National Story Project
With Paul Auster

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September 2000 -- It's the first Saturday of the month, time for another installment of the National Story Project with Paul Auster. This time around, Paul reads stories by Judith Englander, Robert Winnie, Randee Rosenfeld, and Tim Clancy.

Judith Englander
Judith Englander writes: "After remarrying fifteen years ago, I moved from Massachusetts to Hall Avenue in Henniker, New Hampshire, where my new husband had (and still has) a dental practice. At that time, my parents lived in Florida, and I would frequently receive mail from them. When the letter was from my father, our mailing address usually had a 'cross-out' in front of the 'Hall Avenue' part of our address. I finally remembered to ask my father why there was almost always this cross-out. He replied that he had a mental block on our street address: he wanted to write 'High Street' instead of Hall Avenue....A few years later, I was doing some historical research in the library. It was then that I discovered that Hall Avenue had been named High Street until after World War II, when it was renamed for a local boy named Hall who had been killed in the war."

Robert Winnie
This one, from Robert Winnie of Bonners Ferry, Idaho, came in last spring when I was collecting stories for the Memorial Day broadcast. I couldn't fit it in then, but it's one of the best little pieces about childhood I've received. A good title for it might be: "I Thought My Father Was God."

"These things happened in Oakland, California at the end of World War II," Mr. Winnie writes. "I was six years old. I didn't know what war was then, but I was aware of some of its consequences. Rationing for one thing, since I had a ration book with my name on it. My mother kept it for me, along with the ration books that belonged to my brothers. I remember the blackout, the air raid warnings, and the sight of war planes flying overhead. My father was a tugboat captain, and I remember talk about troop ships, submarines, and destroyers. I also remember my grandmother taking fat to the butcher shop to be reclaimed and going downtown to the Federal Building to toss aluminum scrap into the window wells on the sidewalk side of the building.

But what I remember most is Mr. Bernhauser. He was our backyard neighbor. He was especially mean and unfriendly to kids, but he was also rude to adults. He had an Italian plum tree that hung over the back fence. If the plums were on our side of the fence, we could pick them, but God help us if we got over the fence line. All hell would break loose. He would scream and yell at us until one of our parents came out to see what the fuss was about. Usually it was my mother, but this time it was my father.

No one liked Mr. Bernhauser very much, but my father was particularly against him because he kept all the toys and balls that ever landed in his yard. So there was Mr. Bernhauser yelling at us to get the hell out of his tree, and my father asked him what the problem was. Mr. Bernhauser took a deep breath and launched into a diatribe about thieving kids, breakers of rules, takers of fruit, and monsters in general. I guess my father had had enough, for the next thing he did was shout at Mr. Bernhauser and tell him to drop dead. Mr. Bernhauser stopped screaming, looked at my father, turned bright red, then purple, grabbed his chest, turned gray, and slowly folded to the ground. I thought my father was God. That he could yell at a miserable old man and make him die on command was beyond my comprehension....

I remember that Ray Hink lived across the street. We were in the same grade, and his grandmother lived upstairs. She was a tiny old woman who always wore a high-collar dress. She sat in the window with a pair of opera glasses and kept watch on the neighborhood. If we were good, she would let us look through the glasses and smell the rose petals she kept in an alabaster jar on her table. She said that the rose petals were from Germany and the jar was from Greece.

One afternoon, I was allowed to handle the precious glasses and was looking out at the street. A cab pulled up, and a tall skinny sailor got out. He shook hands with the cabby, who took a sea bag from the trunk, and I knew that it was my Uncle Bill, home from the war. My grandmother came running down the steps into his arms. She was crying. I remember the stars that hung in the windows of some of our neighbors' houses. My grandmother told me it was because someone had lost a son in the war. I was glad that we didn't have any stars in our window. That night, we had a huge celebration for Uncle Bill. I went to sleep feeling glad that my uncle was home safe. I didn't think about Mr. Bernhauser anymore."

Randee Rosenfeld
This one, also about a wrong address, is from Randee Rosenfeld: "On August 27, 1996, my mother woke me in the middle of the night and asked me to call 911. An ambulance arrived at the house and took my father to a local hospital in South Jersey. The following evening, he went into a coma and the doctors decided to medevac him to a hospital in Philadelphia. By the time my mother and I reached the hospital, he was already in surgery.

Twelve hours later, the doctors called the waiting room and said, 'An aneurysm erupted in his brain. We don't think he'll ever wake up.' Soon after he was brought to his room, we went in to see him. While we were talking to him, I said, 'Hi, Daddy,' and at that moment he opened his eyes. The doctors came into the room and asked him several questions. How old are you? What year is it? Who is the President? He answered the first three questions correctly. When they asked him the last question, however - - Where are you? - - he answered 'Harrisburg.'

Over the next couple of days, he seemed to be making progress. Then, on September 4th, the first day of my senior year of high school, I was picked up early. When I reached the hospital, my mother was waiting for me. 'He had a relapse,' she said. 'The doctors have pronounced him brain dead.' A few minutes later, a nurse approached and asked us to sit down. She wanted to know if we had any questions. Words came out of our mouths, words that no one in our family had ever spoken before: organ donation. We knew that it could give others a chance to live, and we wanted to help....

About a week after the funeral, we received a letter from the Gift of Life Donor Program telling us where the recipients were from and how their recoveries were going. The list started with the liver and the kidneys. The next sentence read: 'A fifty-three-year-old man with three kids received Raymond's heart. He lives in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.'

Chills rushed through me and I dropped the paper...I believe my father knew that he was going to die, and I also believe he knew that his heart would not die with him. Did he somehow know that it would go on living in Harrisburg?"

Tim Clancy
Tim Clancy prefaces his contribution by saying that for the first seven years of his life (1953 to 1960), he lived on a small five-acre farm in rural southeastern Michigan. The following, he says, is a recollection of one particular summer evening during that time.

"I am standing in my summer pajamas, the lightest of cotton. The top buttons up to a flat lapel collar that lies open at my neck, like a sport shirt my grandfather might have worn. The bottoms are held up by an elastic waistband that I tug and release, snapping it gently against my clean body, fresh from a bath on a Saturday evening in June. A faint breeze curls through the baggy openings of the pajamas and swirls over me like a soft electric charge. I feel weightless.

My father has just finished cutting the grass. I hear the crunch of gravel and the rattly echo of the mower's hard wheels as he pushes them over the driveway and into a gray cinder-block garage. He is wearing what he always wears in my childhood memories of him in the summer: a white V-neck T shirt and baggy gray work pants. His hair is black and cut flat on top. He is a lean 6-footer with neck and arms browned and freckled by the sun, his left arm more so because of the way he angled it out the window of the car whenever he was driving. Parking the mower marks the end of his labor for the week. In my memory he is smiling that jaunty off-to-the side smile, one I could never confuse for someone else's.

Sounds drowned by the roar of the mower begin to return; the cooing of an evening dove, muted by a hazy stillness, drifts on the air. I look in the direction of the cooing but see only a field of knee-deep grass surrounded by a boggy woods. From their already darkening depths comes the steady croaking drone of frogs, invisible but as present as the cool grass beneath my feet.

My mother is sitting in an old metal lawn chair holding a white-haired baby, my brother Pat. She wears a breezy summer house dress, one that she made herself, and she is singing softly, a song about sitting on top of the world and the street where you live and a yellow bird.

I smell lilac blossoms, the freshly cut grass, cow manure, Ivory soap. I hear the rhythmic squeak of the rope swing as my sister Mary Ann glides back and forth under the massive cedar tree under the front yard, her red blond hair and nightgown flowing together like flags in the winds.

My sister Sharon, in her pajamas, sits on the edge of the porch petting a black and white kitten.

The tractor is parked in front of the garage. My brother Mike has climbed up into the seat and is holding onto the steering wheel. He thinks he's a big man driving down the road. Mike's hair is like mine. Mom has given us our summer haircuts with the electric clippers so that what we have left is more like suede than hair. My brother Kevin is standing a few feet away, feeding handfuls of grass to Jerry, our spotted pony. Kevin has the suede look, too. He and Mike are both wearing their pajamas.

I have other memories of the farm, memories that seem to be there for some obvious reason: they might be dramatic or humorous or frightening. But my pajama night memory is different. In it, I am simply standing barefoot on the lawn. I remember the dove, the rope swing, my mother and father, sisters and brothers, the barn, the lilacs, the woods - - all bathed in the diffuse radiance of fading summer light."

The National Story Project can be heard the first Saturday of every month on Weekend All Things Considered.