cynical. Some of that cynicism must have emerged from despair: amphetamine in the morning; sleeping pills at night; then amphetamine again as the next morning dawned. My father was a walking, fast-talking endorsement of his grandiose claims, but he was also a partly empty husk sparked by the stuff—a hopped-up, volatile, addicted puppet. Only last year, Jonathan told me that, lying on the living room couch one day when he was ten, he heard my mother shout: “Jim, a mouse!” Dad was napping in his shorts at the time, in one of those frazzled collapses that alternated with his chemical highs. He leapt up, grabbed the .38 he kept in his bedside drawer at the time, ran down the stairs, and began blasting pistol shots at the tiny beast as it scurried among the dining room chairs and Jon screamed for help from the next room only a thin wall away. “Yes,” I said, though Jon’s anecdote was more overtly violent than any memory I had of that time. Yes, this is the man about whom we’d whisper our encrypted warnings in the dark halls of the house: “Stay away, he’s in a bad mood.”
Even with amphetamine’s chemical assist, my father’s struggle to graduate from medical school was immense. When he was still at Columbia, a professor told him that if any medical student lived more than fifteen minutes by subway from Columbia, his teachers knew he would flunk out by semester’s end. My father often thought about that as he drove his Model T truck the one-hour trip down out of the hills into Albany.
The life my parents lived those years in Alcove wasn’t an easy one. It wasn’t easy to survive in those circumstances. Not everyone did. Bill, the oldest, was born in 1945; Christopher, a year later; and I, the year after that. When Christopher was three years old, he climbed out of his crib in the middle of the night, opened my father’s desk drawer, found and swallowed enough pills to poison himself, put the bottle back and closed the drawer, then returned to his bed to sleep. By the time my mother found him comatose the next morning, my father had already left for school. Not until much later that day did they discover what had happened, but by the time they could pump his stomach it was too late. He died the following day.
The one account my father gave of Christopher’s death, years later, was so freighted with guilt and shame that I felt guilty myself as I tried to press past the narrative’s bare bones. My father’s genial countenance distorted into twists and turns, as if half the muscles in his face contracted in a painful effort to focus even as the rest tried to blur and avert his gaze.
“What kind of pills were they?” I asked.
“They were a French antihistamine, little sugarcoated pills Dr. Perkins prescribed for your mother’s allergies,” he said.
“How did he find them?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know.”
Tortured by my own guilt, I had no stomach for his suffering no matter how much I longed to know more. And yet I saw it clearly—the small boy alone in the room, opening the forbidden drawer. There in the dark, with moonlight from the window leaking in and smearing the edges of things with its cold, mercurial light. He slides it open, that drawer, that narrow rectangle of wood that could have been his coffin if he were smaller. Careless drawer, irresponsible box that gives away so easily its dangerous secrets, that surrenders its poisons so readily. Of course such a drawer is appalling; of course, my father will learn from this and lock up these evil boxes before they can do more harm. And yet he does not—its lesson of jeopardy is one he cannot learn and only ten years later my brother Jonathan will enter my father’s bedroom and slip open the distant cousin of Christopher’s drawer and lift out the loaded .38 pistol to point around the room, to pretend with.
How can you reason with a drawer, a stupid piece of wood? You can’t grab it by the lapels and shake it and scream, “Wake up, don’t you see what’s going on?” A drawer in a desk doesn’t think, it doesn’t act, it’s not responsible for what happens.
Jon told me the story of my father’s mouse hunt in response to my telling him the story of Christopher’s death, which he knew only as rumor. I have always been the difficult member of my family—the one whose desperate curiosity about the past irritates and threatens others because it brings back such painful memories. For much of my life, I’ve felt compelled to probe certain silence-shrouded events and their consequences. It’s not a role I chose but one born out of my own torment and guilt and desire to survive. I wasn’t after other people’s secrets; all I wanted was information that could be light and clear air. And so, periodically, when the pain got bad, got unbearable, I would ask questions I knew I should not. The last question I dared about Christopher came closest to the agony that dominated my own life:
“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
