“How did you and Mom deal with what happened?”
“We didn’t. In those days, people didn’t talk about things like that. Your mother and I never spoke about him.”
So, I was left with a full, empathetic knowledge of how such an awful event must have devastated both of them, but with no model for my own coping. Yet for all their stoic or paralyzed silence, I know Christopher was often in their thoughts. Many years later, I mentioned casually to my father how much I loved the light blue of chicory flowers that, ubiquitous, filled the fields and lined the dusty roads in the Hudson Valley where we lived, and Dad replied: “Christopher’s eyes were that color.”
10
Rensselaerville
Not long after Christopher’s death, we moved off the Alcove farm to the nearby village of Rensselaerville. It was still deeper in the Helderbergs, a beautiful village of forty or so clapboard houses strung out along one side of a steep gorge, whose stream and waterfalls had powered four separate mills since its founding in the last years of the eighteenth century. When we arrived, only a single, boarded-up relic of that early industrial prosperity still stood; the other three mills were high-walled labyrinths of foundation stones along the banks below the falls. What commerce had long since abandoned, summer wealth still clung to and kept alive—a small “opera house” for Gilbert and Sullivan, a tiny mahogany-paneled public library, and the Catalpa House, an inn where two dowagers served afternoon tea at white wicker tables on the wide lawn under its namesake trees. And everywhere, like gray threads stitching together the bright quilt of clapboard, lawn, and forest, were long walls of dark, indigenous slate. Grand lines of these piled stones led up each dirt lane; in ramparts it defined sunken hydrangea gardens, or, as high parapets, propped up cottages built out on the very edge of the gorge.
If stone structured the town into sober adultness, it was water’s wanderings and flashings that held the younger inhabitants in thrall. About a mile above the village, Lake Myosotis released an outlet stream that meandered through birch and hemlock forest for half a mile until it widened out to slide and glitter over the lip of the falls proper. Seen from the wooden bridge below, the falls rose three hundred feet in thin increments of shale like some celestial staircase for creatures so tiny they’d consume their whole lives climbing toward God. The whole face of the falls was covered with gossamer lace, a foaming, inch-deep scrim of water that glistened and flashed when the sun at last lifted above the edge of the gorge and found it out. Dark hemlocks gazed down over each side until the cliffs became so steep only thick clumps of fern and moss could cling to their dripping walls. Whether you stood in a trance on the bridge or climbed the steep paths, the rich smell of evergreen humus mingled so completely with the ceaseless, quiet roar of the falls it was impossible to separate the two sensations.
At the base of the falls, a smooth-bottomed pool extended a quarter mile down to the village mill dam. Here, the underlying layers of slate were so flat and the stream so shallow that on Saturdays villagers drove their cars right into the water to wash them. In another place, the stream deepened enough to be called the swimming hole.
Farther down, where dense thickets of jewelweed clustered along each shore, bullheads had thrashed and fashioned their nesting tunnels into the clay banks. As a kid, groping along that slickness for an opening, I’d thrust my arm in full length, hook my fingers around the cartilaginous barbs that grew behind their whiskers, and yank the primitive, startled creatures out of their holes.
There were other streamside mysteries, too. Caddis fly larvae crawled out on the sun-baked, flat rocks like the dried-up husks of diminutive dragons. Or a minnow cage gleaming on the bottom like a silver-mesh bomb, the tiny trapped fish spinning inside it in frantic, gyroscopic flashes of white belly and orange fin. And once, after spring floods had sluiced the banks, I found a fossil clam perfect as one you might pluck from a fishmonger’s bed of chipped ice but made entirely of rock.
It was in Rensselaerville that I started first grade at the age of five. Though it was 1952, the schoolhouse, like the village itself, was lost in time, a pale-planked, churchish structure perched on a hill at the edge of town. Each morning, the bellrope tugged, the brass bell in its squat tower rang its summons out over the ceaseless stream sound.
There were two teachers in two big rooms—a cluster of desks, a blackboard, and a woodstove in each. One teacher taught first, second, and third grades all in the same room on the ground floor; the other taught fourth, fifth, and sixth on the floor above. After sixth, a bus whisked you up the dirt road out of town, over the hills toward Greenville Central’s upper grades twenty miles away.
But here, in each room, a score of us labored, oblivious of any larger world except twice a month when the itinerant art teacher appeared and we all crowded into one room. Balding, with a bland, blank face, it was not his figure, but his outfits that shouted the mysteries of art to our small-town eyes: white shirts and bright string ties, one with a silver bull’s skull with a red stone glistening in each eye socket. Each lesson began with his announcement of some seasonal theme like spring or Christmas or a patriotic event—especially the births of notable presidents. Armed with crayons and paper, we’d be off to the races. And as if art was a chaotic contest open to all, our teacher, too, put his gifts and imagination to the task at hand. Half an hour later, each student displayed his or her creation, and lo—the winner (how did one win? who judged?) was given the teacher’s drawing as a prize! I remember these odd contests well, having once, with my image of little George attacking the cherry tree with his hatchet, won the teacher’s own version of Rembrandt Peale’s Washington portrait, the one with puffs of white space at the bottom as if he was standing over a steam grate or peering down from clouds.
On alternate weeks, a music teacher appeared. Again, all six grades duly gathered together. These visiting teachers seemed to me to come from some other world far more sophisticated than I could imagine. Perhaps they weren’t traveling teachers at all; perhaps they were only local talent hired for the day—but to me they were as amazing and mysterious as circuit-riding preachers who had the power to dazzle us, their widely scattered and benighted flock, with the gospel of art. Although I firmly believed our drawing teacher was a genius, I was even more in awe of the man who taught us music.
At just the right moment, after announcing the song we would all sing, this mystagogue would produce a round, chrome-silver pitch pipe from his vest pocket and blow a single, clear tone. I assume it was the opening note of the song, but since I was incapable of coming within shouting distance of any designated note, it made no difference. Stunned that this gleaming disk enclosed in its mystic circumference an entire musical scale, I’d stare, dumb and vacant as someone hypnotized by a dangled pocket watch as the rest of the class stumbled its way through the melody.
In those days there was nothing about school I didn’t love. But most of all I cherished how simple, predictable, and responsive it was. In school, everything made sense and there were no mysteries, no shadows and silences that stirred vague longings in me. Everything was overt and clear, as if lit by a bright bulb. All my eagerness to please was rewarded there. If I behaved well, I got a pat on the head. Studying hard got me a smile and a scrawled red star on the margin of my paper. I loved it and gave it my heart and soul from the very start. School was the answer to home and to the silences there, to my mother’s distance and reserve.
No doubt, she was overwhelmed and exhausted. Though she was no longer running a farm, she was still, at the age of thirty, trying to raise four boys, the oldest only seven. Her fifth son, Christopher, had died only a year before under terrible circumstances, and I fear that the move to Rensselaerville was itself my parents’ substitute for mourning his death. Add to that the fact that her husband was still completing his medical residency forty miles away. But there may also have been something inherently remote in her temperament. When I try to remember her then, I see her standing in the dark kitchen like a larger tree among that dense sapling thicket that is table and chair legs. She’s surrounded by a larger dark but on her shoulders and head there’s dappling light like sun on highest leaves. I’m too small to climb her trunk and she’s unbending, oblivious, her arms as unreaching, unreachable as distant branches.
In one of the