Finding Home, A Memoir

ON AUGUST 3 1963, a family put down one thousand dollars to buy a furnished house, five acres, and a car, and moved to Burden Lake Road in Averill Park, a town near Albany, in upstate New York. A picnic to celebrate followed immediately in the backyard. Strange things soon started to happen.

Nearly at once, over the house of the family, the dead started to gather. The family was then made up of a writer, William Kennedy, his wife, Dana, and their children. It was the writer who had caused this gathering of the dead, having said one too many times that he doesn’t hear the Muses, and that his characters do not inhabit him, but that he prefers to inhabit them to some degree. That made the dead mad, and as we all know, mad dead are the worst dead of all, and they started to agitate. The first thing the dead did, as is well documented, was vote in the general elections of Albany, Schenectady, and Rensselaer counties.

And what a bunch they became. Garrulous and hung over, they were a motleycrew: bootleggers, gamblers, cock fighters, hobos, turpitudinous ladies, and machine gun–lugging gangsters who liked to make other people dead, and, of course, politicians whose idea it was in the first place to put the dead on the voting rolls.

As time passed and the writer wrote but refused to listen to these gathering voices, the dead began voting in record numbers in the general elections, many of them twice.

In the history of upstate, this was a monumental event, this gathering of the voting dead. You might not have heard about this bilious balloting, of course, competing for fame as it does in the same area of the country that brought us no less than the Battle of Bennington, the Anti-Rent Wars, and the birth of the Industrial Revolution. This is the place that was once home to a newspaper known as The American Spy and once housed the marvelously named Father Albino Temperance Society. This is a place of unique and wonderful history.

But the dead had time on their side and they waited, watching, and as the writer chose the subject of Legs Diamond for his first book in what would become known as his Albany cycle, they figured he was going to turn to them for the facts on the life of the murderous man. The writer demurred, instead getting out his notebook. Then he did the death-defying thing that writers sometimes do: he went out and actually reported his story, speaking instead to the living, that wild pack of liars who like to tell tales; and there were hundreds of them, it seemed, who knew Legs Diamond, or knew someone who knew him, or never knew the bum but told stories of him anyway, and the writer was as happy as writers get.

And the dead waited on, doing what the upstate New York dead do: voting and milling about until the next general election.

Then the writer whose imagination seemed lit from a light within took on the topic of one man’s greatest game of billiards, and the dead had no choice but to move from voting only in the generals to looking for more places to be heard. They learned about primaries and special elections. Suddenly no election was too small. They voted for dog catcher, and even for the Rensselaer County District Attorney; in all, they rocked the vote.

Then one night in 1983, a fortune cookie tumbled into the lap of the writer. This part is true, by the way. The slender paper inside read, “This will be your lucky week.”

And it was. In that same week the writer received a so-called genius grant from the MacArthur Foundation and published Ironweed, whose opening lines are as gracious, lovely, and compelling as ever an opening scene contained.

The opening lines are these:

Riding up the winding road of Saint Agnes Cemetery in the back of the rattling old truck, Francis Phelan became aware that the dead, even more than the living, settled down in neighborhoods. The truck was suddenly surrounded by fields of monuments and cenotaphs of kindred design and striking size, all guarding the privileged dead. But the truck moved on and the limits of mere privilege became visible, for here now came the acres of truly prestigious death: illustrious men and women, captains of life without their diamonds, furs, carriages, and limousines, but buried in pomp and glory, vaulted in great tombs built like heavenly safe deposit boxes, or parts of the Acropolis. And ah yes, here too, inevitably came the flowing masses, row upon row of them under simple headstone sand simpler crosses. Here was the neighborhood of the Phelans.

That opening scene and the book that flows from it won the writer the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. A movie followed, filmed in Troy and in Albany. Success was the writer’s to enjoy.

And what of the American electoral system? How can we explain how suddenly, seemingly overnight, the voting numbers dropped in upstate New York counties of Albany, Schenectady, and most precipitously Rensselaer?

Feeling themselves heard, finally happy, the dead never voted again, which seems such a shame now, considering what a mess the living have made of Albany.

* * *

It’s possible that much like greatness, a true appreciation of life in upstate New York can come to a person in any of three ways; that either you can be born to it, that you might achieve it, or that it might be thrust upon you. In my case, it was a best two out of three, after someone placed a book in my hands, setting in motion the ability to suspend my belief in most of what I knew and instead to make my way to my very own sense of place.

At the time I came into possession of the book, a whole other life had been planned and was being lived while working at a great newspaper, sampling the multifarious restaurants and clubs of Manhattan, as well as select beaches of the Hamptons. But another life was going on inside, in no small part stirred to life by the contents of my purse, where tucked in amid the makeup and notebooks, and carried literally everywhere during my twenty-seventh year, there was a paperback book.

Thrust brand new into my hands by a good bookseller, it is a now ragged copy of Legs by William Kennedy, which continues to sit on my desk all these years later. A story as much of redemption as it is of terror, that book traveled with me to some of the better places in New York City, equally at home and fitting neatly in both briefcase and evening bag. Originally published in 1975, I came by my copy of Legs in 1983, just after it was reprinted and published by Penguin. It, and the two successive so-called Albany cycle novels that followed, created a kind of worship among the young writers I knew, and made Mr. Kennedy our dervish, particularly as the cycle, already written and suddenly (to us) rereleased, seemed to us to whirl effortlessly downstate.

At the time the books were reissued, I was a clerk at The New York Times, having started among one of the last classes of copyboys—those lucky drones who run around the newsroom all day (or, in my case, all night), fetching wire copy and delivering it to the appropriate desk, getting clips from the morgue, coffee from the deli—at a time when murders above Ninety-sixth Street were considered out of town, and anything upstate was Albany.

At that time, Albany was a curse on the lips to any reporter who was sent there.

There was no hole lower: not Baghdad, not Krakow, nor Minsk. Muttered as a metropolitan desk epithet, to be sent to Albany was to be sent to hell with none of the trimmings. In my job as a city desk clerk, I spent more time getting people out of Albany—making midnight train reservations, booking planes in blizzards, even scanning Greyhound schedules—than nearly any other chore. I never met anyone who wanted to go to Albany; no one pined or preened to cover the capital, and absolutely not one single reporter accepted spending an extra second in the reportedly moribund place, instead exiting every Tuesday night after the legislative session stopped doing whatever it did.

No one who didn’t have to stayed the week.

And then Mr. Kennedy told us a different tale of a place we all thought we knew well, starting with a small book on murder and mayhem. And some of us bit.

My own copy of Legs has its own history. As an artifact, examining it reveals that it was purchased when I still wrote my name in books written by someone other than myself, my own signature suggesting a flourish being tried out, marking a smudgy line between ambition and hubris. The battered paperback includes an indecipherable jot from an equally indecipherable though decorative boyfriend, as well as my own passionateunderlinings. So astonishing was the writer’s pushing those same words I used to shop, commute, and communicate into sentences of syncopation and humor, wreaking magic with the realism that I had thought was mere Albany, I felt the phrases deserved to be scored right there on the page. How could he do so much with so little, I wondered.

There was a long time during which I went nowhere without my copy, reading it over and over, so much so that my own fancy foodie boyfriend once seethed, “If you’d put down the damn book, maybe you’d learn to cook.” I didn’t, and I didn’t, and instead the written words became a form of chant, its pages accelerating the vehicle on which I would move from other people’s versions of life and into my own.

It’s not that I hadn’t known writers. Both my parents, and my sister, as well as everyone with whom I worked, were writers of journalism. And it’s not that I hadn’t known upstate, as a St. Lawrence University graduate and as a kid who had summered in Saratoga when my dad, at the time a turf writer, covered the August meet at the track.

And it’s not that I had never read a good book. What had not yet been unearthed on my own was the discovery that lives could be lived fully in places other than Manhattan, and that specifically a life spent making art could be lived upstate. Beautiful, cold, dramatic, upstate seemed a glorious place to go do something—college, the racetrack—but not someplace where one could live; not a distinction I formed on my own, it was one first and foremost of inheritance, and therefore harder to shake. And that is what the book shook loose. I had never read anything like it, though it remains surprising even to me that such a change might be delivered via a paperback about a murderous bootlegger.

Soon I quit my perfectly good job at The New York Times, broke off things with my hungry ornate boyfriend, and wrote my first book, and when it was published, left home, embarking on a series of ordinal moves elsewhere, mistakenly, though never undramatically, renting the requisite garret or place overlooking some sea, each time feeling more precisely out of place, until, finally, landing upstate, just around the curve of a lonely Adirondack lake from the house where it was rumored that Theodore Dreiser had holed up writing An American Tragedy. Perfect, I thought, and it was; the very pines were welcoming, their broad outstretched arms seeming to hold open a place for me, a young woman from Manhattan, who had little idea of how to live in the woods.

I learned. Spending an entire afternoon-turned-evening quietly tucked into a cove watching beaver, gardening in a season that includes neither Memorial nor Labor Day, frying fish in a pan, upstate and I included one another in our determined agendas. I typed, wanting to write fiction in the worst way, which is exactly what I did, the work I produced having all the substance of imitation twig furniture. But I typed on for two years, until the snickering fates sent love in the form of a journalist, who had a house on more middle ground, downstate from the Adirondacks yet decidedly upstate by the accepted definition, this time in Rensselaer County. Leaving my lake, I felt no small accomplishment. I had lived alone in the Adirondacks, and goodness knows, there are far worse things that a woman can do.

At the time of the move somewhat downstate, I knew only two things about Rensselaer County, and both were about Troy. Home to the courthouse that had tried Legs Diamond, it was also where, I had been told, the writer S. J. Perelman had once opened a play he was loath to open in Manhattan. According to this story, the only recordof the play is a telegram Perelman sent home to Manhattan, the morning after the opening, which was also the morning of the closing of the play. In the telegram Perelman is said to have written, “A staging of the Last Supper with the original cast couldn’t play in this town.” I have never been able to verify the story as true, though I can say that what’s more to the point is that people here believe it, aptly characterizing Troy as being the kind of place that, much like all upstate cities, is easier to shrug off than inhabit.

And I was as guilty as the next guy, carrying within me a little seed that, much like racism, forms a kernel around the heart. A bigotry all its own, mine was the mistaken idea that if you weren’t either at the epicenter of the world or in the wilderness, you didn’t really need to leave the house. If not in Manhattan, where all manner of life is provided, or in the Adirondacks, where every day you pretty much start from scratch, there is so little life to be lived, so why try? On the phone with my downstate friends I defaulted to my city-worst, laughing right along with their quips: Still snowing? Got cows? Any art?

My husband, on the other hand, was living his dream: editor of the Troy Record, the local newspaper that had all the issues editors dream about: a nearly devastated economy, civil corruption, a government in chaos, and two parades each year in which the newspaper editor got to ride on a float.

Rex couldn’t wait for the parades. He grew up in Rapid City, South Dakota, which, in size, is much like Troy. He had been the drum major of his high school band.

All the issues of his new job resonated with him, but one made him beam: he loved a parade.

Me? I actually said that I’m not a parade kind of girl. “I don’t float,” I said, thinking myself terribly clever. “Don’t ask me.”

A million little moments like that complicated things for a while, though the one that sticks out in memory is when, insisting that I needed more than anything to “go home” for the day, I boarded the train to Manhattan and landed in the seat right smack in front of the great author of that book, and his very beautiful wife. Recognizing them instantly as they slid in behind me—I had certainly seen their pictures enough times to know them on sight; they are very social, both wonderful dressers—suddenly there they were. Joined by the chink between the seats on Amtrak, their affectionate conversation slid through the gap, their light laughs personifying a marriage in full. The kind of people I most wanted us to be, they were perhaps the precise two, who only moments before I would have said I wanted most to meet. Clearly I didn’t belong there. I gathered my stuff and slunk off, finding a seat in another car.

* * *

History can be told on the head of a pin. In fact, the story of the pin in itself might

quilt together a fine tale of ingenuity, industry, manufacturing, textiles, commerce, and fashion. So it is with me and my history and that little book, and while it’s only the history of finding my way home, perhaps there is nothing so important to any of us as getting there, and few pursuits are more worth the effort. After all, after finding a true home, we can go anywhere.

As the editor’s wife I got invited onto lots of committees and boards and finally joined the right one, a then-struggling arts center in Troy. Planning a daring move to an enormous new space, we needed a similarly dramatic opening show. The LED artist Jenny Holzer had agreed to be in one gallery with the provision that we get a writer to pair with her work. Of course I thought of Mr. Kennedy.

But the question that hung in the air over the board table as we discussed this opening exhibit was this: What would a writer’s work look like? After all, the creative process is hard to see. What does it look like when someone gets the “aha” moment that transposes mere ideas into an evolving piece of art? Difficult enough to recognize in a piece of stone, it’s harder to reconstruct on the page. I wondered if the author might have something to show us.

Might I come look? A date was arranged. Arriving, I saw a thick manila folder was already out, waiting in the cozy corner of a parlor that also served as the billiards room, a room lined with books and leather sofas.

Some nervous idle chatter, a cup of tea accepted, and the folder was coming in my direction as the writer said something like, “I didn’t know which book might interest you, so I started with the first one,” barely hearing his words as the first page of Legs, the second version of that page, the third draft of that same page and on and on, showed themselves to me, on which, in the margins the writer exhorts himself, scribbles, talking himself into a better version each time. Maybe there were a dozen drafts of the same page until this reader reached the one she knows nearly by heart. And as I tried to focus, and not merely burst into that kind of delighted private laughter that scares other people, I saw that little book born from its first line ever typed, that same line and opening paragraph tried and tried again, the notes made in the margins urging change, forcing thought, transfusing the characters, taking the real and magically suspending it, doing so much more than anyone would ever have thought could be done with what there was to know about one killer gangster.

Maybe I said something like, “Fine. Yes. This will do nicely. Thank you.” I know

I was in and out of there in under an hour.

A few weeks later, the pages were laid out under long museum cases, one edited sheet after the other, the printed book being the last exhibit under glass. It was the creative process there for the world to see. No one—least of all, me—could miss it.

The old journalism ethic I’d learned back in the newspaper business is “go with what you’ve got.” The odd and elusive idea is that “the truth” is never completely capture-able. Not really. There will always be another side to the tale, another fact, perhaps even a better quote. At some point in the process the deadline looms and you go with what you’ve got. Otherwise, no one would publish, nothing would get reported, and we’d never know anything.

The second thing all writers who make writing their life’s work have in common is that they rewrite. They go over and over and over their work because not one of them ever got it right the first time.

Together these two seeming mere writing lessons made marvelous marks to hit when helping me find my way home in Troy, and soon began a summer of writing about what was all around me, but not yet seen. That parade I had refused to ride in?

Remembering that I had eventually gotten on the float, the story of finally climbing aboard made a lovely little NPR essay for All Things Considered, as did that of a gentle man whose sole business was growing organic catnip in the small hills above my town.

The local postal worker did too, as did much of what I had once considered to be too little to work with. Now, using the rules of writing, there was so very much to behold. Two books followed; the essays continue. I was home. The little book sat on the desk where I hope we’ll both be for a good long time.

Then one night we were invited to a party at the Kennedy’s. Almost adrift among a hundred guests, suddenly the author invited me to shoot billiards with him, in that very same room where I had viewed the files of rewrites. And as the first balls were struck, something shifted as the revelers began to morph into one of those still photos where at the eye of the shot, one character is firmly rooted in place, while the surrounding players are smudges and whirls of color and black and white.

The party twisted around me as people, finding their places, blended at the bar, on the terrace, and out along the swimming pool. Some danced; Sinatra played on the stereo; drinks were mixed. Standing stock still amid the whirl, rooted to my very place, I started to laugh, laughing with a singular joy.

Looking over at me, the author started laughing too, a small contagion; laughing,the author of some of the best books in the world, still laughing, only asked, “What are we laughing about?”

“I’ll tell you sometime.”

A note from me: This piece began as a public tribute I was invited to deliver to honor the great novelist William Kennedy at an awards benefit. After I presented it, I reworked the piece and published it in a collection entitled, “Why We’re Here,” (Colgate University Press, 2010). It was then retold live on the fabulous public radio show, Studio 360, as part of their continuing series on works of art that change lives. I put it here as an example both of long-form memoir and as inspiration to you to consider how to repurpose a piece of writing.