Crow Fair and Desperate Characters

One of the pleasures on the boat is having some time to read.   Thomas McGuane’s short story collection, Crow Fair impressed me, reading one short story each evening to completion.  He is a gifted writer and although Montana is his focus and thus the western experience of writers such as Wallace Stegner and Raymond Carver encroach, there are also palettes of Updike and Cheever.  His characters are universal, flawed, sometimes funny, but fundamentally ones you identify or sympathize with, real people in stories that are so natural the denouement suddenly seizes you.  Above all, survival, emotionally as well as physically, is a leitmotif threaded in these stories.  Now I fully understand his close friendship with Jim Harrison.

His story Hubcaps has an exposition that is reminiscent of a Cheever story….By late afternoon, Owen’s parents were usually having their first cocktails.  His mother gave hers some thought, looking upon it as a special treat, while his father served himself a ‘stiff one’ in a more matter-of-fact way, his every movement expressing a conviction that he had a right to this stuff, no matter how disagreeable or lugubrious or romantic it might soon make him….Owen’s mother held her drink between the tips of her fingers; his father held it in his fist.  Owen could see solemnity descend on his father’s brow with the first sip, while his mother often looked apprehensive about the possible hysteria to come.

On a Dirt Road is particularly Carver-like. Ann and the protagonist “need new friends.” A couple moves in a home down the dirt road street where two cars cannot pass, so they see their new neighbors in such a mode neither acknowledging the other. Ann wants to have dinner with the Clearys, old friends, of which our protagonist has tired. Ann says she'll go alone with them to a local pizza joint. Off she goes and our protagonist decides to go meet the new neighbors who turn out to have “issues.”  Nonetheless on the spur of the moment he invites them to go to the pizza place to surprise his wife and the Clearys. The surprise is on him.

In A Long View to the West a man is caring for his dying father who is in the habit of telling or I should say retelling the same stories.  Clay asks his father how he feels about dying, the reply being ‘How should I know? I've never done it before.’  This is when he realizes that he is more frightened than his Dad, also realizing that he needs those stories.

Motherlode is about a “cattle geneticist” who gets caught up in a dangerous scam, way beyond his level of expertise, and he pays the consequences.  The suspense is so carefully built by McGuane that the reader is caught unawares at the end of the story.

Prairie Girl is about a woman who rises from “Butt Hut,” a brothel to bank president, by marrying a gay man from the banking family, having a child by him, and raising the boy as the true love of her life. Peter always wonders about his Mom, never realizing the truth.

River Camp incorporates all the writer’s themes, the role of nature in our insignificant lives, dysfunctional relationships, and the danger that lurks just below the surface because of something which is greater than ourselves.  Two old friends, sometimes adversaries, book a strange guide to lead them on a camping trip in the wilderness, learning more about each, their wives, and then the brutal truth about the guide and what nature has in store for them.

The title story Crow Fair concerns two brothers who learn that their dying mother, suffering from dementia, had a long affair with a Crow Chief who they set out to find. In so doing, the brothers go their separate ways.

Idiosyncratic, funny and sad at the same time, and beautifully written, McGuane tugs at the reader’s heart with simple truths about life.  I’ve mentioned only a few of the stories.  These stories, like Cheever’s and Carver’s deserve to be reread.

Now on to an outstanding novel. Thanks to Jonathan Franzen’s unremitting praise of a “forgotten novel,” I picked up Paula Fox’s Desperate Characters before leaving for the boat.  Here is yet another American classic I could put in the same class as John Williams’ Stoner which was written only five years earlier (Stoner 1965; Desperate Characters 1970).  Those were turbulent years and each novel deals with the turmoil in subtle ways, but mostly through relationships.  Each is written in absolutely exquisite, compact prose. 

Fox’s novel has a special familiarity to me as it is set in Brooklyn, near Brooklyn Heights in the late 1960s, my last years in the exact same place.  Her descriptions of the decadence of New York City are real as it was written at the time when it was experienced.  This is juxtaposed to the decay of the inner lives of the two main characters, Sophie and Otto Bentwood.  They are a childless couple, in their early 40s, living in the slowly gentrified neighborhood bordering Brooklyn Heights.  They also have a Mercedes and a house on Long Island with a barn.  They should be happy, right?

Early in the novel, to Otto’s displeasure, Sophie feeds a feral cat who suddenly lashes out at Sophie, sinking its teeth in her hand.  The incident is the undercurrent of the entire novel as the reader is left wondering whether her decision to not immediately seek medical attention will have serious consequences.  In this regard it is a novel of suspense.  Otto advises that she do so, although, interestingly, he is not absolutely insistent. 

Otto is breaking up with his law partner, Charlie Russel, who has his own marriage difficulties. However these partners, friends from college have gone their separate ways professionally.  But the plot is secondary to the lapidary writing, sentences, paragraphs you just find yourself dwelling over.

When the cat first appears, ramming its head against the glass door, Otto explains “’Ugly Bastard!’ The cat looked at him, then its eyes flicked away.  The house felt powerfully solid to him; the sense of that solidity was like a hand placed firmly in the small of his back.  Across the yard, past the cat’s agitated movements, he saw the rear windows of the houses on the slum street.  Some windows had rags tacked across them, other, sheets of transparent plastic.  From the sill of one, a blue blanket dangled.

When Otto is out of sight, Sophie defies him by feeding the cat, even petting the cat as she serves up some milk.  The cat’s back rose convulsively to press against her hand.  She smiled, wondering how often, if ever before, the cat had felt a friendly human touch, and she was still smiling as the cat reared up on its hind legs, even as it struck at her with extended claws, smiling right up to that second when it sank its teeth into the back of her left hand and hung from her flesh so that she nearly fell forward, stunned and horrified, yet conscious enough of Otto’s presence to smother the cry that arose in her throat as she jerked her hand back from that circle of barbed wire.

What struck me was that “friendly human touch” is absent from her marriage and that she suppressed her cry because of Otto being nearby.  Here is a marriage in crisis.

Fox is one of these rare writers who can capture the essence of a person in few words.  Here is her description of one of their friends, a psychiatrist, Myron Holstein who caters to writers and painters:  He didn’t know a thing about her, not even after ten years, but she loved the air of knowingness; the flattery that didn’t obligate her.  And she liked his somewhat battered face, the close-fitting English suits he bought from a London salesman who stopped at a mid-town hotel each year to take orders, the Italian shoes he said were part of his seducer’s costume.  He wasn’t a seducer.  He was remote.  He was like a man preceded into a room by acrobats.

That last sentence reminds me of Sondheim’s Send in the Clowns or George Barker’s poem To My Mother: “She is a procession no one can follow after / But be like a little dog following a brass band.”

It’s a stalemate relationship between Otto and Sophie.  He refuses to answer the telephone.  She asks, why? “Because I never hear anything on it that I want to hear any more.”  They were both standing rigidly, each half-consciously amassing evidence against the other, charges that would counterbalance the exasperation that neither could fathom.  Then he asked her directly why she was angry.  She said she wasn’t angry at all; it was just so tiresome of him to indulge himself about the telephone, to stand there so stupidly while it rang, to force her to do it.  How many of us have played the same tug of war with our spouses?

As a woman in her early 40’s, Sophie’s body is changing.  It comes somewhat as a shock to her:  Her body was not her own any more, but had taken off in some direction of its own.  In this last year she had discovered that its discomforts once interpreted, always meant the curtailment, or end, of some pleasure.  She could not eat and drink the way she once had.  Inexorably, she was being invaded by elements that were both gross and risible.  She had only realized that one was old for a long time.  Old for a long time, how familiar!  Brilliant writing!

As a student I once spent a long time in the emergency room waiting area of the Brooklyn Hospital.  Note how Fox’s sense of realism conjures up such a room in the late 1960s.  Her writing brings alive an experience I had more than 50 years ago: It was like a bus station, an abandoned lot, the aisles in the coaches of the old B & O trains, subway platforms, police stations. It combined the transient quality, the disheveled atmosphere of a public terminal with the immediately apprehended terror of a way station to disaster.  It was a dead hole, smelling of synthetic leather and disinfectant, both of which odors seemed to emanate from the torn scratched material of the seats that lined three walls.  It smelled of the tobacco ashes which had flooded the two standing metal ashtrays.  On the chromium lip of one, a cigar butt gleamed wetly like a chewed piece of beef.  There was the smell of peanut shells and of the waxy candy wrappers that littered the floor, the smell of old newspapers, dry inky, smothering and faintly like a urinal, the smell of sweat from armpits and groins and backs and faces, pouring out and drying up in the lifeless air, the smell of clothes – cleaning fluids embedded in fabric and blooming horridly in the warm sweetish air, picking at the nostrils like thorns – all the exudations of human flesh, a bouquet of animal being, flowing out, drying up, but leaving a peculiar and ineradicable odor of despair in the room as though chemistry was transformed into spirit, an ascension of a kind.

Yet the heart of the novel is a philosophical question as “desperate characters” seek meaning in a hostile universe, a snapshot of New York City when it reached its nadir in the late 1960s.  As Franzen asks in his introduction: “What is the point of meaning – especially literary meaning – in a rabid modern world?  Why bother creating and preserving order if civilization is every bit as killing as the anarchy to which it’s opposed?”  Striving for the answer, Franzen has read and taught the novel many times.

John Williams’ Stoner has been called “the greatest American novel you’ve never heard of.” Paula Fox’s Desperate Characters is in the same league. 

A Short Story

I’ve written a number of short stories, an art that so many of my most admired writers have perfected, Raymond Carver, John Updike, John Cheever, and William Trevor.  I’ve read most of their stories and I wish osmosis was a better teacher.  This has been a more difficult challenge than I had imagined, the revision process being a particular struggle.  So while I still work on several, it is bringing them to completion that confounds.

There is a thin membrane between memoir and fiction.  Some writers literally adopt personal experience, while for others it is more an imagined personal experience – yet inevitably based on the author’s world in some way.  The stories I’ve written are more of the latter nature, but getting the story “right” has been a battle.  Thus, I chisel away at them occasionally, never seem to be fully satisfied.  I’ve said somewhere in this blog that I’d publish them -- when “finished.”

There is one story that is an exception to the above as it is much more memoir, the only story I’ve written in the first person, and in fact it is based on one of my blog entries from a couple of years ago.  Once I started to work on it, infusing it with several imagined scenes, cutting out other details, I’ve never gone back to compare the two and I don’t want to.  I know it has changed a great deal, although parts are inevitably intact.

I post it on Memorial Day though as the story inexorably leads there at the conclusion.  It is about things we take for granted and their disruption, about aging and loss and remembrance.  As a short story, I hope tone and feeling transcend literal details.  So, I’ll call this story “finished.”

ROUTINE

There is a morning routine I developed in retirement.  In the past, there were many morning routines: helping my wife get the kids off to school; the monitoring of the morning’s commute; financial news to assimilate and preparing for meetings yet to come.  Routines were established of their own accord, some by a matter of necessity, others by the natural progression of men, like me, now retired from the Profession of Routine, some seventy odd years and counting.

One of my remaining routines is during the early mornings.  I am summoned by the Florida sun, and get dressed for a brisk walk.   After fastening my iPhone to my belt, and donning my Yankees cap, I’m ready to go.  Most days I decide en route.  Perhaps “the loop” circuit past the new houses or remodels in the neighborhood, guessing real estate values, or a walk near the river, peppered with dog-walkers, joggers and other morning enthusiasts, reviewing the emerging demographic.

Some people will reciprocate my ”Good Morning!” greeting while others pretend not to have heard, averting their eyes.  Over the years I have noted a direct correlation between age and “good morning” reciprocity, with younger walkers more likely to just pass by as if I am invisible or, worse, dead.  Their loss I imagine.  What else can I think in my self-defense?

But on Sunday mornings, my walk is to my local 7-Eleven where they carry the Sunday New York Times.  This walk is longer, taking me through our local country club golf course, which always seems alive like the inside of a terrarium.  The course had been recently redesigned, with the greens, small lakes, and undulations making it seem ethereal.

I speak as if I am a golfer.  I am not but most of my acquaintances are now.  This makes friendships somewhat tenuous as when we get together as couples, well, the ladies have much in common, but the men talk golf and exchange golf jokes, some of the same ones they’ve told for years, the manner of the telling trumping repetition.

I once said to them that I played golf while in high school and college – in fact was an ambidextrous golfer as one of my father’s friends gave me some old left-handed woods he no longer needed (and I am left handed) and another of his friends gave me some right handed irons  -- and that is how I learned.  My friends listened politely, but knowing I no longer play golf their discussion resumed about their day on the course, with the good natured jousting of men who are poor golfers but have this one thing in common besides their age and infirmaries.  They have their own routines and those normally do not intersect with mine. 

Today while walking through the country club grounds I saw that the often discussed dismantling of the multilevel diving board adjacent to an Olympic size pool had suddenly occurred.  It was there last week (and for decades before).  Insurance costs forced my municipality to tear down the iconic high diving platform.  There is now a space in my memory of where it once stood. 

I walked past the golf carts, humming in their electric charging stalls, early morning golfers gathering over coffee, and the water sprinklers timed to come on, one-by-one, the sole task of a less complicated machine.  I headed over to Route 1, and then north to the 7-Eleven.  The sun was hardly breaking above the palm trees.

A routine like this has trained my eyes, and I tend to notice things out of place.  As I cross the parking lot in front of the driving range, an older white Ford Explorer is usually parked there, someone out practicing early.  It wasn’t today.  I didn’t think much of it, other than maybe the driver has left town for the approaching summer.  I had never seen him, only having noticed the car, as if it was simply part of the golfing landscape.

Sitting back with the Sunday New York Times is a routine I developed since college; I couldn’t imagine a Sunday morning without it.  And my walk to the 7-Eleven made it seem that the Grey Lady herself waited especially for me.  It is not easy to dismiss these thoughts.

When my wife and I moved to Florida, I had arranged for the Times to be delivered; but service was unreliable.  There were issues too with placing temporary holds while on vacation.  I remember the feeling of dismay upon discovering several papers, still soggy in their plastic bags, abandoned on my driveway after one such absence.  I cancelled delivery that morning.  Though one can read the New York Times online, I prefer holding those familiar pages in my hands.  So naturally I was relieved to find the most generic convenience store stocked it, in walking distance away, a commonplace 7-Eleven across the golf course.

Upon walking into the store this particular morning, I immediately saw some things askance.  Sales bins had replaced the stacks of local and national newspapers.  It looked like a yard sale before home owners move on.  I recognized the woman behind the counter.  She always greeted her regular customers, and we both normally found ourselves in small talk, such as “how are you this beautiful morning?”  “Can’t complain, wouldn’t do me any good,” she would laughingly say.  Sometimes I would tease her about having bought a quick pick lottery ticket the week before – when the prize was almost a half billion dollars – the level at which I could be induced to spend a couple of bucks on an impossible gamble.  “Hey, you promised this was the winning ticket.  I didn’t even get a booby prize!”  And she’d say, “You didn’t pray enough!”

No such banter this morning.  There were two other employees with her, seemingly serious in their efforts of recording outgoing merchandise and taking inventory, clipboards in hand. The newspaper rack – now in the back -- was depleted but thankfully there was one copy of the Sunday Times left.

My 7- Eleven lady behind the counter detected my consternation and said “you got the last newspaper we will ever have delivered here – the store is closing in a couple of days.”  I was stunned.  “I’ve been coming here for years, every Sunday, are you relocating?”  No, but fortunately she was being transferred to another 7-Eleven some ten miles away.  “I haven’t lost my job at least” she smiled.  I smiled for her. 

I wished her the best, knowing I would never see her again.  We both lingered there for a moment.  I felt my head make an affirmative farewell.  Then, I walked out – the ring above the door announcing my departure --- with the copy of the store’s last New York Times under my arm.  In all those years I never thought to ask her name. 

Crossing the parking lot in front of the golf driving range, I saw that white Explorer just arriving in its familiar parking place.  An elderly gent emerged.  “Good morning,” I said to the man whose car I had noticed for so many years.  He returned the good morning.  I said “you’re late today.  By the time I see your car, you are already on the driving range.” 

“Got a late start today,” he almost whispered.

Up close, he was slightly taller than I, thin, and seemed in fairly good shape, figured him for maybe ten years older.  He was opening the SUV’s cargo door for his clubs when he asked “Where are you from originally?”  (He sized me up as not being a native Floridian; perhaps the Times under my arm was a clue).

“New York City, you?” 

“Yeah, I lived there for several years after WW II.” 

He said he was in shipping logistics after serving as an infantryman during the War.  He didn’t look old enough to be in WW II, so I asked.  “I’m 92,” I was shocked, and he seemed to be used to such surprises.  I told him my father was a Signal Corps photographer in Europe during the War and he replied “I was first in the European theater and then shipped to the Pacific.”

“My father was afraid that’d happen to him after Germany surrendered,” I confessed.

He then hesitated and finally said “I’m eligible to be buried in Arlington Cemetery.” 

“Such an honor,” I replied “but I think you have many good years before having to think of that.  You’re in great shape, still teeing off every Sunday!”

He chuckled.  “The real honor is still being here,” waving his arm across the golf course.  And, indeed, in that moment, the sun had now fully risen above the palm trees.  A warm breeze started to blow across the greenery on which our shadows lay as well.

Not knowing how to exactly reply, I said “Memorial Day is tomorrow and my father will be very much on my mind, but I’d like to say I’m grateful for your service too.  Just wanted you to know that.”

“Thanks,” he said, “it’s a sad day for me, remembering those guys, they were good buddies, some who died right next to me, no further away from where you’re standing.  Others I simply outlived and everyone in between.” 

He was still gathering his clubs from the SUV but stopped and turned to me and said, almost as if he were quoting someone he knew standing nearby “War is not where you die, but where you fight to live.”  He paused before suddenly hoisting his bag on his shoulder and said “Anyway, right-o, I’ll see you around another Sunday ---?” 

“Bill,” I replied, “name is Bill”.

“John’s mine, pleasure talking with you.”  We shook hands.  Then he walked towards the driving range.  His own routine was about to begin.

No sense calling back to John to tell him this was probably my last Sunday walk through the golf course,   “Yes, see you around” I said loudly, almost as if saluting him, as he marched away.  I stood there for a moment, watching him go off, and then turned and left for home.

# # # # # # # # # # # # #

© Robert Hagelstein

lacunaemusing@gmail.com

Five Hundred and Still Counting

Only six months ago that I wrote about the eighth “anniversary” of this blog. When I posted my last entry BlogSpot reminded me that that was my 500^th entry.  The reasons I write were fairly well summed up by what I wrote in that anniversary piece, part of which is included below. 

When I started this, who knew I’d keep going.  I certainly didn’t.  It was an experiment which still makes me wonder, why?  Perhaps it’s because I sometimes don’t even know what I think until I put my hands on a keyboard.  Writing requires thought, working things out in a way speaking does not, and certainly thinking is completely unnecessary (in fact thinking is the enemy) when forwarding mindless email chains. 

A consequence of writing in this space is “thought accountability.”  I have to take responsibility for the views expressed here which change over time. If others tap into my stories, photographs, and views, benefit by them, identify with them in some way, or are bored by them and never return, so be it.  I chose not to support a comment section in the blog, but one can reach me at lacunaemusing@gmail.com.

One thing I mentioned below is my intent to lessen the focus on family history, not only because of

Age 9

privacy issues, but I’ve covered the essentials.  At the same time I am purging some of the physical “stuff” associated with that history.  The older one gets, the more things own you. In that regard, the George Eastman Museum in Rochester is enthusiastically accepting much of the memorabilia I have from my family’s photographic studio, the history of which I have detailed in this blog. It will be suitable home for those materials, accessible to future generations.  Once they have received everything, catalogued it all, and digitize much of it, I’ll provide a link in some future entry.

And further along those lines, there have been a number of emails back and forth with the The National WWII Museum in New Orleans regarding my father’s unique scrapbook of his service during the War and ultimately I’ll be donating that to them, once I digitize all his letters and locate the photographs he took during the war which are not in the scrapbook itself.

With the completion of that donation, I will be through with not only writing about those pieces of my family’s history, but putting the physical evidence in strong hands for preservation.  Maybe if I didn’t write this blog I might have been less proactive in this regard, another benefit.

So, from my “anniversary” issue….

Can it be?  Eight years writing this blog.  That’s the amount of time I spent in grammar school. Those eight years in PS 90 seem to be light years in the distant past, but at the time they were an eternity.  And four years in high school were equally drawn out, anticipating adulthood, the point at which I could leave the turmoil of my parent’s home.  Time accelerated in college, came on full speed during my career and raising a family, and now it’s a year in a blink.

I think I’ve been true to my “mission statement” in this space -- essentially an eclectic, kaleidoscopic diary. There have been 480 entries thus far, enough to fill at least five printed volumes.  Content has morphed into more about theatre, literature and still some politics and economics, but less about family history.  I’ve pretty much covered that, and the older I get the more I’d like to move on. 

Nonetheless, I still write about things which are fairly personal, always hesitating about what I “put out there.”  As this blog has evolved, so has the digital world, data mining for all sorts of nefarious reasons.  And the digital world has moved way beyond blogs to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumbler, social networks where a momentary impulse can be just thrown out as a developed thought.  Not here.   Traffic building has not been my intent.  According to Google, in eight years there have been 86,021 page views. Some web sites do that in a minute. Most land here via searches (not for me, but topics I write about) and frequently those are image searches as I’ve incorporated countless photographs in this space

The most viewed entry is one in February 2011 about the Maiden Voyage of Oceania’s ship ‘Marina.’ Not far behind in fifth place is the one I wrote on my open heart surgery, only two months later 

Without going into details of the latter, it is truly a twist of fate that I made it through that voyage without ending up in the freezer with the flowers (a favorite repository for those who die on cruises).  Of course I didn’t realize that I was so vulnerable at the time (although we’re all vulnerable all the time). I suppose that is another reason I write this blog:  it is a record and it allows me to reflect on my life and matters of living, to have a documented trail.  I go to it when memory fails.

I add this coda, something I came across in my files while searching materials for the George Eastman Museum.  My father had saved it and obviously so did I.  It is the first letter I ever received -- about a month after I was born, from the War Price and Rationing Board of the Office of Price Administration during WW II.  This presumably contained ration coupons – a bit of history including the address of my parents’ first home, an apartment house which is still standing.