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 few family photos I have from that time so much of the story is already there in people’s faces and gestures. We’re sitting on the back porch in Rensselaerville. I’m hunched between my parents, beaming up at my father worshipfully. He has an anxious, round-faced, diapered Jonathan balanced on his lap and is totally unconscious of me as he smiles his patented smile into the camera. Bill’s standing at the outer edge of the group, dark-haired, wearing a desperado’s kerchief around his neck and a smirk that’s a child’s echo of my father’s smile, a first indication he’s already an apprentice scapegrace.
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,
