RAKE by Nicholas Van Vactor copyright 2008

RAKE
A NOVEL
BY NICHOLAS H. VAN VACTOR
PART I
I was coming up from the river. I turned and looked back in the direction from which I’d come. On the far shore, the Black Angus were grazing. In the distance, the foothills of the Smokies were accentuated by the deep blue of the summer sky. It was morning. The air was still cool, though as the day progressed, the heat would hang heavy over the valley where my grandparents had lived since my father was a boy.
I looked up at the house, which was built by Normans at the turn of the last century. It looked like a small chateaux with its thick, nubbly, stucco walls and its dark brown timbers set in at angles, forming peaks. The slate roof in blues and grays, some with a pinkish cast, reflected the sun’s rays. Projecting out from the house, I saw the terrace where I imagined my parents were installed on the old glider, reading, as usual.
Over the drive, where the path I was on would soon take me, the Wisteria were in bloom, the vines so thick and dark, like the weightiest branches of the trees in the woods, which I was now traversing on my way up the hill. I looked up. I was in a cathedral, so high and wide the vines had spread. It was getting late. I knew I had to join the others on the terrace, my Aunt Raven, who flew into Knoxville this morning from LA with me by her side, my mother and father, arrived last night, having driven down from Boston. And my grandparents received us.
The photographer was about to arrive. The perfect family was assembled on the veranda overlooking the Tennessee River. I ran in the door and joined them.
It was cocktail hour. After the photographer would leave, drinks would be served just as they always were before lunch and dinner. Before lunch it was martini time. My grandfather, the composer, put down his score to make himself a drink. He was fidgety, as was often the case at this time of day before he had had his cocktail.
He had no sooner sat down, when he began tapping his fingers on the glass top of the coffee table, starting with two taps of his thumb, then the index, then the middle finger, then the ring finger, then the pinkie. The doorbell rang. My Aunt Raven, her makeup perfect, her long, dark hair, swept up on top of her head, ran to open the door and let in the photographer.
A youngish, sandy-haired and preppie looking fellow, entered with his camera. We were asked to come close to each other and smile. I heard the flash sizzle, but it could have been my brain on drugs. Again, he said, “smile,” just in case the first picture didn’t come out. I felt like I was about to have a seizure. My grandfather was growling with impatience to have the session over.
Though he was used to being followed by photographers and reporters, to him they were like mosquitoes whining in his ear. I felt like I had to try very hard to keep smiling when what I wanted to do was to go upstairs to my room and shut the door, closing out the voices which would grow louder in the course of the afternoon.
My Aunt Raven led the photographer back to the front door and stood there talking with him for a while, and then she returned. By then, my grandfather was already in the kitchen mixing up a pitcher of martinis. As he came through the door back on to the terrace, I could hear the ice clinking in the pitcher. I didn’t like that sound. I knew it too well. I knew what it meant: that soon, my grandfather would make some abusive remark to my aunt or my grandmother, followed by my father telling him to shut up.
The atmosphere was tense. It was time to sit down at the table. My grandfather lowered his head in prayer. His own father had been a preacher. But this man had the devil inside him. The prayer went on too long. When he looked up at my father, he locked eyes for a split second. Then, taking his fork and knife, he stabbed his steak, filet mignon, as usual.
Sitting opposite from Raven my mother was eating tomato soup, part of her special diet. Red like the blood she had thrown up in the days of her projectile vomiting, a symptom of a bleeding ulcer, the doctor had said. She was like that for years. I had grown up with her throwing up blood on the streets of Paris. For eight long years the symptom continued.
They gave her the medicine. She went through quantities of it. It never did her any good. She got worse. The episodes became more frequent. They did another endoscope. It revealed nothing.
It was my mother finally who suggested they try a bigger scope. Typical. They got the diagnosis. Lymphoma. According to Dana Farber it was unclear that the ulcer caused the lymphoma. Unclear. It could have been the tumor ulcerating.
I remember we were in a restaurant in Paris in what was the market district in the sixth. Now those market stalls had made way for chain stores like the Gap. My mother had just come out from the bathroom when the vomiting began. So that was Gastric Lymphoma. We were all scared to death accept for my mother. She had these incredible defenses. She seemed almost happy to know about the cancer. “Now they can treat it,” she had said.
Maybe it was because she was a woman she could be like that. Or maybe it was because she was the kind of woman she was. I couldn’t imagine feeling happy about a diagnosis. All she wanted to do was to go on with her life, she said. So on that day, back in Boston, the day of the diagnosis, she gave a party, a kind of celebration, she said. Hurray!
French friends from the Loire Valley were staying with us at the time. The guy, who was a psychiatrist, took my dad out for a drink at the bar around the corner, the Plough and the Stars. He was trying to calm my dad while my mother and the guy’s wife prepared for a whole cast of characters who were about to parade through the houses, drinking white wine, enjoying some fabulous feast she’d cooked up, French speakers all of them.
Not long after, my mother started treatment. It was traumatic for us. But she went on about her day, shopping, working on a manuscript and receiving friends. Grey and scaly as she then was, she wound up reassuring everyone, she was going to live, no matter what the doctors said. And she was right. The treatment was no sooner over than she was out on the tennis court as usual.
She was fine. She came out of the experience a happy woman. No more symptoms. I suppose my problem was that I never dealt with my own fear of her death.
I had lost my appetite. I wanted to get away from them. I wanted to get away from myself. Take some pills, fall into a deep sleep, one of my common ways of coping.
Tried to excuse myself but was told to sit back down in my chair. I looked down at my plate so I didn’t know if the command had come from my father or my grandfather. At this point they seemed like the same person. Then came the salad and the desert.
My grandmother made a pecan pie, my father’s favorite. And although I wasn’t hungry, I knew it would be better if I finished it off, which I did. My grandfather, by this time, was dozing, his head sinking down on his chest. My grandmother suggested he take his nap. And he got up from his chair and went inside without looking back. As soon as he had left, the tension dissolved. We had gotten off easily that time. We all knew what a real scene could be like when the alcohol made him bug eyed and threatening. And the demon would take over.

Last night I drank beer and listened to music on a barge called the 6/8. I sat there and moved to the rhythms. I was hearing them all right. But I couldn’t really take it in. I was still back there in Tennessee.
It was over a month ago now, being with my grandparents what turned out to be for the last time. Gramps died of a stroke a few hours after I left. Not long after, my grandmother suffered an aneurism and was dead upon arrival at the hospital.
Two weeks in Paris had done a lot to dispel the gloom I experienced. For instance, I didn’t know. Pretty much a mess when I got here.
Now, I was in the train, light, dusty floor. Girl’s hand was visible, supporting her. Now back in her lap. I was writing in my new sketchbook, now turning the page, already five pages in, having followed my father’s advice to write a novel—to get my mind off my broken heart over a girl in New York—some of the pages containing drawings from paintings in the Louvre, but mostly there were my own modest efforts at drawing pornographic images; these were done on nice thick archival paper with a gritty tooth: I was having trouble finding my voice, and I was wondering if I even had a voice—her name was Catherine.
I didn’t really want to forget about her. She was at Bard College in New York State. I had broken it off with her after she had read me her diary—she wanted me to put her back together. I couldn’t take her baggage: Before coming to Bard she had been drugged and raped by these two rich Israeli boys at her private school in New Jersey—but a couple weeks later I had asked her back. She didn’t want me anymore. She had her Zoloft pills. I was in Paris without a prescription...

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