LETTER TO ALEXANDER
Chapter One
When your Uncle Gary was six, he burned our house down playing with matches. He was supposed to be with my brothers and me, but he sneaked off and went back home and crouched in the kitchen and began lighting matches one-by-one and throwing them into the brown-paper garbage bag under the sink. One of the matches caught the bag on fire, and everything went up in flames.
I’d just finished playing baseball and was walking with my glove and bat slung over my shoulder and heard the sirens. When I turned the corner of our block, the street was filled with noise and fire engines and lights flashing red off the walls of our neighbor’s houses. A web of hoses lay tangled across the pavement like huge snakes, and firemen in helmets grappled with them, shouting and gesturing as they blasted water onto the charred rubble that had been our home. Everything we owned, except our car, which my mother was driving, went up with the house: our clothes, our toys, our books, every photograph and piece of paper acknowledging our existence as a family. All that remained was a jumble of blackened timbers and melted glass and the smell of soot hanging in the air for days.
My brother ran out in a panic when the house caught fire, then went back into it twice to rescue our cats, Charlie and Cocoa. He was sitting on the curb with them in his lap crying when my mother drove up to her house that no longer existed. Gary had a history of bolting and running off, and after the fire my mother began walking him in a leash. It was brown leather with straps that buckled across his chest and a long tether she could hang onto. We used to walk downtown past the stores with him straining against it like a terrier. He never grew very tall, and I wondered later if having to walk in public in a leash might have arrested his growth somehow, that the embarrassment put a lid on his growing any further after that. Whatever the reason, he stopped completely at five-foot-one.
Gary was quiet and had a dry humor like my father. When he graduated from high school he joined the Air Force, and it was there that something happened to him. Being so short might have been part of it, but when he came back he was withdrawn and even quieter.
He used to tell us about a small village he hung out in when he was stationed in Thailand during the Vietnam War. The village had a high, steep hill leading down into it, and he and a friend owned bicycles with headlights powered by small generators attached to the wheels. They’d push their bikes to the top of the hill and smoke Thai-stick in the evening twilight and then ride down as fast as they could with the wheels humming and the generators spinning and the light-bulbs overheating from the tremendous velocity until they finally blew in a great flash like someone taking their pictures. At the bottom of the hill, they’d pull the spent bulbs out and replace them and go up and do it again. I like to remember this image of Gary, flying down the hill in the falling darkness like a shooting star, and the villagers, as he raced by, going about their business as if their weren’t any crazy Americans for miles around.
After he got back to the states, his laughter had a harder edge to it, and he held a succession of jobs and lived in one apartment after another. At first, he did pretty well, but he was on a down-hill slide. Each job paid less, and each apartment was smaller and noisier, until, finally, he packed it all in and sold his car to pay his back-rent and moved in with my dad. He lived there until the end and died six months after my father, three years before you were born.
My father was the original invisible man while I was growing up: quiet, shy, apt to disappear for long stretches in any given day, and totally disengaged. He was tall, and lean, and he had a dry sense of humor and a shy smile that would flicker on and off when he thought something was funny. The big story of his life was when he came to marry our mother. When the mood struck her, she would sit down in the front room and light up one of her occasional Old Golds and tell it. It was romantic and brave, completely the action of a desperate man, she’d say, and fix me with her dark grey eyes, skipping a beat to make sure I was paying attention before she’d go on. I’d never seen my father do anything remotely romantic or even impulsive, and I’d be caught up in the story every time. As far as I could tell, he’d plodded through his entire life, seemingly set perpetually on low with nothing much to say about anything. As long as he had his pipe and my mother to comb his hair for him at the kitchen table before work in the mornings, he was content. Winning my mother’s hand against all odds clearly declared there was more to him than met the eye and presented an image of my father far different from the one I knew.
He and my mother met at a roadhouse between Bellingham and Blaine in early 1940. In those days the roadhouses were wild and fun, filled with music and dancing and carousing, catering principally to the Canadians across the border who had strict liquor laws. On the weekends the highway crossing teemed with partiers looking for a good time. One night, my father was out with some friends of his drinking beer and spotted a group of women together at a table and they flipped a coin to see who got to approach who and my father drew my mother. They danced and talked: her name was Nelda Bernice, but everyone called her Billy; his name was Stanley.
My father wanted to take her out, but my mother wouldn’t give him her phone number or any information about herself, and at the end of the evening when he went to get a pack of cigarettes, she disappeared. She was scared, she’d say, screwing up her face in mock fear as she told the story. She thought he was handsome and very nice, but she was just out of high school and lived with her mother and grandmother and twin brother and sister in a tiny ramshackle house with a woodshed and trailer in the back yard on Illinois Avenue in Bellingham. Her mother didn’t approve of her seeing men, and her grandmother was even harsher, a lunatic in her hatred of all men and the world as a whole. In her often-voiced opinion, there was nothing good about any of it. My mother was the victim of her frequent rages, and the merest whisper of going to a dance or on a date cropping up would send her flying to the wood box to find a stick of kindling to beat the idea out of her.
The night she met my father, my mother lied and said she was babysitting, desperate to escape the tiny house for an evening of lights and music and her first mixed drink--a Tom Collins--which she sipped all night. Her mother’s name was Mamie. She was half Irish and half Scottish on her father’s side and had flaming red hair and a disposition to match. Her grandmother was one-fourth Cherokee Indian and three-fourths sin-hating Southern Baptist. Everything was a sin: music, laughter, love, magazines, movies, men most of all--my mother’s life was a small hell of narrow minds and possessive instincts. Her father died when she was six years old from an offshoot of the Spanish flu, and she remembered him mostly in images as big and strong and holding her up in the air over his head. He was twenty-seven and a carpenter when he got the flu. He stayed home sick for three days and then went back to work--no work, no money to buy food, and, besides, he was young and healthy and he felt better. That night he was dead of a relapse that did him in as quickly as if he’d been caught by a surprise blizzard roaring down from the Frazier Valley.
My mother never had another man in her life until my father came knocking at her door one summer evening. There were a succession of men attached to Mamie, a whole string of them who lived one after another in the trailer in the yard. But they were all animals, her grandmother declared, and none of them showed my mother the slightest attention--none when she was young because of their general indifference to children, being the kind of men they were, and none when she got older because of the watchful eye of her grandmother who terrified them one and all.
But my father persevered. He’d been struck by this shy beautiful young woman with dark wavy hair and lively gray eyes who could laugh and talk up a storm once she got going. Your grandfather was a heart-breaker in Blaine, the small town he grew up in, but Bellingham was ten times as large with at least thirty thousand people in it. A bustling metropolis in comparison to the sleepy little border town with its equal share of churches nestled among the back streets and its taverns perched along the main drag to reel in the Canadians flowing through the Peace Arch into the United States. When your grandfather died, and I was cleaning out the basement of the house he’d lived in for thirty-six years, first with your grandmother, and then, after she died, with one or more of his sons camping there with him and a dog or two along the way for company, I found an old green cotton tool belt with strings that tied in the back and pockets in the front filled with screws and nails and small metal washers. Across the band that ran along the top of the pockets “The Blaine Wolf” was written in black marker.
He’d conquered Blaine, and the bright lights of Bellingham beckoned him along a tide of pheromones directly to your grandmother and the little house on Illinois Avenue, which he eventually found by keeping an eye out for my mother and her friends at the string of roadhouses teetering boisterously along the strip of highway 99 running from Bellingham to Blaine. He never saw her again at any of them, although he looked and looked. One night, however, he bumped into two of the girls she’d been with and they told him her story, clucking and tittering the whole time and shaking their heads at the ferocity of her grandmother and the unfairness of the work and chores her mother forced her to perform. They made it sound like a fairy tale to my father, as if she was a beautiful princess held against her will by a mean stepmother and grandmother, like Rapunzel or something, and he was determined to set her free, plus she had a great figure that later in her life would cause her no end of problems by tending to drift towards chunkiness, but at eighteen she was gorgeous. Three days later my father showed up at the door of her house and knocked, causing an uproar of unimaginable proportions: men did not knock on that door, particularly men looking for my future-to-be mother.
My father had no plan, my mother would interrupt her tale to lift her eyes up to the ceiling and fan her fingers lightly as if brushing away the obvious. He had concocted a number of things to say--that he was the meter reader, that his car had broken down and could he use their telephone, that he was lost and would they give him directions to the library--but all he really wanted was to set eyes upon your grandmother, to find out if she truly lived there, to press his case for the message he’d given her two friends that he wanted to see her again. And he did see her when your grandmother’s mother answered his knock and demanded what in the world he wanted and he stammered something about his car being lost and she slammed the door on him. But your grandmother was behind her peering over her shoulder with a face-stretching smile of happiness that told my father undeniably what he wanted to know.
It was only a matter of time before they were meeting on the quiet. When my mother was shopping for groceries for the family, he would be waiting for her. On her daily walks to the drugstore to look at the new fashion magazines in the display racks by the glass door that opened and closed with a tinkling of a bell, he’d be there. As often as they could, they met at Broadway Park where they sat on the grass my father would one day mow in the big riding lawnmowers when he got his job with the city and talk and kiss and hold hands and plan how they would engineer her freedom.
This kissing and talking and planning and meeting in public places on any possible pretext went on for nearly half a year. My mother wanted to escape the tiny house on Illinois Avenue. She devoured the fashion magazines and the slick monthlies with the stories of movie stars and celebrities, and she was ready to start her own life and see what it might bring, but she was petrified of her grandmother and mother. They had plans for her as well, which didn’t include her getting married and moving away, they liked the way things were. It was clear that the two younger twins--a boy, Gene, and a girl, Peggy--were going to fly the coop as soon as possible. In some respects it would be a good thing, they were both headstrong and determined to get their way.
Peggy was only fourteen but already she was sneaking out and riding in cars with boys, no matter how many times her grandmother beat her she’d just go off again as soon as her tears had dried. Her grandmother’s arm was getting tired from the constant action, and it was taking a toll on the kindling too, breaking the just-so measured lengths into untidy chunks. And Gene was just as bad in his way, but he was a boy and what could you expect? He simply grinned and outran his grandmother until she had to stop to catch her breath, then he would step close to her but still out of range and make her laugh until finally she would put the stick down and turn and walk away muttering under her breath about heathen children but smiling just the same.
He could charm a snake out of its hole and a lunatic out of her rages. My mother lacked the skill of easy small-talk, and she wasn’t a boy which did her no good either. On top of that, she was thoroughly cowed by the powers of the house. She saw what her brother and sister got away with, and she resented their independence and called Peggy loose and a tramp, but she would have given anything to have the strength to do the same thing.
Her mother and grandmother knew a good deal when they saw it: Peggy and Gene were on their way out to the bigger lights of the world, it was as clear as the noses on their faces. But your grandmother could be made to stay, first to help raise the twins until the not-too-distant day when they would finally depart, and then to help run the house and do the chores and make sure there was always wood cut and stacked in the bin for the woodstove in the kitchen, to insure meals were prepared and the dishes picked up, and to wash the clothes in the noisy wringer washer on the porch and hang them on the line to dry outside. There was always something to do, and they weren’t inclined to do it themselves. It was against this axis of suppression that my to-be mother and father arrayed themselves. It was a warm summer evening in June, my mother would stop and smile at the memory. This is how it happened, she’d say, and go on. It was still light, and the swallows were swooping low across the playfield in the park. My father sat alone in the spring-green grass smoking an unfiltered Camel, thinking things through and checking his watch. Your grandmother would have her belongings packed and ready to go. She’d been slipping items of clothing out to her girlfriends for weeks. Coats and bulky dresses, things that would be too hard to carry in the two pillow-cases she was using for a suitcase and filling for a quick getaway, all the pictures from the magazines she’d cut out, and the scrapbooks she’d filled over the years with her drawings of movie stars and her designs for the gowns and shoes they wore.
For a month she spirited her treasures out of the house beneath the ever-watchful eyes of her mother and grandmother, sometimes wearing two sets of clothes, other times hiding important objects among a stack of library books or a load of clothes on the way to washer on the porch. Finally, on the last day, she was down to the two pillow cases and what she was going to wear.
She dressed carefully that evening behind her closed bedroom door in the navy skirt and cream-colored blouse she’d worn for her high-school graduation the spring before and a blue cloth hat with a silver pin on its pointed boat-shaped bow. The hat, fashioned in a vague military style reminiscent of a World War I overseas cap, was currently all the rage. She’d saved every penny from baby-sitting and extra grocery change for months to buy it. War was boiling up in Europe, soon it would spill into their lives, changing everything forever, but for now she squared the cap atop the billowing waves of dark hair flowing across her brow and pinned it in securely with two bobby-pins and stood in front of the mirror and waited for the doorbell in the living room to ring. Her bedroom was tiny; she barely had an inch to stand with the two pillow-cases bulging and taking up space on each side of her. She looked at the wood-trimmed desk-clock ticking away the minutes, sounding as loud as she’d ever heard it. If he didn’t come soon, they’d begin wondering where she’d gotten off to.
She stood fidgeting, her doubts and panic rising with every noise from the kitchen. Then the doorbell rang and footsteps thunked across the linoleum floor into the parlor and she heard the door scrape as it opened and she swept out, right through the kitchen, tipping the kindling box over as she went by, through the parlor with the nubby sofa and chair she detested, straight into the living room and out the front door past the astonished eyes of her grandmother who began screeching at the top of her lungs as soon as her wits caught up with what she’d seen.
By then it was too late, your grandmother was in my father’s arms and he was sheltering her as her grandmother beat against him with her fists. Her mother raced out onto the porch too, screaming in fury, but there was nothing they could do. She was eighteen, she could make her own mind up about her future, and then they were gone, backing swiftly in my father’s maroon Ford coupe out the earth-rutted driveway onto Illinois Avenue and into the flow of traffic and away, over the hill and down the other side and off into their future, leaving everything behind with nothing ahead of them but their dreams.
And this is where you come in, my mother would say, you and your brothers and everything else, and she’d stand up and put out her cigarette if it was still going and smooth her dress, her attention caught by something she needed to attend to and leave me sitting there thinking about it.
After the fire, our family rattled around from place to place. First we stayed at my mother’s mom’s house, which was small and not set up for four boys, and then, when her nerves gave out, we lived in a motel for the duration while the house was rebuilt. Soon after we moved back in, my father got laid off from his job mowing the grass for the city parks. Bellingham was going through hard times, and his job had become a line on a budget cut. It was the perfect job for his solitary nature, and he was sad to lose it. I used to see him perched high on the seat of the mower sometimes as I walked by, guiding the big machine, the wide rollers and blades spinning behind it as it glided along like a stately ship in a sea of green leaving a wake of cuttings behind it. There was only one parks department, however, and no jobs at all for lawn-mowers, and we struggled to make ends meet.
He finally found a position working in a radio-supplies store--radios and electronics was his hobby, and he was able to parlay that into a job, but it was a counter-position that paid next to nothing and we were barely making it. It was then that my father had a crisis of the spirit and decided there was no future in Bellingham and headed off to Seattle to make his fortune. This was the second big story of his life, how he came down to Boeing and talked his way into an interview, convincing the hiring panel that even though he had nothing more than a high-school diploma, he was a self-taught electronic expert and they should let him take a test to prove what he knew, and he’d taken the test and passed with flying colors and subsequently went through the rest of the interviews and got hired.
After he finally landed the job, he found a room to rent in Renton close to the Boeing plant where he stayed during the week. On the weekends, he looked at houses for us to live in and came home twice a month. In the meantime, my mother and Al, the contractor who’d rebuilt our house after it burned, had become seriously involved with each other.
Al was outgoing and smiled a lot and never sat still, the exact opposite of my father who was a master of immobility. Al was married as well, and he had three daughters. Whether he and my mother ever discussed the reality of blending seven kids into one family, I don’t know. You would think they would have, and perhaps that’s what sank the whole thing. Four wild boys suddenly under his roof could daunt any man, but I don’t know the details, only that it was clear my mother was in love with him, and he seemed to be in love with her.
Al’s wife was a female version of my father, quiet, sedate, very proper. We boys went over to his house a number of times to play. She ghosted through the rooms as if she was a spirit, silent and withdrawn, a frail, wispy woman serving cake on thin translucent plates that were too small to hold a large enough piece to satisfy me. My mother filled up our house with her presence. She rattled the pots and pans in the bottom drawer of the stove when she was perturbed as if the solution to whatever was bothering her at the moment was in there somewhere and she would surely find it if she made sufficient noise and moved things around enough.
Her hair was still long and dark and wavy, and she was pretty and mercurial, a product of her ever-changing moods. When you were the center of her attention and she was happy, the world was a wonderful place. When she was unhappy, life was like a constant squall, and it was best to ride out the storm as far away from the eye of the hurricane as possible. She had a soft heart for animals, every stray cat in the city of Bellingham knew this, and they would appear as if by appointment, bedraggled, scrawny, skittish, standing outside our door waiting to be fed. Every time, my mother would exclaim loudly and with great certainty that she was only going to give them something to eat, that no way did we need another cat, that tomorrow it would have to leave, and, every time, we wound up with a new addition. Sometimes we had as many as six cats going at once.
She kept goldfish and birds, much to the delight and constant interest of the cats. She had parakeets that never learned to talk, love-birds that hated each other, and yellow canaries that warbled and sang only when they wanted to. In the mornings she would take the covers off their cages in the kitchen and whistle to them while she cooked breakfast. My mother was a world-class whistler. Soon, the canaries would get caught up in it too and begin to sing along with her, happy to be alive in the small sun-lit kitchen with the sound of the tea kettle going and the coffee pot bubbling away as if it was going to launch itself into outer space. My mother was the center of it all, bustling around, never quiet, never stopping, at least one cat rubbing against her legs and a kitchen full of sleepy kids sitting at the round wooden table poking their oatmeal with their spoons looking for raisins amid mutual punches and wails of outrage.
Our house was a non-stop blur of activity fueled by my mother. Once she got my father off to work after making his lunch and sitting his breakfast down in front of him and combing his hair while he ate, she would throw open the curtains and the windows and doors, and the house would begin to hum like a dynamo. It was probably this quality that Al saw in her that his wife lacked that attracted him so much.
They were together all the time while my father was away in Seattle, and then something happened and they didn’t see each other any longer. I think my father began to suspect and confronted her and she had to make a choice—-was it the right one? I only know that she was very quiet for a long time, and she quit whistling to the canaries in the mornings, and she pushed the cats away from her ankles in distraction as if she was going over and over some formula in her mind that just wouldn’t come out right. Soon after, we moved lock-stock-and-barrel to Seattle, everything we owned in a moving truck ahead of us on the highway. The rest packed into the car along with my three brothers and me and the two cats who’d made the cut in card-board boxes with air-holes punched into the sides and tops.
We moved in the winter and drove the hundred miles slowly over icy roads. Snow humped up in mounds as large as our car all along the highway, and the tree limbs and power-lines were weighted down in a silver-thaw and everything glistened in a sun that glared through the windshield so brightly we had to shield our eyes. We must have stopped a dozen times along the way at gas stations for one boy or another to go to the bathroom. In each bathroom, the toilet seats were ice-cold, and we had to decide whether to sit down slowly and work our way past the skin-puckering cold or sit down all at once, fast, in a heart-stopping plunge that was worse than jumping into a freezing lake. Each one of us had to make the decision, an inauguration of sorts to our new lives that lay down the highway in Skyway.
I was terrified that my mother and father were going to get divorced. I was twelve, and it was soon after we’d moved into our little house in Skyway above the steep hill leading down to Boeing Field where my father worked. It was a bad winter, there were storm clouds in the kitchen every day. My mother could not seem to pull herself out of her depression, and my father shuffled in and out as if everything was normal, except it clearly wasn’t. One night they got into an argument in the front room, my mother accusing my father of going out to bars and dancing with women while he was living in Renton. It escalated, and my mother flew into a rage, everything that had been bottled up poured out at my dad, and then he hit her in the eye.
You could have knocked every one of us boys over—-never in our wildest imaginations could we have pictured our father doing something like that. It was a small house, one tiny bathroom and two equally small bedrooms upstairs and a basement with a makeshift bedroom below that my older brother and I shared. There was nowhere to have any sort of private fight, so when my father hit my mother we were all a few feet away doing whatever we had been doing up until the moment of impact. There was a pop, and my mother’s screams escalated and her arms wind-milled, raining blows upon my father’s head. He left, letting in a blast of icy night air as the front door closed behind him. My mother ran upstairs, and the bedroom door slammed shut. The four of us boys sat and looked at each other, stunned, silent for possibly the first time in our lives as the turbulence that still hung in the room slowly dissipated.
The next morning, my mother had a black eye, and my father was back, and the air in the house had changed. It was as if a brisk wind had come in during the night and scoured out all the bad feelings that had clung to us for so long. My mother began to whistle again, the canaries warmed up and sang out a tentative note or two, and the cats came out from hiding under the house where they’d been for days, once again headed for my mother’s ankles and the food bowls in the kitchen. My father had never hit my mother before, and he never raised his hand to her again; it was as if they’d crossed some internal equator in that rare moment of public passion. As my mother’s black eye turned from purple to orange and then to a livery yellow, all the old ties that stretched out to us from Bellingham dropped away. For better or worse, we were all on our own in a new land that none of us had chosen or even wanted with all the exits locked behind us and no way to go but forward.
