Fred Poole On Writing

LATEST POST

2011-06-02T15:40:00.000-05:00

http://insistentscenes.blogspot.com/2011/06/foray-into-america.html

FOR MY MUST RECENT WORK

2011-03-21T11:06:00.006-05:00

My writing in past months has been primarily on two other blogs:

THE AQUA MUSTANG (theaquamustang.blogspot.com), which contains versions of parts of the memoir I am writing now.

INSISTENT SCENES(insistentscenes.blogspot.com), which is for other scenes and stories that may fit no plan but demand to be written.

If you want to write a screenplay...

2010-10-04T11:48:00.002-05:00

Graham Greene, whose works include The Third Man and The fallen Idol, speaks in his memoirs of how for him "it is impossible to write a film play without first writing a story. A film depends on more than plot; it depends on a certain measure of characterization, on mood and atmosphere, and these seem impossible to capture for the first time in the full shorthand of a conventional treatment... The Third Man, therefore, had to start as a story rather than a treatment before I began working on what seemed the interminable transformations from one screenplay to another... The film in fact is better than the story because it is in this case the finished state of the story."

REAL WRITING IS NOT FOR THOSE WHO PLAY IT SAFE

2010-08-30T16:07:00.003-05:00

Beware anyone presuming to teach memoir writing who says of their own memoir work "There are places I just will not go."

WHAT A SUMMER SO FAR!

2010-07-19T13:18:00.003-05:00

Amazing writing events already this summer. The latest running of the Memoir Festival that Marta and I created. And also the running of the Authentic Writing Solo Show Workshop that I did with Suzanne Bachner and Bob Brader. And on Sunday July 25 Marta at the famous KGB Bar! And now back in our regular workshops, and what seems to be the downhill stretch of my memoir The Aqua Mustang - which can be seen in developing stages at http://www.theaquamustang.blogspot.com.

AS PARIS LOOMS

2010-01-11T12:38:00.004-05:00

I all too frequently hear some wimpy novelist, whether of the thriller or nice-nice variety, talking on public radio about how he or she lets the characters take over, and it is just so surprising, these fools say, what they see these mostly made-up characters do in their mostly made-up situations.

And the fawning interviewer often says that this nonsense proves the conventional novelist is brave. The novelist who plays it safe by running fast from anything real.

Recently, as our Paris trip comes closer, we have been moving back to Hemingway and Fitzgerald. Sometimes they get into literary fantasy too, but this is rare, for it is so clear that they – in the manner not so much of novelists as of the best of today’s memoir writers – work hard to find out what is in the concrete reality of their own lives – not some fantasy thing that disturbs no one and makes professors of literature and conventional writing teachers feel safe.

2009-09-18T09:30:00.008-05:00

for my book THE AQUA MUSTANG, which is unfolding, please go to:

http://theaquamustang.blogspot.com/

Memoir that transcends genre

2009-09-13T14:13:00.003-05:00

FROM MARTA SZABO'S MOSTLY MEMOIR BLOG -- NATALIE MERCHANT! -- http://mostlymemoir.blogspot.com/2009/09/after-seeing-natalie-merchant.html

The Aqua Mustang 98 – OUR GANG

2009-08-11T14:30:00.001-05:00

The night before what I thought might be my final trip north I had slipped into a parking place on 15th Street right in front of the Corlears School, for which we had a key. And after that night’s meeting everyone had gathered around the aqua Mustang, which did not have room for everyone in it. I drove to our regular diner with Myra, a red-headed nurse from Astoria who was living big now that she knew her story, and who had survived since birth many a crisis and many a relationship. Walking over right after us, rather than use the ridiculously small back seat, were Bill, a comfortable-seeming, centered-seeming black man who had found it was his family and their enforced gentility that covered up simmering things he now had to break through, and Susan, a lovely and accomplished actress whose current off-Broadway play did not have a performance that night, and Heidi, a clinical therapist who was getting at matters in these meetings that even she had not gotten at in therapy. And at the diner we were joined by expansive young Loraine, who was living for the moment in a community of liberal nuns, well away from a possibly sociopathic father who was one of those therapists who had morphed into a cruel cult leader. Also Nina, who had been the lover of famous figures in the civil rights movement, and Oscar, a quite successful studio art photographer in his fifties, like me, who was entering life as if for the first time. So many new people, and they had come together as if in a movement, as if marching arm and arm.

My grade school in Connecticut, built at the time of my birth, had had WPA murals in each classroom, men and women from all walks of life but especially muscular workers and some farmers – workers and farmers marching into the future. Which to me was similar in spirit to the murals I would live with later in the main meeting room of Livermore Hall at my boarding school. These panels showed the very hills and fields in which the school was situated in the New Hampshire lake country – showed the hills and woods and fields in the fall colors that I could see in season through the windows, with the added, but quickly becoming dated, touches of an optimistic future that was becoming real. Over the hills and fields in one panel an airplane that had portholes, like in an ocean liner, from which passengers could look out – and in another panel a train streamlined like the trains that were nearly that futuristic already, like the 20th Century Limited to Chicago.

Like a coming together many year ago in the writers I discovered – Thomas Wolfe and James T. Farrell, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Keats and Wordsworth and Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy and Turgenev – and in paintings – Manet and Monet again and Rembrandt and the Abstract Expressionist who painted the way my old girlfriend did – and certain music, Beethoven and Marian Anderson and Rogers & Hammerstein as well as, a little later, Pete Seeger and Ray Charles and Charles Aznavour, and now Dylan and the rest.

Such like-minded people. And such like-minded people here now in the flesh in this diner, people determined to retrieve the lives that had been stolen from them.

I had this car, which I had bought last summer – which had seemed such a healthy thing to do – a car for the city, though I had gotten it in Vermont. This shiny aging aqua Mustang maintained like new by its previous owner, a girl in Vermont who had owned it with her new husband, a telephone linesman, and could not bear to have it around after lightning struck and killed him. This car with a story that was getting longer now that it was my story.

If these new people in New York with whom I shared so much were milling outside a place where there was a meeting – a church basement or a synagogue or the Corlears School – they would cheer when they saw the aqua Mustang coming, its light hearted chrome horse on the front. And they were waving to me and the car when I departed from near the diner last night – departed with them knowing what I was doing, as if I were doing it for all of them as well as for myself. This trip that might be my last trip to the far north, to the old childhood places, where dark things were happening – chickens coming home to roost –and where maybe I could save lives.

The Aqua Mustang 97 – RECAPTURED

2009-08-11T13:36:00.000-05:00

The Aqua Mustang 97 – RECAPTURED
After my best summer ever – up in the mountains with this gang of girls and boys who let me be in the center – abide in the center with Kitty, who taught me the 20s revival Charleston – the only time in my life when I could join a casual baseball game, step to the plate, and sometimes actually hit the ball and run bases – the summer after that one they took my brother and me off to Europe, thousands of miles away from the While Mountains and the summer gang – and suddenly it was as if nothing had ever changed, for I was back in our Connecticut family unit – back with Mother, Dad and Grandmother Clark, and my good boy twin Peter. I was getting letters almost every day that Kitty had sent to American Express in Paris and Venice and Paris again, and the family thought that was the silliest thing they had ever encountered. They laughed.

One evening at dinner at the hotel on the Rue Saint Honoré there was a big vase of black eyed Susan’s on our table and Grandmother Clark said, Look, Nigger Eyes. And Dad saw my face and berated me for having the potential to cause trouble, and they went along, keeping the awkward peace, with Grandmother Clark when she said, in a very loud voice, right here in Paris, I have called them Nigger Eyes all my life and I won’t stop calling them Nigger Eyes now.

And I was back in the place I thought I had escaped, despite all the trophies I had been winning, despite having a girl so kind and desirable she was outside their own experience – despite my surprising popularity, despite my leaving the world of the outcasts, despite this everything was still the same, as if nothing had happened, as if nothing could ever change. I knew I never should have trusted anything.

Though my life was not so empty now as they may have though. I did find a few things to trust that summer. I trusted what I felt when looking at Monet and Manet and van Gogh, all new to me, in the Jeu de Paum. The intensity of it was my secret almost, for in this family visual art was something I could have for myself if Peter was not in the way.

I started to hang out at the Jeu de Paum, which was a short walk from the hotel through all the marble in the beautifully proportioned and grandiose Place de la Concorde. I would remember for the rest of my life the exact placement of the paintings there – up and to the left in one room Manet’s artists picnic complete with nude model, directly in front of me as I entered another room Renoir’s girl on swing, who seemed to me not on a wing but on a path where she had stopped to cock her pretty head and connect with me. The Jeu de Paum, and also the Casino de Paris, which was a little farther away but within walking distance or a quick Metro ride.

There was something to trust here in this old theater too – the waves of desire that passed through me as I watched these happy seeming naked girls – plenty of coyness though no coy striptease, for they were naked before the dancing began – and one of them has a boy friend in the wings – I can see it all from my seat high up and to the side. I see her dance over to a place where the sky blue stage set ends, her arms high, and she had a girl’s cutely cropped brown hair, and rounded arms and legs, and she has these breasts, not too big and not to small, and with assertive nipples and she has a pubic hair triangle, and no tan line. And she reaches out to her right while turning her eyes in that direction and smiling, she reaches to her right again and she and the guy touch hands, this girl and her boyfriend, their touching out of sight except from my privileged spot in the audience. This sweet naked girl and her not-so-secret private life. And I had this fantasy version of my own life. I would not go to college next year, I would return to Paris and become the poet I had started out to be in boarding school, and I would have a girl like the naked dancing girl, and I would live in a garret like artists in the movies, and have intense relationships with people I would meet in tiny bistros with checked table clothes, each table with a candle dripping wax that built upon the side of the wine bottle in which it was stuck – and I would be myself always.

And this gave them a really good laugh, with a stern warning from my mother that I should pull myself together.

The Aqua Mustang 96 – IN BATTLE GEAR

2009-08-05T11:01:00.003-05:00

In the intervening years there had been only a few trips to New Hampshire, and almost none when the snows were coming. A life in cities all over the world, most of them tropical. Some trips into jungle and desert and ocean and equatorial mountains, but always back to cities. Barely sticking a toe into countryside.

I had decided now in November of ’86 that though I could not afford much of anything, I would need outdoor winter clothes for this latest expedition to the north – this place where disaster was always about to strike, this place of poisonous snakes and killer storms and undercover molestation and any number of other acts of, or against, nature. It might still seem like a cheerful autumn in New York but it was dangerous wintertime up there. I needed to dress right for self protection.

I did have a new checked green flannel shirt that had more style then the clothes to which I had been too accustomed most of my life. You had to put it on overhead like a sweater, it was that stylish. I had just bought it at Saks with a credit card left over from my recent marriage. And I also still had a surprisingly still valid Lord & Taylor credit card that my wife had ordered. At Lord & Taylor I charged a sharp looking blue wool scarf, and a pair of boots that looked a little like the work boots I had worn in adolescent days for social hiking in mountains in groups that included young pretty girls. I kidded myself that these boots would protect me from the freezing cold I remembered from the deep past.

I am going up there again in this time of change – this time when what really went on is coming into the light – this time of death and suicide and revelation about the darkness that surrounded those perfect seeming summers in those perfect if slightly stiff and formal mountain family places. It is two and a half months since my return from the summer of probing across the border from Vermont. It is only a month since the last trip, which a trysting trip. She was American girl of some undetermined age but still a girl, the sight of whom had set me reeling – though he had a mostly English accent like those people from the past and came from the same supposed strata. That last trip had become sweetly intense, though ending in multiple betrayals layered on the most un-New Hampshire sort of unfettered sex. And now I must go back again.

Although I had been back so recently, it had been so long since I was there as a part of the place that I did not even have the clothes for it. This place that was supposed to be so beautiful but where the elders were always talking about death – violent death by lighting and sudden mountain storms or stirred up mama bears or rusty nails that created fatal blood poisoning – and also death by sudden disease or stroke – death by old age at any age. I was about to leave New York again to take on death, for there had been sudden new events up there. This time I was off to do a Don Quixote thing – and even less prepared for the reality I might face than that Spanish would-be knight had been. For he did not ride off to fight the enemies, windmill or otherwise, dressed for battle by Saks and Lord & Taylor.

The Aqua Mustang 95 – EVOCATIONS

2009-07-31T10:44:00.002-05:00

As I drove here in Vermont by bright fields in various green hues of grasses and grains and vegetables, drove past orchards and up and down and around and over hills, beneath surpassingly gentle mountains, sometimes driving beside that rushing mountain water – as I drove, the scenes from nature that surrounded me this summer were raising emotions in me that made me feel again the emotions that had first seemed so right as evoked when I read Wordsworth at 14. And as I drove, I was right back there beyond Wordsworth in the distant summer of Kitty and the Playhouse and the our summer gang.

I stopped in Rutland for takeout coffee at a Burger King among strip malls and gas stations in a part of the small Vermont city that could have been anywhere. A wide-eyed young girl with an overbite, all eager smiles, served me and said how nice it was to see me. And again I was full of feelings that brought me into scenes so many years ago when I was coming into life. These many years later I again longed for connection (again also wanting life to be open ended).

Kitty, with her special smile, and the playhouse with our gang, and Gaga with his floppy sun hat and cane and rows of books he had written. Kitty and Gaga, and the mountains changing from harsh black and grey to steely blue to soft green and back again.

These scenes of the White Mountains, which actually were only three hours away from Rutland. These scenes from way back that as I drove alone were superimposed on visual scenes from after childhood to just now that were also in head:

Wild Havana, all bright colors and suspicion, in the final days of Batista, the Upper Nile on a boat that may have been one of the boats Kitchener took into the Sudan in his vain attempt rescue Gordon from the Mahdi. A wild girl in a dark room (she had cigarette burn scars on her smooth back from apparent gang retribution) near Prince Sihanouk’s strange casinos outside Phnom Phen. The Thai and Chinese temples and the stupas and palaces, and the royal barge house across the river in Bangkok from where I lived with Sunisar and then Bonnie.

And more, fading in and now, in Vermont, fading out as if overtaken by the nature I and Wordsworth had celebrated. In and out, Athens stretching out before me from the doorway of my whitewashed house where Vannie and I had lived on the side of the Acropolis. A dark minaret blasting a scratched recorded call to prayer and half blocking the view from my terrace in a bad year at the Levantine end of the Mediterranean. The deadly if comic fat man Somoza’s beaten-down Mangua in earthquake rubble around a lake with freshwater sharks, the even deadlier Duvalier's lovely but crumbling Port-au-Prince, then the girls Santo Domingo. Great Kinabalu rising straight up all alone over northern Sabah. The also great Kapuas River that I took nearly to its source, Conrad style, into the heart of Borneo. And Luanda when, despite the start of revolution, it was still a bright, white's only, Portuguese Mediterranean city misplaced in Africa far below the equator.

At nighttime on a Norwegian freighter where they let me take the wheel and follow on a chart of the North Sea the places still to avoid because of World War II mines. The untamed mountains of Slovenia circling a city with a river and a castle. In Switzerland a landscape nearly made quaint (they brought the bodies from the Matterhorn through Zermatt at night so that so no one could see). And times of hope in San Francisco and Paris and Singapore.

And then there was a fading of these scenes that were still coming in from the years between childhood and this year now when everything in the landscape of my past life was unfolding in new ways.

And I was back at the Holderness School in the New Hampshire lake country down below the White Mountains, alone in a small but crucial library on the second floor of Livermore Hall, looking out over woods and valleys with hills – foothills not mountains – out there against the sky and I was seeing things no one had ever seen before – the coldness of death after five months of a world covered in snow, and that earth coming to life, at first nothing tangible but life in the air, and then the bare branches, the bare twigs, taking on a reddish hue, something I had never heard mentioned, something I might have been the first person to ever see, and then the light green-yellow shoots of reborn flora.

And then summer in the mountains.

And fifty years later a girl in a Burger King.

The Aqua Mustang 94 – BRONZE GIRL

2009-07-30T11:02:00.002-05:00

And I was thinking maybe I was being a little ridiculous. I had heard that almost all young people who did well in debating had this thought that one day they would be President. Actually I had dismissed what I had heard as having nothing to do with me, just something for silly people, many of whom were social outcasts, as I had so recently been myself. And so I when I was15 I did dare to think that this would lead to the Presidency one day, and I was also sure that I was the only one who had thought this realistically. And something was out of control, for I was surely the only one who felt a surge of sexual longing when he thought of how well he was doing at winning arguments.

Ken Kaplan and I won the new England championship in the annual high school debating tournament at Boston University – my first bit victory and I was two years younger than Ken and my opponents. We came back in a school van late at night with a trophy so big it would tower over the pitiful second and third place minor sports trophies that were all my former tormenters at the little boarding school could get. And then I had this surge of sexual feeling while thinking at night about this big trophy, and not just because it was topped with an abstracted but also very clear young bronze woman with no clothes on who was holding a bronze laurel wreath high above her lovely head?

Well I couldn’t tell anyone, but I probably was going to be President. I would even go to law school so that I could go into politics prepared. Strangely the law school part set well with the family. They did not know the rest. I would be a lawyer and I would go to the top. No matter that the poems of Wordsworth moved me more than any good arguments.

It was in the summer after the first big win that I met Kitty at a swimming place beside a Waspily rustic golf course in the mountains. That summer was the time our summer gang was coming together. We had a sort of clubhouse, for we refurbished the old Poole Playhouse – which in what our elders described as better times had been a place for a amateur theatricals and quite formal dances with orchestras. A place covered with brown wooden shingles that had no lower class slickness to it. It was falling apart now, though the dances were so recent I could remember seeing the preparations for one when I was six and too young to stay up for it. Right here in the present there were still anachronistic (a recently learned word) round cardboard containers of cornmeal which could be spread on the smooth floor to make it even smoother for the dancers.

We replaced panes of glass on the French doors that circled the Playhouse on three sides. Nana hired a carpenter to replace some rotting boards on the circular terrace those doors opened out on. And soon we were in the world of the moment, not the world of our forbears that the older people who were forever talking about how things in the past were so much better than anything would ever be again. We did not have fancy dances with orchestras in this new version of the Playhouse. What we had was a portable phonograph playing slow songs to which you could dance in a way no one ever had before us, it seemed. Dance with the girl pressed against you, feel her, kiss her, be kissed back, move you hands way down on her backside, hardly moving your feet, pulling her up to you in the dark, and she reaching up, one hand on my shoulder, the other touching the back of my neck, which I felt in my groin, pulling herself up. I loved her like a lover in fiction, and also I wanted my life to be as opened ended as the lives of my family members were closed. And anyway, who could be trusted? Our feet hardly moved, so we had no need for the cornmeal from a fabled time that was not our time.

And it seemed to me there was a clear link between my winning in debating and the fact that now girls seemed to like me. A link not between my success at secondary school debating and my chance for being President, but rather a link between my having the better arguments on the debate circuit and now, just afterwards, me, so recently a near complete outcast in school and family, me now necking with the most appealing girl I had ever seen.

The Aqua Mustang 93 – JUSTICE

2009-07-28T09:38:00.000-05:00

I was not worried any more about my parents seeing my report cards that were sent down to Connecticut from the Holderness School in the far north. My grades now were no longer the lowest in the school. They were suddenly the highest, higher even than my twin brother’s. I wondered if I had not by now supplanted him as the twin the family would admire.

But when I was home my mother gave me a look that said we can see through you. Then she read me the comment from the boarding school’s headmaster, the rector, Mr. Weld. “Fred is very concerned with social justice in the abstract, but he is a thorn in his floor leader’s side.”

The problem with the floor leader, Terry Weathers, who had been one of my friends when I thought I had no friends in the school, was that I was never on time for anything, always collecting demerits, which for some reason made our floor look bad. And in the room inspections carried out by Mrs. Chase, the basketball coach’s busybody wife, the grade given to my never neat enough room brought down the floor’s rating. And that wasn’t the only thing. I passed out heavy instant coffee that I made from the hot water tap in the communal shower/lavatory. Also, I would often leave the dorm without permission during study times, and it was suspected, though they had not caught me yet, that I was even leaving the dorm after lights out.

But shouldn’t my parents and the headmaster be happy that I was attuned to justice and injustice not just in the school but in the big world that I would enter one day?

Having political views, particularly about justice, was coming to seem like an identity for me. It may have started, this justice thing, back before all the changes when I was the school’s most unpopular boy. It also may have had to do with my connection to the Social Studies teacher, Archie Stark, who was a Quaker and hated McCarthyism and put me in touch with A.J. Muste’s Fellowship for Reconciliation.

Or maybe it was because I read Dickens and Steinbeck, and had quickly learned that people like school bullies were despised in bigger worlds. Also, books showed me that it was not unusual that people who counted in life and politics had been ridiculed and sometimes beaten by the sort of people who had ganged up on me, ridiculing and beating met at this school. Even Ghandi had had his bad early days. Nothing abstract here.

But what really got me going was my rapid rise in the debating world – the dumb kid in the school one day, and another day the number one debater in New England while not yet 16. Rising by winning arguments.

When I tried to figure it out, I fell back on my days in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, my summers in those big formal family houses. I knew from his books and stories that my grandfather Gaga has been in the first stage of the Russian Revolution. Afterwards he had made a case for Kerensky as being a third way alternative to the Bolsheviks and the Czarists, and no one listened. But I could quote him in debates, compare a possible third way in Russia with a possible third way in China, which had just been overrun by the Communists. Not only would it make some sense, or at least confuse my opponents, it would also tie me to this family where I so often suspected I was an outcast.

I wondered why it should make my mother seem so satisfied that Mr. Weld was looking down on me. I wondered if I could ever right the balance in my family or in the world, or if whatever I did I would still be the bad twin to my brother’s good twin.

TASTE OF CONNECTICUT

2009-07-23T10:35:00.001-05:00

I.

I had gone out for the weekend to the small contained, low ceiling, one-story Connecticut house that my parents had moved into next door to the big and quirky house of my childhood in this township that had been chaotic enough so that I had never felt bound by the commuter and golfer aspects of it. I knew it as a place of fascinating danger and adventure – fighting and fleeing and stealing things, like Mr. Steinberg’s rowboat that took me over a waterfall in what I thought was the end of my life, and like when clinging to rock faces in near wilderness not yet subdivided, or outsmarting the wardens who tried to catch me when I fished for bass in a restricted reservoir – things that made me think while it was going on that my childhood in Connecticut, in its better light, was far more Mark Twain than John Cheever.

Connecticut where, as I have written, the food in our house was a combination between what came out of the hard-edged WASP world of my paternal grandparents – who strangely ate well at their own places – and the Southern world of my maternal grandmother. We had WASPy tasteless vegetables and mean portions of grisly meat plus sickening percolator coffee – supplemented by not bad Southern corn bread that was overshadowed by congealed grits and okra the consistency of snot.

So here I am, all these years later, cooking brown and wild rice for a lunch that features garlicky, lemony sautéed red snapper – all of this with the herbs and spices, and mushrooms too, that I never saw in my formative years in Connecticut. Here I am receiving solace alone in the kitchen, just after the death of Frank McCourt.

Celebrating by violating all the strictures of WASP food, as Frank McCourt violated everything set up by the lifeless old schoolmasters in England, those rules set up by ignorant men in England and then used by the anti-art people to torture sensitive children in Ireland and America.

II.

That cramped little house in Connecticut. 1959. I was out from the city for the weekend with my girlfriend Vannie – about whom I was silently bragging. She knew how to fill leotards. She had bangs and a heart-shaped face that melted men thou it was hard to know if she even knew she was pretty. She had run from Tennessee to Manhattan where at 24, which was also my age, she had become a vibrant action painter. I marveled at the contrast between her and the others in that little house, my parents and my very careful twin brother, who was also out for the weekend.

I had a bad case of flu, and I had spent the night alone on a horsehair couch they had saved from the older, bigger house. It was probable that no-one had ever made love here. They were all going to go for dinner at an Italian restaurant down near the railroad station – a far distant world though only four and a half miles away. Vannie and my brother went to a small supermarket to get something I could eat for dinner since there was nothing to fall back on in the house. Peter said I would probably like a TV dinner. Vannie, who knew more than she maybe needed to know about my tastes, found something that looked a tiny bit, though not much, better – some frozen non-TV dinner that at least had pretensions. Peter talked her out of getting it for me, because it would be an insult to my mother, he said. To bring in a really good frozen dinner would be to say Fred needed something better than he could get at home.

So jumping ahead fifty years, I am finally doing something new about my childhood that I have needed to do for a long time. Something beyond deep probing. This past weekend I returned to that retreat place, the Omega Institute, where Marta and I had been, along with Malachy McCourt, a week earlier with our writing program. But this time it was to take a workshop, not give one, though that line can be thin. This workshop had to to do not with writing but with another version of art. It was given by a man named Thomas Griffiths, otherwise known as Tom or Chef Tom, who teachers at the nearby CIA, which stands for Culinary Institute of America and has no connection that I can detect with my twin bother Peter’s CIA. Chef Tom is one of the 60 persons in the world with the title master chef. He used to be at La Cirque, where he did omelet’s for people like Pavarotti and Diana Ross.

I have the least experience of the 15 people attending this cooking weekend, though I have been reading and Googling and watching cooking videos furiously for a couple of months, also bringing people who know how to cook into our kitchen to coach me, working overtime trying to catch up. It turns out I am the only one at this retreat who did not have at least one grandmother, at the very least a mother, who cooked.

The only one here with so little experience is a girl named Samantha who is as guarded as she in pretty, in a tanned and sullen way. She has come, at her fiancé’s urging, but she had never wanted to cook. It seems clear that if the fiancé wants good food after marriage he may have to go elsewhere. She adds that maybe Tom can give her some ideas about expensive culinary things to add to her registry.

On the second day Chef Tom is joined by his colleague Chef Freddy B, who, strangely, lives in the next town over from the Connecticut suburb of my bad food childhood. Freddy’s wife is Chinese, which is not so far off from my own first wife. I go to lunch with Jim and his wife Emilia – she too tanned and very good looking and he a pleasantly confident investment banker. And it turns out that too live in Connecticut! About a mile from my food-deprived childhood home.

Jim knows private Cantonese banquets from business trips to Hong Kong where I used to enjoy such feasts thanks to my first big contact there, Martin Wong, who I had known in New York when he was an investment bank trainee, and where we had many friends in common, including appealing girls like Vannie, who knew Martin well. I assumed Jim and Emilia were rich and probably Republican – and I wondered if I could have met them anywhere except in art. They stay in touch with me after the weekend because they want Jim’s father, who is so un-Connecticut he only has a third grade education – to join an Authentic Writing group.

And there is Mel, who knows the Chinese places in Queens. One of the girls we were with in 1959 was Grace Wu, who lived in a part of Queens that was fast becoming an upscale version of Chinatown. Later my first wife, also from the Far East, and her mother would shop for strange seas creatures on Canal Street.

The red snapper I just cooked, I sautéed in the way I learned at Omega, where there was risotto and roast pork, and lobster – which Chef Tom killed with a knife to the head because it is more humane than boiling the creature alive. We chopped and sliced and seasoned and sautéed and roasted and braised and boiled and grilled. We did couscous and quinoa and cauliflower and wild rice and beats. There was chicken for Freddy B's lush stir fry.

And there was a small vegan continent in our group. Lois, a director at Omega who turns out to be working with Marta. Lois has brought her daughter, who writes, and her sister and a close friend. The point she says is to make this a bonding weekend for her little group. They are not so put off as I would have thought by the rest of cooking and eating once living creatures, for they take the time between vegetable activities for bonding sessions – something else that never would have happened in the Connecticut that I knew 50 years ago

PRISSY PRUDES

2009-07-17T12:58:00.004-05:00

Every modern writer I have liked – from James T. Farrell when I was 17 to the one so on my mind all these years later, Frank McCourt – every one of them has been damned up and down and sideways by so many smug prissy critics. McCourt never should have told those things about his mother, and Farrell never should have written about having adolescent sexual feelings for inappropriate girls. There are some things that people just should not say.

We are in a kind of cocoon here, Marta and I, in Authentic Writing, for we don’t have to put up with English Department chairperson prudes – mine when I was in college damned Hemingway for writing about things no gentleman should discuss – mine when I taught at a community college one precarious year said that English 101 students might learn to write by learning the 17 basic rhetorical modes but most of them muffed it anyway by writing about things that interested them that nobody should be allowed to write about – football and worse.

I was once damned in the ponderous New York Review of Books for writing that a famous Reagan-backed dictator I knew all about at first hand, was, well, a dictator. How culturally insensitive this pompous reviewer said.

Marta and I are not entirely sheltered in the cocoon, and wouldn’t want to be, for we do move in worlds other than our own and want to move that way, and know what sheltering does to academics and genteel authors. So we are out beyond cocoon walls a lot – and this sometimes brings us up against the sort of people I usually think are in some suitable hell from which they cannot reach us.

A writing teacher came to Woodstock and announced that she would help people write memoir, making sure they did not say anything bad about their betters, like Frank McCourt reporting sounds of his mother’s fucking, because, she said, “I always tell my students, when you say something not nice about someone it just make you yourself look bad.”

This teacher hires herself out to other writers who are doing nice books.

And then another woman, who lives in a nearby white glove town, was also hiring herself out to fix up other people’s memoirs – work for which her main credential was that she herself once wrote a prophalactically expurgated family memoir.

Such people came to our Woodstock Memoir Festival and heard Marta field a question about how you should go about hiring an editor to fix up your manuscript – as if that’s what real writers commonly did. I had already come under attack for saying I had never found an editor at any company that was publishing me who was of in any real help, but this question now was about hiring an editor before the manuscript is even submitted. Then they heard Marta answer it with a quick eloquent series of fine one liners, such as, Did Faulkner hire an editor? Did Rembrandt hire an editor to fix up his paintings?

And then a teacher/ghost writer and her clients tried get us banned from our own memoir festival..

So we are clearly doing many things right. But I’m suddenly as furious as I ever was when I was 17.

LOST TIME?

2009-07-02T09:53:00.004-05:00

I was in the Met a week ago for a large current show called “The Pictures Generation.” It is not much publicized though it is underwritten by Rockefeller style promoters of the arts. It is a sweeping collection of works by a group of young artists who from the mid-seventies to the mid-eighties were bringing the image back into art in some direct and some very indirect ways – the image having been all but banned by grey, cold critics, who had decided everything had to fit into one of only two acceptable current trends – conceptualism and minimalism. And it was not that the critics now favored vigorous abstract work but rather that they had gotten everything down to what would exist in a critic’s paradise – no images, and no real emotion either. I was furious and sad.

Minimalism and conceptualism hogged all space for new shows at the Modern, and hogged the galleries too, in the mid-seventies when I returned from my latest stay abroad, this last one four uncomfortable years in the Middle East, which, despite some of the sort of adventure I sought, had become a kind of hell for me and not totally because my drinking was more out of hand than ever. I was fed up with so many of the people there with whom I had been involved, particularly in Lebanon which was filled with foreign journalists who had taken on all the worst characteristics – awkward pretentiousness and quite flagrant anti-Semitism.

What I really wanted in coming back was to get in touch with what I had been missing. But back in New York now I found myself as out of sync with the people I had known there as I was with minimalism and conceptualism. Friends from when first in the city were letting their careers define them. Especially the lawyers, who were now embalmed as lawyers, especially the writers as they began to find publishers. As out of sync with these liberal people who had been my friends in past years as I was recently out of sync with the right-wing expatriates in Beirut. And it made me wonder if I had not always been out of sync, whether when growing up in Connecticut and New Hampshire or when roaming most of the world’s continents.

For economy’s sake, I when I got back in the mid-seventies I went to live in a seedy shared apartment whose rooms went mainly to Maoists, Trotskyists, Trotskyites Anarchists and Stalinists, none of which I was. I had no girl friend to give me definition, only occasional cold one-night, or less, encounters. And I felt more trapped than ever by lack of money. Everything in my life seemed to be under a blanket of depression.

I did get up each day, and I did do the necessary footwork to get advance money two new book contracts, which I secretly suspected would not save me. I developed some new interests and like everyone else in the city discovered a latent passion for classic dance, alternating between Suzanne Farrell and Gelsey Kirkland, Balanchine and the American Ballet Theater, with side trips to the Taylor and other modern troupes. I was in an out of Washington doing research for one of the books, which took me to the sad old State Department, a vacant place in what should be a fascinating area. It is true I was meeting all sorts of people in New York and Washington and during brief research forays abroad, mainly because I had my book contracts, which did not stop my drinking from becoming, more than ever, blackout drinking. I was getting bills form Bellevue for having been taken there in a blackout and patched up for some happening that I did not remember.

One of the things I had missed most when away was being in touch with what was happening in art. Visual art had been a part of my happiest times in the city and in Europe too, from the late fifties when I was with this very appealing girlfriend – we were also in Greece together – who was an action painter.

But I had lost touch. And I did not find anything to connect to. I totally missed – as blind perhaps as a critic to what was around me – what was billed in the Met now, 35 years later, as the Pictures Generation. The show takes up many gallery rooms but is not listed on the banners at the front; a man taking entrance money was excited by it, but it was hard to find any signs pointing to it. Yet the moment I stepped into those rooms (located on the way to the 19th century rooms) I found myself in what seemed like a completely familiar, if never before seen, world – something that sometimes happens with a piece of music or a painting or with written evocations of lives. An array here of different approaches by a great many artists working at that mid-seventies time – from a driven young woman’s recording of herself on film to exuberant sketches. I went to see it because I know an extraordinary talented Woodstock guy who is in it, Paul McMahon, who lives now in the same town where I have lived, and even felt connected, for more than 20 years. His work in the show has joy in it – light-hearted and also moving, ranging from writing on maudlin picture postcards to pastel works done on front pages of the Times, with several stops in between, including an inviting poster, “Masters of Love,” and a series of small paintings in which he did red polka dots.

It felt walking through this show that I was in that world I had dreamt of back in the seventies, a world I could not join, did not even find, when I was back looking for something solid after years of disconnection in odd places. That world of people who knew each other, were working together, and were on a mission, rejecting hack work, taking art out of the hands of the linear hecklers and taking it right up to the often precarious edge of life. The sort of group to which it seemed in the mid-seventies that, despite what I believed, I could never really belong.

UNBORN DUCK

2009-06-30T13:47:00.002-05:00

At motherly but lithe Lita’s slippery little bar on Airport Road – which was of the sort found in every corner of Manila – laughing girls in very off the shoulder dresses and men waving guns around in what was usually bluffing, and numbered rooms upstairs that had fairly fresh sheets on the beds – at Lita’s I am on a bar stool and Mercie is wrapped around me and we are downing San Mig beers rapidly, the last round bought by Sergeant Arellano, a policeman who it Lita’s protector, and outside are the familiar haunting shouts – balut, balut, balut – which up till now I have been able to ignore, but Sergeant Arellano days it will be hospitality tonight, and he calls for the outdoor salesman of balut, balut being not quite hatched ducks in their eggs. You knock off the top, and bite into the well developed duck embryo, blood and all and its strangely colored odiferous parts. You take a bite, and look at the veins and the bitten bones of the part that remains, then you are supposed to drink deep from the open shell the liquid in which the now decapitated duck had been hatching. I’ve managed to avoid this so far, though everyone on Airport road knows what a good sport I am, but I just cannot face actual ingestion of balut.

Sergeant Arellano is scowling and talking about Philippine hospitality again, and Mercie is looking really worried, a look I have never seen on her face in this place where there can be so much cause for worry, and so I have the egg in my hand, and I’ve knocked the top off, and I move the egg away thinking maybe this is enough, and then I see that Sergeant Arellano, talking ever more sternly about hospitality, has his revolver out…..

My precarious relationship to food began way back in darkest Connecticut where we had a kind of classic unseasoned Wasp food – overcooked vegetables, stringy liver, oily mackerel, the saving grace being that portions were so small, but even that was not a refuge for there was my also Southern grandmother always present making sure that whatever else we were eating or avoiding we refilled our plates with congealed grits and piles of snot-like okra.

This was in the background a couple of months ago, when I decided that it was time I learned to cook. I had long fancied myself a gourmet, but maybe it was pure bluff, maybe I could not escape my past. Food was supposed to be awful, and men were supposed to be incompetent. Poole men, for instance, could never learn to carve, even for occasions when there really was something to carve. They certainly could not built things – but I took comfort in what I had done when I began to paint 20 years ago. I went to the hardware store over on Seventh Avenue and talked them into precise instructions for what kind of lumber I would need for the shelves I needed to hold my supplies – for I was doing huge things now, including sculpture – and how I could put up heavy shelves without the walls giving in – what I needed to make sure they were level as well as strong. Well, I beat my fate that time, and maybe now I could do it again.

I have found support. In a short time I have put together a library on cooking that is about as large at the almost instant libraries I assembled when I plunged into visual art, and again when I dove into theology. And I have found help with this version of art as I had with others. Classes. Books. But also regular people. With an old friend I did a pork tenderloin that I think would please any connoisseur and sure pleased me. With someone else who had the benefit of an Italian grandmother I did lasagna, several kinds by now, and all sorts of sauces and of course meat balls such as few Wasps has ever seen much less eaten. And I do all sorts of spontaneous mixtures of meat and chicken and vegetables and fish and spices and herbs, always with sauces. I have begun to assemble more equipment such as a heavy meat bounder that I finally found upstairs at Zabar's so that I could flatten out cutlets the way my more unfortunate friends remembered their ethnic grandmothers doing.

Recipes? Instructions from the books? Proper measuring and timing. Proper seasoning – done mostly by instinct and smell and intuition by me who never saw a clove of garlic until he left home. It was like when I started painting – and I got the books and signed up for the courses and learned anatomy and color theory and all the rest but then almost instantly went off on my own whether doing figurative or abstract work, almost immediately going beyond any given plan – which is something it took me so long to discover in writing that when I did I embark on it there, too, everything in my life changed. If feels just like this with cooking. I need rosemary even though the book says I don’t. I need double or triple of any amount of garlic called for, or, really, any amount of anything called for in the plans – cooking turns out to be so much like painting and like writing and like the life I sought for so long.

The Aqua Mustang 92 – NEW TIMES

2009-06-25T09:06:00.001-05:00

As I drove in 1986 looking to unravel the past, my mind was never far from the litany of family horrors, the bad ends to which others in my generation who had roots in the old White Mountains summer community were coming – this litany what was at the center of my talks and rants in the city – sadism and incest and molestation and miscellaneous cruelty, with anti-Semitism and other kinds of exclusion – these matters that were putting the lie to everything that, to me, the White Mountains of New Hampshire was supposed to have meant.

I drove mostly in Vermont, where I had this sort of safe base camp in the house of an old friend in Rutland whom I had known most of my life first in Connecticut and then in the city, and who had escaped to Vermont many years back and then escaped even alcoholism. I went with him to a political meeting where I met the governor, who was actually a woman, actually a Democrat, which in 1986 across the border in New Hampshire were credentials that would end any contemplated political career. There was excited talk among my friends in Rutland that, thanks partly to their senator Patrick Leahy, who many of them knew, the Democrats were about to take the U.S. Senate from the perverse Reaganites, and maybe the world would be back on track.

And meanwhile health food stores and organic and vegetarian and vegan restaurants were opening all over the state, and reformed businessmen from the cities were raising arugula and goats, and on the village greens there were kids playing music as if it were 1966, not 1986. To put the stamp on it, Brattleboro had a gay bar. If there were gays in New Hampshire, they were so careful you did not see them. If there was health food it was kept a secret. The closest thing I saw in my forays across the border to New Hampshire to what was happening in he rest of the world was that diner menu in Littleton that proclaimed the specialty of the day to be cheeseburger quiche.

And another thing, everyone in the Rutland crowd was in therapy, almost all of them at this moment in groups conducted, oddly, by a group of progressive nuns who had come to town and set up shop practicing something called transactional analysis, which I had heard of in the past only as something silly. In this very quick-fix therapy, members of the Rutland groups, billed as short-term, were apparently supposed to confront people all the time by telling them what was rally going on with them. And everything had a neater-than-real-life label. An adherent among adherents could win an argument by saying something like, “Ah, I hear the little professor speaking.” These people seemed as certain of their lightweight categorizing of others as I was of what seemed to me my deep and everlasting new understanding of the wolves in sheep’s clothing of my family past.

What made the nun’s group worse was that transactional analysis was what had sparked a widely ridiculed (in my New York circles) a popular self-help book called I’m Okay, You’re Okay. But even the silliness seemed to put Vermont once again far ahead of New Hampshire. In the White Mountains, so far as I knew, therapists were as rare as Communists.

The Aqua Mustang 91 – WHAT HAPPENED

2009-06-23T11:02:00.001-05:00

In this time when I had to know not what was happening in situations I had been close to – not what the thugs called tonton marcouts were doing to the best people in Haiti on behalf of the dictator Duvalier who ruled by voodoo and blood, and not what Batista had done in Cuba, or the colonels in Greece, or the makers of Vietnam policy, or the puffed up Somozas in Nicaragua, or the egregiously cruel Marcos’s in my recent wife’s homeland, not was happening in situations to which I had been an observer but not a party, but rather to what I knew best but had investigated least -- my family.

I had made early attempts to connect dots – for example this question of why no one in my parent’s generation could hold on to a job. But in the biggest matters I had not made connections any more than the others did, though the connections had already been coming before I picked up the Aqua Mustang and used it for time travel.

At first it was Cousin Elizabeth, in Sloane Kettering with cancer, not lung cancer but her parents and her husband were blaming it all on her smoking, Elizabeth one of the alive ones, and an artist, a real artist, not like her mother who the family thought so talented because of the family and pet portraits she had done when young before the Junior League took all her time. Before children arrived, Elizabeth was at the Art Students League, which they all said proved she was nothing because anyone could go there and take classes, unlike, for instance, Smith and Radcliff and Vassar. And a year before this time driving in northern New England I had been working night and day on a project that took me down to the Bahamas, and I had made time in the city to go over to Sloane Kettering every day or two. I had seen poems in which Elizabeth told of her pre-cancer suffering, but I had only skimmed them. She had an apparently successful bone marrow operation, and then announced that she wanted to die, and talked what both her mother, who competed with her for men, and her father had done to her, and then one day she was on a respirator, her head swelled up like a deep blue balloon, this just after she had said she wanted to die because of what had happened. And soon after that Cousin Anna hung herself out in San Diego where her husband Cousin Mark was being an academic anthropologist having finally gotten his education after being thrown out of Exeter and then Williams for stealing. And Mark, who was so obese by now he practically could not travel by air, had been with a surprise mistress while the suicide was taking pace, and then borrowed from my brother the Farm House, the last of the big family houses to stay anywhere in the family, so that he could have his honeymoon, as he had always dreamt, in the White Mountains. It was awhile before an order of protection was out to keep him away from his daughter – and a while longer before he shot himself.

Aunt Alice, who said she kind of liked Lauryn’s batterer, and anyway Lauryn brought it on herself for she was too pretty, too appealing. And just after this my mother said she had talked with Mark’s mother, who had talked with Anna’s mother, who agreed that Anna’s death was all to the good for she had been such a problem to both families, and now Mark could get on with his life.

And in this same time, Cousin Lawrence and his wife Cynthia had just told me of a strange thing that happened when they were up in the mountains for Christmas with Lawrence’s mother, my Aunt Alice – who had moved long ago not to a family house – she was too much of a black sheep for that – but to a small company house in a nearby decaying mill town. She had gone there with her daughter Lauryn, who was in the Lysée in New York and almost full time with the ballet, because Lauryn’s brother Paul had gotten so deeply in trouble they had to flee. The trouble involved sawed off shotguns and kidnapping and apparently rape – and had still been going on up in new Hampshire when a judge let him off only if he would join the army. While Aunt Alice and her children Lawrence and Lauryn were watching television that Christmas there was a TV movie about sexual abuse and to their surprise – as if this had come form nowhere – Lauryn started screaming. Lawrence told me about it, but said it was that she had actually been raped by Paul once.

And then Lauryn wound up in a battered women’s shelter in Minneapolis, just at the time I was in the midst of my exploration of New Hampshire. Aunt Alice had been phoning me in the autumn, I heard her voice when I called my answering machine, but I did not return the call. I was busy in a deeply sexual tryst with a very pretty blonde woman, which seemed a natural extension of my investigations. I knew her from Adult Children of Alcoholics, where her stories were sufficiently horrendous. She knew the sort of world I had been born into, and even had one of those fake British accents, though she had apparently learned it during a time studying in England.

At this point the pat was completely in the present – and clear visual images came to me of what had happened to me. They came to me when I was back in New York and picked up the phone and heard Aunt Alice saying a horrible thing had happened to her, Aunt Alice, which was that Lauryn had been battered– and it turned out that Paul had been beating her from the time she was very young – Aunt Alice, Lauryn told me had to have seen the deep whip marks and blood when she was in the bath. Full rape has begun as soon as she was large enough for Paul to enter, and it went on for years It and it would never have ended, she knew, if Paul had not been killed in a single-vehicle motorcycle accident – which in the family they said was so strange, a motorcycle, for nothing like that had ever happened to any of us.

I had been in the Philippines, which I knew far too well, doing a book about the Marcos's and the horrors of martial law – village square beheadings by the constabulary, for instance – in those thickly populated islands. The book was written with a journalist friend from my years in Asia, with the help of a major player, a liberal Marcos rival who had spend eight years in prison, and was killed, shot in the back of the head by government men, before the book was finished, and soon our allies were being assassinated at a rate of horror. And I was under death threat, called in the night in Manila and San Francisco, by figures said to be from the Marcos military.

And just now at this time with Anna and Lauryn and Elizabeth and the memory of Paul it came to light that my brother Peter was working in the Philippines for the CIA at the very time I was there more or less underground with the old-line opposition and also the Maoist New People's’ Army, and he never told me, and we both could have been killed because of it.

This and much more was on my mind as I drove about northern New England looking for what had happened in what has once been the most safe of all places – a little stuffy these people, maybe, but with great accomplishments too – all in the past – in this part of the world that to so many in the family it seemed the family owned.

I was on the track now – and for the first time in my life had gone for a year without depression.

The Aqua Mustang 90 – PROTECTION

2009-06-15T11:07:00.001-05:00

In August of 1970 I decided to finish my picaresque novel in the White Mountains, which, strangely, I thought would not distract me from this basically true story I had sold to Harper’s of my wildly unsafe adventures in the night world of Bangkok. So now I was staying partly at White Wings with Mickie and her new husband Charlie and partly at Lovett’s, the restaurant and high end cabin complex at the corner where you turn off for the Profile Club.

Here in the mountains I kept silent about my recent activities except to let them know I planned to put the finishing touches on this novel right here – letting them see I had credentials of my own apart from family heritage. This was no place to talk of how I had spent the eight months between the time I got the contract and this time now, one of my rare returns to the White Mountains.

With the contract in my self consciously battered briefcase I had gone from New York to London, where I had friends from Southeast Asia days and also could check in with Jason Bacon, who I had known since the third grade. Jason was in London running the big money office of Kidder, Peabody. For years I had considered him my only Republican friend.

With overvalued dollars from my advance I took an apartment on the Chelsea embankment with a view of the Thames. Then I left London, where I knew people, for the Canary Islands, where I knew no one – these sad though lovely islands of the Africa coast that are sparsely inhabited with depressed Iberians and overrun by bargain seeking Brits of the sort who start every other sentence with “as it were,” and mark their wine bottles so that between meals the wogish locals who did menial work in the hotels would not sneak drinks which, the “as it were” bargain tourists said, represented “value for money.” My isolation in such a place weighed so heavy that it was sort of a relief after a night when drunk to incoherence to wake up in a jail cell being glared at through the bars by a man in the costume drama uniform of the fascist Guardia Civil.

Then back to London which was full of people coming and going whom I had known in Southeast Asia – which at least was company, though these were journalist war lovers taking a break before deciding whether to go back to the killing fields in Indochina or look for new ones in the Middle East. And then I was off to Malta with an old boozed-up writer friend who knew a famous alcoholic Australian novelist there. The Australian lived in an old ocean-view house with cool tile floors and glass cases containing dead stuffed birds. I had a room that opened on the roof, where I kept forgetting how many sleeping pills I had taken. Our best reason for being there was that the next town over had the sweetest young prostitute on the island which in the circumstances did feel like connection. I twisted my ankle badly coming down the stone steps from her house, but soon could have it fixed with British national health service. This was not something to talk about in the White Mountains.

Next, back to London again and then a sojourn in Frankfort, where I had old friends from Athens days, and on to Zermatt, which was so clearly not at all like what they said it was in the White Mountains where they somehow connected their wild scraggly ranges with the perfectly ordered Swiss Alps. I hiked and wrote, happy to be far away from English food – which was something else that might seem strange if I mentioned it in the White Mountains summer crowd, whose members from Baltimore, Boston and Chicago often talked, in mysterious ersatz aristocratic style, with what sounded like English accents. For two weeks I did not have a drink – though it worried me that if this continued it would prove offensive to the remnants of my family.

The Aqua Mustang 89 –ENTRANCE TO A VILLAGE

2009-06-11T10:11:00.003-05:00

In those years when I was on the hunt for what had happened, and at a crucial point drove into the geographical, and also state-of-mind, place where what I was seeking would have come to pass, drove into the heart of darkness, it seemed, in this time I had become open to changing versions of everything I had believed about myself and the worlds I had been in – this time that seemed so crucial, so loaded, but for which my writing, by which till now I had defined myself, was useless. And so I had turned to visual art, at first hours and hours, often full days, of looking at paintings in the midtown and uptown and Soho and short-lived East Village galleries, and in the Metropolitan, the Modern, the new Drawing Center, the Whitney, the Guggenheim, the Frick, the Brooklyn. I could have walked with my eyes closed into to any of a couple of hundred rooms in those places and known exactly what paintings were where, which were in front of me, which behind, which to the right and which to the left – as well as knowing with my eyes shut the exact placement of each painting on each of those walls. And I was seeing my life, my past history, through what was coming to light as I looked – the hope and the plight of the young boy in Matisse’s piano lesson, the diagram into suicide in the razor edge, thorny and sexually charged supposedly abstract images in Gorky that were not the least bit abstract to me – and other paintings that had the opposite effect, my refuge in Deibenkorn’s arrangements of colors, which were not abstract to me either, and my old fears and warm longings in Bonnard – my recently rediscovered joy in Monet and Cezanne and newly discovered joy, and warmth and longing again in Corot and Courbet, and awe at creation in Rembrandt.

All this before I had done more than think about drawing and painting myself.

On a wall separating a 16th century Dutch gallery room from the grandiose Eberhardt Court there was a Hobbema painting, called Entrance to a Village – a couple of old houses and some very small figures in a woods. I would stand in front of that painting and feel I had stepped right into it, soaking in the atmosphere of fine summer days – until one day when I could see nothing comforting in Entrance to a Village. That day I stood there berating myself for seemingly having lost the ability to rise to perfect summer day. I walked away not sure when I would be back, but in the night I had a lengthy fearsome dream of being in deep, dark, very dangerous woods that seemed to be the Hobbema woods and then were also the deep, dark woods of the White Mountains that started just past the iron streaked rocks behind the biggest of the family houses, and went all the way to woods that climbed up the distant mountains, which were chopped up with ravines and had big brown markings made by trees dead from sudden storms that even in summer caught and killed hikers, all the way to up above the timber line where all was wind-battered rock except some wiry, low lying, desperately clinging miniature pines that hung on in places where there was no apparent earth.

That was the real Hobbema, I was now sure. And that was the long ignored reality of the those supposedly perfect days in the White Mountains.

And so I was learning more from that Hobbema painting and the visual pictures it triggered in my mind, waking and asleep, more than I had learned from writing – about White Pines and what had happened and why the chickens were coming home to roost in places of the past in the far north that were at one time to me as close to perfect summer day places as was that picture, for a time, of the dark clearing in Hobbema’s woods.

Twenty-three eventful, life-changing years later I am in the Met. It is not like that time when I had been there nearly every day and when in my apartment my lampshades had been lined with the colored buttons you wore to prove you had paid the Met’s entrance fee, which could be anything at all if you had not been fooled into believing a big fee was mandated rather than a donation of even a tiny amount. Since I had often been in there many days in a row back then, and without writing had had no income source, I decided a quarter was enough – until I saw students walking away because they did not have the supposed fee, after which I cut my entrance payments to a single cent.

And now after so much change and expansion in my life, I was back. There had been changes in the past year or two in the Met, though none of the changes as substantive as the curators probably thought, for it still had the same paintings. The brightly colored modern eras ones in the redone American Wing were now arranged in a silly way crowded together in numbered glass cases. But the Hobbema was where it had always been and I went straight to it, and again, like the day and night 23 years ago, it had become a different painting.

I saw light now in that village woodland clearing. Light I could have forgotten. I saw a warm glow. But there on the left was a vague, brown and black, hut-like dwelling so vague and dingy it must have to do with the intrusion of death.

Looked at more closely, that dwelling, too, was glowing.

The Aqua Mustang 88 – INQUISITOR

2009-06-10T10:27:00.005-05:00

I had gone there like a roving, incognito inquisitor, out to get the goods on these people. And I was also finding how much I loved the place, and even how much I longed for the person I had been. My wanting to get back to that person was a part of why I was roaming this mountain countryside. I told myself I was there only to convince the guilty, whether alive or dead. I enjoyed my new anger, railing in these meetings I went to about the people of this past of mine that I had tried to sugarcoat, then tried to ignore, then tried to forget. But now I wanted to remember. Oh God I enjoyed the anger, I enjoyed railing at these people I had once loved almost as if they were in front of me. I called them betrayers. I said they had broken my heart. I cataloged the damage. Whatever it was that had happened back in the White Mountains, there has to be an explanation there for suicide and sexual convolution and molestation and all the rest that was now, so many years later, coming to light in the present. Not knowing exactly what those people to whom we entrusted ourselves had done, I said they all belonged in jail for whatever it was.

Though concrete evidence was sketchy. I was much taken with a young woman, Michelle, in these meetings whose father was a therapist who had turned his practice into a dictatorial cult. I cheered her rage. She said she was looking for evidence. And meanwhile her life had taken a different turn, for she was living in a community of very liberal sisters of St. Joseph nuns. It was a place of safety in the midst of all the change going on – for like me what she had pretended was the best place in the world in which to come of age had become the most dangerous of all possible places. Surely a chamber of horrors. But She need cleared views, clear memories of what had happened to her.

“I want the visuals.” She said.

I wanted the visual too, and I nearly had them and then I would be distracted by other clear memories of the White Mountains, the clouds that sat on Lafayette, the northern birds, and those lawns at White Pines with white, in-ground bird bathes, where I had waded as a soon as I could walk, as documented by my grandfather with a what he called his Kodak, which had a bellows that pushed the lens closer to what was being photographed.

The sounds of northern nature, the hum of the deep woods. The times the mountains looked green, not cold gray and blue, and gave the feeling in life that you got when looking at old postcards that had the mountains on linen stock and they looked so very soft, and safe – for on these postcards, as in some memories, you did not see the craggy granite cliffs, nor the avalanche scars.

But the cool mountain mornings in mid-summer, with fires in the evening in late August.

The awe they all expressed a the very thought of my celebrated grandfather Gaga. And my grandmother Nana a leader too, and kind. And everyone spoke of her too with awe – except their old housekeeper Mrs. Miner whom I have just found – or who just found me, after all those years and who is so clear about what happened, and why she had to leave that world, but keeps keep stopping just short of filling in the final details.

The Aqua Mustang 87 – GIRL

2009-06-03T11:27:00.002-05:00

I was here in this particular present and at the same time feeling I was here in my past as I stood outside the house called White Wings. White Wings, where I had spent summers when I was three and four years old at the end of the 1930s. I was leaning up now, speaking to this familiar, now graying woman Mickie, dressed in the clothes she wore for cleaning her barn, her face strained with the annoyance of a marijuana hangover. I saw her at this moment in her work clothes, and I could also see her as a spirited girl in a bathing suit halter, a flirtatious smile continuing the perhaps unintentionally taunting promise of her partially bare young body.

In her middle age version now she was standing on the upstairs outside walkway that connected the house’s two wings. And though this was 1986, it was just as much the summer of 1951 when Mickie was 14, just a touch younger than me, and Mickie’s parents had come in from Grosse point to put the finishing touches on their new summer house, which had been one of our summer houses, and she was such an appealing and promising girl, so smooth, as cute as she was sinuous, her legs, her breasts, a seeming avatar of a new sphere I might enter. At that time I had recently had my first experiences with puppy love, and also had begun masturbating, and had not till Mickie’s arrival in the mountains seen much connection between the two.

Behind me right now were the familiar mountains of the Franconia range. They were partially obscured by trees that had been allowed to grow freely by the raw outsider who now owned the infinite acres of White Pines, the biggest of our family’s old formal houses. And yet I could see the mountains as if they were not yet blocked by untamed trees, see this old view in this present as if I were in the deep past when the woods were more controlled.

To my left was the wing that had been my grandfather’s writing place, near which no one could talk for the great man might be in the midst of another formidable novel. It was the only part of the house they had substantially changed when Mickie’s family came in from Grosse Point – this family that the old-time summer people treated with some suspicion, as they did with anyone new. But I didn’t care what anyone thought about Mickie’s parents.

They had ripped apart this forbidding place where the great man had worked in silence, and they had had the floors sanded to light shiny wood, and the old dark wall paper had been removed and everything painted white and the place had been dedicated not to an old writer but to gorgeous Mickie and her little brother. It was not like the children’s ghetto houses that the old families had, not like the Boys’ Wing down at White Pines. It was somehow a part of a bigger world, a world beyond these summer places.

That was then. Now in this time I was still seeing the young Mickie while leaning up to talk with this rough aging woman version of Mickie on the walkway. The wing that had been light was now dark again. The walls inside were now gray and splintery. There was a country person’s old wood stove there now. The floor was encrusted with dirt, and a dozen dogs were in residence, and also a young handyman whom Mickie had brought to her bed, saving him from abuse on one of the sparse local farms, which had mongrel cows on rented rocky land and no money even to maintain silos.

To Mickie’s left, as she stood on the walkway, my right from down below, was the shuttered main wing. Her mother talked on the phone almost daily from her latest rehab in Michigan to the one-man Sugar Hill police force to get reassurance that Mickie, though living here now, would be arrested if she broke into that main wing.

And that part of the house had not changed, as I found when we broke into the wing together. They had lived in it but kept it as a museum honoring the same past my grandparents worshipped. A complete set of Gaga’s books was in there. The same wallpaper – a pattern of pagodas – had been preserved from some distant time when Nana had been on the crest of new things and decorated their houses with fashionable chinoiserie. Out front was a new replica of the old striped awning that I remembered.

And the mountain air was as refreshing as ever, and it had the sent of balsam, and the northern birds still sang the songs of their brief summertimes.

The Aqua Mustang 86 – JEWS

2009-05-28T11:46:00.000-05:00

It was like living in the underground, as if I were in occupied territory and could not let on what I thought of the occupiers. The occupiers in this case were the nicest, sometimes wittiest, always correct members of the summer crowd here in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Most but not all of them were Republican. But none seemed to have any social connection to the other Republicans, the year-round people, whom they sometimes ridiculed by imitating their Yankee accents. And moreover, all of the summer people, it seemed back then, were anti-Semitic.

My non-identical twin brother Peter, known in the family then as the good boy, the smart boy, the boy whose “cute sayings” were passed on by dignified old Southern ladies to each other, starting with our material grandmother, who unlike our paternal grandmother was not a full-scale landed member of the old summer community but was, rather, one of the old Southern ladies on the porch at the sprawling Sunset Hill House Hotel, whose clientele had been basically Southern since Southern ladies started coming here in hay fever season in the previous century. This Southern grandmother would pass on
little Peter’s latest, and it would go from wicker chair lady to wicker chair lady. I tried not to let them see how shy I was, much less how hurt I was to be overlooked, and this included trying not to let my face show what I was really thinking.

On Sunday at mid-morning the ladies of the Sunset, with white cloves and lace-lined print dresses and fine summer hats, would walk down the hill to a small Episcopalian summer church, St. Matthew’s, where my parents – my father from the landed people, my mother from the hotel guests and renters – had been married, and which was the bailiwick of my other grandmother, who was so far from being Southern that she talked with an English accent, that mysterious affectation that passes among those who use it as American upper class. This other grandmother ran the church’s affairs. And Peter and I would be dressed each Sunday in ties and pressed shorts and sent along with her so that we could take up the collection. I think I knew what was going on the first time I realized that, in a part of the service, the tune from My Country T'is of Thee was used with the words to God Save the King.

Peter and I would go for walks with our grandfather, Gaga, each of us carrying canes we picked out of the cane rack at the spacious entry room to White Pines, the biggest of the family’s’ formal houses – these places set well apart from the overall rural poverty, these places where they dressed for dinner in tuxedos to and evening gowns. We would go up our long twisting driveway through White Pine woods that had been planted by our grandparents and then continue along Davis Road, a dirt road on which the other three big family house’s, plus the caretaker's barn and living quarters, were situated, and on through White Birch woods, past the driveway to the estate of Gaga’s old Princeton roommate, Otto Mallery, a place where they had apartments above their long garage for the many black servants that they brought with them each summer from Philadelphia.

Yet the road still felt to Peter and me like it was in the wild North Woods until, at the top, it reached St. Matthew’s summer church, and then a paved road that quickly came to a turn for the Sunset Hill House.

I was only 10 then but I knew what was going on a when a nice looking couple stopped there and asked my grandfather for directions to a good hotel and he told them there were no hotels in the area, even though this was right by a sign pointing towards the Sunset Hill House.

Perhaps this was the beginning of my life in the underground. Because my grandfather saw what was on my face, and he arranged for a rare one-on-one session with me the next day to explain that it had to be this way because, he said, a Jew will be unfair, he will work harder than another fellow and take that fellow’s job away.

The Aqua Mustang 85 – HOW LIKE HOME

2009-05-15T10:41:00.000-05:00

A world of privilege was how it was sometimes described by people from the outside, as if they were waifs, their noses pressed against the window of a candy store. Privilege, a word I never associated with my past, no matter how it might have appeared to outsiders. A word that in my mind was applicable to costume drama or the sort of cruel flaunting of great wealth amidst desperate poverty that I had seen on my last trip to the Philippines.

I had many non-political feelings for the Philippines, the land of a girl I had loved and from whom I was recently divorced. Such feelings, even though my last trip there, three years back, has been for purposes of exposing it. Or maybe, I was thinking now, for purposes of covering up what I might find if I probed closer to home.

The rarefied summer world version of the White Mountains, that region for which I had until recently believed I mainly felt nostalgia, had been pretty much, though not completely, wiped out. In recent months in New York I had reveled in my new found fury as I put myself in places where I could shout about things I had once thought no worse than slightly snobbish and naively pretentious.

This change of perspective in looking at the past that changed everything. These memories still developing now in Vermont – the anti-New Hampshire – and in quick forays to the other side of the Vermont-New Hampshire border as I criss-crossed scenes in that world that may have once seemed ideal – a perfect summer day sort of world – a past world that now could be in darkness.

This border, across which I had fled in my mind carrying with me the family secrets that I would turn over to what had been the enemy. The regular people.

I had shouted about it, but I couldn’t find the words as these past scenes swirled round in my head while I was driving near or right into the middle of the literal places where these old family scenes had taken place.

It did not seem strange to me that for 30 years I had gone to such lengths to stay out of New Hampshire. Recently when shouting before sympathetic “adult children” groups I had actually said “my heart is breaking,” said it while feeling the words came from outside of me or from forgotten places. But even now when I turned my car north I also felt my heart leap.

I was glad I did not have to oversimplify these feelings with written words. I was living in a mostly visual world now, thinking seriously of taking up visual art and meanwhile looking and looking at these landscapes the way in the city I had been looking at Hobbema and Gorky and Matisse and Deibenkorn. Almost freed from words.

It was only three years now since the last time I was in Manila, dividing my days between the grandiose world of facades constructed by the rulers and the often deceptive worlds of their opponents, with whom I was allied. I was allied with the opposition in part out of conviction and in part out of ambition since I had a book contract to write about the horrors of this martial law place, the Philippines. For these purposes, I pretended to be take the rulers seriously. I approached them as if I wanted in my writing to celebrate what I pretended were their great deeds – as I had pretended once when with Somoza in Nicaragua, and other times when with Kissinger’s pro-consul ambassadors in Southeast Asia. And yet I knew that they knew.

I had friends from the past in Manila, who now had government ties, and while drinking told me what they knew about me, which was far more than Philippine intelligence alone could have known. It seemed clear I had been followed from New York to California to Manila and back. And yet, I and the powerful Philippine authorities I interviewed played a game. I pretending to be a mere hat-in-hand journalist, they pretending to believe me.

And soon it got wildly dangerous, for soon they were killing the people they and I both knew I was allied with.

How like, it was coming to seem in this summer of exploration, how like what I was doing now in the White Mountains –like what I had done time and again over the years while getting myself into these literal wartime situations

The Aqua Mustang 84 – WRITER’S FEE

2009-05-14T09:11:00.004-05:00

At Penthouse they had given me money for what I knew they hoped would be a celebration of the egregious sex lives of the recently departed Philippine dictator and his greedy wife. What I actually gave them was an angry political piece linking the Marcoses to the Reagans. But they had paid me anyway, perhaps because the editor involved was coked up when he made the assignment. By now I had lost all interest in being published, but the fee was financing my summer in northern New England – my investigation not of the ruins of the Philippines but the ruins of the family I came from.

For the never to be published Penthouse piece I had flown to California and spent time with the same New People’s Army representatives who had recently helped me get with outlaws in the islands for the book my old friend Max Vanzi and I wrote on the horrors of what America’s free world co-conspirators had wrought. It was only two years since the book came out, though the publishing phase of my life now seemed as tucked away in a safe compartment as had recently seemed the New Hampshire part of my past life.

The news that the dictator has fled came at the start of this year as I was plunging into the hunt for what had happened in the past. From my place in Chelsea I did a radio interview by phone with some talk show guy in California. Towards the end of the interview I had popped a new kind of sleeping pill, and I realized the next morning that I was not quite sure about what I had said. Something to examine in my life. Getting free of alcohol, and now getting the goods on those who were not, did not take care of all such problems.

But anyway the Philippine situation was out of the way, and I had nothing more pressing then the family story, and yet there were links. Vermont in this turning point summer of 1986 was the antithesis of that crowded, Southeast Asian nation, which had its music and sometimes grace but treated it poor in a way that could please American Republicans. And it was a place where left-wing or merely liberal opponents of the regime were often put to death, including a principal character of our book, Ninoy Aquino, and where the rampaging Philippine Constabulary had recently staged village square beheadings to terrorize the people. A hot and crowded place of often eager and often graceful people, a wild place of sybaritic drifting that played against the knife-edge politics.

Which brought me back to the hunt I was on. If Vermont was the antithesis of the Philippines, it was also now, to me, the antithesis what lay on its eastern boarder – New Hampshire, the place where I had come of age in my many early summers in the White Mountains – the magic family place where I had once thought myself secure and felt myself happy.

And the White Mountains area was only an hour north of the gentler New Hampshire lake country, were I had gone to a small anglophile boarding school, Holderness – which, by all accepted lore about such places should have been the site of great cruelty, which in some ways it was, but it was also the place where, away from family for the first time, I first began to get clear on who I was and what I might be.

Not that I ever forgot what lay to the north. As even now with so many years between me and those days, the White Mountains was always on the horizon.

The Aqua Mustang 83 – A CLASS MATTER

2009-05-09T09:12:00.002-05:00

Among the rare times I wore my private’s uniform in public was when I was traveling by train, for the uniform meant you paid half price. On one trip up from Atlanta, where I was stationed, there was a loud drunk with a week’s stubble and foul breath who was bothering the passengers, changing seats, talking and talking, sometimes making what seemed to be threats. After he got off the train, an old lady said to me, “I wasn’t worried. I knew we had a soldier with us.”

The uniform gave me some perspective. People who went to boarding schools and the right sorts of colleges dressed differently from everyone else. Most of the time when I was in public I wore a necktie, and virtually all the time I would be in a tweed sport jacket when I was not in a suit. But when I got on a train in uniform some people smiled at me as if I were one of their own, and train conductors called me “chief,” not “sir.” Usually this felt like an attack on who I really was, but sometimes, curiously, it made me curious proud.

Less than a year after Princeton, still a civilian, I was on a Greyhound bus coming up from Miami to New York. It was the last leg of what I considered my first of many big foreign adventures, this first one my failed attempt to get to Fidel Castro in the Sierra Maestre. On the bus I sat beside a retired machinist from Queens. Behind me there was a pale but vigorous young couple drinking beer. A couple of prissy passengers told them to stop opening beer cans, but they paid no attention and the driver did not involved. I was thinking how great to be an ordinary person drinking beer on a bus with your girlfriend. I had just had a lonely night in raw Miami B-girl bars, wishing I were back in Cuba.

The retired machinist talked about this great thing he had done. He had gone to Sea World. I did not tell him that I myself always avoided the tourist gags.

Out of the blue he started talking about the army. Everyone was still getting drafted even now that the Korean war was well over and there did not seem to be any more wars in sight. He was talking about how the sergeants were harsh and unfair but their attitude was part of a plan, for it was important to give the troops a really rough time in order to toughen them up,

I had said nothing about myself up till now – certainly not that I had been trying to join a rebel leader but had been caught by Batista soldiers and had had to settle for Hemingwayesque adventures in small fishing boats, and for nights with cheap rum and ripe girls. But I did tell him how while still away (implying I had been in Florida, not Cuba) my father in Connecticut had sent along my draft notice.

He spoke now in an usually kindly way – this working class man – about how I could make my army time into a great opportunity, how I could let the army teach me a trade and thus be set for life when I came out.

I did not tell him that I had already started a career as a journalist, and was busy writing novels, and had recently graduated from Princeton, and planned all sorts of adventurous travel. And I did not tell him I planned to hold on to my summer base in the White Mountains of New Hampshire.

I was proud that I was able to fool him.

The Aqua Mustang 82 – PAST PERSON IV

2009-05-07T10:20:00.000-05:00

That crucial summer that Gaga was in the Boy’s Wing and we were after real, not virtual, girls, Mrs. Miner had been replaced by Evelyn, a bustling and cheerfully garrulous woman of no clearly discernable age or origin. She had been hired in the city, where Nana had just set up on her own what she had planned, before Gaga’s stroke, to be their new winter quarters, an Upper East Side apartment that seemed to have as much of his presence in it as did the summer houses, though it was an apartment he never saw.

Evelyn was as nurturing as Mrs. Miner, though they were very different. Whereas Mrs. Minor had since the beginning of time been rooted in Sugar Hill, Evelyn seemed to be vaguely from some place in the West Indies. She seemed to be white, but they could not be sure. She talked freely and rapidly in tones that did indicate some place foreign, but the accent did not identify that place. As a child I did not know Mrs. Miner’s first name. As an adolescent I did not know Evelyn’s last name.

Whatever her origins, after she moved into Nana’s tiny maid’s room she settled so quickly into Nana’s life that it was if she had been around our family for many years. When she was serving she tended to enter into conversations going on at the formal city and country dining tables She gave her ideas freely as she circled the table, not hesitating to correct Nana if she thought Nana had gotten some fact or incident wrong.

On 66th Street she also became part of the scene beyond Nana’s apartment. She became a regular at a mysterious place – the big ornate Catholic church on the other side of 66th Street.

Evelyn seemed instantly to be as devoted to all of us – Nana’s children and grandchildren, especially my brother Peter and me – as Mrs. Miner had been. She did not make the same maple sugar cakes that Mrs. Miner made, which were smooth-cornered abbreviated cylinders with golden brown maple sugar icing on the sides as well as the tops. But I was quite happy with Evelyn’s version of maple sugar cakes, which were larger and more like conventional cupcakes, with icing that was white and only on the top, but with the same haunting maple sugar taste that was as much a part of my childhood mountain summers as was the feel of mountain air and the smell of balsam and the pine and wood smell in the souvenir stores at the Flume and the Tramway and by Profile Lake down below the Old Man of the Mountains. Those stores had wonderful common people’s things they said I should not enjoy, such toy tomahawks and balsam-filled pillows that had pictures of the Old Man on them with the words “For you I pine and balsam.”

When the summer parties for kids in our gang began, Evelyn saw to it that Peter and I looked sharp. The first summer when we were sniffing around Mickie Nana had noticed our sweat T shirts and given us a jar of Mum deodorabt. But this next year was different. Nearly every day Evelyn washed and dried and pressed my white and light blue cotton cord suit and Peter’s white and tan one. She was bound up in our coming of age, whereas Mrs. Miner had been on the childhood side of our lives.

And now so many years later I am at White Wings again. Evelyn has been dead for twenty years. But Mrs. Miner is very alive and I am suddenly on equal terms with her – equal terms with someone whose crucial connections are right here in the White Mountains, not Boston, not New York, not Baltimore, not some suburb like Scarsdale or Grosse Point, not some vague island.

And among the scenes swimming in my head as I stand outside White Wings with Mickie and Mrs. Miner and Gracy is one in which I am on a single car train of the old Boston & Maine Railroad from Boston’s North Station that takes Peter and me on the final lap of our return to Plymouth, New Hampshire, where the Holderness School is located. This old passenger car has a coal stove burning inside it. I am hearing the talk of two dowdy New Hampshire sounding women who are seated behind me. One is telling the other about marriage and money difficulties in her life. “Sometimes I feel so blue,” she says, and I feel a little uneasy and a little bit privileged to be so close to someone of a different species speaking in a language I have encountered only in mundane movies and radio plays. Following the family, I make myself feel repulsed by ordinary people, though always I am at the same time excited and almost wishing I were in their world rather than ours.

All those people from different worlds so close to our world, yet their local New England people’s world as distant from us as the world of summering Jews – who, though not at the center since the biggest hotels were “restricted,” came up here anyway, for they were welcomed by innkeepers and landlords in less strict mountain towns, including one not 10 miles away that was called Bethlehem, a place apparently dedicated to catering to Jewish people. We did not know how they talked, but cruel summer kids had made up a language for them – some of these kids driving into Bethlehem and fingering items in the summer stores and saying to each other “Fee-yaps,” which was how, they had decided, penny pinching Jews would talk. Sometimes speeding through Bethlehem at night shouting “Fee-yaps!” from their families’ cars.

And here now was Mrs. Miner, who, with Gracy, was more foreign even then the Jews. Mrs. Miner and Gracy stepping out of the past. Or was it me entering the past? Mrs. Miner were here as a guest, not as hired help sending village girls out from the kitchen to serve us after we had placed our finger bowls with their little round doilies correctly above and to the left of our place settings – the left also the side at which we were offered the platters of abundant food, for some reason quite Germanic, that was so unlike the more meager fare I was used to in Connecticut.

And now I was on this old car of the Boston & Maine, actually inside what might be part of a movie or radio play. And now years later I blink at I stand in front of White Wings and I am dealing directly with people heretofore as remote as actors seen in a darkened theater.

And they are speaking this language in which I had long ago heard the words about feeling blue. And both Mrs. Miner and Gracy, so very alive at they talk about the past. And now they are using a term I had never heard before. This word “buzzing” passing their lips in New England accented form.

I added it to my vocabulary in the only way new words enter my vocabulary, which is not because I look them up in a dictionary but rather because I catch the meaning instantly from the context in which they are used. The context here made it clear that buzzing was another word for fucking.

The Aqua Mustang 81 – OUT OF NOWHERE

2009-05-05T10:41:00.002-05:00

It was all too easy to see something happening suddenly that would ruin everything. Gaga joked about alcoholic danger. A very light drinker himself, as opposed to his brothers-in-law and his children, and soon me though not Peter, Gaga thought it was the funniest thing in the world that the driver of a car hurtling down three-mile hill from Franconia Notch down to Franconia Village and Sugar Hill, this drunk driver turned to the drunk passenger beside him and said, “But I thought you were the one who was driving."

And it was no joke that at a curve in the road halfway down three-mile hill there was a high pile of big rocks put in place by a man whose house sat there, and before the pile there had been occasions when a car would crash right onto his porch, sometimes right into his living room. And afterwards there had been fatalities with cars crashing into the rocks rather than into his house behind the rocks.

On the trails up the higher mountains, trails that crossed great avalanche scars, there were crosses where hikers had been killed by hurtling rocks or sudden winter storms which here could come out of nowhere even in midsummer.

All of our houses had plenty of lightning rods, and there were plenty of stories about people being struck dead by lightning. There was a recurring story of something that happened at White Pines with lightning that would have been amusing if not for the lightning deaths that were always on the horizon. One evening a ball of lightning had come down the chimney at the living room end of the great main room and had shot the length of that room, which in my mind was at least 100 feet, and had then gone up the opposite chimney in the fireplace at the dining room end.

It was common, they said, for boys to cut themselves on rusty nails and get blood poisoning. Often when that happened they died. My father’s best boyhood had died that way. My father himself did not die when he cut himself on a rusty nail, but he was an invalid for a couple of years afterwards, taken away by a family friend to recuperate in Atlantic City, which in these circles was a staid winter resort, not a raucous summer resort. And he still had a slight limp, and it was enough to keep him out of the draft when the war started and millions were getting killed.

And oh yes, the bears. The mother bears. You would probably want to go up and pat a cute little baby bear if you saw one, and if you did the mama bear would claw you to death. Everyone knew someone, or knew someone who knew someone, who had been clawed to death here in the White Mountains. These fatal things would come from nowhere and, no matter how carefully you had planned, destroy everything in blood and pain.

And now there was something else coming from nowhere that was just as mysterious and just as shocking. Suddenly to be taken out of myself by these summer girls and the summer boys, who never caught on to what I had been in school.

Something from nowhere, my sudden popularity.

The Aqua Mustang 80 – PAST PERSON III

2009-05-02T10:36:00.000-05:00

I had been confident that I did not need evidence beyond what I was receiving from deep inside myself, but evidence would not hurt, and no one could provide it better than Mrs. Miner, this woman who had appeared out a time in the past when she had been cook and housekeeper, first at White Wings and then at White Pines.

There had never been a clear explanation for why Mrs. Miner left. A version I would hear from my mother was that Auntie Alice had, back then, enticed Mrs. Miner’s then grown son, Raymond Jr., into her bed. That was Mother’s version, but it was not an explanation from the top, for Nana never said a word to us about why Mrs. Miner was gone. And I had nearly given up looking for answers to things that would not be answered – such as why there were cries and scurrying in the night, and why death felt so close so much of the time, and why Mother and Dad were so often angry, and what had been going on in that Pullman drawing room where I knew, when not quite two years old, that my own world would end in horror.

We had not known Mrs. Miner had gone until one year Mother and Dad dropped Peter and me off for another White Pines summer. This was the summer when I was about to turn 15 and Gaga was glassy eyed and speechless from his stroke, wheeled out twice a day from the back of the house, the Boys’ Wing. Wheeled out wearing his old brown tweed peaked hat and wrapped in a steamer blanket by a male nurse whose mouth was twisted in a leer and whose arms were covered with sailors’ tattoos. Gaga living now in the Boys’ Wing with the least likely of all figures to appear at a family summer house in the White Mountains.

Yet the summer rarely did feel like a dark time. For it was also the summer of discovering actual girls. The previous summer I had begun masturbating to virtual girls – especially Darling Jill on page 47 in a dog-eared copy of Erskin Caldwell’s God’s Little Acre, which when I left in late August I forgot was in its hiding place, a folded up cot in a corner in the Boys’ Wing. It bothered me that they must have found it when the wing was converted for the stroke-addled version of Gaga. But I was confident that if they found it they would pretend they hadn’t, for sex came into the open no more at White Pines than it was in the staid novels Gaga wrote.

Actually this next summer, with Gaga paralyzed, seemed in memory a light and happy time. Not least because at the end of a 20-minute walk up the long winding driveway and over on Davis Road to White Wings was this amazing, smooth tanned young girl with a puppy face and a budding body – Mickie McKnight. A year ago her parents had come in from Grosse Point and bought White Wings. And now they had brought Mickie and her little brother Donnie with them from Grosse Point to take up summer residence here. They kept the main wing looking exactly as it had when Gaga was alive, right down to the old wallpaper with Chinese pagodas.

It was like a museum, which was the opposite of how they handled the other wing of White Wings, which had been Gaga’s work area before they built White Pines and sometimes afterwards when they summered here for, as usual, unexplained reasons. I had been happily astounded by that Mickie’s parents had done. Here in Gaga’s former work area they had had the old dark wood floor turned into a polished light wood floor, and they had had old wallpaper in that wing ripped out, and the newly bare walls painted a cheerful white. This wing where you had had to tiptoe around so as not to disturb the old man while he was writing, this dark wing that had been kept in silence, had now become an airy place for young people.

Their refurbishing it for Mickie and her little brother Donny did not seem the same thing as the old families’ having areas like the Boys’ Wing, sometimes small separate cottages, for their children. This, it seemed clear, was something new to the mountains. And it seemed to me transformative. At some point most days now Peter and I would walk up to visit Mickie here.

One evening when we came back, sweaty from another long summer day, Nana had come to our room, which this year was a regular guest room in the mains part of the house. She gave us a jar of Mum deodorant and told us what to do with it. Deodorant was needed, she said, now that we were seeing young ladies.

And Mickie was not the only young summer lady coming into her own in the mountains. All our lives we had known the children of old Mrs. Gibbs who were close to our age, and they too were now in puberty. At a swimming hole we went to I gently teased Louisa from Boston, who was stately and tanned, and I also flirted with a pretty, open faced blonde girl, Alice from Baltimore, who had been my favorite in our early days. Louisa and I decided to write each other when we returned to our boarding schools. I was actually in the world – at last!.

On days we did not go up to White Wings we phoned Mickie from the telephone room, which contained a genealogy chart showing our origins, which included our being related to old Mrs. Gibbs and her grandchildren. Above the phone there was a small framed reproduction of a stylized naked woman rising from a clam shell. A naked woman even in this house where sex was not mentioned any more than it has been in Gaga’s careful, celebrated novels.

The phone, like so much else in the White Pines world, seemed to be from another century. It included a polished wooden box attached to the wall above a half desk. It had a crank handle on the side and what looked like a prone bicycle bell on top. You talked into an open cone on the front of the box, and listened with an ear piece that could be hooked to the side. There was no dial. You picked up the ear piece, turned the crank, which rang the bell here and alerted the phone company office, and the Sugar Hill operator would come on. She could get you anyone in Sugar Hill if you just gave the name, no number needed. Nana talked of how the operator kept track of who was having dinner at whose house.

At the start of the conversation Mickie would always say, “How is Mr. Poole?” We had no answers for that since Gaga was hardly part of the world now. We saw him only when the nurse wheeled him out to sit in the sun on the view side of the great house. But after an awkward moment we talked about ourselves and the others our age.

There were these other girls, including the two, Louisa and Alice, on the genealogy chart. And there were two other young girls, kind of pretty already but so young they still had spindly legs, that Nana invited to White Pines for an awkward lunch one day with Peter and me. We and the girls could not figure out what this was supposed to be about. But Mickie! I knew what they was about. A year younger than me but so lush, rounded already and with actual breasts behind an actual bra beneath her tee shirt. I had never in life seen a girl I thought so appealing, not even the gorgeous, precocious blonde girl in our 8th grade class who the previous winter had been exchanging letters with my more confident twin brother.

Up till now Peter had always been the focus of attention. But in this new version of White Wings I managed to place myself at the center. I did card tricks for Mickie, and especially for her younger brother so that she would look on and admire me, whether I fooled her or not. In lonely days in boarding school I had been teaching myself card manipulation from books I ordered from the Johnson-Smith novelty catalog. I could do full waterfalls, just like slick gamblers in the Westerns. With a two-handed pass, I could restore a cut deck, faster than the eye could see, to its previous stacked form. I was also getting good at the much more rare one-handed pass. And I could flip a card around to the back of my hand while making a throwing gesture, giving the illusion that I had made it disappear. I was an expert entertainer in the summer, which seemed as mysterious as why I had been such a shy introvert in the winter.

One evening Mickie’s father was giving us a ride back to White Pines in their station wagon. I was in the back seat, and Peter in the area behind it. In the dark he began, in whispers, pleading with me, which was something new, and I could see he was crying. He was so justifiably upset that I had hogged Mickie’s attention – though it seemed a fair balancing of our accounts in this hard world in which he had seemed so often to have all the attention.

The Aqua Mustang 79 – PAST PERSON II

2009-04-29T11:15:00.002-05:00

“So you and Gracie come right over,” Ellen said, then called down to me, “Mrs. Miner’s coming.”

And there was no way I could leave now. And I remembered why I was here – this search to discover what had happened in the deep dark past in this formal community of big Waspy summer house compounds – the hunt I was on, like an avenger, to get the goods on those people of the past. And find out why the cousins who had been there with me in the deep past were now coming to such horrible ends – suicides and molestations and incesting – it had to be connected to things way back then.

I had not thought Mrs. Milner would still be alive. It was forty years since I had seen her, forty years since her mysterious disappearance from our lives, this rock solid figure of my childhood. She had been at While Wings the two summers I had been there when I was five and six years old, long before my grandparents sold it to Ellen’s Grosse Point parents. But mostly I remembered Mrs. Miner from the biggest, most formal house, White Pines, remembered her as the cook and the woman who ran everything. And was always nice and always had snacks for me and never with lectures about being too thin or too fat. This local New England woman who, I suddenly thought now, was the equivalent of those black nannies in the South who were more like mothers to the segregated white children than were the children’s birth mothers. My mother’s family was Southern, and although she grew up in Long Beach, Long Island, she had told me the only thing she could remember from the first decade of her life was a servant looking down at her in her baby carriage.

And in my mind now, while standing in front of White Wings, I was suddenly in a scene in the area in the back of the commodious White Pines kitchen, on the way to the Boy’s Wing where male children were meant to stay, this area with a big round oilcloth covered table where the servants ate and joked, beside a pantry stuffed to the ceiling with non-perishable food, and containing the glass enclosed box where a number would drop down if someone in the non-servants part of the upstairs pressed a button. I knew that 20 something years ago Ellen, when between marriages and denied more family funds, had worked with Mrs. Miner one season closing up summer people’s houses for the winter. But I never thought that now she would still be alive, much less that I would ever see her. And there was immediately something very familiar and even comforting about her. And I was in another scene back there at the oilcloth table where the servants ate. It was at a point in mid-summer when my mother, whom I had not seen since they dropped us off at the summer’s start, had just arrived back up in the mountains, and came in looking for me, and I could not think of who this woman was.

Mrs. Miner, vital still though probably near 90, appeared now in this present with her daughter Gracy, a quick-witted wiry recent cancer survivor, whom I did not remember until I was reminded that when the guest count at the big formal dining table reached 13, Gracy would be brought in and seated at place number 14 so that no one would have to eat at a table that might carry bad luck.

And I remembered why I remembered what I did, for Mrs. Miner spoke now of how much of the time I had been banned from the family part of the house, usually she said for being blamed for things I had not done but often were done by my brother or not done at all. ( She never liked my brother, she said she said now, and she also said that she’d never liked two of my first cousins, Robin and Fitz John, each the good little boy in his family

And she said, here in mountain sunlight in front of White Wings, “I have always wanted to find you, I have felt so bad about all the things that happened back then.”

The Aqua Mustang 78 – PAST PERSON I

2009-04-28T11:05:00.002-05:00

Living in that family and in those places was at times almost unbearably real and awful and wonderful, and at other times like living in the made up stories of a novel, which may or may not have been because at the center of all myths about that family was a novelist who sometimes wrote from life but also made up or altered his stories. That my grandfather has been a very successful novelist was always in the air, both when he was alive and after he was dead.

I am about to leave on my second morning staying here with Ellen, who in her marijuana haze was unreachable. I don’t smoke it much anymore and I do not drink at all, and now here with the smells of new mown hay grass and pine, and the sounds of northern birds, here in front of White Wings on a field leading to woods which now block to our view of the Franconia Range mountains, which I do not need to see to believe. And here with birds and fields and pines in the air I feel much as I would in a dark bar in which I would be the only one not drinking, the only one who notices the stale beer scent mixed with the scents of urine and vomit. Ellen has stopped drinking too, but she does it with the help of a drug, which most days she starts smoking when she awakes. So this morning I cannot reach her.

This is not a place for me. I leave fast in the Mustang, and all of a sudden forget everything except the beauty around me. I go past the Iris Farm, the most picturesque of all the farms, set against the mountain backdrop. I was taken there as a child to see the cows. And then I am in Franconia village, eating a big happy breakfast with a cup of coffee that gets refilled by one of those pretty local girls whom I could see when very young but the other missed because in the family novel the New England of non-summer people was the land of homely girls. She refills it before I finish it. And I can smell her.

I get gas at a gas station that is the successor to the station I used when I first had my license and was lectured by the craggy owner, Chuck Vintner, about my speeding. The stodgy maroon Plymouth station wagon I had borrowed from the family would, after the his lecture, never go as fast as I wanted. I suspected that Vintner had put a governor on the motor.

I go back now to White Wings, ready to pack up and leave for good. I see Ellen’s old Volkswagen convertible, left over from one of her marriages, is still here. And when I am in front of the house. I can hear her on the phone. She is carrying the phone on the narrow upstairs terrace that connects the two wings, her wing which has a woodstove and about a dozen dogs, and her always absent mother’s locked wing that is kept like a museum from my infancy when I spent two summer there, kept almost just as it was to honor my grandfather, who is the main celebrity in this region – not counting Bette Davis who was here for a time and actually rented the Farm House one summer, the Farm House, which is now my brother Peter’s house.

I hear Ellen saying “You’ll never guess who’s here.”

The Aqua Mustang 77 – BIGGEST STORY?

2009-04-21T10:44:00.003-05:00

Was this, I wondered, my biggest story? When I was a writer, which I was certain I no longer wanted to be, I had never gone near what I was I putting together now – what was coming out now in memories raised by this brief sexual affair or obsession with Gillian in the week I was no longer alone in my tour of the old sites, the place where happy memories were raised as I drove about the White mountains alone checking out the key places of what seemed key events in my early life – and also awful memories as I drove about the White Mountains looking for and finding increasingly more evidence of what I had been putting together this year – of dark things I had never admitted to that surely must have something to do with why so many people from that time, especially the cousins who like me had spent their summers up here in the family places when young, were coming now to such bad ends in the present while still very far from actual old age. Suicide and molestation and cancer that they seemed to invite.

Why what I had thought, without probing, had been times of light and happiness now seemed times of darkness – actually, though the evidence was not all in yet, times of far more deadly danger than I had known in the very dangerous places –bloodthirsty Papa Doc Duvalier’s Haiti, bloodthirsty General Suharto’s Indonesia – where I had spent most of the years afterwards. Where had this word bloodthirsty come form? Was it the term that belonged here in this family place, these mountains.

And why was I drawn here even now when I knew that it was not a place for me and maybe never had been? Knew that I had mistakenly harbored the idea that it was my place. Why did my spirit leap when I turned my car north from the city up the familiar roads to northern New England?

And why was I so aware of things I had forgotten that did not necessarily fit with darkness and danger – those long yellow rays of winter light in the New Hampshire summer, the cold but alluring mountains, the rocky old farms with their safe scraggly cows, the smell of balsam, the remembered taste of maple sugar and corn picked at a nearby farm scarcely an hour before the cook cooked it in the White Pines kitchen – and the remembered embrace with a girl on a hayride that started in Landaff, which was a ind of paradise even though we made fun of inbred local farm people who all looked alike to us – and the fabled trails up the mountains, up above the timer line where I had felt I could see all that I loved over scores of miles in all directions.

I had to know what had happened, but now it was the light story, not the dark one, that I did not want. I had rarely gone back to this place in the years I had thought of it in the light version. I had stayed away most of the time for decades. And the rare times I was actually there I had made sure, as if afraid to be here alone, that I was never far from a friend brought in from outside, even if it was just a fortifying drink.

And now I was here alone, driving and drifting, looking and looking, and remembering – not the way it was supposed to be but the way that I had determined was the right version in the case that this year I had building up as methodically – as if I had been a careful lawyer, which I remembered now was what the family wanted for me when it became clear I was not what they had expected.

DARKNESS RETURNS

2009-04-11T11:28:00.002-05:00

We talked in a Monday workshop session about putting fictional things into memoir to get at matters we cannot remember. And we talked about even putting in someone else's supposedly more accurate versions.

I hit the ceiling at the very idea of an artist so distorting, which to me means the artist bringing comfort to the begrudgers.

But regarding my story about Rock Pool, there is a question about the disparaging comments by summer gang members the day the Bohemian crafts people appeared. Did I make up those comments, the way I made up the their names? Did I see at the time they were as limited by place and blood and measured aspiration as their reactionary forebears? Why is depression, of which I have been mostly free for 20 years, returning?

I posted the Rock Pool story on my writing blog before the Monday night workshop session – where by pure coincidence I wanted to open with Jay's thoughts about how when there was a place he did want to go in his writing he found himself trying to bring in fiction. It was predictable that I would be adamant about not going into fiction – about sticking to the author’s impression ( as the McCourts say) of what happened as being the only valid truth for the author.

Was it because I stuck to the truth, my impression of what was said by members of this gang of young people, this gang which was the first group to which I felt I truly belonged. What I had just done in writing about Rock Pool was intended to bolster my impression that my peers would become like their elders. Had I had that impression on that day 50 years back that I just wrote about? Had I denied what I saw and felt?

Had I for 50 years edited the words out because what these peers said did not fit with my picture of those summers as being a sacred time, whatever my overall impression, in retrospect, of the White Mountains summer communities? And I began to think about other times, as at Princeton, of listening to people's bigotry and, worse, trying to edit it out.

The depression was a delayed reaction to my having written. It was at its worse on the Saturday after I wrote about Rock Poole. Marta had a morning workshop that I was not involved with that day. I put in ear plugs and went up to my computer for what I thought would be a fine day of writing. But it was as bad as all the times in the past, the times before I got onto my own story in any valid way by facing up to the fact that I had indeed once been a child. Those depression years, but then a plunge into the past I had ignored, and then the past 20 years in which I was virtually free of the hopelessness and fear that had dogged me.

And so on that Saturday morning upstairs at my computer, while Marta and her group were writing downstairs, I could not write. And it was chilly outside. And the depression had not lifted.

That evening we went to the Colony to hear a concert by a new friend and associate, Bar Scott. In one segment she played the piano while being her as bird photographs that made me want to cry flashed on a screen. The picture were taken by her husband Peter Schoenberger, whom I had known in passing for nearly two decades. These photos so close up in spirit and reality as to partake of revelation. And even while moved by the music and the birds I was still sunk in this surprising, paralyzing depression.

To my right at the Colony was my great love in the present, Marta Szabo, and we were holding hands. To my left was a new friend, Polly Howells, whose grandmother was Abby Howells, who used to talk about her best friend, my grandmother Margaret Poole, who talked the same way about Abby Howells. And strangely I had never met Abby Howells and Polly never met Margaret Poole. Though they were such big figures in a careful past world of supposed privilege that Polly and I both write about now.

This depression. The remaining power of the past.

The Aqua Mustang 76 – TWO CATS

2009-04-09T14:00:00.003-05:00

My driving is like gentle skating or swimming through the hills and valleys beneath Vermont’s friendly mountains. Past many well-kept dairy cows and a few goats and horses, alongside clear streams and rivers, and through Christmas card white clapboard villages with village greens containing bandstands, sometimes with young guitar players doing sixties protest or peace and love songs still in this summer of 1986, this time that makes me feel I am, for maybe the first time, coming alive, though doing it in what to others, not me, might be middle age. Here so far from the exotic and erotic and chancy places on other continents that I had thought gave me definition and therefore an identity far removed from where I had started out – which was across the border in the stark, sometimes green and warm, more often blue-black and cold White Mountains of New Hampshire.

I am traveling in my lighthearted Aqua Mustang that I recently bought on a whim – the first car I have owned rather than rented since my old Humber in 1969 in Singapore, which closely followed my old tank-like green Rover in Bangkok. And now, of all things, a Mustang.

A group of us had gone out to the 1964 World’s Fair where we laughed at the dowdy mid-America things on display there – like Disney’s mechanical Honest Abe and an exhibit glorifying America's capitalist telephone company. And this led into what we thought of the new Ford Mustang model, which we saw as having been designed to take advantage of people mired in no-risk middle class convention who sadly want to think of themselves as sports car drivers.

But 20 years later I am a Mustang owner and yes, it does feel safe, for the dangerous time travel which I plan. I am plunging subjectively and then literally into deep past places to find out, first, why I have been so attracted all my life to life-threatening matters, and, second, to why my peers in the seemingly Victorian-safe family I came from had sunk or were sinking into unexamined life stories of death and molestation.

As I drive I see certain changes in unchanging northern New England, such as that the more prosperous Vermont farms no longer have the old picturesque elongated wooden barrel-type silos but now have shiny dark blue silos made of what appears to be Plexiglas. And I am started to hear in my head the voice of my twin brother, who took over the last of the big old family houses across the border and is probably there right now with his intensely Anglo wife, this brother who had roamed on orders from the CIA and tricky Defense Department agencies in some of the very places where I, in opposition, had sometimes been underground and/or under death threat. He is telling me what I can see for myself – telling me that it is not real unless he is the one doing the telling.

And then I smile, as I am doing often when alone this summer, smile maybe to keep from weeping. I think of how after college when my brother and I were conclusively away from suburban Connecticut, my parents had begun raising two gray kittens, which they named, and treated as, Good Cat and Bad Cat. After Good Cat was run over they talked of how unfair and unfitting it was that Bad Cat was the one who survived.

Telling about the cats had early this year added to my popularity as I talked before one of those groups of people who like me were on the hunt for what had happened to them as children. The Good Cat-Bad Cat story got laughter that rose and fell, and rose again, and blended into applause in a big dark medical conference room on Seventh Avenue that felt like a place of worship.

TEMPLATE

2009-04-09T13:11:00.001-05:00

Each night driving slowly on the dark Charlotte road so the cows would see us and come over.

Unsure which room to sleep in.

Laughing at the house owner’s in-laws who were dressed head to rubber enclosed toe by L.L. Bean.

Deep from the groin, non-program hugging on village greens.

Then setting off to places of the past,

Together, it seemed.

LIGHT

2009-04-08T09:33:00.001-05:00

In my yellow childhood room in Weston, Connecticut, the most comfort came from far outside the house. Partly it was the daytime view of a hill that I could run up after I ran down my second story room’s outside staircase, which was left over from some very different past time when this was a boarding house.

At night, light beams from headlights on the road in front of the house would enter my side window, play along the irregular, glossy yellow walls and over the ceiling and then leave by the back window beside the outside staircase door.

And at night, there would be softer flashes of light that came in regularly spaced intervals from – I learned – a powerful beacon that guided airplanes.

And, moreover, also from far away at night the long sad hopeful sounds of a locomotive’s horn.

Trains, like planes and cars, that told me the future would be different.

NO MERE METAPHOR

2009-04-03T10:45:00.004-05:00

From my childhood horse-mattress bed I could look out through a screen door that opened to a paint-flecked wooden staircase that led to the foot of a green Connecticut hill.

At eye level I could see an ancient root cellar door leading right into that hill,

A hill with a rickety windmill of the kind I would know from movie Westerns.

But right here in my room I had a recurring dream in which I walked up that hill and from it saw a gleaming city –

A feeling that would return when in the Met I viewed El Greco’s Toledo… from a river boat spotted a gleaming temple in thick jungle… from the top of the Arboretum in Roxbury came upon Boston’s late 20th century skyline.

The Aqua Mustang 75 - ROCK POOL

2009-04-01T10:18:00.002-05:00

I drove out into the backwoods township of Landaff. I was looking for the entrance to Rock Pool – smooth granite formations and a waterfall with a drop of 20 feet that felt like 100 to a cool, deep, crystal clear pool at the bottom. We boys would dare each other, and sometimes take up the dare, to make the leap, watched by our gang’s girls who had been sunning themselves prettily off to the side on one of the huge smooth rocks.

We had heard rumors about the existence of this unusual place Rock Pool, and we found the woodsy path leading into it one summer when some of us were finally old enough to drive. Now thirty-five years later I cannot find the path, but while still in my car I am, in heart and head, back on a certain dreamlike day – the day we saw that the craftspeople had appeared.

Booths made of two by fours and old boards had suddenly been erected on this obscure path. Some of the booths had speakers linked by flimsy lines stretching out from a small wheezing generator, sending out through the woods the heartfelt sounds of Rubenstein playing the Emperor Concerto.

This world about which I had fantasized, populated by artists and artisans who till now I knew only from novels and paintings and movies – these mostly bearded men and mostly pretty women – and no sexless plaid on the girls – nor golf hats on the men – nor the sort of straw hats still around from winter trips to Bermuda. And they all wore sandals. Suddenly right here a world about which I had fantasized in the long winters in dress code boarding school. This was the reality I had thought I would not find till some undetermined time in the future, this life for which I was really intended. These men with facial hair and their lovely pale girls in black – these people out of fantasies that entailed cellar restaurants with red checked tablecloths, the dim lighting from candles whose wax had poured down the sides of wine bottles used as candlestick holders, the men and girls leaning in to each other in sexual promise and in rapt conversation about the kind of art – bright colors, a nude girl at a picnic, touching Montmartre whores waiting, poplar trees in many kinds of light, a waltz at a boat house – the kind of art I'd seen in Paris in the first part of the summer. And poetry I knew from long, cold boarding school winters, the poetry that had meant my freedom – Keats and Wordsworth and Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Edward Arlington Robinson – and novels in which people like these craftspeople would meet and thrive and copulate.

This was reality far from the White Mountains and far from New England schools and far from parents and grandparents who affected English accents.

But the sudden appearance of the crafts people had led to remarks from the young people of our gang whom I had thought of as my people. Tuckie Marsh, who was 15, a year younger than me and planning on art school, but now saying about the people who had appeared, "I don't know what they think they're doing here. They'll never understand this place..."

Danny Trimble, who was headed to Amherst, using the term "weenies."

Esther Roberts, on her way to socially if not academically correct Briarcliff, repeating "What do they think they are?"

And even deeply tanned Tammie Thomas, who was herself a subject of fantasies, saying "Our life here won't last if just anyone can be here."

The Aqua Mustang 74 - OPEN AIR

2009-03-24T09:50:00.003-05:00

We were always outdoors, as Kitty’s cousin, Ruthie Grout, pointed out much later. The principal, if not the only, venues for our socializing were in the outdoor parts of family compounds, and on the banks of ponds, and outside the cabins, especially one on a breezy hilltop, that the older people maintained for each new young generation – once even on the grounds of a girls’ boarding school, St Mary’s-in-the-Mountains, that I knew from my very different life in the winter, the place to which I had traveled with hope and fear from my own boarding school in the lake country for dances. I had gotten deeply involved there with an actual girlfriend – but it was closed for the summer, and anyway I could not see how these two worlds would ever mix.

The family compounds. These were not the 700-year-old family seat places I had seen in Europe, but for this context they had felt just as old. And anyway most houses up here were of wood or, like White Pines, partially of wood – and wood could not withstand the wear of centuries.

History was not long up here. This part of the north country had been too wild for Indians. It had not had permanent human life in it before the mountain passes, called notches here, were breached by white men, allowing settlement beginning only at the mid-point of the 18th century – which was like yesterday the way the old summer people talked up here, and also like forever. It was as if these Anglo imitation families and their houses had been here not from the most ancient of days but rather from the time in history that really counted. These big wooden houses framing history that counted.

In the years since my young days in New Hampshire I had been in wildly scenic places on most continents, electric green rice fields, wide jungle rivers, rippling deserts. But I had not in the seemingly eventual years between way back then in the White Mountains and now in the mountains again as a kind of secret agent, I had not in the time in between been so aware of everything in the natural world as I was right now.

This light that did not exist any place else. The constantly changing mountains, soft comforting at one moment, then at another moment black, hovering entities that blocked out the sun like dark giants who were always watching.

In this place where mysteriously in one-o’-cat baseball I could actually hit the ball, something that did not happened at school, hit it farther than anyone else. And on our hikes I was always out in front except when I ran to the back of the line to see one of my friends, or give someone encouragement, and then ran to the front again – for the first time in my life feeling like a leader, not a straggler.

One morning at the tennis courts at the Profile Club I leapt out of the car that brought me there and rushed over to the Mallory clan, which had just arrived for the summer from Philadelphia. Old Otto Mallory and old Mrs. Mallory in floppy but sturdy sun hats they wore for golf, their witty son David and his retiring wife, their wise little grandson, like my brother named Peter, and their granddaughter little Joan Mallory looking almost a woman in this new summer season. I stretched out my hand to each of them. And my unhappy young boy cousin Robin, who was always watching everything with sadness and anger, said why is you are the one who is always out in front? Could it be that Robin had not noticed that until this summer of my sudden adolescent popularity it had been my brother the good twin Peter who wowed everyone with what his maternal grandmother called his cute sayings.

When a group picture of all of us from all these families was taken one morning before we climbed Lafayette together I was in the center and Peter – I thought trying to be funny but I was not sure – held a straw hat over his face to hide from the camera.

The Aqua Mustang 73 – AND ON WATER

2009-03-21T09:53:00.000-05:00

Well before heading north I am making forays. I go to Central Park, to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, to the Bronx Botanical Garden, to Bear Mountain to Roscoe with the photographer Wayne Sorce, whom I know because of Philippine adventures and through my recent lover Jocelyn.

The light had been there when I looked out at the green hill behind our house in Connecticut, and when I was stumbling along the shore of Lake Carnegie in Princeton. It was there in a park with a cupid stature in Ljubljana. And there in the marble Toroko Gorge on Taiwan.

And most recently there in Daubigny and Pissaro and Cezanne – and now, as I go beyond Bear Mountain, in the man-made beauty of Vermont, where the Green Mountains have farmers’ squares of different shades of green high in the air.

Like fields I saw from a backseat in a childhood trip through Quebec.

In this spring of ’86 the light had been there when, with a poetic young lady whose harsh Republican father was an Alaska politician, I walked the length of Central Park all the way to the East Harlem corner where at a neglected lake called the Meer men and women fished with worms as if they were in Alabam. And on another day we rode sleepy old horses through Prospect Part.

And the light remaining when I was alone, as I was so much that spring, frequently circling another pond I had overlooked, which had a curving stone bridge, and an island bird sanctuary, in Central Park’s far southeast corner. Or while retrieving memories on a path around a bigger body of water, where so many years back I had taken girls out in rowboats.

Wayne loaned me fishing equipment and I picked up a license in a gun shop on the way in his K car to the East Branch of the Delaware. He went downstream. I stayed upstream, where I stood on a bank watching the antics of a feral cat moving in and out of everything on the bank across the river.

Wayne never kept his catches, never gutted them as I had done when I was a child. I decided I would not at this time in life keep any creature I caught. And then I did not bother attempting to cast an artificial fly, for the fly would have steel hook in it and I realized that not only had I never wanted to kill fish, I did not even want to hurt them.

The Aqua Mustang 72 - THE LIGHT

2009-03-20T10:40:00.005-05:00

And then past was mixing with present again as I stood on a familiar hill in the family part of the White Mountains, stood where there had once been a timeless old summer hotel. Stood looking out with my back to what before it burned down had been the Sunset Hill House. I was looking out at the same panorama seen from White Pines, and I said to myself that no place in the world has light like this.

Earlier that day I stood with Mickie as I looked across the field in front of White Wings, to which she had returned to live maybe forever – looked past an apparent Juniper to the woods beyond, the woods between White Wings and White Pines, which had been my grandfather's woods, as too had been the woods on the other side of White Pines that linked the house to the panorama. But right now I was looking towards tamer woods where Gaga had walked each day to check the level of two concrete-sided cisterns, with shingled roofs over them, that he called reservoirs. And that special light again, and this time I spoke aloud saying to Mickie what I had said by myself, which was that no place in the world has light like this.

I thought of it as the long rays of winter light even in summer, and could forget that the long rays came at the end of the short summer. Though in memory summer was always like the end of summer. Like the long sad cries of northern birds that thrilled me, the end is always there – winter light always there, even when the mountains are soft in summer sunshine.

It was a direct experience of what had drawn me to romantic poetry and emotional painting. And I had to ask myself if this meant that I was comparing everything in the world, always, to what was in northern New Hampshire? Like those family members, always wearing blinders, who could not see the totally different mountains of Switzerland without thinking they saw the White Mountains in them.

And I asked myself if I too had looked at the world that way? Whether it was that field with sheep across from a self-consciously rustic bar filled with stuffed animal heads that was near Vassar college and where I drank to the point of sickness with a not quite happy red-headed Vassar girl. Or whether it was the hill behind our Connecticut house, where high and happy one spring night, home from a date, I lay in the grass looking at the stars and feeling a happiness that was usually illusive. Or was it in the primeval woods of Borneo? Or the careful dark woods of Bavaria? Or that ripping drunk night on Manila Bay’s malodorous beach that I spent with a slippery girl named Baby, and after sunrise reached for an open San Miguel beer and remembered too late I had pissed in the beer bottle in the night.

Had the piercing light been there when I looked across green fields from the train I had boarded in Liverpool when I was 16? When I thought of Ryder rather than of New Hampshire, though England was far more in the Waspy summer people’s worlds than any other place.

The piercing light that at times posed as soft light. I knew before I was 16 that it was there in Wordsworth and Thomas Grey and Thomas Wolfe and especially Thomas Hardy. In Conrad too, a feverish tropical version, like sunrise on Manila Bay. It had been all over literature, certifying what was here in the White Mountains.

Though my turning point took place not in the sanctioned family part of New Hampshire but down in the non-sanctioned New Hampshire lake country, where I was changed forever by truly seeing the spring come in.

The Aqua Mustang 71 - JUST LIKE NEW HAMPSHIRE?

2009-03-17T10:06:00.002-05:00

Wherever they were, everything was seen in terms of New Hampshire. Peter forever would say of any girl he saw me with anywhere that she reminded him of Kitty, my girlfriend in adolescence in the White Mountains. Dad would not put a leash on his Cocker Spaniel and go for a walk in Connecticut without pointing out that if this were New Hampshire he would not need a leash. Pointing it out as an overriding fact of life. They talked that way whether, like Peter, they kept going back or, like Mother and dad, they took care to ration their time in New Hampshire.

I went to Switzerland in one of the last phases of a book I pulled together in nine intense months in which I was always on the move – New York, to London, to the Canary Islands, to Malta to Switzerland to London to even New Hampshire, to a raw hotel across from Grand Central. In the Switzerland part I had gone to Zermatt looking for a place where I would be left alone, though unable to forget how the New Hampshire summer people always said how much like being in Switzerland it was to be in the White Mountains. Which I knew to be ridiculous, for the landscapes in Switzerland might be wind swept but were never new Hampshire raw.

But it was true that I had thought of the White Mountains even when in such unlikely places as the Taurus Mountains in Turkey, or in the scraggly, untamed Slavonic version of the alps in Slovenia, even when climbing high Kinabalu in the tight little northern Borneo timber fiefdom of Sabah. I had observed myself picking up on the New Hampshire connection even when it seemed silly to me – as even though a doll-like girl from Singapore, or a rounded New York girl who wore tank tops well, were no more like Kitty than was my depressed mother.

But the thing was that looking out at the mountains every day in Zermatt, both up high in cable cars and funicular or cog railways to the point where everything was open space, then walking down and into woods, I was never for a moment reminded of raw New Hampshire vistas by the Swiss landscape, which was either clean year-round glacier or a man-made landscape of trimmed fields and forests, not unlike skylines in Italy where everything was made beautifully orderly, no matter how it had started out. And then the connection crept up on me unexpectedly. One reason I was in Zermatt was that I had sensed before going there that it was a place where I would be left alone – unlike the chaotic cities of the Near and Far East where I was spending so much of my life. And the food in Zermatt was plentiful and Germanic – much like the food in White Pines which had stood in contrast to the less than plentiful food in most of the Waspdom I knew, including in my childhood home in Connecticut, where meager pieces of greasy mackerel or leathery liver vied with overcooked Brussels sprouts or rope-like string beans.

And I was indeed left alone in Zermatt, whether writing or not. I was especially alone when there were people around – except some nights when I would get drunk in the town. I was alone as I ate my separate-table hotel meals and traveled by cable car or funicular railway, and then walked down through woods full of hearty summer hikers who looked prosperous in understated hiking clothes. I would pass through these people unnoticed as if I were a ghost.

It was that much like old New Hampshire!

The Aqua Mustang 70 – DINING TABLE

2009-03-14T09:55:00.005-05:00

I am in the dining room, my back to a standing clock and an opening to the entryway where on the right when going out there is a big staircase going up past the telephone room to the bedrooms and dressing rooms and also on the right the small staircase going down to the downstairs bathroom, and to the left past the walking stick rack the door leading into my grandfather Gaga’s study – the place where on a door turned into a desk, his back to a Franklin stove and a corkscrew iron staircase leading up to a trap door, he writes his books on yellow foolscap.

To my front at the table, past Mrs. Gillman, Nana’s distinguished old friend, who like her has perfect posture and who is the widow of the Herald Tribune’s music critic, and Aunt Peggy, wife of Uncle Nick, looking quite smug and quite pretty in a dress that shows off skin, soft and slightly freckled and appealing but not quite so appealing as Aunt Betsy’s darker, clearer, more shiny skin. For a long moment I fantasize that Mother, who spends very little time up here in the mountains, is dead and I am living with Aunt Peggy. And then I am looking past her to the long horizontal pane glass window that follows both the sweep of the long dining table and the sweep of the mountains. It is comforting that the mountains are always here and also that there is no sign of human activity between them and this house from which I look out at the dining table. It is even more comforting that way up inside the mountains there actually is a sign of life: the Cannon Mountain Aerial Tramway, which is far removed from ordinary life, even the rarefied version of everyday existence that we live here at White Pines.

I have to watch closely, for the Tramway car, tiny at this distance, cannot be sorted out from the side of Cannon except during a few instants when it is near the summit and silhouetted against the sky.

The mountains take up as much space in my head here at the table as does this long room with its living room area down to the right past some Chinese looking screens and the Steinway and Nana's high desk, and to my left the swinging door to the kitchen, and to the left of the window the entrance to steps leading down to a big, airy light blue screen porch with white wicker furniture. I cannot see the porch, and I cannot see the kitchen or the pantry areas – nor beyond them to the Boy’s Wing with its steel-framed folding beds and its beaverboard walls that have very old foreign and steamship line travel posters on them.

The Tramway, the rooms, meld together, along with Aunt Peggy and Mrs. Gilman, and Uncle Nick, and also, at this table our very dark, laughing Great Uncle Prince Jehan Sesodia and Nana’s light-hearted younger sister, Great Aunt and Princess Katherine Sesodia, and my twin brother Peter, who seems much more confident than me, and also, though they are not actually present, Aunt Betsy, whom Nana says is with her young friends, and Mother, whose own mother is spending the summer not here but nearby at a big place filled with Southern ladies, the old Sunset Hill House Hotel, and Dad, somewhat inside himself like me, who is down in the city working at his publishing job.

They are here, just as is Gaga who is toying with his soup way down to my right at the head of the table, and to my left at the other head of the table Nana, who runs everything, including the servants whom she can summon with a buzzer she activates by pressing with her foot a bulge in the carpet that cover the buzzer’s activator. And in the far pantry there is a wooden box that behind a glass frame has numbers that drop down if people upstairs are in trouble or in need and press buttons.

FROM PIERRE BONNARD

2009-03-14T09:49:00.005-05:00

“I’M TRYING TO DO WHAT I HAVE NEVER DONE BEFORE, GIVE THE IMPRESSION ONE HAS ON ENTERING A ROOM AND ONE SEES EVERYTHING AND AT THE SAME TIME NOTHING."

The Aqua Mustang 69 – DOWN FROM THE NORTH

2009-03-10T09:02:00.002-05:00

So Gillian and I got back to the city very late on a Sunday night, back from the lake house I had proudly borrowed for trysting purposes in Vermont, back from forays across the border into the stark, striking landscape of the White Mountains – rocky peaks, jagged cliffs, and beneath them failed farms side by side with the rambling landscaped estates of the summer people with their Anglo pretensions – my people when I was growing up in those places that nonetheless had beauty to them and grace, too, it seemed, and certainly excitement – scenes of first love and artistic and intellectual discovery as well as family scenes – these places that were really not my world now, never had been, I had decided by now, though it had been a shock to discover they still had this pull.

The time with Gillian, which, as planned, had indeed become a trysting time, though that had not been agreed at the start, it was also like an exciting vacation in alluring lands, as much as it was an almost guerilla like series of forays over the Vermont-New Hampshire border, across enemy lines, to find out – it seemed my life now depended on finding out – just what had happened in the deep past that had already brought so many of my peers to bad ends in the present. Who had done what to who, who had done what to me – though in my mind the dark scenes were, however much about the past I was learning, still imposed on scenes of summer days, the smell of pine, the long sweet-sad sounds of northern birds – which in turn would be covered by scenes of dire darkness, things I knew and things I was looking for – but the dark scenes transparent so that the summer scenes where still there – and the other way around too – the darkness in the happy days versions of this place, the happy days versions that still, though I knew better (and I had hardly been there for thirty years) still had a grip on me.

And there was something that seemed so very normal, the powerful sexuality that was somehow tied in with all versions.

I actually thought for what was not much more than a moment that it would continue, the happy times somehow overriding the rest and taking me, taking us, into the present.

The trip down from northern Vermont to the city could be made by a motivated driver in seven hours, but with zigzagging through New England it took us from mid-morning on the lake to after midnight in my one bedroom apartment on 25th Street. And this did not – during this long moment – seem to have any aspect of being an ending.

We get out of bed in a small musty room looking out on fog rising from Lake Champlain, and many hours later are back in bed in Chelsea. The first time she had ever seen my Chelsea apartment.

In the morning we were awakened by voices outside the window, which looked out from the fourth floor over an abandoned back garden and then over rooftops and wooden water towers all the say south nearly, it seemed, to the Battery. The voices were two Indian workers on a platform suspended from the roof of this six-story building. They were talking away in Hindi, and Gillian was translating in whispers – it was all about how to handle women, where and how to fuck them, how to make them want more, and then Gillian, this blonde girl, leaned out the window half-naked and shouted something up in Hindi, and they started making sounds like they were calling out to their heathen gods for protection.

That both of us knew a number of faraway worlds was what had brought us together – though we still hardly knew each other – and then it turned out we had once known fairly similar, and sometimes quite brutal, supposedly correct, supposedly upper class worlds, in which our stories seemed to mingle as we ourselves mingled.

But it was only for a moment that it looked like this would last. Late the following day she went back to her sublet over near First Avenue. Time, we both decided to be alone. The next morning she would be back at work, selling African fetish figures on the sidewalk just down from the Modern Art Museum, presumably wearing the high yellow boots I had bought her at a hardware store in the middle of Vermont. And thought I would go there to meet her, take coffee and bagels to her.

Even that was far more intimate than it could be in reality. Whatever had been there was over.

Never again, I told myself, as if several decades had been covered in this brief trysting time. And I was starting to think that romantic despair had never lived up to its reputation.

The Aqua Mustang 68 - SAFE PLACE

2009-02-27T10:49:00.004-05:00

I am at the top of the stairs, a little too old for the banister, but remembering that long slide from the top, the turn halfway down as I would pass the telephone room, then down into the two-story high anteroom that led to the great formal room, one end dining room, the other a living room, each with formal, city-like fireplaces. That long room that followed the sweep of the mountains outside.

I am at the top of the stairs and Nana is there too, beside big colored storage cabinets, not far from her self-contained quarters with her big canopied bed, from which she sometimes received company, and across from Gaga’s airy suite, where he had a big tile bathroom and dressing room with a doctor’s scale, a rack for his unusual razor, which was like a straight razor but with a safely guard on the blade, and the hook where he hung his truss – and after the dressing room his modest bedroom, which had a trap door to an iron circular staircase that led to his study, and after the bedroom his sleeping porch, a familiar addition here in the city person’s end of the White Mountains.

Nana stands by the heavy painted cabinets and I am thinking how everything is so solid here, nothing changes.

And then that is what she is talking about. She is telling me how important it is for her children – my father and uncle and pretty aunt – that she and Gaga had set up this house, these houses, and that she maintains them (all except White Wings which was recently sold) now that Gaga is dead, for it means so much to her children that they have this place to return to.

And I am wondering why my father comes so rarely. His brother would come more, it is said, but his wife, Aunt Peggy, doesn’t like the place. Aunt Betsy comes, but, although she has a small flat in England for herself, her natural son and the first of her adopted children, she has no career and really no other place to go.

And I am thinking what a waste this on those people of that in-between generation!

And I am thinking how when something went wrong – when I felt betrayed and hurt and angry and sad – and knew no one would believe me or take me seriously – Nana had spoken the words I believed I might never hear.

“What’s wrong?”

And then she had listened.

The Aqua Mustang 67 – OVERVIEW

2009-02-26T10:38:00.002-05:00

When in adolescence I became so interested in so many things – politics and literature and dangerous adventures and European trains and wilderness camping and really appealing young women – I wanted to be on top of events like my grandfather had been as an early Socialist working on exposés in Chicago with Upton Sinclair, and living in the heart of New York’s lower East side slums when he was with the settlement house movement and organizing for the Socialists, and than was lost and feared dead in the Kerensky phase of the Russian revolution which was more moderate than the Lenin phase but nearly as dangerous. And I tried hard to put that together with the man who, though from such a background and so kind to me and my twin brother, was so often angry (so my mother said), and who would emerge from his study not with new chapters but with a stock tip sheet called the Kiplinger Letter which he thought would help him revive the fortune he had lost in the Crash of 1929, which happened five years before I was born and had continued ever since to keep him busy trying to be his own stockbroker.

For it took me a long time to see that nothing was exactly how it seemed in the world I came from – especially the White Mountains summer part of that world. It had seemed so solid to me that even when I knew better, and well after most of the family houses were gone, I could still act – as if I had been programmed to go against reality – as if the family history might in the end might in the end not be a warning to me but instead might provide me with a margin of safety.

In books people who went to these stiff colleges and lived in these big formal places with such ease that they called them cottages, in books, in all the lore, they were sure-footed, privileged people. And sometimes it almost seemed that it really was that way. Once when down and out in Hong Kong, acting as editor for a fly-by-night publisher’s flimsy magazine, I put my writer grandfather and my publisher father into the first and only issue’s blurb about myself.

In the White mountains the summer people spoke with what seemed to be English accents even though they were not from England. Later it seemed to me that this was just like the English in Kong Kong who spoke with fake upper class accents. Like the Hong Kong English, the old family summer people in the White Mountains tended to avoid public places. They rarely went to restaurants. Could it be because their English accents would seem silly outside the private places, much as it was with the English in Hong Kong who stuck to their whites-only clubs where no one was likely to say the emperor had no clothes.

The only one who had lived in England for any time was my Aunt Betsy, who had married a young architect there who went into the RAF, and was killed early in the war, before America was in it, supposedly fighting in the Battle of Britain but actually killed in a drunk flying accident when he and a buddy had broken into an airfield late at night and gotten a trainer plane into the air. But Aunt Betsy had his new RAF wings made into costume jewelry and wore them everywhere. She had been pregnant at that time and she told her son, when he was old enough to understand, that he was the son of a war hero. And it seemed to me no one up there in New Hampshire said otherwise. My grandfather too, in a radio address urging America into the war, called his son-in-law a war hero.

When I was in college my roommate and I had dinner at my grandmother’s place in the city. Her younger sister, my Aunt Katherine, was there. This light-hearted great aunt had been married to an alcoholic playwright who had had some Broadway successes, then chased a bevy of girls to Hollywood and was never heard from again. At dinner she talked about World War I when she entertained the boys, as she put it, gave them cheery times, performed French songs. I was a little surprised when my roommate, who was very aware of social niceties, turned out to be so enthusiastic about her – for in the family she was dismissed. As was her current husband, who in retrospect gave me more than I realized. Uncle Jehan, Prince Jehan Sesodia, son of a maharaja, was an expansive man who attrached admirers. (In circles where black then, and still when I was in college at mid-century, were fine if they were from far away cultures, had titles and walked around with tennis rackets, or at least came from places where their fathers were brutal dictators.) Aunt Katherine was Princess Sesodia. The prince and the princess.

So there was charm. I tried to think of them all as less than they seemed to be, but that finally seemed to ally me with what was worst in this family, which said most people on the outside, and certain figures on the inside too, were something less. More and more I wondered about the summer people of the White Mountains, living in little communities that were as far away from Kerensky or the Lower East side or real war heroes as you could get.

The Aqua Mustang 66 – THIS MY WORLD

2009-02-25T19:14:00.001-05:00

I was face down but leaning up on the floor at the living room end of the main room at White Pines. I was surrounded by file cards I was filling. I was copying quotes from an annual mimeographed book put out and sold to boarding school and high school debaters throughout the Northeast by a Mr. Walsh, who coached the Portland, Maine team. In the winter I, though only 15 and a fourth former, and my debate colleague Ken Kaplan, a fifth former, the two of us the home team at the Holderness School down in Plymouth, New Hampshire, had beaten Mr. Walsh’s usually victorious team (and I had been elected “best speaker” even though I was not in the anchor position).

Now it was summer but I was preparing for more debating. I was copying down, for future use, quotes Mr. Walsh had collected concerning our next national debate subject which, as ordained by the National Forensic League, had to do with the welfare state, which I privately favored, though in keeping with the institution of debating I was willing to argue either side. And I was aware that way back in the Boy’s Wing of White pines I had a batch of love letters from a girl from our sister school and a Brownie snapshot of her in a fairly revealing sun dress leaning against a tree, she a winter girl now seen in a summer picture she had sent me looking prettier than I remembered her in person, and making me wonder now about my attraction to a more appealing summer girl here in the mountains. All this – girls, debating – had given me definition. This was my world. Now, here on the floor, I was in the family world, but what was right in front of me was from the world I had created.

Above and behind me on the Steinway were photographs of my mother, of Aunt Betsy, who was my father’s sister, and of Aunt Peggy, my father’s extrovert brother‘s wife, all in their wedding dresses. And also a picture of my recently departed grandfather, a small worried but smiling man in a tweed cap, leaning with pretty Aunt Betsy, his daughter, at the railing of an ocean linter when they were sailing for England beneath war clouds so that Aunt Betsy could get married to a young architect who had joined the RAF. The past could be the main part of anything in the present, but the past was not my present right now. The past did not seem to weigh heavy any more.

To my left was a big old stand-up wooden radio, where five years back we had listened to the news of Hiroshima and also the news of Atlee’s unexpected defeat of Churchill, but the important thing about the radio was that occasionally my recently departed grandfather Gaga had been on it, as in the speech he had given trying to get America into World War II. Just past the radio were French doors, opening beneath a striped awning onto the familiar lawn, with white bird baths and stone benches, the lawn ending at iron-streaked boulders that fell off to a tangled blueberry field, and from there the view stretching to deep woods, owned by my grandmother still, but maybe about to be sold – and eventually the to mountains of the Franconia Range.

In front of me was Nana herself, reading a new book with a shiny new book jacket, mysteriously maintaining perfect posture while lying back on a silk covered chaise longue. She was dressed in white, as white as her hair, and with a cardigan sweater – but in the evening she would dress in silk Chinese-style formal pajamas, one of the many accouterments that since early in the century I knew, had pointed to her as an advanced person.

Two days earlier Kitty had gotten her aunt, Mrs. Grout, to drive her over from Sugar Hill to visit me – me, not the family. She had brought a record of Charleston music. The Charleston was in vogue. All the girls at Greenwich Country Day knew how to do it. Her visit had come in the afternoon when people napped and we could be alone here. I brought out from the Boys’ Wing my blue, fake leather portable LP player, and she taught me the Charleston in this place that, I knew, would always afterwards feel her presence.

Especially now as I lay on the floor preparing for the debate season in this most familiar of all places. It was always the same here, even with Kitty in the air. Scattered around the room were end tables with drawers containing Chinese checkers and Parcheesi. On one of the tables the most recent important new books, in crisp shiny book jackets. They were forever coming to Nana in the mail. And there was a formal fireplace – definitely not a country-style rough stone fireplace. And after that the bookcase, quite large but much smaller than the bookcase in Gaga’s study, which was still looking just as it did when he was alive. It was among Gaga’s books that I had just discovered Turgenev. Turgenev was now part of my world – not their world. This was me, here on the floor, preparing for triumph, thinking of girls. And here in the same room this afternoon was Nana, who not only never made fun of me but seemed, I dared think, to know who I was.

The Aqua Mustang 65 - BEFORE THE FIRES

2009-02-24T09:24:00.004-05:00

I didn’t learn to read until I was seven, and this was long before that, but I already had a sense of the difference between the them and the us. The them, to me, operated in a bigger sphere, as opposed us, who were self contained in the formal summer houses. Also, as opposed to other thems made up of local people, or of aliens who might be dangerous.

We rode over to Peckett's, a White Mountains inn on the scale of a hotel. It turned out we were there to see Nana, who was rolling bandages for the Red Cross. Our Nana, so confident, her white hair perfectly in place close to her aristocratic head. In retrospect that time to me seemed something out of movies or novels about World War I, not World War II, which the English were in now and Gaga and Nana wanted Americans to be in too. Rolling bandages.

To my amazement, Nana was in charge of this end of the war effort. She had on a white Red Cross uniform. Women were coming to her with questions, and she was able to answer their questions and greet family at the same time. I would never again think of her as just our grandmother. She was an important leader.

That was the only time we went to Peckett’s, though it often came up in conversation about other times. At some point when I was a child it burned down, as so many of the old hotels in the mountains would. The older people spoke of it with sadness, the way they spoke of good times in the 19th century. It seemed that it was as old as or older than, as established as or more established than, the big rambling Sunset Hill House, which did not burn down until the 1970s, and where our Southern grandmother was often in residence, sitting all day on the long porch that circled it, gossiping with other mostly old ladies, many of them Southern like herself, who had been coming since long ago it had become the thing to do to go to the White Mountains in the hay fever season. The Sunset had the same view, the absolutely essential view, of the Franconia Range that we had from all the family houses. And it had a certain excitement for me, as public places always did – something a little risqué about a billiards room, a putting course that felt like the miniature golf attractions which we would pass on long drives but for which we would never stop. And there was also a smaller than usual nine-hole golf course with a caddy shack club house. And in the hotel itself certain nights were for gambling on Keno (a rarified word for Bingo). The old ladies on the porch talked of how the manager, Mr. Haslam, was not a real gentleman. They suspected he was plotting to turn the billiards room into, horrors, a cocktail lounge.

Peckett’s had been more safely sedate, it seemed. Aunt Betsy was friends with Sig Buchmayr, who had been brought over to Peckett’s from Austria to introduce Alpine skiing to America. Sig was still around when I was a teenager, by now married with triplets, and almost as respectable as the summer people. He was not associated with an outré, for this place, new ski resort called Mittersill’s at the foot of Cannon Mountain, which was owned by an Austrian émigré named Baron Hubert Von Pantz, whom summer people liked to say was probably not a real baron and who chased after celebrities. They said it in the same tone they used for any outsiders who thought well of themselves. Mittersill’s was for outsiders and Sig was mostly an insider.

The Sunset was on a borderline, though much closer to the smaller Peckett’s than to the flashy and common Mittersill’s – as, for example, because the Sunset ladies donned white gloves on Sundays and walked downhill about a third of a mile to the place where Davis Road, a properly picturesque dirt road, our road, began. This was the place where the small Episcopalian summer church, St. Matthew’s, was situated. Mother and Dad had been married there. By the time we were in boarding school, Peter and I, dressed in our school blazers, were taking up the Sunday collection there. We stood facing front as everyone sang, a few of them with good voices, “Praise God from whom all blessings flow, Praise Him all creatures here below. Praise him above ye heavenly host. Praise Father, Son and Holly Ghost.”

Nana was in charge of everything St. Mathew’s, just as she was always the leader. I never doubted her in the years that followed, not even in the few times I – though apparently nobody else – saw her doubting herself.

She had been a rich socialite in Chicago and left Chicago with Gaga because, she said, they had become too liberal or radical for the place – though they now were based in a tight Republican. Anti- Semitic summer community. It was after Gage died that Nana told me about why they left Chicago, and also why they had come to the White Mountains. They came here, she said, because Gaga felt it was not healthy for a writer to associate only with fellow artistic people.

Gaga liked to take his old brown Dodge touring car up to the Sunset, turn it around, put it in neutral, and coast all the way down, turning off on Davis road, coasting through the birch woods and the entrance to the estate of Otto Mallory from Philadelphia, who had been his Princeton roommate, coasting along as our family houses came into view, and then, still coasting, turn down the long winding driveway to one that was not in view, the biggest, White Pines. He would make it almost to the door.

THE CRITICS

2009-02-19T16:10:00.001-05:00

Malachy McCourt calls them "the eunuchs in the harem.”

IMAGES OF TWO YOUNG GIRLS

2009-02-19T15:42:00.001-05:00

They are there still waiting to go into writing, so clearly there because they are in Brownie snapshots remembered from the time. Elyssa is smiling beside me on a sofa. Tina it leaning against a tree.

It was in time that I was suffering. It was because I had become that worst of all figures in life or books a betrayer. Me the betrayer, although earlier in the summer in North Adams, where her doctor father drove us because we were too young to drive, Tina had seemed the betrayer. This time in North Adams that was supposed to be a high point, if not the culminating point, in our romance, which most of the time till now has been conducted at a distance. She was up at St. Mary's, sending me scented envelopes that said SWAK on the back, Sealed With a Kiss, letters containing protestations of undying love right out of the movies if not stories in our English anthologies. And I was sending daily letters with the literary Victorian touch that the stamp was upside down because due to my love for you I am too distracted to get it right side up.

Mostly at a distance, but the empty space around us was the negative space around our infrequent necking times - intense necking that we knew was very far from fucking but which at 15 seemed close when it was happening. Hands on bodies there in the shadows at rare joint events between our schools.

And how I longed for Tina one night when she was up on a stage in bright light. I was alone in shadows at the back of the Plymouth Teachers College auditorium, where I watched a joint glee club concert between her school, St. Mary's-in-the-Mountains, and mine, Holderness, watching from the shadows because I had been turned down and told I would never sing - but watching my love up there, this pleasingly chubby girl I had necked with now forming an "O" with her lips as she sang a glee club song about a place called an ash grove.

This was part of the build-up to my long-planned visit to her home in North Adams at the end of the school year, But the visit turned out to be no culmination of anything. She ignored me, flirted with another boy from our school who lived there - cast me out, it felt, withdrew all that had been given me - like something I vaguely remembered from deep childhood about a naked woman who went away.

Tina and I kept on with our daily letters, as if nothing had gone wrong. But later in the summer, up in the White Mountains, I met my sweet gorgeous love
Elyssa, and now I felt really guilty. A big part of the guilt had to do with how Tina was not that gorgeous.

I already had pictures of Ellysa, so cute and contained, so loving. Then Tina sent a picture. She was in a skimpy sun dress leaning against a tree. The Brownie had caught beauty, if conditional beauty, that I had overlooked. A come-hither smile, and her skin in the snapshot apparently smooth and shiny now. So maybe it was okay. Maybe she was okay and so it was okay that I was betraying her.

I kept a Brownie snapshot of Ellysa on a sofa, smiling together as if at a secret we shared. I might have wondered at the time if either of us could look that content and contained again.

The tree picture survives only in my mind. Tina had come to a fall weekend, and in our dorm, which we vacated for the St. Mary's girls, she had found my letters from Elyssa. And later I placed all my pictures of Tina and all her letters in a shoe box filled with rocks and wrapped it in twisted coat hanger wire, and I took the heavy packet to a muddy pond where I sometimes fished for vicious-looking, sharp-toothed pickerel, and I hurled it out into that muddy place.

EARLY SIGHTINGS

2009-02-17T16:04:00.004-05:00

I was really onto something. In the summer of 1951, not long after entering adolescence, I was sitting with a pad and a pen at a fold-out table in a compartment on a steam-driven train to London from Liverpool, where that morning the small Cunard liner Parthia had docked. It was my first time abroad and I was entranced with the countryside we traversed – the almost unbelievably intense green hills and the big pastel skies and actual English sheep. Something out of dreams that made me feel anything was possible. What I was seeing seemed a match for pictures I has found in Life of a recently rediscovered American painter named Ryder. And even more it connected up with for the Romanic poets that I had been reading at boarding school as if my actual life depended on them. This landscape and my attempt to recreate it in words on paper was outside my direct experience and was something I wanted badly.

The Aqua Mustang 64 – THE MIDDLE DISTANCE

2009-02-17T14:45:00.002-05:00

In the city as well as up in New Hampshire, I had been looking into places of the past in this year of exploration, 1986. It was as if my life depended upon finding out what had happened in the deep past in the summer houses that had led by now to so much violent death and molestation in involving my cousins.

I walked along the block on East 66th Street where my grande dame grandmother, who had white hair and perfect posture, had had her last apartment. Her city place had been a miniature version of their grandiose old summer houses in the White Mountains. In the apartment, a smaller but equally shiny table for formal dinners. Behind glass in the pantry, the omnipresent finger bowls that gave this family definition. Under the rug at the head of the table something she could press with her foot that set off a buzzer summoning service from the kitchen. In the kitchen the same tall smoky glasses as in the summer places, the same jars, strangely never touched, of macadamia nuts, the same special soup crackers that came only from St. Johnsbury, the same S.S. Pierce canned goods that came from Boston.

In college in the fifties, when my grandmother was alive, I would sometimes spend a night in that apartment when I was in town for Broadway shows or debutante parties. I used a day bed in the study she had set up after my grandfather died, a city version of his New Hampshire summer writing places. In this new study a frame held the certificate for his Pulitzer Prize for fiction, which had never been shown in the mountains where everyone knew. Almost everything intact here from the summer places, familiar chairs and desk and some chinoiserie wall hangings. But also there was something new, something disconcerting. In another frame, a close-up black and white photo portrait of Robert Frost looking as sensual as he looked craggy.

Before my time Frost had been a neighbor up in Franconia and went on walks with my grandfather. But I knew this only from books about Frost, for in our houses he was never mentioned. And yet here he was in this place of honor. What was he to us? Surely he and my grandmother could not have been lovers. But maybe nothing was too far fetched. In this year 1986 I had just found my family’s old housekeeper, Mrs. Miner, still alive in the mountains. And someone else still there, a woman who had been a very pretty summer girl in teenage days and had come back to stay. Now the former summer girl videotaped old but alert Mrs. Miner telling, in local language, about convoluted sexual activities, which Mrs. Miner called buzzing. That it was called buzzing, not fucking, made it instantly believable, though no one in my family except me would ever imagine my regal grandmother doing either.

In the early sixties in a summer when she was in the mountains and I had just come back again from aboard and again had no home, I had used her apartment for the steamy month of August. Steamy, and air conditioning was not an Anglophile thing. Across from the study there was a guest room, which was used in winter by Nana’s best friend, Frances Perkins, the same one who had been the first woman in the cabinet. While I was there that summer I had brought in the object of my long-time sexual obsession, a syrupy, married Kentucky girl named Laurie. And now here we were in my grandmother’s bed, then the Mrs. Perkins bed, then my grandmother’s, fucking and all the rest in every way we each knew and in ways we had only heard about and had to try out, going from room to room with our latest of many bottles of Scotch. Sweat giving a shine to Laurie’s smooth body. She telling me, who had not been always been sure of his physical self, that she just loved his body’s line. Now together in a bathtub, now, still too hot for clothes, up against the Steinway. No clothes in this place that cried out for formal wear. Rolling on the living room carpet in this place that, till now, has seemed to exist in an ordered past. Me up, she down, she up, me down. Moving from room to room, hot and dripping. Not so much buzzing as fucking. Also making love, it seemed. Fucking and making love while getting drunk. My first experience with all three taking place at the same time. And I guess we left traces, for my grandmother turned cold in the fall, and her maid would not speak to me.

Across 66th street was a big Catholic church, used by the Upper East Side cooks and maids as a shelter from Waspdom. I walked on that street, between her building and that church, in this time of exploration, 1986, 20 years since her death, 30 years since my college time, 25 years since the romp in her apartment, the romp still seeming so out of context as to have no meaning there. As I walked on that street in 1986, I thought I should have warm feelings from memories of nights spent there after coming into the city for those debutante parties and Broadway shows, which seemed more real than that out-of-context romp with Laurie.

But 66th Street felt awful now. Stifling. Suffocating – as if I was not then just walking outdoors in an area of warm memories but rather was being smothered now by old heavily powdered women who had fox furs around their necks.

The Aqua Mustang 63 – PLANET OF THE APES

2009-01-28T11:58:00.003-05:00

I came out of the past and appeared to myself once while living in Beirut. It was one of those awful times in this life of high adventure, this life in hopefully wonderful exotic places, when everything had gone wrong – living in Beirut, surrounded by the very worst sort of non-Arabs, the Arabist anti-Semites and pack journalists. I had to admit that there were people I knew there who could seem alive and decent and even entertaining, yet their presence served not to change the picture but, by being so outside the picture, make its awfulness even more clear. Here in a tunnel of hopelessness – and also broke – down and out in this nowhere place city whose pretentious French façade was about as convincing as my family’s British façade had been.

The English couple downstairs in the Sinno building in Ein-mreisse say that for their party they would like everyone to bring a childhood picture. I have just recently received in the mail, out of the blue, a small slightly dog-eared and fading Brownie snapshot of myself at maybe 3 years old sitting with an expression of abandonment all alone in a rowboat on what is clearly Echo Lake where the highway meets the foot of Cannon Mountain at the entrance to Franconia Notch. This picture sent to me from Littleton, New Hampshire, by Aunt Alice in this time I am in what is feeling like a dangerously deep mire – which I am just beginning to see always comes when family seems to surround me – even when via surrogates and from a great distance.

At the party I stay drunk on the most outlandish of alcoholic beverages – Lebanese rosé alternated with arak. No one else brings a childhood picture to the party, so, with relief, I take mine back upstairs, where I will lose track of it, pleased that I have been a good enough sport to have been ready to go along with this unpleasant childhood picture plan.

But well over a dozen years after Beirut in this time of travel into the White Mountains, this time on the hunt in my Aqua Mustang time machine, I am suddenly, as I drive, thinking of that picture – and now also of Aunt Alice with shiny smooth skin suckling her baby, back when I could not have been more than 7 or 8, but not too young to notice wonderfully smooth female nakedness. Pretty Aunt Alice, the black sheep of her generation as am I in mine, which maybe was a part of why I had been so ready to think of her as being what I was told she was, my favorite aunt. Maybe also that she was warm and that she liked me.

I drive through the Notch now. I see lying by the side of the Notch road an old broken sign. Its scratched and faded letters say “ROBIN’S NEST, See a tree growing through a restaurant.” And then another old sign rotting near the shoulder, “DRINK AND JEST AT THE ROBIN’S NEST.” When I was a child we never went to the Robin’s Nest, even though it should have been a proper place since it was in the Notch, which was family approved, but nonetheless the Robin’s Nest was damned as a “tourist gag.”

Now decades out of literal childhood I will go to look for the first time. I turn off on an overgrown driveway that is what I think was the entrance, and suddenly it is like the Planet of the Apes when they come upon the century’s old ruins of New York city. The restaurant building is all loose and rotted boards and broken windows, with a live tree poking out.

I continue on to the edge of the Notch where I come to Echo Lake, where when we were boys and girls starting to live on the exciting side of puberty we went swimming at midnight with hormones wonderfully raging, and I had been sure I had escaped childhood forever. But it is cold today on Echo Lake. There is a familiar cold wind in August. There are no swimmers. The only sign of anything human is a muscular man wind surfing, something that did not exist back in the past I am exploring. Round and round the lake he goes.

I get out and walk on drizzle-soaked path that follows the lake. Clouds are coming down. I nearly trip over a long, partially crushed green megaphone. Planet of the apes. It has to be the very megaphone that used to hang from the arm of a high pole and you would shout into it across the lake and your voice would come back to you.

I hold it up, and I make noises. It is more intact than I had realized. I hold it up. I have no words, just noises. But it works. The noises come back to me from across the lake where once, in ancient times that might, I think, have been present times if I had not taken to the road – where once I was a hopeless child alone in rowboat aware that the worst was probably happening.

The Aqua Mustang 62 – HOME TO DIE?

2009-01-21T16:27:00.003-05:00

The first time I was in Beirut I was traveling with my girlfriend Vannie and our friends from New York, Steve and Berta, who had met us in Athens, where we were living in a house with no plumbing on the side of the Arcropolis. I had been writing, in marathon bursts, a novel I thought might get published. Our friends came in a Volkswagen they had just picked up in Germany, and we all drove off through Turkey and Syria and down through the mountains to the far eastern end of the Mediterranean. I had some vaguely romantic ideas about Beirut, though not enough to keep me there, for I was about to head off alone by ship to Alexandria, and then down into the Sudan, on my way to the sort of adventures I thought should be at the core of my life – across Africa through Darfur and what was French West Africa and down past the Congo into Portuguese Angola, which was in revolution. The very best sort of situation.

Some things looked intriguing in Beirut. Land rovers full of police would dash around the city, stop, let out a bunch of club waving thugs in red berets, who would pile into some place where you knew something bad would happen. One evening we were in a café on the Corniche watching a nightclub raid across the street, watching guilty looking, shifty eyed men walking briskly away – some, as in the recent movie Beat the Devil, looking about as convincingly innocent as would Peter Lorre, some more like Robert Morley.

And at our table we had a boor who had inserted himself on our party, a tightly wound little Levantine guy who was holding forth on the human condition, telling we raw Americans how everyone, whoever they are, wherever they are from, will always late in life, or at the end of life, go back to where they started out. You’ll see, he said. This idiot. That I, a world adventurer, would ever think of retreating to a Connecticut suburb.

That was when I was in my mid-twenties and I am thinking of that evening in Beirut now in 1986 as drive, at almost 52, across Vermont to St. Johnsbury, and then over to Hanover, and turn into the old territory, the towns of New Hampshire’s White Mountains, seat of so much that was real and mythical in my family, those big formal houses in the midst of what their denizens thought of as quaint rural poverty – those grandiose houses in what they called restricted towns, which meant Christian towns in a social if not spiritual sense. Most of the prominent summer families had several of these houses – in this place where for me it was not just family myths but also the place where I came into my own, first fell in love, first gloried in nature, decided to be a writer like my grandfather, and a socialist too, hated and loved and became determined to be a certain kind of person, not unlike what I was planning back when I first passed through Beirut before setting off without friends for essentially uncharted territory – literally uncharted for, with the most of the Congo closed by war and the Sahara not seeming to count, the place where I crossed Africa had no roads, just shifting tracks in the sand made by market trucks such as those I rode, and military caravans, which I sometimes rode in too.

I think of this now in 1986 as I drive in New Hampshire in this time when everything in my life is changing and everything in my past is become something different from what even quite recently it was. This time when the landscape of my past has changed so rapidly, black becoming white and vice versa, trusted elders becoming molesters or at the very least betrayers. Not that I had ever accepted their snobbery and their bigotry, but I had felt the presence of these people, so many of them dead, for until quite recently they had given me tacit, unsolicited comfort.

As I drive into the White Mountains – where now I do not have another kind of comfort that I somehow sometimes had in intervening years from getting into danger in Angola, Laos, Cuba. As I drive into the White Mountains of New Hampshire.

New Hampshire was in so many ways always more important to me than that part of childhood and youth spent in Connecticut. Am I proving the boor in Beirut to have been right. 1986. Am I coming home to die in the White Mountains?

The Aqua Mustang 61 – EVERYONE

2009-01-05T11:14:00.003-05:00

The summer people’s houses contrasted with the bare bones farms in this rocky windblown landscape. These houses were so perfectly decorated and so formal and the people in them dressed up every evening – and yet they were part of the countryside in the sense that so many of the people in them, including older people, climbed in the Franconia Range, which we saw towering over us, and sometimes in the Presidential Range too, using the “huts” of the Appalachian Mountain Club, where the men and women hikers slept separately on bunks in dormitory rooms and everyone ate great hearty meals at long, unfinished wooden tables, the food carried up the mountainsides by healthy college boys, who were what we might become one day. People who went to the same boarding schools and colleges, had relatives in the summer communities, and shared a love for New Hampshire’s mountains that started in infancy. This was the outdoors and we were part of it and so not completely separate from the world beyond the family houses.

But when Peter and I were walking on Davis Road, past the driveways for all our family places and also for the places of our grandfather Gaga’s old Princeton roommate Otto Mallory, we would often imagine ourselves in worlds that went beyond the summer places. We fantasized about how when we were older we would make it be more like pioneer days here, for we would open a roadside log inn and restaurant right among the birches on Davis Road, and in the inn we would wear and also sell heavy boots and black and red checked flannel shirts – and the place would be open not just to family but to everyone.

And anyway not everything about our life outside the formal summer world was fantasy. I was amazed that tucked away here in the midst of our houses, down a bit from our dark, circular, ominous House on the Hill, in sight of our rambling old Farm House, across from the long winding driveway through woods to our main house, White Pines, and just up from yet another of our houses, White Wings, quite close the Poole Playhouse, which had once been for dances and theatrical shows, right here near the middle of all this was the Caretaker’s Cottage, which was heated with a pot belly stove, and, even more amazing, out in front was the pickup truck the caretaker used. Our truck!

And in the direction of our tennis court there was a barn that was our barn, and with a cow, our cow, that supplied the milk Peter and I drank, the others put in their tea and coffee, and our housekeeper Mrs. Miner used in cooking. The caretaker’s old wife taught Peter and me to milk the cow. It was hard at first, but soon we caught the rhythm and while I worked, pulling the udders just firmly enough so as not to hurt the cow, the warm milk zinged against the side of the milking pail, and I was one with a big world.

When we were very small our nurse, Ann, took us one day to the caretaker’s place. Lying on a bed in the cottage's small, low-ceiling living room was his old father, who was unshaven, dressed in long underwear, and apparently unconscious, so out of touch with what was around him that big black flies were alighting on his nose and eyelids. Not for the first time in my experience in this otherwise idyllic summer world, I felt the nearness of death. It was so often in the air here in the White Mountains where so much of the talk was about better days. And I had felt it the only time I ever saw my great grandmother, Mrs. Winterbotham, who one day was in a bathrobe standing in the doorway to the Farm House, which had been the first of the houses belonging to our family.

When we were a little bit older there was a caretaker who had a son, Teddy Noyes, who was our age and became our friend, along with Teddy’s friend Herbie Whipple, who became our friend too. Together we built a tree house on a path through the pine woods. We were aware that Noyes and Whipple were big names among the year-round people. At this point I saw no real barrier between the them and the us.

Mother and Dad were in the mountains for two weeks, driving around with Peter and me in our Plymouth convertible – which Dad, to Mother’s disgust, had purchased just before the auto plants were converted to making war machines. It seemed to me that by now, with the war ended, we had had that Plymouth forever, and that it had become dowdy and old hat. But when we all stopped in front of the caretaker’s cottage to pick up eggs before turning down to White Pines, the whole Noyes family came out to greet this fancy car, and watch how Dad could make the top go up or down by pushing or pulling something on the dashboard.

The Aqua Mustang 60 – ENOUGH?

2009-01-03T13:49:00.003-05:00

Maybe I have told myself enough – not just today but since I went back to writing in 1991 after a glorious period that began in 1986 when I had decided to stop writing forever, for words at that time were of no help to me – not like scenes in nature and in painting, sounds in nature and in music – as if even thoughnature might connect with Wordsworth and Keats, as it did with visual artists and musicians, there was no such connection for me that I could put into words without falsifying what I felt with conclusions, premature or otherwise – as if nature were safely fortified against the forces of the tyranny of words.

This freedom from words must have been part of the lightheartedness that kept sweeping through the aqua Mustang that summer – that spirited vehicle in which I was spending so much time, driving and driving and driving though not bothering much with maps, stopping to park and breathe and think in thin, pine-scented mountain air, or lie beside a lake – there were lakes everywhere in the summer of ’86 when I had passed 50 and was finally young, and it was as if it were forever since I been by a lake, certainly never the way it was now wearing the earphones of my new Walkman. A Walkman, which was not an our-kind-of-people’s device. They would edit out Walkmans just as they had edited out Jean-Paul Belmondo. I could think of these careful editings out of experience as something that had affected all in the family, even at times me myself.

And sometimes as I drove I wondered why it had taken me so long to burn bridges – as everything I remembered now I remembered in a different way than I would have before I started speaking before groups about what and how it had all been, the life in that family. The way it has been before what I had taken so long to identify as a depression had lifted, a depression bad enough when assisted by alcohol, and worse without the alcohol – fighting it by trying to set off fireworks, as someone once said of me to my then girlfriend Vannie. Don’t you see he’s always setting off fireworks for you – as if sparkle and substance could never meet and Vannie should run fast. This guy was just out of Yale and thought he knew how far a person should go.

But now since the previous autumn I had been again setting off the rockets and pinwheels and whistling bomb-like things. It was the first time, I realized that, though I had always seen what was wrong with them – the caution, the Anglo envy, the bigotry in the world I was supposed to be in – the first time that I was choosing sides with no way back, crossing enemy lines to hand the enemy my people’s secrets.

This was more complex than my stated, to friends, conclusion years back that there must be bad blood in the family I came from since they were all doing so badly. Not me, since I did not hold jobs, but my brother and father and uncle, who had been fired from jobs by which they defined themselves – and their wives who were sunk in something so deep you did not ask questions. Bad blood.

More recently my mother, though unhappy with her state, had been talking about what, as she put it, separated us from all of them outside the family. What it is, she said, “is that we must have good genes.

I drove through the summer, still based in Vermont but gradually spending more time over the border the land of the White Mountains, which now seemed black with menace, and I felt like a knight riding into battle, a little scared but gleefully ready to take on all foes, natural or supernatural. And time became compressed.

I kept on driving, but in September I was not alone in the car, and this long-haired blue eyed girl/woman with me now in what had become an intense trysting time, she had, by god, one of those mysterious English American supposed upper class accents, and she knew the Wasp world, and her pedigreed mother had set her up for sex with older men when she was still a child, and so she knew these worlds full of fake correct people, and she knew what I was hunting.

We based ourselves at Jason Bacon’s other house, which he called a camp, in a Wasp enclave on Lake Champlain. At first, before it shattered, before betrayal and counter-betrayal – so surprising and so familiar – it was all more like a hopeful kid’s wet dream, she was that good at what we were doing. I stared at her from above and below in wonder as if I had never seen a naked woman before. Maybe not so young as she looked, but young enough to look the way she looked. In bed I could imagine her covered in a 1950s prom gown that was strapless and about to slip down – this dreaming taken place right there in Jason’s camp and played off against her actual nakedness.

And still I was not finished. As the hunt continued and the last part of the year unfolded, in the first snow now, I was back again, this time to rescue my favorite cousin, the one who had been a dancer until they had had to flee New York ahead of the law. My favorite cousin, who was just now back in the mountains, just sprung from a battered women’s shelter in northern Minnesota.

The Aqua Mustang 59 – BEYOND DANGER

2009-01-03T10:20:00.003-05:00

So I had this ill-gotten check from Penthouse for a piece bringing up to date the exposé of what was happening in the Philippines – which, to my discredit, I had been almost hoping would be another Vietnam now that Marcos and his bloodthirsty relatives had gone wild, right down to the Constabulary staging village square beheadings. A quagmire would serve these awful people right – Ronnie and Nancy Reagan and their cruel jet set friends Ferdy and Imelda Marcos. Not to mention what it would have done for my career to have gotten this one right.

Every night on television in Manila there would be a rerunning of a video of Reagan’s errand boy, the silly and angry little Yale guy who changed his principles from minute to minute, this Vice President Bush, whom nobody except journalists and the more insecure new money rich took to be a classy aristocrat. In the nightly rerunning of the video he would stand up at a banquet table, wearing Philippine formal national dress, which was a long sleeve transparent shirt that looked as much like something synthetic as it was possible to achieve with pineapple and banana fibers – this costumed twerp holding high a glass of something and toasting Marcos, testifying to the seedy dictator’s love of democracy, this nightly show convincing so many in the Philippines that if they rebelled against Marcos the Americans would come in and kill them.

This awful four-name Bush was the sort of person I felt I had known from earliest times and may not yet have shaken off. This pompous little twerp so familiar to me, as was so much else everywhere, including my just ended marriage to a girl from Quezon City whose mother, who had immigrated illegally and moved in with us in New York, was a professional gambler, a non-cliché part of a situation that went on too long. This I thought about as I drove around green Vermont, and began forays across the frontier into the granite state of New Hampshire, where a some people crucial to my coming of age years could still be found – including summer people who went back to stay.

In Vermont I had two old friends, Jason Bacon and Peter Cooper, who had both been in our commuter town during the big part of my growing into adolescence that took place in Connecticut, and they had both of them been rebels of sorts who remained my friends later, Jason and I sharing a place for a year in what was not yet called the East Village when I first was free to live in New York, and Peter, a major drinking companion from that time. Peter was now in Rutland, which he had reached in hippie times and where he had apparently come to dead end – then pulled himself up. He was now running a state alcoholism unit, and had just published a not bad if sentimental novel. Further up the state, Jason was also living, he in well-heeled early retirement, splitting his year between London and a big log place near Middlebury. We had taken separate paths from the East Village, and he had retired in his forties rich from investment banking. It was a try at respectability that was meant, I expected, to blot out the past. A big scandal in Connecticut way back, after Jason’s father went broke, was his and Peter’s parents going off with each other’s spouses. And I imagined the guys in the next generation had to have been attracted to their sisters-in-law.

Me, I was rerunning my entire life this summer in Vermont in this light time of something that felt like happy drifting – this lighthearted, life-filled time when everything l saw – a stream, a barn, a pretty girl on a village green – seemed something wonderful that I had never really seen before. Drifting up and down and around Vermont in this lighthearted aqua Mustang with lighthearted music always playing. Especially Judy Collins, who was about as dangerous as I really wanted anything to be in this time of heading into deep dangerous places from a past I had not realized until recently was dangerous. I had thought the dangerous parts had only been my times later on hiding from the Tontons Marcout in Haiti, or from the Portuguese in the revolution in Angola, or when caught by sweaty men with tommy guns while looking for Castro in the last days of Batista’s Cuba, or roaming in Laos, or Beirut when the serious killing began, or Panama.

Southeast Asia and Latin America and the Middle East. Was it too much like a hack written story to suppose that there was some connection between my growing up in the White Mountains and what I was drawn to later?

I thought all this as I drifted around Vermont, which was what I was drawn to now, Judy Collins singing about love and sweetly deferred happiness.

The Aqua Mustang 58 - ILLUSION OF SAFETY

2009-01-02T14:22:00.002-05:00

Only on occasion did it seem that we were very close to a world I knew from comics and radio dramas in which everyone was an ordinary person, everyone open to everyone else, worlds where there might be no fortified barriers between standardized people and us, which was so unlikely since we were descendants of the great writer, us in our big houses, us with servants to bring in the platters of food as we sat around the long shiny dining table being served by women from the village who seemed not to hear the talk about the good old days before World War II began, the even better days before World war I, talk of other big houses from Lake Forest to Europe, talk of cousin this and cousin that in Chicago, talk of cousins alive and dead, and famous people who had come here to White Pines, us dressed up, never casual at the dinner table, us so unlike the them in the villages who farmed and made things and repaired things, the them that I knew inhabited almost all of the world except for our tiny corner that was said to be so safe, the them I knew when in New Hampshire mainly from comics and radio serials, the them out there in the rest of the world where fairness, the comics and the radio told me, might win out in the end. The them, the fictional version of them – though sometimes I could feel safe in this family by the very fact that I was surrounded by people who knew that the them of the outside world were probably not people we should trust.

Peter, who never had a bad word for anyone in the family except Dad, spoke once when we were ten of contempt he felt for our grandfather Gaga because we had been in a public school and Gaga did not know worlds beyond this world that was fed by very private schools and equally private imitation English colleges. We knew more than Gaga did, he said, though he quickly rewrote what he had just said, and spoke of how kind Gaga was. Peter so controlled and determined, wearing glasses that seemed to underscore how wise he was, or how wise they all took him to be.

And Gaga with his floppy summer sun hat that had green isinglass in the brim, Gaga with one of the many canes that were in the rack at the high ceiling entry room in White Pines, that led out to the big main room that seemed to go on forever, or at the right of the entry room to Gaga’s study, meaning you had to tiptoe when near that door, or to the left to a wide stairway, halfway up which was a landing that contained only the telephone room, needing no explanation, for in this world it was as if every house had a telephone room. Ours contained a framed genealogical chart and also, strangely, for the very idea of sexy naked women seemed alien here, a small framed print of an old painting of an unclothed woman rising form an oyster shell.

I had never been happier getting to the mountains than late in that summer when we were nine and the parents for unexplained reasons had send us away for six weeks to Camp Saugatuck, a bare bones camp that was not far from where we lived most of the year in Connecticut but was as distant from us in our Connecticut town as was the world of the presumably uneducated year-round people up here in the mountains. Peter had hated that camp, he said, but he had not, it seemed to me, been hurt by it. He had not been one of the spindly, slow, less than human boys whom the other boys tortured with wet towels and fists, urged on by the camp counselors whose main duty seemed to be to line everyone up outside a toilet shack each morning, the line going on for hours it seemed, and to sent a kid back if after he came out the counselors saw that there was no B.M. in the toilet. The whole camp seemed to smell like that toilet. And we wore uniforms that were like died green underwear except that they were made of scratchy wool, here where everything smelled of B.M.'s, where the water was so muddy you could not see the bottom even where it was shallow, where you were likely to come out of an enforced recreation period with blood suckers attached to your back and legs.

The last part of that summer was spent up in the mountains, for which I thanked a God who had not seemed very interested in me. Certainly had not seemed to notice when I hid that I had a burning throat and high fever and, shivering in the summer heat, I kept on going into the disgusting lake water, for I was so afraid of what could happen to a sick person transferred to the camp owner's house. And there seemed no God interested in explaining why in that time at camp I would suck in my cheeks and clamp down on the inside with my teeth until the pain was excruciating, which somehow gave me comfort, especially when the inside of my mouth had the consistency of raw meat.

And there was nobody in the White Mountains to advise about the horrors of Camp Saugatuck. Gaga, who usually seemed so indulgent, was telling everyone how the twins had never looked so healthy, this has been such a wonderful experience for them.

The Aqua Mustang 57 – LIGHT FROM BELOW

2008-12-31T11:31:00.003-05:00

But it is 1986 now and I am on the hunt, and I have just encountered Mrs. Miner, the energetic and kind old woman who I thought was old when she was still the cook and housekeeper and boss of other helpers at White Pines decades back – back when I was enjoying popularly in our summer gang such as I never knew before in groups of contemporaries, where most often I had been dismissed as slow or dumb or unattractive, nothing at all like my twin brother. And even when I was popular and had fallen in reciprocated love with Kitty, to me the most desirable of all the sweet tanned girls in our summer gang, it did not register at home. My maternal grandmother, not the grand dame paternal grandmother but the one we called Grandmother Clark and who lived with us in Connecticut, would wonder aloud why my successes in school, in a academics and in debate, weren’t my brother’s successes – he was always so studious, so if only he had put his mind to it like Fred did. And my mother would wonder aloud why it was Fred who was with Kitty or Sandie or even some other girl no one knew, and why couldn’t girls see how very much – much more was how I heard it – that Peter had to offer.

This was on my mind in 1986 – this time when my cousins, the first cousins, not the distant older cousins, had come of age and were in the course of dying off already, dying in great pain and usually under circumstances of violence. This time when my brother Peter was at large not just in family places but in the CIA, and I was for the first time letting myself really know what I knew and taking it a perhaps logical step further to the point where White Pines, formerly the most perfect place on earth, had become a chamber of horrors that was at the very least unsafe for children – populated, I was saying, by people who not only should not have had children but who were too narrow and bigoted to be entrusted with much of anything, much less my love.

A situation that seemed so clear in 1986 but before this had seemed so muddy – their anti-Semitism and other snobbery now far outweighing their distant past accomplishments as Socialists and other sorts of liberators. This even before dealing with them as actual or suspected molesters.

Yet even now when I was on the hunt, in a time when what had been white had become black, even now this landscape would be full of color and I could not forget what it had once been for me.

It was partly a place of enchantment. Dad and Uncle Nick and Peter and I rose before dawn the morning after hiking – with snacks for us and a flask of whisky for our elders – all the way up to the Greenleaf Hut at the timberline on Mount Lafayette – the highest mountain in the Franconia range – the official view of which was seen so clearly from White Pines out past the long, horizontal pained class window that followed the line of the long dining table, and out past graceful French doors that followed the formal sitting room end of the great room – through the French doors and outside among white bird baths and trellises on a perfect narrow lawn that ended at boulders laced with iron ore, and then after the boulders a thick, prickly wild blueberry field that ended at, still with no humans in sight, the deep woods my grandparents actually owned. That they owned the woods I had checked on some years back when helping a criminal lawyer coach a young cousin. Whatever you do, the lawyer said to him, don't tell the judge that your grandmother owns those woods, for neither a judge nor anyone else in a city courtroom would get the conception. Those woods that led to the grand mountains.

In the early morning we walked from the Greenleaf hut on a steep pathway up through rocks and scrub pine, carrying with us a small mirror. At the summit, under the direction of Dad and Uncle Nick, who had been doing it since they themselves were children, Peter and I tried turning the mirror in ways that maybe it would send flashes of light that could be seen as far away as at White Pines itself. Whether our small mirror worked, the wall mirror Gaga brought through the French doors at a prearranged time certainly did – great flashes of white light from the valley, like some sort of annunciation.

And Peter was right, and Gaga was kind, and so too was Nana, my stately grandmother, the one who knew the famous people and knew right from wrong in style as well as substance, Nana the one who struck people as cold but who often took my side – probably, I thought by 1986 when I was on the hunt, because, bigoted or not, straight laced or not, socially superior or not, she was so much more intelligent than the rest of them.

The Aqua Mustang 56 – HOUSES AGAIN

2008-12-20T12:17:00.003-05:00

We were in a barn behind a Waspily tasteful house, looking at two black Bentleys, way out on the Easton Road in deep, maturing second growth North Country woods. It was August and there was a chill to the air.

The barn seemed strangely dead. I could not imagine live cows or farm workers in it. We were standing around these two old but perfectly maintained black Bentleys. And I heard myself asking the tweed-capped old gentleman who owned them if they were for sale – and he said they were in the sort of careful British-like, American upper-class accent so common to the summer people. It seemed like a reasonable thing to ask him, since I was quite drunk – drunker probably, than my old friend from childhood and her new husband, who had brought me here.

It was the summer of 1970 – and there was talk about the chance I would soon have money. I did not realize there was always such talk when you had a certain kind of novel coming out. My editor was saying that mine – which was set in Vietnam-era Bangkok, and had plenty of war and sex in it – would somehow be the successor to Taipan, Love Is A Many Splendored Thing and The World of Suzie Wong. He said this though the advance had been $5000 (which seemed high to me).

I was on the final reworking, actually meeting my deadline. In the six months since signing the contract I had been sometimes working furiously, and sometimes furiously not working – moving first to London, then to Las Palmas in the Canaries, then back to London, and then to an obscure part of the obscure island/country Malta, and back to London again, then Zermatt, then Frankfort, and once more London. An old childhood friend who had become an investment banker lived there, and many war-loving journalists I had known in Southeast Asia were passing through.

I had not much liked London this time around and was wondering if I had ever liked London or had just been told by the family that it was my favorite place. For it was their place, not mine, the place where my sexy Aunty Betsy had a child and lingered after her husband was killed, and also adopted two more children. More important, it was the home of my grandparents’ close friends Sir Arthur and Lady Ethel Salter – names that were actually shouted out by a footman at the sort of parties these friends went to.

All of this being the sort of thing I hated most except when it was parodied for comedy's sake.

But then I was reluctantly coming also to hate the family’s home base, the White Mountains, notwithstanding that I had come into life there, including love and sex and literature. Despite sex and love I could never totally deny what the White Mountains stood for – which included silly, bigoted Wasps (who had recently voted for Nixon),

That there was a long-odds chance that my book would make big money did not explain why, as the book came to an end, I had been drawn here. Drawn not so much like the moth to the flame as like the fly to the flypaper.

Why did I come? Why, when drunk, did I, clearly a radical left-winger when out in the world, say I wanted to own a Bentley? I knew I would never spend another summer here – I know it on some level – but a few days before the Bentley evening, when drunk again, I had talked seriously with my friends here about using book money to buy back White Pines, the biggest of the old family places. Bringing White Pines back to glory, the way it was before it had been sold to avoid taxes and fallen into the hands of uncouth people. Gatsby-like I would buy it.

The people of the past could make of this what they would. I would put them in their place, though it might seem I as out to honor them. For just a moment this house purchase idea, like the Bentley idea, had the feel of clear thinking – for just a brief gin-soaked moment.

The Aqua Mustang 55 – PARKWAYS AGAIN

2008-12-16T10:24:00.002-05:00

For the first time in my life I was freed from the tyranny of my mother tongue – this English language, the only one in which I was fluent, the language that had been so useful for making lists and arguments and putting forth closure and conclusion, but was of so little use to me in this time when everything was changing.

A language that worked now was that of trees billowing out on either side of the old style parkways I drove now for the first time or the first time in years. Special old four-lane, divided and landscaped highways from the early days of automotive motoring. Highways that brought instant nostalgia whether it was the name of the Merritt Parkway, which I had traveled to go to Kitty’s place when 16, or the Palisades Parkway along the Hudson atop high cliffs that spoke of sensuous danger, or the old Taconic, the take-off route for northern destinations – the Taconic, which felt familiar though I could not remember being on it before.

The Merritt Partkway like the rest of Connecticut as I remembered it, intensely green and hopeful and unadventurous, and strangely comforting in its lack of surface excitement. The Palisades, high above the river, with a circular restaurant with fireplaces and fans rather than conditioned air, and they cooked the cheap hamburgers to order, a time warp situation. And now the Taconic, so like the roads that were driven in 30s movies and civilized old detective novels.

On the Taconic this summer they had still not gotten around to anything resembling the exits and entrances of modern turnpikes. So far from having cloverleafs, you could simply turn off the Taconic onto narrow roads that went off at right angles, appeared without warning, and seemed that summer to as often as not go through bowers of lush vegetation – like tunnel entrances to enchanted lands. Several times I turned off to see what was there and, by God, I would come out the other side of the tunnel in my aqua Mustang and I would be in exactly the kind of enchantment I had imagined – rolling hills and flowers and cows and horses and once even fluffy sheep.

It all came in these new word-free languages I was learning – everything now so far from books I’d planned or actually constructed.

Constructed. That’s all I seemed to have left in 1986 of what writing had been about. Constructed with a certain end result always expected. As perhaps in my grandfather's novels, that not so long before this time could turn up on compulsory college reading lists, as they still did on the compulsory reading lists for White Mountains summer families.

But now sounds. Music was constantly playing in the car. Willie Nelson and Carly Simon and James Taylor and Judy Collins. Also Mozart, who knew the lightness of being that I was only just beginning. Mozart (though not Beethoven, for right now I wanted gentleness). Sounds, not thoughts put into an alphabet. Sights, like what I was seeing in the city in the museums and galleries and cityscapes as well as parkway landscapes that I had not seen before – sights, not labeled things that could be looked up and checked. Feelings rather than maps showing the way.

Breaking out of times without music, without painting, without billowing trees, without parkways, without a car.

The Aqua Mustang 54 - OLD VOYAGE

2008-12-12T14:59:00.002-05:00

After all these adventures – later there were those who said I must have been suicidal but that had not occurred to me, or I had protested against it. Even during times of deep depression alone in Darfur without water or among silly expats – or being served raw liver in a desolate grass hut village – and certainly not suicidal in the clearly exciting times, hiding in safe places deep in colonial Angola during the revolution against the Portuguese. Or dealing with scoundrels, such as a travel writer who turned out to be the cruel son of a titled English friend of my grandparents. He was was traveling through Angola and Katanga financed by the mining interests that had had Lumumba killed. Hardly depressed when facing spear carriers in Chad’s near desert who suddenly emerged in a previously empty landscape to negotiate the division of a just shot antelope – or, after being ordered out of Abeché by French army men who were still present, but staying anyway and sleeping in the house of their enemy, a mysterious Foreign Legion widow named Madam Lucieni, whose pet lions roamed through every room.

And now I was on a ship – with help from an old friend from draftee army days who was now in the Foreign Service and in the U.S. Legation in Luanda. I had gotten this job way, way below the equator on a Norwegian freighter going non-stop all the way up to Emden on the North Sea – this in exchange for my friend helping with paperwork so the old captain would not have to go ashore and do it himself.

Another reason I was hired, it soon became clear, was that the old captain needed someone new to hear his stories. Norwegian ship’s officers, though not crew members, stayed at sea for six years at a stretch. The captain needed someone new to hear about being shipwrecked in the 1920s off the China Coast, and about his adventures, before he was a ship’s officer, going up to Greenland to club baby seals to death.

Nominally I was working for my passage. I was given the job of painting around the portholes in the officer’s quarters. And I was put up in their part of the ship in what amounted so a suite – something called the owner’s carbin, which they said had never been used by any of the line’s owners but every norwegian ship had one because it was tradition.

Once I actually was doing a little painting and the ship’s stewardess, a tall and tight, though technically Venus-like, Nordic woman – I had never imagined that a non-passenger ship would carry a stewardess – started talking to me like an angry schoolteacher, about what a messy job I was doing, and why was I spending so much time talking with the men rather than working? The others told me the story on her. She had just moved into the first mate’s cabin, which was a scandal in this life at close quarters. The first mate told me that what he had done meant he would never ship out as a first officer again but he didn’t care. He did not look like he was having fun. He did not even look like he was getting laid, though he must have been.

The ship's engineer was a wiry right-winger. He invited me into his sitting room – they did live well on this ship – so he could rail at Socialists everywhere, especially those in power in Norway. But he would get off track and start telling me about the war, about his days in the underground, the chances he took, his friends whom the Nazis and their collaborators caught and executed.

There was abundant mealtime food of the meat and potatoes sort, and at all hours an assortment of cheeses in the officers' dining room, which benefited from a behind-the-scenes cook I never met, just as I met few on board who were not officers. And there was sometimes plenty of good Norwegian beer, which was important to me at that time in my life. How they got Norwegian beer in the obscure places they visited was a mystery. No place was quite so disconnected then as Luanda – which strangely was an all-white Mediterranean looking city – white buildings and white people – even the shoeshine boys and lottery ticket salesmen were white Portuguese. My friend and his wife, though both anti-apartheid liberals, left margarine in the kitchen for the servants, and had real butter at their own table, the only sign that they followed local custom. My friend had complained to me that there were people in the Foreign Service who had told him he was being sent to Africa because his experience growing up in Georgia would help him in tough dealings with Negroes.

I was actually kind of depressed most of the time on the freighter. It was feeling like I belonged nowhere. I had been living high with my lovely artist girlfriend in Greece but I did not speak the language there. Before Greece I was all over Yugoslavia, a young man alone in strange towns without Serbo-Croat. In Africa there were many new languages I did not speak.

When I ran out of reading matter I went to the closet they called the ship’s library, where almost everything was in English, which is the official language of the sea. And there was a paperback of an historical novel that a few months ago my mother, strangely, had written me about. Strange that she should give me literary advice. But maybe not so strange that she did not know me well enough to know how much I disliked historical fiction. She said I really should read this one.

This novel was about Dumas or Hugo or one of those old-time best-selling French writers – musketeers and pretty girls in lacy long dresses and evil cardinals and galley slaves and that sort of thing. This novel about this writer starts when he is an inexperienced young man. It is his first night in Paris. He is just in from some dull provincial place.

On that night, knowing no-one, he by chance meets Major Dreyfus, and then by chance meets Toulouse-Lautrec. I put it down before finding out if by chance he slept with Colette, I was that depressed.

The Aqua Mustang 53 - MONGOLIA

2008-12-05T09:51:00.000-05:00

Although Walter did most of the talking, he did seem fascinated by my experience of the world, which was so different from his –the foreign adventure part, and even more the part of my life when I was very young, a child, up in the restricted part of New Hampshire and also in Fairfield County Connecticut. And as my past came into focus, I was proud that from the very start I had rejected the family’s nasty bigotry, even though I had usually kept silent and seethed rather than go openly on the attack.

Such silence was becoming untenable in this time when everything was changing – this time when I was about to head up to northern New England to go on the hunt, feeling ready to kill as I gathered evidence against the villains and information about what had really happened, on the hunt for what had happened to all these cousins who were coming to such bad, often violent, ends now in the present, and not least what had really happened to myself.

Maybe on some level I had wanted to play the game. Why else Princeton? Even though I hated that shoddy Republican place, I did stay for all four years. And as for continuing to play the game: Why else give that “Twins in the American Century” shit a chance. Now I had to fight my way out of some maze I was in. Whether I had created it or been placed in it were irrelevant matters. But the fact that I might have a hand in it – me so opposed to so much of their awful nonsense from the time I was first aware of what they were doing, which started when I was about seven years old – that I might have had a hand in it somehow made logical sense – and made me even more want to kill.

Because I could not sit in silence anywhere now, I was spending almost all my time with people I knew only in this new time – people who were getting really organized now – people who were also on the hunt for family horrors in the present and especially in the past.

One reason I could not keep going to these hospitable Sunday gatherings, which had actually been a big part of life for me, was that nothing about me was explained there. I realized, as I began what I felt could be a fight to the death, that I could no longer listen to anyone’s nonsense.

One thing I had learned in those years of Sunday afternoons at Walter’s was that to people I consciously cared about, which more and more meant non-family people, the world I came from was as strange and forbidding and exotic too as would be the world of someone from Mongolia. And I realized that they would understand Mongolia better than they understood Waspdom.

For I knew William Buckley, who everyone thought so smooth, was a fraud. I just knew it. I was delighted when someone wrote that Buckley proved that old saying that if you give an Irishman a horse he will vote Tory. Buckley with his fake English accent – so like the fake English accents of my supposedly nearest and dearest, who also would know Buckley was a fraud even as they tried themselves to make accurate British sounds. No one in my family was nearly so cool as the Anglophile Irishman Buckley. My family’s model was non-existent.

I did not at this point, want to spend another Sunday afternoon with people who thought that what I came from was classy.

The Aqua Mustang 52 - AT WALTER'S PLACE

2008-12-04T12:54:00.002-05:00

Often during the last four years of my failing first marriage when I was living with my wife, her son and eventually her mother too in a cramped place looking out on an air well on West 81st Street, often during that time and for two years after I moved out of the place and the marriage and into a bright place on 25th Street that had a view, I would still spend most Sunday afternoons in an old and solid West 79th Street apartment where my very old friend Walter Karp and his sparkling second wife Regina, lived. Walter still did most of the talking, as he had in the 20 years I had known him. He was still trying out verbally before he wrote them the latest chapters for the latest of his political theory books for which he was becoming known. Sometimes it was just Walter, Regina, me and Walter’s younger brother Richard. Sometimes on these Sunday afternoons we would be joined by old friends of Walter’s from his days at Columbia, where he was Valedictorian of his class, and shocked them all by refusing to go to graduate school but instead took a position writing picture captions for show-biz stories in Pageant Magazine. And sometimes there would be some well-known editors too, who had come into the picture after his writing became respectable.

Often on these afternoons I would feel more like an observer than a participant, but this had been going on since childhood.

My childhood was something I rarely talked about, so I was surprised when, one Sunday, Walter brought it up. I noted that he had my last book, the one on the Philippines, displayed on what looked like a dictionary stand. He had this great idea, he said for my next book, which he said should be a light autobiographical work about me and my foreign adventures, my grandfather who Walter knew of as a novelist and internationalist, and my twin Peter, whom I occasionally referred to as someone who worked for the C.I.A. The book, Walter said, should be called Twins in the American Century.

That was one of the rare times that my family came into actual conversation on those Sunday afternoons. On one other occasion the family appeared, but I did not let on. It was when Walter was speaking with humor about a time he had been a Scarsdale girl’s date for a country club dance. Before the dance started he was asked to leave town because the grown-ups had discovered he was Jewish. I shook my head and remained silent even though I knew Walter would have been amused by my experience with the same event.

It was one night when I had fled college, as I often did, for the pleasures of the city. Being broke, but maybe more obedient than I realized, I took my grandmother up on dinner at her New York apartment, which was a tiny replica of their big houses up in New Hampshire that were so much a part of my early years. That night at the dinner table – as formal as in the mountains, right down to careful servers and the finger bowls, she talked about what she said was an awful thing that had happened in Scarsdale to her son Nick and his wife Peggy (who sometimes came up in conversation to be put down for being too careful about appearances). What had happened was that some girl in Scarsdale had invited a boy to their country club dance and it turned out he was Jewish and so of course had to leave. But the worst came afterwards, she said, for at the Episcopal church (which I knew from Scarsdale funerals) the minister had railed against the country club – and so the congregation had asked the minister, too, to leave Scarsdale. The point seemed to be how awful for Peggy that not just the girl but the minister too had behaved so badly.

That time at that dinner table was yet another time when I kept quiet but seethed. At certain times I knew of nothing between violent ranting and silence. And, worse than silence, I actually did make a stab at that book Walter suggested. I took the idea to the point where Macmillan just needed a sample chapter for the record before making an offer. Of course it was impossible to write even a fake chapter of Twins in the American Century.

BANGKOK '76

2008-11-25T17:16:00.003-05:00

When I went back to Bangkok in ’76, after those seven in-between years, it was hard to sort out what was there at this point and what had been there before. The place had had another ten boom-town years, so different from the devastation in nearby Vietnam and Laos and Cambodia. Thailand seemed more than ever to be all glitter.

I headed off to a dark bar I used to haunt – a seedy place still, despite the overall glitter, filled with grim Western spies and very un-grim Eastern girls. It was the place where ten years back I had met up with Sunisar, who wore gold lamé gowns and was more or less a singer. It had the unlikely name The Dew Drop Inn, like the name of some mundane beery place in American where lithe girls would never be found.

On my way to the bar I looked in on what had been a shiny new hotel seven years back but by now looked old and shabby. In the lobby there was a florist shop, which I remembered because I had brought girls flowers there. This time I saw a tall floral arrangement with a card on it that said “Amranand” in Western letters, and below it something else in Sanskrit. Amranand was a name known in Bangkok where not everyone used last names. When I was in Bangkok the first time around Prock Amranand, a Thai economist who worked for UNESCO, had asked me to be the English language PR man at the World Fellowship of Buddhists annual conclave, which was being held that year in the relatively cool, flower-scented northern city of Chiengmai. I had then quickly asked a Burmese guy I knew at Reuters to get Bonnie Beaman credentials for the conference as a special Reuter’s correspondent – really shrewd, for Bonnie and I were on the verge of being an item now that Sunisar was no longer living in the airy house I had rented across the river in Thonburi.

Not that the end of the Sunisar period and the beginning with Bonnie meant any decrease in sexual tension. Or any other kind of tension in this place where, along with the frenetic night life, assassinations by spies chasing spies seemed to be a daily occurrence, and every foreigner seemed to have some sort of undercover role with some national or factional intelligence service. Bonnie had come to Bangkok originally with one of the contract CIA people who were everywhere that year in this boom town city of temples and elaborate massage places (which were blessed by legions of Buddhist monks when they opened), and very big temples with gold leaf in their sweeping roofs, and cavernous nightclubs, also cozy bars, all full of girls, and also palaces whose denizens were a mystery. She had started from Tokyo, where she had gone on a teaching job via Antioch College’s innocent work-study program. She had abandoned the program for a job standing in a low cut evening gown that showed off her tanned bikini-ready figure at the door to an expensive Tokyo nightclub, she the bait waved in front of rich Japanese men. It would have worked for me if I were a rich Japanese man.

We went to Chiengmai in a special plane for the conference in which, as on many regular flights too, two monks were placed at the front so as to ward off air crashes. In Chiengmai we moved fast from being fake journalist colleagues to being lovers on a tryst. We spent the bulk of our time in bed at the compact new Railway Hotel. The first time we ordered from room service from the their new Western menu – Western food being a big fad in Thailand that year – half a dozen people burst into our room and formed a semi-circle around our bed, including two guys in chef’s hats who poured brandy over a sort of brochette dish and lit it to the applause of several boys and girls in white uniforms, the girls looking like teenagers disguised as French maids for Halloween. The room was full of dead bugs because we had left a door to a small balcony open while we were at a Buddhist conference session. And we were naked under a thin sheet, though after that first time we would get dressed before the food arrived.

Before I was finished with Southeast Asia that first time around I wrote enough of a novel about that time to get the book sold right afterwards in New York. What I did not put into the novel were family factors whose importance alluded me. I edited out that the reason I knew Brock Amranand was that he was the husband of a royal Thai lady named Pim Sai, who had been to boarding school in England with my ultra-white sister-in-law Rosemary, who was send to England for boarding school by her father who was with the India Army in Malaya. My sister-in-law was there in Bangkok my first time around along with my twin brother Peter, subject of a childhood rivalry that never ended.

I was writing hack books full of sex that belied the fleeting but intense intimations of innocence I had with Bonnie at first – the feeling that now, at 31, I had a chance to redo my early years.

Peter was there with an ominous Defense Department agency, part of the Johnson war escalation, the agency’s main goal apparently to teach the Thai army up-to-date ways to kill peasants. In my novel a character named Mickey was exactly like Bonnie, and two charactyers, Andrew and Simon, were meant to be exactly like me, Andrew them full of alcohol-fueled romantic swagger, Simon had low self-esteem. In the book there was no Peter.

Some time after I saw the floral arrangement near still seedy bar, I discovered it was indeed for the Pim Sai house. Pim Sai had just been killed, slashed to ribbons by a gardener who for some reason ran amok.

The Aqua Mustang 51 - GOING BACK

2008-11-21T13:46:00.002-05:00

As I drove up and down Vermont, I was sometimes 30 years or more back in New Hampshire, and sometimes I was back in the places with which I had replaced New Hampshire - places of war and beauty and love and hatred, sex and life and death, ships and planes and trains, chasing adventure, includinig adventurous girls of all nations, but often alone, moving about Asia and Africa and Europe and seas that contained islands - almost, but maybe not much, like the man I had dreamed I could be.

One day while driving I was thinking about a time I went back to a familiar place not in my head but literally. I had returned to Southeast Asia – these wild and/or languid tropical places, so full of sex and comfort and danger or adventure – back after seven sometimes dark years away. I was back and I was all over the map, just as I had been in those earlier years out here. I had been everywhere back then, usually with a drink, which could be beer or could be rough rice whisky – and even with the sort of throbbing hangovers that feel terminal I had had so much energy in those past years – and yet it was nothing like the sudden bursts I experienced when I returned.

Just before leaving New York I had stopped drinking after 22 years of drinking which I had told myself unconvincingly was not so bad as that of my alcoholic literary heroes – from Fitzgerald to Kerouac by way of Hemingway if not Mailer. And here I was heading into the old scenes – just like in a novel, scenes of happiness and excitement in exotic places. A few days before leaving I had gone to a single AA meeting in a dark church basement on the Upper West Side, and I had had coffee afterwards with a wet blanket sort of overweight guy who said he had just canceled a bus trip to Louisiana to see his family for it would put his sobriety in peril. No new relationships for at least a year was the rule, he said, and no travel either. Everyone in what he called “the rooms” knew that.

But I knew he was wrong. I knew it. So I would travel, which was something I was good at, and maybe, with luck and by design there would be a new woman to love – and the sooner the better. I had come back to Southeast Asia with what was meant to be a hot new book contract, and some almost adequate advance money, to do two books. I was kidding myself that I really wanted to do these books – journalist type things – one on American ambassadors and the other, more congenial to me, on American expatriates. To supplement the advance money, which more and more clearly was inadequate, my editor had gotten a ticket to Bangkok for me from someone at SAS who owed him a favor. And then I had talked a nice lady who flacked for Intercontinental Hotels into giving me free rooms everywhere on the verbal understanding that the hotels I used could be mentioned in these books (something I suspected I would not honor).

As I moved about, old characters and new ones came into the story as, for a start, I moved through Singapore and Thailand and Indonesia – and I was thinking that this was where I was meant to be. I was thinking this in part because I had spent some of those seven years away based in Beirut, which was noisy where Southeast Asia was silent – crowded and pushy where Southeast Asia was free flowing and polite and graceful – violent where Southeast Asia, despite its wars, seemed pacific – Beirut with its pretensions and false Frenchness and its assassins and militias – the Middle East in so many aspects as ugly and fake as Southeast Asia was beautiful and, with some effort my part, as erotic and exotic as a free-flowing fantasy. And the years away had not just been in the Middle East, though the only part I reallyi liked has been brief trips to Latin Countries.

It was in this time that my novel came out and its publication was surprisingly depressing for me. Since Beirut I had been living partly in a musty hotel near the sorry old State Department in Washington, the world’s most mundane place, and partly in a cheap room I rented in a condemned Upper West Side floor-through inhabited by sixties hold-over Maoists and Soviet Communists and Anarchists.

But now I was back in worlds of excitement – first Bangkok which surely I had immortalized in that one published novel (which I had thought would give me safety) and other published books – published, my God, which was what separated me from the crowd, though I was not convinced of it - no more safety than from the hack books I did, including horribly genteel school library-type books and also soft core porn. Yet I was back now in that part of the world I had so longed for in dreary, hazy times in the Middle East and l Washington, and also New York, which was an unrealized place for me this time. I was back, and I had never felt so alone. For one thing, the guys I had known had mostly married, mostly to lovely Asian girls, while I had been away, and I had turned forty and serious romance was deep in the past. I felt as if the seven years was a lost time, lost to booze and places and people I had never loved.

I did not make any family connections with anything – neither the mysterious blackness that could overtake me, neither that, nor anything else. I had not, for example, quite pinpointed such a grim matter as how the anti-Semitism in Beirut’s Western press corps was of a piece with background bigotry when I was growing up in family times and family places about which I had never written and had almost succeeded in putting out of mind.

I was exhilarated and also lonely and bereft now as I was traversing old ground looking for what had been there. By the time of this return, I had not been in love in seven years, not even to the point of faking it. And, that time away – it just felt like lost years now. Not that this was the first time I was lonely, but for the first time now I was ready, almost, to admit it.

ON MY OWN

2008-11-15T12:40:00.002-05:00

On good days when I was 22 it seemed as if I had come a very long way from early times when I was at the bottom of the heap, and a few more recent times in circles run by bullies and potential bullies – as in a boisterous rich guy in our summer exchange group in Holland when I was 17 – and later some encounters with Republican jocks at Princeton – but for the most part I thought I was as far as you could be from the horror of my early days – the sadistic camp counselors, the militaristic society kids in that year we spent in the city – those times, like at the start in boarding school, where it was as if I were so far beneath contempt that anyone could do anything they wanted to me – as it seemed sometimes too in the bosom of the family in Connecticut. But it also seemed I had come so very far from those times as to be forever safe.

I had had my summers in Europe. I had had this amazing girlfriend I met in the White Mountains. I had spent a large part of my college days away in various part of New York not inhabited by dumb, Republican Princeton people, and certainly not by people from the family. And in the months since then I had been so very far out in the world – I was in Indianapolis covering right wing politics for United Press, dealing with the one-time Klan people who ran the state including a dapper senator named Jenner, who had been passed the mantle of the recently disgraced Joe McCarthy. And I was having the time of my life, getting into every corner, things licit and illicit, of that city that was so far out of my experience – me on my own now, all preordained family and school things behind me.

Four separate railroad companies ran tracks from Indianapolis to Chicago – it was that easy to get out if leaving Hoosiers behind was your goal. On weekends up there I was in the beat world I had read about, and I had Second City, the College of Complexes, jazz and strippers and South Side blues, and Hopper at the Art Institute – and girls sometimes, and also a society of people from the old left United Electrical Workers. On my own, paying my own way and exhilarated by it. Some mornings I would wake up in my brick rooming house, where I wrote an unpublishable novel, and find myself wildly angry at the far away family that no longer paid for me. Then I would step out onto North Pennsylvania Avenue and head down past the old Claypool Hotel, which smelled of cigar smokes even from the outside, and then gypsy storefronts to the Indianapolis Times building in the midst of one of the city's skid rows, and the world would seem light and bright.

But the darkness was not always at bay, and finally came in almost to consume me. I would wander the streets all night – past the Neuremburg-like back marble eagles and pillars of the two-block-long American Legion headquarters, and the old raidroad station, and the stockyards, and the little hotels that filled up with wonderful young whores when the legislature was in session – wandering through the night feeling harsh and hopeless. And there was a night when – my draft notice having arrived in Connecticut (as I was informed in oddly prissy tones on the phone with my father) – I got on a plane to Miami at 2 in the morning, and from there switched to an empty Air Cubana flight to Havana, where tanks were in the street and everyone knew now that Castro was alive down in the Sierra Maestre. But I got caught on the edge of the mountains by sweaty fat government men with tommy guns, and so did not get to Castro, but made my way back to Havana for three weeks drinking and much more, in dance places and brothels, with especially fine girls in rooms above the waterfront bars – and dangerous nights with fisherman from Cojimar in small boats out of sight of land, once landing a shark who seemed to have the advantage, but not failing to stop at a little harbor island girl place on the way out into the Gulf of Mexico. This was living.

The moment I got back to Connecticut I was in a depression so deep I did not have a word for it – a black time of hopelessness way beyond anything I could imagine. Indianapolis had never existed, Cuba was a dream, so were the girls, and so was my wire service e career, and so too my projected life as a novelist. So since nothing mattered I did go into the army, lined up in Bridgeport for to Ft. Dix, and from there a train to Ft. Benning.

Before then, as the induction day drew closer, some fear did penetrate the blackness. All the descriptions I had read of basic training and the rest of that military idiocy – as in James Jones – seemed just like descriptions of my worst times in summer camp and school.

But to my surprise, almost to my horror that the army might be responsible, the moment I was on the army bus the blackness lifted. I was top of the world here in basic training, as if, though I would not admit this, nothing could be better.

I almost wished it would be the expected James Jones world, but it was actually a good time, a lively group of draftees, officers who feared us more than we feared them since it was between wars and many were being asked to leave the army and might well have to go to people like us while looking for civilian work. Everything was still there to make it just like school or summer camp, but the army never had the power of those deep past places. Much of the time we sat around smoking so as to be kept out of sight, we uncaring and slovenly reluctant draftees, from touring delegations of foreign offiers in fancy uniforms broughg to Amrica because of the grim Eisenhower/Dulles allilances – SEATO, CENTO, a pumped up NATO – for American hegemony.

Ocasionally we put out our cigarettes and would be brought back form hiding. Every once in a while we would actully line up to do calisthenics. I would not rise off the ground in the pushups part. The harried officer leading us yelled “What are ya doing Poole, social exorcises?” And the laughing crowed was on my side, not his.

Others were, however, on the bottom of the heap here as I had once been elsewhere. And we had in our company a bully who reminded my of the raw sadistic hockey players at boarding school who would spit insults at me as one of them twisted my arm till I thought it would break. And this army bully was like the camp counselors when I was 8. And yet this wasn’t terrifying for me, though it was for some. They were picking on a fat momma's boy sort of guy who really could not keep up, and I stepped in and told them to stop, and the did! It seemed the most natural thing it he world – not scary the way facing the enemy down had been when I was younger and not on my own. The army in the deep South, my version, was very tame compared to an Episcopalian boarding school in New England.

The Aqua Mustang 50 – ROYALTY

2008-11-14T13:26:00.005-05:00

As I drove through those places of my childhood, I thought of when in adolescence I became so interested in so many things – politics and poetry and dangerous adventures and European trains, and wilderness camping and really appealing young women – I wanted to be on top of events like my grandfather had been as an early Socialist working on exposés in Chicago with Upton Sinclair, and living in the heart of New York’s lower East Side when he was with the settlement house movement, and actively organizing for the Socialists, and then being reported lost and feared dead in the Kerensky phase of the Russian Revolution, which was more moderate than the Lenin phase but also chaotic and idealistic and dangerous.

I though of how I had tried hard to put that together with the man I knew to be often kindly but also so often tired, ill or angry, and who would emerge from his fabled writer’s study not with new chapters but with something he had learned from a stock tip sheet called the Kiplinger Letter which he thought would help him revive the tidy fortune he had lost in the stock market crash before I was born, and had kept him busy ever since trying to be his own stockbroker. And then that final year up in the mountains after his final stroke.

For it took me a long time to see that nothing was exactly how it seemed in the world I came from – especially the New Hampshire part, which consumed only the summers until I was in a New Hampshire boarding school in the winters. The summers remained the officially important time, even as I came into my own in the winters. The summers in those grand and formal family houses in the mountains, clearly the base for the people from whom I came and hence the people who, I could not help thinking, might in the end provide a margin of safety for me – the way my grandfather's Pulitzer was taken as providing safety for all of them.

In books, people who went to these stiff colleges, and lived in these big formal places with such ease that they called them cottages, in books such people were confident in their privileged state. And sometimes it almost seemed that way in life. Here in the White Mountains they spoke with what seemed to be English accents even though they were not from England. The only one who had lived in England for any time was my seductive Aunt Betsy, who had married a young architect there who went into the RAF, and was killed early in the war, before America was in it, supposedly fighting in the Battle of Britain but actually killed in a drunk flying accident when he and a buddy had broken into an air field and tried to take up a flimsy trainer plane. But she had his new RAF wings made into costume jewelry which she wore with showy pride. She had been pregnant at that time of the air crash, and she told her son when he was old enough to understand that he was the son of a war hero. And no one up there in New Hampshire said otherwise. In fact, they backed her up.

In retrospect, they were not confident people, Ivy League club members who traveled life with ease. In retrospect they were not so confident as they seemed to me. In retrospect, I should have looked closer at the people they made fun of.

When I was in college, I once took along to dinner at my grandmother’s place on East 66th Street my roommate, a young man from upstate New York on his way to a successful life at the top. Her sister, my Great Aunt Katherine, was there. She was a bubbly, still pretty, woman who had been married to an alcoholic playwright who had had some Broadway successes, then chased a bevy of girls to Hollywood and was never heard from again. At dinner she talked about World War I when she entertained the boys, as she put it, gave them merry times, performed French songs. I was surprised when my roommate turned out to be so enthusiastic about her – this intelligent and charming woman, he said – for in the family she was dismissed as lightweight. As was her current husband, who in retrospect gave me more than I had realized – Uncle Jehan, Jehan Sesodia, son of a maharaja, they said (in circles where black men were fine if they were from far away cultures and bore titles, such as his, which was "Prince," Prince Sesodia, as Aunt Katherine was Princess Sesodia – often referred to by non-family people simply as the Prince and the Princess). The beginning of stories I must write now. The Prince and the Princess being in retrospect the most charming people in the dramatic personae of this family.

I tried to think for a time that Uncle Jehan and Aunt Katherine were something very minor and silly, for that was the sort of thinking upon which this family staked its place in the world – not least because my grandparents lived not among writers and artists but among the pedigreed summer people (real people, they said) of the White Mountains, whose little, restricted communities were as far away from Kerensky or the Lower East Side, or real war heroes or saucy French songs as you could get.

SEARCHING FOR MY FACE

2008-11-12T10:57:00.000-05:00

Living here in this Catskills town, Woodstock, that in so many ways really is what its enthusiasts claim it to be, a colony of the arts, from way, way back when a major art colony was founded here, right up through almost every good thing connected with the sixties being found here – the music, the politics, some of the spiritual movements, the painting, matters hallucinogenic and matters in that new world of sex.

Living here I found that not everyone was enthusiastic about all this. When I got into local politics, I saw the other side come out – the people whose families have always been here, and who work in excavation or building or services such as the maintenance of septic systems, men who do exactly what their fathers do – and could be considered the enemy. I didn’t want this divide, but it was there, as I found when involved in caucus fights and was part of a committee aimed at saving land that the old guard badly wanted paved over. This other side, local people who had never left for bigger worlds, acting as if there were some point to making this place as bad and profitable as Florida. But still, that part, that old guard part, could be seen as little more than a subculture in the more than a century since the artists settled here in force, almost half a century since the name Woodstock became synonymous with art and freedom. Maybe.

Recently I went to pay a bill at Paul’s Auto of Beaverkill, the best automobile service place for many miles around, just outside Woodstock in the Catskills, run by a frequently jolly fat guy named Paul, who does the important work himself but supervises other mechanics too, and his homey wife Sally, who runs the office and handles the accounts, sometimes with the help of a very pleasant grown daughter who sometimes stays with them in their apartment above the garage.

I had rarely seen Paul and Sally outside the garage. I did see them appear once in our town’s library, where so many of the local writers get assistance, for a vote on the library budget. They were clearly among the local righted-wingers who never enter the library except to vote against budgets. They walked in steely eyed and uncommunicative, but that was not how they usually seemed. Generally their eyes showed good humor and usually they were garrulous.

I hadn’t seen Paul and Sally for some time because money was a problem and we were overextended with them. But I expected a fine reunion now since I was carrying cash to pay with interest what we owed them. Yet they were not at all friendly. Worse than that day in the library. They looked at me with hatred. Not looking me in the eye, but rather with their eyes fixed on my Obama button. And I realized that there were Obama and Obama-Biden bumper stickers on the back of our little Toyota, and another that said "POLAR BEARS VOTE DEMOCRATIC", and the front bumper had a bright “YES WE CAN” sticker.

It began to seem like the harsh divide in the New Hampshire of my youth between the people from bigger worlds and the people who had always lived up there in the beautiful if stark White Mountains. I had thought that here it was different from New Hampshire, for in Woodstock the newcomers tended to be free-wheeling artist sorts, often living in houses they had made themselves by hand, while in northern New Hampshire the people from the city lived in huge formal houses, and tended to out-Republican the locals. Both sides agreed on such crucial matters as the dangers of Roosevelt and the need to keep Jews away – but otherwise the sides never came together except when the local people were providing services to the well-do-do summer home owners.

But maybe that was not the whole picture up in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. On a recent trip there Marta and I went to the old maple sugar store that I used to delight in when a child. It had for some time now been a bustling, mostly outdoor, pancake restaurant catering to tourists who passed through. But it was still run by the same families, the Aldrishes and the Dexters, who were the area’s main retail merchants. Sitting by the cash register was a very old man I recognized as Mr. Aldrich, who, when I was a child and he was running a small grocery store, had seemed to me already very old.

There was something new here, however. In front of the counter was a display of small self-published books Mr. Aldrich had written. I, feeling, I fear, condescending, purchased one of them. It was about life and lore here in the White Mountains.

When I finally opened it some week later what I came upon was a history that pinpointed another place the two groups I had found so separate, the summer people and the local people, came together. Kindly rich men from the city often bedded their maids, old Mr. Aldrich says in the book. He says that if you look around, you will notice how so many of the local people and the summer city people look so much like each other.

I now, in the rare times I am up there, search for my own face.

The Aqua Mustang 49 – BRAVERY?

2008-11-03T10:08:00.000-05:00

Sex was looming despite the restrictions of the time – late forties and early fifties – and despite the place, this old-line, all boys boarding school that, nonetheless, was a bare hour away from a sister school, St. Mary’s-in-the-Mountains. There were rare times for fraternizing, an occasional get-together for a dance, or for a joint glee club concert (to which I went as a spectator), or something entailing cold weather sports, which I could not do at all, though for the sake of female company I could sometimes bluff it. And young Janie Doolittle from St. Mary's, as young as I was, showed me things that were at that point beyond what I knew but not so far beyond that I could not catch up. That was what happened in one compartment of my life. In another, my roommate moved out on me. I became the only boy in the school without a roommate. It was as if my unpopularity were a contagious disease.

But I had found Keats and Wordsworth, and I was writing romantic poems of my own, mostly about situations with girls I had met only in imagination, but some about my actual life – which would soon include my great love Kitty from the summers in the mountains. But each night when I appeared in my dormitory, they would set upon me, and the most vicious, Hector, a raw hockey player from Massachusetts, would come in when they threw me down and he would twist my arm back demanding I surrender – just like Murdock, except this school was my whole world, there was no Park Avenue mother to walk in. Eventually, each, night, as the pain became worse than unbearable, I would shame myself by surrendering.

But there was also more on the plus side than poetry. I had started taking part in debating, and the coach who was also the English teacher and my first real world non-family mentor, told me I would have to deal with the fact that, contrary to what I had been told in the past, and really believed, I was at least as smart as, maybe smarter than, my so far uniquely talented twin brother, who in the family was the chosen one, and the families position had been ratified by all three schools we had by by now now attended together. And I began to win debates – would be on the varsity and bring home debate trophies while still 15 – but the reality of those victories did not overwhelm other realities. They were still going to kill me.

Each boy in the school has a job to do in the kitchen or on the grounds or in chapel or the gym or the building we called the Schoolhouse. Mine at that time was to sweep up at night in the Schoolhouse, the musty old building where we had our classes. It had once been an actual New England one-room schoolhouse. Classrooms now circled the original big room, which was now the assembly room and recently for me the place I had to go at night for compulsory study hall, which was only for boys who could not keep up. Now I had suddenly passed everyone with good grades – something that had never happened before in any other school I had been in. Before this time I had rarely had any idea what any teacher was taking about.

Alone at night in the Schoolhouse, sweeping up, I sang songs I got from movies – especially Ole Man River, which was about a suffering man on the Mississippi. I sang even though I had been denied entry to the glee club, told I would never have music. I sang loudly, in a time my voice was getting lower day by day, and when I sang I could almost forget what awaited me back at the dorm.

Then one crucial night I suddenly decided that I would not surrender no matter what they did. My arm would break, and blood would spurt from me, but I would not give them the satisfaction of seeing me give in.

There must have been something about the way I walked into the dorm that night, for they did not jump me, and Hector not twist my arm that night, and in fact never did it again.

NOT LOVE?

2008-10-31T12:23:00.004-05:00

I tried to keep it arms’ length – this possible being in love thing – this being in love again thing – I tried to keep it at arms’ length. This was what I said to myself with some confidence – or was I just saying this to increase the tension and thus the enjoyment, as in delayed ejaculation/gratification. As I drove in my seventh decade – carrying little volumes of Keats and Wordsworth with me – driving the 70 miles back from her place one of those first times.

We lived an hour and half away from each other – I in a Catskills town that was in large part, though not totally, in the spirit of being a colony of the arts, my house beneath a mountain that was the opposite of the harsh granite mountains of my dangerous childhood further north – this house where the workshops had now begun – and her town was all boarded stores and shuttered cottage colonies and other depressing rural poverty more extreme even than the ordinary people’s poverty in the New Hampshire towns of my youth.

She had been coming to Woodstock for two years and we had been writing together and I had been sneaking looks at her – so lithe and smooth, and with high cheekbones too – trying not to be caught at it, keeping to the business at hand, which was writing and not mating – trying so diligently to be professional about it.

And I would drive back from where she live elated – saying to myself, trying it out aloud – I do not want to fall in love – I will not fall in love.

When I was in my early teens and moving fast though imprisoned in an old line Anglophile New Hampshire boarding school, not in the White Mountains but in New Hampshire’s far more gentle lake country – still the far north – reading Keats and Wordsworth and watching the seasons change – and ferociously overcoming the cruel boy’s boarding school culture by triumphing in near bullying competitive debating – filling up the school’s trophy case with woods and brass and plastic idols, each topped by a not very representational brass, apparently nude, young woman holding a brass laurel wreath high above her head and even higher above the pitiful little sports trophies down below her.

All of this mixed up with learning to kiss with tongues with a nicely plump girl named Dilly from our distant sister boarding school, and then my true love Kitty of the summers, who seemed a real and also symbolic confirmation of the life I had wanted to enter.

All tied up with Keats and Wordsworth.

And now after so much passing time. Because we lived an hour and half apart, much of the courtship was by this new e-mail – and so it was just like Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning who wrote each other in London at a time there were half a dozen mail deliveries in a day – so you could send a letter to your beloved in the morning knowing she would read it and probably write back before the day was over.

Just like the Brownings – this e-mail., this time, this woman – so different from all the women – including two to whom I had been married – and I drove, happier than I had ever been before, finally maybe where I wanted to be – saying out loud I will not fall in love, I will not fall in love – saying it still well after I had fallen in love – as clear as the Catskill skies, it seemed. In love – a line I had always wanted to use – in love for the last time.

The Aqua Mustang 48 – OLD THINGS

2008-10-31T10:25:00.005-05:00

Things that never went away, faded out sometimes but were always there somewhere, even as I moved through Vermont’s fields of clover a near lifetime later. Things like being the class dullard, and refusing to fight a boy weaker than myself, at the Horace C. Hurlbutt Jr. school way back in childhood in this Weston, Connecticut elementary school where, as in the family, my brother was deemed the twin with charm and brains and I was the hopeless bad twin. Worse still, my state one December at the Hanover Inn Ski School where I could not figure out how to ski and was caught out thinking I could bluff it. And later treated with cruel contempt at the outset at Holderness, my New Hampshire Anglo boarding school, where with deep dull-witted irony they called me “Speedy” until I climbed over them, kicking as I went. And always that sixth grade year when we moved to the city, and I would not give in and so went after school with 11-year-old would-be aristocratic Allen Stevenson boys to big Murdock’s Park Avenue apartment, where I did not surrender as he was beating me senseless, pounding and pounding, pain and horror, I thought I would die but still did not give up, and Murdock did not stop until his society matron mother came home unexpectedly.

When I was at Princeton a new novel came out that was getting a lot of attention – partly because it was published as part of a much heralded experiment by a new house called Ballantine that would issue simultaneous hard cover and paperback editions of the same book. This one, among Ballantine’s first in this format, was intriguing to me because it was a novel that seemed like a memoir – which was confirmed in the jacket copy – by a guy who had been at Princeton, and had not been on the Daily Princetonian, which was galling to classmates later when he became a successful journalist with no help from his old college. Although he did not seem to credit Princeton much, he was clearly still obsessed with the place, and he did not bury his Princeton years. All through his life – including when his beloved wife went to prison for mowing down a group of children with a car she was driving drunkenly, he kept on reading the Princeton Alumni Weekly – turning while still young to the specific happenings reported in his year’s class notes, which were about clubs and Republican politics and golf and mini-reunions taking place in pretentious suburbs in Ohio and the dullest parts of London. More interesting to him then the events recorded there was that he tracked how his classmates aged, as seen by how their class notes column was moved further and further back in the magazine to the point where they were with older and older loyal Princetonians. Eventually he stopped turning first to the class notes and turned first instead to the obituaries.

Me, I tried to edit out childhood. I tried to edit out Holderness, where actually I came into my own, my life saved, but to be correct had to later trash the place because it could be mistaken for one of those Anglophile, Episcopal, all boys New England boarding schools that ape their British models and hence, as in Anglo literary tradition, were hard and cruel places ripe for parody. I had eventually triumphed in boarding school, my life saved, and then college was supposed to be very, very different, and I tried to think of college as better than it was, and so a few years went by before I started editing out Princeton, which was well before I redid my version and started happily trashing the gray, cold place as I wrote more deeply about my life.

One spring day close to our graduation there was a senior class barbecue held on massive gray flagstones between big, harsh, colorless fake Gothic buildings that overshadowed an inviting, out of context, small, yellow clapboard house where I worked on the Daily Princetonian. I was thinking about my work on the paper as I stepped towards one of the grills. Just then my name was shouted by someone with a deep fruity threatening Anglo-like voice. “No cheating, Poole. Back of the line, Poole. Follow the rules, Poole.” I thought I had never seen this big smirking guy though it seemed he was one of my 700 classmates.

And as if a cold wind had just blown through me I realized that right now, all this time later, in this new college time of seeming safety, just before my planned entry into the world as a novelist, adventurer and lover of fine women, right here on what should be the threshold, I was being bullied by, just like in sixth grade, the very same Murdock. Would any place ever be safe?

THE END OF MURDOCK

2008-10-31T10:17:00.002-05:00

There is no way to stop the Princeton Alumni Weekly from coming. No matter how often I moved, never filling out change of address forms, it followed me – its letters columns full of old grads fulminating about the horrors of diversity, most of its pages devoted to sports news, eventually involving young women too. In the class notes I see names that are sometimes familiar, but sometimes unfamiliar names of college boys whose spheres at college did not connect with mine – just as when at that senior class barbecue I realized that in four years I had not noticed that the dreadful Murdock of my deep past was in my class, in effect in my life as he had been when we were children.

I find it hard to throw that silly alumni magazine away before making a quick check. I am one of those old grads, if an extremely disloyal one, who goes first to the obituaries.

And there a couple of years ago in the columns about dead Princetonians was Murdock, my tormentor from the 6th grade who turned up in my college class. He had died a little young but he had died fulfilled, the obit said – mentioning his socially rarefied anti-Semitic undergraduate eating club, Ivy (which was as far as anything could be from the sphere I was in). Murdock’s obit talked about his loyalty to Princeton, his regular attendance when in the country at the football games, his satisfying and completely fulfilled life as a corporate man, golfer and international big game hunter.

THE OTHER PEOPLE

2008-10-13T11:30:00.001-05:00

There were no colored people living on their own in Weston, Connecticut, no more than there were colored people over in Ridgefield in the Silver Spring Country Club, which did not have Jews either. Colored people lived in the nearby bigger and more plebian town of Norwalk. They did come to Weston, however, as maids.

Grandmother Clark, whose room was across the hall from mine, warned me not to leave out where it could be seen the silver dollar she had given me. Mother, who was down at the far end of the hall, said the reason was that Negroes could not resist shiny objects. And sure enough, I left the silver dollar on my bedside table and in the evening I saw that it has disappeared. But for some reason I drew no conclusions from this.

I objected to Dad insisting when once he and Peter and drove into Westport with the colored maid that she sit in the back seat. They like it better that way, he said. Dad was furious at me. Just as when at our hotel in Paris when we came down to dinner we saw that the cut flowers at our table that night were black-eyed Susan’s. “Nigger eyes,” Grandmother Clark., who traveled with us, said loudly in her Southern accent. Then, apparently noting the expression on my face she sat up straight and said, just as loudly, I have always called them nigger eyes and I always will. Dad took me aside and said I should stop causing trouble.

I had noticed in myself that I had not drawn any conclusions from the disappearance of the silver dollar. This was perhaps because what they said about outsiders made no sense even when there was seeming evidence.

When mother was in one of her mournful rants – as in the war will go on forever and nothing will ever be any good – her rant could turn a corner and land on the Irish. The Irish are dirty, she would say. I did not see any sign of any Irish around, except for Jim O’Malley, who we called Uncle Jim. But he and had been at Princeton with Dad and also sometimes summered in the White Mountains, so he was did not count. The biggest threat was from the Italians. Many lived in Saugatuck, about four miles away but distant in spirit. Saugatuck’s main purpose was that it was the place where commuters, like Dad, caught the New York, Hartford & New Haven Railroad trains into the city every day. The only time we were there not to catch or meet a train was at the St. Anthony’s festival – succulent food and fireworks that were better than anything the non-Italians could set off on the Fourth of July in the nearby but very different town of Westport. And further away in the big, rough city of Bridgeport (which was where we the bad kids would go when we played hooky) there were Italians everywhere. The problem, for the people in our town was that the Italians were not really white people. They were swarthy and uneducated. Once a carload of Italians boys had stopped on our road near the place were we sent swimming and they themselves actually went swimming. From the way my parents talked they lived in terror of further invasions by what the called those boys from Bridgeport.

Once we had a vibrant white maid, Emmy Defoe, who had been to Vassar long ago and had once been married briefly to a famous alcoholic Broadway playwright and was now married to Joe the garbage man. This had to do with radical things going on at Vassar in the thirties, Mother said. Joe certainly did not live with us, but he visited Emmy in her damp room behind the kitchen, from which came loud laugher. My brother Peter and I concluded Old Joe and Emmy were fucking – which made our house a much interesting place. Joe had a daughter with the sexy name Yvonne who was as smooth, and already curvy, as those terrific villainess Mexican bar girls who sometimes turned up in Westerns. Smooth and olive skinned with black hair that fell around her shiny smooth shoulders. She was put in our eighth grade class but she was absent a lot and had no friends in our school. The other girls had names like Emily and Mary Ellen. We boys when we were at Compo Beach would take up positions from which we could stare at Yvonne, who wore a black bathing suit so tight on her body that she looked like a Varga girl out of Esquire – and was always surrounded by dark older boys who must have been from Bridgeport.

I though that when I grew up I would spend a lot of time Italy. So it did not seem out of the way that in my teens I lost my virginity at a Roman brothel to a not-so-young girl who appeared in the reception room in a skin-tight swim suit.

The Aqua Mustang 47 – THE SMELL AND THE FEEL

2008-10-09T15:01:00.002-05:00

The smell of blood. The smell and the feel of a woman’s soft skin. Somewhere far in the past. Neither ever seemed far away, wherever I found myself – as in this room for servants in the main part of the big house, White Pines.

I and my twin brother had been moved from the Boys’ Wing, where there were beaverboard walls and early century travel posters, to two separate bare floor upstairs bedrooms where the servants, who now slept in the village, has once been quartered. This area was sealed off from the upstairs of the formal part of the house, where there were fancy rugs and mountain view guest rooms, and the separate bedrooms, really suites, for our grandparents Gaga and Nana.

The Boys’ Wing was off beyond the kitchen and pantries. It included a room for a nurse or governess, and a big room for boys that had many beds and beaverboard walls on which were tacked very old travel posters for shipping lines and European places that had been family favorites before World War I but seemed contemporary in this place. Down below there was a dark bare room called a playroom that did not interest us much, and also a spacious garage, and behind the garage a large, high, thick-walled ice house from when refrigeration was not yet reliable.

On my last dark night in the Boys’ Wing that summer I had heard raised voices, maybe screams, certainly shouts, and the sound of people running and then car motors starting, and I knew it was as bad as or worse than anything I could image because the next day they would not tell me anything about it. They acted as if the seeming emergency was just something in my and my brothers’ heads. But they did decide to move us, so we knew better.

Now at least I was on the same floor where the others slept, though they came up on a curving carpeted stairway while I came up a steep and bare back staircase that led up from a pantry room where there was a wood-enclosed box in which, behind glass, a number would drop down if someone from one of the main houses’ non-servant bedrooms should ring.

Many parts of my life did not seem scary up here in New Hampshire around the houses and the woods owned by my grandparents. In fact I thought this place brought me comfort, or at least I thought I should think it did. We would walk with Gaga – he always had a cane, and a floppy sun hat with green isinglass in the brim. We would check the level of what they called our reservoirs, two reservoir off in different parts of the woods, big rectangular well tanks that had walls and roofs. Gaga would say everyone had to take only very shallow baths because soon there might be no water at all if we were wasteful.

Almost every day we also walked all the way to Sugar Hill Village where, after going along a wooden sidewalk on one side of the street, we would cross to the post office, which was also a shop, on the other side. There Gaga usually gave me a dime to get a comic book, and I would put myself right into the adventures or Little Lulu and the Little King, or Mickey and Minnie or Donald and Daisy and Scrooge McDuck and Huey, Dewey and Louie, and also some adult adventures, especially with Dick Tracy, whose world did not scare me because I did not believe in the reality of any of the funny criminals he tracked with his marvelous wrist radio.

And there was glamour not so far from the house and the servants' quarters. About a half mile away, but still on the property, my grandparents owned an attractively rustic brown shingled building that they called the Playhouse. It had a stage and small dressing rooms, and a smooth floor once used for dances. Peter and I would go there sometimes. It was deserted. But on the edge of the stage there was still an old box of corn meal, to be spread on the floor so dancers could slide easily.

We were to understand that all this was mostly something of the past, not for the present. But while I was in the servants’ quarters America entered the war and so a benefit dance was held at the Playhouse for the Red Cross. Japanese lanterns led to the reactivated entrance, the biggest of the glass doors from the porch that surrounded the building, a little like a miniature version of the town’s sprawling old Sunset Hill House Hotel. Peter and I were in bed, but Aunt Alice, who was shiny smooth and somewhat dark and was always laughing, came up to say goodnight to us. She was in a long summer dress that displayed her appealing skin, as was light-skinned Cousin Nancy, who was married to Cousin Tommy, who was now in the Navy and went around in a fancy white uniform with gold on the epaulets.

Betsy, followed by Nancy. And all the feeling that this aroused – which in memory had to do with a naked woman. I was seven years old. For years afterwards I could not remember why I remembered what I remembered.

THE JOURNALISTS

2008-10-03T10:36:00.004-05:00

This morning many hyper-conventional, empty-suit commentators are saying that the bloodthirsty and scandalously uneducated governor of Alaska did herself good in her debate last night with Joe Biden. No matter that she lied and lied and lied. And did not link her lies to anything beyond what she was told by her handlers, not even to the subjects raised in the debate.

These journalists remind me of petty little social studies teachers judging a high school debate and naming as winner, “on points,” not who convinced them of anything but rather who was on the side that, in their cynical world view, always wins.

The Aqua Mustang 46 - REAL GIRL

2008-09-23T10:35:00.005-05:00

I was working for UPI at night over in Newark that first summer that I had my first place in the city. I was living on 13th Street between First and Second, then 11th between Second and Third, which was really the Bowery. This so long ago it was not called the East Village yet. I was living among people who seemed very much like me, and also actual Puerto Ricans, on what could pass for the Lower East Side.

So I wasn’t merely a wire service reporter. I was really the author of one and a half still unpublished novels, and I was leading this little group who had decided we would start a magazine that picked up from where The New Yorker had once been, which had been on top of its era to the same extent that it was mostly irrelevant now with its stories that usually avoided big themes and that went nowhere.

Then Vannie. I met Vannie at a party near Gramercy Park after my shift, just back to Manhattan via the Hudson tubes, where I had been reading The Myth of Sisyphus. Vannie. It would last, sometimes close, here and also abroad, for a number of years. She fit what I hoped would be the picture. She was an action painter who knew how to be in leotards. She had what seemed to me a face of movie loveliness, framed by soft black hair and with bangs. I thought I had never seen anyone who looked quite so perfect – and so different from the people in the family I came from.

When walking alone in that first year, noticing girls, I was getting competitive about it – for no pretty girl I saw strucke me as being as pretty as this pretty girl who was my girlfriend.

Vannie and my real life, what I really wanted, whereas wire service journalism was something I had to fake. My serious unpublished work, and my plan to unseat The New Yorker. Though overall I felt contempt for it, I still read The New Yorker, and each new Salinger story was like a major event in my life. We were into the Glass family now. But to my horror I saw in a new issue a full page cartoon that showed a couple, a guy who did not have to deal with neckties and a girl dressed like Vannie dressed, sitting on the floor at a smoky bohemian party not unlike some parities we went to – and he was saying “ I have a confession to make. I am a feature writer for Scripps Howard.”

I was given silly assignments, like one to stand all night outside an apartment house on the chance that Charles Van Doren, at the center of the rigged quiz show scandal, would show up. His building was not far from Vannie's. I abandoned my post, and I woke her up. And we were a couple, though we had our problems actually coupling, and I saw no need for loyalty because I had seen in my family how women bully men. Which seemed to me then not so much an excuse for my going after other women as it was an attempt at accuracy. At getting life right.

And it did often feel like I was in real life now. Vannie and I went to museums and galleries and constant parties, which were more my scene than hers. She was constantly in my mind. As was death. Working for a wire service I was always hearing and writing about death, as in plane crashes or murders. And each time I heard about it, just as each time I passed a graveyard, I had this sudden picture of Vannie accompanied with a sexual surge. One of many things I knew I could never completely understand.

One day we were on our way to Washington to see paintings. I had barely made it to Penn station in time to meet her, for I had been held up at UPI. Boris Pasternak was dying and, though he was not dead yet, I was at work on his obituary.

Vannie has brought a picnic lunch for us. The train was not crowded, so we took over two facing seats. As happened sometimes, I was not thinking of anything or anyone beyond this moment. While we were laughing at something, the conductor handed us a folded note. It was unsigned. It said, "It makes me happy to see two young people who are so happy together."

The Aqua Mustang 45 – GIRL WITH PALE EYES

2008-09-20T13:42:00.003-05:00

One day in October in this new time – no more school, no more army – one day thinking I was of New York now and not just in it, I walked along Central Park South and saw the Plaza, and then the horse carriages on the park side of the avenue, something that had not been part of my childhood but still brought on these powerful feelings of nostalgia. And saw, as if it were a part of my actual history, a hotel's doormen and baggage men in what looked like French army costumes. Saw through Rumplemeyer’s plate glass windows people eating big ice cream concoctions beneath large shiny toy bears and dogs and deer and pandas – something else I had never seen when in the city in actual childhood.

At sunset I passed this lovely tall girl who was gliding the other way. Delicate but also statuesque and with a confidence in her bearing that made her foreign to me – from some wondrous sphere – whatever her nationality – very light blond hair that may or may not have been natural and was an erotic touch either way – and very white and perfect skin – high cheek bones – full lips that betrayed no feeling – and eyes so light they had snow from some far northern place in them. All this tinged with the oranges and lavenders of the sunset colors from the sky on the street and in the park.

And suddenly I felt what might, I hoped, be not so much despair as absurdity, something, I hoped, that would be okay with Camus, my current literary hero who had moved absurdity up to the highest level.

But suddenly I knew it was not that easy, knew I would have to fight. The way some people had to fight against suicide. I would have to fight against what seemed all to real now, the proposition that no matter what I did, that nothing in the world I had now could hold together.

Looking at the girl beneath that sky with Rumplemeyer’s behind me I was in the midst of sadness that, if I should ever let myself cry – which I wouldn’t – sadness that would have no end.

Sadness that was worse than feeling nothing.

I moved on to the Oak Room Bar. As I walked, I lit a fresh cigarette from the one I was about to put out, hoping I did it well.

The Aqua Mustang 44 – DANCING GIRL

2008-09-19T09:15:00.002-05:00

In that time after Africa, after San Francisco, during and after the Kennedy assassination while I was still with Kim but sometimes with Lottie who danced under the name Princess Aisha at the Egyptian gardens – with Lottie in the Madison Square Hotel where the lobby TV played and replayed assassination details, and deep in the night my sheets were clammy and bright red with her monthly blood – and we made so much noise that the elderly permanent residents left notes under my door about what a nice place this had been until I came to live here – and then Kim was pregnant and I called in sick to Time-Life two days after I’d started there, and we went to Puerto Rico for the abortion but had to stay out of the sun, fearing tans, because she still saw her husband and if he knew about this he would have the upper hand – and at Time-Life I should be pale after telling them my absence was due to flu.

And sometimes ultra-cute Sue, who had been in Athens just after me and dealt with the same expats, so it felt like we had crossed paths already.

In this time after Kim and I got back and everything was going wrong we still met in trysting style. I found a small but pleasing ground-floor apartment on Waverly Place. Lottie danced and disrobed there while I was on the phone to my parents, who were such a threat and an embarrassment to me. As Princess Aisha’s panties landed on the coffee table while my father was telling me that Sandra Donaldson, whom I had known in childhood as a cruel little black-freckled girl on the school bus, had become, in adulthood, a sought-after fashion model.

One morning Kim climbed through my ground-floor window when she suspected, correctly, that I was in bed with Sue.

I would go to the cavernous, Egyptian Gardens, which had a touch of evil, its darkness and its underworld patrons. I would walk in near midnight thinking I could be Humphrey Bogart. From the bar I sent a note up to the stage where when not dancing Lottie sat, almost demure, spangled and as smooth as if her skin were oiled, sitting, when not dancing, in a row of musicians and dancers much older than she was. I had met her when I was doing a try-out for the then liberal New York Post and had been assigned a common tabloid feature – nice Jewish grad student works at night as a belly dancer. In this time when the sixties were about to crest but belly dancing was for tabloid readers akin to stripping. Very late, after her last erotic dance of the night, we would go to an upstairs Greek after-hours place where they looked you over through an opening in the door and you drank ouzo from coffee cups.

But many nights I roamed the Village by myself – Chumley's, the no-name bar, and Julius’s which was still straight, this was so long ago – and the Duplex and the Ninth Circle and some I would not remember the next day, looking for women, sometimes finding one – in this time in which there was still Kim and Sue and Lottie, and the occasional no-name woman from an adjoining bar stool, and those researchers at Time-Life – after the Post fired me, at the instigation of Lottie’s agent, because I’d gotten her name wrong in print. And there was also the girl I had thought I would be with forever, our being together that crucial to my identity, but whom I’d left in Greece, and now she was back – and I was moving around, including to Broadway tryouts in Wilmington and in the Wilton – always in motion but feeling stagnant as if with a hangover that would last forever, exciting as my life was supposed to be.

The Aqua Mustang 43 – ENGLISH GIRL

2008-09-18T02:57:00.000-05:00

A graceful cantilever bridge curving upwards from a familiar shore where there are billowing trees – spanning years of longing and places of pleasure and places of battle – then curving downwards to a far shore full of billowing trees, similar but different from what the shore I departed had been.

I was on this far shore now and I did not think anything reminded me of what had been down bellow the graceful bridge. I was on this far shore and the intense green of the early Vermont summer did not – as would happen in novels – take me out of the present and into something remembered, as in electric green rice fields and a water buffalo (a child or a bird likely to be riding on the stolid animal’s back). And neither the slabs of rock on mountain sides nor the sight and smell of clear river water running over smooth stones, neither took me back into Taiwan’s marble Toroko gorge.

A surprisingly friendly very young and eager girl working at a Burger King on Rutland’s strip smiled at me and seemed to have questions and it was almost like I were on the original shore, a child, and falling in love, or maybe something worse and I had to hold myself back from thinking this was what it might seem. And no more than I was led back to water buffalo and the Toroko Gorge did the present lead me to smooth smiling Bangkok bar girls in their strapless gold lamé gowns. Not that I had forgotten. But the life below this graceful bridge had no more connection to the present that did the very different life of the stuffy family I came from.

And yet what was down below would not completely go away. For instance, the English girl.

In Greece two English girls had moved to the a small white-washed house that was cattycorner to our small whitewashed house on one of the paths in Anafiotika that wound up on the city side of the Acropolis – two English girls, one of them, Patti, so smooth and flowing and lazy. They had had no curtains and I was able come up with what I thought were a few good consciously world weary lines, talking the way I though then Evelyn Waugh would talk about English girls fucking practically on my doorstep.

I came upon Patti again, two and a half years later that felt like ten years later. She was at an adjoining table at the Cedar Bar, which was still in full swing in 1964. She was dressed in what looked like filmy drapery. Very much in the swim of things in this place, whereas she had stood out in Athens. She was soft and tall as I remembered her – and all extensions – long, dark arms, long legs seen in shorts slit up the thigh in Anafiotika, and now in the Cedar she stretched and the drapery nearly fell away. She pulled back long straight black hair, bunched it up, her arms raised, soft armpits and shiny, tanned flesh all around, flesh flowing with her lazy movements, breasts partially on view through her garment’s large arm openings.

The next night we met by arrangement. We had hamburgers at the Cedar Bar. A date. I wasn’t the only one who had noticed her. Her last date had been with Mike Nichols, she said, and she did not seem to think that was anything unusual.

We went to look at a huge old loft she shared with what seemed to be a dozen beautiful people. While we were drinking and chatting she suddenly asked, “Why did you want to see me?” And what I had hoped would happen never did.

A possible answer to her question, the chance now to fuck, seemed too easy and obvious and certainly not up to Evelyn Waugh standards. But in fact I had no actual answer – for it was as if she has asked, “Who are you?”

The Aqua Mustang 42 – FEET

2008-09-17T09:13:00.003-05:00

This new time, driving in Vermont, free of the past, it seemed, but mostly staying in the car, this time requiring solitude, perhaps so certain of my course that I could not feel lonely, or perhaps not quite admitting I was lonely again. This time so new it really was as if I had just been born. This time when I had passed 50 and had never been so young. And yet there were these moments in the happy old Mustang when I heard my twin brother Matthew’s voice describing what I saw, such as the new fiberglass farm silos that had come in while I was away from New England, as if I could not see the change from the old more picturesque silos of my childhood until the change had been categorized by that family I so carefully avoided.

And thinking of Matthew’s voice I was remembering when 30 years back Matthew had come to Atlanta to visit me while I was in the midst of an affair with a girl who looked to me like someone in an Italian movie and who had a husband who wanted me dead. I was in Atlanta because I had been drafted, but it was the maneuverable, corruptible peacetime army so, with considerable luck, instead of staying in a barracks I was living in a high-ceiling room I rented in a once majestic Peachtree Street house that had gone to seed. And I was working nearly full time for United Press. I was only 22, but already, and despite four years in the country’s most retrograde college, I had begun the life I planned, partly during summers in Europe but most notably in Cuba where I’d divided my time between life-risking adventure and sweetly slippery episodes with girls of the night. And now Atlanta.

A terrible time for Matthew to visit, for I was floating in what seemed to me the most crucial affair of my life. Matthew had been sent down by our mother for comfort, since his engagement was suddenly off. This was annoying, for I had problems of my own, and I was sure it would be hard on him, so often my rival, to see me with someone so appealing – this smart young woman Susan, this olive-skilled women Susan whose movements were so graceful. And she had a husband, who had been my friend for awhile and now wanted me dead.

With no chance this evening for a real rendezvous, and Matthew anyway in the way, she’d told the husband she was going out for cigarettes. She sped up from the Southside and over to Peachtree Street, where the air smelled like flowers. Over to the big old house on a rise above Peachtree where I rented this musty, very non-Army sort of room. She arrived in front of the old house in time for us to meet for moments at her car. I went out followed by Matthew.
She raised her arms from the wheel and stretched up and out, and I leaned down and in, and we kissed through the open car window. I introduced my twin brother, who was standing behind me. She handed me a love note. We kissed. She sped off.

"What a sweet smile," was what my brother had to say, and he was right and I realized I would have to fight hard to see more than he had seen.

And I wondered if I been romanticizing Susan into a plastic figure the way people in the family always did when confronted with people outside the family – as if all the real world people that they saw were only characters with fixed characteristics that our family members had created. Maybe I was not seeing her but seeing Audrey Heyburn in "Roman Holiday." Or someone with skin like hers on the Via Veneto, or a tawny girl from the summers in Sugar Hill – or Goddard's Anna Karina playing a lovely streetwalkers with angst – or Susan Strasburg doing Jean Anouhi – or even Ellyssa. Not seeing someone but rather seeing someone that was like someone.

But this was the first time I could fully understand fucking as making love – fucking not upstairs in bars in Havana or in seedy hotel room in the Midwest or South, or with girls from the Tango Palace at the northern end of Times Square, or with that girl who became an obsession who wore a swim suit in the waiting area of a Roman brothel – not those times, those other 1950s times. But this time, the first time, in my room in this big old house on Peachtree Street. Something so new I did not have the word for it yet but it came to me years later. The word was intimacy.

Not only skin on skin when entering her but realizing her feet were naked too. Naked feet in play. Intimacy. This memory now as I drove in Vermont.

After orgasm, we tickled each other’s feet with our toes.

IN THE COLD

2008-09-09T11:04:00.003-05:00

This is trite, I think, to think of death here where I lie on a raised bed in a curtained off corner of an emergency room. And it is cold. My life’s love is here too, not as a patient but as my life’s love and she is freezing. She is three feet from me, on a metal chair, resting her head on a metal table. For some reason, a nurse explains without explanation, they intentionally keep the place at 60 degrees. Outside it was more like 90. We keep ordering up blankets, which in hospital fashion are more like sheets posing as blankets. At home we never go to bed except on the warmest of mid-summer nights without a sort of ceremony in which I place extra blankets, real blankets, on her side of our bed – our real bed, which bears no relation to these raised hospital beds. The doctor, a youngish woman, appears and pokes around and she hurts me, or anyway stirs up the pain, and I cannot stifle my moans, though I don’t want it known that there is pain. And I am in a timeless place, harsh lights, far away from the world.

But maybe not so far, for there are little dramas. A youngish olive-skinned woman, nicely rounded in places where the doctor is all angles, also makes sounds of pain, and then cheerful chatter, in the next curtained off area. I can see her in a gap in the curtains. There is a young man with a half beard sitting at the end of her bed, another emergency room patient who has just met her. She is telling him that, though she looks young, she has three children. “And I am going to get married,” she says. She is trying to sound convinced. “I am going to get married. I know I am.”

The young man hails each nurse that goes by and the doctor too. He has all these debts, he says, credit cards and delinquent mortgage payments, and now he has hurt himself and they are telling him he must take a break from his work, which is construction. He tries to get the nurses and the doctor to say it is not so bad as it seems.

Now a short, and by God again pretty, and also bouncy Latin-looking girl appears with a wheel chair. She has a bright smile and is wearing some sort of crisp hospital uniform. She tells me it is time to go to radiology.

The moment I am in the wheel chair we set off at great speed through miles of corridors for my X-ray. This is a race and a game. When we come back, the same way, at top speed, my life’s love says I look like I am having fun, and also that I look just like my late dog Claude, a Bassett hound terrier, who made everything exciting. She says I should be wearing goggles.

Much later it is time for another dash, this time to the CAT-scan place, again pushed by the pretty girl at high speed. And there is something comforting about being surrounded by attractive women – and something sad about it too – an overtone of last times. Or am I being silly?

The pretty girl does everything in radiology, arranging the patient, taking the pictures. It is comforting. I am feeling weak now, for I have not eaten for a day, and my head aches, and there is the pain still, if not so bad as it was, and most of all I feel intensely weary and sad – not sure where the sadness is coming from but clearly sad. And hazy too.

As I lie on this CAT-scan thing that will slide me into the CAT-scan tunnel I feel her hands beneath my head. Then I realize that these are my hands.

I read this piece in a group where I read every week. We read for reaction, not for passive aggressive MFA style criticism. One member who likes the piece says it it is so true that people stay consistent, that even heading into death this particular narrator still notices good looking women!

The Aqua Mustang 41 - LAUGHTER

2008-08-29T10:12:00.002-05:00

There was a horse carriage in an old barn behind the old house, with high grass all around it. The carriage was covered with dust and cobwebs. I had no idea why we did not have a horse. The ice man had one. And so did the man who sharpened knives.

We had a black car that looked like most cars. Once someone visited in a small green car that had a fold-out rumble seat in back – the sort of place where I hoped I would one day get to sit while speeding along in the open air.

The house was very dark. In our room where my twin brother Peter and I had
adjoining cribs, the walls had cardboard cut-out figures of Jack Sprat and his wife who would eat no fat and of Jack the Giant Killer and of Little Bo Peep. Even when placed in our cribs Peter and I were usually fighting – except once when we joined forces to make what they called BMs in our crib and throw the results against the wall.

I was moved to another room, adjoining the room with the cut-out figures. It was because we fought so much. Once Peter hit me with what in memory is an iron pipe. Some clear substance that hardened like glass was put on the wound by a doctor. Once I was hit in the groin so hard my little balls swelled and turned almost black.

The far end of the dark room I was moved to was at the front of the house, which was really exciting. Though shades were always drawn and you had to get close to the windows to peek out.

The New Rochelle trolley cars rolled along outside, bells sometimes ringing – the wires above making singing sounds. And at a certain time a Good Humor truck would come by and it would stop if our nurse Josephine hung a special sign with the letter “G” in a window.

Josephine was very dark and very thin and very old and had very few teeth. She showed us how we could get castor oil down if we held our noses. She had once been the nurse for Dad and his brother and sister. She spoke in a language no one in the house could understand.

At the far end of the room, the end with shaded windows facing the street and trolley line, there was a tall wardrobe with a tall mirror. Through the mirror there were many people always talking, sometimes laughing – people who knew me. At a time in Atlantic City with our grandparents I was surprised and pleased when it turned out that all these people of mine – people no one else could see – were along.

Mother would often get angry. You could tell when it would happen because she wore was a certain gray dress on her angry days. Sometimes she would read aloud about the elephants Babar and Celeste and the monkey Zephyr. She would read it in French, she said, but tell it to us in English. At the end of the Zephyr book there was picture of a mermaid with bare nipples that made me feel good.

Mother had her gray dress, but no one was so angry as Dad. He came home with the parts of a brand-new lawn mower in a big box. He started to put the parts together but nothing would fit. He waved is arms and spat out harsh words and his face was bright red.

We had a thin black dog named Herbert. He lay in thresholds in different parts of the house and you were told to be very careful because Herbert was an unhappy dog who liked to bite people.

Inside the room I’d been moved to – the room with the mirror people and the sounds of the trolley – it always seemed to be night. Once I saw an owl fly into the room – an owl with ties to the people in the mirror. He landed on the top of a half-open door and stared an me, and I found it comforting.

Once there was laughter in the room. A very pretty, very smooth woman with bright white teeth, large dark but bright eyes, gold and silver bracelets, jolly curly hair – sat in front of the wardrobe laughing and laughing. Mother and Dad had said she was here because she’d been thrown out of her school. That’s what I remember them saying, “thrown out.” She was Dad’s sister. I’d never seen her. Now I was smiling and laughing too – and so were Mother and Dad – on that one day when there seemed to be light not just in the mirror but in the room itself.

The Aqua Mustang 40 - CONVERGENCE

2008-08-26T14:40:00.003-05:00

The points of convergence. We had both come out of twisted parts of that smallest of worlds, not a full world, just a tiny subculture – the Social Register, boarding schools, Anglo envy, boys playing girls’ parts in Gilbert & Sullivan, debutante parties, hardly any Catholics, and almost no Jews at all – our respective twisted parts of a subculture in which everything was supposed to be forever properly in it place, and all people in theirs. Neither of us had considered staying in it past childhood. I remembered the family uproar when when I was ten and questioned why hotels in our part of New Hampshire would not allow Jews.

And in our separate lives we had both moved around the world in ways others had not. Asia. Africa. It was a reason we had first connected, something that separated us from people around us. The foreign reason added to the Waspdom reason. And all tied up with the most intense reason, which was that we were both working full time, almost, to find out what had happened in our different but now converging deep pasts.

The man who climbed into the little girls’ beds, a man with one of those names with a Roman numeral after it, had a certain celebrity based on what a forebear had done. One way I knew of that man was that he had been a joke – the founder’s aging and pretentious boozed up son – at a publications place where I had once briefly worked as a hack writer. But more than that, I knew he was the son of one of my late grandmother’s closest friends.

One day, on the spur of the moment, we drove from Lake Champlain right over to the frontier, and crossed the New Hampshire line. We cut down to White River Junction, then over to Hanover, and then up route 5 on the Vermont side and route 10 on the new Hampshire side, crossing from one to the other several times on bridges over the placid, haunting Connecticut River with its green banks and water that reflected the sky. Then at Woodsville away from the river and into the mountains. This was the old, pre-interstate route, going north alternating between the two sides of the river, which I had seen in childhood from the back seat of our family Plymouth in the years we went by road rather than by old, single track steam railway up to the White Mountains.

I had started staying well away from New Hampshire by the time I was in my twenties, and anyway by then there had been summers in Europe. Staying well away, most of the time anyway, started 30 years before this time with Gillian, 30 years until this past summer when – hot on the trail of what had happened – I had made those two trips over from Vermont, and I had already come so very close to the story – knowing what had to have happened beneath the proper veneers in those formal houses, knowing it for certain even though the pictures in my mind were still hazy. Though increasingly less hazy.

Now I drove with Gillian over these same roads in the landscape of my past that I had retraced in the just-passed summer. We did not stop in to see anyone, though my childhood friend and early crush, still a friend so many years later, the gorgeous Terri, would have been in White Wings. I had seen her on one of those summer trips across the border. Now we did not stop. And we also drove past the looming house called the Farm House, which looked down on us from a rise between White Pines and the dark, octagon-shaped House on the Hill. “The Farm House” was not so much a description as a reference point for people who lived in houses with names. It was possible my twin brother, the responsible twin who got the property, would be in residence, but we did not check to see. And although we drove another ten miles to the stark market and mill town of Littleton, where in the old days the family had gone to shop, we drove straight past the house of my aunt, who had been my favorite aunt and who was looked upon as the wanton rebel in her generation. Aunt Alice had retreated to Littleton some years back, taking her daughter Lauryn out of the Lysée and the ballet school, a relocation made necessary because one of her sons would have wound up in prison if they had not fled, the charges in New York were so great – kidnapping, doing things with a sawed off shotgun. (And every one in the family said, then, as they were saying about events taking place right now, how strange it was, something like this in a family such as ours.)

Lauryn, my favorite. I might have gone to see her but she had long since moved to Minnesota in one of her several marriages. I knew Aunt Alice, was exasperated, near fury base on jealousy, that Lauryn still looked so appealing, was still so sought after by men. That has been the mother’s role, a reason I had liked Aunt Alice, for that was part of her being a fellow black sheep. I was thinking suddenly about Aunt Alice’s smooth skin. I was thinking too that in recent years it had been hard to be in the same room with her.

As this time, this tryst, the meeting of minds with Gillian, was going on, the time of the Aqua Mustang, I would call my answering machine down in Chelsea every few days.

Now, on the very day we had passed her house in Littleton without stopping, there was Lauryn’s mother, Aunt Alice, leaving message after message. Message after message from the past, from someone I hardly ever saw anymore. It was urgent that I call her, she kept saying. But that was the past, and I did not call and did not plan to call.

The Aqua Mustang 39 - LOVE?

2008-08-19T16:47:00.002-05:00

The past coming back, with Gillian as a witness, and with her past too – darkness and betrayal coming into focus at the very time that summer air, and billowing trees, and the sight of fields and flowers, mountains and clear streams, and the occasional deer or raccoon or porcupine or turtle – and the scent of grass and leaf and earth lake water – are all part of something like rejoicing – things I might have lost or never known this way again. In this my most unusual year, 1986.

This autumn in the north country, this light I, and I think Gillian too, felt was leading us into something new, these scenes in this light, though, always in opposition to, or set off in sharp relief by, what was there from the past. Gillian talking about a demon lover, a Brooklynite with mother troubles who made her into something very small in New Delhi, where she tried to please him by bursting the pimples on his back and by spreading flowers on the bed he shared with another lover. Gillian talking about how one of the famous people her mother fucked used to regularly molest her and her sister – crawl right into their childhood beds.

And sometimes I was sent into myself by the British intonations in her speech – taken on during a time she was at Cambridge – and getting stronger as she talked about that time, and about a book she wrote, and about how she was a central figure at the glorious late sixties love fest around Central Park’s Bethesda Fountain, and about other past lovers, and about the famous literary men who bedded her mother, and how when her mother wasn’t fucking she was masturbating, so much so that Gillian did not realize for a long time, she said, that not all apartments smelled like theirs. All this, molesters and the rest in a British accent, which of course put me in mind of the fake British accents of summer people in White Mountains. But this was different. This talk in those tones that was also about an orchard cabin in India, and about these groups we went to in the city that seemed so full of hope. And at the center of the stories this lovely, still, girl with the long blonde hair. A desirable girl/woman in the sun. Here a British accent was okay.

Each day we racked up what seemed like more memories that I thought would be around forever. We had a herd of cows that always approached us, coming right up to our car, on a dirt road before the spot on Lake Champlain where we had this peculiar old lake house. In Middlebury in the heart of WASP land we took a tour of a claustrophobic house full of hooked rugs and bric-a-brac and horse-hair-stuffed furniture on slanting floors – as uncomfortable as the furniture in our smaller living room when I was a child in Connecticut. A main feature was a lifelike family cat that had been skinned and stuffed in the 19th century. We kept crossing the border into Canada – from woods to the north, or from a lake town that felt strangely like an ocean town – and one day at a small, seedy roadside eatery that had wonderful café au lait, a bossy woman told us in French that we were leaking gas. We got back to the house, replenishing gas each time we saw the level was down, and the next morning at a garage in Vergennes we found we needed a new gas tank, which would take several days, and she said that was just fine with her. And I was thinking seriously about being in love.

The Aqua Mustang 38 - HIGHER AND HIGHER

2008-08-14T15:12:00.006-05:00

High time for the sex scene, I think, as I drive the aqua Mustang north from Lake Champlain and head to what they call Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, which is dangerously close to the New Hampshire border – danger Gillian understands, for it is past if separate horrors in Waspdom that brought us close at the start and she is with me now in this car I had been driving alone, rarely leaving – afraid to leave? – while on the hunt. In the summer I made two trips over from Vermont, and saw people from the past, including one who knew what had happened in ways I had only sensed. Neither of us by now has any illusions about the past. Where we had met was a place where illusions could not stand, and anger was a virtue, and where it became nearly impossible to shock.

Her hand is on my knee as I drive and I am less in the car than still inside visual images of her in bed and bath this morning at the borrowed lake house that, translated into Wasp, is a camp. The occasional neighbors we see, still here from the summer, are dressed from head to toe by L.L. Bean – the feet always in those strange boots in which the foot part is rubber, not leather – the invention of which, the Bean catalogs, with their dowdy models, praise as a milestone in history.

And we are so far from world adventures in this carefully shabby and insubstantial house, in a musty little bedroom that has a cuckoo clock, or in an old bathtub that has legs. “Don’t look right at me now,” she said. “I don’t want you to see me getting fat.” But I look, and she’s so alluring to me, pink from the bath, not my idea of getting fat. And I did not have my eyes shut earlier, when there was wetness before the bath and she blew on me gently.

A sex scene, and in the car it is mixed up with a million other scenes from past and present, for this too is part of the hunt for what happened way back then, the hunt still on, whether I knew it or not – the hunt for what happened back then and also for where and who I am now in this time of roaming the places of the past – now that I admit I am mainly a visual person – not a writer – scenes outside the car and inside too and at every time period since visual images first began to be indelible, which was before I was two years old – these pictures in my head as real as what I see inside and outside the car I am driving – in this new time of stepping into places without clear precedents or reference e points despite all the roaming I had done. And these images are now accompanied by songs, this car with its tape deck – songs, many of which I had never heard before, as important seeming now as the visual images – catching up on what had happened while I had been away. Not knowing I needed songs – certainly never singing – catching up now on what I’d missed, though it's filtering through others, Judy Collins doing Suzanne, for I had never heard of Leonard Cohen, who had arrived when I in the Balkans – or it is a fairly cornball Anglo-accented baritone named Roger Whittaker doing the very non-Anglo songs of Cat Stevens, who had arrived when I was south of the Congo.

We head into the Northeast Kingdom – this part of Vermont not far from the White Mountains but a place our family and friends never went. It is a rival place, as bare bones as New Hampshire. We go via the last real outpost before the Northeast Kingdom, St. Johnsbury, Vermont, hardly bare bones, built on hills including a hill that is a village green, a place that seems to represent the upside of 19th century New England, a place of culture while a few miles away New Hampshire people were merely trying to live by their wits. It is new to me. Our people did their big weekly shopping on the New Hampshire side in a mill town called Littleton, which has no shade trees, much less a green, much less anything like St. Johnsbury’s Athenaeum, its own art museum – not far from a brick boarding school campus and close to its own museum of natural history, which is full of its own fossils and Indian artifacts and impaled bugs. And after St. Johnsbury, the only store is a very small, crowded one that sells everything, from cheap warm coats and kerosene lamps to canned hash – survival things. I ask about Lake Willoughby, which I know is here somewhere, and am told it does not freeze until February if it ever goes – this black lake, surrounded by rock formations that look like the work of Druids on Cocaine. This might be the gates of hell.

And going higher and higher, leaving the lake behind and below us, seeing what is here and in the distance as dry leaves blow away – higher and higher till the hills and mountains, which we see as we stand outside the car and turn 360 degrees – hills and mountains into infinity in all directions, and I say this is the top of the world – another reason for one of those hugs that may still mean nothing but I am unguarded enough to think that now, post nakedness and wetness, they do. “It’s the top of the world” is what I say, and what I shall write in the guest book at the dowdy lake house, the camp, I have borrowed, and again I will not be sure what are my words and what are someone else’s, some alien appearing from the past to filter words through me.

The Aqua Mustang 37 - UP FROM THE CITY

2008-08-12T10:27:00.004-05:00

On the drive up I miss the turn onto the Northway. Close on the seat beside me Gillian is fiddling, prettily, with little items – a shamrock key chain, an eye glass repair kit, a tiny game with a little ball you try to maneuver into a bull’s-eye hole – things she got from a rest stop vending machine – the sort of things that fascinate when you return from very non-American places, which she did recently from a few years in the Tibetan refugee part of India.

We go by mistake so far in the wrong direction on the New York Thruway that it feels like we are in the Midwest, and we both find this funny, and I remember being in family cars and how a wrong turn would in all the years ahead be held against you. She quotes her late father being cheerful about what he called, when a wrong turn was made, “grand turismo,” and this makes me a little nervous, for I am not sure that if he were alive he would not now be closer to my age than Gillian was. And I thought of what she had just told me about how when she was barely at the start of puberty her father and her near-famous celebrity-fucker mother would have their children strip on a cold Maine beach and then both parents would egg Gillian on to suck off her little brother.

The context was our talking about Wasp summer places. “I didn’t have a magic kingdom, like you did in New Hampshire,” she said. "We had places but we were renters.”

This talk about our backgrounds, and now her sexually convoluted upbringing. Razor-edge horrible, but I could relate. But oh God I like where I am right now, the crisp piney air flowing through the aqua Mustang, and beside me a pretty blond who seems both girl and woman, and we talk and talk about many other matters, and we inch closer to each other, and it feels as if this is something not so much like all the other sex in adulthood but something more like from dreams.

We turn around at one of those places on the Thruway conveniently marked with a no U-turn sign. Back in the right direction, we switch after Albany and Troy to Rt. 7 and other old roads, and we stop whenever we feel like it. In sunset, beneath a willow, she stands and raises her arms over her head, pulling her long hair up and letting it fall, stretching, the body’s line imprinted on her sweater, and then her arms are around me and she is pulling herself up – though again this may not mean much since in the circles where we met there was so much expected and supposedly chaste hugging.

It is early autumn now. The reason I am no longer alone in the car is that when I was just down in the city, in one of our chats by the African fetish figures she sells from a sheet spread out on the sidewalk near the Modern Art Museum, I told her it was almost my birthday. And I spoke of the north and my summer adventures, and we decided we should drive up together to look at the fall foliage which in a week would be at peak in Vermont. New Hampshire too.

At one point at dusk we are on shale rock at a dark pond in the woods, where small fish leap up for insects, creating expanding circles on the mostly still water – a place of instant nostalgia though neither of us has been here before. We begin a kid’s competition to see whose flat stone will skip the farthest across the water’s surface.

The Aqua Mustang 36 - DRIVING AWAY II

2008-08-08T09:00:00.001-05:00

So I drive off and out to country roads listening to Judy Collins singing about how this girl named Suzanne feeds me tea and oranges that come all the way from China, and she's wearing rags and feathers from Salvation Army counters. And the sun pours down like honey...

I drive off in Vermont, the anti-New Hampshire, suddenly elated with the thought, as Judy Collins begins to sing, that I have broken a barrier by recognizing at last how important music is to me, who has lived in foreign, as well as domestic, war zones, but has never sung. As important as the paintings I have just this year rediscovered, as the Keats and Wordsworth I am reading again for the first time in decades. And now, though what I seek in what some would call mid-life – these family horrors I am tracking down – though what I seek is filled with peril, it is not like that time alone in Darfur or that time alone in a small Cessna straying into the dread line with Syria, or that time in Kalimantan when ritual cannibalism had returned – it is only now looking into my family past that I am clear about being in an area of peril. And even so I am not jarred by Judy Collins’ nearly too nice sweetness. She takes you by the hand and leads you to the river, and you know that she will trust you for you've touched her perfect body with your mind. This sentimental part will not go away.

I do get distracted, though I know this search I am on is not for simulated puppy love or relationship or fucking. It is a matter of life and death to me to return to past places to find out why those people of the past have had lives that led to razor edge horror. This is my mission this summer. I have to know. But I cannot put out of my mind thoughts of ease and orgasm with teasing women. Perhaps because I feel so good without cigarettes, just Vermont air. Sex in this air. Thoughts and images of the real Julia, the real Bonnie, the real Anne Marie. And also Suzanne of the song that is playing in my car, Suzanne, who I note is dressed in feathers.

Remembering or fantasizing with surges of sexuality in Vermont where the fields are smooth and lush green and the cows are well fed, never the skinny New Hampshire mongrel cows who stand on rocks and yellowing dead grass. I drive past Vermont village greens – New Hampshire does not go in much for village greens. And on the Vermont greens there are guitar playing kids of the sort not smiled upon in new Hampshire.

And though I drift and glide and fantasize, Vermont does not fool me either. The ski slope gashes on Killington are as violent as the avalanche gashes in the Franconia Range. And I know what lurks behind clever landscaping – things never hidden in New Hampshire with its lack of zoning and it big advertising signs on even small roads. But here, state ordered landscaping to hide the shoddy condos and the trailer parks. And I stop in nice-nice Middlebury and it feels as suffocating to me as anything I can remember. Also, I see and hear summer colony ladies coming out of Middlebury antique stores talking through their noses in carefully modulated and very fake British tones. Those accents that were so common in the restricted summer communities across the border in New Hampshire – the starting point for all those people, young and old, who are dying now without their own voices. The place where I started too.

The Aqua Mustang 35 - GET ME OUT!

2008-08-07T09:21:00.002-05:00

What am doing wandering around in the all too connected 1938, 1952, 1970 and 1986 versions of the White Mountains, where nothing ever changes? How can I get out? I had gotten out years ago and now I am in there in my writing as if I have entered a maze and have no sure way to retrace my steps.

Once in the summer of 1955 when I was 20 and a virtual virgin, free for the summer anyway of that pretentious college I was in, I began frequenting this mid-level brothel in Rome that, though only three blocks off the Via Veneto, charged the equivalent in overvalued dollars of 58 cents. I was happily obsessing over a not so young but very smooth girl who had these swim-suit like costumes. In the reception room she didn’t need to hustle. She just stood there for a few moments in a certain way, and I was thinking how fine it was to be here conquering shyness in an international whorehouse.

How fine, yet two blocks closer to the Veneto was the Eden Hotel, where that summer I sometimes slept in a suite taken my distinguished grandmother, who like me was taking a summer off from the White Mountains, and she was traveling happily with my younger Cousin Robin, her favorite grandson, who went to Winchester and lived in London except for summers in the White Mountains, and was the only one in the family whose English accent had to do with actually growing up mostly in England.

I don’t want to write anything more about the White Mountains. And that summer of 1986, when everything was so different. I don’t want to write over and over of how before I headed north that summer on the hunt for what had happened, visual art was taking me to places that the logic of words obscured, and I don’t want to write of visiting places from the past to see what I would find, as in walking on the Upper East Side and feeling I was being smothered by powdered old women in fur coats, or entering the Modern and being whisked back to the time of Motherwell and Kline and Pollack and deKooning, and my girlfriend Vannie, who was an action painter herself and who looked just right in black leotards – nor about how Hopper paintings at the Art Institute drew me into Beat era Chicago, where I spent my weekends away from Indianapolis where when I was 21 and a wire service reporter I was dealing with Klan people posing as ordinary Republican government leaders. Such dealings being something I knew how to fake. And anyway I was on my way to Cuba where it seemed a nonfiction revolution was about to start. And I don’t want to write about those recurring nightmares that would not go away.

Such writing right now is no more satisfying than doing more bragging stories about feats in Borneo and Angola and Laos and Egypt.

I want to get out. I had those happy years when I was not writing, working with color and line and form instead. And then after I came back to writing I got into that maze again. How can I get out?

“By writing,” I would say while attempting to put on a wise face if someone else should ask me about traps of the past. My words would be very helpful to someone else. I could tell them what was their best material.