Love and Fury Read Online Free Page B

eighth grade. And yet she sang. What love—is there another word for it? Courage? Generosity?—to have been kept from ever opening the gift, but to pass it along to her children just the same and not demean it or throw it away in frustration. What wisdom, astonishing in its offhandedness, to have passed along also the wish to open it, the yearning to be able to one day open it, the longing to live beyond mere duty and endurance.
    My father would most likely have encountered the word
patriarchy
as a ten-letter gap in one of the crossword puzzles he did with a pencil sharpened with a knife so the lead had a sculpted quality, rounded at the tip and smooth, not pointy, so it wouldn’t tear the soft paper, and so it wouldn’t incise the letters onto the page, which would make them harder to erase. Erasing, correcting, changing your mind when you were wrong, was a given; in fact, if you didn’t have to do this at least several times to complete the puzzle, it was too easy. That’s why each of his whittled pencils was capped with a pink wedge of eraser, soft rubber that didn’t wear away the surface of the page, that gave you as many chances as you needed.
    No one outside a marriage can really know its features: its ecstasies and regrets, its disappointments, reassurances, tendernesses, cruelties, secrets, truces, promises, compromises, least of all a child of that marriage. I can only say how it seemed to me; when I was young, before the future became a source of dread and inevitable grief, my parents were happy. They were in love: I recall enough of their touching and joking and kissing and flirting back when Bobby and I were young to feel sure of this. And I believe that “in love” or not, they loved each other continuously, even when their angers burned hot as hatred.
    This will not come clear. It can’t. There is no binary good/bad, glad/sad conclusion to be reached. When I have spoken of my family in the past, there is always someone who wants to know how such love and fury could coexist, and I don’t understand the question. It seems either naive or disingenuous. Families seem to me to be
made
of love and fury. The world is mostly water; we are mostly water; life itself is mostly water, but we don’t ask how such hydrogen and oxygen can coexist. We just drink it and live. Maybe we wish it were champagne, or root beer, or cider, but we’re not foolish enough to wish it were liquid hydrogen, or liquid oxygen.
    When my mother was dying, my father proposed to her again. My aunt Marie told me this coming from my mother’s room where she lay struggling for breath. My aunt blew her nose in a tissue and smiled through tears: “Your mother said yes.” I have no business dismissing that as sentimentality, nor is it any of my business what either of my parents said. And yet, if my mother had had no choice years earlier, she certainly didn’t have one then. And there is always, intrusively and insistently, the thought that she had in fact already made her choice, moving smoke by smoke, pack by pack of Chesterfields, toward the only escape available to her. And even if she were still hurt and angry, wounded and furious, she could not have refused my father the consolation he was seeking; she didn’t have it in her.
    And neither do I. I am also my mother’s son.
    â€œIt’s a great relief,” my father says, rising from the table and reaching for his footed aluminum cane, “a great relief to me to get that off my chest.” The meeting is over. Joe and I sit there at the table and watch him make his way slowly into the living room to his recliner. He reaches for the remote and in a moment the TV comes on, loud enough to feel it through the floor.
    I have a memory of a particular evening that has been with me so long it’s become a little story. I would have been about six, I believe, having just started school. I think that’s right because