Joyce Oates - Sourland

The car was my father’s newest: a showy 1959 cream-colored Cadillac Eldorado with Spanish red leather interior, a chrome grille like shark’s teeth, swooping tail fins and flaring taillights. A massive vehicle twenty feet in length, like a yacht it glided past ordinary traffic seemingly without effort. Within the family it was believed that Harvey Fleet had acquired this car from one of his gambler friends in Sparta in need of quick cash but my father typically offered no explanations, he’d only just driven the Cadillac home: “Look out in the driveway. Anybody want a ride?”

My father was like that: impulsive, unpredictable. He was a man of secrets and he was generous when he wanted to be generous and not so generous when he didn’t want to be. He owned properties in Sparta and vicinity, mostly rentals, and recently he’d become a developer, with partners, of a new shopping center north of the city. Business was the center of my father’s life. Yet you could not gain entry into that life by asking him about his work, for when relatives asked him such questions he would say, with a disarming smile, “Can’t complain.” Or, “Holding my own.” He would not elaborate. He had as little interest in boasting of successes as he had in acknowledging failures. If a question was too personal or pointed he would say, “Hell, that’s business” — as if his business affairs were too trivial to speak of. Yet you knew that what Harvey Fleet meant was None of your damned business.

We had stayed at the blues festival for less than an hour and during that time I’d seen how my father, in his trademark white cotton shirt (no tie, open at the collar) and seersucker trousers (melon colored, for summer), and canvas shoes (white), moved easily among the crowd shaking hands with people who were strangers to me; being greeted by the musicians, most of whom were black men (young, middle-aged, elderly) eager to shake Harvey Fleet’s hand for Harvey Fleet was one of the sponsors of the festival — “A friend to blues and jazz music.” (Was this so? At home, my father never listened to music of any kind, never even watched television.) In Sparta, my father had many friends: local politicians, the chief of police, the district attorney, county officials. On a wall of his office were framed caricatures of Sparta personalities, including Harvey Fleet, crude but clever line drawings by a cartoonist for the Sparta Herald who’d exaggerated my father’s vulpine good looks, his thick dark hair springing from a low forehead, his fistlike jaw and his trademark smile so wide and emphatic it looked riveted in place. Years later I would see on TV the 1946 film The Postman Always Rings Twice with flawlessly blond Lana Turner and darkly handsome John Garfield and it would be a shock to me, how closely my father had resembled Garfield when he’d been young. At the blues festival to the sexy-seductive strains of “Stormy Weather” — “Mood Indigo” — “Sleepy Time Gal” — I’d seen how my father was acquainted with women who were strangers to me, some of them very attractive, and I thought, My father has his secret life, which none of us can know.

I wondered if it was better that way, our not knowing.

Though you couldn’t question him about his past, my father sometimes spoke of his youthful nomadic adventures: he’d quit school at fifteen and gone to work on a Great Lakes freighter bearing iron ore from Duluth to Buffalo; he’d hitchhiked out west, worked in Washington State, and in Alaska, where he’d worked on salmon fishing boats. His own father, Jonas Fleet, who’d died before I was born, had been exhausted and broken by the age of fifty, having worked in a Lackawanna steel mill; my father was determined not to emulate him; he said, “There’s better use for a man’s lungs than to be coated with steel filings.” In the army, in World War II, he’d been stationed in Italy, and the names of Italian regions and towns — Tuscany, Brescia, Vicenza, Parma — rolled off his tongue like an exotic sort of music, which meant little to his listeners. Of these long-ago adventures he’d had before he returned home to Sparta he spoke in a tone of wistfulness and pride; he’d made it through the war without being seriously wounded or “drove crazy” and of ugly memories he did not speak, at least not to us.

He laughed often. He liked to laugh. There were some in our family who distrusted my father’s laughter, which made them uneasy. Why is Harv laughing? Is Harv laughing at us? You understood that there was a prevailing joke to which my father’s joking alluded, but it was a private joke not accessible to others. “The only laugh that matters is the last laugh,” my father said. “And that isn’t guaranteed.”

“Wait here in the car. Read your book. I’ll be a few minutes. Don’t come looking for me.”

My father had parked at the rear of the Brewer Building, on a back street not far from the river. Buildings on the other side of this street had been razed and lay in heaps of rubble behind a ten-foot fence posted NO TRESPASSING: DANGER and a half block beyond was a wharf at which battered-looking fishing boats were docked. This was not the Sparta Yacht Club marina several miles to the east on the Black River, where my father kept his Chris-Craft powerboat; this was the old Sparta waterfront downtown. On Sundays the area was nearly deserted except for a few taverns and riverside restaurants; except for East Capitol, there was little traffic. Seagulls flew overhead and the air was pierced by their sharp cries; river smells — briny water, rotted pilings, dead fish — made my nostrils pinch. These were mostly pleasurable smells, and I liked being here. From time to time my father brought me with him to his office where his secretary Charlotte smiled to see me: “Madelyn, hel lo . Come to help us out today?”

The Brewer Building, owned by a real estate broker friend of my father, was the tallest building in the neighborhood and impressive with a smooth-shiny facade like polished marble. Inside was a foyer with a barbershop, a smoke shop, and a newsstand, all of which would be closed on Sunday. Only dimly could you see the stately mosaic figures on the foyer ceiling meant to suggest Egyptian pyramids, ancient hieroglyphics. There was an elevator with an elaborate grillwork door. Yet at the rear and sides of the Brewer Building you saw only weatherworn dark brick; the facade was what a facade meant — just a showy front. Especially from the rear, the building looked shabby. On each floor were ugly fire escapes. Some of the windows were cracked and opaque with grime. My father’s office on the eighth floor overlooking East Capitol Street and in the near distance the gleaming spire of St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Church was nothing like these. Years ago when my father had told me to wait in the car for him I’d disobeyed him, gone inside, and dared to take the elevator to the tenth, top floor of the building; on the tenth floor, I’d dared to climb a brief flight of steps and pushed open a door marked NO ADMITTANCE: ROOF and stepped outside on a shimmering-hot tar roof. So high! A sensation of vertigo overcame me, a sense of being physically drawn to the edge of the roof where the parapet was no more than two feet high; in halting steps I made my way to the edge; my eyes blinked in amazement, at this height I could see the S-curve of the Black River, boats on the river, more tall buildings than I would have imagined in Sparta, rooftops, church spires, chimneys. Airplanes droning high overhead, pigeons and seagulls. Everywhere were bird droppings, white crusted like concrete. How exhausting the wind, and hypnotizing. It was both exhilarating to me and frightening that no one knew where I was. If someone were to glimpse me from a window in another tall building, he would not know who I was; he would not care. When I turned back to the heavy door a chilling thought struck me — Now the door will be shut and locked against you.