"Seasons Clear, and Awe" - Chapter 2

by Matthew Gasda

We continue PILCROW’s Inaugural Serialized Novel Contest: over the next three weeks, we’ll serialize the first few chapters of our three Finalist’s unpublished novels, and then subscribers (both free and paid) will vote on a Winner to be fully serialized here on the Substack (Finalists are awarded $500; the Winner $1,000.)

Our Finalists for this round:

1. Seasons Clear, and Awe by Matthew Gasda

   Chapter 1

2. Mites by Gregory Freedman

3. Notes on the State of Virginia by Michael Pilarz

We’re excited to have all of you as a part of this endeavor to forge a new path for fiction on Substack. If you believe in what we’re doing, please consider offering a paid subscription.

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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 next morning, Adele took Elizabeth with her to her parents’ place in Allentown, leaving Stephen at home with his father, who was working on a new stone patio in the backyard. Stephen loved watching his father work, or seemed to. He was really still too young to say what he liked or didn’t like. Like all very young, little toddlers, Stephen was obsessed with construction of all kinds. One of his first words was backhoe. And he loved all sorts of big machines. Stephen’s eyes would grow wide when they drove past the now largely shuttered Bethlehem Steel, which had turned into the largest brownfield site in the United States.

Adele’s grandfather had worked at the steel mills, while Michael’s father had been a steelworker, which was the difference between them. They came from the same class of European peasantry, but Adele’s family had already been educated for a generation. Adele’s father had gotten a scholarship to Moravian Academy, had learned Latin, and memorized large chunks of Milton and written poetry. He was in the Navy right after the war, luckily enough. Michael’s father read the newspaper; that was about it. Michael’s father sent all of his kids to college, that’s true, and he valued education in an abstract way as a means of class mobility, but didn’t savor it the way Adele’s father savored it.

Adele’s parents’ ranch home on Ulster Street was small and unremarkable, beige and squat, with a concrete porch covered on the west side of the house, across the street from an old public middle school with tall sycamores on the grounds.

The Ulster Street house’s best feature was the backyard, with flowering wisterias and a long vegetable patch along the side of the house.

Her dad, Arturo, was gardening when she arrived with little Elizabeth in tow in the baby carriage.

—Hi Delly, how’re you doing? her father asked, harvesting cherry tomatoes.

—I’m good Dad, how are you? Adele said. —How’s the gardening?

—It’s good. Thought it was going to rain, but the rain never came.

—We need it, Adele said.

—Yeah we do.

—I’ve been having to water my flowers every day. Which is a real pain in the ass. Where’s Mom?

—She’s watching TV, Arturo said, twisting a spade into the earth, making a hole where he was going to add another tomato plant. —You know how she gets.

Adele nodded. She did know how her mother got: sullen, quiet, grave. Never with any warning. Never for any reason. Adele glanced at her daughter, glad that she was too young to have any idea what was going on. Maybe they could just stay out here with her dad in the sun, or the half-sun, which kept peeking between the clouds. She felt so much love for her father and for her daughter…

—Everything ok? Adele asked as she unstrapped Elizabeth from the baby carriage and hoisted her up. —Whoop! Whoop! the toddler wailed in delight.

—The weather, I think it’s got her down.

—The weather…

Adele put Elizabeth down. The toddler, who began walking at an early age, wobbled around the yard, gleeful and gurgling. Her pink mouth was ripe with joy, like the cherry tomatoes her grandfather was harvesting.

She felt so much love for her father and for her daughter… but she was worried too that the lingering pain of her own childhood and adolescence would pass from her to her daughter unconsciously, that she would not be able to build up a boundary between her and her own mother, Maria.

Adele looked down at her father’s hands. They were weathered and layered, crisscrossed with lines. He was fifty-nine, but he had the hands of a much older man. His face was aged too. His hair had been snow white for more than a decade. White hair ran in the family. Adele’s brother, Dave, had also gone white (not even gray, but white) when he was in medical school.

In the back of her mind, Adele worried about Elizabeth getting stung by the bees in the grass, but there was something bucolic, almost peaceful, about watching the bees hover above the clover buds, indifferent to her girl, her baby; they wouldn’t actually hurt her; they might even protect her.

—Should I go in there and talk to her? Adele asked her dad.

—No… Arturo said, mumbling something in Arbëreshë under his breath. —I don’t think you should.

—That bad, huh?

Arturo shrugged, shoveling out another chunk of earth. —I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.

Chunk of earth. Tamping down the earth and dirt around the new plant. Watering it from a can.

—Ok, but… Dad…

—Delly…

Adele watched her father’s eyebrows furrow and unfold.

Adele’s father didn’t want to admit, was too old-fashioned, too old-world to admit, that there was a word for this kind of person. Borderline. And another word. Manic Depressive. And that these terms could explain and predict the things that happened with accuracy and consistency. And that they clarified that Maria was not, in her father’s words, “a difficult woman” (a phrase that implied a uniqueness and worthwhileness), but, actually, a sick person with a very specific and therefore generic set of spiritual maladies.

Through psychoanalysis, Adele had learned that her childhood was traumatic, and that her mother’s days and weeks and months of silences and diffidence, cutting words and terrifying breakdowns were not her, Adele’s, fault, or the fault of her brothers or her father, but stemmed from something internal to her mother. For Adele, learning that the morning star could be renamed the evening star, that the behavior she grew up with could be categorized in a new way, brought great relief; she acquired a new way of talking about the thing that had affected her psyche for as long as she could remember.

But for her father, the clinical labeling was profoundly cruel, wrong, and inhuman. Profoundly cruel, wrong, a great misunderstanding. And to utter these technical words, a bipolar manic depressive, would be far worse than anything his wife had ever said or done.

—Can I have a cherry tomato?

—On the house.

Arturo tossed a tomato from the bowl, which Adele, who always, in her own opinion, had good hand-eye coordination, caught.

—Thanks.

—How’re things at home?

—They’re good, Dad, they’re good.

—Michael’s doing the patio?

—One paving stone at a time.

Elizabeth was fascinated by an anthill in the crack of the concrete path which led away from the porch towards the other end of the yard, leading towards the alley; to the child, perhaps as was really the case, everything was alive, and had a certain magnetism. From her own vantage point, Adele was almost jealous of her child and the total innocence with which she could survey this landscape, which, for her, her mother, was often a site of emotional ruin.

—He’s handy, Arturo commented, that’s good.

—Well, Adele responded, shaking her head, —he gets frustrated pretty easily; he’s uh… he’s good at following directions, but if things don’t go his way, he starts f-bombing.

—That’s how men are.

—I don’t think you’re like that, Dad.

—I can be, but I’m good at improvising when I’ve made mistakes.

—Yeah so am I. Guess I get that from you. But Mike’s unable to cope. He unravels.

—But, eventually, it gets done, right?

—Sure Dad, just it takes him about three times as long as it should.

Arturo stood up, his harvest complete. He seemed to look a little bit older every day. So many of her parents’ generation had dropped dead of heart attacks or more slowly of cancer. They all drank and smoked, had high cholesterol. People in her parents’ generation aged so fast, so much faster, Adele imagined, than she or her husband or their friends were aging, slower than the previous generations did.

His hands were coarse and rough: peasant hands. He had never really stopped being the boy from a Calabrian village, had he?

She didn’t really know that much about his early childhood; perhaps he didn’t remember, perhaps it could never really translate, be transcribed. This was a regret for Adele: she had always wanted to connect with that part of her father’s identity, and by extension, her own.

Arturo was planning a trip back to the village (he had taken two since 1970), but Adele, who had stopped flying a few years ago (which she claimed was due to claustrophobia more than fear of flying) couldn’t foresee going any time soon. It was probably better that way: walling herself off from contact with the ideal (the ancestral past). There was less disappointment that way.

This was the kind of thing (her phobias), however, that she didn’t want to pass on to her children: they would get on planes; they would do things; they would be a little more adventurous. They would try to make contact with their ideals, and properly live then. She would make sure they would.

—She’s really getting big, Arturo commented, referring to Elizabeth.

—I know. She does everything fast. They’re both do.

—Proud parent.

—I guess I can’t help it.

—I was like that way too with you and your brothers; every step, every word, I just thought was the greatest thing.

Pride had an interesting role in human life, Adele reflected; you could see the purpose it served in keeping human beings alive on this planet. Pride was a binding agent, told you that you had special genes, a special disposition, that nature wanted to see more of you and yours.

—Do you remember me at this age?

—Of course Delly.

—What was I like?

—Well you were very quiet, always watching, taking things in. Very rambunctious though. A little, silent adventurer. Infinitely curious.

This could have been a description of Elizabeth.

—I’m gonna go in and wash my hands; I’ll be right back, Arturo said.

He didn’t want her to come in. Her mom must have really been in a black mood. They must have had a fight.

Thankfully her mom’s hearing was going on her, and was probably listening to the TV turned up loud. She wouldn’t’ve known anyone was even here if they just stayed in the backyard… and didn’t stay for too long.

After a moment, Arturo returned, with two cans of Coke.

—Want one?

—Sure Dad, a good Coke right now would be refreshing.

—Well, here ya go.

Arturo had retired last year from his job as a middle-school principal. She worried about her dad, a little bit, not having something to keep him away from her mother, to get him out of the house. Though he seemed happy, very content actually, she just couldn’t be sure; he was a master of denial, or even just repression. If he didn’t like spending all day with her, well, he wasn’t letting anyone know. It occurred to Adele that she might never know. There were so many things about her parents she might never know; marriage, as she was learning, was, in so many ways, a black box. It would never be recovered from the crash sites of their eventual deaths.

She didn’t want to think about it: her father’s death.

He had a cough that worried her; he had a bit of a hunch now when he walked, even though his health was otherwise robust and he still did a lot of manual work around the house, and up at their cabin near Lake Tupeek. Men from that generation would just drop dead. She knew at least two older lawyers, from when she’d been a paralegal in Philadelphia, who simply never came to work one day. One got out of the pool after doing laps, keeled over; another: on the golf course.

It was actually so strange how life carried on around the dead; it’s not like the firm had ceased to function when one of the partners disappeared from existence; no, they kept growing. It was not like her father’s school stopped functioning when he retired. Nothing stopped for anyone: that was how civilization worked. Looked at from a certain angle, though, it meant that modern civilization was really at odds with the most fundamental human urges: to mourn, bury, refuse joy. You weren’t supposed to overlook catastrophe; you really weren’t.

—Mommy! Elizabeth said, holding up her arms, ready to be picked up.

—What is it lady? Adele asked, picking her up.

—Mommy! the child shouted, delighted to be whooshing through the air.

She wasn’t ready for conversations, that’s for sure.

—Wanna go to pop-pop?

Arturo put his Coke down on the stoop.

—Lemme have her.

—Don’t drop her!

Adele handed over the happy child. Her father’s face brightened as he hefted the child in his arms. —Weeee, weeee, he repeated over and over, underscoring the action.

Adele wondered whether Elizabeth knew or sensed that something was wrong inside the house, or whether there was something unusual about not penetrating the barrier of the kitchen door. If she talked openly with her father, she wondered further, would Elizabeth understand raw elements of what was going on? Very young children were very perceptive, but could they understand psychological concepts? It was kind of fascinating that no one really knew what children knew, Adele thought. That everyone forgot what their own experience was like at that age, that everyone was wiped clean.

At what point did you become you? At what point did the camera start recording?

Nothing good she did for Elizabeth now, no kindness or motherly warmth would be properly remembered; it would all just be shadows; all she could hope to do, as a parent, was make a general imprint on the wax tablet.

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Adele found her mother, Maria, in the den with the shades drawn, watching C-SPAN (her mother was a ‘big Democrat’).

Adele’s parents, though they were vigorous outdoorsy people, looked older than their age. Older than 61. Her mother’s weight had been distributed down her body. She was squat and low. Adele knew that her mother’s legs (Maria was dressed in an old robe) were veiny and thick with cellulite.

Adele waved from the doorframe, annoyed at herself for even bothering.

—What’s wrong, mom? Did someone do something wrong? Is there something wrong?

After a long pause. —You usually call today.

—What’s today?

—The day my mother died.

—That’s right; I’m sorry.

—You’re not sorry.

—Mom, I’m sorry, I forgot.

This was something her mother did. Make up rules, make up expectations, traditions. Adele wasn’t even sure if it was actually the exact day her grandmother had died; it could have been June 10th or 11th rather than the 9th.

Maria hadn’t even been close with her own mother, hadn’t mourned her death, hadn’t cried at the funeral.

Noni wasn’t a woman anyone remembered fondly. Adele couldn’t speak Italian, so it had always been difficult to even communicate with her grandmother, who didn’t want to talk to anyone anyway. Noni would stare out the window all day. She liked growing sunflowers. She’d had a hard life. That was it.

Now Adele would have to apologize or grovel or find some way to express remorse for this fake crime, this newly invented crime.

But she knew what it was about, really. Maria was feeling sorry for herself. She was anticipating that her own grandchildren wouldn’t miss her, just like Adele didn’t really actively miss Noni. Maria was projecting.

—I don’t have anything to say, Mom… I don’t have to say because you know I just, I’m sorry you’re feeling sad. I really am. I wish I could help.

—Could you go away? Could you please just go away? I don’t feel like talking.

—Okay, Adele flung her arms in the air for a second. —Bye, see ya.

In the next room, the living room, her father, who had changed into clean slacks and a clean, white, collared shirt, which was unbuttoned halfway down his chest, the sleeves rolled up, was mixing himself a drink.

—Sweetie, he said quietly.

—I know, I know. It’s not that I don’t know. I shouldn’t have; sorry.

Arturo sat down with his drink, lit a cigarette.

Adele hated the smell of smoke. —Can I open a window? she asked.

So many of Arturo’s teacher colleagues had dropped dead over the past few years; heart-attacks were common, even expected. (Frank Patterson, Mr. Patterson, one of her dad’s best friends, had died two months ago on a cruise; he’d just retired, for instance.)

It was impossible to think of life without her father, but at this point she was hoping for another decade. If he made it to 75…

—Dad?

—Yes honey?

—I love you… Adele said quietly so that her mother, who would be envious, wouldn’t hear.

—I love you too.

—I’m sorry things are like this.

—It’s not anyone’s fault.

—I’m not sure if that’s true.

—Well whose fault would it be?

Adele pointed towards the den.

—I know she’s a difficult woman, but…. Arturo’s voice quavered a bit. —She’s your mother; she’s my wife.

—I know. That’s what you always say… I just um… Adele mumbled. Divorce was much more common in her own generation than it was in her father’s; but the two phenomena were linked. Boomers like her didn’t grow up seeing happy couples… just couples: people stuck together out of pride and… —That’s why she should behave better than this.

—People go through moods.

This was frustrating. —These are more than moods, Dad…

—I don’t see how, if I… I’m being honest, Delle.

—She uses her bad days as weapons.

—Against who?

—Against all of us.

—I’m fine, Arturo said firmly.

—I know it takes a toll on you.

—I had a nice day in the garden.

—Because you were afraid to come inside.

—No, because I like gardening.

—Dad.

—I’m not gonna… Arturo’s voice dropped. —I’m not going to do this right now.

Adele felt herself beginning to panic; here was an opportunity to actually talk to her father, to actually acknowledge the weight of… but no… he wouldn’t do it, wouldn’t admit that there was this traumatic core to their family life. —Dad…

—I’m not honey.

—It would mean… so much… really I’m… sorry I’m getting emotional; it’s just. I’m so tired of walking on eggshells all the time. You must be too.

—I’m happy. I’m a happy man.

—I’m not gonna use them as human shields Dad…. Now Adele was getting angry.

—That’s not what I mean Adele.

—No I think that’s precisely what you meant.

—It’s just nice to see my grandchildren.

—Well I know better sometimes than to bring them over on Sundays. She’s always like this on Sundays.

—I don’t like talking about her like this… Arturo’s voice dropped.

—She’s going deaf…. and the TV’s turned all the way up.

—Still.

—The principle right?

—Yes. The principle.

Adele almost felt like she’d been called into his office.

—I’m desperate to talk about this.

—There’s no use, Arturo said, half-assertive, half-pleading.—I’m sorry.

—Desperate…

—What would it accomplish to…?

—I’d feel… I dunno? Relief? Just… hearing you… acknowledge what’s been obvious… for a long time…

—Why today?

—Today’s as good as any, Dad…

—I’m struggling to understand, Dell.

—I’m struggling too.

—Loyalty’s important.

—But what are you loyal to Dad?

—Your mother.

—But what about me?

—I’m loyal to my family. All of you.

—But what if we’ve reached a point where that’s not possible, and where maybe you have to make some hard choices?

—I’ve made a lot of hard choices.

—I know, I just...

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When Adele got home, the kids were eating ice cream on the couch, watching cartoons. Michael, sitting in the worn blue recliner, was clipping coupons, something she’d asked him to do. Michael and Stephen were in the process of consuming ice-cream from ‘The Bethlehem Dairy Store’ which sold big tubs that Michael bought every week. Always ‘mint chocolate chip.’

It looked like fun.

—Hey boys.

—Hi, Mom.

—You’re so cute.

Adele sat down next to Stephen and kissed the top of his head. He had brown hair and brown eyes.

The windows were open. It was another humid night. There were fireflies in the grass in the front yard when she pulled up. You could still hear the sounds of older kids (Kate, Chloe, Evan, and others she didn’t know) playing and calling like birds in the twilight.

Elizabeth tottered in, pantless, in a t-shirt, from the kitchen, a freeze pop in her hands.

—You guys are sleepy, huh?

—Sleepy, sleepy, Elizabeth mumbled, munching.

—Does anyone have to go potty before bed?

—I do, Stephen said.

—What about you? Adele gave Elizabeth a mock hard stare.

—Naoh! Elizabeth shook her head.

—Are you sure!

Elizabeth nodded.

—I don’t believe you!

—Noooo mommy!

Adele hoisted her daughter in the air. —I’m gonna put you on the potty just in case.

—Nooooo!! Elizabeth screamed, half-smiling.

Stephen giggled on the sofa. —Lizzy has to poooop.

—Nooooo! Elizabeth screamed.

—Pooooo! Pooooo!

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The kids were in bed. Adele was in bed. Michael was downstairs, by himself, enjoying the quiet.

Seated at the kitchen table with his head tilted out open window , Michael smoked a cigarette (which he only did a few times a week, following Adele’s insistence that he do so away from the kids).

His father, Joseph, an inveterate smoker and drinker, was missing part of his lung (but he had also spent 40 years working with steel and that could fuck up your lungs as much as anything else).

Once, fifty years before, Joseph had been a gymnast at the Bethlehem Sokol Hall: an incredibly fit, handsome man (like all the Gazdas of that generation when they were young). The peasant body did well in America at first, in the beginning, when peasant hardiness was given a backbone of modern medicine and dentistry and leisure.

But over time, the American lifestyle took its toll on Michael’s father. Factory work, and heavy drinking in addition to his unfiltered, tar-filled cigarettes. TV and TV dinners. Joseph was an old man by 50.

Adele said that the old people in her father’s village, from what she understood, lived into their 80s, 90s, into their 100s. Her father, too, looked worse than he would have if he had remained in the old country.

Joseph had grown up speaking Slovak at home, but Michael and his siblings hadn’t learned it: there had been no need. Immigrants then only cared about assimilation, unlike the Puerto Rican families now moving to the South Side who still spoke Spanish at home and in the street.

If the Gazda’s had stayed in Slovakia, his father, might still be pale and hearty, climbing hills with his shepherd’s staff.

Something like that. The truth is, Michael didn’t really know what the old world was like. He and his new family were so completely of the new world; they were lucky to have any awareness of their roots at all. The old world was distant and dark, like a ship sailing into the dusky sun, about to disappear off the edge of the horizon.

Michael put out his cigarette in a coffee mug, enjoying the calming, lingering smell of smoke (which Adele of course hated).

But because of his father’s habit, Michael had actually never smoked until the end of his first marriage with Susie.

At the time, he’d been living in the Poconos. Susie had been his college girlfriend. She was a cheerleader at Lafayette. Busty, curly hair, great legs. Didn’t want kids.

Susie had bragged to Michael when he caught her, presented her with months of carefully gathered evidence, that the hirsute little man (Jerry or something) was a much better lover than he was.

—You think you’re so good-looking. You think you’re such hot shit. Well, you know, you have to make an effort, Susie had told him. —It’s not college anymore. You’re 31 years old. Your hair’s going to fall out soon.

She’d been drunk when she told him that, but it still stung.

It was crazy that you could live with someone for years and still not fully understand how much they hated you, resented you, marked your every flaw, shortcoming, or potential shortcoming, even.

He never stood up for himself. Even while presenting the evidence, so to speak. He never yelled. Never imposed himself physically. Just served Susie papers.

Now, he had kids. Now, he had a wife who loved him, who respected him as a father.

Michael felt the long centuries flying through his soul. He felt the weight of the generations pressing on his back, climbing on his back, trying to force him down into the dirt, to join them, to die. He felt staggered, unsure of himself, and without some deeper sense of order or value that could structure this heavy ontological anxiety.

All he had, all he’d ever have, and all he would ever have was this instinctive sense of duty.

Bachelorhood was the world of options. Fatherhood was the world of musts. And it came with an emotional force, strain, and painful self-adjustment, and the permanent consequences. One could never think in terms of options again. The antiphonal exchange between man and woman led to this: the permanency, the absoluteness of children, and responsibility. The castle of the house had to be protected. The membrane that differentiated between order and chaos.

A father was guardian. Adele didn’t even fully understand or respect that Michael provided this, this tough, skin-like, psychological barrier against chaos that allowed her to be an intellectual and an amateur psychologist, to try to get him to watch Bergman movies and to read Freud and to listen to opera instead of The Band.

His masculine strength and his masculine beauty were largely meaningless to her, and he had to protect himself from her sardonic destructiveness, because if she destroyed him, if she picked away at him, if she did not appreciate the purpose and the mystery and the deep and personal urgency that he brought to fatherhood, if she nagged him to death, the family would collapse around him. All of this he knew implicitly.

And in a few decades, like his father, he would one day be sick and infirm, and his own son would reflect on the wreck of what was once his beautiful body, his football body, his strength and masculinity, withered and faded (just as Stephen would think about his mother’s beauty, her heavy sensuality, her Mediterranean figure and Mediterranean eyes).

Children not only had to bear the loss of their parents eventually, but they also had to bear the withering, the ugliness of their parents. Children had to watch their parents grow gray and stout, had to watch varicose veins appear in their legs and cellulite and watch their teeth fall out. Children had to watch their own fate unfold in front of them.

Michael should call his dad. Michael felt that he should call his dad in the morning, or go over there. He could ride his bike. It was a ten-minute bike ride.

Joseph lived with Michael’s sister, Mary, who was three years older than Michael and had four kids of her own, the youngest only slightly older than Stephen and Elizabeth. Tim, Katie, Sarah, Patrick.

Michael knew his father Joseph didn’t have long to live. Joseph had been 41 when Michael was born, and Joseph’s own father, born in the 1860s, had been nearly 50 when Joseph was born. Stephen’s great-grandfather over 130 years old.

Did Michael have a relationship with his father? What did that even mean? If they did, it wasn’t because they discussed more than weather, Joseph’s health, and Sunday homilies. Joseph lived two blocks from St. Anne’s Church on Elm Street. If they had a relationship, it was through masculine divination or mutual respect between men. Joseph had gone from a young man doing solo-lock gymnastics to an old man needing oxygen to breathe. They were also united by the solemn memory of Michael’s mother Mary, who had died of ovarian cancer in 1977. Mary was in heaven. Joseph would go there soon. He had to pray now to atone for years of getting drunk nightly after his shift: the many nights coming home enraged, ignoring his wife’s genuine love, her saintly kindness, and even her passionate Catholic faith.

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Adele couldn’t sleep. Her body felt tingly: her toes, her fingertips. She was thinking about her father: how she couldn’t break down the calloused blisters of willful denial.

—Hey you’re snoring, she said, nudging her husband.

—Sorry…

—I feel like you should see a doctor about sleep apnea or something; this is really getting out of hand.

—I don’t snore, Michael said, deadpan.

—Mike…

—I’m not gonna see a doctor…

Marriage was a man-made convention, a set of obligations like the Constitution, a code of law. She wanted her husband to stop snoring but because he was her husband she couldn’t just smack him or tell him to shut up, like the way she could have even told a boyfriend or a lover.

She couldn’t just kick him out and tell him to go to his own apartment, like she would have with casual date in Philadelphia. She couldn’t insist on her own privacy, or primacy. She had formed a unit with her husband. She had suspended her individuality.

–You know, I’d actually fallen asleep, Michael, until you woke me up.

—Oh, Michael mumbled. —I went downstairs for a cigarette; sorry.

—I was actually having this dream, like I fell into this dream right away. It was so strange, so emotional. I was at my dad’s cabin in the Poconos, like where he used to take us up, my brothers and I, as kids, but in the dream my father had the head of a dog, almost like an Egyptian mummy or something. It was very strange, like he was very alien. He couldn’t talk and in the dream I’m like in the car with my brothers and Dad is driving but he has this strange head, this dog’s head, kind of like a beagle. And then we get to the campsite and the cabin. He just like runs off into the woods and I’m looking for him and I’m calling him and I don’t know whether to call him Dad or like a dog’s name. And then I find him in the clearing eating a deer carcass and it’s like that’s when you woke me up. Maybe I woke myself up. But you were snoring. But… isn’t that strange? Isn’t that the strangest thing?

Michael sat up and rubbed his eyes. —Pretty strange.

—Are you listening to me?

—I was nodding off but I heard you.

—Do you ever have dreams like that?

—I don’t really remember my dreams, her husband said.

At that moment Adele realized she wanted her children to grow up so that they could have somebody to talk to. So that they could have somebody to talk to; Michael didn’t want to talk. It scared him to open up his consciousness to peek in and scared him even more to articulate what might be found therein.

She felt that she was mourning something. A contract she had signed that included the darkness and the mystery and the danger of childbirth and motherhood and the boring, banal spectacle of being a wife, sharing a bed, keeping the house in order.

All of human history underwrote this moment in her life, this moment in their life, this house, this family, astronomy, geology, biology, landscape, painting, poetry, physics, music, geometry, psychoanalysis, ecology. Everything explained everything: her character, her disposition, her mood, her husband’s mechanized and standardized, almost universalized husbandness, his manliness, his stubborn strength and stoicism, his uneasy fumbling with sex and emotional vulnerability.

Adele failed to run away and knew that the main purpose of her marriage had been fulfilled. Her husband was handsome, intelligent (if not emotionally perceptive), and decent. He had given her two kids who would inherit his best qualities. And in all the ways he was deficient (emotionally blocked, psychologically obtuse, morally rigid), she could compensate. Stephen and Elizabeth would have a blend of masculine and feminine qualities. They would be better than her, better than him.

It was important, moreover, that some of the feminine get injected into the Gazda line. Michael’s own mother had died early when he was 20, but it seemed like Minka Gazda had always been in the background, making things easy on her husband, her boys, and Michael’s sister, who was like her mother: her femininity. Mary’s femininity was underutilized as well. Michael’s nieces and nephews were all more like his brother-in-law, Tim, who was strict and demanding. By marrying her, Adele understood that Michael was actually letting more of an assertive kind of femininity into his life and into his lineage. The feminine unconscious couldn’t be banished forever. It had to return, and it was returning through her and through their children.

Adele couldn’t wait to know them, to talk to them, to be their friend, their peer, their guide. Why did she need that? Why did she need to convert her children into peers and friends? She had Mariana, Susan, and Mary (the gals). She had her brothers. She had her parents. The constituent fact at the core of Adele’s self-knowledge was that she was alone. There really was no one that she could unburden herself to, share the dominant parts of her psyche with: all of her self-questioning and experimental self-testing, the consciously dominant parts of her personality were hidden, even dormant.

She would die without being seen unless her children saw her. Even her father, even Arturo, who she knew was like this too, had a searching, sardonic, phlegmatic, taciturn, equivocal, and mercurial inner life, was not really a peer and not really a friend because he too had to pretend that their mother was all right, because he had taken up that role and would not relinquish it, would not have a real conversation with his daughter about the problems of marriage. You could either love or you could rule, and her father felt that he had to rule. This was the role for an immigrant.

A related, more complicated thought rose to the surface. Did she simply look up to others more than herself? How had she suddenly begun to see her father as wise and imagine that her children would be better than her? Shouldn’t she be better than her father in some way? Why didn’t she look up to herself? Why didn’t she look forward to being with herself? Was this a self-esteem problem? Or was it natural to put others above yourself?

There was no one to referee or arbitrate these thoughts.

—Should we have another baby? Adele asked, jostling Michael with her elbow.

—I dunno, should we?

—Okay, I guess not, Adele said.

—I should get a vasectomy, Michael asked. —I mean, I know I should.

—Okay Mike. Two’s fine. Two’s great. Two’s perfect.

—I need to sleep, Adele.

—I know I do too...

—But? Michael asked, sensing her dissatisfaction.

—I guess I already miss being pregnant.

—Never thought I’d hear you say that.

—I never thought either but...

—But...

—Never mind.

—Okay...

—You can go back to sleep.

—Thanks...

---

The next morning, it was raining and the hydrangeas around the porch glistened and were full of life and Michael sat out with Stephen on the porch and listened to the rain bounce off the tin awnings. And he and his son just listened to what was both a self-organizing and emergent form of beauty, the rain and the tin and the tessellations and spirals of the cells which made up the plants and the mid-August flowers and of their own, human bodies, too (his and his son’s), which were mirror images or fractals of each other and the natural world. Everything was spelled out in the language of mathematics. Father, son, plant, flower, porch, house, town, country, earth, cosmos, from amino acids to sugars, carbon atoms and hydrogen and whatever else.

—Daddy, can we go inside?

—In a second, Michael said, bouncing his son slightly on his knee.

—Sometimes it’s good to just sit and listen.

—I want to watch cartoons.

—You can watch cartoons. Michael trailed off. —In five minutes. Okay? Five minutes?

—Okay.

---

The rest of August went fast. Phillies games and the Olympics on TV at night. Long days of coming up with activities for the kids. A trip to Jacobsburg State Park.

Sunday afternoons at Adele’s parents’ two-room cabin at Lake Tu Peek, where there was a pool, a little macadam tennis court (all of which Arturo had built himself by hand in the ’60s and ’70s), his little, ramshackle estate.

There was also a stone fire pit, a stone well. Right before the summer was over, the kids had screamed with delight and fear when a snake crawled out of the well and Arturo beat it to death with a shovel. The sight and closeness of death was new for the kids.

—Couldn’t even let it just go, Dad? Or shoo it away or something?Adele had asked.

—Not with the kids around, Adele. Not with the kids around.

And on some unconscious level, the death of the snake seemed terrible to them both: to their impressionable, partially pre-linguistic minds. On the car ride back, strangely, both Adele and Michael had talked about getting a dog, somehow to compensate for the dead snake, the meaningless snake, as if the kids deserved some kind of life in exchange for what they’d witnessed.

Arturo had carved this odd miniature replica of a country estate out of a poor stretch of woods. So nature had to be kept out: it had to remain a garden. That was his ideology.

Nature was tamed, made supplicant as a proxy for the untamable and unspeakable parts of relationships, the sinister glancing blows of social relations with people who weren’t like that, that weren’t special and endowed with the ancestral vision, the people of Bethlehem around town where parents now lived, were just grateful to have survived the loss of industry and enterprise, the loss of any economic and national importance, the loss of collective purpose that had spread like elm blight over the long, slow 20th century. Now they wanted to cheer the Gulf War, get office jobs, better jobs, cars, and leave aside the deeper fundamentals of the Old World. The spirit of cultivation, a largely Catholic sentimentality for the centrality of family and children.

Adele liked to garden too. She worked out the problems of marriage and parenting through the earth and through the tragicomic struggle to make a suburban plot of land more fertile and abundant, more Edenic. In a way, she and her father were like priests and priestesses, strange, mystical people pretending to be normal inside the construct of a Pennsylvania domestic space, bringing about true freedom and true fulfillment for their spouses and their children, working under immense pressure to pass the spark of life and the spiritual spark into the future, like sleeper agents engaged in a vast conspiracy. So she and her father had their tomatoes, their peppers, their cucumbers, their lettuce, their arugula, their mustard, their basil, their mint.

---

Back in Bethlehem, there were no snakes. The lawns and gardens and flowerbeds were all neat and well-kept. The trees were old and glowered over the street, summer starting to turn brown in the August heat.

And then, in the third week of the month, Michael had to go back to the school. Students would be there in another week. There were mandated trainings and preparation time. The glorious summer of the teacher, the paid three-month vacation, was over.

Chapter 3