Luminous Airplanes by Paul La Farge Read Free Book Online

Then Richard Ente murmured, You mustn’t tell your father.—Damn my father, Marie said, rolling away from him and snugging her back to his chest. He’s a good man, Richard said softly. Not as good as you, Marie said. Hm, said Richard. He got up and dressed in the moonlight. Is my tie straight?—You look dashing, Marie said.—Then adieu.—No! But Richard Ente was gone; he had climbed out the window and down to the ground, and now he walked to where his car idled silently among the trees. None of this explained him taking his own life. I invented other scenes in which Richard Ente’s suicidal tendency would be manifest: Richard draining a flask before he gets into his car. Richard growling, I can’t go on with this charade! Richard speeding around a curve and closing his eyes. No. The story I’d made up about my father had petrified in my memory; adding the story of his death in Denver didn’t change him any more than the addition of paint to a rock would make it not a rock. My story was beyond contradiction, to the point where even now I think of it as being about my real father, even though I know for a fact that it is wrong in almost every particular.
    Finally I stopped looking for the truth about Richard Ente. I was left with a mystery, a love of library research and a desire to get as far away from my family as I could: these last two came in handy when I went to Stanford to study American history.
    LOST THINGS
     
    The sun was already high over the mountains when I woke up, my neck and back frozen at bad angles from sleeping on the sofa. I washed my face and drank sulfurous water from the tap. By day, the house didn’t seem haunted, only cluttered. Four generations of Rowlands had lived there and as far as I could tell not one of them had ever thrown anything out. Cigar boxes and tobacco tins from the early twentieth century were heaped on a table in the hall, teapots, hatracks, mugs, pens, bowls full of buttons and pins, vases, stacks of old magazines, china statuettes of shepherds and milkmaids, candlesticks, bundles of letters, books, albums, records, telephone directories, ashtrays, bottle openers and pens given away by businesses that no longer existed, framed photographs of long-dead cousins, sewing kits, skeins of wool, coasters, place mats, watercolors of the Catskills that my grandmother had painted in her youth, road maps, paperweights, letter openers, seashells, lamps. Every horizontal surface in the house was heaped with stuff; every cabinet was full. There was no separation between the priceless things and the worthless ones: in the parlor, the silver inkwell which supposedly came over from France with Jean Roland was full of paper clips.
    I went upstairs to my mothers’ bedroom, which looked just as it had when they ran away from Thebes in the spring of 1970. Embroidered bedspreads covered the twin beds; the trunks where Celeste kept her art things stood against the wall. There were two windows and two desks, and a poster tacked to the wall between them: Russian Folk Music, University Performing Arts Center, December 19, 1969. Their closet was a museum of fashion from the late sixties. Their bookshelf was the summum of thought from the same era: The Bell Jar , Being and Nothingness , Steppenwolf , The Stranger . The room had always seemed strange to me, and it was strange that my grandparents hadn’t done anything with it, the way they’d changed my uncle’s room into a study. It was as if they were still hoping my mothers would come back. But the room was creepy, and I could understand why the Celestes hadn’t wanted to come back. I felt like an idiot for agreeing to come in their place. I should have let them hire someone to get rid of everything. Without looking at my grandparents’ room, or the study, or the attic, my god, the attic, I got dressed and drove into town.
    I parked in back of the Kountry Kitchen, took a booth by the window and looked blankly at the big sign outside the ski