Learning to Drive

Syracuse, New York

DECEMBER 1952

Man, governed by immortal Mind, is always beautiful and grand.

—MARY BAKER EDDY, SCIENCE AND HEALTH WITH

    KEY TO THE SCRIPTURES

CHAPTER

1

Charlotte lay awake all night listening to the clock in the downstairs hallway. Every quarter hour it squeezed out a chime within a long and predictable sequence of sounds that became more distinct as the night wore on: a wheeze, a cough, a running start, and finally a pause and a failure of nerve, and then a little song—another quarter hour is coming, another is gone, another is coming, another is gone. She pictured the old, dead quarter hours piling up, then sliding off the pile and disappearing into endless Time where quarter hours didn’t count. Quarter hours were mere human constructions, temporary units fabricated by mankind for convenience in daily life, like minutes, though more important than minutes, since clocks didn’t chime every minute—and for that she was very grateful. There was an infinite number of units of time, as many as you could think of names for, each one folded inside the other, their inward progression stretching beyond the mind’s eye, to the outer edge of knowing, all of them ticking, relentlessly beating, like her own heart.

She decided to drown them. She gathered them into Melvin’s fishing net and lowered them into a dark pool, watching as the flimsy little units cascaded gently toward the muck at the bottom. Just before they landed, she reversed the net and whipped it out of the water. Success! None had stuck! They were all gone, or nearly all. Just one was left; it clung to the net, its delicate green wings twitching, ticking, relentlessly beating.… She was doomed; she would never sleep. Her skin prickled; her long, heavy braid pulled at her scalp. She listened to Melvin breathing peacefully beside her, to the quiet little snort at the bottom of each breath that signaled his blissful oblivion. Across the hall, their two small sons slept on, two soldiers of sleep marching through the night. It was always she, the lone female, who had to carry the whole nocturnal consciousness of the household, she alone who watched and prayed, and waited for the dawn. Insomnia had been a way of life in Charlotte’s family. Her mother and two older sisters were always prowling the house at night in search of sleep, a loosely knit pack stalking the same elusive prey. Their mother read from Mrs. Eddy’s works, her flowered bathrobe tucked tightly around her legs as she sat curled up on the couch, head resting on her hand under the glow of the lamp. Rosey, the oldest, read romantic novels, while Kitty, the middle child, did puzzles. (Kitty was always alert and cheerful no matter what the hour and could easily do anagrams after midnight.) Charlotte, the baby of the family, was last to join in their forays. At first she snacked, like any child let loose in an unsupervised kitchen. Later, she got out her crayons and sat alone at the long, polished table in the dining room, creating the same little scene over and over again: a house with a high-pitched roof and a garden in front (always drawn from the same perspective), a standard lollipop-shaped tree (with nests), a row of tall flowers marching alongside the walkway through the garden, two happy clouds, and a flock of V-shaped birds in the far distance. After she had made a few of these pictures, so full of goodwill and brave resolve despite the dark shadows in the corners of the room, her fatigue would take over and her flowers would wilt, the tree would list, her birds in flight would start to wobble, and Charlotte would awake with her face on the paper. As she groped her way back to bed, feeling vaguely ashamed that her staying power was so slight, she would always vow to do better next time.

Their father was the only one in the family who had a normal relationship with sleep: Jerome Baird took it for granted, looked forward to it, cherished his sleeping garb. He would doze off after meals or during his daughters’ impromptu recitals and incoherent dramas, waking up just long enough to announce his intention of retiring, yawning and stretching as he locked the doors and made his sleepy way upstairs, carrying a book they all knew he would never stay awake long enough to read, and inspiring them all with envy.

After her youngest child was born, Charlotte had suffered a bout of insomnia so severe that she actually became physically ill. It was a time in her life that she still looked back on with apprehension; nevertheless, she was grateful for it, too, because it had led her back to Christian Science. Baird was only four at the time, the baby just a few weeks old. She had truly lost her wits, hardly knowing who she was. (At one point she even considered the possibility that she was someone else, an older woman who suffered from numbness in all her extremities and who rode buses in endless loops around the city.) The children needed all of her attention, yet she found it impossible to focus. She would wander off in search of a diaper and find herself in the basement, looking for a broom, or wake up at night, ravenous, and begin baking, then leave the batter to collapse in the bowl while she went to look up the fifth monarch of England in her college history text. Perversely, a sinister idea began to take hold: She would die if she slept, if she let go. In the wink of an eye she would go from constant, unwavering, unblinking consciousness to absolute extinction.

She became painfully aware of her pulse, coming to regard it as a fragile lifeline. Her heart skipped beats. Her skin went from its normal lightly freckled pallor to a dead papery white. She grew thinner and more angular. Her small flat face, grown luminous with anxiety, became a white disk lost in a cloud of red hair; her fingernails cracked; she bumped into things. Her sisters called daily, asking for updates on her condition. She couldn’t make decisions; she felt angry at the baby. She felt afraid. Melvin worried about her safety and the safety of the children, and he hired a girl, Gretel, to stay in the house with her when he was gone. He was just starting his souvenir business then and was spending a lot of time in Vermont taking his scenics, which is what he called his seasonal photographs.

He claimed she was a hazard to them all, and she agreed, yet she couldn’t seem to gain control of her actions. He even suggested that she cut her hair—she had never cut it, not once, not even when the craze for bobs overtook her sisters. It tumbled down over her back, a luscious coppery waterfall that reached well below her waist. There was so much of it, people turned to stare at her on the street, dazzled by all that hair. It influenced everything she did—the careful way she turned her head; the pretty way she perched instead of sat, with her back held straight; the peculiar way she walked, at the same time awkward and graceful, like a heron picking its way from rock to rock along a shallow river. And of course, wherever she went, she left it behind her—on people’s furniture, on their clothes, in their mouths—and in her own house, on her own clothes. She came across the long red strands a hundred times in the course of a day, like her own secret tracks; if she ever committed a murder, she had once told Melvin, she would have to wear a hair net.

Cutting it, he had argued, would help her sleep; it wouldn’t pull at her in the night and wake her up. It had frightened her, hearing him say that. When they were so in love—when they filled the whole world for each other, when it wasn’t big enough to contain them—he had called her long hair his ocean, his heaven, his coppery earth.

At his insistence, she made an appointment with a doctor in downtown Syracuse. Young Dr. Jericho listened to her story, examined her cursorily, and concluded that she needed to relax.

I’m trying to relax, she told him. I’m trying to sleep. I’m trying everything.

He snapped her file shut. Not everything, Mrs. McGuffey. You are a young and beautiful woman. Why not try enjoying life? Ask your husband to take you to the movies.

The movies! How dare he! Here she was, desperate, half out of her mind, and he told her to go to the movies! Walking back to the bus stop on Genesee Street after her appointment, she passed a Christian Science reading room and paused to look through the plate-glass window. She had not considered herself a Scientist since her marriage to Melvin ten years earlier, when she was a student and living at home with her sister Rosey and her father, a classics professor and the author of two slim volumes of poetry written in strict and regular recurrence of quantitatively long and short syllables.

The Bible and the Science and Health lay open side by side on a green velvet cloth. Passages from the current week’s lesson had been underlined in powder-blue marker on both their pages. The underlined passage in the Science and Health was well known to Charlotte and featured the Porter, a curious figure who had accrued special significance in her imagination as a child:

Stand porter at the door of thought. Admitting only such conclusions as you wish realized in bodily results, you will control yourself harmoniously.… The issues of pain or pleasure must come through mind, and like a watchman forsaking his post, we admit the intruding belief, forgetting that through divine help we can forbid this entrance.

Her father had had an ancient model train set that he kept hidden in his bedroom—perhaps not exactly hidden, but it had seemed so to Charlotte, since why else would a grown-up keep such a thing to himself? He kept it on his big desk in a corner of the bedroom, covered up by a woven white shawl of his wife’s, along with his Science books and periodicals and stacks of Home Forum pages from the Monitor. When she was sure she was alone in the house, Charlotte had sometimes stolen into his room to look at the little figures, at the gloomy station house, the corroding tracks and bridges and railroad cars. The little figures that belonged to the set were dark and mysterious and made of a hard rubber material: Among them were a conductor, an engineer, a flagman, a flagman’s wife (they had the same startled expression), and a porter, whose red trousers sported a military crease. His face was creamy brown, and on his shoulder was a curious lump of deteriorating rubber with a long cinnamon-colored tail, and in her imagination, Charlotte had construed it to be a sweet little monkey who whispered naughty things.

Standing at the window, feeling the mesmerizing pull of Mrs. Eddy’s soothing, familiar words, made softer and sweeter by the velvet cloth beneath the book, Charlotte had been seized by a powerful longing for her mother. Charlotte was ten at the time of her mother’s death; protected by her family’s belief that disease and death were essentially illusions, and that the inevitable outcome of every sickness was the good health her family members took for granted, she had remained unaware of much of the drama taking place in the house during her mother’s illness. Her mother’s bewildering behavior toward the end was enveloped in mist. Only certain smells brought her mother back, and the image of her strong, beautiful hands.

Charlotte remembered the peace she’d felt as she sat with her family in the little church they attended on Sundays, the quiet rustling of people’s clothes at the Wednesday evening testimonial services, the lilt in her sister Kitty’s voice as she read aloud to her family from Mrs. Eddy’s works on Sunday evenings.

When Charlotte was twenty and newly married and just barely starting on a life of her own, Kitty was already a licensed Christian Science practitioner. She had completed all of her classes at the Mother Church in Boston at the exceptionally young age of thirty-two and had started a small practice out of her home. Kitty had always had an advanced understanding. Even as a child, she had been a dedicated Scientist, performing healing ceremonies on squashed bugs and droopy baby birds, giving testimonies in church in her reedy little girl’s voice, sitting beside their mother’s bed in the dark and praying with her whenever she got one of her nervous spells.

The reading room was very clean and nearly deserted. A Mrs. Helen Wade Rounds was on duty that day, wearing an expensive-looking maroon suit with a loose-fitting jacket that was held in place by only one button, as if there were other, more ineffable forces at work to keep it closed. She had looked up, smiling, and handed Charlotte a copy of Mrs. Eddy’s book. Take this, she had said. This will help.

After reading the first three pages on the living-room couch, Charlotte had fallen fast asleep. Hours later she woke in the darkness to the smell of baking potatoes as Melvin, in the kitchen with the children, prepared their supper. She lay there a long time, enveloped in a delicious drowsiness, and listened to their voices—Baird’s high-pitched, childish tones, Mel’s low somber ones, Hoskins’s erratic infant sounds—and was filled with gratitude for God’s power to heal, and for heavenly sleep.

When she went back to the reading room the next day to thank Mrs. Rounds, the white-haired woman behind the desk said she’d never heard of her. After the testimonial service Charlotte attended the following Wednesday, the usher shook his head solemnly. No, he didn’t know of her. Charlotte took it as a sign and came to think of it as part of her healing: the visitation of Mrs. Rounds, with her one button, her soft, powdery skin, her utter confidence. In her writings, Mrs. Eddy defined angels as God’s representatives, and that seemed like a perfect description of Helen Wade Rounds: She had materialized out of nowhere at just the right time, offering Mrs. Eddy’s healing words at the exact moment when Charlotte needed them, and then simply disappeared.

Charlotte sat up, quickly undoing her braid. When she lay back down again, Melvin stirred beside her. She held her breath, listening intently and willing all her muscles to be still. The last thing she wanted to do was to wake him prematurely.

The Porter arrived at once, looking dapper in his red jacket. Surprisingly, his fingernails were dirty, and then she saw why: He had been shining his shoes, or perhaps it was her shoes, or perhaps another passenger’s. He held the dirty rag loosely in one hand and bowed slightly. Was there something contemptuous in his little smile? They had a rocky relationship; sometimes it went smoothly, sometimes not.

She directed him to close the door against the images that had been trying to invade her consciousness all night: Baird in the bathtub, his soapy hair sticking up in comical shapes; Hoskins struggling in his father’s arms as they climbed the stairs; Melvin plunging him into the bath; Baird’s wild laughter. She had rocked Hoskins to sleep, rocking and singing until her arms grew numb from the little boy’s weight. When she finally set him down in his bed, he sank into sleep like a stone in a riverbed, without a twitch or a ripple. An hour later, when she went to check on him, he still hadn’t stirred. He was lying on his back, palms up, fingers softly curled. There were faint dark circles under his eyes, making him look fragile and exhausted. She said a silent prayer before she left, asking God to comfort him and make him forget his moment of terror. Somehow, she vowed, she would make sure it never happened again.

When the faint light in the bedroom was uniform, she got up. She felt grainy and raw, weary to the bone. She put on her thick red robe, giving the belt an extra tug for increased purpose and strength, and peeked into the boys’ room on her way downstairs. The closet door stood ajar, just as they always left it, so that the light would fall on the floor at the certain angle insisted upon by Hoskins before he would consider going to sleep. One of their parental chores at his bedtime was readjusting the closet door to his satisfaction. Sometimes Baird would move the door a little after they left the room, but not enough so that anyone but Hoskins could tell. When they got there in response to Hoskins’s screams, Baird would be buried under the covers, feigning sleep. He was snoring lightly now, his arm thrust out over the side of the bed, and in the mysterious light of the bedroom, his arm seemed to glow a little.

Charlotte crept down the stairs and went through the swinging door into the kitchen, pausing a moment before turning on the light. Her eyeballs hurt. Her heart was fluttering. How was she going to make it through the day?

She let out the dog, standing in the cold air at the back door while he relieved himself against a mound of snow. Hannibal was an English setter, with belton markings; his silky coat was white with light orange ticking, and barely perceptible against the white snow. It had been snowing on and off for a week; more had fallen during the night. The spruce was laden, its branches drooping.

Hannibal hurried back into the kitchen, leaping lightly over the camera equipment Mel had piled by the door. Charlotte filled the thermos with hot tap water, started the coffee on the stove, searched in the back of the cupboard for a clean cup. It had been several days since she’d done the dishes, and most of them were in the sink, where a web of iridescent grease floated on top of the water.

Then she sat down at the table in the breakfast nook and rehearsed her lines while she waited for Melvin to come down.

His itinerary was propped up against the salt shaker: Leave Syracuse at 7 A.M., Friday, December 12, 1952.… He always dated even the most informal of notes—he loved keeping records. In his heart he was a scientist, though with a small s, of course. He dated all his shopping lists as well, and every picture he ever took, noting the time, the lens setting, and the position of the sun, or the absence thereof. Next to the dates on his itinerary he had listed the names of the places he intended to photograph, the most important being the church in Beede, the village where he had grown up. The members of the First Methodist Church of Beede always waited for him to come up and take his Christmas picture before setting up the outdoor life-size crèche, which was too modern for the traditional images he preferred. Leona Cake, who was the postmistress and generally the one who saw that things got done right, made sure that Mel got what he wanted. She liked to say that it was Melvin McGuffey who single-handedly had made Beede’s First Methodist the most photographed church, not just in the state of Vermont, but in all of America.

Charlotte thought it might even be true. Melvin had photographed the church in every light, in every season, its graceful spire silhouetted against the hillside, the stand of sugar maples behind it variously aflame or dormant or ebullient with springtime buds. He always took his pictures from the same spot, a small turnoff on the road that led up to the old McGuffey place, which is what the local people always called the house on McCrillis Hill that Mel and Charlotte had inherited from Mel’s parents some years earlier; it was unclear whether the old referred to the house or the McGuffeys. Since the village fire the summer before, which had wiped out the graceful old building that had housed the Weavers’ store (quickly replaced by a hideous prefab from New Hampshire) and left painful scorch marks on the back of the Wyndams’ house, Melvin had had to adjust his viewfinder to eliminate these eyesores—which he did, competently and creatively, with the same sure hand he used with all his photography.

He called his souvenir business the Vermont Scene Company of Syracuse, New York, which he had named partly in jest, hardly expecting the commercial success that would follow. He had a knack, as it turned out, for marketing as well as for capturing pristine beauty. His popular images appeared everywhere, on place mats, greeting cards, calendars, ashtrays, shot glasses, key rings, postcards, cardboard jigsaw puzzles, trays, clock faces, playing cards. When he saw his pictures on cheap tea towels and date books in souvenir shops, he was always embarrassed. But it was a lucrative business, and he was tired of babies and weddings, he told Charlotte, and anyway, he liked tromping around Vermont’s countryside. The photographs he took before the war for the Farm Security Administration had been long in storage, and he never looked at them.

The radiators all over the house began their clanging. Charlotte heard Melvin get up, go down the hall to the bathroom, close the bathroom door. She monitored his footsteps as he returned to the bedroom with his toiletries, imagined him snapping the little brown case shut, buttoning his tartan shirt, pulling his favorite gray sweater over his head.

He came down the stairs, walked toward the kitchen. Her heart lurched as he came through the door with his suitcase. Her saliva had dried up, and she couldn’t speak.

Melvin searched through the cupboard for a cup, found one in the back, and poured himself some coffee. His movements were brisk, energetic; he loved his trips to Vermont, at any time of year, in any weather. Did you sleep? he asked.

Did I keep you awake?

I noticed some activity. You sat up.

I sat up?

For a minute.

I undid my braid. It was bothering me.

He leaned back against the counter with his coffee, smiling. Really? What was it doing?

She took a breath, and didn’t answer.

I was making a joke, he said finally.

She got up to feed Hannibal, who was watching Melvin’s every move; he knew the signs of a trip, and knew he was being left behind. Don’t bother feeding him now, Charlotte. He knows I’m going, and he won’t eat. You can feed him after I go. She sat back down, feeling defeated. He poured the hot water out of the thermos, filled it with coffee, capped it, set it aside. I got through to Leona last night, he said. Orrin’s in the hospital again.

Same thing? she asked, trying to keep her voice light, and he nodded. Orrin Poole was their caretaker in Vermont. Orrin always had some calamity going on, a mysterious combination of arthritis, heart trouble, engine trouble, and what they thought he was calling bad deeds, but which they had finally decided was bad dreams. He’d looked after the place on McCrillis Hill for Mel’s parents for years, and now he did the same for Mel and Charlotte. In the winters he kept the driveway plowed and the snow off the roof, but this year he had hardly been there. Too many bad dreams.

Leona will try to get someone there today to plow. If Johnny can’t do it, she’ll try Eugene. She said there must be three feet of snow.… I may have to snowshoe in. He paused. Are you sure you’re all right?

She nodded, feeling hopeless. I’m fine.

You’re still angry about last night.

She shook her head.

I’m sorry, Charlotte. I lost my temper.

He’d come to the doorway of their bedroom where she was rocking Hoskins and offered a kind of an apology. He was at his wit’s end, he said. It was time to ask for help. She told him it wasn’t the time to discuss it; it was never a good time for her, he said; she was forever avoiding such a discussion. After a while, when she didn’t answer, he withdrew.

It’s not that, she said.

Well, something’s wrong; you should see your face.

She focused on breathing. Air in, air out; it was going in, but it wasn’t reaching her lungs. All she had to do was say, Something’s wrong with us, Mel. The problem is, she said, speaking very slowly and carefully, we don’t have a tree.

We don’t have a tree? he repeated, incredulous.

A Christmas tree.

That’s why you look so distressed, because we don’t have a Christmas tree?

It isn’t just that.

What is it, then? He stared at her, waiting.

Another opportunity. It’s us. Just two words. Her hair, which she had wrapped in a loose wheel at the back of her head, was coming undone in little spurts. Three breaths. Three heartbeats, booming. It’s us, she said softly. Alea iacta est. The die is cast. For a minute she thought perhaps he hadn’t actually heard her, but his expression told her he had. There was no going back. Caesar crossed the Rubicon and headed toward Pompeii, defying the senate and so commencing the civil war. I’ve made up my mind that we should separate, she said, heading toward the ancient city, finding the steady rhythm from her perch on the animal’s back.

He stared at her, his gray eyes changing color, and she knew that he was already at work, building his own defenses. He had to, just as she had to go forward, to plow through, to reach the real battleground. I’ve thought about it, and this is what I want, she said.

What about the children? Have you thought about them?

It will be better for them in the long run.

Is it someone else? Someone at school?

No, Mel, it’s nobody else.

What about that fellow with the roadster? He spit out the last word, showing his contempt.

One day another student had given her a ride home after class, and she had invited him in while she searched for a book. Melvin had come home unexpectedly that afternoon and had interpreted her surprise as guilt. No explanation necessary, he’d told her, waving her away brusquely, but she knew what he thought. There’s no one, Mel, I swear. It’s not like that. We live in a house divided against itself.

He exploded into a harsh laugh. Oh, baloney, Charlotte! What a time to be quoting Abraham Lincoln!

It comes from the Book of Luke. It’s from the Bible.

So what! What difference does it make where it comes from?

Please lower your voice, she said quickly. The children will hear you.

And have you thought about them? You have no idea what you’re up against with Hoskins. Getting rid of me is not the answer.

His tone was sarcastic, and she was glad for the little shove it gave her past her next moment of doubt. It will be better for them in the long run.

And for you?

"I’m not trying to get rid of you."

You’re not?

She felt herself teetering at the edge of a large open space. It will be easier without all this confusion between us.

Which kind of confusion is that? I’d be curious. Is it your principles or your feelings that cause you this confusion?

She had to say feelings. Then he wouldn’t argue, because she would have said she didn’t love him anymore. My feelings, she said.

Somehow I doubt that you know what they are. He turned away, took his leather jacket off the hook, put his hat on his head. If you want to reach me, you can call Leona at the post office and leave a message. I’ll check in with her. He dropped his cup into the sink. If you think about this a little more, you may change your mind—the boys will miss me, Charlotte, even if you don’t. Maybe my absence will help. Then you’ll see what it’s like to manage alone. He went through the door. His cup bobbled around in the greasy water for a moment and then sank.

Be careful, she whispered, watching him pick his way through the new snow, weighted down by his equipment. When he reached the garage, he opened the door and began loading his truck. She looked at the clock. It was seven exactly.

CHAPTER

2

An hour later Charlotte and Baird were playing their breakfast game with Hoskins. The younger boy was swirling the brown sugar around in his oatmeal with his finger, and Charlotte was trying not to notice. How old is Hoskins? she asked, keeping her voice bright and cheerful despite the ringing in her ears and a desperate thirst that water couldn’t seem to quench.

Baird answered for him, loud and clear. Three!

How old are you, honey? she prompted. Hoskins looked away with a shy smile.