The Death of All Things Seen (11 page)

It still hurt. He felt it and winced. It was all there again in his heart and head. In wartime, gear and supplies had to be meticulously packed and weighed. This was how his father packed for him, military style, deciding what to take and what to leave behind. They had the lie rehearsed.

They were going on a fishing trip, wilderness gear packed into the car, canned provisions, oil-slick parka and wading boots, thermal underwear, a Swiss Army knife, flint, and a cache of dry kindling. His father weighed it all in the carriage house on a scale taken from the kitchen.

In pulling out of the drive, Nate saw his mother in the upper floor window of his old bedroom. A curtain moved. She was then gone from his life.

They talked among themselves eventually miles out of Chicago. His father drank whiskey from an engraved pocket flask set between his knees. At times the car swerved and had to be corrected. Thankfully, they didn’t run into anyone as they drove along the funneling timberline.

Business had been going to hell, or so his father had determined, or it was getting so. He saw bad times ahead. There had been mistakes made at all levels of government. It wasn’t even about governments anymore, but multinationals, about prevailing interests that transcended any one border.

His father cast into a great pool of discontent. He was then anticipating the rise of the Japanese imports. He had a head for understanding the ways of the world, or it was his hatred of the
Japs
that keyed him in on them specifi-cally. In looking back, it was hard for Nate to decide what was prophetic and what was rage within his father. It was perhaps both.

Whatever the case, the Vietnam War was a great distraction. His father announced it, banging the dash of the car, the joke of those early Toyota and Honda four-stroke engines – a lawnmower motor in a car – the compacts that nobody in their right mind would think of driving, and didn’t, but then did eventually, in what would be the subtle narrowing of dreams and skyrocketing inflation.

It was never about Nate. That was one of the fast truths emerging at the time. There would be no succor. His father was lost. It was the
Japs
, what he had experienced in war.

His father pulled over and pissed into the desolate landscape against the onset of evening. He wavered and steadied, went round the front of the car, shielding his eyes against the cone of light.

Getting in, he reached back and touched his hunting rifle with a strange reassurance that it was still there, so it had frightened Nate what might have happened if they were stopped, or what might happen after he was gone across the border.

The anger was suddenly gone from his father. He was exhausted. He took another drink. They talked again eventually, or his father did. What he described was not the act of desertion, not the act of disgrace, but something far nobler, something connected to the Feldman past.

They were heading up into Feldman territory connected to a band of heroic Norwegians going generations back. They were, in fact, more Ingebretson than Feldman. His father turned and faced Nate in the compelling sense that this was all true, or it should be believed.

Nate could do nothing but acquiesce and listen.

It was a complicated story. The Feldman name had entered the family through a mercurial Norwegian who had given birth to a daughter of immense beauty, but also petulant character, who broke camp eventually and was seduced and bedded by a fur trapper named Feldman, so the mirthless Ingebretson Norwegians, those dumbfounded giants who had come across the Atlantic, had their bloodline infused with a sagacious, nomadic taxidermist from the Urals who knew something about fox fur and ermine and its value to the Imperial Court of czarist Russia. This, according to his father, was how a rarified beauty, a daughter who struck out and found another life, saved the Norwegian side of the family from a great obscurity.

His father had been brought up outside Saint Cloud, Minnesota. The family name was Engelstad, and he was christened Angar, a name he had always associated with a clod driving oxen, so that when he distinguished himself in school and left Saint Cloud eventually, he took the lifeline of the ancestral, Semitic Feldman name. As for Theodore, he chose the name from a haberdashery storefront sign seen fleetingly through the window of a train on his way down through Saint Paul, believing he might find favor in circles of money in the metropolis of Chicago, Philadelphia or New York. He did. He was such an anomaly with his flaxen hair and great strength, and to be counted a Jew, to have that lineage.

He earned a scholarship to Cornell, enrolling in ROTC simply because he had no respectable civilian clothes. He wore his uniform exclusively, compensating in the way certain men can turn disadvantage to advantage. He was described in the Yearbook as a student of great patriotism, featured in his uniform, inspiring and deferential, and he came to understand that you could be a fraud, or not a fraud exactly, but that your true self, what you felt and thought, could be so concealed from others, and from yourself, too.

He had a head for applied mathematics and a penchant for philosophy, and also the steady hand of a carpenter, given the thunderhead Norwegian Engelstad and Ingebretson in him. His height and his looks gave him a physical stature. He was wildly courted and admired. This was an established fact. There was nothing he couldn’t do, because you had to do everything in Saint Cloud, Minnesota, and he had done everything well by necessity.

A Vanderbilt had her claws into him at Cornell. She didn’t care a whit where he had come from, not then, but he knew it would come against him, and yet, for a time, he described a growing self-awareness, how he could elicit a recklessness in women. They were rough in their lovemaking, and there was always the possibility he would sire a child. There was that much in him, that much explosive charge. This was the frontline of a war that might be won, the war over the heart.

Nate had heard the story. His mother had verified certain facts during the trials and rows of a contentious marriage, relaying what his father could have had, and what he left behind in the first great act of selfless love in leaving behind his Vanderbilt. There was a lamenting sense that he had passed on true love and was never whole again. So it wasn’t the war entirely that had changed him, but what he left behind, what could never be recovered, and would most surely have ended, if there had been no war, anyway.

Nate dared not ask about the Vanderbilt. It wasn’t a question of facts and understanding, but a story of perceptions and deepening influences. His father described how he had been influenced by his studies in philosophy and engineering at Cornell, where, notoriously, existential devotees of Sartre and Camus regularly committed suicide at any of a number of bridges along the gorges near campus. He revealed how, during his sophomore year, he used to walk out toward the gorges with his Vanderbilt debutante, both sharing the mutual understanding that suicide was a genuine option in a world without a God, and that, each time neither jumped, they were making an existential choice to go on living and felt the better for consciously making a choice.

His father held the whiskey between his knees. He drank liberally, looking out into the unfolding landscape. There was the surging sense of what had passed, the rush of great and undeniable passion, and all of it begun before his father was Nate’s age, the indictment laid out before Nate.

At times, his father found it hard to contain it all, the car swerving so it had to be corrected and accounted for, but, thankfully, there was nobody going north or south along the funneling timberline. These were stories pulled from his father’s head and his heart, the stream of words, the Feldman nomad and the giant Swedes, or was it the giant Norwegians? Yes, the
goddamn Ingebretsons
. His father corrected himself, lost in the quiet incantation of how life could be otherwise invented and lived, peopled by great and noble nomads who must surely have existed in how the land was first discovered.

Nate listened, his father coming round toward an awareness of his own disaffection, tendering the tremulous and humble opinion that, at a certain point in history, just before the Industrial Revolution, when men still lived without the hitch of industry and machines, when distances meant something, a man could find the measure of his strength and temperament in Nature, in lands yet uninhabited.

He alighted on the story of a great ox of a man, Per Ingebretson, their Norwegian primogenitor, who, of his own volition, neither from religious persecution nor any real ambition, just a wandering sense of wanting to see the greater world, had left home at age sixteen, crossed Iceland and Greenland, before making shore in North America. Per, a towering, uncomplicated figure in the tradition of Paul Bunyan, a man who would find his true calling logging in what would eventually become Minnesota. His passage to America had been secured through a trading company out of Hudson Bay, his first true landfall along a meandering river at a bleak outpost near Pictured Rocks on Lake Superior at a supply shed on the way to nowhere, where he was given the vague mandate to begin work further north and simply keep chopping until someone came and got him. There was enough in a lifetime to keep him busy.

His father told the story driving into the upper mitt of the Michigan peninsula in a thinning tree line of spruce and pine. How he knew the most intimate details of Per Ingebretson was not up for debate. It was just understood he did.

His father shifted, took his hands from the wheel, and, describing the strength of Per, made the halted chop at something that could never be felled in a single blow. He described the stance, the measured series of blows, the angled cuts, impressing at all times the absolute isolation of it all.

In those years of first discovery, he explained, men lived rough, authentic lives and gathered in encampments at season’s end in the trade of goods and services. A breed apart from others, they were all alike among their own kind, because of the physicality of the work, their shoulders broad, their arms and legs thick, hands like shovels. But, lamentably, they were a sort others did not willingly suffer drawing alongside, the comparison too striking in their collective favor, so, when camp broke, each giant went its own way.

In the clearing of the far North, his father maintained, there were no stories of drunkenness or disaffection with life. Each could carve, and did, reeds planed to a fine-grained translucent parchment, wood whittled to release the fluted trill of a songbird’s call.

They were on a grey scratch of road.

His father drank again from his tumbler of whiskey. He imagined Per, in the metronome swish of a weighted axe, in great advancing strides coming upon a stream, drinking like a horse in a satiating quench, and, at day’s end, pitching an impoverished tent, flint struck against the coming dusk, a glow of kindling coaxed with a whisper, the sudden bloom of his shadowy form and his hand cupped like a teller of a great secret.

It was thus told, in the way stories are, for the listener, but for the teller, too. His father filled with an emptiness of his own days pitted against a heroic life that most probably never existed, which made it all the more irreconcilable, more tragic, because he believed it in his heart, and he would not be dissuaded that there was another way, when there never was.

J
OANNE
DIDN
’
T
KNOW
anyone could still get carsick. Maybe it had been the McDonald’s. It was a plausible alternative explanation.

They were in the suburb of Winnetka. Joanne rubbed Grace down with baby wipes. Norman was out of the car, too, compliantly holding the box of baby wipes.

Joanne pointed to a shop across the road from a café. Maybe Norman could get a coffee, while ‘the girls went shopping’. Joanne turned to Grace. ‘Maybe they have dolls?’

*

Norman acquiesced, left them and went over to the café and ordered a double espresso. In a day waning toward a darkening sky, he saw already, beyond a tree line of oak and cedar, the visible glow of city-light pollution, a soft, bathing light belying an afternoon of falling temperatures and the gridlock of a treacherous afternoon commute.

They might yet be trapped out here. There was the issue of Randolph. Norman didn’t want to think about it, the piling of responsibilities that could pull you under and take you from any central and focused interest. There was much beyond his control.

Norman felt it. All that had been so recently lost to him. Not least, the loss of Daniel Einhorn’s investment that might have propelled Norman toward greater success. Money accrued in the essential fraud of how so much of the world had been built upon deceit. It sickened Norman, not least that it had ended before he could cash in. There was the sudden and unsettling sense that his life had reached a point where the best years were behind him. It struck out here in the most unlikely of places, not in the confines of his office, but in the run of life and the coldness of an advancing afternoon.

In the quiet indeterminacy, Norman opened and reread Nate Feldman’s email. What struck him again was the language, the authoritative but ingratiating, accessible tone. Here was a man who could find a broad and accomplished reach in the measure of a single line or two.

It irked Norman. It must have been this way with Mr Feldman. The executive shorthand of a voice and lines that could communicate a buoying optimism or reprimand, without ever using the exact words of praise or indictment. Mr Feldman moving around the center of an emotion, so he was never any one thing, but the sum of a continuance in the aftermath of great slaughter, and at the end, sequestered in a skyscraper, among a pantheon of demi-gods surveying the antlike procession of what now constituted the emerging world.

Norman looked up in the contained world of the coffee shop. He felt like a man long submerged, breaking the surface of water again. His breath came in fits. He should have stayed at home. This advance on his old life, it meant nothing. What did the Feldmans want from him? He felt himself asking it.