Joseph O'Neill - Netherland

“Misery?” I said.

“Misery,” Carl repeated. He hissed. “I do not like that place. I do not like it one bit.”

I understood him to be referring, here, not to Missouri but to the bureau’s headquarters at Federal Plaza. I’d been there myself earlier that month in order to cure the typographical error on my green card. In the dim, windy early morning I joined the queue of aliens in a cement basin at the foot of the tower. It was a cold wait. Clouds like rats ran across the sky. At last a man in a uniform appeared and goonishly scribbled a light-sensitive mark on the hand each of us offered him, as if we were entering a cheap nightclub — and indeed, within the jurisdiction of the federal building a negative dance was the rage, one which prohibited all blamelessly instinctive movement: in the course of that morning I saw one man removed from the building for looking out of the windows, another for leaning against the heating units, another for taking a telephone call. I duly received a corrected green card, which enabled me to return to the DMV to collect my learner permit, which left, as officialdom’s final hurdle between me and a driving test, a compulsory presentation on road safety. This turned out to be a four-hour lock-in at a Fourteenth Street basement with ridiculously small classroom desks, behind which the students — we were nearly all foreigners deep into adulthood — sat like imbecilic giants. Our lecturer, a destroyed-looking man in his sixties, appeared apologetically before us, and I am certain that a compassionate understanding tacitly arose among the students that we should do everything to assist this individual, an agreeable and no doubt clever man whose life had plainly come to some kind of ruin. Accordingly we were a well-behaved and reasonably responsive class and, an hour or so later, did our best to abide by his request not to sleep during the screening of two films, the first concerning the impossibility of driving safely when under the influence of drugs or drink, the second concerning the tremendous dangers of night driving. The lights were switched off, a screen was lowered, and the basement was transformed into a crappy bioscope. Unlike many of the others, I managed to stay awake; and could not help thinking, as I endured an ominous dramatization of the loss of vision produced by alcohol and by nightfall and the disastrous consequences thereof, of my father’s life ending in a smashup presumably just like those presented on the screen, and of the fact, unconsidered by me before, that on top of everything else his early death had given an unfairly morganatic quality to his marriage: he had been posthumously robbed, in his son’s sentiments, of a ranking equal to that of his wife. It’s our lucky day, my ancestor apparently used to say with that Dutch love of slipping into English phrases. I saw there would come a point when Jake would ask me about his paternal grandparents and it would fall to me to repeat just such scraps relating to my father, and to speak to him about his grandmother and perhaps even her late and only brother, Jake’s great-uncle Willem, whom I never knew, and with such small gusts of facts assist in the dispersion of his world’s delicious indistinctness — delicious, at least, in retrospect. For my comings and goings were frightening mysteries to my three-year-old son. My arrival, however closely anticipated, startled him; and from our first moment together he would be filled with a dread of my departure, which he could not comprehend or situate in time. He feared that any minute I might be gone; and always the thing he most feared would come to pass.

Carl and I took the top deck of the Verrazano Bridge to Staten Island. A crosswind blew strongly as we soared over the brown water of the Narrows. I wanted to glance left, beyond the towers of Coney Island, because the ocean when glimpsed from New York City is quite something, a scarcely believable slab of otherness; but Carl, sitting to my right, continued to demand my attention.

“Two years they keep me waiting,” he said once more. “And my lawyer say maybe two years after that.”

“I guess you have to persist,” I said, hoping to bring an end to the topic.

He grinned inexplicably. “Yes, that’s what I have to do. Persist.” The grin grew even more hilarious. “I have to persist.”

At Staten Island I negotiated the unruly toll plaza and drove up the slip road to Clove Road, where I turned right and continued up past the Silver Lake Golf Course to Bard Avenue. Staten Island is hilly, and Bard climbs and descends a hill, and at the bottom of the hill is Walker Park. There I stopped the Buick and got out alone.

My immediate purpose was to find out what had happened to the daffodil bulbs that I and a few other volunteers from the cricket club had buried the previous November along a section of the park’s edge. The exercise made no practical difference to the club, since the flowers would bloom and go to ground before our own season got fully under way; but it was felt that an act of elective stewardship would strengthen our claim on the park, a claim which in spite of its longevity we regarded, I believe correctly, as always under threat from unfriendly forces.

Green leaf blades were indeed rising out of the loose earth, and in one or two sunlit places a stem carried a packaged flower bud. For a while I inspected them: botanical dummy that I am, I could hardly believe my eyes. Then, surrendering to another impulse, I walked over mucky grass to the strip of clay at the heart of the field. The clay, altogether battered, was pocked with pools and footprints. Wood fragments were buried in it. Very soon, in early April, our club secretary would pick up two Mexican day laborers from a street corner and pay them each a hundred bucks plus tip to heave picks and shovels and spread fresh clay, and then the heavy roller that had wintered in chains by the clubhouse would be released and dragged out and pushed slowly over the clay, pressing out moisture and flattening the surface, though not completely: you preserved the very slight convexity needed for the drainage of rainwater. Tufts of grass growing in the clay would be pulled up by hand and countless tiny surfacing stones and pieces of grit would be lightly raked away: then, given a few days of baking sun, you had a track fit for batting on and bowling on. With luck, the parks department would seed the barer parts of the field, and on a dry spring day a man on a lawn mower would wander the acreage lengthwise and trail a faint, fresh swath of grass and clover. By this time of year, the club’s Annual General Meeting, convened in the clubhouse, will have already taken place. The club officers — president, treasurer, club secretary, first and second vice-presidents, fixtures secretary, captain, vice-captain, friendly captains — have been elected by those present and those voting by proxy, and the election results have been noted in the minutes of the meeting, which may or may not record the more truculent points of order raised by members fueled by midday shots of rum. In the second week of April, after all the winter’s talking and forward planning and conjecture; after perhaps a Saturday — Sunday tour to Florida, whose lucky cricketers play year round; after all the phone calls and the club committee meetings and the preparatory buying and cleaning of whites and bats; after all of our solitary prefigurative frenzies; after the clocks have jumped forward by an hour; after all these things, the season will actually be upon us. Each of us is a year older. Throwing a ball is harder than we remember, as is the act of turning one’s shoulder to bowl a ball. The ball itself feels very hard: skyers struck in catching practice are a little frightening. Bats that were light and wandlike when picked up fantastically during the off-season are now heavy and spadelike. Running between the wickets leaves us breathless. Trotting and bending down after a moving ball hurts body parts we’d thought renewed by months of rest. We have not succeeded, we discover, in imagining out of existence cricket’s difficulty. Never mind. We are determined to make a clean try at things. We show in the field like flares.