Free The Lost Landscape by Joyce Carol Oates Page A

“home” there is the murky penumbra of adults who don’t especially care about you, and are not obliged to wish you well. It may be that the writer/artist is stimulated by childhood mysteries or that it is the childhood mysteries that stimulate the writer/artist. Sometimes in my writing, when I am most absorbed and fascinated, to the point of anxiety, I find myself imagining that what I am inventing is in some way “real”; if I can solve the mystery of the fiction, I will have solved a mystery of my life. That the mystery is never solved would seem to be the reason for the writer’s continuous effort to solve it—each story, each poem, each novel is a restatement of the quest to penetrate the mystery, tirelessly restated.
    The writer is the decipherer of clues—if by “clues” is meant a broken and discontinuous subterranean narrative.
    I WAS WELL INTO adulthood and living far from Millersport by the time the Bush family secret came to light, and even then it was a faint, glimmering light, about which no one wished to speak without averted eyes, an air of embarrassment and shame, and a wish to change the subject. Growing up in their household, on that farm in Millersport, my brother and I may have had a vague awareness that John and Lena Bush were not my mother’s “real” parents—beyond that we couldn’t know, and in the way of family reticence, which is a kind of dignity, we could not ask, any more than children of that era would have boldly asked their fathers what their incomes were and their mothers whether they’d really wanted children.
    But here is the surprise: my mother’s account of that traumatic time in her early life did not center upon the murder of her father (whom she had not known—after all she’d been an infant at the time) but on the mortifying fact of having been “given away.” When for a special feature in O, The Oprah Magazine in the late 1990s several women writers were commissioned to interview their own mothers, I learned of some of this old, sad story, still upsetting to my mother so many decades later. All my mother seemed to know was: her father had been murdered, her mother had given her away. Several times she said, “My mother didn’t want me. I used to cry and cry . . .” I was stricken to the heart—my mother was eighty years old! This trauma of 1917 was as recent and fresh to her as if no time had intervened.
    Of all the relatives on both sides of our family my mother Carolina Oates had the reputation of being the most generous, the most kind, the warmest and “sunniest”—I did not want to think that, in her innermost heart, Mommy thought of herself as a child whose mother had not wanted her.
    Crimes reverberate through many years, and through many lives. It is a rare homicide that destroys only one person. And it is a paradox to accept that, had a Hungarian immigrant not been murdered in 1917, I would not be alive today; how many of us, many more than would wish to speak of so sordid a fact, owe our births tothe premature deaths of others whom we have never known but to whom we are linked by that mysterious shared fate called “blood.”
    Here is the ironic equipoise of which Henry James wrote: this catastrophe that was for my mother, through her life, a source of acute sorrow and shame was for me, her daughter, the very genesis of my life.

SUNDAY DRIVE
    ONCE UPON A TIME , the Sunday drive.
    In our succession of Daddy’s wonderful cars!
    (Were Daddy’s cars wonderful, or did my brother and I just imagine this? They were all American cars of course and all built by General Motors for my father worked for Harrison Radiator in Lockport, New York, an automotive supplier for GM. Though technically these were not “new cars” but “used” they were always “new” and spectacular to us.)
    Where are we going, I would ask.
    And the answer