. Baderman.” I hung up before she insisted that I call her by her first name.

The first half of the advance arrived. I found Mother sitting in the living room listening to Mahler. My father had always loved Mahler, but even as a child I found it heavy and overwrought. She was listening to the Kindertotenlieder and looking near tears. I was smiling.

“Why are you so happy, Monksie?”

“Just got paid for a new book.”

“A new book? I can’t wait to read it.”

“Yes, you can,” I said. “But anyway. I’m taking you on a trip. Anywhere you’d like to go.” I wanted to take her on a vacation while she could still enjoy it, while she could still remember who I was and who she was and what a fork was for. “Where would you like me to take you?”

“Oh, Monksie, you know how I’ve always been about traveling. You decide. I’ll be happy with wherever you pick.”

“Detroit,” I said.

The expression that crawled over and sat on her face was precious and let me know that she was no vegetable yet.

“Just joking,” I said.

“I should say.”

“Well, it’s summer, so what do you say we head north. How does Martha’s Vineyard sound?”

“Why don’t we go open the beach house,” she said.

It wasn’t what I’d had in mind, but the idea was perfect. The house had sat empty now for three years. Lisa had used it with her ex-husband, but never returned after the divorce. “That sounds good,” I said. “We’ll take Lorraine and we’ll leave tomorrow. How’s tomorrow?” “Fine, Monksie.”

Yul: What did you say to her?Me: What do you mean?Yul: She’s more gung-ho than ever.Me: I don’t know why that would be.Yul: They’re going to take out a full page ad in the New York Times and the Washington Post.Me: You’re kidding me.Yul: She wanted me to ask if Stagg will do a couple of talk shows. Morning network stuff.Me: Laugh laugh laugh laugh laugh laugh laugh laugh laugh laugh laugh laugh laugh laugh laugh laugh laugh laugh laugh laugh laugh laugh laugh laugh laugh laugh.

I called the number Bill gave me and a man answered. He seemed cool until I identified myself as the brother, and then he, Adam, was quite pleasant and told me more about Bill’s problems than I believe Bill would have wanted me to know.

“William tried to see his children the other day, but it became a big scene. His ex is seeing some homophobic highway trooper or something and they nearly came to blows. The kids aren’t taking the truth very well, I’m afraid. I believe he told me that he’s picked up a few new patients. That’s a good thing.” Then Bill came home. “It’s your brother,” Adam said away from the receiver.

“What have you been telling him?” Bill’s voice was stern.

“We were just chatting.”

Bill took the phone. “Monk?”

“Hi, Bill.”

“How’s it going?”

“Fine. What about with you?”

“Things could be better,” he said. He sounded near crying.

“Bill, I’m calling because I’m planning to take Mother out to the beach tomorrow. We’re going to stay there for a few weeks. I was wondering if you could make a trip out. I’ll pick you up at BWI.”

There was a long silence.

“Bill?”

“I’d really like to, but things are pretty hectic around here these days. I’m having to go to court about visitation and all that stuff.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Thanks.”

“Well, I just thought I’d ask. Hey, what if you brought Adam with you?” Before he could respond, I said, “I’ll buy your tickets. Mother’s not doing well, Bill.”

“Okay, Monk. I’ll talk to Adam. Are you going to turn the phone on down there?”

“I guess so.”

“Okay, well, I’ll call in the next couple of days.”

“Okay.”

I hung up and stared at the phone on my desk. It was black and heavy and had been used by my father and sometimes I imagined I could still hear his deep voice humming through the wires. Bill sounded so remarkably sad, so lost. When we were kids I had often felt, however vaguely, his sadness, but this hopelessness, if it was in fact that, this lostness, misplacedness, was new and not easy to take. For the first time I sat back and watched the destruction of my family, not a weird or unnatural thing, indeed it was more natural than most things, but it was a large portion to swallow. My father was dead for several years. My sister was recently murdered. My mother was slipping away on her kite of senility. And my brother was finally finding himself, I suppose, but seemingly losing everything else in the process. I wouldn’t use the cliché that I was the captain of a sinking ship, that implying some kind of authority, but rather I was a diesel mechanic on a steamship, an obstetrician in a monastery.

“Would you rather lose your sight or your hearing?” Lisa asked one evening while we all sat at the picnic table behind the house. The mosquitoes were just starting to come out and the crabs were almost gone.

“Hearing,” Bill answered quickly. “There’s too much in this world to see. Paintings, landscapes, faces. You can get around if you don’t hear and you can learn to read lips.”

“What about you, Monksie?” Mother asked. She saw these sorts of things as good conversation and good for us.

“I don’t know. I’d miss hearing music and crickets. I’d miss seeing things like paintings like Bill said. I guess it would be hearing. I’d rather lose my hearing.”

“Me, too,” Mother said.

“What about you, Father?” Bill asked.

Father had been chewing and listening to us in that absent way of his. He looked at Lisa, then me, studying us, it seemed. He looked down the table to Mother, nodding his head. Then he looked longest at Bill. He then took us in as a group, and said, “Sight” with a smile that was not quite a smile, but enough for us to laugh as if we had been teased rather than insulted.

In my head, as I drove along Route 50, Mother by my side, disapproving Lorraine directly behind me, I considered everything that was not good about the novel I was about to publish, that I submitted for the very reason it was not good, but now that fact was killing me. It was a parody, certainly, but so easy had it been to construct that I found it difficult to take it seriously even as that. The work bored and had as its only virtue brevity. There was no playing with compositional or even paginal space. In fact, the work inhabited no space artistically that I could find intelligible. For all the surface concern with the spatial and otherwise dislocation of Van Go, there was nothing in the writing that self-consciously threw it back at me. Then I caught the way I was thinking and realized the saddest thing of all, that I was thinking myself into a funk about idiotic and pretentious bullshit to avoid the real accusation staring me in the face. I was a sell-out.

Mother touched my arm as if she recognized my torture. “Are you okay, dear?” she asked.

“Fine, Mother.” I looked into the rearview mirror. “Okay back there, Lorraine?”

“Yes.” Lorraine had not really wanted to come, but I needed her help in taking care of Mother and, frankly, I couldn’t see leaving her alone. “I could use a ladies’ room.”

We had been on the road for thirty minutes and had perhaps another twenty to go to Annapolis. “Do you think you can wait until we get to Annapolis?” I asked.

“I suppose if I have to.”

“Lorraine needs to stop,” Mother said.

I nodded and pulled off at the next exit which turned out not to be conveniently located for anything people in cars might want. I drove along the two lane highway until thirty minutes later we’d come to a gas station. I parked in front of the restroom doors and killed the engine. “Okay, Lorraine.” I got out and opened her door for her. A greasy-looking, lanky white teenager watched us through the window.

Lorraine went to the door, opened it, then came back, got into the car. “I can wait,” she said.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“I can’t go in there,” she said.

“There’s no place else.”

“Lorraine said she can’t use that one, Monksie,” Mother said.

“I’ll just wait until we get there,” Lorraine said.

An hour later we were in Annapolis and Lorraine was asleep in the back. Mother was asleep beside me. I drove through town to the beach. The guard at the gate actually recognized me. He was as old as my mother, but I couldn’t recall him. “Monk Ellison,” he said. “My, my. You don’t even remember me, do you? Maynard Boatwright.”

I did recall the name, but I remembered a big, heavily muscled exmarine with an iron jaw, instead of the sweet old man saying my my in front of me.

“I remember you,” I said. “How’s life treating you?”

“Finer than frog’s hair.” He looked over at my mother, then at Lorraine. I remembered that Lisa suspected he had a thing for Lorraine. “Is that?”

“Lorraine,” I said.

“Well, I’ll be.”

I turned to wake Lorraine, but Maynard stopped me.

“You must be a good driver,” Maynard said. “For everybody to fall asleep like that.”

“I guess so.”

“Well, I’ll see you later.” Then he waved to the sleeping Lorraine.

The naps must have had a restorative effect on the old ladies. Once at the house and awake, they set to the task of getting the place in order with single-mindedness. I was only a little tired from the short drive, but they wouldn’t let me close enough to help with the cleaning. I went out to the side of the house, turned on the water and threw the main breaker. I poked my head back in to reaffirm my uselessness and stepped out the back to the little dock on the tidal pond. I looked east out to the bay. The old aluminum canoe was still upturned on blocks and covered with a tarp the way it always was. Later, I would take it out and just float on the water with a cigar. The rim of the pond was crowded with houses, nothing like it had been when I was a kid. I could hear the noises of families, music, dogs, a distant car alarm. I walked between our house and the neighboring one and to the road, where I walked toward the bay beach.

I wondered how far I should take my Stagg Leigh performance. I might in fact become a Rhinehart, walking down the street and finding myself in store windows. I yam what I yam. I could throw on a fake beard and a wig and do the talk shows, play the game, walk the walk, shoot the jive. No, I couldn’t.

I would let Mr. Leigh continue his reclusive, just-out-of-the-big-house ways. He would talk to the editor a few more times, then disappear, like down a hole.

I walked along the beach, then turned to look back at the Douglass house. It had been owned first by the grandson of Frederick Douglass and had fallen into several hands since. When I was a child it was unoccupied and we would walk into it, climb the stairs and stare at the water from its tower. My father told me that James Weldon Johnson had written in that lookout. The thought of it scared me a little, but also made my mind race, searching for lines of poems of my own that would never come. Now the house was fresh looking and somewhat unfamiliar. The tower top was no longer screened in, but surrounded by glass. The house looked tight and air-conditioned. There was a Mercedes Benz station wagon parked by the front walk.

I walked back up the street. I stopped to look at the old Tilman house. A woman whom I had not seen was sitting on the porch and she asked if she could help me, in that way which really asked what the hell I was looking at.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I was just remembering a former owner.”

“Oh, really?” Meaning of course, yeah, right.

“No, really. His name was Professor Tilman. I never knew his first name. Maybe it was Professor.”

The woman laughed. She was tall, as tall as me, and she stepped off the porch and looked at the house with me. Her square face was framed by near blonde dreadlocks. “Professor Tilman was my uncle,” she said. “We called him Uncle Professor.”

She was funny. I smiled at her. “I didn’t mean to be rude, but I didn’t see you.”

“That’s okay.”

“How is the Professor?” I asked.

“He died three years ago.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I inherited the house. Some of the house. My brother and I own it, but he lives in Las Vegas and never comes east.” She said Las Vegas as if it were not to be believed.

“I’ve driven through there,” I said. “My name is Thelonious Ellison. Everybody calls me Monk.”

“Dr. Ellison’s family?” I nodded and she said, “My uncle mentioned your father often.”

“How about that.”

“Marilyn Tilman.” She shook my hand. “Are you down for the summer? What’s left of it?”

“Just a couple of weeks. I’m here with my mother and her housekeeper. Speaking of which, I’d better get back there. I know they’ll have a shopping list waiting for me. I’ll talk to you later, okay?” I took a couple steps away. “Would you like me to pick up anything for you?”

“Why don’t I ride with you?” she asked.

“It’s the two story with the green shutters.”

“I’ll be over in a couple,” she said.

“Good.” I watched her take the porch steps two at a time and enter the house.

Back at the house, I discovered that Mother and Lorraine had gotten on each other’s nerves. The outward manifestation of this nerve-pinching was an awkward silence. Mother told me she felt the need for a nap and Lorraine told me, aside, that Mother needed a nap. Lorraine had compiled the shopping list, at the end of which were a couple of things added by my mother’s shaking hand. This was no doubt the source of trouble between them, especially as one of the items had already been listed by Lorraine.

“She’s tired,” Lorraine said again, this time loud enough for Mother to hear.

“It’s no wonder,” Mother said softly, looking around as if for a place to lie down.

“Lorraine,” I said, “take Mother up and get her to bed, will you? I’ll be back in an hour or so. And I’ll pick up some food so no one cooks tonight.”

“Yes, Mr. Monk.”

Lorraine followed Mother up the stairs.

“I don’t need your help,” Mother snapped.

“I have to make up your bed,” Lorraine said.

“Well, get to it, Lorraine. You’re such a slow girl sometimes.”

I stepped outside to find Marilyn approaching. She was wearing a straw hat that shaded her face, but still her youthfulness shone on her cheeks and in her eyes. It was a glow that I believed I recalled, but was faded from me. My eyes felt tired as I watched her confident gait, her cloth knapsack swinging by her side.

“Ready?” she asked.

“Oh yeah,” I said.

We sat in the car and I fumbled a bit with the keys. The scene was strikingly and alarmingly unfamiliar to me. A woman less than seventy was seated beside me, a woman whom I found attractive, a woman whose short-term memory was at least as good as mine. I felt like a spinster and fought appearing too self-conscious.