The Remembrance of Our Misdoings : Part 2

The Black Veil
by Rick Moody

(Page 2 of 5)

What did he tell me? Was he just a mother's son, a guy named Horace, maybe, or Linwood, or Parker, a guy from New England, uncomfortable in the city, didn't care for it, stuck here now, living in tunnels, out of touch with what family remained, if any? Was he part of one of history's diasporas? Had they all died in the fire in which he was scarred, in which he was disfigured? We have our prejudices about who our homeless are, about their origins and their logic, but are these prejudices really valid? Wasn't he related to all of us? or so I began to argue, in certain insomniac settings. Wasn't he related to the mariners of the thirteen colonies or to the immigrants of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this particular American, related to me, to my interlopers on the continent, authors of Manifest Destiny, sufferers of conscience, my settlers with their inventory of persecutions worried out like bad fevers through the troubled sleep of the centuries? Horace Cabot or Horace Adams or Horace Mather, or some such name, in his ragged cloak, sleeping badly, giving up on the consolations of family, village, and nation.

He began to appear to me regularly. Which period coincides with the beginning of these pages, the middle nineties. The Hooded Man on the R train. At Borough Hall, and later standing peacefully, arms folded, at the Canal Street Station or at City Hall. The Hooded Man, sentry, at Fifty-seventh. In the morning, in the evening, late at night, face covered. Emblematic. Occasionally placid, occasionally restless. I began to ask people. Had they ever seen this guy? Was anyone as preoccupied with him as I was? It turned out that everyone had seen him. He was a fixture in my New York City. On the way to rehearsal dinners and fancy society balls, book parties, press screenings, we had all seen him, dressed in our rental tuxedoes, wearing excellent perfumes, or maybe just in business casual, in sportswear, we had all found ourselves in the orbit of this celestial body. He'd made a celebrity of himself by zipping his hood, hiding his face. Or maybe that is simply my interpretation.

The disease of an evil conscience is beyond the practice of all the physicians of all the countries in the world, says W. E. Gladstone, or, according to an American thinker about inherited remorse: The world should recline its vast head on the first convenient pillow, and take an age-long nap. It has gone distracted, through a morbid activity, and, while preternaturally wide-awake, is nevertheless tormented by visions.

Readers in search of a tidy, well-organized life in these pages, a life of kisses bestowed or of novels written, may be surprised. My book and my life are written in fits, more like epilepsy than like a narrative; or: the process of this work is obsessive and like all obsessions is protean, beginning with the burden of conscience, moving through the narrative evocations of that sensation, shame, remorse, guilt, regret, into the story of a particular search for the original image of the veil in my life, the veil in the life of my family, the original image of facelessness, all this in an account of a five-day driving trip to Maine to locate the origin of the veil among Moodys, this five-day search woven like a braid into an account of my own difficulties, which are not entirely unlike the difficulties of the hooded ghost on the R train. Alas, this account never settles for the orderly where the disorderly and explosive can substitute, because obsession is not orderly, it is protean, like consciousness, it is one thing on a day sunny and cool with offshore breezes, quite another in winter, as in this preface, where there is description and then analysis, where there are disembodied quotations (some from Hawthorne, some from others) that float like ghosts of literature past. Encountering obsession is like encountering a whole person; obsession has its blind spots, it is occasionally inexplicable, it is worrisome, it is amazing and sometimes charming, it is both deceitful and forthright, it features recurrent and persistent thoughts, impulses, or images that are experienced, at some time during the disturbance, as intrusive and inappropriate and that cause marked anxiety or distress; you deal with obsession the way you deal with an unusual neighbor, uncertain about your right to demand his complete story all at once, satisfied with the way details are parceled out here and there, because that's how a life goes, helter-skelter, like crows rising from a tree where a hawk has just settled, famished. If birds will describe the obsession, I will break away to describe the birds I have seen; if baseball will describe the obsession, I will break away to speak of foul-outs and pop-ups of my life; because I am myself the matter of this book, you would be unreasonable to expend your leisure on so frivolous a subject, as Montaigne advises. Get to know my book the way you would get to know me: in the fullness of time, hesitantly, irritably, impatiently, uncertainly, pityingly, generously.

Children, with bright faces,
tript merrily beside their parents,
or mimicked a graver gait...

Fathers make fetishes of their cars. Mustang convertibles, spor-tutility vehicles, Jaguars, Corvettes (fathers receding into their middle years), Audis, Saabs, the restored Nash Rambler, the MG, the Ferrari, Lexus, Lotus, Lincoln Town Car; there are souped-up motorcycles and fathers are out in the driveway, on their backs, fumbling for wrenches.

I'm concerned here with patrimony, with all the characteristics attendant thereupon, with self and the vain reiteration of self implicit in fathers and sons, with national pride, national psychology, national tradition, with inheritance, with all the eccentricities that run in families, so you will have no choice but to get to know my dad (to the almost complete exclusion of my mom, unfortunately), as you will also have to wrestle with certain long-standing rules of dads. My particular dad, Hiram Frederick Moody Jr., didn't appear in my life until I was nine. He was in residence before that, sure, throughout the early years, but in a way more capricious than fatherly. He made his way around the premises. He had thinning dark hair and glasses (worn with embarrassment since early childhood). He was slim. His most frequent expression was one of furrowed skepticism. He dressed casually but never sloppily. My dad wore Top-Siders and cable-knit sweaters and tweed jackets with patches on the elbows. And tortoiseshell glasses. He was, compared to me, very large. He was a behemoth. My childhood interest in dinosaurs, in the T. rex or the pterodactyl, was really a metaphorical interest in dads. He dispensed incontrovertible orders. We executed these orders. But my father was also a cipher to me, a mystery, an enigma — at least until my parents were divorced in 1970. This was all in Connecticut, in the suburbs. In Darien, mainly. Sun-dappled lawns, sprinklers, station wagons. My parents had to go as far as Mexico to secure their divorce. My mom had to go. That I hadn't been aware of any difficulties between them says more about what awareness is to a child than it says about their difficulties. My parents didn't talk to each other very often; they would pass through the kitchen or the front hall or on the way to the bar in the den and acknowledge each other in a miserly way. They didn't yell or bicker. They mostly agreed in public. But they managed to avoid being in a room at the same time, and we (my brother and sister and I) were rarely with the two of them in the family constellation, that I remember, except occasionally on our sailboat. I have the pictures of their wedding to attest to the fact that they were married at the same location and moment, but that is the only evidence. Dad turned up late, most nights, after my bedtime. Or, if earlier, he secluded himself in front of the network news, in a recliner, with a cocktail (vodka martini very dry with twist) and dry-roasted peanuts. Occasionally, I fitted myself into a small crevice beside him on the vinyl recliner, my head upon his shoulder, and watched the news with him, not understanding a word — Vietnamese body counts, riots at the convention — not talking to my dad, as my dad didn't talk to me. I absorbed the warmth of his sweaters and enjoyed the irrefutability of the head of household. When he took us out on weekends to play games, to engage in athletic contests, to school us in competition, he seemed distracted. Especially when baseball was involved. Baseball was too slow. Baseball was a game of the past, a nineteenth-century game, an Indian game. A game from the old America. The pitcher is the only important player, he observed. Why was anyone interested in it? My father watched football on the television in the den; he watched the New York Giants and grumbled at their performances, at Frank Gifford. We tried to excel at football as a result, even my sister, because we wanted to rouse him from distraction. Out on the lawn. In the space between crab apple trees and dogwoods. The neighbors came by and played too. Somebody's feelings were always hurt. The rules had not been effectively stated! Someone was cheating! I often tried to declaim facts about football in order to impress my dad, like that the Los Angeles Rams were very good, but my heart was not in it. I wasn't even in possession of genuine facts.

Fathers use acronyms. Fathers refold maps; fathers like to appear as though they have infallible knowledge of direct routes between any two points. Fathers are purveyors of ethics.

Copyright © 2002 by Rick Moody

About the Author

Rick Moody is the author of Demonology, Purple America, The Ring of Brightest Angels Around Heaven, The Ice Storm and Garden State, which won the Pushcart Press Editors' Book Award. He is a past recipient of the Addison Metcalf Award and a Guggenheim fellowship. Moody has contributed fiction and essays to most major publications and has been widely anthologized. He lives in New York.