The Weather Brewer
“It’s not what we do but what we do with our minds that counts, and for me only the invented parts of our life had any real meaning.” — Gerald Murphy (quoted by Calvin Tomkins)
Our father understood himself as a particular kind of weather and that his task could be only to let it out. At 11, at 13, my brother Michael and I readied ourselves for the swoop up into those hormonal frenzies that adolescence would make of us, the worry over pimples and the right clothes. But duty to our father entailed that we should yield to the slashing storm he was, be bent by it, lean into it, become limbs heaped at the raging fact of it, before assenting to or despairing over our bodies, about to stretch into the something else that men were, things you had to watch, read. I learned early the necessity of reading a raised brow, a fist tightening, an eye in the shape of a shuttered window. To read was to anticipate the likelihood of what bulked close, to adjust my behaviors as best I could, so our father might delay that weather whose release he thought he was there for. But this learning, this reading, trained us to mistake our father for the atmosphere that sustained or could kill us, to conflate him with nature and its bigness.
Our father sold the Rockland County house he’d purchased with his parents’ money. He returned us to an East Hampton of his boyhood summers, where a nanny once gestured towards what no one else found time for, the washing, the dressing, the scolding, in a gated community anxious about confining tales that would ruin the families within its fences, when loosed on the wrong tongues. But moving involved reduction. Our father shaved off the plenty of his Madison Avenue job and its gush of advertising copy in favor of writing up any sort of ballgame for the local paper, something that his parents’ adroitness at what they called distanced giving, or charity donations, mixed with the sprawl of their political contacts in the city, eased the way for. These exchanges told our mother that the life she thought she’d married, the overstuffed house not far from Hook Mountain, the country club dinners served by wait staff who wouldn’t otherwise be allowed in, must surrender to this two-story, shingled place on a street named after the Reverend Samuel Buell. His 18th-century sermons preached how the revolution that crafted white America merited the blood pooling on behalf of it, and their example, beloved by East Hampton elders, helped our mother to imagine that some reductions could be built on. As head teller in a bank in town, she earned her own money for the first time, though it was deposited in our father’s account and he mistrusted her daily freedom, even as that liberty paid. One afternoon, we chose, Michael and I, to treat their absence as a sign that we could go.
We pumped the pedals hard while our bikes whizzed passed a side-view of the elementary school’s field, where Michael kicked, dunked, threw, batted any ball that would offer him the love he wanted, when teammates hoisted you up because you belonged already to the air and could never drop down. We swooshed by the library’s courtyard, and I met images of myself from a week ago throbbing among the ivy: a boy entering teenhood with knees shoved into leafy dirt. His yellow clogs upside down, the ones that everyone in high school berated him for, since they didn’t match what almost man-feet should be covered by. Hair the length of his shoulder-blades and swung from side to side, brushing against the idea of those parents he knew as one big hand flattened over a mouth, his mouth, at an elsewhere he didn’t know how to make real enough so you might walk through it.
We braved crossing Route 27 and the spot where teenaged drivers misread the “yield” sign, crumpling into metal, every future banged out of them. Wheeling up the hill at the start of Dunemere Lane, we freed our feet from pedals and skimmed the downward curve that answered it, widening our eyes at Hook Pond and its three swans walking on water for the seconds that their flapping wings heaved them up. We took a narrow road to the left of the Maidstone Club, and that was when Gerald and Sara Murphy’s house gave itself to us, in a whoosh of sun that couldn’t be put out.
There’s a nano-moment when anyone can sense the past of someone they never knew, someone who refused to greet death because it overtook them on the least expected occasion or who remains alive, yearning for a reminder of that gift. A blurted out cry, a kiss, they slip alongside you if you wait on what foretells them, the dart of something acidic on your tongue, mutating into sugar as it travels down the passageway of your throat.
We were near the front door, bikes propped against our hips, the ground floor’s wall of windows a code of lights flicking from one pane to another. I didn’t know how to cipher out this message that treated us as though we were there to record it. But we saw, through a single pane, a hearth so wide that we could have lived in it. Gerald Murphy was in a green armchair: a man on the last turn of middle age, scanty hairs pretending to warm his skull. He moved his right hand to his forehead and enfolded it in his fingers, as though that enfolding were a way to moan. Our bikes clumped on the grass.
Then, we were upstairs in a bedroom that measured the width of the house. Sara Murphy, her hair the color of maple syrup, sat in a rocker that seemed to tilt by itself. She was about to walk across the room to an oval table with a pair of photographs on it. Their frames would have glinted, had the silver been kept up. She removed a muslin glove from each hand, draped them over pictures of the two sons whose deaths she didn’t know it was possible to stay upright in front of. They huddled there. Back on our bikes, early evening light in our eyes, we were trailed by the moment that had been subtly subdivided, though we didn’t know how to explain it.
I forget the punishment our father vented on us when we came home too late. The whacks, the wallops, burning the underside of an arm, the rake of one ringed hand along a ridge of boy-skin — all of these were consistent in exceeding their ostensible cause. That’s what fathers who pose as the weather do — overstep perceived ploys to contain them. We must have known that he imagined exiling us in the murk of night to a forest and its wadded branches, without compass, food, or water, until we scratched our way back. But Long Island’s East End boasts no forests. Later, we learned of Sara and Gerald Murphy, of their two sons, killed at ages close to our own by bacterial squalls that no flesh could rise from. Their parents built the house we voyaged through as a pledge to that twinned not-rising, so a form would spring up from it.
We never talked about how the things we thought we saw that night, those apparitions, projected what we’d been denied and wanted, when the dark in our bedrooms stretched too far out: parents devoted to taking care, especially once it cost. A dying that saved us from the hurt we couldn’t shut our eyes to. But that shared knowledge lives in bones, our bones.
Another sort of ghost story: I’m poking at words on my keyboard in a Brooklyn where admonitory helicopters thump and whine. They’ve been hovering over thousands who shake their signs and bewail the black, the brown, the trans bodies stopped, frisked, jailed, pounded out of life in a country whose founders were never interested in them except to take the measure of their use, which meant they were here to be used up. The protests quiet now, but their rightful noise will be made again. I dispute Murphy’s words, in Tomkins’ New Yorker profile of him, about how the mind’s inventions outweigh the scale of any action — equal value can’t be claimed for every thought, and each needs to be judged according to the enactments that it limits, fosters, realizes through its capacity for expansion. I’m trying not to be benumbed by a country whose governmental representatives mishandle this world-virus and its end I can’t see, whose history of legal thinking has so often demanded that the ones inadequately acknowledged, the ones it won’t let in — to work, eat, thrive — but who are here, anyway, should weather this history or die from it. That demand deserves all the rattle, all the noise, we can jerk at it.
Against weathering or dying, I see us, Michael and me, on Wiborg Beach, where Sara Murphy’s family swam before her marriage and where the boys who didn’t last bathed in sand as though it were water. It’s days after the mystery of our nighttime sojourn in a house and its lamenting that we’d understand, over time, how to hear. We watch waves roll up to us. A smudge in the sky magnifies into a storm about to bear down all the heft it carries. And the wind, gust by gust, speeds into whirls.
Let the wind come.
Let the wind do its blasting work.
We’ll still be standing.