Preservation hall, p.1
Preservation Hall, page 1
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Preservation Hall
Scott Spencer
To my parents
and to Devorah Zeitlin
Contents
ONE
1
2
3
4
TWO
5
6
7
8
THREE
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
FOUR
17
18
19
20
21
A BIOGRAPHY OF SCOTT SPENCER
ONE
1
IN 1960, when Earl Morgan, my father, was forty-five and I, his only son, was twelve, we left Chicago to move to New York. Earl had decided to drop the mask of his obscurity and claim his place in the world of music. I didn’t believe anything of the sort would happen—the man was cursed, I thought, doomed—but as we piled our belongings into our gangsterish black Pontiac and prepared for our assault on America’s cultural capital, my father and I were almost as one, for though I could not believe that Earl was going to realize or even cure his chronic ambitions, one thing was certain: in New York we’d be unknown, unjudged, and I, at least, could begin again.
In Chicago, while he nursed the wounds of a failed career and then a failed marriage, my father taught music in the same public school I attended and this, in a childhood brocaded with real and imagined mortifications, was my central, ravishing woe. It was worse than living in a chaotic pisshole of a house, and worse than my mother running off the way men are supposed to—with a cheap, battered suitcase and a couple hundred bucks, marking her trail with increasingly far-flung postcards, from Nevada, California, Oregon, and British Columbia. She traveled with a man named Stewart, who was dying and wanted to see the world.
Earl was hated by our neighbors. We lived in a rabidly provincial lower middle-class neighborhood and his presence on the block was barely tolerated, even when he was a married man. Once Evelynn left him and he entered his second bachelorhood, he traveled downhill in their collective estimation from oddball to outcast. Once, coming home from the bus stop, someone threw stones at him. My father stoned! He talked about it for months, and though I never was certain who’d done it I dreaded that it was someone I knew.
If Earl had been hounded because he had an accent or because he limped, he might have held a firmer grip on my allegiance, but I could never rid myself of the suspicion that his position as pariah was somewhat willed. No one else in sight wore even a colored shirt or a mustache, but there was my vulnerable papa with his tusk-like goatee and the linty beret he wore even when he gave our tiny patch of lawn its annual mowing. Our neighbors might eventually have forgiven him his vaguely fruitcake job of teaching their children music at the Burnside Public School. They could have forgiven him his ignoble loss of spouse and the subsequently sporadic brand of parenthood that turned me, his only child, into a pest, one of those fast-talking kids who show up around dinnertime or when their favorite shows are on TV—Earl wouldn’t have a set in the house. I think they could have arranged amnesty for his reading the New York Times on our tiny, three-step cement porch. But that beard and that beret—never! It was an affront, like a lewd remark. Of course they were silly and hysterical about Earl’s democratic right to decorate himself as he pleased, but why in the world did he press it?
I waited for people to turn on me as well. I envisioned the day when sides for softball would be chosen and I would shuffle off, red-faced and unchosen. But no one blamed me, or the blame was not thrust in my face. It amazed me. In some soft, childish way, it frightened me that those who had contempt for Earl would welcome me. And knowing they felt as they did, there was no one on that block I could ever open my heart to. I had to live there and, by and large, I didn’t press my luck.
The neighbors didn’t know the half of it, of course. No one knew Earl stayed up past midnight writing long, unpunctuated letters to friends he hadn’t seen in ten years, or that he spent a minimum of two hours every night slaving over a piano concerto he’d been pulling through the birth canal since the dawn of time. Not one of our stolid, intolerant neighbors knew that Mr. Morgan favored a little can of caviar for breakfast, which he would eat on soda crackers along with a demi-tasse of muddy coffee. And no one was privy to my most guarded secret about him: from the day my mother left, when I was seven years old, to the day we quit that house and moved to New York, when I was twelve, my father slept in his bed no more than twenty times. Every night he would lie on the couch with that garish flowered slipcover and pretend he was just going to read for a few minutes. Fifteen feet away, in the salmon-colored cubicle that held his double bed, the sheets were turned down, the alarm clock set, but he almost never slept there. Every school day I’d hear the alarm go off in his room, hear him groan, and then he’d pad through the living room, across the small kitchen, past my bedroom and into his own. There he would turn off the alarm, sigh as if it were execution day, and then come into my room and touch my shoulder gently to make certain I was awake.
But there was worse: for this was the period when we both left for the same destination. He knew better than to ever ask me to walk with him, assuming, of course, that he wanted to. The school was only five blocks away. I rode my bike. I didn’t trust myself to refuse Earl should he suggest we walk together, so I pedaled my tomato-red Schwinn every day, through the rain, through those supernatural winds, even through the snow—the school’s bike rack would be coated with a soft layer of snow interrupted only by my thick black lock and chain. Yet it was within that low-slung, modern schoolhouse that my immunity to Earl suffered its final devastation, for there I would be faced with him, and all the eyes that gazed upon him could turn and gaze upon me as well. Nothing could break my pink boy’s heart quite so convulsively as watching Earl teach music to my friends. It was like madness to be sitting with him in that hot, honey-colored classroom while he swayed back and forth like a human metronome, his huge claws beating the keys, singing:
Some say that life was made for fun and frolic
And so do I
And so do I
Funiculi, funicula
Funiculi
FUNICULA!
Earl’s aim was to take two-lane highways all the way from Chicago to New York. “This way,” he explained, as we moved out into the hot July dawn, “we’ll actually see where we’re going. I hate those turnpikes, Virgil. They’re inhuman and, just you wait, one day they’ll take over the whole country. Everything will be concrete.” There were other, less sentimental reasons for taking the back roads: no tolls to pay, cheaper gasoline stations, and a chance to price shop when we were hungry.
He had me laughing from the moment we left town. I’d never seen him in better spirits. He did redneck imitations in Indiana and told stories about hick stupidity and Ku Klux Klan mayors. In Ohio, our road sometimes moved right alongside the turnpike and we could see the new cars, with their outlandish fins, passing us as regularly as cards being dealt off the top of an endless deck. Earl urged the Pontiac on with whoops and slaps at the steering wheel, like a cowboy racing his horse to the death against a train. He made remarks to the waitresses in the little restaurants we’d stop in every three hours, coolly demanding boiling water for his imported tea bags and then lavishly complimenting their culinary skills. He even let me listen to the car radio and seemed to develop a taste for Elvis Presley singing “Won’t You Wear My Ring Around Your Neck.” We were like convicts escaping; every mile crossed testified to our incredible good fortune, our giddy peril.
Earl wanted to make it across the country in one sprint, without wasting money on a motel. He asked me to keep an eye out for hitchhikers, so he might have someone to share the driving. My father had, however, exacting tastes in freeloaders and though we passed perhaps a half dozen I had no luck in finding someone who met Earl’s standards.
“No, I won’t ride with servicemen,” said my casually seditious father, as he slowed down and peered at a young soldier and then resumed his full cruising speed, while I, patriotically offended, watched the stunned defender of my freedoms kicking at his dufflebag and getting smaller and smaller as planet Pontiac continued its fuming orbit. We passed teenagers, we passed old men, we passed a man in a suit who held a gas can, and each time Earl had a different excuse for not stopping.
Finally, I felt the sullen rage of one whose suggestions have been systematically rejected and I exploded, “Why don’t you ever stop? It’s not fair to look at people and then not stop, goddammit.”
Earl looked at my face. “I don’t know, Virgil,” he said. “I think the reason is that I don’t want anyone in the car. We never have any time alone and I like it with just the two of us.”
“But you’re getting so tired.” It was no use, though. My reply was a weak reflex and it could not control the surprise I felt at his unexpected tenderness nor could it conceal the tears in my eyes. He wanted us to be alone! How wonderful, yet how disturbing, and how unprepared I was to hear it.
We pulled in for the night some twelve hours after leaving Chicago and checked into a nameless motel. We stayed in a cabin that smelled like a brand new shoe. It had two double beds, soft as éclairs, pink walls, sanitized glasses, a tub the size of a child’s casket, and a TV that received but one channel and even that rather ectoplasmically. It was in this motel that my father and I spent one of the best nights of our lives. He watched television with me for a while and then he cadged a deck of cards from the motel manager and did card tricks for me—a talent I had no idea he possessed. Then my father and I played casino and were so entertained and comforted by the game that we took the deck with us when we drove for a late night snack of ham and eggs. The sky was riddled with stars and before we went to bed we turned out all the lights in our room and looked out the window. I thought about my mother because I always imagined her beneath a sky bright and thick with stars, planets, comets, and moons. Earl had a soft, distant expression on his face and I was certain his thoughts moved in the same direction as mine, and for that moment our loss combined with our blood, and he was my friend. We whispered to each other in bed, like boys who fear they might be overheard. He told me what he remembered of New York, a city which, in his mind, held hope itself in its huge electronic fist. I don’t remember what I said, but I was sure he was listening, and certain that, perhaps for the very first time, I truly interested him.
Since that night, I have stayed in at least a hundred hotels and maybe, without my even knowing it, I was all the while listening for Earl’s whisper—but really this is just mockery because the fact is that years went by when the memory of that night was lost to me, as if it had been something that had happened when I was drunk. Even now, I remember only enough to describe it and I’m sure I wouldn’t even have that much had it not been my lot to fall in love with a woman who believed in family life and who forced me to think and talk about mine.
Her name, when I met her, was Tracy Keating, but she took my name when we married. I wonder why: if she believed so in family connections, why would she abandon her last name? I suggested a number of times that I take her name but each time my suggestion got a laugh and I didn’t quite dare force her to understand how dearly I would have loved to complete my separation from Earl by changing my name. I loathed my name.
Less than a month after Tracy and I met, we took an impetuous weekend trip to the Bahamas and it was somewhere during the sunny, alcoholic romp that I stumbled on the memory of that night in a motel with Earl. Tracy had asked me a few vague questions about my recent past and I mentioned seeing Earl six months before. I hadn’t known it, but until then she’d thought I was an orphan. Then she ascertained that not only was Earl alive and well but that he lived in New York, about fifteen minutes by subway from where she and I had been making love and laughing like lunatics for the past three weeks.
And so, between trips to the beach and trips to the casino, where I swam with the blind vehemence of an urbanite and gambled with the forced flamboyance of an up-from-under boy, I talked to Tracy about Earl. I didn’t know what she was making of my traitorous tales but she kept probing, kept egging me on and it was so wonderful to feel someone cared about my life that I didn’t mind revealing the depths of my resentment. But then she said something that should have warned even a fool in love.
“We’ll go see him when we get back,” she said.
But I was not warned at all. What it meant to me was that she planned to keep on seeing me—I loved anything that smelled of a future between us. And the fact that she wanted to meet Earl only meant that she was serious about wanting to mix her life with mine. So instead of telling her to keep her finely tuned sensibilities out of my discordant life, I put my arms carefully around her—she was so thin, so beautiful, and I loved her so much.
During our last day in the hotel, I lost a couple hundred dollars playing blackjack and Tracy took me out for a few drinks, to cheer me up. We had those fruit-chopped-ice-and-rum drinks we wouldn’t have touched in New York but which seem somehow ideal in the islands. When I had my second, she casually asked me what I remembered as the best time between Earl and me and it was then that I remembered that one quiet night in a motel as we traveled toward New York. I described it to her and she nodded with slightly irritating, though altogether well-meaning encouragement, as if to say that if I looked I would discover this was only one sweet memory in a galaxy of them.
It struck me as curious that the memory of that night should have eluded me for so many years, for though I rarely spoke of Earl I thought of him all the time and had practically memorized my life with him, as if our past was an extinct language that only I could keep alive. But as I thought about it and sipped noisily on my third rum glacier, I realized that that night was for me one of the true and dizzy peaks of filial treachery. I had looked forward to moving to New York because I thought I could disassociate myself from my father and that was exactly what I did. All of the touching moments along the way, all the games of twenty questions, all of the Cokes with two straws, engaged only an infinitesimal part of me because I’d long ago made up my mind about him and waited only for the chance to separate our lives.
I had five more years of living with him and we kept out of each other’s way. Whatever dim impulses he might have felt to fuse our lives were either forgotten in the confusion of his own life or tabled in the face of my apparent indifference. I got a scholarship to Cornell and left shortly before my eighteenth birthday and never slept in the same house with him after that. I was not comfortable in his presence. Even that night in the motel, when Earl’s whispering stopped and I knew he’d dropped off to sleep, went sour for me because I simply did not feel safe around him. It was not only that I didn’t think he could protect me but I suspected that he drew calamity into his orbit. If anything as lofty as philosophy can be ascribed to a twelve-year-old, mine was that the man who stands next to the man who is struck by lightning also gets burned. I wanted a life of my own.
I was never eager for what we generally call success, though I wanted to live comfortably. But with Earl as a negative example, I rejected most of ambition’s temptations. I coasted as quietly as a shadow through the semi-fancy private school for which my father had sacrificed so much and then I crept off to Cornell, where I first studied physics, then history, and finally scraped together enough credits to graduate with a major in English. I had the usual quota of friends and lovers, maybe a bit less. But as long as there was someone to invite me to their parents’ summer home and keep me out of New York and away from Earl, my need for friendship was satisfied. As for my plans, these were persistently vague: I would graduate, get some sort of job, and go to Europe.
I did just that. I looked at some of the great paintings, learned how to play billiards, took drugs, almost married a Dutch girl who turned out to be fourteen years old, lived for ten days in a cave in Greece. I was out of the draft on an adamant lie and all I wanted was to stay alive and enjoy myself.
When I ran out of money I came back to New York, thinking I would work for a few more months and then return to Europe. I stayed with an old classmate and didn’t tell Earl I was back until I was working, afraid, I think, to meet him with anything resembling a vacuum in my life. Through a friend of a friend, I was introduced to a man named Bob Halpin, a cheerful, fortyish businessman who liked something in me and hired me to work for his management consulting company. I never dreamed the job would last more than six months, but I had that knack some people have for fitting in. Halpin had a belief in me, not so much in my talent as in my luck. He said that things had a way of working out well when I was around.
From the very start, I didn’t care about that job, but it gave me money and determined to a large (and telling) extent the circles I moved in. I suddenly knew far too many people who were twenty years my senior, who’d been born into wealthy families or who had pursued wealth all of their lives, who were on their second marriage, and who were content to touch the most distant, public edge of my life and leave it at that. I moved into a beautiful apartment on Central Park West and while I knew enough to realize that it’s unsympathetic for someone who’s suddenly hit the bucks to complain about what it’s done to his so-called soul, there were, nevertheless, times when my life seemed so strange that it was nightmarish. I feared I had cut myself off from ever feeling young again and worried that I was living utterly out of my depth. I had no distinct ideas about what to spend my money on after I paid the rent and so I saved it for some future trip. I thought I might buy a piece of land in the country but I felt so alone in the world that I didn’t dare isolate myself further. I had what people in their middle age call empty affairs. I bought a wooden valet for my custom-made suits. I made fun of vegetarians. I was twenty-five years old.
