And then there’s my mother holding a blanket-wrapped baby Peter in her arms. She could be a German peasant girl posing for a Madonna and Child, except her smile is enigmatic, Italian. She gazes steadily out, but her look is veiled, withheld, as if some heavenly sadness had settled heavily upon her. And her smile, for all its loveliness, is vague and unearthly; her smile is not meant for anyone on earth.
11
Germantown
The summer I was six, my father finished his residency and the time came for him to set up as a doctor. While we lived in Alcove, he had met a remarkable woman doctor, Dr. Perkins, who had an office in the nearby village of Westerlo and a practice that extended all through the hills of that area. She had arrived there in the early twenties and been there ever since.
Though I was only five or six when we knew her, I remember her face very clearly: thin and sharp beaked like a hawk’s and with a silvery helmet of hair. Slight yet wiry, she was Joan of Arc transformed from warrior to healer, though in her version Joan lived an unimaginably long and tireless time. She was elderly when I was a small child, but she kept working until the day she died. Many years later, I saw an article from an Albany newspaper celebrating her ninetieth birthday that described how she still charged four dollars for an office visit, five for a house call, and still lived in a windowless room just off her office that contained nothing but a bed, a lamp, and a Bible.
She was a tiny woman, hardly five feet tall. She had such a presence of authority that when people inclined their heads to listen to her, it seemed to me they were bowing out of respect. She so impressed my parents that they named my baby sister after her. And even more than that, her firm example inspired my compassless father to establish a rural practice and spend his life working where doctors were needed most.
So it was that in 1953, having finished his residency in Albany, Dad moved us all to Germantown, to start his own country practice. Germantown was a hamlet in southern Columbia County in the mid–Hudson Valley on the east bank of the river. It had one red light on Route 9G, the main north-south highway that ran from Albany to New York. Down by the Hudson River, there was a train station, but the New York Central had long ceased stopping there. Two or three cement-block structures loomed up over the houses like medieval fortresses over their clustered huts—these were cold-storage buildings for apple and pear crops. The village proper, about a half mile back from the river, consisted of about fifty houses, two grocery stores, a drugstore and a candy and newspaper store, the Central House bar, and a funeral home. In addition, there was a locally owned independent phone company, a small bank, and a brassiere factory that employed ten women. We were too far from New York for there to be any tourism or summer people. Most people were poor, working either as small dairy farmers, fruit growers, or in the cement factory in the nearby city of Hudson.
My parents arrived in Germantown driving a green van of the sort no one drove in those days—a modified panel truck, really. Perfect for a gang of kids, but enough to set the whole town talking, especially alongside the fact that my father did his doctoring in flannel shirts and work boots, not the starched white shirts and bow ties people expected.
Bill and I began attending Germantown Central School, a single brick building midway between the river and the village. Each dawn, school buses prowled the dirt roads and long drives of farmhouses for a radius of fifteen miles and still managed to gather only about thirty or so students for each of the twelve grades.
When we first moved to Germantown, we rented briefly in the village, but my parents wanted something with more land and we soon settled in a farmhouse, which we called “the red house,” about five miles distant. It stood on a low ridge with fenced pasture on one side and a hayfield sloping away toward a shallow, marshy valley on the other. Besides a hay barn, a large garage, a chicken coop, and other outbuildings, it came with about thirty acres of fields and scrub woods. Moving there, my parents could continue to dabble in rural life, raising chickens, haying the fields, eventually gathering a small herd of saddle horses.
It’s a daunting task to move into a new town and lure patients away from the old, ignorant doc who’s been there for decades, though he’s almost senile now, coasting toward reluctant retirement with his drinking catching up to him as he wraps one pink Cadillac after another around fence post or oak. My father worked hard, worked steadily six days a week, would drive out night or day on house calls, gradually memorizing the vast maze of roads and shortcuts, slowly building his practice.
Dad was a good doctor, too; he enjoyed his job, especially in the early days, though later he would say most of general practice was kid stuff. Most of all, though, he had the gift of healing—people felt better after they saw him. He seemed able to transfer his energy to his ailing patients as easily as he flashed his charming grin. Having been lured into medicine by the dazzle of science, he would never be comfortable with this power that resided as much in his person as in his diagnoses and pills. We kids seldom saw him—he was either gone by the time we got up, or still asleep after having gotten home at eleven or so at night, as he always did. Once every month or two, we’d all get away across the river to dinner at a tavern named Red’s in Coxsackie. On these rare family trips, even the minor rituals of connection—like playing the spelling game “Ghost” as we sipped Cokes and waited for food to come—were filled with significance and pleasure.
And on the way home, we’d sing “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” in rounds, or the far more melancholy “Birmingham Jail,” whose haunting refrain I always associate with my mother:
Down in the valley, the valley so low
Hang your head over, hear the wind blow …
Having only heard the song aloud, I was never certain whether the lines were:
Angels in heaven
Know I love you
Or:
Angels in heaven?
No, I love you.
When the singing stopped, I’d stare out the window at the dark world rushing past and ponder the difference. If it was the former, then it meant his heart’s secrets were open to the eyes of heaven—as if the angels could look down and see something pure and shining as a star in the darkness of the human sky. But if it was the latter, then the depth and intensity of his love was even more impressive—that he could have preferred his mortal beloved to the perfect beauty of angels. Such commitment made me think of my parents’ upbeat theme song: “We Belong to a Mutual Admiration Society (My Baby and Me).”
When the impulse to sing was exhausted, we’d persuade Dad to tell a story. Almost always, it was “The Monkey’s Paw,” that tale of a sailor son who sends home to his parents the gift of a monkey’s severed paw. An accompanying note says the paw has the power to grant three wishes. When they make their first wish—for a thousand dollars—the paw opens and closes and immediately the doorbell rings with a telegram announcing their son has fallen into the ship’s engines and been mangled beyond recognition, leaving them his insurance of a thousand dollars. The hysterical mother grabs the paw and demands to see her son again. Just then, another ring at the door. Even as the mother rushes toward the door, the father grabs the paw from her hand and says: “Whatever it is at the door, make it vanish.” When the mother flings wide the door, there’s nothing there but a small pool of oily salt water and blood.
By this time in the story, we were always screaming with terror and glee.
“The Monkey’s Paw” scared me with the way it showed how the human heart could trick itself, could want something it thought was good only to be thwarted by something more sinister and powerful in the universe. Or was it all the parents’ fault—had their own simple