Free The Lost Landscape by Joyce Carol Oates

My mother was taken in by a couple who not only wanted a child, but also needed another farm-helper in their household; as soon as she was old enough, she was given farm chores; for a few years she attended a one-room schoolhouse a mile away from the small farm in Millersport, across Tonawanda Creek in Niagara County—the very one-room schoolhouse I would attend years later.
    Briefly too my mother attended a Roman Catholic school taught by nuns, in Swormville, from which she graduated after eight grades, at which time her education ceased. Eight grades were considered more than sufficient at this time in our history, in rural communities especially, where the designation “high school graduate” was a matter of pride.
    When my mother Carolina Bush was eighteen or nineteen years old, and working part-time as a waitress in a restaurant on the Millersport Highway, she and my father Frederic Oates met. This would have been 1935 or 1936. Fred Oates was three years older than Carolina; he’d been born in Lockport, a small city seven miles north of Millersport, on the Erie Canal. Like my mother’s early life, my father’s early life had been shaped by the premature and violent death of a relative, in this case his maternal grandfather, a German Jewish immigrant who’d tried to kill both his wife and his fourteen-year-old daughter (my grandmother-to-be) with a shotgun, and ended up killing only himself. My father, too, had had to quit school young, and began work in a “machine-shop” (Harrison Radiator) in Lockport. He would work at Harrison’s for an astounding forty years before retiring, though by degrees he was to be promoted from the assembly-line machine shop to tool and die design.
    Since such family secrets were shrouded in mystery, as in mortification and shame, I never knew, nor had I any way of substantiating, whether these two (very attractive) young people confided in each other, or commiserated with each other; both sides of my family were notable for reticence, and a stubbornness in reticence; these were not individuals for whom openness came easily, still less anything approaching “full disclosure.” The ardor of confession for which our era is known would have been astonishing to them, scarcely believable and in no way desirable. There seemed the fear among my adult relatives that something misspoken could not be reclaimed; if you spoke heedlessly, you would speak unwisely and you would regret it. In much of my fiction there is a simulacrum of the “confessional” but to interpret it in these terms is misleading. Not literal transcription but emotional transcription is the way of the writer.
    While we were growing up, my brother Fred, Jr., and I had no idea of our parents’ backgrounds. We had no idea that my mother had been given away by her mother, after her father’s murder; we had no idea that my father’s mother had nearly been murdered by her raging father. We had no idea that my father’s mother Blanche Morgenstern was Jewish. (In western New York State of those days,we had no idea what “Jewish” was.) We would be adults before we learned even the skeletal outline of these old, shameful secrets that had both altered the trajectories of our parents’ (impoverished) lives but also made our births, in 1938 and 1943 respectively, possible.
    It was fascinating—I suppose. To live among adults who must have frequently spoken to one another in a kind of code. (My mother’s stepparents with whom we lived would certainly have talked about my mother’s biological mother and her siblings, who lived less than ten miles away; there were Bush uncles and aunts and cousins who appeared at a little distance, and gradually became known to me in my teens.) Much of adult life was forbidden of entry to children—not just family secrets of this sort but financial crises, health crises, problems with work. Outside the brightly-lit