THE LAST SANCTUARY
Wolf, Howard
THE LAST SANCTUARY Howard Wolf i. People who come to South Florida to retire and grow old live as exiles. The muted decay of their lives and dreams takes place in an almost alien country, and the...
...You know she doesn't want to move...
...The track, nightclubs, women, good food, Miami's got everything for someone like me...
...I'm a tough nut...
...They are not working...
...You can see that, can't you...
...The coast will be developed out...
...What about mother...
...My people are in Miami...
...My father looked wistfully across the lake...
...It's a lake...
...people are, like their new cars, objects for one another, and, like their cars, they exist to be seen...
...Soon, no lots will be left in Safe Harbor...
...I don't think my father really knew what had happened...
...Will a telegram come then...
...But, like other citizens of Safe Harbor, he cannot...
...Still, he is driven to spend and buy...
...In the end, they will protect themselves: from the vision of their own terminal role in the society, from the inescapable message of Safe Harbor — demise, decline, death...
...The escape ante has gone up in retirement...
...We drive on silently for a while...
...For the older people of South Florida, almost all aspects of life are rebukes...
...He would tell me that I knew nothing about the world...
...That's the problem...
...dream images become tangible (though not yet real...
...Their homes and environments are, more or less, as pleasant as the brochures that pulled them South in the first place...
...When I came out of the store, he was on the phone talking to his broker in New York...
...See those guys fishing...
...Perhaps the hoses are turned on from inside the houses...
...I would soon lose my chance to teach him anything...
...Cold orange juice...
...I am less afraid just now for my parents and for myself...
...We've got to get going," he said, "I've got to see how the market is doing...
...My father and mother and their contemporaries . . . are an endangered species...
...I am as old as my father to them...
...So, my parents, who have become more caring towards one another than I remember them before...
...My father will like that...
...She sank every penny into this house...
...3._ My father and I will not go back to Okeechobee, but I always think of him there when I hear the Dow-Jones report on the evening news...
...The people I meet in Safe Harbor carry the real and imagined furniture of the past like the characters in The Price, till it breaks them...
...When I last went to Safe Harbor, I managed to persuade my father to go to nearby Jensen Beach, where high school and community college students come every day in the late afternoon to bask, to show off their new sports cars, to surf...
...It is not so much profit that he seeks as it is a sense of reality, a sense of connection to a material world which weighted his life for fifty years...
...As always, these were conversations from Long Day's Journey...
...Maybe she makes me feel crude, I don't know...
...He has too much pride...
...I lie back and do not think for a few minutes...
...I passed the candy bars into the booth...
...The logical outcome of his primitive economics will be dependence on the State, despite a house full of toasters, roto-broilers, and whirring blenders...
...Now that they are equal partners in idleness, she is coming more into her own...
...My mother waves to us...
...They were something...
...He does not want to go out...
...These names promise, in turn, Rest, Sensuousness, Heroism, and Aristocracy...
...What does it matter where I live if I'm not happy...
...I'm too old...
...The surface of the river seems less luminous to me...
...I did not have to make this point to my mother...
...The muted decay of their lives and dreams takes place in an almost alien country, and the enclaves they have chosen to stave off extinction guarantee obsolescence...
...He does not want to end up running an orange juice stand...
...If nothing else, I have friends there," he says to me in a letter...
...Dog races...
...Something just goes cold when 1 get to the door...
...It is less difficult for the women...
...So now it seemed to me important to go back to that childhood, this time to drive inland...
...The cult of youth, the lure of South Florida, become, in the end, a rebuke to those who are aging, a painful reminder of what has been given over to a life that is now out of reach...
...As a child, going to Florida meant going to Miami Beach, a hot version, with minor variations, of Atlantic City...
...I will leave Safe Harbor tomorrow...
...I wonder, as always, if I will return before I am called to a funeral I often dream about...
...Maybe I'll travel six months a year...
...But he surprised me...
...Yes...
...The proprietor came out onto the porch in coveralls...
...they are moving towards extinction on credit, and they will do it together...
...The citizens of Safe Harbor can neither celebrate life nor reckon with death...
...Safe Harbor is the logical end-step for those who have dreamed the dream of covertly aphrodisiacal cigarettes and the aggressive uplift of 4-wheel drive...
...are his connection to New York, and New York is reality...
...My father and mother and their contemporaries in South Florida are an endangered species...
...My father still did not look happy,' but I knew that a few candy bars would pacify him...
...And that's what I want now...
...My father is not ugly to them...
...At that moment, I understood him better than I ever had before...
...The condition of their lives is not changed, it is merely unmasked, revealed for what it has been all along: a state of affluent confinement...
...They come continuously, with Muzak...
...Our family had always travelled straight through any concrete possibility for new experience...
...It is as if the family drama has been reversed: it is now father who fears losing mother to me...
...As his small savings run out, hostage to his credit cards, my father begins to think of moving further south, from Fort Pierce to Miami Beach...
...It is a dream that can only be approximated in the suburban imagination...
...She becomes most vivid for me then...
...fish tank, not even in the mythological South, so I didn't worry too much...
...as the salesmen say, from Miami to Vero Beach...
...after more than a half century, his struggle is still to make it all seem less strange, safe...
...This is one of my father's old dreams...
...What are they ashamed of...
...As I make a U-turn to head back to U.S...
...By the time my father got off the phone, the store owner was laughing and had even brought out some Almond Joys...
...I plan to make my first trip to California...
...A quick look at early morning TV (The Price is Right) defines the dream: bountiful acquisition, a free ride to the supermarket and mall...
...These young . . . the stock market quotations...
...The space of the aging — like that of any severely isolated group (the imprisoned, the mad) — is a memory-theatre...
...The names are an extension of television advertising, another example of the metamorphosis of the banal in American life...
...I am also pleased, and relieved, that because of this my father may have a firmer grip on his current reality than some of his contemporaries...
...His wife is always my mother...
...That's why I'm trapped...
...Take away all my action and I'm nothing...
...All of this would take money, at least that, and they are living on a fixed income, the noose is tightening...
...Late late movies, like in New York...
...But not beyond...
...And I: because they are, at last, together, their need for me, that overwhelming need I have feared so much, is no longer so much a burden to me...
...He must prove to himself that he is still engaged in the economy...
...Ironic...
...I knew he was right...
...Go about a mile, I want to show you something...
...The cult of youth is only one manifestation of the denial of age and aging...
...It's not a swamp...
...Building costs are rising there," I say, "and people will buy anything...
...He would become irritable, and we would once again enact our family drama...
...Turn right at this road...
...These aging people are condemned at every turn by the very symbols they have acquired (my father's unused golf clubs lie in his car trunk like atrophied limbs...
...The evasion of reality is everywhere...
...No, a betrayal...
...New Yorkers come through this way," he said...
...The big developers have caught a second wind: postwar hotel building peaked in Florida, the Cadillacs and White Houses became second and third rate, some were converted into rest homes, and now the geriatric and retirement boom has made Florida one of the growth states in the country...
...As important, I would do something with my father, this, too, a way of repairing the past: except for a few Giant football and N.Y.U...
...I couldn't leave your mother now...
...in the middle of the night...
...They do not see him, or me, for that matter...
...In some deep and fixed way, the "market" as a form of romance has replaced the romance of the real for him...
...This objectification serves to make them attractive in the way of pinups, mannequins, and calendar girls...
...if he is threatened with the end of buying, he must buy to save his life...
...If he could afford it, this behavior would not be so bad...
...I know...
...You'll get half for twice as much...
...If Safe Harbor does not provide them with the potential richness of community life, if this community is a halfway house between productivity and death, it is, nonetheless, warm, safe, and easier on the psyche and nervous system than life in the Big City...
...My father talked and threw the wrappers into the bait tank...
...He would listen and then shout: "Don't hold it, for Chrissakes, sell...
...When we come to the Hutchinson drawbridge, one of the many small bridges spanning the river, he signals for me to pull off onto the shoulder...
...Longing and Nostalgia light the stage, if it is lit at all...
...But the more he buys, of course, the less he has, and the more he feels the pinch of his situation...
...My father wanted to know what was in Okeechobee and where we would eat...
...I don't see how...
...During my visits to Safe Harbor, I was struck by the care the women administer, especially in restaurants: straightening the ties, smoothing the hair, and wiping food off the mouths of their men...
...It used to be three months...
...If a man works hard in this country, he deserves something for it, he surely deserves life...
...I always feel closest to my mother when I think he is going to hurt her...
...4._ But the dream of restoration must compete with the dream of youth...
...It is one thing to imagine one's parents, oneself, dying among friends and cronies (my father has cronies more than friends...
...Soon I will have more friends dead than living, so I'd better move...
...When he gets back to the house, my father immediately turns on the cable TV and watches stock quotations come across on tape...
...And it was always worse between us when these scenes took place in a car...
...Maybe I'll carry a small line in California half the year...
...The bikini-clad sirens who beckon to him through the advertisers do not sing for my father, and he knows it...
...Miami Beach is moving up the coast like an embolism...
...But that's what you've had all your life...
...It will do no good to tell him that he has been displaced from the system, that Senior Citizens are a useless subsystem in our way of life, a drag on the economy...
...No competition...
...What...
...The stock market is a connection to New York...
...I shudder when he says this — memories and feelings of separation and divorce (my parents have been leaving one another for forty years) — but I think, as always, that it would be better in some ways if he were to leave...
...I squawk a lot," he says, "but there are times when I like it here...
...Like most people in Safe Harbor, he has put in an honest forty or fifty years of work...
...Where did you go...
...As we drove to Okeechobee along the St...
...At least his fantasies are based on the real...
...They're out here every day...
...I don't get it...
...they are moving towards extinction on credit...
...Maybe we'll move in the spring, after the season...
...In saying this, I express one of the fears of the children of the aging: that their aging parents will, in addition to sustaining prolonged illnesses and unpayable hospital bills, slip away into reverie, will become "senile...
...I would tell him that he did not know how to live...
...There can be no South-flowing migration beyond this consciousness...
...I look closely at him...
...A way to keep busy and make a few bucks...
...Once again, as so often before, there had not been any reason to fear my father or to think he would embarrass me...
...But my father, it turns out, does not want to discover...
...It did not seem possible that I would be able to steer him away from the endless miles of Burger Kings and McDonald's until we got onto the Okeechobee Road...
...it is quite another to face the end in an alien landscape...
...He would learn that he could not make it alone, and my mother might have a respite at last...
...His ability to purchase, to unfurl a string of credit cards, his ability to spend — these confirm his status as an American...
...I don't think he believes he will ever open a stand here, or anywhere else...
...Every other place is lonely and desolate...
...If the men were once intimidated by the doting, over-protective, even affectionate ministrations of these strong women, they now recognize their own passive position and accept more easily a measure of concern and tenderness...
...The warmth of the sun and soft breezes will make up for the sudden feelings of coldness and isolation that often seize my father...
...The boys on 37th Street would be green with envy if they knew I had this location...
...So long as he can buy, he is no different from anyone else...
...Each time I visit Safe Harbor, my father's first order of business is to show me a new shopping mall and his latest credit card, and to buy something for me as a sign of his solvency...
...if they only will, move easily between indoors and outdoors — a simple, but crucial, distinction in the life of a civilized people...
...My father set out in 1920 helping his father run a pushcart on Christie Street on New York's lower East Side...
...Instead of leaning elbows on gray sills and watching life go by, my parents can...
...It is part of the irony of the situation...
...It is the last fantasy, it is where you come after forty years of reading cereal box copy, watching Hollywood movies and TV prize shows...
...Now that she finally knows his threats of flight are only threats, perhaps she will withdraw less into fantasy...
...The nurturant and nursing roles women have traditionally played become vital here...
...These phantom figures that loop through the night are his connection to New York, and New York is reality...
...I have nothing to do...
...What did you do...
...Then, thankfully, there was a sign: GENERAL STORE - BAIT...
...But why do these people who have come to South Florida like displaced conquistadors go out into the non-summer sun so little...
...It would be pointless to tell him that the children and grandchildren know there is a trace of death in the Florida air, that they will not be coming down too often...
...Whenever I go to Safe Harbor, I think of Limelight, The Entertainer, Pinter's The Homecoming...
...Suppose there's no food near the swamps...
...In the end, it is better to have nothing to do than to go back to the beginning...
...basketball games in the middle Forties, I had mainly seen my father in his "place" on 37th Street in New York City's garment center...
...After leaning against the car for a few minutes, comrades-in-age for the moment, my father says, "You should have seen the dames I knew when I was young...
...Lake Okeechobee was just ahead...
...She will not have her respite though, because my father will not move further South and will not go to California...
...Like most native New Yorkers, he does not believe that a place exists outside the city unless there are delicatessens and race tracks nearby...
...she has always wanted peace of mind, her own, his...
...Not too many...
...And enough fishermen to make a few bucks and keep busy...
...That is the message my father received at an early age — a message whose truth he never doubted and still does not doubt...
...Why do you want to move further South...
...children are a threat in this environment...
...Why don't they step into the imagined landscapes of their urban dreams...
...Or, perhaps insomniac landscapers tend the lawns Howard Wolf teaches English at the State University of New York at Buffalo The fiction-essay presented here is an adaption of the first chapter of his forthcoming bOOk, gathering evidence a personal history oe america in the 1960's...
...I walked into that tree a year ago and wanted to chop it down...
...But if he will be more at ease then, it will be better for her as well...
...I even understood why he had come to live in Safe Harbor...
...An orange juice stand...
...They are there as a reality for my father even after the late late show has given way to a test pattern...
...shopping and shopping malls are a connection to America-at-large...
...Lucie Canal, with orange groves giving way to dry pasture land and the air becoming heavier and windless...
...A little action now and then, that's something else...
...It is balmy, even at dusk, the best time of day in South Florida in the early spring...
...While my mother and father get ready to go out, I sit on the lawn and watch another S27.000 unit go up...
...We would not find a place in which he would be comfortable...
...Orange juice...
...I guess they're all right, but they're not my people...
...The first time I drove through Safe Harbor to visit my parents after their retirement, I was struck by trimness and by emptiness: well tended lawns, spinning garden sprinklers, but no people...
...These are, it seems, the good, if humiliating, times of their marriages...
...This temple is, finally, an appropriate emblem for this community: the dream of snapping everything into place, parody of an older dream of rejuvenating tropics...
...Maybe I've never felt accepted...
...Like mannequins, they are indifferent to any particular face...
...It is a vicious circle...
...OK, let's see what kind of joint we can turn up...
...It's out almost every day, too...
...Even now, after three visits to Safe Harbor, I am not quite sure how or when the tending is done...
...he wants to go back...
...America has always been alien to him...
...1, I notice a sign that marks this spot as a site for a condominium...
...It is precisely at this juncture, when he can least afford it, that he especially must buy...
...I'll bet there are fish houses all the way...
...he said...
...But the skein is running out...
...While their husbands may once have complained about female idleness and inefficiency, they now see their women as pivots of survival...
...My father, I think, lives now with a fear of abandonment...
...Having escaped to the sub-tropics, he now dreams of a South Sea escape...
...children serve as the link to "out there," but are also painful reminders of a life left behind...
...We'll go out tonight, splurge a little, we've got to live, right...
...What about her...
...This would be a good spot...
...For my parents and the other citizens of Safe Harbor, shopping is a way of establishing a link with America's dominant items of the real: commodities...
...Not too crowded...
...I'm glad she'll be there when I get back...
...Action, what else...
...I think of her slipping into old movies during the afternoon, of going to Europe and visiting my brother, even of her imagining as she goes that she might meet a romantic "lover...
...We could get something here to tide us over...
...In this country of the young, our elders live, isolated and defeated, in tropical ghettos...
...She grew up in the country, and after living in New York City for thirty years, she is relieved to sit in a yard again...
...I wanted, in any case, to show my father that he doesn't have to stay in Safe Harbor all the time, that there are other places to discover, that Safe Harbor is not a prison...
...I do not point this out to him...
...It will not help to discourage him...
...And see that sun...
...My parents: aging, alone, squeezed, slipping between fantasy and nostalgia, rebuked by money, rebuked by youth, rebuked by their children, waiting for death, the ultimate rebuke, they have, strangely, quietly, found each other...
...Had he really been prudent throughout his life, or had he defined his own identity apart from the world of things, he would not have to go off each morning to J. C. Penney or Searstown in quest of yet another piece of dead matter to make him feel alive...
...No one gets shot for throwing Baby Ruth wrappers in a My father . . . does not want to discover...
...If I don't get out of here, your mother's going to bury me alive in this graveyard...
...he has always been headstrong...
...like other citizens of Safe Harbor, he wants to recover...
...It just isn't right, then...
...He has never been so direct with me before...
...At the end of the line, though, when one can no longer sustain the fantasy of being a winner, when income is fixed and limited, the persistence of the dream is insidious...
...Between New York City with its risk of death by garbage and the Florida of 1990, they are in a tolerable middle ground...
...my mother will like it less...
...If she turned in her youth to King Gable as an escape from a bad marriage at a time when uneducated and provincial American women did not leave their husbands, she can...
...If anything, their roles are augmented...
...For those fifty years, the measure of weight was, of course, money: if not money as a concrete object, then money as the goal and organizing principle of his life...
...Let's eat now," he said, when we were at last on our way...
...How she's put up with me all these years 1 don't know...
...She worked twelve years for it...
...The gallery begins with Vanity and Zieg-feld girls and comes up to the mid-Fifties...
...One sees it especially in language, as in the names given to the trailer camps and mobile parks, names that seem to come out of the pages of Nathanael West — surely, he is the proleptic eye of this physical and moral landscape: Easy Acres, Tropicaire, Windjammer, and Lucie Estates...
...I expect him soon to be living entirely from social security...
...No one really needs me, except, maybe, your mother...
...So now, with work no longer available as expression of that reality, with no reason to wake early, he watches the stock market quotations on TV after the last movie is over, at three o'clock in the morning...
...I am not happy here...
...Do you know what that adds up to...
...Nothing...
...I couldn't miss with it, could I, kid...
...If he really wants his stand, there will be a hundred other locations in the same area within his lifetime...
...You won't believe it, kid, but I've always loved your mother...
...But it is not less true that aging and retired people rely on their children in an unprecedented way, for continuity with the "outside world," for a living connection with a world now lost in memory and memorabilia...
...for it is at this point, where the end of expenditure is imaginable, that he must prove, however irrationally, that he is in the marketplace and can participate in the Great American Acquisition...
...It reminds me of my father...
...As we pass the chiropractic clinic and approach the house, we both see my mother watering the back lawn, letting the water soak in at the base of the one cactus tree she has planted in the yard...
...He does not want to go out...
...I'd never be lonely down there...
...he wanted less lawn, a shorter view, most of all another neighbor to contribute ambient sound to his all too quiet days and nights...
...It comes as something of a relief to me, then, that as we drive away from Jensen Beach my father takes out his wallet and shows me pictures of show girls he has known...
...My back is warm deep beneath my shoulder blades...
...At least he can draw upon the actual memory of the real to oppose the dominant fantasies and images of the culture, images which appeal to him as a consumer but which exclude him as an older person...
...So I am pleased, if somewhat embarrassed as well (my father and I have never shared sexual knowledge before), that he can draw upon a wellspring of memory, especially erotic memory, to ease the emptiness of his tropical nights...
...he wants to recover...
...now that my father needs her, accept being his wife without embarrassment, with even a measure of nascent pride...
...My father did not buy the vacant Safe Harbor lot next to his, although it was insurance of privacy and a hedge against inflation...
...Even a train stops," he once said to me...
...It takes only four days for four men to put up the basic structure...
...I am pleased, therefore, that my father can lounge in the real furniture of his past...
...The girls loll on the beach — like fantasy ready-mades — and when my father and I went down there, he caught the atmosphere exactly when he said, "I'd like to take one home, but who would look at meT He was right, I think, in seeing the girls as "items" and, perhaps, wrong to take too much upon himself...
...For the next two or three decades, the old and ill will continue to come to South Florida to wait it out and play some over par golf...
...It is rather that aging, even maturity, is not part of their window display...
...he wants to go back...
...Will my brother return from Europe for the first time in almost a decade, so that a funeral will be our reunion...
...Why don't these self-exiled ex-citizens of the Upper Peninsula and Upper Manhattan, who have borne and survived the hard freeze and the rat race, luxuriate now in the warm fruition of long standing dreams...
...The lime current to the East and the dirt roads to the West of the railroad track were out-of-bounds for families on the Seaboard Express...
...5._ Driving across the marsh from Al-A on a desolate tar-topped road to the main highway, I feel the isolation, despite his fantasies, of my father's retirement...
...For the men, especially, this is the crux of their situation...
...They have labored for years to afford this dream-life, this ersatz Eden of orange groves hard by corroding trailer camps, but they discover that an older and deeper dream has been of labor, of daily occupation and preoccupation...
...We walked, later, along the walls of the reservoir...
...It's a good thing your mother stopped me...
...He points back in the direction of the Indian River...
...Instead, they build a massive chiropractic clinic (in the style of Citrus Corinthian) at the entrance to the community...
...My father is now aware of my mother's energy, concerned with the demands my visit might make of her: using her car, draining her energy in excessive cooking, interrupting daily patterns of rest, most of all diverting her attention from his needs to mine...
...In this world of the aging, feminine and domestic arts — cooking, sewing, laundering, shopping — become the critical coordinates...
...So, it has come to this: if he can buy, he feels alive...
...He came across the water to a strange country...
...Listen to the big shot financier...
...Children displace their parents when they visit, but also replace the lost, larger world...
...A Daliesque imagination could, in time, make a Lourdes out of this landscape...
...From that perspective, what my parents have does not seem so barren...
...But when I leave the house, especially now...
...2._ The fear of moving away from (perhaps it is more accurate to say outside of) Safe Harbor became clear when I suggested to my father that we drive inland to Lake Okeechobee, only forty miles away...
Vol. 1 • October 1975 • No. 4
