Family

Hudson Review, The, Autumn 2002 by Makuck, Peter

My cousin Cash phoned me late one night. Though my contact with her is minimal, I knew the voice immediately, a sharp nasal monotone. At Christmas, she sends out cards with a generic letter detailing her political and church activities. Last year her card included a printed leaflet with a photo of an aborted fetus in a surgical basin. Merry Christmas. Not one for polite preambles, she got right to the point-our aunt Sophie had developed critical heart and lung problems. It had been too long since the family had last gotten together. Cash was organizing a gathering at the farm and hoped I could make it.

Aunt Sophie was a teacher who never married. She was the aunt who visited, the only one I recall staying the night in my boyhood home. Visits often meant some small gift for me. When I outgrew toys, she gave me books, then pocket money on the sly. Her colorful talk was always a treat, but a summer trip up to Connecticut seemed a great effort: long check-in lines, delayed flights, airport crowds, risky food, the usual irritations.

My wife Nicole phoned from Bordeaux, and I told her about Cash's gathering of the clan, and why. She urged me to make the effort. Suddenly I felt guilty about not being in France with her. But she sounded buoyant. It gave her great pleasure, she said, to see our sons getting reacquainted with their cousins and improving their French. They actually seemed to be enjoying the visit. Before saying goodbye, she told me not to take my family "trop au serieux" on certain subjects, and not to drink too much.

I arranged to see an old college friend in Connecticut, caught a plane from Atlanta to Hartford, and rented a car. I drove southeast toward the farm where my father, his three brothers, and four sisters had been born and raised. Stone walls that ran through pastures and woods, white wooden churches, picket fences-the perfect postcard of New England, so familiar, had become strange to me. So had lilac and white birch, which didn't grow in Georgia.

I turned off the Boston Post Road, a slight detour from the farm still thirty miles distant, and drove down a country lane past the white clapboard house that used to belong to my parents; it sat on a grassy rise surrounded by trees on three sides. At the old Wallace place, I reversed direction, approached it again, and parked with the engine running. Once I knew that house completely-from the underscent of mildew in the crawlspace to the odd sourceless light that sometimes wavered in a corner of the attic. On hot nights, the white curtains in my room ghosted back and forth in the screened windows, as if the earth were breathing.

The sign still read: The Olde Flower Shoppe.

The Dereloos, a Dutch family, used to own the place. I had worked one summer in their nursery, digging, planting, and watering. The gum-chewing teenager with green hair and a gold nose stud said she had never heard of the-"Dereloos," I offered, pushing a pot of daisies toward the cash register. "Whatever," she said. Her father owned the place now. I asked if she liked the flower business. Her green eyes rolled up as if to check out the underside of her brain. Nuh, right," she sighed. "I'm, like, outta here first chance I get."

I drove into the cemetery, turning left and right along avenues lined with tall dark cedars. Ragamuffin sparrows splashed in a puddle under a spigot. On the twin-bedded plot, under the outstretched arms of a tall Blessed Mother made of bronze, I was surprised to see a box of bright geraniums. Odd. All Mom's and Dad's friends were dead. Who could have brought the flowers? Probably some mistake. I knelt and looked at their birth and death dates. I tried to say a prayer, but no words came.

On Gilead Road, in front of St. Paul's, a banner proclaimed the good tidings of bingo every Friday night. This was where my parents had gone to nine o'clock mass every Sunday morning without fail. I hoped not to see Father O'Brian, the pastor, waddling from the rectory.

Connecticut woodland, pale green, flowed past, and I was jolted to find myself so quickly at the closed piano factory with its gaping black windows and fangs of broken glass. Then up the hill to the pond where I used to swim with Cash, Anne, Frankie, and my other cousins. The old brick pump-house had a catwalk a few feet above the water, a good place to dive from. Huge granite stairs rose from the water and took you back to the catwalk.

Aunt Sophie's house with its wide porch was one of three built on what remained of the hundred acres my grandfather once owned. It was the first place you came to after an entrance framed by stone pillars at the bottom of the hill. Eight or ten cars and a few pickup trucks were helter-skelter on the lawn. A keg of beer sat in a shiny galvanized tub in the shade. The Petroski and Golek families from downstate were there. I looked for Stan but didn't see him. Stan, four years older, organized our games when we were kids. First in the family to go to college, he was now an investment banker in San Diego.