Love at Goon Park Read Online Free Page B

with him. One day, according to his mother, “guided by uncontrolled scientific curiosity, I dropped a large stone on the potty’s bottom to see what would happen.” He sobbed over the pieces for days afterward. An incurable punster for most of his life, Harry wrote that his grief was probably caused by his having hit “rock bottom.”

    His parents were Alonzo Harlow Israel and Mable Rock Israel. If Harry was something of a misfit, that standard was perhaps first set by his father. Lon Harlow—he loathed the name “Alonzo” and as an adult refused to respond to anyone who called him that—had hoped to be a doctor. He gave that up, though, dropping out of medical school in his third year to marry Mable Rock. Lon never quite found anything else that he liked as much as the study of medicine. He reluctantly tried and happily abandoned farming. He tinkered with what Harry called “intermittent, unsuccessful inventing.” Lon experimented with home appliances, and once even developed a small washing machine. He dabbled at running a garage and battery business, teaching himself about mechanics by reading books and manuals in a weekend frenzy. He started a small real estate business with his father. Eventually, Lon and Mable bought a general store in a small town near Fairfield and settled there. Harry’s parents had been married for ten years and were in their mid-thirties when he was born. At the Fairfield public library today, there is an archived photo of Lon on his wedding day: a slim man with a pointed chin, dark eyes under deep brows, a thin mouth just tilted into a smile at the corners. There is also a photo of Mable wearing a lacy white dress that seems to float at the edges. Mable was barely five feet tall. In the picture, she is as delicate as a fairy, fine-boned and graceful in her posture, her shining dark hair pulled smoothly back from a small, rather beautiful face. The Israels had four sons, in this order: Robert, Delmer, Harry, and Hugh. The boys all had their mother’s slight build, their father’s brown eyes and heavy eyebrows. In Harry’s face, one can also see Mable’s finely drawn features and slightly squared, stubborn chin.
    Harry remembered his parents as being determined that their children would grow beyond them. They had to fight for that—another lesson learned early. He was just three years old when his older brother Delmer was diagnosed with Pott’s disease, sometimes called tuberculosis of the spine. Lon Harlow had outguessed the local doctor on the ailment. Disturbed by the increasingly warped look of his son’s back, Lon bent an iron rod into the same odd curve. He sent the bar
to a research hospital in Chicago, where doctors made the diagnosis from the distinctive bend in the metal. They recommended that the boy go to a warmer, drier climate—then the standard remedy for TB. Frightened for their son, the Israels sold their house and moved the family to New Mexico. Short on money, they camped in a small canyon outside Los Cruces. Delmer’s health did improve in the brilliantly lit New Mexico air. But the family, already poor, grew more so. They lost their remaining possessions in a season of wild spring flooding. At one point, Lon Harlow was forced to carry his children out of a rising stream when it flooded through their tent. In little more than a year, the family returned, near destitute, to start over again in Fairfield.
    His parents, Harry said, “literally lived for their children. Fortunately, they did not have enough money to be really indulgent.” Not that he wouldn’t have enjoyed a little more indulgence—or extra affection. His own research would lead him to realize, many years later, how much he had felt like an afterthought and how much he had minded. “I remember my mother as a tiny, beautiful, hardworking, and efficient woman who reared four sons, and probably a husband, ably,