understand his obsession well enough to be the kind of son I should have been. Now, years after his death, after he has been dead for more years of my life than he was alive, after I have come to have an obsession of my own, I understand all too well what he went through, and I sympathize, too late though it may be.
But back to my father’s dream. I won’t tell what I know about the Iowa Baseball Confederacy just yet. It is more important to explain about my father and my mother, the woman he dreamed to life.
‘She was so real sometimes, I could smell her and taste her and do everything but touch her,’ he used to say to me. ‘When you get older you’ll understand what it was like, Gid.’ I wonder if all parents tell their children things the children don’t understand but will when they get older. I wanted to understand then.
Matthew Clarke knew he wasn’t likely to find his dream among the residents of Onamata, or even in nearby Iowa City. It was the summer of 1943, the war was raging, and Matthew Clarke was just graduated from the University of Iowa with a degree in American history.
‘I had a choice to make and make quickly,’ he used to say to me. Some of my earliest memories are of hearing this story. We – when we were still a family – used to sit on the wide verandah on humid summer evenings, Mother and Father on slatted wooden chairs, hers enameled white, his vermilion, while my sister and I sat on the floor, our legs in front of us in V shapes, rolling a ball back and forth.
‘It was either the army or graduate school,’ my father would continue. ‘In fact, I had the graduate school application, all filled out, in the back pocket of my pants the night I dreamed your mother to life.’ He’d laugh a low, soft chuckle, and look across at my mother, who would be sitting forward in the white chair, dusky as an Indian, her eyes unfathomable and molasses-black.
I have often imagined Matthew Clarke as he lay on top of the old black-and-red patchwork quilt, which still graces the bed and still looks as if it might at one time have served a Gypsy as a cape, the graduate school application folded and stuffed in his rear pocket, crinkling to remind him of its presence each time he moved slightly.
‘That evening, I was just like a bear gettin’ a whiff of honey, Gideon. I stood up, my arms out in front of me like a sleepwalker, and I headed for the truck, drove off to Iowa City, went to the carnival, and the rest is history.’
That was the short version of the story. The tale became longer and longer, I think in direct proportion to the time my mother was absent from us. As the years passed, my father recalled more and more about that fateful summer night. And as I grew older he supplied more details, and told more and more about what he felt on that magical evening.
After telling the short version, my father would look over at my mother and down at us children and smile. He would wipe imaginary sweat from his high forehead, raise his hands palm up in a gesture of wonder. I would stare at my dark-haired father, at my dusky mother and sister, who would blend into the summery shadows of the porch until I sometimes wondered if they were there at all, and silently question why or how I came to have lank blond hair and eyebrows the color of corn silk.
Matthew Clarke had lived all his life near Iowa City, where sun-blond girls with browning skin and endearing overbites flocked around the campus of the University of Iowa. A few even lived in some of the two dozen houses that made up his home town of Onamata. In the summer of 1943, those sweet, sincere, interchangeable young women wore saddle shoes and pleated skirts. The skirts were made of red, yellow, or green plaid, often with a six-inch safety pin worn just above the knee to keep them modest. Many of these young women were beautiful; most were scrupulously laundered, smelling clean as fresh ironing. They were cheerful, dutiful, God-fearing, and ravenous for husbands. Matthew Clarke wanted none of them.
He knew what he wanted. He had even gone to Chicago in search of her.
‘I ever tell you about the fat woman in Chicago?’ I remember him saying to me. We were on our way to St. Louis to see a Cardinal double-header. It was a Sunday and we’d left Onamata at five A.M. to be sure to get there in time to buy good seats.
‘Fifty times,’ I was tempted to say, but didn’t. I was about fourteen and thought anyone as old as my father must be partially fossilized and fully retarded. But I was cautious. He didn’t wait for an answer from me.
‘Seemed like every street I walked on in downtown Chicago there were women every forty feet or so, posed like statues, in suggestive stances. And there were loud women in the bars I went to, women with quarrelsome voices and stringy hands. But they weren’t the kind I was lookin’ for. Stay away from those kinds of women, Gid. They’re nothin’ but trouble.’
‘Your experience with women hasn’t exactly been trouble free,’ I thought of saying, but again, didn’t.
‘Then I met this woman, Gid. And I think she was the start of this whole thing with the Confederacy.’
‘She’d slipped through one of the cracks in time,’ I said, staring out the window, resisting the temptation to say something about its being a wide crack.
‘I was just off State Street, I think. A dark street with sidewalks covered in grit and glass fragments. There were boarded-up buildings, and bars with blue neon beer bottles bleeding down their windows. She ambled out of a doorway, wide as she was tall, so ash-blond I swear she gave off light, an aura. She was as blond as you. She had bangs to the middle of her forehead. The rest of her hair was straight and chopped, as if a bowl had been set on top of her head. She might have been twenty-five or she might have been fifty. Her face was wide and mottled, her nose flat as a baby’s. She was wearing a tentlike dress that stopped above her pale knees; the dress was a swirl of color, like scarves blowing in the wind.
‘Her eyes were a pale, pale blue, and she was barefoot. She walked splay-legged right into my path, her stubby feet with their gray, sluglike toes grinding sand. She’d come out of a run-down building where dirty velvet curtains were strung across a storefront. A few stars and triangles were painted on the glass in front of the curtains. The words FORTUNE TELLING had been hand-lettered on the windowpane by an amateur.
‘That woman looked a little bit like Missy, you know, except she was a lot fatter than Missy, and she wasn’t a … a mongoloid, although before she spoke I thought she might be. As I stood staring at her, the only thing I could think of was a white Gypsy, an albino Gypsy.
‘‘‘Excuse me,” I said, and tried to step around her. But she didn’t move; in fact, she leaned into my path until I had to stop.
‘‘‘No, no,” she crooned, like she was talking to a child. And she put her pudgy hand on my arm. Her fingers were white as fresh fish, the nails chewed down to the quick.
‘‘‘I came to meet you,” she said in that same purring voice. “I could feel you getting nearer.” Her bottom lip was turned down like that of a child about to cry. Her teeth were short, crooked, and stained.
‘‘‘Go home to Iowa,” she said. “You’re not supposed to be here. Go home.” I glanced down at her huge knees; they were dimpled and scarred.
‘‘‘What are you talking about?” I said. But she was gone. I swear it, Gid. Gone, vanished. There I was, standing on that sleazy sidewalk, lookin’ like a fool, talking to a parking meter, a big, prehistoric, beast-headed thing, all pitted and ugly and metal-smelling.
‘I got out of there, let me tell you. But I never forgot that woman or her voice. And she was right. Because I no sooner got back to Onamata than I dreamed your mother. And then went out and found her.’
Ah,
