0143107828 by Stephen Dobyns

Author:Stephen Dobyns [Dobyns, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2015-07-12T21:00:00+00:00

Twenty-five

I was four when my father was sent to Korea, which was the last I saw of him. My mother moved back to her mother’s house in Aurelius. We had been living in Utica, though I remember little of it: big people, busy streets. My grandfather was dead by then, but my grandmother was quite healthy, active in her bridge group and at Saint Luke’s Episcopal Church. My father’s family came from Utica. I hardly knew them. Occasionally an uncle would drive through on his way to Binghamton and stop for half an hour or so. I should have been unhappy that my father was gone, but I was glad. Secretly glad, that is, because my mother missed him and when word came that he had been killed she cried for days. Naturally I felt terribly guilty to feel glad, and when he was killed I even thought—irrationally, of course—that it was my fault because I was pleased to have him out of the house.

We moved back in summer and Aurelius was green. There were flowers everywhere. I was with my mother all day long every day. She read to me and we went for walks. She would tell me stories about the people who lived in the houses we passed. I remembered my father as rough. He liked to tickle me and throw me into the air, which frightened me. It seemed more convenient with him away. If three is a crowd, then he was the one who made it a crowd. After he was killed, I rarely thought of him. Of course, I received lots of sympathy. People patted my head and said it was so sad that I didn’t have a father. And this made me guilty as well. As for my grandmother, she was a slower and softer version of my mother and she, too, read to me and took me for walks. It was a happy several years.

Aurelius was a busy place in the early 1950s and there was still train service to Utica. The county fair in Potterville was a big event and every summer Aurelius had its own Firemen’s Field Day with rides and games of chance. I looked forward to it and was quite smug about my ability to pop balloons with darts, though I doubt it was anything special. At the Strand there were double features every Saturday afternoon. Once a hypnotist came and did tricks. He hypnotized half the audience and I felt there was something awfully wrong with me that I couldn’t be hypnotized. Those fortunate people who were easy subjects got to sit onstage and quack like ducks and cry at an imaginary sick puppy and skip rope without a rope, which was very funny.

What I am saying is that the town felt like an extension of my mother’s house. There was no place I couldn’t wander, though my mother told me to stay away from the train tracks and not go near the river. But on weekends

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