passed only simple manifestations of broad, unterrifying beauty. There were mountains, and fields of cattle. There were silver streams that clattered alongside the highway, studded with chocolate-colored rocks. The landscape touched you with its fertile kindliness, but didn’t change you in any way. It never threatened to break your heart.
We drove all day, and reached Nebraska before dark. Clare read
We slept in a motel fifty miles west of Lincoln, and started again just after daybreak. Clare was only slightly ill that morning. We fell into a lulled rhythm of driving, reading, eating, and listening to music, with the farmland of Nebraska and Iowa and Illinois rolling by. You have to travel through the Plains to fully appreciate the emptiness of this country. Its main characteristics are not traffic and abundant store displays but a windswept solitude that lacks the dignity of true remove—no horizon is truly empty. The sun always glints on a remote water tower or silo, a billboard or a tin-roofed, temporary storehouse. Every twenty or thirty miles you pass through a struggling town which continues to exist because at some point in the past it set out to exist. We stopped for meals in some of those towns, hoping for homemade hash browns or pies baked an hour earlier by the owners’ wives, but all the food was dead, thawed and microwaved. Fields rolled by, seeded but still bare, hour after hour of blank black earth exposed to the raw sky. Clare read to us from a book of Flannery O’Connor’s stories. Our car became more and more disreputable, littered with wrappers and empty bottles. By nightfall, when we stopped at a motel in Indiana, we had all but lost track of our histories and futures—it seemed we had always been driving across a vast table of farmland and would always continue doing so. That is both the horror and the marvel of long travel. You lose track of your life with astonishing speed. An interstellar traveler would be not quite identifiable as an earthling within two weeks; after six months in deep space he or she might as well not return to earth at all.
The next day we drove through Cleveland. Clare was sick in the morning, worse than Nebraska but less severe than Pikes Peak. By the time we reached the Cleveland city limits, just after 11 a.m., she was more or less recovered.
“Cleveland,” she said. “Who ever expected to visit such a remote, exotic place?”
Bobby and I were overtaken by giddy nervousness at the town line. We pointed out buildings to one another, joked about their stature. They had seemed so grand. We drove past the limestone clutter of downtown, took the familiar exit. Our itinerary was brief. First we passed the six-story brick-and-concrete parking structure that stood where my father’s theater had been. The new building was an arrangement of tiered ramps with an unintentionally beautiful blue neon arrow pointing out the entrance. It was serene and uncomplicated, utterly functional, and it had the look of something that would stand for hundreds of years. My father’s old theater, built during the Depression, had been cheaply ornamented, its yellow bricks laid in a herringbone pattern and its aluminum marquee arched and buckling like an ocean wave. Even when it was new, it must have seemed temporary, a small monument to forgetfulness and good cheer thrown up during hard times. The parking structure was more businesslike, hard and smooth as a roach.
“That’s that,” I said. “Rest in peace, Dad.” I managed a brusque, flippant tone because I couldn’t bear the idea of myself gone maudlin at such an obvious moment. I didn’t mind my own sentimentality but I hated to be a sucker. I was not wholly sorry my father’s business was gone. I was vaguely ashamed and lonely, yet pleased with myself simply for being alive; for surviving into the future. Only the most dedicated nostalgist could have argued against the notion that this part of town had been generally improved. New restaurants announced their names in gilt letters, and a famous department-store chain was renovating the defunct family-owned store that had stocked drab outdated clothes and gaudy costume jewelry.
We passed my family’s old house, which looked wonderful. The new owners had painted it pine green, and had reshingled the roof. A skylight had been installed over my parents’ former bedroom. I could imagine the current state of the rooms: the woodwork would be painted white, and the carpet taken up to expose the oak floors. There would be art, and spare leather furniture.
“Shit,” Bobby said. “Look what they did to it.”
“It looks great,” I told him. “Don’t stop. It isn’t ours anymore, don’t even think about going up to the front door and asking if we can look inside.”
“I wouldn’t want to,” he said, though I knew if he’d been alone he’d have done just that. Bobby had no talent for leaving things alone.
Our last stop was the cemetery. We drove to the tract where Bobby had lived, past the low flagstone wall on which the word “Woodlawn” floated in scrolled wrought-iron letters, the final “n” broken off but its silhouette remaining, a pale shadow on the stone. We followed the serpentine street, past houses that repeated themselves in threes, and parked at the site of Bobby’s old home. The house was gone, burned almost twenty years ago and bulldozed away, but no one had built anything in its place. This subdivision was not undergoing renewal. It appeared that the residents had annexed the property without formally purchasing it: a small garden was staked out, ready for spring planting, and a swing set stood rusting among the weeds. It seemed the Morrows’ holdings had become a sort of People’s Park in the suburbs of Cleveland. The others on the block, those who still lived in the fading jerry-built ranch houses with birdbaths or plaster dwarfs on their lawns, had appropriated it. I could imagine them gathering there at dusk, their children swaying creakily on the swings as the women planted sunflower seeds and murmured over the day’s events. It was slightly criminal, an unfounded claim made by people who were not prospering but only getting by, and as such the property had passed beyond reclamation. To own this parcel of land now you would have to wrest it back from those who had learned to care for it. If you leveled their tiny works and put up a new house you would be an invader, not much different from a colonial, and the land would be tainted until your house fell down again. This suburban quarter-acre had returned to its wilder purpose, and could not be redomesticated without a fight that would leave the victor’s hands stained.
“This was it,” Bobby said. Clare looked around incredulously. She had not expected anything so ordinary, although we’d done our best to prepare her.
We got out of the car and walked onto the patch of bare ground under the singular openmouthed gaze of a red-haired boy who had been digging in the dirt with a tablespoon when we pulled up. As we walked across, Bobby said, “Here’s where the front door was. And, like, this right here would have been the living room. That was the kitchen over there.”
We stood for a moment in the phantom house, looking around. It was so utterly gone, so evaporated. Sun shone on the bare earth. Clare bent to pick up a little beige plastic man crouched with a bazooka.
“This was the den, I think,” Bobby said. “Or maybe it was over there.”
We crossed the gully that separated the property from the graveyard, jumping the trickle of brown water that ran along the bottom. Bobby looked for a moment at a stone angel balanced atop a marker, the tallest monument around. She stood canted forward, on tiptoe, her slender arms raised in an attitude more ecstatic than solemn. I don’t imagine the carver intended her look of triumphant sexuality.
“There used to be a fence here,” Bobby said in a tone of defensive pride. “Our back yard was, you know, more private than this.”
I remembered that the angel had appeared over the top of the Morrows’ fence, floating among the branches.
“Mm-hm,” Clare said. She had grown quieter since we reached Cleveland. I couldn’t tell what was on her mind.
Bobby led us straight to his family’s graves. They lay some distance from where the house had been, in a newer section of the cemetery. Rows of markers continued for some fifty feet, and beyond that we could see the line where the advancing tide of graves ended and the unbroken grass lay waiting for those who were, at that moment, still alive.
“This is it,” Bobby said. His father, mother, and brother had similar granite stones, shiny and dark gray, wet- looking, carved only with their names and dates. We stood before the graves in silence. Bobby gazed at the stones with a simple and almost impersonal respect, like a tourist visiting a shrine. By now his mourning was over and he’d fallen away from the ongoing process of his family’s demise. They had sailed off, all three of them, and left him here. After a while he said, “Sometimes I wonder if there should be, you know, some kind of message on their stones. You can’t tell anything about them, except that they were related.”
