The Lost Landscape

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The long-ago romance of small planes. Daddy as pilot.

But I have only to shut my eyes to see the airfield bumping and jolting outside the windows of the Piper Cub and to feel again how we are being lifted into the air, wind-buffeted but bravely continuing to rise . . .

AFTER BLACK ROCK (#ulink_fefee3da-a137-529d-8305-4d1f3f6b89ba)

DO ALL FAMILIES HARBOR secrets? Do all families conspire in secrets, if not cultivate secrets? The family is the social unit that seems to depend crucially upon a clear separation of those who are in power and those who are subordinate; those wielding power are required to know more than those who are subordinate to them, and there almost seems, at times, a kind of taboo in sharing such knowledge. Before you were born is both a neutral designation and a way of shutting a door in your face which you would wish to open at your own risk.

Of course, all that children are not told, children somehow know. Not the words to the song but its melody, and its tone. A writer might be one who, in childhood, learns to search for and decipher clues; one who listens closely at what is said, in an effort to hear what is not being said; one who becomes sensitive to nuance, innuendo, and fleeting facial expressions.

And there are the abrupt silences among adults, when a child comes too near.

IN HIS PREFACE TOWhat Maisie Knew, Henry James ponders the “close connection of bliss and bale”—the irony of “so strange an alloy, one face of which is somebody’s right and ease, the other somebody’s pain and wrong.” Nowhere is this paradox more true than in the matter of a premature and violent death, for example the murder of my mother’s father which was also, in effect, the murder, as it was the irrevocable dissolution, of a family.

All this happened long before I was born, in 1917. In a Hungarian community in Black Rock, now a part of Buffalo, New York. My mother’s father was in his forties at the time, a Hungarian immigrant from the countryside near Budapest, who worked in a factory in Buffalo; one night, in a tavern in Black Rock, he was killed by another Hungarian immigrant, allegedly “beaten to death with a poker.”

Beyond these blunt bare facts, nothing more seemed to be known. The killer must have been identified, maybe even arrested and charged, and very likely the killing would have been described as “self-defense”—possibly, this was true. All I would ever know of my mother’s father was that he was, like other Hungarian males in the family, an individual of whom it might be said that he was not slow to flare up in anger, if not rage, and that he was a “heavy drinker.” The word peasant is a disallowed word, a shameful usage to contemporary ears, but Hungarian peasants is probably the most objective description of my mother’s relatives who’d immigrated to western New York in the early 1900s. By contemporary standards these immigrants were desperately poor people of the class of those about whom Upton Sinclair wrote so compellingly in The Jungle (1906), set in the Chicago slaughterhouses.

The sudden death of my mother’s father left her family destitute. Her parents had had eight children, the older of whom were already working. (Recall that this is 1917, when immigrant children rarely went to school but worked in factories, mills, and slaughterhouses, for wages much less than those of adult men.) My biological grandmother, whom I would never meet, nor even see a photo of, gave away at least one of her children at this time, the youngest, my mother, who was nine months old.

The infant was given to the couple whom I would know as Grandma and Grandpa Bush—Lena and John Bush. (“Bush” was the name the immigrant couple had been given at Ellis Island, as it is an approximation of their Hungarian name “Bus.”) One day it would be told to me, or suggested, in the casual way in which such genealogical information was likely to be provided, that John Bush may have been a brother of my mother’s deceased father—in which case, my mother had been sent to live with an uncle and his wife, which does not seem quite so desperate as being given away to strangers. There were no “adoptions” in those days—at least, no government agencies that were concerned with the fate of immigrant children of whom, in heavily Roman Catholic communities like Black Rock, there were many. My mother was taken in by a couple who not only wanted a child, but also needed another farm-helper in their household; as soon as she was old enough, she was given farm chores; for a few years she attended a one-room schoolhouse a mile away from the small farm in Millersport, across Tonawanda Creek in Niagara County—the very one-room schoolhouse I would attend years later.

Briefly too my mother attended a Roman Catholic school taught by nuns, in Swormville, from which she graduated after eight grades, at which time her education ceased. Eight grades were considered more than sufficient at this time in our history, in rural communities especially, where the designation “high school graduate” was a matter of pride.

When my mother Carolina Bush was eighteen or nineteen years old, and working part-time as a waitress in a restaurant on the Millersport Highway, she and my father Frederic Oates met. This would have been 1935 or 1936. Fred Oates was three years older than Carolina; he’d been born in Lockport, a small city seven miles north of Millersport, on the Erie Canal. Like my mother’s early life, my father’s early life had been shaped by the premature and violent death of a relative, in this case his maternal grandfather, a German Jewish immigrant who’d tried to kill both his wife and his fourteen-year-old daughter (my grandmother-to-be) with a shotgun, and ended up killing only himself. My father, too, had had to quit school young, and began work in a “machine-shop” (Harrison Radiator) in Lockport. He would work at Harrison’s for an astounding forty years before retiring, though by degrees he was to be promoted from the assembly-line machine shop to tool and die design.

Since such family secrets were shrouded in mystery, as in mortification and shame, I never knew, nor had I any way of substantiating, whether these two (very attractive) young people confided in each other, or commiserated with each other; both sides of my family were notable for reticence, and a stubbornness in reticence; these were not individuals for whom openness came easily, still less anything approaching “full disclosure.” The ardor of confession for which our era is known would have been astonishing to them, scarcely believable and in no way desirable. There seemed the fear among my adult relatives that something misspoken could not be reclaimed; if you spoke heedlessly, you would speak unwisely and you would regret it. In much of my fiction there is a simulacrum of the “confessional” but to interpret it in these terms is misleading. Not literal transcription but emotional transcription is the way of the writer.

While we were growing up, my brother Fred, Jr., and I had no idea of our parents’ backgrounds. We had no idea that my mother had been given away by her mother, after her father’s murder; we had no idea that my father’s mother had nearly been murdered by her raging father. We had no idea that my father’s mother Blanche Morgenstern was Jewish. (In western New York State of those days, we had no idea what “Jewish” was.) We would be adults before we learned even the skeletal outline of these old, shameful secrets that had both altered the trajectories of our parents’ (impoverished) lives but also made our births, in 1938 and 1943 respectively, possible.

It was fascinating—I suppose. To live among adults who must have frequently spoken to one another in a kind of code. (My mother’s stepparents with whom we lived would certainly have talked about my mother’s biological mother and her siblings, who lived less than ten miles away; there were Bush uncles and aunts and cousins who appeared at a little distance, and gradually became known to me in my teens.) Much of adult life was forbidden of entry to children—not just family secrets of this sort but financial crises, health crises, problems with work. Outside the brightly-lit “home” there is the murky penumbra of adults who don’t especially care about you, and are not obliged to wish you well. It may be that the writer/artist is stimulated by childhood mysteries or that it is the childhood mysteries that stimulate the writer/artist. Sometimes in my writing, when I am most absorbed and fascinated, to the point of anxiety, I find myself imagining that what I am inventing is in some way “real”; if I can solve the mystery of the fiction, I will have solved a mystery of my life. That the mystery is never solved would seem to be the reason for the writer’s continuous effort to solve it—each story, each poem, each novel is a restatement of the quest to penetrate the mystery, tirelessly restated.

The writer is the decipherer of clues—if by “clues” is meant a broken and discontinuous subterranean narrative.

I WAS WELL INTO adulthood and living far from Millersport by the time the Bush family secret came to light, and even then it was a faint, glimmering light, about which no one wished to speak without averted eyes, an air of embarrassment and shame, and a wish to change the subject. Growing up in their household, on that farm in Millersport, my brother and I may have had a vague awareness that John and Lena Bush were not my mother’s “real” parents—beyond that we couldn’t know, and in the way of family reticence, which is a kind of dignity, we could not ask, any more than children of that era would have boldly asked their fathers what their incomes were and their mothers whether they’d really wanted children.

But here is the surprise: my mother’s account of that traumatic time in her early life did not center upon the murder of her father (whom she had not known—after all she’d been an infant at the time) but on the mortifying fact of having been “given away.” When for a special feature in O, The Oprah Magazine in the late 1990s several women writers were commissioned to interview their own mothers, I learned of some of this old, sad story, still upsetting to my mother so many decades later. All my mother seemed to know was: her father had been murdered, her mother had given her away. Several times she said, “My mother didn’t want me. I used to cry and cry . . .” I was stricken to the heart—my mother was eighty years old! This trauma of 1917 was as recent and fresh to her as if no time had intervened.

Of all the relatives on both sides of our family my mother Carolina Oates had the reputation of being the most generous, the most kind, the warmest and “sunniest”—I did not want to think that, in her innermost heart, Mommy thought of herself as a child whose mother had not wanted her.

Crimes reverberate through many years, and through many lives. It is a rare homicide that destroys only one person. And it is a paradox to accept that, had a Hungarian immigrant not been murdered in 1917, I would not be alive today; how many of us, many more than would wish to speak of so sordid a fact, owe our births to the premature deaths of others whom we have never known but to whom we are linked by that mysterious shared fate called “blood.”

Here is the ironic equipoise of which Henry James wrote: this catastrophe that was for my mother, through her life, a source of acute sorrow and shame was for me, her daughter, the very genesis of my life.

SUNDAY DRIVE (#ulink_ec78bc48-e6b0-5a82-8a7c-4107b70eeed9)

ONCE UPON A TIME, the Sunday drive.

In our succession of Daddy’s wonderful cars!

(Were Daddy’s cars wonderful, or did my brother and I just imagine this? They were all American cars of course and all built by General Motors for my father worked for Harrison Radiator in Lockport, New York, an automotive supplier for GM. Though technically these were not “new cars” but “used” they were always “new” and spectacular to us.)

Where are we going, I would ask.

And the answer was enigmatic, Wait until we get there. You’ll see.

Our car was our principal means of adventure, exploration, and entertainment; our lengthy, looping, seemingly uncalculated Sunday drives with sometimes my father, sometimes my mother, at the wheel were our primary means of experiencing ourselves as a family.

Of course, we did not know this. We would scarcely have articulated such a notion, at the time.

Where weekday drives were always purposeful, Sunday drives were spontaneous and improvised. If Daddy was driving it was not unlikely that we might drive south on Transit Road in the direction of Lee’s Airfield just to see who was there; if Mommy was driving it was not unlikely we might drive west or east on narrow curving country roads along the Tonawanda Creek, where Mommy knew who lived in every house. Our car was like a small boat, or maybe a small plane, blown like the perpetual cumulus clouds of the sky above the Great Lakes, in any of these directions, by chance and not choice; the drives were familial daydreams, dreams somehow made conscious and translated into landscape. Unknowing, we were enchanted by the mystery of the (familiar) landscape and our place in it.

The writer is one who understands how deeply mysterious the “familiar” really is. How strangely opaque, what we’ve seen a thousand times. And how inconsolable a loss, when the taken-for-granted is finally taken from us.

IT WAS A BEAUTIFUL landscape in some way haunted.

Millersport Rapids Swormville Getzville East Amherst Clarence Rapids Pendleton Wolcottsburg Lockport Middleport Wrights Corners Gasport Ransomville Royalton Medina Wilson Newfane Olcott—a strangely comforting poetry these place-names of our Sunday drives. Open, uncultivated countryside; stretches of dense deciduous woods; pastures bounded by barbed wire in which dairy cows, beef cattle, sheep and horses grazed; fields planted in corn, wheat, potatoes, soybeans; miles of fruit orchards—apple trees, pear trees, cherry trees, peach trees; farmhouses that resembled my grandparents’ house, large hay barns, dairy barns, silos and corncribs. Single-span wrought-iron bridges over the Tonawanda Creek or the Erie Barge Canal whose planks rattled as we crossed high above the water; smaller bridges over narrow streams, only just wide enough for a single vehicle. (The particular terror of the larger bridge was the possibility that a wide vehicle—truck, tractor—might be crossing at the same time, in the other lane; the driver of our car might then be required to back up, slowly and laboriously, to let the other pass. The fear of the smaller bridge was that another vehicle might suddenly appear around a blind curve and collide head-on with us.) Two-lane blacktop roads sticky as licorice in hot summer; narrow rutted dirt roads winding like strips of fraying ribbon between plowed fields; those attractive and beguiling unpaved roads through dense countryside that dwindled into mere lanes bordering farmers’ fields, bumpy and eventually impassable ending in what my parents called dead ends . . . We learn our awe of the world as children staring eagerly out the windows of a moving vehicle.

If we began our Sunday drive along the Erie County side of the Tonawanda Creek to Pendleton a few miles away we might cross the wrought-iron bridge at Pendleton and enter Niagara County; if the drive was to be a relatively short drive we might turn right, or west, onto the Tonawanda Creek Road, return to Transit Road a few miles away and cross the bridge into Millersport, and so to our house which was the first on the right, beside a small Esso gas station (operated by my mother’s brothers Frank and Johnny Bush). Or, we might drive along the creek to Rapids, a few miles in the other direction, cross the bridge there and so return to Transit Road along a more circuitous route following the curves of the Tonawanda Creek, past the single-room schoolhouse which I attended for five grades, and which my mother had attended twenty years before, and so home. (“Tonawanda Creek Road” is a confusing term because, in effect, there were four roads with the same name, that might more accurately have been designated “Tonawanda Creek Road North-East”—“Tonawanda Creek Road North-West”—“Tonawanda Creek Road South-East”—“Tonawanda Creek Road South-West.” These were country roads narrow and minimally paved, bisected by the wider Transit Road running north and south.)

When my father drove, my mother sat beside him in the passenger’s seat. But whenever my mother drove, it meant that my father wasn’t coming with us because my father would never have consented to be a passenger in any vehicle in which he was not the driver.

(In this Fred Oates was the quintessential American male of his time. It wasn’t a question of “equality”—that my mother was a woman was not the issue; it was a question of who had authority in a vehicle, and this was likely to be the man of the family, in whose name the vehicle had been purchased.)

These least adventurous/most familiar Sunday drives nonetheless intrigued my brother Robin (Fred, Jr.; born on Christmas Day 1943) and me, for our mother knew the inhabitants of virtually all of the houses along the Tonawanda Creek, if not personally then by reputation, or rumor; my fascination with people, as with their houses and “settings,” surely began with these Sunday drives and my mother’s frequent, often quite startling and elliptical commentary. Six years in the one-room schoolhouse containing eight grades of often unruly “big boys” had enabled my mother’s generation of young people to know one another intimately, if not always fondly; sometimes my mother’s reticence was all that was forthcoming as we passed a house. (“Yes. I know who lives there.”)

This was an era memorialized by Edward Hopper of shingle-board houses with front porches and people sitting on these porches keen to observe people driving past in vehicles observing them. Narrow, winding creek roads were best for such sightings, for vehicles were likely to be driven at unhurried speeds on these roads; sometimes my mother would be stuck behind a slow-moving tractor or even a horse-drawn hay wagon.

Once, on the creek road to Rapids, when my father wasn’t with us, my mother behind the wheel suddenly said: “In that house, a terrible thing happened.”

Mommy slowed the car. No one appeared to be visible in the house, observing us.

(Had this been an ordinary-seeming dwelling? Not a farmhouse but a smaller, shanty-like structure with a tar paper roof, set back from the road on a badly rutted driveway. In the front yard, straggly trees. Rusted hulks of cars in the scrubby grass. Decades later the name of the family who lived there is still vivid in my memory—not Reichling but a name that slant-rhymes with it.)

A man had been murdered, my mother said. The father of a girl with whom she’d gone to school.

At first it was believed that the man had “disappeared”—his wife claimed not to know where he was. But then his body was discovered in the creek behind the house; it had been forced inside a barrel, and the barrel had been nailed shut, and rolled down to the creek where it only partially sank in about five feet of water close to shore.

“The wife and her man-friend murdered him. Stabbed him. It was a terrible thing.”

Why did they kill him, I wanted to know. Were they arrested, were they in prison, who had discovered the body in the barrel—many questions sprang to my lips which my mother was vague about answering, whether because Mommy thought I should not be so curious, or because she didn’t know. Enough for our mother to have surprised us by saying—It was a terrible thing.

(I HAVE TO CONCEDE that I scarcely remember myself as a child. Only as an eye, an ear, a ceaselessly inquisitive center of consciousness. For instance, I can remember my mother’s tantalizingly brief account of the murder on the Tonawanda Creek Road in the direction of Rapids only a few miles from our house but I can’t fit this memory into a sequence of memories of that drive, that day, that week or even that year; our memories seem to lack the faculty for chronological continuity, in which case an episodic and impressionistic art most accurately replicates the meanderings of memory, and not chronological order. What is vivid in memory is the singular, striking, one-of-a-kind event or episode, encapsulated as if in amber, and rarely followed by the return home, that evening’s dinner, exchanged remarks, the next morning; not routine but what violates routine.

Which is why the effort of writing a memoir is so fraught with peril, and even its small successes ringed by melancholy. The fact is—We have forgotten most of our lives. All of our landscapes are soon lost in time.)

WHEN MY FATHER TOOK us on Sunday drives, it was more likely that he would take us much farther, as he drove faster; on Transit Road, which Daddy traveled all too frequently, he was inclined to drive above the speed limit, and to pass slower cars with some measure of irritation. My sense of maleness, based solely and surely unfairly upon my father Fred Oates, is that the male more than the female is inclined to impatience.

Where Mommy drove us on country roads never very far from the Tonawanda Creek, that cut through her childhood, as through mine, and fixed us comfortingly in place, Daddy had little interest in the familiar countryside of Erie County, apart from his visits to Lee’s Airfield. The landscape of Fred Oates’s boyhood was Niagara County: he’d been born in Lockport, in the least affluent area of the small city known informally as “Lowertown,” and had lived in Lockport all of his life until he’d married my mother and came to live with her in Millersport. (There had been an earlier domestic life in Lockport, about which I knew nothing, and which had always seemed to me romantic, as it had to have been short-lived. Only a scattering of snapshots allowed me to see my young parents, an infant bundled in their arms, photographed in a waste of snow behind a rented apartment in Lowertown near the canal. Where we lived before Millersport—was the terse description. Before we came to live with your grandparents.)

Daddy’s drives may have reflected his restlessness. The same restlessness that motivated him to fly airplanes, even to experiment one summer with a glider at Lee’s Airfield. (Gliders are far more dangerous than small aircraft and Daddy may have had some close calls with this glider, about which my brother and I would not have been told.) Though Daddy did not drive slowly past houses and name to us their inhabitants and hint to us of the mysteries of lives within, yet Daddy’s drives into Niagara County were more interesting than Mommy’s drives in Erie County, as they were farther-ranging, and fraught with the kind of urgency my father brought to most things.

Daddy liked to follow the Erie Barge Canal westward in the direction of the beautiful turbulent Niagara River or eastward into hilly Orleans County, in the direction of Brockport and Rochester; he liked to drop in on a small airfield in Newfane, where he had friends; he liked to drop in at the Big Tree Inn near Newfane, or the Inn at Olcott Beach on Lake Ontario; there was the excitement of the Niagara County Fair at the Fairgrounds, and the excitement of volunteer firemen’s picnics scattered through the county where food and drinks—especially beer—were served. Daddy’s drives were not without direction like Mommy’s but intended to bring him to places where, when he approached, voices lifted happily—“Fred! Jesus, here’s Fred Oates.”

In such places there were jukeboxes. Clouded mirrors behind the bar where men who resembled my father turned to welcome him. Pervading smells of beer, cigarette smoke. Plastic ashtrays filled with ashes and butts. Small bowls in which greasy fragments of potato chips remained. If such places were on the vast, wind-lashed lake, there was a sandy beach littered with broken shells. There were picnic areas with tables, benches. Summertime smell of wet sand, wet bathing suits and towels. Burnt charcoal, grilling hamburgers, hot dogs and mustard and ketchup. Broken rinds of watermelon on the ground, corncobs buzzing with flies. Discarded Coke bottles, beer bottles. Music from car radios.

If summer, and if near Lake Ontario, there was always a chance of lightning and thunderstorms. You started off in Millersport on a sunny blue-skied summer day, you ended at Lake Ontario in pelting rain beneath a boiling-black sky in autumnal chill. Even when we had plenty of time to return home, Daddy tended to ignore our pleas and continue driving. Or, if we were already at Lake Ontario, and the sky began to darken ominously, Daddy was likely to delay leaving until the last possible moment.

There came flashes of heat lightning, soundless. Then actual lightning, thunder. Deafening thunder like cymbals crashing. We were chastened waiting for the storm to pass beneath the overhangs of strangers’ roofs, beneath tall windswept trees.

At the Big Tree Inn on a promontory above the lake there was indeed an enormous tree—probably an elm tree. The novelty of the “big tree” was that it had been many times struck by lightning. My mother feared lightning, as her older sister Elsie (my “Aunt Elsie” who lived in Lockport) had in fact been injured when lightning struck a doorway in which she was standing: Elsie’s face, throat, and arm were riddled with slivers from the shattered doorframe; but my mother could not prevail against my father who thought a thunderstorm was an occasion for rejoicing and not cowering indoors.

My mother was not an assertive person. Especially she was not assertive with my father. Mommy might suggest turning back to avoid a storm but she could not insist, and if she had, our father would have ignored her; if she’d insisted more adamantly, our father would have defied her.

Once, not at the Big Tree Inn but at a place called Koch’s Paradise Grove, by chance on my way to a women’s restroom adjacent to the bar, amid a barrage of loud music, a din of voices, laughter, I came across a sight that was shocking to me, and that I have never forgotten: my father speaking with another man, a man of about his age, a stranger whom I was sure I’d never seen before, and they were standing close together, faces flushed and voices raised in anger, and the frightening thought came to me—They are going to fight, they are going to hurt each other; but in the next instant my father turned, and saw me, and the expression on his face altered, and the moment passed.

A child is very frightened—viscerally, emotionally—by the raised voices of adults. Even when anger isn’t involved but rather excitement, hilarity.

I might have registered—They have been drinking. But Daddy is not drunk!

It was not unknown, that men became drunk. But that was very different from being classified as a drunk.

So often it seemed to happen in my life as a child and a young girl, such arrested and abbreviated moments—the scene that is interrupted by the girl blundering into it. If there were words exchanged the intrusion of the girl silenced these words and so it is not words that remain but the sound of a voice or voices, uplifted in anger or in hilarity, essentially indecipherable. It is the child’s experience to blunder into scenes between adults and to become a witness to something inexplicable to her though it is (probably) a quite ordinary episode in what are not extraordinary lives after all; it remains that the child or young adolescent will make of these broken-off and mysterious fragments some sort of coherent narrative. What is fleeting and transient in time, no doubt soon forgotten by the adults, or rendered inconsequential in their lives, may burrow deep into the child-witness’s soul, whatever is meant by “soul” that is not fleeting and transitory but somehow permanent, and inextricable. And so, decades later I am still seeing my father and the unknown, unnamed man, a man who resembled my father, and both of them flush-faced and prepared to fight; I am remembering how my mother’s father died, in a tavern fight in Black Rock in 1917, though long before I was born; I am remembering a casual remark of my father’s—A man never backs down from a fight. You just can’t.

And there were other occasions, like this. Like the Sunday drives, beyond estimation. A child sees her father at a little distance, a figure among other figures; a man among men; a child is baffled and thrilled by her father in precisely those ways in which the father eludes the child. It is as if my father had said to me—You will not ever know me, but it is allowed that you can love me.

The mother is the known, or so the child imagines. (This would turn out to be not exactly true, or not true in the fullest degree, but it was not the case that my mother was inaccessible to me emotionally, as often, in those years, my father was.) But the father is the lesser-known, the more obvious figure of romance.

How many times returning late from Sunday drives into the countryside beyond Lockport, in Niagara County; a nighttime drive back to Lockport and up the long steep glacier hill to the wide bridge over the Erie Canal at the junction of Main Street and Transit Street; and so onto Transit Road (NY Route 78) and another long, steep glacier hill and our house seven miles away in the countryside just across the Tonawanda Creek. Often, my brother and I would drift off to sleep in the backseat of the car. Often, it seemed to be raining. We would hear the slap of windshield wipers, and my parents’ lowered voices in the front seat. Headlights of oncoming cars sweeping into the back of our car, across the ceiling and gone . . .

On a map of the region—(I would not examine a detailed map of Erie and Niagara counties until 2014 while composing this memoir)—the space of our Sunday drives is compressed like something in a children’s storybook. Lake Ontario, that had seemed so romantically far from our home, is fewer than twenty miles away, to the north; Niagara Falls is only twenty-five miles away, to the west. The landscape of my childhood that had seemed so vast, so fraught with mysteries, could be contained within something like a thirty-mile radius.

Sunday drives! You’d think they would continue forever but nothing continues forever. Like gas selling for twenty-eight cents a gallon, that’s gone forever.

FRED’S SIGNS (#ulink_a80832de-559e-50ed-9c1e-43e1ae2ee121)

“DADDY! CAN I TRY?”

And your father will hand you one of his smaller brushes, its thick-feathery tip dipped in red paint, and a piece of scrap plywood, and on the plywood you will try conscientiously to “letter” as your father lettered—precisely and unhesitatingly, with deft twists of his wrist. But in your inexpert hand the paintbrush wavers, and the lettering is wobbly—childish. The bright red flourish of Daddy’s letters, the subtle curls and tucks of his brushstrokes, will be impossible for you to imitate at any age.

This evening after supper in a season when the sky is still light. When you have left your room upstairs in the farmhouse and crossed to your father’s sign shop in the old hay barn—not a “shop” but just a corner of the barn that has been converted to a two-vehicle garage with a sliding overhead metal door. The shop isn’t heated of course. Your father seems virtually immune to cold (never wears a hat even in winter when icy winds lower the temperature to below zero, often doesn’t wear an overcoat) though he has to briskly rub his hands sometimes when he’s painting signs. When he isn’t working at Harrison Radiator in Lockport, forty-hour weeks plus “time-and-a-half” on Saturdays, Fred Oates is a freelance sign painter whose distinctive style is immediately recognizable in the Lockport/Getzville/East Amherst area, particularly along the seven-mile stretch of rural Transit Road from Lockport to Millersport.

It is fascinating to you, to observe your father preparing his signs. Some are so large they have to be propped up on a bench against a wall, smooth rectangular surfaces on which he has laid two coats of shiny white paint. Then, bars straight-penciled with a yardstick, between which he will inscribe his flawless letters:

GARLOCK’S FAMILY RESTAURANT

5 Miles

EIMER ICE

We Deliver

FULLENWEIDER DAIRY

KOHL’S FARM PRODUCE

2 Miles

CLOVERLEAF INN

He’d begun as a sign painter for the Palace Theater in Lockport, when silent movies were shown there. In fact, he’d begun as an usher at the Palace, and a Wurlitzer player. (Silent movies were not “silent” of course but required live music initially.) How, at age fourteen, had Fred Oates been hired for such responsibilities? Soon he was working at the Palace and painting signs for local businesses—“I don’t remember how I got started. Just one thing led to another.”

The lives of our parents, grandparents, ancestors—Just one thing led to another.

Vertiginous abyss between then and now.

After the Palace, Fred Oates went to work in the machine shop at Harrison’s, a short block or two from the Palace Theater on Main Street, Lockport. There he would work for the next forty years until retiring at sixty-five, all the while painting signs in his spare time, to amplify his income.

Difficult not to feel unworthy of such parents, who’d come of age as young adults in the Great Depression. Their lives were work. Their lives were deprivation. Their lives have led to you.

As he paints, Daddy hums. He has never complained of the circumstances in his life for possibly it has not occurred to him that there might be legitimate grounds for complaint. Work has been much of his life, and in this, his life is hardly uncommon for its time and place. Painting signs is work of a kind but it is also pleasurable, like playing the organ at the country church or, when he’d been a boy, playing the piano at the Palace Theater. Work to do is not, as some might think, a negative but rather a strong positive for work to do means purpose, and the pleasure of having completed something. In this case, something for which Fred Oates will be paid.

You must be quiet when Daddy is wielding the paintbrush, and you must be still. A restless child isn’t wanted here in Daddy’s “sign shop.” You are fascinated by your father’s utter concentration as he paints. You can see that there is a distinct pleasure in precisely shaping the subtly curving letters and you will absorb this pleasure in precision, in “lettering,” that might translate into a pleasure in “writing”—for a writer is after all someone who writes words in succession, and words are shaped out of letters.

In the sign shop there is a strong smell of paints, turpentine. And a smell of damp earth—(the barn’s floor is hard-packed dirt). On Daddy’s work bench are paintbrushes of varying sizes, and all kept in good condition. For Daddy can’t afford to use brushes carelessly; each brush is valuable. There is no excitement quite like taking a camel’s-hair brush from your father’s fingers and dipping it into paint to “letter” on a piece of plywood—-Joyce Carol Oates.

Is it a magical name, that Daddy and Mommy have given you? That has often seemed a gift to you, out of the magnanimity of their love.

“Can I try?”—not once but many times.

As long as you can remember as a girl, the landscape within an approximate fifteen-mile radius has always contained your father’s signs. Mommy will point as we drive past—“See? That’s Daddy’s new sign.” In a vehicle with others, someone might say—“See? That’s one of Fred’s signs.” To a neutral eye these signs are of no special distinction. One would not even know that they are hand-painted and not rather manufactured in some way. They are mere signs, distractions that interrupt the mostly rural landscape of Transit Road. Yet, to you, the sign-painter’s daughter, these signs are beautiful. There is something bold and dramatic about a hand-painted sign nailed to a tree. On the side of a barn. You can pick out Fred Oates’s signs anywhere—the curve of the S’s and O’s that suggest almost human figures. The way Daddy crosses his T’s. Once you asked your father, “Why is there a dot over the i?” and your father gave this childish question some thought before saying, “Maybe because without the dot the i would look too small, like something was left out.”

For many years after he’d ceased to paint them Fred Oates’s signs remained on Transit Road. Then, one by one, they were removed, or replaced, or faded into the oblivion of harsh weather and time. And now, I have not driven along Transit Road in years in fear and dread of what I will not see.