There were several parties in the summers of 2003 and 2004, always with two cars. But one July day Gary and I drove up alone, parked at the old railroad station in Monkton, then walked the length of the river up to the low, slightly creepy concrete bridge of Blue Mountain Road where we always put in, screaming as we first sat back into the giant whale-colored tubes.
After the hour's ride, shivering in the hot car, our hands pruned and white, we got to the intersection with Route 45—the Old York Trail—and I suddenly told Gary "Keep going on this."
What has kept us together for 24 years is his responsiveness to my passionate or manic concepts—in the graceless, bureaucratic parlance of modern therapy, an enabler—and we found ourselves silently heading north, following the serpentine rise of the two-lane road up from the river valley. The opposite direction from home.
At the top of the hill, I looked back over the fields to find the high bridges, like two towering aqueducts, that carry the four lanes of 83 across the river.
I last saw them when I was seven, and the distant view (there were far fewer trees then) provided me with my first full-on Sehnsucht. My grandmother, my great-aunt, and I were driving down from Shrewsbury to White Hall to visit my Aunt Lillian. I had never met her, and after that day I never saw her again.
Thirty-seven years later, I am trying to remember the roads and turns as I saw them from the massive back seat windows of my grandmother's 1951 Buick.
"Turn right."
* * *
I spent all summer—every summer—with my 70-something grandmother and her two unmarried 80-something sisters. My mother appreciated the laxity of the three months of weekend drinking and sleepovers with no introductions the next morning. A summer of no surprise uncles.
My grandmother had moved back into the big family house from a wealthy suburb on the Main Line in Philadelphia, after her husband had died. Back home to roost with her came the English boxwoods and rhododendrons, the Duncan-Phyfe dining room and cupboards of paper-thin china, and piles of lithographic, disintegrating sheet music from her days as a student at Peabody Conservatory and her brief performances on Baltimore radio.
She was tall, physically strong, intellectually curious, not easily mollified when once angered, and—to the furthest extent possible in good taste and Christian humility—proud of herself and her good fortune.
My mother liked to remind me that my grandmother (who was her mother-in-law, all too briefly) never worked. My mother held jobs from age 16 until two months before she died, and this statement struck me as a polite expression of hatred, when I was a child.
My father had been from a different economy altogether, and his few years with my mother were the result of, the symptoms of, a confused downward spiral that ended with his suicide when I was 19 months old.
The two women became unlikely conspirators, agreeing never to tell me the truth about my father, meeting at Easter and Christmas and the beginning and end of each summer with a peculiarly brave warmth toward one another, each determined—in such different ways—to recompense for the sad beginning of my life.
One smelled like Coty and roast beef, the other like Sea Breeze and cigarettes.
* * *
We started down toward a fork, and I remember wondering as a child where the left road, sinking suddenly down into woods, went. So we swung right, dropped speed, and I started looking at each of the houses.
Then I just saw it—the deep grassy lot with the long dirt driveway leading to the garage, the porch with the single dormer above it—little had changed.
My luck in recreating a trip I had taken once, so long ago, seemed faintly malicious, like spotting an old lover against the odds, or receiving a late but sincere compliment—a devastating word of kindness—from an unexpected source. It was exonerating my sentimentality, massaging bruised tissue I tried to maintain stiff, unused. This seemed to be whispering You were right all along, when what one needs to believe—has believed—is that one's ineptitude, the flawed personality alone, has been to blame.
It's too painful to think that, maybe, it was all just very bad luck.
* * *
The summer drive back in 1967 seemed exceptional from the beginning.
First, we never drove south—only north to Jacobus, or York, for housewares or Easter clothing or the next book in the series for my piano lessons. It seemed the old car, which sometimes dropped a hubcap at higher speeds or overheated under the noontime sun, would lose its way crossing into Maryland.
Another thing was my grandmother—dignified in her Wayfarers, a charm bracelet jangling a little tune when her wrist tugged at the giant steering wheel—seemed to be growing oddly excited.
I remember pulling into that driveway, which seemed like a mile to an 8-year-old. We entered through a back porch of white painted wooden boards.
A man, Dick, met us as we entered the kitchen. He lived there. He was not my uncle, and he was not a servant: he was Lillian's friend.
And then my grandmother and Lillian were embracing. My grandmother saying Oh Lil! with a girlish enthusiasm, a joy that seemed ready to erupt into tears if left unmanaged, an affection that was more reverence than charity.
And toward my grandmother—with her slender face and restrained smile, in a black mohair cardigan held closed with a gold chain clip, a rumpled Kleenex in the sleeve, a very good bag the color of cafe au lait hanging from her forearm—Lillian's voice boomed a mannish greeting like an accusation, her tone ebullient but wounded—impossibly good-natured, sportsmanlike, visceral—her face flush and her broad smile demarcated by brilliantly white dentures, scolding my grandmother for the long time that had passed, yet in deep celebration at the visit.
And thus I met my Irish aunt.
I was scared to death of her.
It was like a man inside a woman—I'm certain I'd think of her as gay had I met her now—everything large, the face like Santa Claus after a martini, laughter always just approaching or retreating from the eyes, a complete engagement with the world.
I'm sure there must have been sandwiches or cake, but at some point during the afternoon it was decided that we would all take a ride in Lillian's Cadillac, down to the mill in White Hall, one of two businesses for which she was owner and chief executive officer.
It was the first time I'd been in a car with my grandmother where she was not the driver.
* * *
Beyond these fleeting, disjunctive memories of a woman with a powerful personality, silver-white hair, and a blinding smile—and business acumen and wealth—all that remains of the day is an understanding of how much my grandmother must have loved my grandfather—Lillian's brother, who had died from lung cancer 14 years before this visit and 6 years before I was born.
It was as if I had met him that day—blonde hair and blue eyes—a man who must surely have rocked my grandmother's German sang froid with a teasing, puckish bonhomie.
Though all three of us were William Fogle, I had never met my grandfather and had no memories of my father. My afternoon with my Irish aunt—expressive, jocular, driven by a love of the world—was all I was to know of the Fogles.
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