Remembering An American Memory

I have returned to one of my favorite books. The first time I read it in 1989, I was stunned and overwhelmed by its power and found myself weeping within the first several pages. It has lost some of its effect on me as I now understand the switches it trips in my psyche. I once bought the last five copies in a bookstore and gave them as gifts to friends; I thought that much of it. It's a fine winter read.

AN AMERICAN MEMORY
by Eric Larsen

How much anger there was in my father: something in him made him wish to destroy himself, to destroy others as well, to pull down the world around him and trample it in angry spite. Throughout his life he wrestled with this desire, sought to contain the terrible impulse of rage, yet at the same time fed on it secretly as if from a silent pool of irresistable liquor that lay hidden deeply inside himself. My father's life was a short circuit, a trip-valve, a contradiction: he must be in a rage, yet he must not be in a rage; he must rise in the world, yet he must not rise in the world; he must exist, yet he must not exist. My father agonistes: his emotional life a ganglionlike bondage of knots that grew tighter and more unrelieving with the struggle. There were times - in winter, on the farm, in the bottom of despair - when I imagine, had my father been an animal, that he would have devoured us one at a time, then shrunk into his lair to gnaw slowly with sullen and furious spite at his own limbs and flesh.

and

My grandfather was a man who went through his life without grace of imagination. Stolid, purposeful, sternly comforting as he may have seemed on the outside, the wind blew through my grandfather’s bones.

When he was inside his office, the door would stand open; a shaft of light from his desk lamp would fall across the red carpeting of the mezzanine where the staircase turned up toward the darkness of the balcony seats. In the auditorium, two cleaning ladies would vacuum between the rows of seats, their machines attached to long black cords plugged in under the skirt of the stage. They would sweep up spilled popcorn, pieces of candy, crumpled wrappers of various kinds. Under the seats they would find lost coins, dropped scarves, gloves, handkerchiefs, sometimes wallets or valued personal objects, necklaces, trinkets, jeweled rings, sometimes dollar bills.

There is a memory that stays with me in which it seems always to be February or March, the months of chill gray light, and in which the time seems always to be the same vacant, slow hour of midmorning. Outdoors, the snow is turning to slush; it falls in wet clumps from the black branches of trees, and, in the streets, the tires of cars leave deep ruts in the slush, which then fill with icy water. In this memory there is a cold buffeting wind, heavy and strong with a cutting dampness, under a sky that is low and gray.

Inside the theater, I feel aimless and confined, burdened with empty time. I embark upon a circular pattern, which compulsively I trace over and over. I climb up the stairway past my grandfather’s open door, then continue along the muffled carpeting up into the chill emptiness of the balcony. I cross through the darkness of the balcony; descend the opposite staircase; move through the wan gray daylight of the main lobby; then re-ascend silently past my grandfather’s open door. I make this identical journey six, eight, perhaps ten or a dozen times, running as quickly as I am able without breaking my silence or alerting my grandfather, traveling circles through the darkness of the hollow old theater.

When I am exhausted, I climb to the top row of the balcony and find my way into a center seat, beneath the square holes cut into the wall of the projectionist’s booth. The auditorium is dark, illuminated only by the dim glow of the exit signs over the doors. Waiting for my breath to calm, I gaze down through this great volume of historical emptiness, able to see only vaguely the pale image of the screen standing behind its thin translucent curtain. As my wild heartbeat slowly quiets, silence closes in around me. I am enclosed inside a vast dark space free of sound, of motion, perhaps even of time. I wait. I seem to sense only a great silence. Then at last I begin to hear the sounds of the wind from outdoors. There is a dull buffet against the wooden roof. From somewhere backstage comes a subdued, hesitant moan. Then the wind gets caught under a roofboard, or tries to come in at a barred doorway, and I hear a high rising whistle, a small voice thin with unspeakable weariness, a sound that comes from the far distance of the dead past, palely wavering, tenuous, as frail as a thread.

Copyright © 1988 by Eric Larsen
Algonquin Books