The Remembrance of Our Misdoings : Part 5

The Black Veil
by Rick Moody

(Page 5 of 5)

We had five different addresses in five years. With my mom. I was shy to begin with, wary, disappointed by human interaction. I took months to get up the pluck to start a conversation. I refused to be photographed. I was sick a lot. After a couple of relocations, I gave up worrying about it all. I crossed off the days on a calendar, waiting to move again. My brother and sister were untroubled by this, or so they have said, but for me what was broken was irreparable. I hungered for company, and this famishment was my first perception in the morning and my last before bed, and I couldn't remember feeling any other way, though there were people who loved me all around and there had always been. I was the focal point of cheating scams and extortion schemes at my public schools — Let's make Moody give us the answers! I cried spontaneously, I plotted the murder of my brother, banter seemed impossible, kids pushed past me as though I were spectral. My camouflage was perfect. But what I was good at was reading. It started in the sixth grade with The Old Man and the Sea. I read through most of Hemingway that year. Complete disclosure: I also liked J. R. R. Tolkien and anything having to do with horror or science fiction. Where I found that one reliable thing, that other thing, that elsewhere, that space unavailable to me in contests for masculinity and prestige and social standing, was in books. And this was where I met my dad. Where I encountered a guy I had never before been introduced to, really, whose preoccupation had always been numbers, numbers, numbers. October in Darien, and my sister and brother were outside, in the urgency of a chilly weekend evening, and I asked my dad to explain the epigraph to For Whom the Bell Tolls, and he located somewhere in his house a copy of selected John Donne and we sat and went over it line by line on the couch where my mother had last slept when she slept in what was now my father's house, lines about being a part of the herd, the rabble, the people of whom I knew nothing. About lineage too, or so I thought, how we are of one substance with the past, with countrymen, with peerage, with all who went before us, even in the nomadism of the late twentieth century, when families were easily sundered and people moved away from one another. No man is an island. And Hemingway wasn't the only American writer my dad knew about. He'd been an American literature major. I wasn't sure what this meant, but it sounded formidable. There was Hemingway on the bookshelves, there was Fitzgerald; there was Salinger (I quickly consumed The Catcher in the Rye and Franny and Zooey), John P. Marquand, Stephen Crane, Thoreau, Frost. I'm sure that my father, with this additional time to spend with us, this time of visitation, was canny enough to search out areas where my sister and brother could bask in his attentions too — I'm sure my brother learned to make the football spiral properly, I'm sure my sister learned to operate a manual transmission — but I felt, as a reader, that the bright light of parental affection had been turned on me for the first time. I was good at something.

It wasn't long before my father urged on me his favorite book, the book on which he had spent most of his college years, Moby-Dick. Illustratively, he began reading aloud a certain passage annually, over Thanksgiving dinner:

Wonderfullest things are ever the unmentionable; deep memories yield no epitaphs; this six-inch chapter is the stoneless grave of Bulkington. Let me only say that it fared with him as with the storm-tossed ship, that miserably drives along the leeward land. The port would fain give succor; the port is pitiful; in the port is safety, comfort, hearthstone, supper, warm blankets, friends, all that's kind to our mortalities. But in that gale, the port, the land, is that ship's direst jeopardy; she must fly all hospitality; one touch of land, though it but graze the keel, would make her shudder through and through. With all her might she crowds all sail off shore; in so doing, fights 'gainst the very winds that fain would blow her homeward; seeks all the lashed sea's landlessness again; for refuge's sake forlornly rushing into peril; her only friend her bitterest foe!

Know ye now, Bulkington? Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore?

But as in landlessness alone resides the highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God — so better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety! Take heart, take heart, O Bulkington! Bear thee grimly, demigod! Up from the spray of thy ocean-perishing — straight up, leaps thy apotheosis!

A strange passage to read at hearthside at the celebration of our nationhood. In which wonder and memories are unmentionable. In which domesticity is repudiated and the wild call of landlessness is celebrated in its stead. Better to perish in that howling infinite. After some years of this, my brother and I both got much of chapter XXIII by heart, and would quote from it while engaged in more pedestrian activities.

And in the midst of this homely education in the American classics, which stretched out over my early teens, my father must also have let me know about the coincidence with respect to Nathaniel Hawthorne of Salem, Massachusetts. He was a good writer, of course, not as good as Melville, but pretty good, Scarlet Letter is pretty good, except for where the allegory gets the best of the work, but what was most interesting about Hawthorne was that he had written a story about a relative of ours, a story about a Moody! Forefather of our clan. It was the kind of thing you repeated on the playground. I'm related to Davy Crockett! My grandfather owns a newspaper! My father fired off a howitzer! Some guy called Hawthorne wrote a story about our family! Dad had a complete set of Hawthorne, a nineteenth-century edition, and he therefore provided substantiation, produced the uncut leaf on which the facts were to be found, the first page of "The Minister's Black Veil" in the Twice-Told Tales volume of The Collected Works:

Another clergyman in New England, Mr. Joseph Moody, of York, Maine, who died about eighty years since, made himself remarkable by the same eccentricity that is here related of the Reverend Mr. Hooper. In his case, however, the symbol had a different import. In early life he had accidentally killed a beloved friend; and from that day till the hour of his own death, he hid his face from men.

He wore a veil? What did that mean? Hey, who cared? We were famous!

By the advent of the evening in which I sat down to discuss John Donne, my father had mostly retired from literature. He had responsibilities. He was a dad, clocking in and out, getting vested in the pension plan, writing the child support checks, taking the car to the shop, catching the 5:02, but according to my daydreams, maybe more than that too, maybe he was part of a great long line of dads, it seemed to me, extending back to intrepid religious protesters of the seventeenth century, to Carvers, Bradfords, Winslows, Brewsters, Allertons, Standishes, Aldens, Fullers, Martins, Mullinses, Whites, Warrens, Howlands, Hopkinses, Tilleys, and their ilk, the trash, as I have heard it put, that came over on the Mayflower, who wrote on their way to their New World, Haveing undertaken, for ye glorie of God, and advancement of ye Christian faith and honour of our King & Countrie, a voyage to plant ye first colonie in ye northern parts of Virginia, doe by these presents solemnly & mutually in ye presence of God and one of another, covenant, & combine our selves togeather into a civill body politick, for our better ordering, & preservation, & furtherance of ye ends aforesaid; and by vertue hearof to enacte, constitute, and frame such just & equall lawes, ordinances, acts, constitutions, & offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most meete & convenient for ye generall good of ye colonie; unto which we promise all due submission and obedience, and if not one of these, then part of some other wave of immigration, some other American flotilla, part of something, I felt, after learning about Hawthorne, even if lapsed, even if a television-watching, martini-drinking, sports car?driving, American cheese?eating dad, even if estranged from ancestry, even then part of something, and I part of his tribe, though I was perhaps a disappointment to the ghosts that hovered around me: These stern and black-browed Puritans would have thought it quite a sufficient retribution for their sins, that, after so long a lapse of years, the old trunk of the family tree, with so much venerable moss upon it, should have borne, as its topmost bough, an idler like myself.

What trouble we got into next. I'll have more to say about it. The resistance to fathers is honorific, and resistance to fathers is always the last lesson in the instruction of fathers. Fatherhood knows that it is honored by teenage contempt. My sister was expelled from Rosemary Hall for curfew violations and finished up at Pelham High. She crashed my dad's car and pretended that it had nothing to do with drinking. My brother crashed my dad's next car. We stole booze from my father's liquor cabinet and stayed out all night and we walked the beaches, or went driving, looking, searching among contemporaries for lessons calling from the past. A whole sequence of fathers and sons and their relations looking backward for answers, finding, ultimately, that the most impossible father, with the most draconian set of regulations, was not in the living room preparing to lecture them, but cradled inside and impossible to dislodge.

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.