Wealth, Economy & Madness

Selections From The Family Photograph Album

by Howard Winn

When I was a child, my father took me on many Sunday mornings not to church but to the New York Central Railroad Station to watch trains storm through or stop. We stood together on a crosswalk above heat and cinders, sometimes caught in the higher eddies of fading steam, and we shared Good and Plenty, licorice flavored candy at five cents a box bought at the newsstand inside. Although I have not thought of these moments in a long time, they have meaning.

I have walked through a Dublin mist with my wife and children, and into fields behind our house in Limerick, watching great gray clouds boil over flying laundry clipped to the lines of back gardens. From a room under gabled eaves in Donegal, I have heard singing and vomiting in the closing-time streets below. My wife and I have watched the flooding Seine cover the pavement of streets following the river, reaching up to bridge arches that only the smallest of boats can clear. We have driven the winding rising roads to the hill top of Venasque, looking out over valleys of lavender. We have stood in a whipping Mediterranean wind on the southern coast of France when the sun flashed between vaporous sky and rain bursts like bullets. The Amstel has flowed for us into the sea and Amsterdam has called us to sit beside a canal, flowers in wreaths falling down its sides toward the water, contemplating the houses from which merchants went to plunder the world. Portraits have looked down on us from ancient walls in Haarlem. We have paid our pounds in London to see theatre and watched the changing of the guard with other Americans and walked the parks, clean and swept, where ducks waddle for crumbs.

With the exception of my father during the Great War, my parents never left the Hudson Valley, not even for my wedding, staying insular where they were born and will die. Is it comfort or fear that holds them to the hearth?

At eight, my daughter skips rope expertly on her toes in my father's living room, having learned lately the game's timing. She leaps just before the ankle tangling sweep of rope swishes below her soles, saying, “I can do something you can't do,” to my father at eighty-one. Challenged, he says, “I can do something you can't do.” Head down upon the oriental rug, hands complete the triangle as legs erect upwards; soles toward the heaven of his home's ceiling, he does it.

At eighty-three, my mother said she wished to read Plato or Aristotle at last. She had always meant to, she said, but she had been so very busy. “I know St. Paul well,” she said, “although it would be instructive to know something of the classics, too; but my eyes tire easily and maybe it isn't necessary by now, or isn't something I will use.” It appears, however, at eighty-three that just one history is not enough.

My mother at eighty-five did not expect to live this long. Her mother died, imprisoned in the self by strokes of inner lightning, leaving her shell shriveled in the chair placed by northern light. Only eyes moved. Immobile in the bedroom, she never left it alive. My mother marvels at the miracle of being at breakfast before a bittersweet half-grapefruit in the eighty-sixth year, at swallowing hot tea and ordinary toast, at talking by telephone to a great-grandson in far away Texas.

The way it is, my father naps in the middle of every morning; my mother turns off her hearing aid and sleeps every day after lunch. Each watches over the other, not speaking of the inevitable time alone. I remember them running down a beach to the edge of water where he splashed while she shrieked and giggled. I made sand castles.

***

My father is still alive, but I am middle-aged in this moment. My son beds down with a soft young woman and my wife awaits me as my mother turns back the blankets in the other house. Two old lovers go quietly to a short death hand in hand with my son. Do they all know that the morning will overthrow the stars?

Old at last, my father fears he will not wake to his death some morning as his mother slept through the dawn in her eighty-ninth year. She uncoiled her hair from its proper bun, thin strands down her back in girl's length, yet in old woman's white. He remembers when no breath clouded the ambulance driver's mirror demanded by the unbelieving son. At that moment of verification, death was at last clear before him. No parent intervened finally. He has entered that time when I wonder will I believe another mirror. He is waiting for the coming spring. It will be his ninetieth. There is the bird feeder to be filled each morning. Chickadees cannot wait and circle his head, crying, “Dee, dee, dee,” to doves and jays diving down the sunlight to scattering seeds about his feet. Look at this man as if he has not been before the moment we see him. He has concentrated his time, surrounded by history of brain cells and bird calls. He is not just what he is.

He and I could not occupy the same country. It was the same space and his house filled the yards between. I could not see the property line. Cardinals called from the top of my trees. Periwinkle spilled down my banks. Yew, laurel and honeysuckle spread about the house. Sugar maples, oaks and hemlocks ringed the open land; but ogres filled his forest, once dead dragons breathed fire that scorched his lawn. Bandits waylaid travelers who turned to his door. At night, dark forms convened upon his steps, plotting vile ceremonies. In the morning his eyes were filled with fear and he asked if those at our house had survived.

Thin and dry as goldenrod in December, he does not remember yesterday, although he knows my name. He says carefully, “Is this the place where I live?” but he goes outside and trims hedges that have obscured windows, leaving doors open by his departure. Found by his wife, he returns, white hair ruffled by ancient breeze, to sit without movement in the same chair that he left. His eyes watch trees from misted panes. Fingers feel smoothed wood. In this moment, he does not turn or speak, but waits as I know him. The worm is in the rose; the flower will not last and is almost true.

In his final spring, my father would not let the daffodils die a natural death, wilting over green leaves ringing the house, until the trumpets turned brown. He plucked them all to fill his rooms, yellow and white in every corner. Stiff in glasses, blooms stood on tables and shelves. Vases holding crisp stems and nodding flowers were whisked away at first signs of decay, replaced by newly opening jonquils in profusion. The faint odor of single flower multiplied to perfume, bringing April indoors. Empty leaves, stiff as swords, stood about edges of lawn and woods. Even they were gone by the November of his death.

The hospital bed is aligned with the right wall as seen from the door. Chromed pipes guard the sides as if it were some giant crib. The small body beneath a yellow blanket barely lifts the covering and it might be a rumpled, unmade surface until a white-haired head turns toward the visitor. “I want to walk in the house again and see the rooms, the chairs, and the windows facing woods.” He is ninety and my father is not ready for death. He is dying, but not as I am. We see the past together, holding hands through polished bars, connection, flesh to flesh, surfaces. A strange strength in his grasp holds me with dreams that he tells.

I am his father in that internal world, but he breaks through like moments of blazing light between dark roiling clouds and I am son as well. He talks about our lives without tears. I would lift him in my arms, disentangle him from false umbilical, take him home as newborn; but he remembers carrying me on his shoulders into the sea as wild surfaces rose toward his chest and chin. I felt only tamed waves over my ankles clasped in steadying fists.

I adjusted the curtains, partially pulled about the mechanical bed. I lifted my father forward to drink, his heart failing, lungs drowning in sea of self as medical journals described the condition. No heroic measures at ninety with cancer at the groin. Gripped in our hands, glass trembled from his hands and lips without breath enough to pull through hospital straw, pleated and crooked. The tremor was transferred, damped, to my fingers. He said, “Am I dead yet, son?” and I said, “No, no, of course not,” as he died. There was no irony in this event, only accuracy and truth for the moment by moment nature of the present I gave and received makes it impossible to answer outside of art.

When I last saw him, I was alive. His skin was carefully arranged against the one suit that nearly fit, tailored for this occasion by the embalmer; and he was wearing shoes, tied as he could not tie them. We stood, my mother between my sister and me. We exchanged looks over her head, as she searched for her husband. Perhaps his hand would clench, or his forehead wrinkle, or his pale blue eyes would open while his voice would say, “Don't be foolish, Ruth.” He always expected water to part if he needed to cross and she would follow, retrieving whatever fell away from the bundles stacked about his person. He wanted the best. Hart, Schaffner and Marx, Stetson, and not just for himself, but within himself. Stromberg-Carlson. Abercrombie and Fitch, Packard, Oldsmobile. His wife. His children. His grandchildren.

He wore his glasses in death, an apparition without them. Funeral directors have a strong sense of what is correct. Strangers would not have known him, casket closed before the family in the front row of the church, while a minister with a head cold spoke out over his polished walnut exterior. Sprays of gladiolas mark the grassless earth while eternal spectacles rim no sight.

Stepping aside into nothing, he has cleared my way to the horizon. Trees clump in November colors of autumn. Rust and gold ridges range from left to right. There is no stop to the highway hidden below boughs not yet bare to reveal hard edge of earth and sky blurred by leaves. Color of clouds and cold heavens contrast with oriental rugs rich in reds and warm beige walls surrounding book spines blue, brown, orange, and green. Gold-lettered titles signify imagination caught.

I have looked across Loch Ness in the sunlight and seen no monster. Sheep clothed in Scottish wool have called in plaintive, lost tones outside our house in Dornoch, but not to me. I have stood on the Cornish highlands and watched the sea boil blue and white below, while yellow and purple blossoms inched down the cliffs through rocks, and seen no pirates except in my imagination. I have trekked the Fells on Wordsworth's path, going up and up until there was no more.

We nearly buried Father in the wrong plot, Brinkerhoff instead of Collins. At the last minute, as the back hoe moved to autumn earth, Mother corrected me. A call to the manager of the cemetery set it straight because Mother wanted to be next to Father and to her mother, wife and daughter in death. Distant relatives filled the Brinkerhoff space, along with her in-laws because Winns had no plot, apparently not believing in death.

She wanted to go back to the grave after the funeral to see if workers filled the hole and placed the flowers properly over raw earth. It was a necessity for order to prevail and to know that space remained.

The Veterans' Administration did not put the proper marker over his grave, according to my mother. It was not a stand-up stone, but a flat block, surface level with the ground. Rank. Name. Birth. Death. Mowed grass obscured it from a distance. The AmericanLegion raised a flag over it for Memorial Day but flag, stick and shield added up to about twenty-four inches.

An eight by ten printed document arrived, facsimile signature by President Jimmy Carter, saying the country was indebted for his unselfish service during World War I. From across the living room it resembled the award in the same size given by the New York State Commissioner of Motor Vehicles when my father surrendered his license at age eighty-nine. Even that was not his decision. I did it in his name when I took away his car keys. He demanded them back one afternoon after he had run out of cigars. He told us he had given them up, but he had not. He bought them surreptitiously and smoked them in the woods behind the house. I could not return the keys, and sold his car shortly after to a man who answered an advertisement and wanted to use it to get to work. My father had forgotten how to shift into reverse by that time. He had to get a complicit neighbor to buy his cigars on the sly for him. Now my mother will not visit his grave. The marker only makes her angry.

The widow goes to church. I help my mother out of the car. She climbs two stone steps. I hold her arm at the elbow. She enters the church door. I watch an immense fat man hold it. She disappears before him into shadows. I return to the driver's seat. Dialogue is suspended for an hour. The fat man has an ordinary wife who also precedes him into church. I see it all in my rear view mirror as I wait to re-enter highway traffic. I drive away.

Inside I believe the minister begins. He is tall and has tall sons in the choir. They sing and pray, although angels do not enter through stained glass windows. The fat man does not know it, nor does his ordinary wife, nor my mother with her fragile arms, nor even the minister who is looking over the bowed heads of parishioners praying. The service ends.

I am waiting in my car for my mother. She leaves by a rear door with no steps. I am out of my seat. She takes my arm for the short walk and I ease her down to the car cushions. She sighs and says that it was a nice sermon. I drive her home. No one stands along the highway, placing palms beneath my wheels. Crowds do not cry for the Messiah. Herod does not plot with priests. Pilate does not wash his hands. Easter is a long way away. November sun is white on white sky. Bare limbs are drawn in jagged black across the infinite distance of stage wall. In the foreground, myrtle leaves shine slick and green, unreal against dead brown grass.

There is responsibility in spring. My mother is worrying about mowing the lawn again. Arnica raises yellow heads above grass level. My father has been dead seven months. Gypsy moth larvae eat the oaks in something close to ecstasy. Tent caterpillars have nearly all disappeared into powdery yellow-white cocoons. Will the boy come soon to push the power mower over golden flowers? We all like happy endings, don't we?

The bikini-ed blond daughter of the neighbor bathes in moody music from her portable stereo and in heavy sun-warmed humid air, tanning to the taste of an acned high school hero. Everyone wants it to turn out well. Grim endings are no fun at all and Japanese beetles will be next. Birds hover below eaves to pluck and eat in flight, change waiting to change gone into beaks and bellies.

The house will not disappear as will not the yard, grass, weeds, chimney, shingles, siding, paint, windows, furnace, faucets, chairs. My father has been dead seven months. His clothes fill the closets, hanging over shoes arranged in rows. His mackinaw remains a presence of plaid in the hall. We all like happy endings under a perfectly ordinary sky where the moon can be seen as paler shape in our pale daylight.

After a year there is the old woman's winter. When I sit in my mother's house I want to sleep. Old woman's heat fills the rooms as the furnace roars and blows in the basement. She wears a sweater like a shawl and asks if I am cold or hot. My eyes rebel and do not desire to focus. I would nod, blinking shut to light and sound, but I must talk about her grandchildren in New York City. She sees them as if on the six o'clock news, hunkered down behind triple locked doors while muggers and rapists roam streets and hallways.

I pull myself back from the dark separation of closing eyes and reassure her they live and prosper. She believes for today. I exit into the sharp cold of January, edge of my sight hardened and honed outside her door where she watches my departure from its window. Here I am aware, vigorously waving good-bye. She alone is slightly out of focus behind imperfect glass. All other lines where trees begin and end are clear, precise, as though drawn by an artist with a very fine pen.

The fading photograph is of my father taken during World War I. He stands on a fence post in Texas, as far as he will get from the mighty Hudson River, poised like a ballerina, no support but his two closely placed feet and outstretched arms, holding to hot San Antonio air. His hair is black and full, combed back in pompadour but clipped high on the sides, exposing all of his white ears to sun and wind. Twenty-seven years old, his body is slight and trim, compact in khaki knickers with calves bound by puttees from ankle to knee, but airy as any bird holding to limb or wire, ready for flight. I have a son older than this age now.

My father died at ninety, frail as a finch held in a hand that knows the paper hollow bones beneath the insubstantial covering. Pausing for no moment at all, such finches fled from the feeding hand of my son as child who stood in woods, arms outreaching with palms full of sunflower seeds, taught patience enough to hold still, surrounded by pied beauty and sharp eye.

My father is forever on that post, wild eye observing anonymous camera. My son lures finches in yellow, black or brown behind my eyes in permanent joy. I stand between them always, saying good-bye to my father, who does not go in going, applauding my son who performs unendingly these feats of discipline to capture fantastic flights of real birds. I hold it all here for as long as I am.

Howard Winn is a graduate of Vassar College and the Stanford University Writing Program. His poetry has appeared in numerous magazines, Southern Humanities Review, Epoch, Laurel Review, Kansas Quarterly, and in anthologies, such as Hudson Valley Poets—edited by Mary Gordon. He was nominated for a 2002 Pushcart Prize (Chaffin Journal). He teaches courses in Modern Poetry and 21st Century Novels, and experiments with hypertext fiction and the memoir form.