Screening Room by Alan Lightman Read Free Book Online Page B

bees, housed in two wooden boxes sitting on cement blocks in the backyard. While we ate on the screened porch, we could hear the buzzing of the bees, like a soft chorus of background music. Instead of salt and pepper, every table had two jars of fresh honey. We dipped our fried chicken in the honey, which had the flavor of oranges. There were plenty of serving hands. I recall that the family had seven children, including, to my surprise, an adopted African-American boy who was always licking a stick covered in the wonderful orange-blossom honey.
    At night, after dinner, the six of us watched television in my parents’ room or played gin rummy, a game my mother loved. Some evenings, we walked along a path by the lake. It was cool, and the opposite shore glinted with the lights of cabins in the woods. By nightfall, all the tensions of the day had evaporated with the mist on the water. Nothing needed to be organized or packed, there was no danger of unintended jibes or low bridges. We were just a family together.
    I recently saw a photograph of the large resort that has replaced what I remember of the Kenlake Hotel. I’ve not beenback since 1962, when I was thirteen. Sometimes, I imagine those early mornings on the hotel balcony, my brothers dropping little parachutes of Kleenex and string over the rail, my parents sleepy with their coffee, the old man with suspenders turning on the sprinklers.

Portrait of the Family at Home
    During my childhood, as my brothers and I remember it, my father disappeared to his reading chair when he came home from the office, joined the family briefly for dinner, and then disappeared again. The succession of one son after another, while my mother kept trying in vain for a daughter, left my father overwhelmed, and finally detached. We were four boys, born in the space of five years, and our house was chaos. But Dad was detached. Sitting in his chair in the living room, he could read through any amount of yelling and screaming around him, stirring only to turn a page. During the course of an evening, he might say a dozen words. He never knew what clothes hung in our closets or what sports we played after school or what girls we had taken a fancy to. He lived in his own world.
    There were exceptions to these vacancies. My father was an amateur flute player, and, for a few years in the early 1960s, a group of musicians came to our house every Tuesday night to play Bach and Handel with him. During intermissions, we could hear Dad in the next room talking to the other players. If we asked, my father would always help us with our school homework, especially when it involved the delicacies of literature. I remember one evening—I was thirteen or fourteen years old—when I came home with “The Raven” to dissect. Dad put down his newspaper and began reciting the verses from memory, then praised the rhythm and alliteration of the poem. After this wehad a lively discussion about the meaning of the last lines: “And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor / Shall be lifted—nevermore!”
    Sometimes, the silences were enough. He and I once sailed around Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket for a week, just the two of us. One day during the trip, a thick New England fog rolled in, and the land disappeared. Looking out, we couldn’t see beyond twenty feet in any direction. We were most afraid of colliding with a ship, so we would ring a bell every minute or two and attempt to gauge our position by the compass heading and a continual estimation of the speed of our boat. We could have been in outer space. Although he said nothing to me, nor I to him, we were together, and I felt connected to him. But these few moments of communion were only scattered dim lights against a dark empty night. For many years I tried to talk to my father, tried to draw him out of that empty night, but I did not try very hard, and I came to accept his small and almost invisible existence as a part of the