Blue as the Lake: A Personal Geography. - Review - book review

African American Review, Spring, 2000 by John F. Callahan

The first two parts of Blue as the Lake subtly prepare readers for the three essays of the final section: "Black Piano," "Hyde Park," and the valedictory "Vineyard." The three are companion pieces in which Stepto tries to reconcile himself with his recently passed away mother and father--work of kinship he knows is crucial to the life and territory he is presently mapping out in Oak Bluffs on Martha's Vineyard. In "Black Piano," a moving tribute to his mother, Anna Burns Stepto, Stepto discovers that filling in the memory gaps reveals the contours of family secrets but does not necessarily solve their mysteries. Her children grown, moved away and settled with families of their own, she and her husband "Big Bob" move into a Hyde Park penthouse with a crow's nest view of Lake Michigan and a spacious living room perfect for her Steinway black piano. Why in the world does she ship her long-desired gift from her husband to her son's somewhat cramped quarters in New Haven? What, Stepto wonders, does her gesture sa y about her life's diminishment and her sense of the coming years to be spent alone with her husband, his father? Recalling Ernest Hemingway's observation that the dignity of an iceberg lies in seventh-eighths of it being underwater, I sense Stepto's eyes cloud over as he watches possible answers slip away into ever deeper, murkier, silent reaches of consciousness.

Instead of engaging in what Keats called an "irritable reaching after fact or reason," Stepto pursues his deepest connection with his mother on the frequencies of music. When he lets down the hair of feeling and imagination, his mother comes swinging into focus, snapping her fingers to the syncopations of the jazz they loved and shared. But memory requires an unexpected act of tenderness in the present. "Recently," he writes, "while talking about my mother with my sons, I badly needed a hit of her, needed the sight of her tall thin brown self, swinging, fingerpopping, schooling me in what to listen for." And the hit comes, but only when his older son, Gabe, with almost telepathic consideration, produces a "perfect recording" of Miles Davis and Red Garland playing "Working." The old LP, Stepto writes, "didn't deliver." "Primitive audio," he adds, before his simple words--"then Gabe touched me on the shoulder as he will"--release indelible vibrations of feeling and imagination into the nourishing circle of his , and perhaps his reader's, immediate family.

With the help of music and his son, Stepto remembers his "first improvisations into companionship" with his mother. With his father he has no such luck. On the contrary, all is strained beyond any breaking point that might clear the air. In "Hyde Park," the saddest, most painful essay in the book, it first appears that most of reality lies submerged underneath the clear-seeming blue waters of conversation or discourse. Distressed, at first I began to hope for revelations of the unseen, but I soon came to suspect that paternal subterfuge and flight from the simplest contacts, never mind intimacy, together with an attendant filial shrinking into fidgety self-protection, are all there is between father and son. I know this is not the case because Stepto courageously makes the reader privy to his desire to "strike through the mask"--his own and his father's--and establish a cease fire zone from which each can tentatively, safely move toward the other. But propriety makes prisoners of them both. The son's respect for manners and the father's canny disregard for conventions drive them even farther apart.