The People in the Trees: A Novel Read online

  But then too, she was young in all things. In my memories she is persistently childlike, not only in behavior but in appearance as well. Her hair, for example: no matter the occasion, she wore it loose, rippling down her back in a loose, snaking helix. Even when I was a child, this hairstyle of hers was troublesome to me; I saw it as further evidence of a rigorously, inappropriately maintained girlhood—the long hair, the distant, vacuous smile, the way her eyes would wander from yours the moment you began to speak to her, all things not admirable in a woman with her supposed responsibilities.

  It is discomfiting to me now, as I list these few details of my mother’s life, how little I know and how incurious I have remained about her. I suppose every child yearns to understand his parental origins, but I never found her an interesting enough person to consider. (Or should that reasoning be inverted?) But then, I have never believed in romancing the past—what good would it do me? Owen, however, later became much more interested in our mother, and even passed through a period as an undergraduate in which he attempted to trace her family and complete an informal biography of her. He abandoned the project months after its inception, however, and became very defensive about it when asked, so I can only assume he found our maternal relatives without much trouble, realized they were yokels, and gave the whole thing up in disgust (he was still enough of an avowed elitist back then to do exactly that).6 She has always mattered to him in a way that I have never been able to understand. But then, Owen is a poet, and I believe he thought it important that he have these details available for future employment, however mediocre or ultimately disappointing they may have been.

  At any rate. It was July of 1933. I hesitate to say “It was a day like any other,” for it sounds so melodramatic and portentous, as well as wholly unbelievable. Yet it is also true. So: it was a day like any other. My father was off with his friend Lester Drew, a small-time farmer, doing whatever it was two small-time farmers did together. Owen and I were gathering a bucket of leeches that we planned to bake into a pie and then give to Ida, the part-time cook, a sour woman we both hated. My mother was dangling her feet in the stream.

  For weeks afterward, Owen and I would be asked to try to remember—had anything seemed different about her that afternoon? Had she seemed listless, or ill, or particularly fatigued? Had she spoken to us of feeling dizzy or weak? But the answer was always no. Indeed, if I can tell you very little about my mother’s actions or mood that day, it is probably because they so closely resembled what we had come to accept as her normal behavior. As exasperating as our mother was, we could never accuse her of inconsistency. Even her last day of life followed that same inscrutable rhythm that only she could decipher.

  The next morning Owen and I slept late, as we usually did during the summer. When I woke—Owen was still asleep in the bed next to mine—the day was hot. Little was required of us. Unlike other children, we were not expected to complete any chores at all; the days were ours to fill however we chose. Consequently, our summer months were spent on frivolous pastimes—torturing the bullfrogs down by the stream, stealing apricots from Lester Drew’s trees, creeping through the tall, scraping grasses after a family of groundhogs. In the mornings we’d wake whenever we wanted, eat whatever had been left for us in the kitchen, and leave to execute the day’s plans. Sometimes my father would be there with Lester Drew, rolling a cigarette between his fingers, a plate of red sliced peaches between them glistening sickly like raw flesh. They would grunt at us, and we at them, and we’d sit at the table in silence.

  They were there when I arrived that morning, but so were two other people: John Naples, the town doctor, and Reverend Cunningham, the town minister, all of them talking quietly. As I entered, their conversation ceased. My father was an impassive man, stoic and not given to emotionalism. (He had a large, square face and eyes the dull olive of caper berries.) Therefore, whenever he did evince some sort of emotion, it was cause for alarm, or at least curiosity. In fact, I remember his expression from that morning—a mix of surprise, consternation, and bewilderment—rather better than I do his actual face.

  “Your mother’s dead,” said my father. He sounded calm and grave, and he spoke in normal tones, which belied his expression—indeed, his voice reassured me.

  “Really, Joseph,” said Reverend Cunningham.

  “It’s best he hear it this way, straightforward,” said my father. He had looked directly at me to tell me the news. Now he looked away and spoke to somewhere over Reverend Cunningham’s head. “I assume you’ll take care of the body, Reverend. Do whatever … she wanted done.” Then he slapped his hands together once, in a neat, conclusive gesture, and wandered out the back door into the yard. Lester, after giving me a long, dolorous look, trotted out after him, leaving me with Reverend Cunningham, who sighed, and John Naples, who scowled.

  “You!” Naples said to me. “Don’t you have a brother someplace?”

  He knew I did. The previous summer, Owen and I had trapped a mess of green grass snakes and fed them, one slithery strand at a time, through Naples’s clinic’s letter box. It was a bit of childish fun, but he had been enraged and had never forgiven us. He was a bitter, angry man, made corrosive by his disappointment with the world, the sort of man who on the street kicked up puffs of dust in the direction of children simply because he knew they’d have few means of retaliation. “Aren’t you interested to know how your mother expired?” he asked me.

  “Naples!” said Reverend Cunningham.

  Naples ignored Father Cunningham. “Those mosquitoes that crowd around your creek,” he continued. “It’s my medical opinion that they carry a strain of Chinese flu. Mosquitoes carry disease, and your mother wandered into a cesspool of teeming bacteria and caused her own demise.” He leaned back against his chair, satisfied, and puffed on his pipe. “And if you and your brother don’t avoid that creek, you’ll meet with the same death.”

  Reverend Cunningham looked aghast. “Really, Naples,” he said, and then, having exhausted his resources on that one rebuke, he left through the back door as well. I was not surprised, and had expected little from him—not simply because he was a minister, but because he looked so diminished. He had the sort of face that was memorable for its absences rather than its presences: cheeks so gaunt and cadaverous that it looked as if someone had reached in, scooped out the meat in two quick movements, and sent him on his way.

  Naples shrugged. He, unlike the others, seemed to have no intention of leaving. Owen and I had noticed that when we talked to adults as if they were a bit slow, even inferior—as if they were nuisances we’d learned to tolerate—they were often shocked into giving us information and speaking to us in tones they would never normally use with a child. Such a technique, however, did not have the same effect on Naples; his arrogance had lent him a sort of immovability that proved very inconvenient.

  “What the devil is the Chinese flu?” I began.

  Naples puffed away. “You wouldn’t understand,” he said rudely.

  “I think you made it up.”

  “And I think you’re an insolent brat. You and your brother both.”

  “You did make it up, didn’t you?”

  “Watch yourself, boy.”

  “But what is it?”

  There were a few more rounds of this—me asking, Naples threatening—until he finally sighed and yielded. “A kind of airborne disease spread by mosquitoes. One bit your mother and she got sick and died.” It seemed a logical explanation, and I was quiet. For a minute we sat in silence, each of us, I imagine, contemplating her somehow disappointing demise. But then Naples remembered how he had been manipulated into answering my question and recovered himself. “I’m surprised your mother hadn’t killed herself,” he said. “God knows I would have were I your parent.” His eyes shone with triumph and anticipation.

  It didn’t bother me, what he said, but he must have mistaken my silence for hurt, and, satisfied, he knocked the ash out of his pipe into a tidy anthill on the table and left throu
gh our front door, banging it shut behind him. As he walked down the path, I could hear him whistling, until the sound grew faint and then disappeared altogether, leaving only the purr of a flock of summer insects. It was the first time I had been spoken to as an adult.

  But it was also John Naples, this small-town, smug, fifth-rate doctor, who truly sparked my interest in disease. He did this inadvertently—I don’t believe he told me about my mother’s death in such blunt terms because he intended to speak to me as an adult; indeed, he was a petty, cruel man, and I am certain he was attempting to do nothing more than stun me into tears—but in his harsh and erroneous explanation, he offered me my first glimpse into the world of disease and its exacting, brilliant puzzle.

  Even at that age, Owen was interested in words: he read dictionaries and all manner of books and loved any sort of wordplay—anagrams, puns, palindromes. He could amuse himself all day with strings of rhymes he had discovered or created. And although I too enjoyed reading, I never loved the sport of language the way Owen did. This was because to me, language had no native intelligence of its own—it was created by man and was given meaning by man, and therefore clever writing often seemed to me little more than a Chinese puzzle box of contrivances. Writers are praised for having a facility with something man-made, something that can be changed or manipulated at will; but why is augmenting a man-made construction considered an act of brilliance? But perhaps I am not making sense here, so let me put it another way: language has no inherent secrets.

  But science, specifically the science of disease, was all delicious secrets, dark oily pockets of mystery. Language could be misinterpreted, misconstrued, its rules imposed or ignored at whim. There was no discipline to it. It seemed sometimes a sort of game made up by man to amuse himself with, much as Owen did. But a disease, a virus, a wiggling string of bacteria, existed with or without man, and it was up to us to fathom its secrets.

  John Naples, of course, did not think about disease this way (a good sign of a weak mind is the doctor who insists that it’s the patient, not the disease, on whom one’s efforts should be concentrated), but I credit him for appearing in my life as a cautionary figure, the sort of person with whom I would now be interacting had I not chosen to pursue research medicine. Even then, I knew I would not be satisfied with imperfect explanations. I was simply too impatient.

  Naples, thankfully, was not to have the last word. My father may have been a lazy man, but he wasn’t foolish, and in this matter he proved surprisingly competent. Later that afternoon, after telephoning his sister in Rochester (he had overlooked the matter of informing Owen, which I had to do myself when he at last padded down to the kitchen, rubbing his eyes and grousing), he called a medical school classmate of Sybil’s who lived in Indianapolis, who called a friend of his who lived in Crawfordsville, a town fifty miles to the east of us. This doctor—a Dr. Burns—arranged for my mother to be transported to his clinic for an autopsy.

  The next week he sent us his report, which stated that my mother had died not of Chinese flu (“I myself am not familiar with the illness, though I must also admit that as a pathologist, I am perhaps not as well versed in local afflictions as my esteemed colleague Dr. John M. Naples,” Burns wrote diplomatically in his letter) but of an aneurysm. An aneurysm! After Sybil explained it to me, I pictured it often, all but heard the soft explosion as the artery burst, saw the coil of soggy, flaccid tissue, the black blood staining the brain the shining, sticky red of pomegranates. (Later, as a teenager, seized in an odd moment of guilt, I would think, How young! How unfair! And later still, when I was an adult and old enough to give serious consideration to my own death and the circumstances I’d prefer, How dramatic! I’d picture shooting stars, fireworks, glorious drops of light falling from the sky like thousands of glittering gems, each shard no larger than a seedling, and almost envy my mother her last great experience.)

  “She didn’t feel any pain,” Sybil wrote to me. “She had a good death. She was lucky.”

  A good death. I thought about that phrase often, until I became a doctor and saw for myself what Sybil meant. But as a child, the words were as mysterious as the concept of death itself. A good death. My mother was someone who was given a good death. A dreamer, a ghost, she was given the greatest gift nature can grant. That night, she slipped under her quilt as quietly as she slid her feet into the pale, murmuring stream and closed her eyes, unaware and unafraid of where she might go next.

  For years afterward, I had dreams in which my mother appeared in strange forms, her features sewn onto other beings in combinations that seemed both grotesque and profound: as a slippery white fish at the end of my hook, with a trout’s gaping, sorrowful mouth and her dark, shuttered eyes; as the elm tree at the edge of our property, its ragged clumps of tarnished gold leaves replaced by knotted skeins of her black hair; as the lame gray dog that lived on the Muellers’ property, whose mouth, her mouth, opened and closed in yearning and who never made a sound. As I grew older, I came to realize that death had been easy for my mother; to fear death, you must first have something to tether you to life. But she had not. It was as if she had been preparing for her death the entire time I knew her. One day she was alive; the next, not.

  And as Sybil said, she was lucky. For what more could we presume to ask from death—but kindness?

  After that, it was Owen and me and our father. I have spoken briefly of my father, and while it would be inaccurate to say we liked him, he was certainly more tolerable than our mother, although they shared a similar maddening refusal to remain anchored in the world of practicalities. If my mother had found her share of luck in death, my father had long ago accepted luck as his birthright.

  My father had been born and raised in a nearby town called Peet, another place of which you will have heard nothing. Today Peet is all but deserted, the sort of place that grows sadder and sparser with each passing year, as its children grow up and leave, never to return. When my father was young, though, Peet was something of an important town. It had its own railroad station, which had in turn spawned a small but healthy local economy. There was a hotel, for example, and a music hall, and a Main Street lined with two-story wood shops painted the colors of the sea and rock. Travelers heading west to California would stop in Peet for an egg salad sandwich and a celery soda from the general store near the station before reembarking. The townspeople thrived from these impermanent relationships, which were in their own way pure: the exchange of money for goods, a pleasant farewell, the assurance that neither party would see the other again. After all, what are most relationships in life but exactly this, though stretched flabbily over years and generations?

  My father’s parents, both of whose parents had immigrated from Hungary, were the owners of the general store. Unlike their son, they were hard workers, frugal, and made wise investments. In 1911, when my father was a senior in college, they died, one after the other, of the flu. My father and his sister inherited their parents’ store, their house, and seventy acres of farmland they had bought in a town called Lindon, as well as their savings. As in the case of my mother’s death, my father proved himself a capable and efficient administrator. He sold off the store and the house in Peet, paid the taxes, arranged for the burial, and established a savings account for his sister. Sybil, who was graduating from high school, used some of her money to pay for Wellesley. My father, lazier, made it through the rest of his term at Purdue, graduated, and moved to Lindon, where he built a house and every year added a few more acres to his land. While Sybil began medical school at Northwestern, my father grew soybeans, flat beans, and yellow beans. He fathered his sons. Eventually he began working for the local railroad as a timetable administrator. He had accomplished all he would in life.

  My father proved as frustrating to me as my mother was elusive. He was, so far as I could determine, interested only in achieving a state of complete and total inertia. This was almost indescribably irritating to me. For one, we lived in a country in which a person’s worth wa
s measured by his industriousness. Not that either Owen or I particularly cared what the townspeople thought admirable; it was simply that we happened to feel the same way—that there was something shameful, and perhaps even obscene, in my father’s behavior. It was, after all, the Depression. We heard stories of children abandoned by their parents, saw photos of defeated and exhausted-looking men waiting for a bowl of soup, a job, a loan. And yet my father, unambitious, placid, spectacularly unmotivated, somehow emerged utterly unharmed. I remember many nights sitting at our kitchen table, prickling with impatience for a father who would shout, berate me, beat me to do better, to work harder, whose ambitions for me would be greater than my own. Instead my father merely sat there, dreamily humming the latest popular song and rolling his cigarettes. Corn, the remnants of a hastily constructed meal, nested in his brushy mustache, and when I pointed it out to him, he would languorously poke his tongue out and sweep it around his mouth and nose in a serpentine and graceful movement, humming all the while. This careless, carefree gesture irritated me more than anything. It makes me laugh a little now, my self-righteous disapproval: I, of course, greatly benefited from my father’s continual dumb luck, but back then it seemed to me that he was doing Owen and me something of a disservice. Growing up in our home, you would have assumed that fortune fell from the sky with a reassuring thump and that nothing, not even the prospect of amassing a great fortune, was worth aspiring to. My father did not in fact accumulate his money out of any sense of capitalist zeal—no, if it happened, it did, and the few times he made poor business decisions, he didn’t seem to mind that either.