The Postwar Dream

Grouse:

It was the winter of '49 when my life came apart.
It was the winter that my world started and stopped
with the chime of the wind from the east,
signaling the cold beast of another storm, and the promise of snow.

I lost myself in a world of white while inside my mother died
from some affliction of the mind, or so the doctors told my father
when she drew her last breath, I couldn't have been farther from her.
In the wintery world my mind was set on play.

So I died a little the day my mother passed, but when the eastern chime
again filled my ears, my loss was fast put away and I donned my boots,
coat, and the snow cleansed me in blood
while inside my father courted the same lover that had know my mother.

I was eight in the winter of 1949 when both my parents died suddenly of mysterious and highly irregular causes within the span of two weeks, and I was sent to live with my uncle. My father had been a serviceman in the war, who, after fighting on several small, long forgotten Pacific islands, had won the Silver Star and the right to be transferred stateside on reserve, where he had been shot in a barroom brawl and had his left leg amputated. He had met my mother six months before Pearl Harbor, and had married and impregnated her before shipping out for training. My mother had been young, not even eighteen, at the time, and raised me on her own for the entire duration of the war while working in a stateside Red Cross hospital near Scranton. She mostly worked nights and cared for me during those grey days when the Pacific war was at a frenzy and news of the casualties seemed simultaneously overwhelming in their breadth and crushing in their datedness. Word would surface about deaths in battles that had occurred weeks before, and the weight of not knowing the fate of the only man she had ever known, hung over my mother, and consequentially, our house, like a heavy wet blanket.

After he returned home, my father, disabled from his unfortunate foray into the world of alcoholic binging, enrolled in classes at the University of Pittsburgh, and upon receiving his baccalaureate, took a job teaching English writing and literature - the only subject he had not virtually failed - at a the Scranton Middle School. Shortly afterwards, I remember he began working on his novel, a tragic and bitter story of war, terror, and Hemingwayeque disillusionment. It began to consume him, and I often remember lying awake at night, staring up at the creaking floorboards of his study above my head as he paced back and forth across the weathered pine, working through the inner demons he was transferring, gruesomely unto his characters.

My mother held down two jobs, and brought in the majority of the modest income that supplied our house with foodstuffs, clothing, and other necessities of modern living. Every year that passed she would look hawkishly older and more bent, a posture that belied her mere 26 year-old self. Dark circles colored the fragile skin under her eyes, and her smile, which was at once comforting and heart-wrenching, appeared less often and was increasingly broken, as if it was given merely to stave off the tears that hid behind her eyes. Meals were silent, my mother's simple cooking occupying the space between my father's dower downward stare and Mother's broken visage. I would sit quietly and stare between them, the air heavy with unsaid words and the sadness of one too many broken dreams.

That winter - the winter of 1949 - seemed less tense. My mother had been employed at the end of October as a full-time nurse, allowing her to quit her second job as a store clerk and spend more time at home. I enjoyed that time immensely, and would spend the evenings reading to her out of schoolbooks. My father still spent his evenings pacing in his attic study, which had become a cavern of wads of paper, used rolls of ink strip, and stacks of prose, each page less involving than the last. His work was going nowhere and he knew it.

Seemingly without fail, every two weeks, from the first week in November, until the second week in March, a strong easterly wind would arise, sounding the small metallic mobile of pipes and ornamental robins which hung from the roof of the front porch, that faced the bitter winds off the Long Island Sound, and during the night, a heavy, thick blanket of snow would cover every bare surface on our small acreage. The expanse of white glittered in the morning sun when I would look out my window and would run downstairs, catch up my coat and boots, and disappear into the endless sea until the dark cover of night foreclosed any further castle making or Frankensteinian creations for the day.

The day my mother was taken ill, I was out playing, creating bricks of snow and building them up into a grand fort, which sat behind a retaining wall and a low ditch. I had been creating it for some days, importing snow from other areas of the yard, and steadily cementing the rectangles into place with snow warmed from the heat of my hands. It was a magnificent structure and I daydreamed during the evenings about the great battle it could withstand when my school chums came over to storm it, and me, lord of the manor, hurling an inexhaustible supply of ice-covered balls of powdered water from behind the ballasts and bastions of my stronghold.

My mother had been fighting a serious bought of flu for the past two weeks, I remember, and she had stayed home from work for several days the week before her death. However, despite her still ill condition, she, out of necessity, had been steadily working her shift at the hospital for the last five days. She had stayed home that day, complaining of blurred vision and difficulty walking, most likely, she hypothesized, from an inner ear infection due to the flu. I sat at the breakfast table, my mind distant and focused on the tower I was constructing, a spectacular 360 degree protective cocoon, with a hidden tunnel entrance, and walls constructed out of snow ball ammunition. I went outside, and began construction, and an hour later my mother, completely blind, stumbled down the basement stairs and split her head open, mumbling incoherently, and jerking her limbs uncontrollably. My father carried her into their bedroom and yelled at me to telephone Dr. Katzenburg, the local physician. The doctor arrived half an hour later, pulling up in his black sedan, one fender crumpled in some long ago collision.

"How are you, Grouse my boy?" He said, his voice booming across the snow toward my fort, seeming to pick up resonance as it expanded out into the countryside. "That's quite the citadel you have there!"

Dr. Katzenburg worked with my mother at the hospital, and we had made the Seder two years ago with his family, an odd assortment of people, which included Dr. Katzenburg, a large and imposing man; his waifish wife; his two sons, both as tall and broad as their father; and their adopted daughter, Lara, a Vietnamese by birth, a Jew by necessity of adoption.

"I'm fine Doctor, thank you," I said, turning back to my work.

"I hear your mother's taken ill," he said, making his way across the snow toward me.

"Yessir."

He stopped over me, standing around the side of my retaining wall, and smiled down at me. "You want to come in and help me work? Your mother says you've taken quite an interest in medicine."

"No, thank you, sir," I replied quickly. "I'd really like to finish my 'citadel' today. We're going to have a big fight tomorrow after school."

Dr. Katzenburg clearly wanted to press the issue, and in retrospect the reason was clear: he knew my mother was beyond his country doctor ability to help. However, he decided to let it rest, and nodded. "Well, okay then; come in if you like." He turned and walked back toward the house, shaking the snow from his trouser leg.

My mother died that afternoon. Her illness and the doctor's arrival had all but slipped my mind as the sun descended from its crescendo, until I heard my name called, and turned to see my father standing on the porch in his undershirt, his arms bare in the wind. I tramped in obediently, sensing, even in my obtuse young mind, that something had gone horribly wrong.

My mother was lying on their bed, her eyes closes, her hands splayed painfully, and her arms - obviously arranged - folded on her chest. Her stomach was caved in and her legs were bent, as if her lower half was attempting to curl into the fetal position. She did not look at all peaceful; on the contrary, it seemed that she had been in agony as she died. Her face was contorted into an expression that resembled the look of having splinters shoved beneath your nails. Her hands were curled into claws, and long scratches ran along the back of her neck, as if she was trying to rip out the source of her pain.

I stood there silently, staring at her, unthinking, not registering what exactly was happening, as if I expected her to suddenly move, to open her eyes and laughingly say, "Just kidding!" My father stood behind me, the muscles in his jaw knotting and unknotting themselves, as if he was trying to chew the depth of the import of this event down into some swallowable pulp.

"I'll contact Josef Liebiwitz at Shema," Dr. Katzenburg said. "He can come pick up the body whenever you're ready, Irvine."

My father grunted in approval, turning his head toward the doctor, but never taking his eyes off my mother.

"They will take care of the Tahara," Dr. Katzenburg continued. "But you'll need people to perform Shmira. Do you know any of Esther's Jewish friends?"

My father turned his head and finally broke the penetrating gave he had fixed on my mother. "Yes, of course; I'll get her telephone book. If you'll follow me, Doctor." They left me alone in the room, which suddenly vacated, felt cold as the warmth of the living was swallowed up by the coldness of the dead. I took my mother's hand; it was stiff and immovable in mine. I swallowed hard and put my hand up under her nose, checking, just in case. Nothing. I crawled up in the bed, the wire springs squeaking under the new weight addition, and laid my head down on her cold breasts.

The Kvurah B'karka was short. The day before a cold wind had come in out of the North, lacking the benefit of snow, and chilled the bones of those gathered. The ground was hard, and it took heavy machinery and the hands of many dedicated Jews to break the hard ground so that my mother could be lowered into it in her Aron. The rabbi spoke words in Hebrew that I did not understand, and performed the sacred, ancient, and holy service of the lost Children. I did not know many of the people in attendance. Old and young people floated past me, and hugged my to them, smelling of cheap perfume and matzoh.

I do not remember much of those hours spent after the burial of my mother, but when we returned home, my father snuffling from the cold and a flu he had acquired over the past four days, silently driving me back to the dark farmhouse on the hill, I heard the chiming of the east wind again, and eagerly awaited the snow promised by it. My father took a bottle of whiskey and his can of smoking tobacco upstairs, disappearing into his study, and consequentially, the creaking resumed in short order. I slipped upstairs in my pajamas, and pushed open the door to their bedroom. The bed stood tall and brass in the middle of the room. My father had not slept in it since my mother's death. A waft of my mother's familiar perfume greeted me as I opened the door, as did a blast of chilly air. I slipped in, and pushed the door to, then climbed up in their bed, rolled onto my mother's side, and pulled the covers up over my head.

My father did not come to bed that night. The squeaking of his tireless tread continued into the night, accompanied by loud crashes as he threw empty bottles and boxes around in a blind, aimless fury. The wind howled against the window panes and the snow flurried down in small cyclones, thick and fluffy, covering the ground anew and erasing the wounds therein.

I caught up my hat and coat the next morning and fled from the house in a mad rush that was half joy to return to my building project and half exodus from the emotional trap that the small wooden structure had become for me. I stopped short as I approached the fort. My tower lay toppled, broken by the wind, the carefully iced snowballs strewn across the inside of the fort. I carefully picked my way through the expansive interior of the small castle, collecting pieces of the tower and setting them down, as I prepared to rebuild the felled structure.

I worked on the tower all day, until the sun had set so far that I could no longer see to work. I do not know if it was determination to complete the project or the fear of returning home that drove me forward, but I stopped neither for lunch or dinner, having already precluded breakfast. As I trudged back, foreboding haunting me across the lawn, I noticed the only glowing light in the house, way up in the small circular window of the attic. I climbed the creaking stairs, and pushed the ajar door open, the thin wood creaking back on its rusted hinges.

My father lay between the small mountains of his novel, on a bed of broken glass, his typewriter broken on the floor next to him. He was splayed much in the same way that I imagined that my mother had been, before she was arranged for my benefit. His eyes stared unblinkingly up at me, as if he had died waiting for me to come up the stairs. His hands were twisted into claws and gashes marred his forehead. His face looked as if he had slowly had his intestines unraveled from within by means of some ancient torture device. Slowly, I closed the door, and descended the stairs. I slept in my fort that night, curled up in the tower, covered in a blanket and my coat, listening to the banshee scream of the wind across the opening far above my head.

I stayed with the Katzenburgs until my uncle, a tall and imposing man, handsome, but with a coldness that you see in the faces of bankers and financial aficionados. He was much older than my father had been; at least 40, with steel grey hair creeping up from his temples, and hard, pale blue eyes that pierced through the haze that had surrounded me since my fathers death. His name was Julius (I believe he changed it at some point, but was never sure) and he lived in New York City, doing some job, the nature of which I never inquired. When he arrived, sliding into the crowded driveway of the Katzenburgs in the kind of sleek, long black sedan that makes you think of Amazonian snakes, or tar floating on water, he immediately sought me out, his ears attentively listening to the buzz of the mourning, but his eyes fixing me with an unblinking stare.

"So," he said to me. "You must be Grouse. I can't say that I've heard much about you, young man; I haven't spoken to your father in some number of years. I don't think we've even met. I would be your Uncle, of course."

I swallowed and shifted my weight, nervous like the way children always are when being engaged by a person of older and greater import than themselves.

"Yessir."

"I'm sure its a tragedy of some small measure. Both of them going like that, you see. And now you're to come live with me." - Here he smiled the smile of a predator having cornered an unsuspecting prey. "What do you think of that, Young Grouse?"

"I'm sure it will be nice, sir." I wasn't. In fact, I was fairly sure that it wouldn't be. Besides, what of my fortress? Left all alone on that desolate farm to be broken down by wind and springtime warmth.

"Yes, undoubtedly," he said, but I could tell he believed that statement no more than I did.

My father's funeral done, and him lying cold in the hard earth next to my mother, the two laid closer together than they ever had been in life, my uncle collected me in the backseat of his automobile, my meager belongings in the trunk, and left behind the bare wood house in the Pennsylvanian field. I watched the snow fort disappear into the white from the back window, the turret of the home I had known for just a night still toppled a little, the icy north wind swallowing it up into a tornado of white.

Author's note: I wrote this story in 3 hours over the course of an afternoon. The subject matter came from the brief poem that preceeded it (both in chronology and in text) that came to me all but spontaneously. The first stanza of the poem came to me and I began writing the rest rather quickly, which is odd because poetry is by no means my forté. From there I decided to embellish it, as if the narrator had himself written the poem, and then commenced to tell the story of his young life.

I haven't yet edited this piece much, and it is very much as it was first put down. As it stands my own observations are that is may be a bit skeletal and lacks a strongly defined plot.

I hope you enjoyed,
Andrew Austin