"Seasons Clear, and Awe" - Chapter 7
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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Stephen felt such pity for his mother, who was staring out the window: thin, pale, grimace-faced.
His father was upstairs with his sister, who had not stopped crying all day. Stephen was like his father in that the emotions of others blotted out his own emotions, compressed them, made them inarticulate and hard to understand, let alone express.
He was like his mother, however, in his desire to talk about things and try to work through the dense, quivering mass of human experience to try to get to some verbal encapsulation of it. His mother had always told him that he, like her, had a talent for it. His giftedness, his gift, was in giving shape to things in a lightning flash.
But what shape could he give to his mother’s sorrow, to his sister’s sorrow, to his father’s worry, and to his own queasiness at the first serious apparition of death in his own life (or if not quite death literally, because his grandfather was alive, but to the inevitability of it, because no one seemed to believe that his grandfather would ever go back to being the hardy old man who chopped wood and made fires and told stories and rambled about in the garden)?
—Mom, he said, taking her hand across the rectangular wooden kitchen table, which looked out on the backyard garden, which grew and budded up to and around the kitchen window. —I love you.
This was the only thing he knew to be true: that the word love was kind of medicine you could take that would make things better.
—I love you too, son. My dear son, she said. —I love you so much.
—How’s Pop-Pop? He’s not well, Adele said.
—Is there anything they can do?
—Yes, there are things they can do, she said. —Modern medicine is amazing, but he went a day and a half with a heart attack... I mean, the doctors couldn’t do anything because my mother, you know, my mom wouldn’t let him go to the hospital. She insisted he was having indigestion.
—That’s crazy, Stephen said under his breath.
—Yeah, it is crazy.
Stephen followed his mother’s gaze up to the backyard. Bees landed in the poppy flowers, which were purple and red, and they landed in the clover flowers and the grass. He smelled the sweet air that was coming in through the screen, and he thought about how unbelievable it was that people could leave the world, that you could close your eyes and everything could go black, and there would be no more color again. You wouldn’t open them, and your breath would stop, and the voice in your head would stop talking, and even the images in your head would stop appearing, and there would be nothing but a plunge into the waters of cold and absolute darkness. He shivered thinking about it.
—I’m so lucky I have you, Adele said, reaching across the kitchen table and brushing her son’s hair. —I’m so lucky I have you, she repeated. —Otherwise, I think I’d go crazy or something... right now.
Stephen dimly understood that adults had children to replace their parents, as a response to this thing called death and to this thing called time. He also understood that all the love that his mother had for her own father was bound up in him now, that it would float to him once Arturo passed away. Whether that was in a day, a week, a month, a year, five years.
And she was preparing him for that. Transference. It was like she had decided that every quality in her father that she adored would be his. It was already his; it would be solely his soon. But was he like his grandfather? He didn’t really know. Most of what he knew about his grandfather he knew through his mother’s statements about the man, not through the man himself.
Who was kind but distant, of another world and another time. Stephen felt immense shame when his mother would complain to Arturo in front of him about her son’s preference for playing video games or even just watching football or baseball on TV. Arturo didn’t do those things; he’d been an immigrant, a dirt farmer, the son of dirt farmers. He’d had to win a scholarship to private school. He didn’t have time for something as ridiculous as Crash Bandicoot or Spyro the Dragon or a meaningless regular season Eagles game. Because his father worked at the steel and his mother didn’t speak English, Arturo’d had to take care of four younger siblings on top of his academic duties when he was Stephen’s age.
How could Stephen be like this great man who had been formed by the pressures of history?
Stephen felt worthless. He wasn’t really like his grandfather, nor was he even like his father, who also worked hard and was diligent and caring.
Stephen had been raised by his mother to be selfish and self-serving, to gratify himself. He knew this intuitively. But what could he do other than to get better at video games? Or to get better at baseball or to go through a growth spurt so he could play football. There was no manual labor for him to perform. No one to sacrifice himself for. He was just a special boy whose only goal was to show that he was special and to enjoy himself.
And that was the complication at the core of who he was, or was becoming: he was special because he was useless, at least according the standards that his father and grandfathers would have recognized (because from what he understood Grandpa Gazda had also had a hard youth and life); he was his mother’s son, not his fathers, just like his sister was her father’s daughter, and not her mothers.
Though he couldn’t possibly tell his mother this, his first impulse (and one he carried out) after she picked up the phone and after she went to the hospital with his father while his sister was still asleep was to close the door to his room and put a brick in front of it and masturbate, thinking about Bethany Herzog. That was the only thing that gave him a chance.
He couldn’t relieve himself of the terrible anxiety brought about by the specter of the dying man, his grandfather, in any other way.
—We’ll go to the hospital tomorrow. Okay, I’ll take you and your sister, Adele said.
—I’m not sure I want to go, Stephen said.
—I’m not going to force you, Adele said.
—I don’t know how much longer your grandfather has.
—I guess... I guess it scares me, Stephen said a minute later.
—It scares me too, Adele said.
—It’s okay to be scared.
Maria, sitting in the kitchen chair with a cup of coffee, and a cigarette, did not make eye-contact with her daughter who was there to take her to the hospital (Don, Dave, and Adele were taking turns ferrying their mother, who they’d refused to let drive, given that she was barely sleeping and drinking whiskey around the clock). It was the last day of May, around 9 a.m.
—Are you ready Mom?
Maria’s voice was ragged, —In a second.
—He usually takes a nap around ten, so we should go.
—Okay.
Maria took another sip of her coffee; she made such good coffee on the stove, just like her own mother, Adele’s Nanna, who never learned English (and barely communicated to anyone, even in Italian) did; Adele’s only real memory of Nanna was drinking her coffee.
The Mucelin women (her mother’s maiden name) were women who loved kitchens; not the work of the kitchen, but the enclosure, closeness, silence, ordinaryness of the domain of the kitchen.
The hospital windows were open. Dave and Don sat with their mother. Adele had a cup of coffee in a Styrofoam cup in her hand, and she was sipping it just to have ballast.
When Michael lost his father in 1995, she said all the right things and listened to him talk about the good and bad in his relationship with his father, but she hadn’t really felt much pity or concern. Joe Gazda had been a cipher. The role of Joe Gazda, the role of the Gazda, the hardworking peasant-turned-man; the steel worker; the father.
Her own father was not an archetype to her, however, like Joe Gazda was, he was a particular person: a wise, rounded, interiorized man with a complex inner life; Arturo was perceptive, with a peasant’s canniness and a prep school boy’s learning (Arturo had won a scholarship to Moravian Academy after emigrating).
When Adele was around her father then she was in some ways still her girl self, her child self. With her father, as long as her father was alive, she was still somebody’s little girl and still could protect and nurture the childish part of her own psyche and still retain and feed into the fantasies and nostalgias.
Both her brothers drank too much. They made crude jokes. They believed in aliens and conspiracy theories and reptilians in the White House and the Masons and the Illuminati. They somehow had failed to grow up. They made more money than she did, much more money, but they had married women (in Dave’s case twice) who babied them; they, in terms of habits and temper, were still teenagers of the 1960s: suburban teenagers dancing around their father’s authority.
In a few hours, or maybe days, however, he would stop breathing, and only her mother would be alive. Her mother, whom she didn’t love, except out of some basic primal sense of duty. The outcome was not negotiable.
—Mom, do you want anything? Do you want a glass of water?
—No.
—I’m going to kill this doctor, Adele said to her brother, Dave, who was a surgeon.
—He’s doing rounds, Dave said. —He’s going to be in.
—I don’t know what to do, Adele said. She hadn’t slept in 36 hours or maybe more. Michael was at home with the kids.
—There’s nothing to do, Birdy.
—Adele, why don’t you go home and get some sleep? You should sleep.
—I cannot sleep, Donald.
Don and Dave both didn’t like their wives and had gotten married as a consequence of their father’s ethical ideal. Dave had two girls; Don never had kids. Dave had remarried and was going to have another child with his much younger wife: another doctor, a young doctor he’d met at Pocono Hospital, Patricia (but that marriage wasn’t going well either). Both her brothers drank too much. They made crude jokes. They believed in aliens and conspiracy theories and reptilians in the White House and the Masons and the Illuminati. They somehow had failed to grow up. They made more money than she did, much more money, but they had married women (in Dave’s case twice) who babied them; they, in terms of habits and temper, were still teenagers of the 1960s: suburban teenagers dancing around their father’s authority.
Adele sat down in a chair next to the hospital bed and stroked her father’s hand. He stirred slightly. He was still breathing through the oxygen tubes in his nose. His lungs had frayed and flaked away like mica. Arturo had smoked since he was 16; he’d grown up drinking wine up in the village as a boy. As an adult, he always had three or four whiskies, at least, after work every evening. When he and her mother fought, which was often, at least when Adele was a child, he would drink even more. He never got angry, he never got belligerent, with his children, but he would drink, he would get sad, and he would think about the old country (the dry hills of Calabria, the bells on the necks of goats, the sight of the sea in the distance; cheap peasant wine and cheese, cabbage and beans, olive oil).
—Oh, Dad. Oh, Dad. Oh, Dad, she murmured.
Don and Dave loved him like an Old Testament patriarch; she loved him like he was a little boy (the little boy who had taken a ship across the Atlantic and spoke a dialect of medieval Albanian).
She hadn’t married Tom Villani because he was too much like her father: Another Italian boy: sensitive and small, muscular, artistic.
Her father had played a role in every choice she’d ever made; he was the standard, the ruler, she held up to men.
She just wanted this to be over.
She started to cry. Her brother watched her silently, her mother still looked out the window.
—You’re a good man, Dad. I just want you to know.
He couldn’t hear her, probably, but in case he could, she wanted him to hear, to know.
It wasn’t right that he should be taken away. It wasn’t right that this compact, sensitive, kind man should suffer and die.
She was losing her connection to the ancestor realm: to the dialect and to the 500-year history of the outrush village where her father had been born, which was not really in spirit Italian at all. Even though he arrived in Bethlehem when he was nine years old and became an American, her father had never accepted the Pennsylvania landscape as his native landscape and always tried to transform the nature around him back into Italy.
That’s why he bought a mountain, bought a lot of land in the mountains and built a house and built a well and built a pool and built a tennis court. But also why he tried to grow grapes in the wrong climate and raise chickens. He wanted an old-world America. Her father didn’t want America so much as he wanted the resources and the respect that America could give him, a peasant.
—Dad, she whispered quietly. —Please don’t die.
She didn’t want her kids here. She didn’t want her husband here. She gave them permission to compartmentalize. Elizabeth would have come, she wanted to come. Stephen wanted to avoid the hospital at all costs.
—I fucking hate the hospital, Mom, he said.
Adele didn’t have the stomach to tell Elizabeth that she and Don and Dave and her mother decided to sell the house and just leave a plot of land, a parcel of land with a fire pit, after Arturo died. Her mother couldn’t keep it up and all they really wanted was a place to be in nature. They could have that. A fire pit, a compost toilet, a driveway, a place you could just spend a Sunday afternoon and go home. Arturo had fully moved his wife and Dave to the woods when Dave was in high school after Adele and Don had graduated and gone to college. Selling the original house in Bethlehem. That was the 70s. Dave had been miserable, her mom had been miserable; only Arturo had been happy in Danielsville, Pa.
But Dave didn’t like going to high school with rednecks. He missed his friends in Bethlehem, he missed a high school with a band and advanced chemistry classes. Expanding the house and turning it into a state house was a consuming passion of her father’s. But it made no sense. The land was carved out of the woods. The neighbor’s houses were dilapidated and small. It wasn’t close to a body of water or Bethlehem or Philadelphia or New York City. It wasn’t easily accessible. It wasn’t off the highway. It really was just raw land, land that had been ignored by enough Pennsylvanians that Arturo could afford to buy a few acres on a principal’s salary in 1963.
The last thing Arturo had said before he lost consciousness the previous day, and it was unclear whether he would gain consciousness again or talk:
—Let’s take care of your mother.
This had made Adele so angry. Take care of your mother. That’s all he ever cared about. Not take care of yourself, not take care of the kids, but take care of your mother. She didn’t care about her mother. She didn’t give a shit about her mother. Her brothers didn’t give a shit about their mother, and Arturo knew that. He knew that they also had to do their duty. That’s because they wouldn’t do it naturally. They didn’t want to do it naturally (but of course she would never actually abandon her mother; that was never a question; none of them would).
But that’s not what Arturo meant by take care of your mother. He meant: you must uphold the illusion that I have upheld. You have to internalize the illusion that she is good, kind, patient; he wanted his children to will themselves to believe, as he had, that she was well.
Adele resented this. She had suffered directly at her mom’s hands for so long: her silences, her paranoia, the blow ups every holiday, excommunicating extended family members, neighbors, friends, boyfriends.
But Arturo had preached obedience, submission, faith, belief, responsibility: power, even. He had preached and insisted. And now his three children faced middle age without those values, without anyone to maintain the moat against a chaos of values.
Dave and Don both wanted divorces; and when Arturo died, they would act; Adele was sure of it. And she couldn’t blame them. Don’s wife Jessica was melancholic and needy. Don had put her through college and hadn’t had kids because she had lupus and couldn’t have kids (even though Don would have loved having a son, would have loved and adored a son). Dave was the opposite. Dave didn’t want kids, but his wife had wanted kids. Dave would have been happier on his own. A bachelor surgeon, an oddball.
But Dave and Don had done what their wives had wanted them to do, just like Arturo had always done, because that’s what Arturo had taught them: to honor their wives (always).
Ironically, Adele’s marriage to Michael was much more balanced, much more rational and modern than her parents’ marriage or her brothers’ marriages. Adele and Michael actually talked about things and actually made decisions together. They were both reasonable people. They might have their issues but they didn’t force each other, really, to do anything, not directly.
The Gazda family was far more democratic in spirit than Adele’s own childhood had been.
She stroked her father’s pale, veiny, dying hand. She wanted so badly to believe in God. And she was starting to. She could feel God and her father. She could feel that God somehow was being released by his death. Like the ripe smell of rotting fruit. Arturo’s death would not be in the news. It would not be in the movies or in novels. It was not for anything in this complex. The soul would loosen and disintegrate soon, in a few hours.
A nurse came in to check the vitals. Dave, who’d basically been acting as a surrogate doctor, saved the nurse time. For the time being, nothing was really happening. If he made it through the night, they would take him to a hospice. If he woke up and felt better, then maybe he could die at home, but no one really believed that. That was just something they talked about. To console themselves, if. The truth was that he would die in the hospital.
An hour later, the siblings sat now in the hospital cafeteria, drinking more coffee; it was close to two in the morning. Their mom hadn’t left the hospital room and didn’t want to eat. Adele had just gotten off the phone with Michael; he said Elizabeth was in her room crying, Stephen was asleep.
—Hooch is going to die tonight, Don said, using his nickname for Arturo.
—It could be a few days, Dave said.
—Oh God, Adele sighed, —It’s fucking awful.
—Well, yeah, Dave said. —That’s dying in a hospital.
—We should drive out to the woods and let him die by the fire, Don said.
—Yeah he’d like that, wouldn’t he, Adele said.
—He wouldn’t make it, Dave asserted rationally.
—I know; it’s just...
—It’s so fucking awful, Adele repeated.
—It is, Don said solemnly.
Don was a big man, a former wrestler; Dave was thin; it was like the two brothers were reacting, chemically, to the presence of the other, forming a single stable bond between two unstable-on-their-own halves.
—Adele, why don’t you go home? Get some sleep for a couple hours. You can’t sleep here. I mean, you haven’t, right?
—No, I haven’t, Adele said, —but I can’t leave.
—I think he’s going to make it till tomorrow, Dave said. —I think you should go home.
—No, Adele said, close to tears. —Please don’t send me home. I need to be here.
—Mom seems happy, Don said. —She finally has him under total control.
—Can you not joke right now? Adele said.
—I don’t even think I’m joking.
—They have a strange relationship, Dave said.
—You can say that again, Don echoed.
Her brothers were so sentimental that they had to hide it by engaging in this kind of ironic banter.
Or maybe it wasn’t her brothers. All men were like this. Her husband would have been doing the same thing, making small talk. She remembered Joseph Gazda’s death in 1996. Michael’s sister had found Joe dead in the kitchen one morning. He’d had a heart attack in the middle of the night, trying to walk to get water. He was 83 somehow, despite missing half a lung. That was that. Michael got a call. She remembered finding her husband sitting at the dining room table with the cordless phone, tears in his eyes.
Her own father was a much tougher case. He had fought and fought and fought, resisting going to doctors or hospitals, taking him five hours to even go to the hospital for his heart attack, partly because her mother, his wife, had insisted that he was fine, just having indigestion. If he’d gone for regular checkups, they would have caught all of this: the blocked artery, the blood pressure, lung cancer. Instead, her father had basically ignored everything until it was too late. Then again, what did she hope for? That her 76-year-old father would live to 100? Arturo had looked 75 when he was 55 or 60; he looked 85 at 75. He’d had gray hair since she was a girl. If not for the mountain house and chopping wood and the vigorous rituals required of keeping up the house and the clean air and the spring water, her father would have been dead at 50 or 60. There was no doubt. (Many of the other men he taught with at Buchanan Elementary had died young of heart attacks. His generation was killed off by heart attacks. Her generation was being killed off by cancer. There didn’t seem to be natural deaths anymore.)
—There hasn’t been a good death since the Romans, her father liked to say. —I’m going to have the first good death since the Romans, Arturo had bragged after his heart attack, when Adele first visited him in the hospital.
But that hadn’t turned out to be true; this wasn’t beautiful at all, nor was he conscious enough to render it such.
A few weeks after Arturo’s death, Adele, Dave, and Don took Arturo’s ashes up the mountain house at Lake Tu Peek; Maria, their mother, abstained, claiming it was too hard on her emotionally; she couldn’t bear it. And that was fine with her children.
Don, Dave, and Adele gathered around the stone fireplace that Arturo had built about twenty yards from the house (which they were in the process of selling because Don and Dave would need money for the divorces that Adele understood were imminent).
—Goodbye Hooch, Don said.
—He could be a real bastard, Dave said.
—Yeah he could, Don said.
—Oh Dad, Adele whispered.
Dave put his arm around his sister, and Don followed, and they pulled her close.
