"Seasons Clear, and Awe" - Chapter 11
by Matthew Gasda
We continue this week in serializing our inaugural contest winner’s novel, Seasons Clear, and Awe, by Matthew Gasda. New subscribers can catch up with the previous chapters below:
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“Seasons Clear, and Awe” chronicles three decades in the life of the Gazda family, whose children inherit not wealth but something more dangerous: their parents’ unlived ambitions and their mother’s gift for psychological dissection. As Stephen and Elizabeth grow from precocious children into neurotic artists in their thirties, Matthew Gasda reveals how post-industrial, late 20th century America created a generation too intelligent for ordinary happiness, too self-aware for decisive action: suspended between the working-class pragmatism of their fathers and the creative and spiritual aspirations of their mothers, capable of everything except building lives.
Matthew Gasda is the founder of the Brooklyn Center for Theater Research and the author of many books, including the recent novel The Sleepers and Writer’s Diary.
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Elizabeth read Boettner’s letters to her brother zealously and jealously. When she was done reading (she had read every word, trying even to memorize some sections on the fly), Elizabeth carefully put the letters back where she found them, and thought with satisfaction, that there was no way for her brother to know, or to prove, that she ever removed to them to read them; she would never tell him (under no circumstances would she tell him).
She found the way the two young men talked about art and literature intuitively irritating and infuriating; no one had given them the right to think this way about themselves. They had elected themselves poets and seers. And the two young men would later become poets. Why not?
Boettner had divided his affections and his passions so evenly in such a gendered way. Stephen received Boettner’s intellectual self, and she received Boettner’s sensual and romantic self. And she realized, reading Boettner’s letters, that he would never really think of her or speak to her as an equal. She would always be a woman, an idealized type, a muse rather than a civilized human being who deserved this kind of intelligent, bookish discourse.
For years, going back to junior year of high school, she and Boettner had met and rambled all over Bethlehem: the Municipal Golf Course, along the Lehigh River, along the Monocacy Creek, in the Ski Hill Cemetery, downtown Colonial Core, the nameless cemetery near Boettner’s mother’s house. Boettner’s father had left when he was three and lived, as far as Elizabeth could tell, as a shut-in on disability (though he had once been a doctor and a highly cultured man).
During these rambles, Boettner could go on up to a half an hour, even an hour sometimes without speaking, and when he did speak, it would be in over-intense utterances, and sometimes they would kiss without erotic charge, and she would feel him trembling, basically terrified. And she would understand, over and over again, that no kind of sexual thing would be possible with such a perceptive, neurotic, uncharming man.
Sexual things would have to happen with men like John: taller, stronger, generally more masculine men, who didn’t think about sex but just did it, who fucked so that they could flash their masculine beauty and feel the breakthrough of a happy animal self.
Boettner also wrote letters to Elizabeth, but they were strange, shorter, mostly reportage about his time at Vassar: his weird obsession with the Vassar Quidditch team, some Asian girl that he had fallen into consummated (of course) love with, his devotion to the thought of Nietzsche.
She wondered what her brother thought about Boettner’s sexlessness.
Her brother was sex-obsessed; he had tried to seduce her friend Megan at a party over the weekend, who had a boyfriend. Megan, as far as she could tell, was Stephen’s type (Belgian, very womanly, heavy-breasted, maternal, anxious and forceful).
Stephen pursued mental intimacy with anyone and everyone he could. And this embarrassed Elizabeth, who didn’t like ideas and didn’t like gossip, and preferred to talk about concrete things, how things were made, how things were done, how things worked. She despised the eroticized banter that her brother traded in, that he had learned from and distilled from their mother, who also, in a foolish and doomed way, subtly tried to seduce and amuse and draw everyone in, even strangers.
Alternately, though, she was grateful to her brother, somewhat unconsciously, that he had taken responsibility for this sliver of their mother’s personality, because Stephen confidently and romantically pursued his appetites and a life of surprise and unattached, aestheticized hookups. She could keep her desires close at hand within herself, maybe like her father, who showed only a very few emotions and very subtle shadings of intensity.
She could not trust charming men, because charming men were too much like her brother and her mother, and could only trust stoic men like John and like Boettner, though they were stoic in very, very different ways for very, very different reasons: men who essentially were charmless, who expected you just to admire them (in John’s case for his arctic beauty and in Boettner’s case for his arctic intellect).
Expressive men who exposed their hearts too quickly produced a sense of dread. There was something too feminine about it, something that nullified her own feminine sexuality.
Elizabeth heard the front door creak open, as if her brother had borrowed a key or had his own copy of the front door key. His face was rosy.
—That felt great, he said, perhaps exaggerating the degree to which he was out of breath.
—Oh yeah?
—Yeah, you should start running.
—I don’t like running, Elizabeth said ruefully.
—What’s that?
—It’s an herb. It’s good for steamed lentils and carrots with kelp.
—Ooh, yummy, Stephen said, with apparent sincerity (they were both vegans).
—I also made some burdock tea, if you want some.
—What does burdock do?
—It’s good for a lot of things. And it’s better for women. You should drink it too.
—Whatever the doctor orders.
—You get sick a lot.
—I’m running 40 plus miles a week. I mean, I think maybe I should try eating meat again, but I can’t bring myself to. And it’s disgusting.
—Yeah, it crosses my mind too. I might in Germany, Elizabeth said, referring to her second semester plans.
—When do you leave?
—I don’t know, I’m not entirely sure yet, but right after Christmas, like early January.
—Dresden?
—Yeah.
—How do you feel about that, do you wish you were going to Berlin?
—No, I feel like it’s a lot like Bethlehem. I feel like I’ll feel at home.
—Well, Bethlehem was built by Germans, so...
—Yeah. It’s amazing how... we just keep replicating it wherever we go, Stephen continued.
—That’s the way things go brother.
Elizabeth set out plates and two cups, pouring the burdock tea from the glazed blue teapot which she bought at an estate sale with her mother in Pennsylvania, before dishing out lentils with carrots and seaweed.
Stephen looked hungry. —You’re too skinny, bunghole, she said.
—Okay, Mom.
—Aww, you’re so skinny, you need to eat, she said, pinching his cheeks.
Stephen was on the road in his 1998 Ford Taurus, which he’d had since junior year of high school, through Western Mass on his way back to Syracuse. His iPod was playing through the car speakers via the tape deck. He was listening to Beach House’s Zebra. Anyway you want to run, you run before us, black and white horse arching among us. Using a period of interregnum, he was only taking one class: Logic, which he had to complete to get his philosophy degree, and doing a thesis on Virginia Woolf with the professor, Dr. Kara Bradley, who was willing to let him combine English and philosophy. He was rereading The Waves, To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Dalloway, and her diaries. He was also reading Heidegger, Bergson, and William James on the psychology of time. Then he found that he basically had nothing to say. He just, in some ways, wanted an excuse to reread those novels. Without much of a class burden, he would get up, write poetry and letters on his typewriter, go for a long five-mile run, make a smoothie, and then sit reading in the big green plush chair that he’d brought from Bethlehem to Syracuse the year before. His apartment was on Genesee Street in Syracuse, about a half mile off campus, which was rare for Syracuse students who were afraid of the surrounding community. He lived with his roommate, Andrea, who was in the MBA program for music and entertainment industries. Stephen had started in the program but dropped out, realizing that music and producing were more of a vocation, that he wasn’t going to be brand new, and that he was compelled by his friend Dan, who was meant to be an American Joyce. Dan was the critic who couldn’t write much of his own: two poems a year, letters, and essays. Stephen was the graphomaniac.
School was an excuse to get library books and read. He hadn’t been dating too actively since he broke up with Finley. He had sex maybe once a week with Kristen, a philosophy student and punk with blue hair, who he found very beautiful despite her own concrete attempts at downplaying her beauty. He had met her in an ethics class. She’d invited him over to a party at her house in the Westcott neighborhood, which was the bohemian hipster part of the Syracuse Greater Campus area. At around two in the morning, she kissed him in the hallway. He wasn’t sure if she was into him, but she clearly was, he thought, and it made him think about that night. He stayed over and they talked again the morning before he walked home. He wrote letters to Gloria, a philosophy student he met that summer in Paris, who was also living there. They met at Shakespeare and Company while he was playing the piano on the second floor. He was thinking of the “Before” movies and then the moment came to him in one of the exact places where the Before Sunset began (the bookstore). He was planning to go to Milan that summer if he could find a way to afford it. Maybe he could convince his parents to give him a graduation party. The only person who really knew about Gloria was Dan.
He started to cry: Teen Dream was such a beautiful album. The trees were changing color, and he could feel the fullness of human life. It was right there in front of him, if only he could lay hold of it. Don’t live through ideas, live through what’s here. Through music, speed, movement, power, love. That too was an idea. Destroy all ideas.
Things had to work out a certain way, they had to. It was impossible that he should have to, like his father, teach high school for forty years. Not because it was beneath him, but because that just wasn’t who he was. It couldn’t be who he was.
He loved this time of year, he loved being in college. He loved going to the library and watching Criterion movies at night with his friends and a bottle of wine. He had no practical skills. The only job he’d ever had was mowing lawns and working as an R.A., which weren’t really jobs.
He was a philosophy major. His father was getting nervous, his mother said she was proud of him. Frederick Beiser said he was the best student he’d ever had. Dympna Callaghan said he should study Shakespeare in graduate school. Those things mattered. What mattered were the people who thought you were special, who saw it, who knew, who shared the knowledge of what you really were.
He’d had a good time in Boston, despite the attention of his sister. She, along with Dan Boettner, was his best friend. She was Dorothy Wordsworth. Boettner was Coleridge. Genius was always co-occurring. Genius arose in clusters and networks. They were proof of each other’s powers.
Gloria had seen it too. Meeting her had also been proof of something. You could fall in love in a few hours. You could actually visit Paris and meet someone and walk around and touch souls.
It was around nine o’clock, the Sunday before Thanksgiving. Both kids were driving, which also made her anxious (especially because Stephen had already gotten three or four speeding tickets over the years, driving back and forth to Syracuse, which she, of course, had paid off herself).
The risotto she had prepared was warming on the stove. She hoped that Stephen would not insist on keeping his new, extreme form of veganism (raw), that he would permit himself to eat some cooked food while he was home for the holidays.
Adele could never sleep the night before her children came home; latent worry became over-active, malevolent.
By conventional accounts, her kids were going to good schools. They weren’t troublemakers; they were extremely intelligent. But there were worries.
Elizabeth had, at one point or another, struggled during her time at BU; every year, at some point, she insisted was leaving or dropping out. She wished she had gotten into Vassar. She wished she were going to Vassar. Every year she had begun transfer applications to other schools, but never submitted She considered changing her major from art history to philosophy, but in the end, hadn’t. Or didn’t. And so on.
Stephen, conversely, was less bothered, or not bothered at all, by any perceived shortcomings in his own school placement, and mystically confident about what he was doing, or meant to do (write), but he didn’t have any clear plan for what to do after graduation (beyond, as far as she could tell, read books).
And Adele knew it was setting him up for conflict with his father.
Adele didn’t think Stephen needed a quote, plan, or an internship, or some token piece of résumé building. Or some token résumé-building activity. But her husband disagreed. And subsequently, it was almost worse than any success or failure. It was something on the horizon for Stephen.
Unconsciously. Adele considered Michael’s judgment, and lack of imagination, a worse punishment for her son than anything the real world could mete out.
Michael was downstairs watching Sunday Night Football. It wasn’t an Eagles game. It was just football, filling the time. Her husband was on an experimental course of drugs, offered by Harvard Medicine, which brought Michael frequently to Boston. A form of leukemia, which entailed the gradual, steady, and unsure potential of a deadly virus. His wife had brought this up to him four years before. The drug, which he would have to take for the rest of his life, made him tired and grumpy (or so she believed). Though the side effects were, admittedly, almost indistinguishable from regular aging.
Cancer had allowed Michael to take a year off from school, on medical leave. Ironically, during that year, she and her husband had become closer than they had been since the kids were little. That was 2007. Now he was back to teaching, at least for another few years, before he could retire. And a strategic, ambiguous distance, an emotional distance, opened up between them again.
Open conflict, moreover loomed, when the kids graduated; graduation meant the end of the parenting experiment, the unveiling of results, the beginning of tallying and recrimination over went right or wrong.
The day after Thanksgiving, Dan Boettner, who Elizabeth hadn’t heard from directly in almost a year (though he wrote regularly to her brother), asked to go for a walk, which had been their habit since early high school. And so they agreed to meet at God’s Acre Cemetery downtown, where all the original Moravians were buried.
—You’re going to meet Dan? Adele, who believed that the two young people were meant to be together, but had been told many times by her daughter to back off, asked.
—Just for a walk.
—That’s nice.
—Thanks Mom.
—You look nice darling.
Elizabeth wore a grey peacoat with a thick red scarf she had knitted herself during the school year; her long hair (she had cut it short freshmen year only to let it grow unabated since) falling over her shoulders.
—Thanks Mom.
—Dinner will be ready for you when you get back.
She was still with John, but she was glad Dan had texted her; and he wasn’t a threat, sexually, really; in a way she needed both men, or both types of men, in her life, to be happy.
Boettner was the opposite of her boyfriend. Extremely thin, emotional, and perceptive: an individual who possessed an inner core that made any kind of falseness or feigning untenable.
Because she had divided her romantic energies into similar archetypal categories as her mother had; Elizabeth’s feelings for Dan and John occurred to her, formed in each least symmetrical parallel with her own mother’s relationships with Tom Villani, her first love, and her father: there was the hypersensitive local boy artist, who was lover material, and then the tall, strong athlete who was husband and father material.
The lack of respect their mother showed their father, or at least often did, too surely influenced Elizabeth. That lack of respect in flagrant ways, but in small, significant ways (always letting the kids know that Michael’s masculine way of ordering the household was too inflexible and could be safely ignored in favor of more creative, outside-the-box solutions).
It was about 46 degrees. Stephen said Syracuse had already received 100 inches of snow by Thanksgiving, but it hadn’t snowed here yet in Bethlehem. Boston had also gotten some snow, but Pennsylvania just kind of looked grim and bald.
God’s Acre was a small cemetery, less than the size of a football field.
They would maybe start here, she imagined, and then walk over to Nisky Hill Cemetery, which was bigger, more of a 19th-century rather than an 18th-century cemetery.
These cemeteries were two of the most special places in Bethlehem. Bethlehem could be so ugly and modern, and so old and sacred in the spirit of the Moravians, depending on the direction you were looking or where you were standing.
Some streets were colonial, some were Victorian, some were industrial, some were mid-century.
There are so many interesting features to the city that have been silently erased. Streetcars once run through downtown. Her mom used to take an old diesel train to Philadelphia from the station that ran along the Lehigh. Her AP U.S. History teacher in high school had told her that there used to be a magnificent island-park in the Lehigh River, but it had been actually removed and leveled to make room for barges that needed to dock at the steel.
It almost seemed unfair that she didn’t get to experience these different Bethlehems with streetcars and trains and horse-drawn carriages.
Bethlehem had once been an industrial, polyglot city; now it was a deracinated, almost Disney version of its past self, and that made her angry.
And this was why she was going to Dresden in the spring for BU’s study abroad program, because she wanted to try to experience the town. It had actually, in some ways, rebuilt itself along 19th-century lines (this was both a conscious and unconscious thought).
After about ten minutes of waiting, just when she was getting angry and ready to send an angry text on her flip phone and storm off, Boettner appeared. He was wearing a gray jacket, slacks, New Balance sneakers (because he refused to wear anything nice like leather shoes or boots), and a knit cap.
He was probably underdressed; the jacket was thin, he was just wearing a t-shirt underneath. There was no chance he was wearing long johns. But Boettner liked to underprepare, to unthink, to just be. That was his thing.
—I walked over here, he said.
—I drove. I would have picked you up.
—No, it’s okay, Dan said.
—Long time no see, she said without smiling.
—Yeah? Well, do you want to walk?
—Yeah, we can walk.
They began a slow stroll between the flat graves.