"Seasons Clear, and Awe" - Chapter 12
by Matthew Gasda
This week we serialize the penultimate chapter of our inaugural contest winner’s novel, Seasons Clear, and Awe, by Matthew Gasda. New subscribers can catch up with the previous chapters below:
Submissions are still open for our next quarterly contest, whose deadline is January 28th, 2026. Finalists are awarded $500, and the Winner $1,000. We’re excited to announce that, due to subscribers like you, it’s free to submit for the foreseeable future. Spread the word (and throw your hat in the ring!).
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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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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.
Boettner smiled. She sensed that his version of emotion was impossible, or rather that he considered emotion impossible. But to feel this way, to feel anything close to magic or dream was impossible, and so that she would have to, in effect, give him permission to enjoy this, the half-sickness, the strangeness of the faintest hope of what? Was it kissing, was it holding hands, was it collapsing into the snowy loam of the graveyard and making love, was it the gradual descent into death together, husband and wife? Was it a cold distance, saying hello, catching up, resigning themselves to talking three times a year at holidays and oversummers, was it summer, all of these things she didn’t know he didn’t know? It was embarrassing not to know.
—How’s the semester going? she asked.
—It’s fine.
She took a deep drag of air, swollen, terrified, happy. —Are you seeing anyone, or like in love with anyone?
—I’m not in love, Boettner said, matter-of-factly.
—You were last year.
—That was last year, he said.
She felt a rush of unforgiveness, —you hold onto things for a long time.
—I do, but that doesn’t mean.... And his voice disappeared.
They were walking down the stone path through the diametric vertical center of the graveyard.
—Doesn’t mean what?
—Nothing Boettner said.
—No tell me.
—Are you still in love with me? she asked. —Do you love me? Is that what you’re trying to say?
—I something you, Boettner said. —And I think I’d be dead if I couldn’t see you or talk to you Elizabeth.
—Oh, dramatic, dramatic, she said, —dramatic, dramatic, dramatic.
—Honest.
—You’re so dishonest, she said, contradicting him, wanting to cry. —You’re disgusting,
—Thank you.
—No, I mean it Dan, you’re disgusting.
—Happy Thanksgiving, he said.
She felt a sense of spatial lostness, disorientation. She hadn’t gotten in the car, driven here, nine minutes away, to repeat the same blunder that she’d been repeating with Boettner since 10th grade: stinking, bloodless, romantic formality without bodily contact; nauseating, faux seriousness without directness.
(And yet, she clearly had.)
—If you loved me, I don’t think you would act like this, she said, after ninenty seconds where they both walked looking at their feet.
—What’s like this? he asked.
—I don’t know what to call it. Abstract. Theoretical. I don’t think you really want to know me,.
—That’s all I want...
—What’s really on your mind, Dan?
—I went to see my dad this morning.
—How was that? she asked.
—Unpleasant, he said, —disturbing. He’s a hoarder. He’s on disability. His apartment is disgusting.
—I’m sorry, she said.
—He seems very happy. He has no complaints. He couldn’t be happier not to be a doctor anymore. He couldn’t be happier never to leave his apartment.
—Do you envy that kind of life? she asked.
—I think I’m drawn to it, he said.—And I know I shouldn’t be.
—Do you think you’ll end up like your father? she asked.
—It’s not impossible. Do you think you’ll end up like your parents back there?
—I don’t think I could possibly end up like either of my parents, Elizabeth said.
—Then who are you afraid of ending up like?
—Do I have to be afraid of ending up like someone? Elizabeth asked.
—I think everybody has someone... that they’re running from... becoming... I don’t know, it could be a character from a book or a movie that you’re running from that you don’t want to become. It could be a neighbor or a friend, I don’t know. It could be your brother.
—It’s not my brother. Elizabeth cut him off. —Maybe my grandmother.
—That makes sense, Boettner said. —How was your Thanksgiving, or how was it?
—It was fine. My Uncle Don came over for dinner. My dad and brother watched football.
Boettner was the only child who lived with his mother. He didn’t have a brother and a father. Everything she took as normal and perfunctory was extraordinary to him.
She looked over at Boettner: he wasn’t looking at her; she could feel the gray hush of his mind remembering, running away, digesting everything, and turning it into purely intellectual phrases.
She looked at his slanted, Magyar eyes. She wanted to kiss him. Or for him to kiss her, but he never would.
He only had once. The summer before college. And only then for a second.
It occurred to her that he almost certainly was still a virgin. That his only talent really was virginity, and that he had no idea of how to grow up, or any idea of what to do after college (any idea of how to be anything other than a precocious, know-it-all, teenage boy in Bethlehem).
They passed out of the south gate to the cemetery, headed downhill towards, now on the sidewalk, out of the cemetery towards downtown Main Street, which was a half block away.
Bethlehem was simultaneously small and big at the same time. You could hit most of the major landmarks in a day or night, walking in at the same time. And yet, you could never really feel like you knew the town.
—Your brother’s mad at me, Boettner said.
—Why is that? she asked.
—I guess I criticized his writing.
—I don’t think he’s mad at you, she said —he wants to hang out.
—He’s avoiding me, Boettner said, in that infuriating, matter-of-fact voice of his.
—You guys can figure it out. I don’t want to get involved in your who’s a bigger genius competition.
—Do you think you’re a genius? Boettner asked sincerely, like it was the most important thing in the world.
—I have no idea and I don’t care, Elizabeth said, angrily and uncomprehendingly.
His thin face had a glamour to it, almost like a greyhound’s. Boettner was a lean creature, sleek, as aristocratic as someone from Bethlehem could be.
But he was just a boy in New Balance shoes, she thought, with his father’s craziness, his mother’s philistinism.
She felt seasick from trying to love him, from mirroring his neurotic deflections.
They were walking along Main Street now. There were a few people out, besides smoking or drinking at the few restaurants and bars. The Tapas restaurant, the ice cream store, the Hotel Bethlehem, which they crossed in front of now.
—Should we would walk up towards the library? Boettner asked.
—Sure, why not? she said.
The library was three blocks up a hill. Boettner loved the library. She thought it had some kind of nostalgic attachment. Maybe his father took him there when he was young, before his father lost his shit. But the cramped, grey, modernist Bethlehem Public Library never really appealed to her. Boettner, and indeed her brother, loved it. Probably for the same reason it was a place where they felt safe with their fathers, where they remember feeling safe and protected and special.
—Does it make you feel powerful?
—Does what make me powerful? he asked, flatly.
—Offering nothing of yourself to anyone?
—I offer so much of myself, I offer everything, he said.
—No, you don’t, Dan.
—Then you’re not paying attention.
—All you do is withhold.
—Have you ever read Narcissus and Goldmund by Hermann Hesse? he asked.
—My brother gave it to me this year, she said. —He said that you guys decided you were the characters in the book. That made me not want to read it.
—Okay, then never mind, he said.
—I don’t think it’s healthy, she added, —that imagining that everything in your life is part of some scheme connected to the history of Western literature and philosophy. Because what happens when you discover that it’s not?
—I think everyone has the right to place themselves in some kind of larger pattern, or to think their way into that larger pattern, Boettner said. —If you have skill enough to identify the pattern, then no one can say that you aren’t participating in it... and you don’t need reference to God to assert that.
—I’m much more willing to believe in God, Elizabeth said, —than to believe that any of us are destined for anything special.
—That’s fine, Boettner said. —It’s totally fine. It’s probably true.
—I just think it’s dangerous to elevate your own ego like that.
—Again, you’re probably right.
They were at the library now. The city was dark and empty. The house was on Market Street across from the library. The old colonial brick houses, though they were inhabited, seemed like mausoleums, houses of the dead.
A century or two before, there would have been beeswax candles in all the windows. These homes would have been full of warmth and light. In the 21st century, they housed the blasphemy of the TV.
It’s hard to believe that anyone was really alive in Bethlehem. The living spirit of the place, she estimated, had died out when her parents were kids, or maybe even before then. The old, truly human humans, her grandparents and their parents and grandparents, the steel workers and the steel executives and the Moravians, further back, had given way to rational, modern beings who were not entirely human in the way that the people of the past had been. Cold, sly, contingent people with a calculating treacherousness, suburban people who watched TV, who read the morning call, who took their dogs for walks, who gossiped about their neighbors and coworkers, who were in all likelihood sexually inadequate, desperate for real companionship and tenderness.
Young people like herself and Boettner or her brother rebelled against this, but they had no practical notion of how to refute or avoid it or transcend it: the pitiable, unrelenting ordinariness of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania; the casual, melancholy animosity of the living citizens towards the old, traditional, ancestral liveliness of the place, which had been muted, suppressed, ignored, and forgotten.
The modernist library was built on the site of what was once the home of the poet Hilda Doolittle, or H.D. (ironically, the only poet ever produced by Bethlehem a modernist herself). In 1890, H.D’s family would have taken a carriage down Market Street to get home in the snow. Now there was no snow, no carriage, no family closeness (only the strange, calculated ruthlessness of the middle class and the children of the middle class, who were all competing for places in schools and honors and awards and fantasies and praise, all imitating their parents who had done the same thing).
She wanted very badly to throw up.
—You and my brother just feed each other’s egos.
—Do you not have an ego Elizabeth?
—I do, but.
—But?
—I dunno Dan.
—Do you want to sit here?
They were at the “Garden of Serenity” next to the library, built by Bethlehem’s sister sister Tondabayashi in the early 1970’s. The Garden of Serenity contained a wooden Ceremonial tea house with benches and a small gravel box surrounded by shrubs. They always seemed to end up here.
—What’s on your mind? she asked, only half-interested.
Michael, standing on the porch, watched Calvin the dog sniff around the backyard, hemmed in by the wooden fence that Michael had installed himself, looking for a place to pee. It was cold, and Michael was in his pajamas and sweatshirt, and he shivered. Just inside, in front of the fireplace, his son, Stephen, was reading. As he had almost every night of the school break. Tonight, Stephen was reading Plato, which was at least a name that Michael recognized. But there were many nights when Stephen was reading an author that Michael had never heard of before, and that he had no opinion on. And Stephen, in his contempt for his father’s more limited education, could not or would not bother to explain to his father who. He was not sure how to admit to himself that his son had surpassed him in many ways. And suddenly, he seemed to know more, just generally, to have far more information and more ideas.
Calvin, who was five, who Adele and Michael had gotten the senior year of high school, partly to help spare themselves from the emptiness, trotted up the stone steps of the porch and pawed at the screen door. Michael opened it. Calvin trotted into the kitchen, away from the fireplace, wanting water.
—How’s the book? Michael said, closing the door behind him.
—It’s fine, Stephen said.
—Your sister’s not home?
—No, Stephen said. —I think she’s still out with Boettner.
—Sounds good, Michael said. —Mom’s upstairs. She wants you to come watch some BBC show with her.
Stephen said, not looking up from his book,
—Okay. Can you just make sure the doors are locked if you come up? Go to bed before Elizabeth’s back.
—I think she’ll be back before I go to bed, Stephen said.
—Okay, Michael said. —Sounds good. Calvin needs to go out again, just let him out.
—Yeah, of course.
Michael felt wounded and embarrassed. Almost victimized by his son’s bitter indifference. He really had no way to talk to this person except about sports. Which his son had made a point of talking about less and less. Almost as a referendum on the way that he’d been brought up (as if to say, he, my father could have taught me something more useful, deeper, but he never did).
