LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

Grandmére allowed, and looked back to my father. ‘It’s nice to see all of you.’

      ‘So, Mother,’ my father asked. ‘How’s the mildew this year?’ Grandmére was obsessed with the hippies, my father with the mould. And with good reason; Grandmére’s house was famous for its virulent strains. A river ran through it – literally. Groundwater sluiced down the shale mountain behind her and it flowed straight through her stone crypt of a basement. All the water smelled of sulphur; her rooms smelled of rotten eggs and Chanel No. 5. Mould attacked the house from below but Grandmére had a solution of sorts. She painted the interiors teal green, a colour we called ‘Catskill Mould’. She painted everything that colour, the oak beams arching above our heads, the fieldstone fireplace, the furniture. She imported the massive teal-green curtains to hold back the north light. She installed green carpets. Her living room was a perfumed grotto, a wet place at the bottom of the sea.

      But water saved Grandmére’s house as well. The house overlooked a gently sloping meadow with apple trees and a trout stream flowing along its far side against birches. Years ago, someone had built a large stone pool in its path and the brook flowed through its wooden slat gates. It had begun to collapse before I was born, and over the years it gradually filled with silt until the stream broke down its bank and swept around the old ruin. The pool drowned in mud and wildflowers and tadpoles. My sister and I would greet Grandmére, cut loose, and run down to the water. Dad waved and said, ‘David, hey, David. Try to spot some trout.’

      Then my father always brought in the bags and stood in the kitchen with my mother and Grandmére, where he’d announce: ‘I need to run downtown. I can see the allergy situation is bad this year.’ He’d leave Mom and my infant brother alone in the house with Grandmére and dash back to the car. After two or three hours my father always returned with two dozen night crawler worms, a stack of lurid science fiction paperbacks, and a stockpile of allergy medications. He doped himself up on anti-histamines and disappeared into his books and his space travel, alone again in the New Mexican desert.

      ‘In our family,’ Norman Maclean famously wrote, ‘there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing.’ Norman’s father, also a Presbyterian minister, taught him the counts of a fly cast. ‘He certainly believed,’ Maclean wrote, ‘that God could count and that only by picking up his rhythms were we able to regain power and beauty.’ It was different for my family. In Woodstock, just after dinner my father and I would take our polystyrene cup of worms and our rods and walk down through the meadow. When we were close Dad would crouch down and we’d whisper and thread the thick night crawlers onto the hooks. We’d crawl closer and flip the baits over the grassy bank and my father would count to twenty. If nothing happened we’d leave the worms drowning and go and watch television. In the morning I’d run down and pull out a trout, dead and all twisted up with the line. In fact, it wasn’t really fishing, it was trapping, and an ignoble introduction to something I love. Discipline and patience are hard-won in my family. Years later, after Grandmére was gone, I lived in her house until I learned fly casting, how to fish all her streams. I came home to teach my father and brother and together we fished through the Catskills’ own legends: the Esopus and Willowemock and Beaverkill.

      When I was nine, Peggy and I brought a cassette tape we had made especially for Grandmére on Dad’s new machine. After dinner we begged Grandmére to turn down William F. Buckley – the man somehow dominated her television – and listen to us, to the new tape we had made. ‘Well,’ Grandmére said. ‘If we must. We shall wait until the next commercial.’ Peggy and I squirmed while Bill Buckley listed our gains in Southeast Asia. It was a long list but finally Grandmére turned the sound off and my father popped the cassette into his portable recorder.

      ‘HI, GRANDMÉRE. THIS IS DAVID,’ it said. ‘I’M GOING TO READ YOU SOME RECORDS. WORLD RECORDS FROM THE GUINNESS BOOK.’

      ‘Hi, Grandmére, this is Peggy. I want to say a poem that –’

      ‘THE WORLD’S FATTEST MAN WEIGHS FIVE HUNDRED SIXTY-TWO POUNDS TEN OUNCES STRIPPED NAKED. A MONSTER PIG WAS KILLED BY AN ELEVEN-YEAR-OLD PHILL-I-PINO BOY IN 1962 AND IS CONSIDERED THE WORLD’S LARGEST SWINE. THE WORLD’S MOST – hey, cut it out, Peg, I’m reading. THE WORLD’S MOST PRO-LIF-FIC MOTHER WAS RUSSIAN. NADIA BUKansky or something GAVE BIRTH – stop it, c’mon, stop it – TO SIXTY-NINE CHILDREN FROM 1725 TO 1765. THE MOST HOT DOGS CONSUMED IN…’

      Grandmére’s smile, normally frozen, had calcified. She was clutching the arms of an antique chair, her eyes fixed on my mortified mother. Just under my tinny voice you could hear my sister crying. Dad and I thought it was great. Everyone just loved it.

      Grandmére said a quick thank-you and lapsed into silence, watching William F. Buckley talk on the screen. My father picked up his science fiction and my mother picked up Jonathan. Grandmére finally broke her silence. ‘It was quiet here,’ she said. ‘Just the real artists before that communist boy moved in up the road.’ It all went to hell, my grandmother maintained, when Bob Dylan came in 1965. ‘You know his manager, that Jewish man, what’s his name? Grossman. He owns property in Bearsville. Just over the stream.’

      ‘Oh, really,’ my father said. He held his book on his lap and kept reading.

      ‘Richard, I was speaking to Henry Maust yesterday.’ The Mausts were Grandmére’s only Woodstock friends. ‘Henry came home yesterday and found a number of naked hippies just lying on the lower field. Just lying there. Imagine, Richard.’ The red menace and flower children kept Grandmére on her toes. When she drove us to town in her Cadillac, she had us lock all the doors. ‘Put your hands in. I’m rolling up the windows.’ We were pushing twenty miles an hour. ‘Hilda Maust said a hippie on a bicycle actually reached into her car. Imagine.’ I couldn’t imagine. I couldn’t believe a hippie tried to grope Hilda Maust. There were far more interesting things to do in Woodstock than grope Hilda Maust. The town was full of psychedelia and head shops. Even the hardware store was a head shop. I loved it.

      Our last mornings in Woodstock had ritual. My father and I would clean the last brace of brown trout. My mother had finished packing by eight a.m. and lay on the green couch in a state of nervous collapse while Grandmére fried the trout in bacon fat, filling her kitchen with sweet smoke. After the trout and English muffins Grandmére would give us all stiff little hugs and we left. Grandmére would soon leave herself, decamp to her winter lodging at the Women’s Republican Club in New York City.

      My father always slowed at the base of Grandmére’s long gravel drive; he’d honk and we’d shout, ‘Goodbye, Grandmére,’ and then, finally, relax. Mom and Dad would start laughing again; Peggy and I could get back to our quarrels and jokes. Despite all the forced manners, the endless wait to be excused from her table, I never wanted to leave my grandmother’s. I loved its ruined slate pool, the meadow, the trout with their red spots circled by orange, their brown sides sliding into buttery yellows. The Catskills are old mountains, worn down and haunted; Woodstock was an old artists’ colony shot through with new colours. Scotch Plains, New Jersey, stood in stark contrast to all this, a flat patch of white suburbia, my father’s church full of middle-management parents and bored kids.

      I know my father struggled as much as I did. It was hard to just blend into the normality of a suburban pastorate, especially at the helm of a youth group. His occasional sermons often confused the congregation with concerns they viewed as tangential to the gospel, things like poetry, music and film. My father was aloof and cerebral and lacked many of the basic ministerial tools, social skills like facial recognition. Dad was terrible with names. He once buried a body without knowing its gender, fudging the pronouns. When he looked out over the faithful, I’m convinced Dad simply had no idea who most of these people were or what they were doing in his church.

      Nevertheless, he grew close with Willow Grove’s pastor, Julian Alexander, and before long they were staging all manner of unlikely cultural events. The church youth group performed my father’s adaptation of Waiting for Godot. Julian and my father presented a series of dramatic readings, including No Exit and Franny and Zooey. My dad’s flock of teenagers grew both in numbers and enthusiasm. My father and his group began dismantling preconceptions, the distinctions between high culture and low. ‘They

Скачать книгу