Cabin Read online

  Out of college, out of work and without a girlfriend, Paul was untethered and looking for the next thing in his life. He has always been one to move on—Paul is not a brooder, the opposite of me. Coherence is not a big concern of his; or rather, I should say, he possesses it naturally, and from within, and not with conscious consideration. Or, as he has counseled me through the years, “There are times when you can think about things too much.” This readiness of his to move on was in 1975, and he had just bought a blue 1955 Chevy pickup truck. He was busy rebuilding the engine in an extra room of our mother’s apartment in Lakewood, New Jersey, where he was living when I called him about the house I wanted to build.

  “Sure,” he said. “I can come up.”

  He finished work on the truck, drove it to Maine and moved in with my wife and me—we had a small spare bedroom in our apartment.

  Neither of us had built a house all the way through before. We had the experience of summer construction jobs growing up in rural South Jersey. In college I had worked on a framing crew; Paul had worked as a Sheetrock installer. So we learned the rest of it as we went along. I bought a pile of books and studied the pine-and-oak-ribbed cavities of nineteenth-century barns scattered around the Maine countryside.

  The house we built was not perfect but—being way, way overbuilt, with the intent to last forever—it most definitely captured my inner psychic complexity at the time. I wanted permanence. I fell somewhat short of the mark. My wife and I spent nearly twenty years of marriage in it, some of them happy, and together we raised our two children, Elizabeth and Adam, in it.

  In the mid-nineties, as the marriage was coming unglued, we put the house up for sale. I decided, as a final act of ownership, to hire a man to clear a stand of big pine trees on a corner of the property. The trees were beauties: tall and straight as pencils but thick as carpenter’s crayons. They had been pruned of their lower branches years earlier to create clear white wood—furniture-quality wood. A truck hauled the logs to a nearby sawmill, and I paid a carpenter to cut and shape the lumber into the framing members that would eventually form a set of cabins. I more or less left it to the carpenter to figure out the work based on what the trees gave up for boards and beams. I had no mental picture of what I wanted the lumber to become. “Work it out as best you can,” I told him. I vaguely had in mind a set of small cabins that one day might be arranged near a pond somewhere to make a family compound, something like the Kennedys had at Hyannis Port, but on a workingman’s scale. I imagined children and grandchildren running and jumping into the pond off a long wooden dock, canoes tipped over in the grass and rocking chairs on the porch. I think I had seen that picture in a movie once.

  Of course, none of this family-retreat fantasy fit the reality of my true situation. Aligning aspiration with reality has never been a strong point with me. This is the gene that I inherited from our mother, and in better times might account for whatever progress I have made in my life. In other words, I sometimes didn’t know what I shouldn’t attempt. But back then, as the carpenter was doing his work on my lumber, I was a man on an icy slope toward divorce who was simultaneously assembling the pieces of a family retreat. I haven’t yet found the right analogy to capture the conflicted quality of my life then: maybe a man fixing his porch on the morning of the day he knows he will burn down his house. Was it desperation or delusion? I don’t know. But clearly I had an obsession with shelter. The reason for claiming those trees as future cabins would have been perfectly obvious to any slightly self-aware person, but I was not paying a lot of attention then to my deeper motivations. My gaze was ahead, not back or inward. I wasn’t able to see the submerged reasons until much later, when I started trying, with the help of a psychiatrist, to understand why I was coming seriously unhinged.

  Stories are like hens. They hatch new stories. So here’s another story, and it stands in a row behind the stories of the woodpile and the house we built in 1975 and even the marriage that cracked —it’s all part of a long line of explanation that leads to the cabin.

  Growing up, I had always been on the move, from one place to another, sometimes in the middle of the night. My mother and father had separated several times when I was very young, and my father disappeared from my life when I was seven years old. There was no explanation from him or my mother. There was no last day with him; he was simply not there anymore. Following his departure, my childhood became a succession of rentals—small homes or apartments in which we often lived for just a few months before departing—with the rent unpaid and the security deposit sacrificed. My mother was a beautician, and the foundation of her income (and our lives) were her skills and hard work and a small suitcase that contained several pairs of scissors, combs, frocks, curling irons, a handheld hair dryer, a tin of wax, tweezers and other tools of the hairdresser’s trade. There was also a vibrator in there, which she said was for massaging the scalp, but now that I’m older I have to wonder.

  For awhile she had her own shop; then she worked for others. Sometimes she did hair at home; sometimes she went to the homes of her customers. She was very good at what she did, and she enjoyed it, but still we were nearly always broke. A five-dollar tip meant we were flush: a pizza with all the toppings for dinner. She received a few dollars a month in child support from my father, but it was hardly enough to cover a week’s groceries—not to mention the rent. This meant that there were times when there was no choice but to pick up and leave. Moving was no tragedy for my mother, at worst an inconvenience. I think she enjoyed the change of scenery and the drama that accompanied these moves. I once counted seventeen different places my mother, Paul and I had lived before I went off to college. All of these moves were tightly clustered in two areas: Spotswood, in central New Jersey, where I was born, and Toms River, on the Jersey shore, where I went to middle and high school.

  From time to time, the memory of one of those rented houses or apartments comes back to me. It usually begins with an association like the smell of frying pork chops or the sight of a rain-smeared window. I feel a nostalgic hum when one of these sensations is pregnant with the memory of a home that slumbers hidden in my past, and if I sit with one long enough, I can usually stalk it back to its source, very often a house in which I ate, played or did my homework as a boy. I love the smell of frying pork chops, and the sight of a rain-smeared window can make me tear up. Behind the pork chop smell is an indistinct vignette of a woman my mother had hired to watch Paul and me while she was at work. The woman, our babysitter, is fat, wears an apron and stands at the stove. I look at her from behind, and the flesh at her elbows is loose like on a baby’s legs. The cool autumn air comes through the kitchen window, lifts the curtain and brings me the delicious aroma of the searing pork fat as I wait for supper. I cannot account for the emotion behind the wet window—I know only that in the memory I am alone in a big house and the rain is steadily falling. I am warm and out of the weather. I don’t even know if we lived there.

  Sometimes I count back over the houses. Of the places we lived, the one I liked the best was a bungalow on Polonia Street in Spotswood. I was about eight. Polonia Street was less than a quarter mile from dead end to dead end and lined on both sides with small wood-framed homes on tiny lots. One end of the street faded into a patch of woods that contained a three-story house with a mansard roof occupied by two ancient women who wore long shapeless dresses and high lace-up shoes. We called it the haunted house. We would sneak up to the door, bang the big knocker and run away in fear and delight. The other end of the street went right up to the wire-and-wood fence that enclosed a horse pasture adjacent to a small ramshackle stable kept by a man who gave pony rides at fairs and amusement parks. There was something creepy yet secretly alluring about the place, mixing, as it did, teenage girls in cowboy boots and scruffy male ponies who seemed frequently tumescent in their presence. So you might say this period of my childhood was bounded on one end by danger (the haunted house) and on the other by the suggestion of depravity (the horse pasture)
. Home in the middle was security.

  Our Polonia Street house had a kitchen, bathroom, living room and bedroom downstairs and two bedrooms upstairs—one for Paul and one for me. The upstairs bedrooms were on either side of the house with a stubby hall between them that led to a front window tucked inside a snug dormer, where there was a window seat. I remember sitting on it watching the limbs of a big tree brush the roof and listening to the sounds of the house—my mother in the kitchen downstairs, Paul in his bedroom playing with his toys, the television on in the living room. I don’t remember any winter scenes from this house, which suggests we were there for less than a year’s full cycle of seasons. There was a small front yard with a cement sidewalk to the front door, and a somewhat bigger backyard that went right up to the tracks of the Camden–Amboy railroad. The train clicking by at night would put me into a deep sleep.

  Johnny, my mother’s boyfriend, was already living with us then and a comfortable part of our lives. He did most of the housework; having been in the navy, he cleaned the house as if he were a seaman swabbing the deck of a ship. I would come home, the floors wet and the house smelling so strongly of ammonia that my eyes would burn.

  It was a cozy house. It had a roomy kitchen with a deep porcelain sink, and a view over the sink to the train tracks and the huge field beyond, where men would hunt rabbits in the fall. The muffled faraway gunshots were exciting. Even now, the memory of coming in through the back door into the linoleum kitchen and encountering the small kitchen table gives me pleasure. Why this house on Polonia Street stays with me so permanently and why it is the place I can most easily see Paul and me as children is a mystery. Maybe it is because the house was comfortable, cozy and simple, and we lived there with Johnny as a family. It was a happy time, a brief period of calm.

  This recollecting of houses has been a kind of reverse senescence with me: the older I get, the more I remember of the places where I lived as a child, and the more valuable the past has seemed to become. In my darker moments, when the past shimmers with more appeal than the future, I know to be on my guard—a melancholic mood is about to fall over me. It is like the premonitory aura that precedes a migraine headache. I recall some homes that Paul can’t, which makes sense since I am almost four years older than he. He has recalled one or two that I have forgotten. He has always had the better memory, right down to the details of the model-airplane decals that we pasted on our knotty-pine bunk beds. He remembers that I slept on the upper bunk, he on the bottom. But I have one big memory on him: our father. Paul was only three when our father left us. I remember him as an actual person in our lives. For Paul, he is a name on a birth certificate.

  So maybe the explanation for why I had those pine trees cut down was that I couldn’t bear to leave them behind while they held the potential to be a house. I must have known deep in my heart that I was about to enter another unsettled period of my life when homes would slip out from under me as they did in my boyhood and I would be on the move again. In any event, the trees came down and yielded an impressive amount of lumber—a seriously big pile of wood.

  At this point in the dream, the one that cracked, Paul was already ensconced in his suburban life, having himself recently ended a long relationship and begun another. He brought his five children into his new marriage. His new wife brought three. I was his best man. There was a Catholic wedding followed by life in the big house with the lawn and all the kids. It was right about then that he offered me a patch of his backyard to store the lumber. This would have been 1996. You might say we were both in transit: he into a marriage, and I on the way out.

  It still amazes me that Paul never had the mess of wood hauled away to make room for a shed or more grass in his subdivision, an Iowa of lawns. His neighbors in their supersized colonials could not have been pleased with the woodpile and its perpetual halo of tall weeds, which caught leaves, papers and the occasional plastic bag. Yet it was always there—under snow or sodden leaves, depending on the season—when I came to visit him for Christmas, Easter or Thanksgiving.

  After the trees had been cut and my wife and I sold the house and our fifteen country acres, I soon left Portland, where I had become the newspaper’s editor, and traveled to a new job in Philadelphia. We were separated at first, and then divorced. I worked in Philadelphia, at another newspaper, and raised my son, Adam, through high school. Until his graduation, the two of us lived in a small Center City apartment that I did my best to make a home. Adam graduated from high school and went off to college, and I remained in Philadelphia. I was fortunate to be in a new and nourishing relationship by then, but it suffered the strains that accompany a divorce and the conflicts that arise when two people have jobs in different cities. After Adam’s departure to college, my job in Philadelphia ended in 2003 with the arrival of a new boss at the paper. I got a severance package and some reassurances about references.

  I soon moved to Boston, where I had been hired to be a professor of journalism. I was happy to land on my feet and pleased to be a teacher, something I had wanted to do for a long time. It was good to be back in New England, which was familiar, and almost home. By then, the divorce was fully final, my mother had passed away and my children were adults and on their own: Elizabeth in New York and Adam in Peru, where he had become a Roman Catholic brother. I missed them both terribly, and my mother too. The only things that had seemed to stay in place were the lumber and Paul.

  Of course, I shouldn’t marvel at Paul’s reliability. We had grown up together and moved around together, and he knew something about the meaning of a home, even when it existed only as a pile of sticks destined to be a cabin.

  I have been a lifelong fisherman and fortunate to have fished many places in the world. Once, while walking the flats with my fly rod under a bright sun in the Bahamas, I heard a piercing screech and saw a cleft shadow sweep across the water and over a school of cruising bonefish. There was panic in the shallow water, which suddenly boiled with frightened silvery fish. I looked up and saw a hawk between the sun and the water. The fish could not have seen the bird, and I doubt that they had heard its call. They had felt the swift dark wings between them and the sun in the form of a swiftly moving shadow. In their frightened rush to deeper water, I wondered, were they responding to the imminence of death, or to the fear of the emptiness that lurks behind death?

  I had been in my new job in Boston for just over two years when, in 2006, I got the news that my uncle Babe was reaching the end of his fight with colon cancer. All of us in the family had called him Babe because he was the youngest of my mother’s three siblings. His real name was Thomas, which he definitely preferred to Babe, but to all of us he was Babe. The news of his fast decline had come to me from my aunt Judith in New York City. She was married to another of my uncles, John, my mother’s oldest brother. John and Judith had been an emotional shelter for me as I had stumbled through my divorce, offering reassurance and financial help, and their home in the East Village had been a haven for me more than once when my life was in serious emotional tumult. They had a big black sofa that I’d cover with a sheet and blanket and use as a bed. On the phone, Judith told me that she and John were going to New Jersey to visit Babe, who lived in a retirement community with his wife, Ruth. She was direct: this might be the last chance to see him alive. Did I want to come with them? I immediately said yes and took the train from Boston to New York.

  I had sensed from Judith that John had been declining—he was in his eighties—but I was shocked when I reached their home, a loft on the fifth floor of a renovated factory building on East Fourth Street whose walls were covered with the art of their friends in the city. John seemed hardly to know me. He was welcoming as usual, and gave me a strong handshake and big hug, but he could not remember my name. He called me by the old Greek honorific palikari, or brave young man. (John’s parents, my grandparents, were from Greece, and Greek was his first language.) Together we sang the same verse from an old Greek folk song. First once, then twice, then a third tim
e. He seemed unaware that we had just sung it. He was unusually reliant on Judith, asking her frequently what they were planning for the day. As we prepared to leave for New Jersey, he kept asking where we were going. Judith patiently told him we were going to see his brother Babe.

  “Babe is very sick,” she told him again.

  “He is?” John replied.

  “Yes. He has cancer.”

  Tears filled his eyes each time he heard it again.

  I returned to Boston, shaken. My mother was gone, Uncle Babe was dying and John was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. I brooded on the passage of time, the loss of family. The description is inadequate but I felt like I was standing in a house in which everything important to me—books, photos, cards given to me by my children—was being carried out by strangers. What soon would be left? How would I recognize my world and find my way without my mother and uncles? Only one of my uncles, Constantine, was both alive and healthy, and he was at the precipice of eighty. I had grown up with no family homestead that I could return to—no familiar porch, or view to the barn or the mountains, no place at the lake that was full of memories. Four years was the longest I had ever lived in one place as a boy, and that was in a home that we eventually lost in a foreclosure. I did not have a single possession from my childhood. These family relationships were all I had brought into my adulthood.