The People in the Trees: A Novel Read online

  The entire situation enraged me, as indulged children yearn for nothing more than the romance of poverty. Often I found myself dreaming of parents who were hardworking immigrants, for whom I was the sole hope. I was very moved by sentimental children’s stories such as The Silver Skates and rendered my own family as characters in a similar narrative. My father would be the lumpish stroke victim, helpless and slobbering, and Owen my crippled, idiot younger brother. I was the pioneer and the hero, ruthless and resourceful as well. Education would be my family’s sole hope. My academic success would be a necessity; I would become a doctor and yank us all out of despair and filth and into tight, square houses. In my fantasy, my hands, made magical by years of American education, would cure my poor father, who would immediately set to work despite my protestations. My mother, strong and determined, her beauty restored, would smile for the first time in years, and my brother, once proper schooling was paid for, would gain language, learn to move like an athlete. How I yearned for such motivation! But as it was, I had to defy the burdens not of poverty but of a contentedly and determinedly unkinetic father and a comfortable childhood—one I might have enjoyed were I not so set upon denying it.

  But then, I also had Sybil. As I have mentioned, my father greatly respected Sybil; I do not think it an exaggeration to say that he was even in awe of her. Certainly she was as much a puzzle to him as he was to me; how could someone so industrious, so intelligent, so active, have come from the same family as he?

  Not everyone was so impressed by Sybil, though. In those days, people who were jealous or small used to say that it was a good thing that Sybil could support herself, because no man ever would. If confronted, they would explain that they meant only that she was too independent, too outspoken, but really, everyone knew what they meant: Sybil, with her bready roll of hair, was considered too ugly ever to marry, and indeed, she never did. She was four years younger than my father, but when she died of breast cancer in December of 1945, she looked older than I imagined a fifty-two-year-old could. People had considered Sybil strange all her life, and by the time she began her pediatric practice in Rochester, she had, I believe, resigned herself to occupying the position of a provincial town’s sexless spinster.

  This is a pity for a great many reasons, but largely because I have always believed my aunt would have made an excellent immunologist. She was endlessly, unflaggingly inquisitive and creative, confident but not arrogant. She had a wide-reaching mind, one that made the sorts of balletic leaps in reasoning and analysis of which only the true genius is capable. She seemed to know everything, and once I myself reached medical school, she admitted that she herself had wanted to be a “medical adventurer” (I wasn’t sure, and neither was she, what exactly such a job might entail; we knew only that we both wanted to do it) but could never have done so.7 Later she would admit to me in that same shy way that she had always wanted children and urged me, no matter what else I might choose to do in life, to have children of my own. She promised me that nothing would bring me greater joy. Naturally, this has been much on my mind lately, for obvious reasons. Sybil was correct and wise in so many ways; how could she have been so wrong about this?

  As a child, I saw a great deal of Sybil. Until my mother’s death—after which she came more frequently—she used to visit us for a few weeks every summer. She would refer her patients to the other local pediatrician and arrive with gifts for all of us. For my mother, whom she never quite understood, she would bring something frivolous and pretty, partly from a clumsy condescension and partly because she knew that beauty and frivolity would not be wasted on my mother—whatever it was, my mother would appreciate it, and her own beauty would only augment the gift’s. One time, I recall, she brought her a silk dress printed with splashes of wildflowers. My mother immediately put it on and twirled around in it—I can still see her spinning in our living room, and the creamy, buttery blur the silk made. Sybil had never known quite what to say to our mother, whom I believe she both pitied and envied—pitied because my mother seemed so content with the simple, unambitious life she led, and envied because she was content, because she did have the life she did.

  For my father she would bring something whimsical—a bird whistle one of her patients had carved, a container of maple syrup in its pebbly jug, a book on rock collecting. For Owen she brought books, puzzles, sheets of drawing paper so thick with cotton they were fibrous.

  But as much as Sybil liked us all, I was clearly her favorite. Although Sybil loved Owen and he her, they never had the sort of relationship that my aunt and I enjoyed with each other. In fact, I have always suspected that Sybil regarded Owen as a bit facile, and although she highly praised all his artistic efforts (the epic poems, the abstract sketches of farm life), she did so with only a sort of diffused general enthusiasm; she could never offer him any specific criticism or praise. She did not have a disdain, exactly, for art, or artists, but neither did she make much of an attempt to understand either.

  To be fair, I should here add that Owen never felt about Sybil as I did, chiefly for two reasons. The first had nothing to do with Sybil herself, even. It was simply that Owen had always attributed a sort of mystique to my absent mother and torpid father—against the backdrop of an American culture he would eventually declare vulgar and excessively ambitious, he considered their lassitude radical and even rebellious. (To me, however, inertia does not constitute rebellion.) Of course, Owen too had phantom parents, but where mine were impaired, his were, for lack of a better word, countercultural. I have always thought that Owen’s greatest regret was that he wasn’t born thirty years later to a pair of Beatniks.

  The other reason Owen never cared for Sybil as passionately as I did did have to do with Sybil. Although he respected her mind and was fond of her, he also considered her inelegant and untaught in all things cultural. But while that may have been essentially true, it doesn’t negate the fact—as I have argued with Owen many times in the past—that she was still the most vital adult in our lives. Were it not for her, we would not have been given an alternative model of adult behavior and might have applied ourselves toward less challenging vocations.

  At any rate, Sybil always saved the best presents for me: a small microscope; an old stethoscope; a hand-lettered resin model of the heart. She brought me cases of African dung beetles mounted on pieces of stiff white cardboard and encased in black leather frames. There was a ball and bat, which came with an early physics lesson; an old radio she lugged down from Rochester, only to show me how to disassemble it; a thick slab of magnifying glass and a lecture to go with it, after she discovered me crouched on the hard dust road, roasting ants to death.

  Sybil’s gift the year I turned eleven was a book that seemed initially something of a misstep. The Lives of the Great Scientists was unimaginatively written and childishly illustrated and the text insultingly cheery and simple, as if for a dull six-year-old. Really it was no more than a sort of “Who’s Who” of the scientific canon, in which all the “top” scientists (their names, their important contributions, etc.; I half expected to see their height, weight, and extracurricular interests listed as well) were given a short entry, as if scientists, like baseball players, could be ranked in some sort of definitive fashion. I must say, though, that as absurd as this concept seemed at the time, it becomes more appealing by the year. (In fact, I was given my own entry in the most recent, 1994, edition. The text was of course extremely reductive, but no less inaccurate than many biographical sketches many times its length.8 The entry also includes a picture of me with Philip,9 who was around ten at the time. The photo’s quality is so poor that Philip’s face appears merely as a round dark circle with a gash of white for his smile. I myself appear hulking, awkward, a gently bumbling circus act.)

  But to continue—the book, of course, was hardly my introduction to the possibilities and workings of the natural world, but it was, I suppose, my introduction to the personalities of science, with whom I found myself deeply fascinated. For it wa
s then that I realized there is a certain sort of mind that turns to science, and this, I decided, was the sort of mind I admired.

  II.

  I have already mentioned the curving staircase that ran up the center of our house. It was incongruously fancy for such an architecturally modest place and always seemed to me something like a visitor, destined to return one day to its proper and glorious permanent state, joining two floors in a Fifth Avenue town house. This affectation had been installed by the previous owner (a fledgling architect who had attended Columbia and had never quite overcome the humiliation of having to leave the city to return to his family’s property in Lindon), and although the construction was sound and the wood solid, the staircase had fallen into disrepair in the fifty years it had endured our family. My father spoke often and halfheartedly of tearing it down and replacing it with something simpler, but he never did, and so it was that by the time he died and I returned to the farm, the staircase had all but collapsed, and Owen and I were forced to use a ladder to access our old bedrooms on the second floor.

  But in 1935 the staircase, while not especially aesthetically pleasing, was at least still functional, and at any rate quite suitable for my needs. I decided to begin my project from the top stair and paint my way down. The staircase’s carpet had been removed some years before, and because the steps were so shaggy with dust and splinters, each one needed a few layers of paint before the grain of the wood was obscured. I made my way down the twenty steps, painting the front, bottom, and sides of each with varying colors in turn. After a few hours the paint dried and I once again began at the top of the stairs. Working my way down, I painted on the front and top of each step the name of a different scientist. By the time I had finished, the staircase was a blaze of color and words: Curie at the top, Galileo beneath her, Einstein beneath him, Gregor Mendel, James Clerk Maxwell, Marcello Malpighi, Carolus Linnaeus, Nicolaus Copernicus, and so forth. I had listed the names in no particular sequence, only as they occurred to me. But before I could complete my project, I was interrupted by Owen, who began yelling at me for not including him in it. Our ensuing fight brought my father and Lester ambling in from outside, and after gaping at the staircase for a long, silent moment (during which even Owen and I held our breath), Lester began screaming that we needed to be beaten, the harder the better. And then, unexpectedly, my father began to laugh.

  The three of us—Owen, Lester, and I—froze, all of us in mid-speech. Until that day, neither Owen nor I had ever heard our father laugh before. It was an unremarkable laugh, wheezy and rusty, and, I thought, irritatingly lacking in much enthusiasm or mirth or energy. The laugh lasted for only a few seconds, after which my father concluded this uncharacteristic expression of emotion by saying, “See, Lester, I can’t destroy the staircase now—the boys have taken it over.”

  Lester scowled, disappointed that Owen and I hadn’t received a proper punishment (he didn’t think much of my father’s parenting skills), and I too was angry, although for different reasons. Somehow my wonderful tribute to the mind of the scientist had been co-opted by my father to be employed as another justification for his idleness! But interestingly, the staircase—which my father left undisturbed not from any respect for my work but, as I have said, from his own laziness—would become much more significant than any of us then realized.

  I have already noted that Owen and I returned to the house upon my father’s death. In his last year, my father had, not surprisingly, taken to living in absolute squalor, and the house had transformed itself into a barn of sorts, with small rodents and untamed, unclaimed cats rummaging through the sticky kitchen cupboards. By the time we returned in 1946 (since leaving for college four years earlier, we had proved almost wholly successful in our resolve never to return to Indiana), the house had gone without cleaning for at least four years, and I do not embellish when I say that it was a disaster—peeling floorboards, rusted door hinges that screeched so gratingly we tried never to open them, furniture that choked out great vogs of dust when we sat upon them. And then there was the debris, which had been vomited throughout every room—papers, crumpled boxes and cracked bottles, various neglected gadgets. My father hadn’t, presumably, been upstairs in some time, because the ladder, when Owen and I finally discovered it under the house, was rusty and unyielding after what must have been years of neglect. (Upstairs there was a mess of such proportions that contemplating it still exhausts me. We found a family of bats nesting in the beams above Owen’s bed, whole dynasties of mice, balls of dust as big as human heads, replete with snarls of unidentifiable hair.) But it was the staircase, its crude, old-fashioned primary colors deadened from age and dirt and the canopies of glittering spiderwebs that covered it, that gave us both pause.

  This was a massive staircase, and its collapse meant that my father was allowed only a small space—perhaps less than two hundred square feet—in which to live. It had bisected the living room, so that in order to enter the kitchen, one would first have to go outside and around the house to the kitchen door. In the summertime this was merely inconvenient, but in the winter, with its harsh winds and buffets of snow, such a trek would be arduous for even a young person. Because there was no makeshift bed in his small living quarters, and because my father had been discovered lying facedown in the grass some yards from the house early that March, we concluded that he must have been attempting to stagger to the kitchen—which was dismayingly ill-stocked: just a few tins of tomatoes and a can of mushroom soup—when he had his heart attack. (We later discovered a sad little bed constructed from some deteriorating quilts and an old sofa cushion in the little lean- to formed by the outside wall and the screened-in sunporch attached to the back of the living room.) It would therefore not be too great an exaggeration to say that the staircase was responsible for killing my father, although ultimately he killed himself with his own laziness. Even his suicide was an act of characteristic passivity.

  I was torn between sympathy for and annoyance with my father’s pathetic end. What can you say of a man who neglects his house until his house destroys him? Really, though, I was sorrier about my staircase, although it was purely a nostalgic reaction. As I had grown older, it had only irritated with its childishness in both conception and execution, and although I always said I would, I never did find the time to paint it over. Shades, I suppose, of my father yet.

  Neither Owen nor I placed much value on funerals, but partly from a sort of guilt at the humiliating way in which our father had died, and partly out of guilt for not having attended our mother’s funeral, we found a small church and convinced the local pastor, a man whose name I no longer remember (Reverend Cunningham having long since died), to perform the services.

  Only a dozen or so people appeared at the funeral to mourn my father’s death. Lester Drew had been institutionalized by his niece after he had had a severe stroke some years before, and so the only people in attendance were curious townsfolk, most of whom we didn’t recognize, and some former employees of my father’s, farmers and sharecroppers mostly, of whom we had dim recollections. I think some people were there simply to see how a rich man dies.10 I imagine that the whole affair must have been a great disappointment to them—the shabby church, the pastor’s vague and tentative sermon, the unenthusiastic expressions on my and Owen’s faces, the scarcity of people and the absence of friends and family. If this was how one of the richest men in town was laid to rest, they must have thought, what bleak ceremony (if any at all) awaited them? Had we not been so young and callous, we would have thrown a more impressive and festive funeral, if only to reassure them. At the time, though, we were not in the habit of attempting to assuage others’ insecurities.

  After the punch and biscuits had been served at the pastor’s house (we did not think it appropriate to invite mourners back to the scene of the death, where the long wisps of grass upon which our father’s spread-eagled body had lain were still matted down in an unsettlingly distinguishable shape), and after we had shaken the hands of t
he dozen or so people present, we thanked him for his help.

  “It was my honor,” said the pastor, solemnly. He was a blandly handsome man with sad eyes who kept looking lasciviously at Owen when he thought Owen wasn’t watching him. He was not much older than we but already had a defeated-looking wife and two squalling blond sons. “You poor boys—you have only each other now.” (I wondered for a moment if he might have been pitying us not only for being left alone but for being in such poor company; it was clear he didn’t much like us.) To me he said, “God be with you always.” To Owen he said, “Always watch out for your brother. You are his keeper.”

  “What for?” Owen asked. At the time, Owen was very interested in Truth and Justice and was beginning, tiresomely, to dabble in Marxism; he had always been very impressionable. “I shall treat my brother as I treat any of my fellow men, no better, no worse,” he said grandly, and the pastor moved off, sighing and shaking his head.

  Writing this makes me remember how much I miss Owen. I am a little surprised to see those words on paper,11 but I would be lying if I did not admit it. Despite my many complaints and annoyances, it occurs to me (and not for the first time) that my childhood, while often tedious, was certainly much simpler than my life today. This is, I suppose, as many people remember their childhoods. But back then, I do believe I was familiar with a state that was reasonably close to contentment. I was not funny-looking, I was an adequately skilled athlete, I was rich but not extravagant, I was intelligent, I had interests, I was stronger and swifter than Owen. My schoolmates left me alone: I was never beaten or teased, I never needed friends or anyone else—after all, I had Owen. Now I live a life in which I funnel great amounts of my savings to my lawyers from my barred-in quarters. I am fat and no longer stronger and swifter than Owen, and even if I had any hobbies, I would not be able to practice them. I am living a strange kind of life, a life in which I have no one. My children are gone and my colleagues are gone; everyone who has ever mattered to me has left me.