Silver Lake Ramble #1

I’m going out to clean the pasture spring,

I’ll only stop to rake the leaves away

(And wait to watch the water clear, I may)

I shan’t be gone long—You come too.

I’m going out to fetch the little calf

That’s standing by its mother. It’s so young,

It totters when she licks it with her tongue.

I shan’t be gone long—You come too.

Robert Frost

No pastures hereabouts. I cannot introduce you to hired hands, or to witches, or to crazed hill wives. Or show you cows, or mending walls, or snowy woods, birches, or oven birds, though they are for me part of a mental landscape laid down in a classroom in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, in the fall of my thirteenth year, 1953. Frost territory. But I do invite you to walk a few blocks with me in Silver Lake, my neighborhood. We’ll make some stops, meet some people. A mile, a mile and a half. Not far.  A piece of Sunset Boulevard runs right through Silver Lake, east to west, between downtown Los Angeles and Hollywood. That’s how I put it to people from Pasadena, or to Westside types, always asking, Where is that again? We’ll start at my house, the next to last one with the high gray wall, on the north side of the street, at the western end of Crestmont Avenue. Be careful, the bottom stairs get very narrow. We’ll go left on Lucile and left again at Effie. Ubiquitous Effie, we call her, for her meandering ways. Right on Maltman, right on Sunset to Griffith Park Boulevard where we’ll stop at a certain point to choose the way home.

This was Ernst’s walk, one he devised after recovering sufficiently from a heart attack and quadruple bypass in 1984 to undertake walking. In fact, he jogged. But, like Mitterrand, je ne jog pas. This I read in a French newspaper after Clinton was observed jogging in Paris: Mitterrand ne jog pas. Feel that Parisian scorn. A familiar walk then, even sometimes a sentimental one, depending on my mood. For years I saw nothing. I walked in the dark at five in the morning, bent on getting everything done before I left for work: walk, breakfast, lunch and beds made, on the road by seven thirty. I cannot persuade myself to get up so early anymore, but that was a good time for me, the world empty and ill-lit, dogs sleeping. I walked in silence and alone, heedless of a neighbor’s warning. I needed a rape whistle, he thought, should be prepared to make a thief’s eyes sting with pepper spray. I refused to let him speak to me of a reported mugging or murder on a street nearby. He thought me foolish, and probably I was, but in twenty years I met nothing more dangerous than a hungry cat hoping I would let him in to the house he’d been put out of for the night.

These days I walk when it suits me, when the walk fits into my day. And I do meet people, dog walkers mostly, sometimes caught in embarrassing straits. One guy puts down a newspaper and waits. Some people seem to have dogs only to scold them, to jerk them around, to muzzle them, to dye them different colors at Halloween, dampening their spirits generally, or turning them into babies conveniently stashed in pockets, pouches, and strollers, anything  to prevent their being dogs at all. Some, when they see me coming, immediately begin talking, not to me, but to their dogs. Fine. I don’t want to talk to them either. Always that moment of agony, eye contact or not?  And just when it looks like they’re going to let me off without hard feelings, out comes Good morning, curt and reproachful, making me look bad. Sweet day, so calm, so cool, so bright, the bridal of the earth and sky.  Many days in Los Angeles call forth this line, but I prefer to think it to myself and go no further, since I so evidently am not the virtuous, immortal soul Herbert speaks of at the end of the poem.

Here’s Maltman already, chosen by Ernst for its lack of steepness. Silver Lake is all up hill and down dale. Don’t look for balance, order, symmetry. It’s a hodge-podge. Mostly small, cheaply made one-story houses, a few carefully restored California bungalows, small apartments facing a central court, a couple of tear-downs. Wooden fences, grillwork, tall cactus barriers. If there is beauty here, it’s flash-in-the-pan:  inside an open gate, an orange cat momentarily transfixed, stippled greenery, white satin flowers with bright yellow centers in the background. Pied beauty, beloved of Hopkins. Glory be to God for dappled things! Here we have sidewalks cracked and crazed. Black asphalt laid down haphazardly where irregular pavement slabs have been heaved up by the roots of trees, those smog-eating jacarandas I’ve mentioned before, and silk floss trees (like the one in our driveway in Haiti), blooming now in Los Angeles in the fall, the bark on one side smooth and green, on the other spiked and prickery, pinkest of pink blossoms clashing, gorgeous, just at the corner, against a burnt-red wall. But eyes on the ground is my habit, the better to avoid unbearable Lost Cat signs depicting Katz, a calico with tiger-striped knee socks who haunts me for days. New, ever more adorable photographs, heart-rending pleas, escalating offers of monetary reward, until I walk with my hands before my eyes. I, whose cat sleeps safely on the window seat at home. No more. No more, I beg Katz’s inconsolable owner. I’ll call her, I think, just to say, I know, I know. But a call about her cat would only get her hopes up and make things worse.

Look down, look down.  A friend of mine got a grant once to study Roman inscriptions. That had a thrilling sound, as though through study she might hear the squeak and gibber of the Roman streets. Several silent but seemingly proud contractors left inscriptions here in 1926. By L.A. standards, Silver Lake is old. C. Stansbury has been here, also Peck, Kiddington, Carlson, and Calvin McCray (all Anglos, I note). Here comes my favorite: Al Mork, Maker. Al Mork, I perceive, had a sense of himself, of the highway he was making straight. What would he think of his work now, I wonder, all upended, permanently ruined? For the city has disclaimed responsibility for residential sidewalks, which many residents like me cannot afford to repair.  Silver Lake belongs to metropolitan Los Angeles and to Southern California. High voltage. Certain hieroglyphs signal surveyors. A drain inspector, too, has left his mark.  And here’s a blue dolphin: Drains to ocean, No Dumping.  Reminders underfoot that Santa Monica Bay is polluted, that Los Angeles took shape in a desert, lives on borrowed water. Yet no one talks about desalinization; the DWP is widely thought to be mismanaged, if not thoroughly corrupt.

Sluts fuck. Fuck sluts. A poet of equal opportunity, depending on the walker’s perspective.  I give it its due. Clever catchy, I call it, praise the Anglo-Saxon, use of assonance, and pass on.  STOP! In the name of love, I am commanded next, in colored chalk, and do, supplying the tune and as much of the song as I can remember. A pair of lovers set down their initials here in 1980: J.G. + H.J. KITTYRIOT and ARTCLB (I think these are bands, but The Cigarette Bums?) have been here, and someone behind a fence who owns a motorcycle begins, What Dylan did was…, which I would like to hear, but miss. What are you doing? Two guys getting out of a car. Would you be doing this if you weren’t in L.A.? Would you be playing that in Berlin? Someone has hung teddy bears on the telephone wires.  How? When? There’s a lot around here that seems to me youthful, optimistic, but naïve. Someone whose 2008 white and red Triumph Scrambler has been damaged in a hit and run is hoping for some Karma here. Colored stamps spell out INSPIRE SOMEONE, NOMATTERWHATNESS, NOMATTERWHATNESS and, carefully lettered in turquoise, tilts a plank against a wall: Stop here and think of someone you love. I scoffed at this for a few days before I started doing it, see it there still, though it’s gone now.  I have even grown fond of a graffiti artist, one Casio by name, whose sign is a rippling arrow which will never fly straight. No matter what.

I’m surrounded it seems by artists, writers, philosophers—lovers who wear their hearts on their sleeves.

Sentiments flimsy and shallow. Brief, not lasting. Nothing like Roman inscriptions. But they invite me all the same, as Frost did many years ago. At thirteen, I already had a head full of poetry: Mother Goose, A. A. Milne, and Robert Louis Stevenson, snippets of Shakespeare, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Robert W. Service. I knew the meaning of thanatopsis and that only God could make a tree. I had watched for the highway man by moonlight, wandered in the forest prime evil, stood with Nokomis on the shores of Gitche Gumee, sailed the ocean blue with Columbus. I was all over the map! The Pasture, the first poem we looked at in my ninth grade English class, was somehow different, and I took it inside. You come too.

Caution: Zombie Zone: a backyard taped off in red lettering. This is no season of mists and mellow fruitfulness. Leaves do not turn in Los Angeles. Instead, a hot desert wind, a Santa Ana, is blowing, and El Conejito (the little rabbit) has set up his altar for el Dia de los Muertos (the Day of the Dead). El Conejito is the name in green on his truck advertising gardening services, but I haven’t seen this truck in some time. No longer a gardener, but an artist, I think, to judge by the installations he composes in front of his house to mark seasons and holidays. El Conejito is in love with everything in this world. Every bauble, every piece of broken pottery, anything plastic, all the world’s religions. He likes mannequins, hula hoops, bad paintings on easels, tables and chairs in intimate setting, satyrs, bird cages, wind chimes, kites, light bulbs. Are those plants real or fake? Everything fits, everything belongs. He never loses his nerve. Picture rows of life-size skeletons, separated by gravestones (R.I.P.), working furiously, each at his own computer. Arise, arise, from death, ye numberless infinities of souls and to your scatter’d bodies go, writes Donne. El Conejito’s  skeletons have skipped a step, eschewing souls and bodies both, in their haste to get back online. The dead are us. We are the dead.

Next door the Germans have orderly borders, neatly spaced trolls, a hummingbird feeder, a birdbath. The husband with his glassy stare is gone now. I always thought he was hostile when what he was, was old. His wife wears a hat like Marlene Dietrich’s in The Third Man, makes her way very upright, shopping bag in hand, to the 99 Cent Store down the block, across Sunset. And here’s Marilyn, heading off on her bike. She’s eighty years old, has a fur coat, her wisteria blooms on a trestle in spring. She wants to study German for a trip to Berlin, vague air of a movie star about her.  Pretty. And I don’t mean you can tell that she used to be pretty. Not still, but now. Marilyn has men coming and going. A handsome black man and another guy who drives a truck, both younger than she is. She’s glamorous and at the same time an old shoe. She worries about her children when it’s they who should worry about her, down there on her bike in heavy traffic.  It’s not that she’s been here forever. Marilyn moved to Silver Lake quite recently from some other world, but I see her house as a last hedge before momentum carries us downhill, toward the homeless, the uninvited, the dispossessed. Toward those who have been left out of life’s feast.

Though the Cubano will have none of this. He has fenced himself off. His property is an island compound. A Cuba. Two houses with spacious lawns well-mowed, roses, birds singing all the day in an aviary, a Bentley and a Porsche, two-car garage. He lives with his mother whose hair in the Latin manner has never gone gray. I think she dyes it with shoe polish. Not as slick as he used to be. Not the black t-shirt and gold chains he wore when I used to bump into him at Mayfair (now Gelson’s) market. He’s a bit paunchy now, undershirt showing inside his plaid bathrobe, losing his hair, but still pretty flashy in leather driving gloves. We are growing old together, the Cubano and I, friends now, after a fashion, only because his daughter, now grown, recognized me as a Westridge teacher.  Westridge means a great deal to the Cubano. Westridge is elite, exclusive, a private school for girls in Pasadena. A world apart, a world not Cuban. He doesn’t want it for himself (his business, Latin beauty products, he assures me, is immense. Immense!), and he had it for a moment until his wife insisted that his daughter return to Catholic school. Now he wants it for his granddaughter. So he flags me down to deliver a blast about his children (two boys besides the Westridge girl, difficult as teenagers, but all straight arrows now, all three with him in the business), a warm-up to his true subject. New buildings! Endowments! Tuition raises! A centennial celebration coming up. I hardly need to say a word as he makes love to the Annual Giving report. It’s enough for him to feel a connection through me to something he himself cannot precisely name. His granddaughter is well-positioned. She lives in Pasadena, goes to Pacific Oaks, a prestigious pre-school. Money is being put aside against the day when she will enter Westridge where she will have her own encounter with the poems of Robert Frost.

At the Shipley School in the fall of 1953, I was the stranger in a strange land. I had read the exciting novels assigned for summer reading, The Bridge at San Luis Rey, Oliver Twist, and Of Human Bondage (in the bulky hardback edition my mother carried with her when she left Oklahoma for New York in 1925), but had not been able to find in Haiti the poems I was supposed to memorize. My teacher’s response to my excuse was to declare any English-speaking family without the Oxford Book of English Verse uncivilized. Though her judgment was harsh, snobbish, and senseless, Miss Y. became my favorite teacher. She was a bird-like New Englander in her 60s, near the end of life (she died just before graduation in 1957), and perhaps on that day she had simply had enough of dogs who ate homework, of teaching, all endeavor, like Frost in After Apple-Picking: I am overtired of the great harvest I myself desired. Miss Y. taught without teaching. She sat well back from us, told girls over-eager with the answers to put their hands down. She said sarcastic, sometimes shocking things, showed us a painting of a girl in anguish or ecstasy, the blood of her first period pooling at her feet. That fall, without fanfare, she put The Pasture, with its gentle invitation to journey north of Boston and beyond, before us. Its promise was personal, not burdensome. I was thirteen, misunderstood, and far away from home, but I believe I saw it then without seeing, my direction, my vocation. You come too.

Quickly go past the empty house, tagged, condemned. The posted sign is too far away to read, but I suspect foreclosure. Gone overnight: a family of four, a home, the yard strewn with the children’s toys, tacky garden ornaments, Mary, Mary quite contrary with her watering can, an inflatable snowman at Christmas. And quickly again past two homeless men, their clothes in an overhanging tree. It’s almost possible to think of them as teenagers who have trashed their room, who have refused to get up this morning, quilts pulled up over their heads, or as even younger children when one day I saw them looking at a picture book together. But they are not children. They are mature men, and one of them uses a wheelchair. Provocateurs, pricks to thought, to conscience, though they ask for nothing.  We should never, Ernst and I, have bought a house so close to Sunset. We should have looked toward the lake, not the city. I never should have brought you here to see that I do not stop in the name of love but, like the priest and the Levite, pass by on the other side, make my excuse the nomatterwhatness of it all. For we are going to turn the corner, leaving behind sidewalks in disrepair, lost Katz, bad Karma. Signs will fade or be taken down, litter will blow away. A new family will make a new home in the foreclosed house, and these troublesome men I cannot bring myself to look at may be gone tomorrow.  They come and go, propelled by whim or physical necessity. El Conejito will take down his altar with its grim reminder of our common destiny; he’ll be getting ready for Thanksgiving soon, and Christmas.  Many more sweet days, calm, cool and bright, will ensue before winter comes to Los Angeles.

Second Sight

Key to Family Names:

Rose and Frank Van Dyke, my maternal grandparents

Their children: Marguerite (married to Melville, daughters Marian and Elizabeth/Libby); Howard (married to Margera, son Lester); Bill

Tina, Rose’s sister, daughters Nadine (married to Wilton, daughter Patricia) and Norma

Second Sight, Part I

It’s not what you look at that matters. It’s what you see—this, quoted in a recent New York Times nature article, from another journal keeper, Henry David Thoreau. Stung, I took it as an admonition. It was time to put aside my disappointment in the diary, my critical distance, make what I could of the donnée. And gradually, by letting my own experience, guesses, and family lore invade the text, I did begin to see something of Rose’s mental life, as well as sequences, intersections of action, thought, and feeling, something I might call story, if not quite plot. Some French children’s books I discovered recently, through Leonard’s granddaughter Meline, were another inspiration. They present first a basic outline, followed by a series of transparent overlays, until the reader, knocked out by an encyclopedic naming of parts, holds in her hands, from façade to inner workings, a medieval castle, say, or a pig. With new thoughts in mind, I returned to the diary.

In March, 1944, Rose’s sister Tina makes room in her house for her daughter Nadine and granddaughter Patricia when Nadine’s husband Wilton is drafted. Nadine, who has been living in Oklahoma City, immediately puts in a phone. Nadine is less provincial than her mother—nothing extraordinary about that, but Tina’s new phone offered a clue as to why my grandmother makes no note of my sister’s birth on March 28, 1944, the day after she and Tina threw a surprise party for their sister Sophia’s sixtieth birthday. This rankled on my first reading. Worse, she makes no mention of her new grandchild until May 11 (her own birthday) and then gets her name wrong. Betty, she calls her. I can remember the tossing out of Lizzie, Liz, Eliza, Bess, Bessie, Betsy, and Betty. Libby was always Libby. Betty was a reject. I gave Rose more bad marks for the lightness with which she treated my father’s nearly fatal pneumonia, followed by his and my chicken pox, our apartment dark, my mother and new sister guarded by a grim nurse. Where was Rose’s sympathy, her motherly concern? We didn’t seem like relatives at all, just names, too remote to care about.

 But, as I think of it now, Rose may not have known about my sister’s birth for days if not weeks—whenever it was that my mother found time and strength to write her a letter. Then too, there was the family fear of long distance, a paralysis which set in at the thought of anything expensive, frivolous. Marguerite and Rose did not talk on the phone which, like the lawn mower and the automobile, still feels new-fangled in Rose’s account. And I’m sure that when she did write, my mother made light of her troubles. Straighten up, she would have told herself. There was no whining in her, no pouting.  Outrage or anger when she found something ridiculous, but complaint had been teased out of her in childhood by her father. Watch that lower lip, he’d say, you might trip on it. Van Dykes, Oklahomans, were tough.

As far as she could, my mother protected her parents. From worry, from jibes my father made. She remained homesick all her life. To find direction north, south, east, west, she put herself on the front porch at 316 Chautauqua. When she described the way her father ran around the house with sleigh bells on Christmas Eve to inspire visions of sugar plums in his children’s heads, or threw his hat into the air as they left Wright’s Ranch at the end of a vacation in the cool mountains of Creede, Colorado, she wept. What was she crying for? I wondered. What need had she of parents when we were right here, my father, my sister, and me? But, guided by her, I soon began to see it: the Model-T, the twists and turns in the road, her brothers spitting peanut shells into the wind, the dark red paint of the ranch house, their breakfasts of expertly gutted pan-fried trout. Grandpa’s gesture was hail and farewell, mute promise to return. Pre-wrapped was how my grandparents came to me, suggesting how little free will we have as children; love itself can never be quite spontaneous. It is conditioned: copied, taught and learned. My grandparents might be tough, tougher than I could ever be, but they were also old and fragile. I think Rose was somehow lame, perhaps from a case of childhood polio. Or from a bad fall she took down the cellar stairs. Not in the diary, but in a letter to my mother from the same year, she tells how she stayed in for days before her fortieth anniversary celebration for fear of icy sidewalks. She had survived, but been weakened by typhoid fever; in later life, she suffered small strokes. So many contradictions to absorb, which only became more snarled as I got older and formed my own idea of family relations.

Listen to the little New Yorkers, someone might say at table. And on the day we had cornmeal mush for supper, I got myself in trouble by declaring, Pigs eat mush! I doubt that I had ever seen a pig. Little New Yorkers are more familiar with zoo than with farm animals. My source was a book, probably an illustrated Little Golden Book, absolute authority in my three-or-four-year-old mind on farms and farmers, cows, pigs, chickens, and what they ate. Pigs ate unappetizing yellow slop from a trough which I would never do.  Somehow, it seems to me, my grandparents and I never got past this gaffe of mine which, though amusing, remained an insult. Rose and Frank rejoiced at my birth and came to New York to see me. I was their first grandchild, but I sensed very young that Lester, a boy, had taken my place, as Bill’s son, Frank, or Red, some years later took my sister’s. The boys (Howard and Bill), often referred to as a team, learned to drive; my mother did not. Because she didn’t want to. Didn’t want to back the car out of a long, narrow, gravelly driveway to prove it. Women’s lib may have been a long way off, but I knew this was unfair, this teasing mean. Lester was said to be more Wiles (his mother’s family name) than Van Dyke. Not a good thing. Just as my sister and I might be too much like our father who spoke French, was bookish, and leery of guns. And Norma’s (Tina’s other daughter) girls with their large brown eyes were the pretty ones. Everyone had a tag, an epithet.

Oklahoma had its delights, of course, beginning with the train trip of two days and two nights. Noise of a steam engine (last of its kind) on a platform in Chicago; undressing in the Pullman car behind green curtains, our bunk beds hooked down by the porter; foul smelling lavatories, Passengers will please refrain from flushing while the train is standing in the station. More luxurious, a bedroom with miniature fold-out sink and toilet, tiny cabinets and drawers for our doll clothes, the gong announcing dinner is served in the dining car forward, perilous crossings between cars, doors hissing, gusts of fresh air from whatever state we were passing through, choices on the menu, the silver-plated pots and deferential service of that bygone world. And when we got there, little New Yorkers could run barefoot in the grass, cool off with a squirt of the hose, catch fire flies in the dark and set them free again, watch backyard Roman candles burst on the Fourth of July, learn the names of all the flowers in Grandma’s garden: larkspur, delphiniums, red and yellow canna and spotted tiger lilies along the side of the house, blue hydrangeas, pink peonies, fuzzy, stiff-legged zinnias, sweet peas, pansies with their human faces, petunias, marigolds. And, of course, there were roses. No tomatoes as good as hers; no corn-on-the-cob, no fried okra dipped in cornmeal, no Toll House (chocolate chip) cookies with pecans ever again as good. The swing my grandfather made for me of sanded wooden plank and rough ropes merged with the swing in Robert Louis Stevenson’s poem and stayed there; I cannot think of one without the other. Was not this Paradise enow?

This Wilderness of Oklahoma where, child pioneers with doll children in a cradle, we swept dust off the front porch and down the steps, stored supplies in our tall green kitchen cabinet. Then we were housekeepers. But when I returned to Oklahoma at seventeen, in 1957, after a seven year absence, I had become a graduate of the Shipley School, headed for college on a scholarship, and a thoroughly useless young woman. Rose and Frank by then were 80 and 83, impatient, their teeth were false. We couldn’t get Frank’s midday dinner on the table fast enough, though Grandma pounded her cane, and we stared bleary-eyed through the kitchen window screen to spot his car coming slowly up the driveway which had defeated our mother years ago. It was one of those ill-conceived family plans. What a help we’d be! It would toughen us up. A chance to know each other. A real American life after Haiti and boarding school and debutante parties in Connecticut, which were not real.

In fact, the unreality of that summer in Norman amazes me still. I performed. I cooked (very badly); I will never make good gravy or another minute steak. I put the dirty clothes down the chute, clean ones through the Maytag wringer, scrubbed out stains on a washboard, blued, starched, sprinkled and ironed, while watching Queen for a Day. Defrosted the refrigerator, great hunks of ice, which reformed overnight, falling  to the kitchen floor; pulled shades, carried endless pitchers of water to the cooler in the living room; ate Rotary Club pancakes; learned to play 42 (again, badly); made friends with Melody, my age, member of the McFarlin church youth group. She felt de trop in her mother’s kitchen, she told me. Wanted a kitchen of her own, a husband too. Her life stretched out before her here in Norman. A year or so at OU first, of course, however long it took; or she might marry the boy she was going steady with now, anything to get out of the house. I, too, acquired a boyfriend, Wilbur Jones, who had lost part of a finger in a threshing machine, who asked permission to kiss me goodnight. Every time. I had a dizzy spell reaching up to the ceiling from the dining room table to change a light bulb. If only I could do it all once more with feeling. But I was frozen in the Oklahoma heat like the pieces of chicken I began to fry too soon, unthawed. To think that Marguerite had raised this creature: spoiled, scared, snobbish, scornful, shy, stubborn… I was not rude, nor did they scold, but there it lay, unwrapped, the glaring, unpalatable possibility that I did not love my grandparents, nor did they love me.

Part II

This must be why I tore into the diary in the first place. To get to the bottom at last. To discover, explore, resolve, explain my mixed-up feelings about Rose and Frank. About Oklahoma altogether, where I never felt right. I think it was a breakdown, on both sides, of theory of mind. This phrase has lately been popping up everywhere. Have you noticed? On Charlie Rose’s brain series, which Leonard insists on watching, in articles in the New York Times and the New York Review of Books (hereinafter NYT and NYRB). Theory of mind is what makes us human, they say, the ability to imagine what another person is thinking, the way I know in conversation where you’re coming from, as the talk show types put it.  No doubt I oversimplify, but is this really a new idea? Isn’t the failure of theory of mind what makes us turn to fiction, to soliloquy and interior monologue, where even unreliable narrators, manipulated by their authors, tend to give themselves away? Why do we watch reruns of Law and Order, Criminal Intent except to see detectives speedily unravel the mystery of human motive, including that of psychopaths? Why do we love Dickens who tells us pretty quickly that Gradgrind isn’t such a bad sort, that Bounderby is the one to watch out for? Because we have in life so little access to the minds of others, all of us inveterate liars, forever saying less or more or the opposite of what we mean. As twice-betrayed Duncan in Macbeth must admit: There is no art to find the mind’s construction in the face. My attempt to apply theory of mind to the dead starts to look crazy. Nevertheless, I have followed love where I found it: in two pounds of butter, a new set of bedroom furniture, and a quilt.

Live birth, pneumonia, fevers and poxes, the lack of an empty hospital bed for my father carry no weight with Rose, but when she learns through Etta Parr, a childhood friend of my mother’s who has seen Marguerite in New York, that her daughter has come away with only a quarter pound of butter after standing in a ration line for an hour, she flies to put two pounds in the mail. This may be my favorite detail from the diary, so absurd, so practical. Though my mind explodes with unanswered questions as to wrapping, possible preservatives, interaction with the postal clerk who accepted the package, its state upon arrival, and Marguerite’s reaction, none of this detracts from Rose’s desire to help in an emergency.

Marguerite’s story, like several others (of the never-identified Miss Oats, of the finished but apparently unused tablecloth, of Tina and Nadine, waiting for Wilton to come home, of the toddler Lester stuck in nursery school), are fragmentary, come to no necessary end. Bill’s story, however, which runs right through, gives the diary shape and meaning. Rose mothers Bill. She scans a recent photograph to assure herself that he looks well and happy. She writes to him constantly, hunts for his Kappa Sig pin, sends him razor blades, and hires a local seamstress to piece him a quilt. Perhaps at an earlier time she would have pieced this quilt herself, or with her sisters, but now she takes great care in selecting remnants, backing, cotton batting. This quilt is better insurance than King G. Price (source of the physical diary) can provide, something to keep the war at bay, quiet her anxiety about her younger son, now twenty-six, who has been in the Navy for four years, on an ammunition ship near Pearl Harbor and in the foreign Territory of Hawai'i.

Behind the busyness of every day lie the missing and the dead Rose reads about in the Norman Transcript. Her hidden fear remains in play until she learns on October 13, that Bill may be coming home in the middle of December. Goody, she writes, and on she rushes (without preliminaries or any suggestion that she has been taken by surprise) to his 1:00 AM phone call from San Francisco (November 23), to his wedding day (November 30), to Mrs. Mortimer, the bride’s mother, who thoughtfully sends Rose a piece of wedding cake along with two carnations from the bouquet. I hope they will be very happy, Rose writes. On December 19, Bill arrives by train (it was late) with Bebe, who gets to work in the kitchen straight away, and Rose is in her element planning a reception with snap dragons for the centerpieces. Just ahead of all this, Rose and Frank purchased a new bedroom set ($149) for the front room. For the comfort of roomers, I supposed, but now the double bed with lovely quilt on top, chest of drawers, dressing table and bench assume positions in a honeymoon suite for Bill and his bride. And as though all this good fortune were not enough, it’s Christmas, and 1944 ends with the last of the pheasants and high 42 scores, with fruit cake, present wrapping, carol singing, visits, and a trip to Skiatook for a family reunion which brings together Frank and Rose, Bill and Bebe, Howard, Margera, and Lester at the Wiles’ (Margera’s parents). Even Marguerite checks in to say that she always gets homesick at this time of year, that Marian is very excited about Christmas. When the family returns from Skiatook, they go to bed, like children, tired but happy.

What is this but the story of the Prodigal Son? I don’t mean prodigal in the Biblical sense of a son who has wasted his talents in riotous living, squandered his inheritance, his father’s investment. Only that Bill has been absent and in danger, that he is young and until now unattached, unsettled. Marguerite, though not forgotten, exists at considerable remove; Rose has long been used to the idea that she is married with children of her own, that she has left Oklahoma for good. Howard is the son to whom the father in the Bible says: Son, thou art ever with me, and all that I have is thine. It was meet that we should make merry and be glad: for this thy brother was dead, and is alive again, and was lost, and is found.

The story of the prodigal son in the New Testament is a beautiful story, seductively told in its cancelling out of sibling rivalry and parental favoritism. It is also a parable about relations between God and Man, but fully meaningful as a tale of parents and children without a father in heaven. I have felt the anxiety, though mildly and briefly, Rose feels about her son. It came upon me suddenly, in 1990, at a dinner party where I declared myself an instant pacifist to ardent defenders of Bush and was laughed at. All because David received a Selective Service notice during the Gulf War. I, who had lived through World War II, Korea, and Vietnam finally got it, what war is really: the wholesale slaughter of young men. War or no, our desire to keep ‘em down on the farm remains strong, even when our children’s labor is no longer needed. Go not to Wittenberg, the queen begs. And Hamlet in all his best obeys her. Far better for Hamlet had he gone back to school (never mind that his departure would end the play in the first act). Just yesterday, I read of estranged family members who sneak peeks at each other on Facebook. The last thread, one woman called it. Both my children have left California for excellent reasons, which I commend and call them deserters in the same breath. I must conquer my fear of long distance. I think, too, of Ernst who was never truly welcome in his parents’ home after he married me, who never knew what stuff he was made of. Whose grandparents were not even a memory. No stories clung to them, no habits or patterns of speech. They died naked. Their diaries do not survive.

Is this too subjective? Do I see too much? Very likely. It’s a rate, time, distance problem, isn’t it, family algebra? What is the rate of attrition of affection, of memory? How many different people are we over time, and how much of it must pass before we can bear to contemplate our adolescent selves? Is it absence makes the heart grow fonder, or out of sight, out of mind? Both surely, surely both. Then, who is the chip off the old block and who the black sheep? How long to hang on, when to let go? Who will return to pick over the furniture, minister to the dying, arrange the funeral?

Every generation lives out this story, and my grandmother tells it as well as anyone. She writes about what she knows, as creative writing handbooks instruct, selects telling details. Of her ending, at once satisfying and surprising, Aristotle, first among critics, would approve. Like Virginia Woolf at the close of Mrs. Dalloway, she gathers her “characters” together at not one but two parties. And in the comic spirit of Shakespeare and Jane Austen, she arrests them, in full swing, at a wedding which by no means seals their fates. Is all the fun over for Beatrice and Benedick now that they are married? How will Elizabeth Bennett fare as mistress of Pemberly? Though readers continue to speculate and novelists to write sequels, we can never know. I almost wish that Rose would stop here, that tired but happy, she could put down her pen, transcendent. And in hindsight she might say so too, say like Othello, bursting with joy at his conquest of Desdemona: If it were now to die, / ’Twere now to be most happy. Instead, in the fullness of life at 67, she looks forward to the New Year, to 1945. She scratches out another page, though before long Marguerite, pulling further and further away, will leave New York for Haiti and El Salvador. Howard will take that good job he has been offered in Tulsa, and Bill and Bebe will decline to sleep forever in the front room beneath their lovely quilt. Frank will die before her, and Rose herself, left to the care of grasping strangers, will die on Christmas Day in 1961. We foolish mortals have no choice but to keep the wisdom of Thoreau in our back pockets: Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.

Year Book

It’s a little like being in a Jane Austen novel. There’s tea at the parsonage, preachers abound. There’s a  war going on on another continent, a naval base on the outskirts of town, a capital city within reach, an endless round of social engagements, calls made and repaid, gifts delivered, changes of season and fashion, births, deaths, weddings, funerals. What’s missing is a plot and, more important, Jane’s mordant wit, edge of her irony, some means of understanding how the characters rank and rub against each other so I can line them up between wisdom and folly, a place for everyone and everyone in his place.

Who, for example, is Miss Oats, frequent recipient of such blandishments as pheasant meat, Toll House cookies, yeast-filled sugar rolls and coffee cakes, slices of pumpkin, raisin, custard, chocolate, and apple pie?  Ancient, ailing, a hypochondriac, invalid, widow, gossip, bore? Is she an obligation, or a dear friend who has fallen on hard times and must retrench? Where are the confidantes and confidences? What was the content of that reportedly good sermon? Is there a cad or lout in our midst? An overweening matriarch? I long for scandal, contretemps, intrigue of any sort. But none of this can I find in the Year Book belonging to Rose M. Van Dyke of 316 Chautauqua Ave., Norman, Okls.To aid me in determining the final cause of this text, I decide to attack it as critic John Crowe Ransom (see his essays, The New Criticism, 1941) would, to view it as self-contained, self-referential, an object entirely independent of its author, its biographical, cultural and historical context, and from any subjective response I may have as a reader.

Year Book, 1944 (five and a half by eight and a half inches), has a forest green cover with contrasting Kelly green plastic binding. Gold lettering on the front reveals title and origin: King G. Price, Insurance, 118 North Peters, Norman, Oklahoma, Telephone: 945. On the back is the company’s circular logo depicting an eagle whose spread wings reach beyond its circumference. Each page within has an insurance related heading, Fidelity Bonds for Fraternal Order Officers, Check Forgery and Alteration Bonds, Automobile Collision Policies, and provides equal space for two days, beginning with Saturday, January 1, and Sunday, January 2. At the end are five blank pages headed Memoranda, one of which narrates doings from January 19-31, 1945, and a page of calendars for the years 1943, 1944, and 1945.

As to the appearance of notations on the page, I find blue and black ink from a fountain pen, handwriting small and neat, stiff not loopy, slanting here and there to right or left. Most entries do not fill the space available, and there are few crossings out, usually to correct spelling. More than a few spelling mistakes have not been spotted. Rose M. Van Dyke employs capital letters, periods, quotation marks, parentheses, and apostrophes, often abbreviates and, year, and through. No colons or semi- colons. In spite of many run-on sentences, her style is terse and to the point. She seldom uses the first person singular, but plunges ahead with an active verb: went, washed, ironed, baked, hoed, planted, wrote, worked.  She repeats many actions, week to week, but she does not shrink from or skip over these. She is forthright, not murky. She pays attention, names names, counts how many were present at a meeting, notes numbers of eggs her hens have laid and whether they are molting, records domino scores and games she wins.

I begin to be at home here, to understand her lingo. I no longer call her by her full name, or even by her last name, which would be usual and proper. No. She is Rose. Rare telephone calls are specified as such to distinguish them from the many calls she makes in person. To relatives only she gives first names; friends and acquaintances are Mr., Mrs., or Miss. To visit is to do more than talk, implies a conversation of some intimacy. Dinner is at midday; supper, the evening meal. Putting up is canning; she gets dinner, eats mashed taters; neighbors take sick, a show is a movie. Nifty, swell, goody, and jolly good stand out as slang among Rose’s favorite adjectives: cute, fun, good, nice, and lovely. She mentions the weather as it affects outings or gardening, but rarely describes setting in detail whether indoors or out.

This is no country of war shortages, nor is it the dustbowl, which I have lately learned was mostly in the panhandle. Rose and her family live in a land of plenty. A land of milk and honey, I might say, an earthly paradise in which fishermen fish, hunters bring home their kill; chickens lay eggs; cellars store apples and potatoes; butter, flour, sugar, fryers, pork roasts, and Arkansas peaches for cobblers can be found at the store to supplement the prodigious fruits, flowers, and vegetables grown in backyard gardens. (1) When spring comes, Rose is able to furnish seven card tables with white, yellow, red, and lavender tulips. And geographic borders, some tangentially related to this bounty, stretch far beyond Oklahoma to California, Hawaii, Mexico, England, and Russia (tacked a comfort for the Russians), to missions in China and Africa, subjects of talks given at meetings Rose attends.

The action takes place during the calendar year which provides a kind of structure, punctuated as it is by national and religious holidays (2) as well as family birthdays and anniversaries, but I leave these aside for the moment in order to place emphasis on dailyness. At the center of each day (3) is what Rose does.  She washes and irons. She irons her sheets. She cleans her house, even though she has help in the form of Mrs. Long, good cleaner, who comes in once a week. She cooks and bakes for her own use, for family and friends, and to supply refreshments at various events:  pecan rolls, ginger cake, and sugar cookies, all in a morning; six coffeecakes, eight pumpkin pies at a clip. She is provident, setting her dough at night to save time next day. She plans meals, arranges flowers, participates in gift exchanges of tea towels, bars of soap, and Pyrex pie plates, serves food and drink at USO events at the Armory. She babysits, pays bills, sees her G.P., Dr. Berry, and a foot doctor. She attends showers, weddings, and meetings as a member of several societies. (4) She pays calls on family and friends, on the sick and the dying. She is often either hostess or guest at luncheons, suppers, and backyard picnics. When not entertaining or being entertained, she spends her evenings reading (5), or out riding in the family car. Only once, for her 40^th wedding anniversary on January, 12, does she eat in a restaurant, the Spinning Wheel Tea House, where she has a turkey dinner, followed by present opening and a party at home.(5) She plays dominoes, a domino game called 42, and a board game, Pollyanna. Infrequently, she naps. She has her hair done or simply combed; she gets a cold perm and a facial, has her nails polished, sees a style show at the Christian church. She grows vegetables and flowers, feeds chickens. She shops for groceries, once in a while for clothes, a mesh dress ($25.00, alterations and tax included), stockings, face powder, a fall hat. She gets her fur coat out of storage. She sends birthday cards and writes many letters. She goes to the McFarlin Methodist church, sometimes twice on Sunday, and to prayer meetings, one of which lasts all day-- also regularly to movies at the Boomer or the Sooner.(6) She sews (new curtains for the church basement, a sun bonnet), mends, dyes, embroiders dresser scarves and luncheon cloths, crochets, cuts dandelions for her chickens, gathers eggs. She often goes up town, less often to Oklahoma City, and twice on longer trips to Shawnee and Skiatook, Oklahoma.

She keeps all this up, day in and day out, does Rose. A remarkably energetic, active, fun-loving, and sociable person, it would seem. Not Rosie the Riveter, but doing her part for the war effort. Patriotic, religious, mindful of her civic and Christian duty to feed the hungry, clothe the naked. Self-effacing, but not murky, as I have said. And yet there is something opaque, impenetrable, in her absolute equanimity. Almost without exception, books, movies, sermons, lessons, programs, speakers, and meetings are good. Every baby is cute. On January 3, she begins to crochet a table cloth; on March 16, she finishes it and sends it to the laundry to be blocked; on March 21, it comes back, and it is lovely. And in this one word in praise of her accomplishment, there is a note of triumph. Yet she does not think, as another woman might, of how this cloth will wow her guests when she uses it for the first time. Perhaps it is not intended for herself, but as a gift for someone else. Perhaps. But the reader will never know, for she does not mention it again. On June 6, she writes, Early this morning 4 0’clock the McFarlin Church chimes rang out ‘Rock of Ages.’ D-Day has come. Though her simple phrasing suggests something longed for and hints at historic significance, the Normandy landing causes no more stir in her mind than a tablecloth.

What I choose to call negative space pervades the diary. Rose uses active verbs, but she is also fond of passive constructions (very nice time was had; part of the play ‘Oklahoma’ was enjoyed), so much so that in trying to describe her writing, I begin to use them myself. Rose drives me to it. To enumerating what is missing, what is not. No pronoun I. No outpouring of fear, doubt, worry, grief, regret, desire faith, love, or hope. No juicy gossip, no disapproving glances, no wondering whether or why. Who preached, but not what; who was honored, but not what for. Not one of the seven deadlies can I accuse her of. Rose does not drive; Frank and fellow club members take her everywhere. Neither does she smoke or drink except for tea, coffee, Sanka, and Coca Cola. She does not listen to the radio. She does not have, as the saying goes, a job outside the home, but earns money occasionally selling eggs at fifty cents a dozen and, more consistently, by taking in roomers.  In the Memoranda section are lists of couples or single people who have stayed in her home since the war began, ten in the front room, twelve in the middle room ($2.50 per night). Mrs. Cory was a cooking school instructor, Mr. Powers, a defense worker.  Everyone else is identified simply as Marines or Navy. These people hardly seem to exist except in their arrivals and departures when their rooms must be cleaned and aired, their sheets and towels laundered.

Like these roomers, the presence even of central characters is faint; they are not described, rarely speak in their own voices. Chief among these is Rose’s husband, Frank, also called Dad. Frank works for Van Pick’s where he unloads transports of oil and gas which sometimes make him late for dinner. His jobs around the house include: mowing the lawn, spraying cedar trees, hauling chicken feed, putting up the flag, cutting weeds in the alfalfa patch, trimming hedges, and painting the house. He is a Rotarian and church steward, often called upon to present awards at banquets. On his birthday, June 16, Rose made an angel food cake and bought Icecream at the store, gave him a shirt. In late September, Frank leaves for South Dakota on a hunting trip, returning with 41 pheasants on which he and Rose feast together and with friends for a solid month. In a rare expression of affection and coquettishness, she writes: I was glad to see him and have him home again. Had my hair done and a facial.

Similarly, she does not gush over her grandson, Lester, except to call him cute fellow. Lester is Howard’s; that is, he is Howard’s son, as Howard is Rose’s; Margera is Lester’s mother, Howard’s wife. When Rose writes was over to Howard’s, she means much more than Howard’s house. Her use of the apostrophe suggests the man and all he possesses: wives, children, grounds and gear, chattel. Slaves, if he had them. Rose and Frank interact with this family and with Rose’s sisters, Belle, Sophia, and Tena, almost daily what with Margera’s popping by with Lester on her bicycle, companionship at meetings, help with sewing and cooking, planned and impromptu calls, exchanges of guns, boots, ducks, quail, and pheasants, babysitting, holiday dinners, church going, after supper rides, and paving a sidewalk to the henhouse. Family closeness and harmony among sisters and with a daughter-in-law are built-in, not worth mentioning in the face of more important activities to write about. Howard, whatever he may do for a living, grows tomatoes, cabbage, and beets, cans bushels of cherries and spinach, and goes on juice and pickle-making jags in his spare time. Rose notes mildly that Howard has been deferred and without comment that he has a good offer from an unnamed Tulsa paper. Any rivalry or unevenness in intellect, talent, interests, and fortune (think how pointedly various are Jane, Elizabeth, Lydia, Mary, and Kitty in Pride and Prejudice) among the four sisters remains unexpressed, unspoken.  As are Rose’s feelings about her two other children who do not live in Norman. It is to Marguerite in New York and to Bill in Hawaii that Rose writes her many letters.

Reader, I knew her. Down to her bones, which are mine now, jutting out at the base of my thumbs just as hers did. As some have known all along and others have no doubt guessed, Rose M. Van Dyke was my maternal grandmother, and I am a cheat, a spy seeking to pluck out the heart of her mystery. Wherefore should I do this? Why should I say again in tedious and excessive detail what Rose has said already? Why, for Rose. For myself. And for Virginia Woolf who on March 8, 1941, was keeping a diary of her own.  And now with some pleasure, she writes, I find that it’s seven and must cook dinner. Haddock and sausage meat. I think it is true that one gains a certain hold on sausage and haddock by writing them down. Why, to gain a hold. On the heartland in the middle of the twentieth century. On a life my mother fled, but which might have been hers.  On the diary of a sane housewife, who passed on her genes, who did not think of drowning herself, of filling her pockets full of stones before walking into the river Ouse, as Woolf did less than three weeks after her diary entry.

But now that I have blown my cover, everything I say breaks Ransom’s rules, will be seen as subjective. So I will stop. I will not fast forward into the future which I can see, but Rose cannot, and for which she has no insurance policy, protective eagle on the back cover of her diary notwithstanding. I will not now speculate as to the sources of her evident and enviable content, call her a Zen Buddhist, an existentialist (we are what we do), a utilitarian philosopher dedicated to the promotion of general happiness, fusing what is pleasurable with what is good, as Keats merges truth and beauty.  I will say instead what I often say to Leonard when he objects to one of my Netflix choices, some plotless film we are watching in bed, obscure, shaky as to direction, practically cinema verite, but which takes me somewhere I have never been, will never see. “Slice of life,” I tell him. Or, puzzled, he may ask me: “Is this slice of life, Darling?” So we pass it back and forth, a running joke. But that’s exactly it, what Rose’s diary is. Slice of life, darling Rose, slice of life.

Footnotes

1. Garden crops: apples, cherries, grapes, watermelon, tomatoes, snap beans, English peas, lima beans, turnips, asparagus, cabbage, corn, spinach, wheat, and alfalfa. Rose has a lily pond and grows lilacs, chrysanthemums, hydrangeas, tulips, and iris.

2. Holidays: Armistice Day, Decoration Day, D-Day, Flag Day, Thanksgiving, the Fourth of July (celebrated with a cakewalk, games, and singing), St. Patrick’s Day, Christmas, Easter, World Prayer Day, and Worldwide Communion Sunday. On October 31, Rose goes to an all-day prayer meeting, but does not mention Halloween.

3. January 5 and 6, when Rose has a bad cold, are blank.

4. Societies to which Rose belongs:  Women’s Society of Christian Service (W.S.C.S.); General Missionary and her particular branch or circle; Garden Club; Sorosis (an important sorority-like organization devoted to household crafts among other things). Less frequently, Rose attends White Shrine and Eastern Star meetings.

5. Book titles: The Robe; Tears and Laughter; Strange Fruit; Papa Was a Preacher

5. Movies: Home in Indiana; Harvest Moon; Christmas Holiday; Wing and a Prayer; Song of Russia; The Butler’s Sister; The Chance of a Lifetime; Jack London; White Cliffs of Dover; Jane Eyre;Blonde Trouble; Love Crazy; In Our Time; Winter Time; Lassie Come Home; Heaven Can Wait; Whirlwind; Whistling in Brooklyn

6. Guests: Reverend and Mrs. Mansfield, Mr. and Mrs. Hackett, Mr. and Mrs. Jackson, Dr. and Mrs. Walker, and Mr. and Mrs. Christopher.

Marian Plumsteel

Poor Stuart Little! A quick snap of the blind has sent it clear to the top and Stuart, crushed inside, is now distinctly uncomfortable, invisible to his parents; the cat Snowball, keeping mum, has helpfully laid out his clothes and walking stick next to the mouse hole in the pantry implying that he has deserted the family to join his own kind. I sympathized. How often had this happened to me when I was dusting. Of course, I was much too big to be lifted off the ground, but I could hear the sound, feel the suddenness and fear of having done irreparable damage, the frustration of being unable to return to the normal peace of a Saturday morning, to being a good girl doing my chores without being asked. If only I could leap for the round pull and yank it down. Stuart’s parents are heartbroken; Snowball paces; what will happen now?

Rereading Stuart Little, mentioned last time, has led me to think of monsters: the child as interloper, aberration, object of ridicule and disgust, like Jane Eyre or Heathcliff. Cinderella, Snow White, Hansel and Gretel. Regan and Goneril come to mind and with them Lear’s lamentation: how sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child. The boy in The Snow Queen who becomes unmanageable when a piece of glass lodges in his eye; Kafka’s Gregor Samsa who wakes up one morning to find himself transformed into some monstrous kind of vermin; a teenage killer in the contemporary film We Need To Talk About Kevin. I’ve put this film on my Netflix list, but will I have the courage to watch it? Mismatched, misplaced, misshapen, born under a caul or malevolent prophecy, bastard, changeling, wild child, step-child, adoptee, neglected orphan, they tumble out, Edmund and Oedipus, bad seed and ugly duckling, as though the writers of these stories have tapped into primal fears best left to myth, to fairy and horror tales. 

In the beginning, Stuart, a mouse born into an ordinary New York family, resembles none of these terrifying children. His parents make haste to accommodate him with a bed made from a cigarette box, a doll-size toothbrush and bar of soap, a small hammer with which to whack the bathroom faucet his mouse paw cannot turn. They go so far as to change mouse to louse in The Night Before Christmas to avoid demeaning their son. For his part, Stuart dives down a fetid drain to retrieve his mother’s ring, rolls lost ping pong balls into view and, risking deafness, unsticks a piano key. A bit of a show-off, perhaps, no more. But is there a child who has not been naughty, who has not been bad? There was a little girl who had a little curl right in the middle of her forehead. And when she was good she was very, very good, but when she was bad she was horrid. In our house, when I was very young, this little girl was called Marian Plumsteel. “What? Is Marian Plumsteel here?” She seemed to come out of nowhere, taking me and my parents by surprise with her crying, whining, sulking and pouting, bouncing a ball when she had been told not to, disturbing the neighbors downstairs, willful, vengeful, mean. Tricks up her sleeve, this thief with my name, a tough customer. I hated her. The truth of original sin crept up on me as I discarded alternatives. She was no sister, or cousin, or friend, or guest of mine, certainly. I was Marian Plumsteel.

I can imagine the raised eyebrows at this child-rearing technique possibly disturbing, even destructive, to a developing psyche. On the other hand, I believe it fits famous child psychologist Bruno Bettleheim’s theory, put forward in The Uses of Enchantment, that fairy tales, though expressive of anger, violence, and cruelty, far from being harmful to a child’s development, are a necessary part of education because they give shape to the child’s own evil thoughts and help him or her imagine a happy ending. I can remember the energy with which I hated Marian Plumsteel, how passionately I wished her gone. How long did it take me, I wonder, to figure out that I alone could make her go away? Thus did autonomy, again essential according to Bettelheim, point the way to a happy denouement: good behavior. Ernst and I, without much thought, introduced David and Sirene Plumsteel to our children with mixed results. David quickly seized power, but Sirene was angry at us. We, her bad parents, were the cause of misery.

Marian Plumsteel was a hand-me-down, a revenant, the ghost of the aunt I was named after, my father’s sister, killed in her late twenties in an automobile accident six years before I was born. She too had been called Marian Plumsteel long ago, in North Dakota far away. There was mitigation in this for me because I was glad to be named after someone my father had loved, and still loved, very much, my mother explained. His sister’s death had upset him like nothing she had seen or known. Marian Plumsteel pulled me closer to my father, but closer, too, to the rumbling associated with his family. By rumbling I mean dissatisfaction, deprivation, discontent. Separation, divorce, alcoholism, abandonment, sorrow, guilt, and shame. Career moves, foolish and erratic, made on impulse. I mean raised voices in the living room, which my sister and I were not supposed to hear because we were supposed to be asleep. Even soft and tender voices coming from my parents’ bedroom across the hall merged into rumbling, suggesting worlds which lay beyond us, world upon world, I should say, of sex and novels and foreign languages and the theater, camembert cheese and cocktails and smoking too much, international commerce and being on the dole, fluctuations in the flour market, the poor house and being your own boss. D.H. Lawrence perfectly captures the continuous whispering heard by all children (see Henry James’ What Masie Knew) and especially by Paul in his short story, The Rocking Horse Winner: There must be more money! There must be more money! Yet nobody ever said it aloud. The whisper was everywhere, and therefore no one spoke of it. Just as no one ever says: “We are breathing!” in spite of the fact that breath is coming and going all the time.

In due course, as my mother was fond of saying, Marian Plumsteel, having served her purpose, disappeared. Marian Shaw, both self and ally, model and rival, took hold. On the 90^th Street subway platform, in my brown bowler hat and gray spring coat with epaulettes and brass buttons, my sister’s hand in mine, I have an anxious, worried look; my mother, in another photograph, needs a haircut, is no longer stylish as in earlier days of her courtship and marriage. In due course, she had given up her job as a social worker to raise two demanding children. She was our playmate, our plaything. We twisted her head back and forth on the pillow, “Look at me, Mommy, look at me!” There was drudgery in the filthy basement where she did the laundry and on the tarred rooftop where she shoved an apple basket heavy with sodden clothes through a trap door, coming out into a wind swirling with litter and dust. First the depression, then the war. Now, in due course, this: a husband with a troubled past, apprehensive and high strung, who took the phone out to save money, who handed her fifty dollars once and fled down the stairs, who took on the personae of characters in books he read, who came home tight one evening to chase away her sewing circle, who had bounced from J. Berlage and Almendinger, small import-export firms, to Pillsbury Mills, but still wasn’t getting ahead. I don’t know what the matter was exactly, but when people ask me why we moved to Haiti, as they often do, I put it down to rumbling, to restlessness.

While riding his outgrown rocking horse, Paul, in Lawrence’s story, discovers he can predict winning horses at the track; his gift is real, but erratic, and his frenzied zeal to provide for his selfish, unloving parents, kills him. There must be as many stories of bad parents as of bad children and a little of both in each of us, no doubt. Some critics find that Regan and Goneril seek no more than vengeance on a pompous, spoiled, and bossy father, who paid them no attention when they were little. Even Lear’s adored Cordelia will not cater to him, say she loves him outright. I have read that Bruno Bettelheim, too, with all his theories, failed as a father, was accused of child abuse in his practice, died a suicide. In our apartment, the rumbling was no more than a low hum, discontinuous and hard to follow. I felt it here and there, wondered if they were getting a divorce, and fell asleep again. Just as often, I registered the high notes, the lifting of spirits that came with the tutor and red Portuguese grammar books as my father prepared for a trip to South America as interpreter for Philip Pillsbury, president of the company. To us, Phil Pill.

Lace tablecloths, ice cream suits, palm trees and wooden shutters, ice buckets, dark women with shoulder pads and curly hair, and one of the customers is a bit pudgy, and so is Phil Pill, but my father looks handsome, relaxed and smiling, making hand gestures, his long legs stretched out, showing a bit too much sock, perhaps. And from Recife in February, 1948, he writes of touring the red light district in Belem with Phil whom he hasn’t yet dared to call by his first name. They indulged in a beer. An innocent abroad, he notes that Brazil is a man’s country, that American and English girls look pasty; more attractive are those of mixed race to be found, he adds significantly, in all the best hotels. I think back to a time almost before my own when air travel was still unusual for middle class people, when over the airwaves for the first time came mambo and rhumba, Latin songs like Besame Mucho and Perfidia, and everyone knew Carmen Miranda from the movies. Like Fred Astaire, my father was flying down to Rio. To Recife, Belem, Fortaleza, Sao Paulo, Venezuela and Surinam. In photographs, he brought it all back to us, in purple-veined shells and red paper flowers, in dolls with black and brown skin with baskets on their heads, in a lustrous alligator bag for my mother, in the dizziness of pronouncing Parimaribo, treasure spilling out of suitcases into a winter night in Queens. My sister and I, allowed to stay up late to welcome him home, were wearing our quilted bathrobes, new at Christmas I remember. My father returned from South America full of pep, as he liked to say. Our car might be full of pep on a given day. Or not. But pep was in the mix now: in a heap of trinkets, in the power of speaking in foreign tongues, in the glamor of being called Mel, Portuguese for honey, in the good money a Pillsbury agent could make, in a vision of the future somewhere out of this world.

By 1950, we were saying good-bye to the Empire State building and the Statue of Liberty, to the lions in front of the Library. For it was not as though we had not made conquest of East Side, West Side, Battery and Bronx. We got haircuts at Best and Company on Fifth Avenue, picked out dolls we wanted for Christmas at Macy’s on 34^th Street, stood cold in line to see the organ rise from the pit and the Rockettes on stage at Radio City, opened compartments with nickels at the Automat, sampled leaf-shaped, chocolate-covered cookies at Rumplemeyer’s. My father and I, since it was my luck to be the right age when he felt most cooped up in the apartment, had skated on the ice in Central Park and in the shadow of Atlas at Rockefeller Center, ridden a bicycle–built-for-two like Daisy in the song, made a record in Times Square, explored the Museum of Natural History and the Met, where we saw the original of our Renoir copy, Madame Georges Charpentier et Ses Enfants. On the promise of kittens, as many as we wanted, I was willing to throw it all away: sidewalks, bright lights and speed, department stores with whizzing pneumatic message systems, elevators with uniformed operators, going up, going down, my nose pressed against perfumed sable and mink. Without complaint, I gave up pizza and doughnuts, lamb chops and Idaho potatoes, Technicolor and television, hot running water, my winter coat in soft tweed with maroon velvet collar and iridescent lining, my New York accent, my very self.

Kafka and E. B. White persuade us of the intrusion of strangeness into ordinary lives through an even-handed profusion of detail: Gregor Samsa is both cockroach, his plated body and pathetic legs fluttering in the air, who cannot turn over, and middle-European traveling salesman with cloth samples to prove it, parents and sister cowering in the next room, a seductive picture of a young woman on his bedroom wall. Stuart Little may be tiny and vulnerable, a mouse complete with tail and whiskers, but he is a New Yorker through and through. Dapper, with fine blue suit, pocket handkerchief, and walking stick, he traverses a familiar Manhattan landscape where doormen stand in front of apartments, garbage scows plow the East River, miniature sailboats compete on a lake in the Park. When Gregor can no longer participate in their bourgeois routines, his parents isolate and torment him (his father is particularly brutal) until he weakens and dies. But Stuart, presumed dead, is released from the window shade by his human brother George who piously pulls it down out of respect. Stuart moves on to new adventures, yet he remains in my mind a thankless child who leaves home without a thought for his devoted parents, bound to fret over and miss him. Even Snowball, who refrains from killing Stuart for this reason, calls himself a guest in the Little household. My father, too, was a thankless child. As a teenager and young man, he played his divorced parents off against each other, dropped out of college, ran off to New York and later to Haiti. His father and sister were dead by then; his mother, whom he never saw again, died poor and lonely in Seattle.

My parents were 47 and 44 when we left New York, not young by the standards of the time. They had been married for 17 years when they decided to burn their bridges, as my father puts it, leaving a secure job with a pension plan for the dubious rewards of self-employment in an unstable and mysterious black republic in the Caribbean Sea. From Port-au-Prince where he was looking for a house to rent, swallowing advice from Howat, dour Scotsman and retiring agent who got him down, suffering intestinal upset, worrying about expenses, discovering Haiti’s unique charms, my father sent letter after letter, urgent to the point of hysteria, contradictory as to what documents to secure, what to bring, what not to bring, enough to drive my mother crazy. He tells her he doesn’t know what the temperature is, that thirty-five centimes is seven cents, that she should slip him some sleeping pills. But above all, his letters tell how much he wants and needs her. Park the kids, he writes, concocting a fantasy in which they could spend a month alone together in a hotel making up their minds. Please write me every day or two if you possibly have time, and I will do the same.

Are happy families all alike, as Tolstoy declares in the first sentence of Anna Karenina? Insofar as they are able to tolerate risk, welcome strangers, absorb the natural shocks that flesh is heir to, and create elastic love, I believe they are. My sister and I would live to see the gutted building, now a museum, a crater on the banks of the Mississippi, formerly Pillsbury Mills. But for a brief golden time, we were going to be daughters of its agent in Haiti, ti blancs with freckles, aliens, stingy and ugly; we were going to learn to swim and to speak French. It was going to be a wonderful life.

Again After Pamuk: The Inside Story

In the anteroom to the lobby at 3760 88^th Street, Jackson Heights, New York, is a mat to wipe feet on and a row of shiny brass mail boxes. The key my mother uses to open ours seems magical to me, the feel of it, impossibly flat and thin. The lobby has a kind of faded, spacious grandeur, one or two benches covered in maroon or red velvet, dark polished floor. No one sits here, no one hangs out.  In the center is the Super’s apartment, imposing, up a couple of steps; the building’s two wings open dim and cavernous on either side; there are two hidden sets of stairs, twin elevators. We seldom visit the “other” side, but our pediatrician, Dr. Lally, has his ground floor office there, my friend Phyllis lives there, and Anita Seitz and her son Kevin. Is there a Mr. Seitz? I have an idea they are divorced. The Graves family lives there too. I have seen Bob, back from the War in his uniform, know Kitty and their daughters Margaret, who sometimes babysits, and Eleanor, my age. They gave us our cat, Velvet, a male with white paws, but I just assume he is a girl cat because I am a girl. It was exciting to pick Velvet out from the litter of gray Maltese kittens, the floor streaked with sunshine, and one was called Buttons because of three white spots on her stomach, but we rejected the one with six toes.

To get to our apartment, we must turn right. By we, I mean the four of us, Melville, Marguerite, Marian, and Libby (Elizabeth) Shaw, in any combination, and I jumble the years (1944-1949) and our ages deliberately in this memory. On our way to the elevator we pass the Sullivans and the Abells. The white marble stairs under which bicycles are stored without locks are faster, but they are cold and uninviting. My father sings and whistles in the elevator. He talks to people, even to people he doesn’t know, and once a woman tells him I look like Veronica Lake. It’s the way my blond hair is falling over one eye, not because I really look like this movie star who is not one of my favorites. She is too knowing, too sexy, not one my mother admires, Barbara Bel Geddes, for example, or Myrna Loy. Smoothly we ride past the second floor, where Penny Ingles lives, and the Reynolds family. Owen is older, but I play with Bebe, short for Beatrice, who will become a nun; little Patricia is my sister’s friend. And here we are home again, as my father often says when we return from some excursion to apartment 3M.  Mrs. Fisher, as nosy and pushy as my mother says she is, lives across the hall with her seldom seen husband and teenage daughter Evelyn. Silent, shadowy, black-haired Evelyn, wherever she is, dead though she may be, I thank her for her gift to me of a book she no longer cared about, my first Beverly Gray mystery. Next door to us lives Josephine Kaiser, a retired nurse from upstate, who gives off a powdery smell masking something else, who puts her dresses on inside out. Kyky is a dear friend and help to my mother, though she goes overboard when she tells us she will get sick and die if we don’t learn to pick up our room. Kyky is the best kind of babysitter who checks on us and goes home, telling us to knock on the wall if we need her.

We enter the foyer, kitchen to the right, a longish hall. Here is the coat closet and another with shelves where Christmas and birthday surprises are kept; here is the telephone table with its bright glass knobs, red cloth on top. From here we can backwards somersault to the end of the living room where the Christmas tree goes, or reenact endlessly the opening scene of Little Women (1949) in which Jo (June Allyson) leaps over a fence, in our version a small stool which belongs in our bedroom. The neighbors downstairs, who never have names but are always the Neighbors Downstairs, complain about this and about my mother’s running the sewing machine at night to make clothes for us and our dolls, about her letting every child in the neighborhood in to play, but my mother holds her head high. This is one of her expressions, one of her ways. Shy and self-conscious as a girl, she has by now developed remarkable presence, my mother.

On fair days, the living room is bright with windows at the far end, a burgundy couch, and flowered upholstery on the wingback chair. The living room is where we read and are read to, where we pretend with Let’s Pretend, and the red head of Mary Queen of Scots rolls on You Are There; where radiators bang and hiss in winter, where we listen to the Nutcracker Suite with words that will never leave my head; where Little Women continues, and I perfect falling to the ground gracefully, though not without noise, as I play Amy’s (Elizabeth Taylor in a blond wig) part in Jo’s melodrama: Roderigo! Save me, save me! In the living room on Saturday nights we listen to Frank Sinatra, always begging for five minutes more on the Hit Parade where Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco, while my mother rolls up our wet hair, glorified by Halo, on mismatched socks, softer to sleep on than curlers. On nights like these, I am unaware of any restlessness, of any sense that my parents might wish to spend their Saturday evenings in a different way, out to dinner and a local movie, say, or rattling into Manhattan for a night on the town. And I explain to myself that they couldn’t afford it, or at least not often, banishing the thought that Ernst and I were less contented with, less devoted to family life than they were.

But, of course, when my grandparents come to visit, they take them out for Chinese, not worth ten cents for a carload, my grandfather says, and to see the musical Oklahoma, which belongs to us because that’s where my mother’s parents live, where she grew up, went to the University, majored in English, flunked swimming, and snickered at jokes about being hit on the Oval, OU’s answer to a quad. Soon after, I can walk to privies in the rain, lust after fat, pink, pretty girls who go about as far as they can go. I can practice saying no, being in love, or being dead like poor Judd, his fingernails clean at last. It’s a revolving stage, our living room, never more than now, revolving in my mind. It fills with cigar smoke and Spanish when my father entertains Escobar, a big customer from Venezuela, who arrives with dolls we name Esther and Annabelle for my sister and me. Small cocktail parties sometimes after Libby and I have gone to bed, but in the morning we sample the dregs, fishing out maraschino cherries, what luck, becoming adventurous, tipsy. The Graves family comes for an evening. Glowing lamps, bowls of peanuts, tomato juice for the children, but I am being punished. I imagine the scene in the dark from my bedroom. I see it all, it’s better than being out there. I find peace of mind in pretending and fall asleep happy.

But we have somersaulted past the kitchen. A quick list because otherwise I cannot bear it, leaving anything out, that is. The kitchen is where we open pheasants packed in smoking dry ice sent by hunters, our Oklahoma uncles; where my mother puts up a gate when she scrubs the floor, her hair tied up in a kerchief giving her a second set of pointed ears; where the enamel-topped table sits with its dangerous drawer full of knives; where the open dumbwaiter allows us to hear things and smell things going on in other kitchens; where the refrigerator is the icebox, round motor on top, raw liver inside for Velvet who refuses to eat cat food until he gets it; where we learn to cook scrambled eggs and bacon and baking powder biscuits by ourselves for breakfast in bed on Mother’s Day.  At dinner, we are not in the tiny dinette on the other side of the stove, bare bulb overhead, but in my father’s office with the exasperating secretary who does nothing but shrug her shoulders and Jean McGibbon, another one, but she’s in love with Charlie McVeigh. Paniagua, whose funny name means bread and water, says, He cannot come to the phone right now, he is answering a call of nature. He actually says that into the phone, in the New York office, in the export division of Pillsbury Mills, can you imagine? We can, we can! We know him, this crazy Cuban, who says embarrassing things on the telephone, and all the others who become real while my father prepares his baked potato, mashing it smooth in the skin with salt and butter and just enough pepper. But then we want it. It’s perfect, it’s a work of art, it really is. So he gives it to someone and starts over, but the other half is cold by now and will never be the same. The human garbage pail, he calls himself.

We sing as we do the dishes, my father and I. This is how it falls out, the way the family is divided: Libby is Mommy’s baby while I am Daddy’s girl. I stand on a stool, a dishtowel tied around my waist, as we make our way through the fight songs: Illinois, Wisconsin, Georgia Tech, Princeton, Columbia, Harvard, Yale, and more. My father and I are fellows, a couple of rambling wrecks, as we turn the ball around Chicago, crash on through that line of blue, pausing to breathe, rah, rah, rah, we are dead sure to win. It is all about honor and glory and soap suds sliding down slippery glasses, about happy hours and careless days coming to an end so suddenly now, just as they did when it was bath time followed by bedtime. Somehow we manage to steal it, that sliver in between. And like Columbia’s lion we roar, Naked, naked, five touch the kitchen floor! We are gleaming, my sister and I, damp still, and without a stitch, as we race, one behind the other, out of the bathroom, into the small space between the two bedrooms, through the living room, down the long hall, quick swipe of the black and white linoleum, back to the hall in reverse. And again. And again, shouting, Naked, naked, five touch the kitchen floor! 

How many times do we do this? Over what period of days, weeks, months? Are we two and six? Three and seven? Four and eight? And what about the accompaniment, the nameless march my mother sits at the out of tune piano to play by heart? The piano not good enough for the lessons we cannot afford. Why and when does this begin, and where is my father, because he is part of this scene, observing his escape artist daughters, his offspring, these savages. What can any of it mean? It’s a little embarrassing, a little too intimate, because we are grown up now. Like Adam and Eve, we have tasted the apple and know we are naked.

Why must they grow up and lose it all? Never will they be so happy again. So thinks Mrs. Ramsey, mother of eight, in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. Plaintive, guilty for having brought her children into life which she views as hostile, terrible, ready to pounce on you if you gave it a chance. And so it is. Mrs. Ramsey dies suddenly and young, as do two of her children, beautiful Prue in childbirth and Andrew, blown up in France during World War I. My sister and I are more than grown up, we are old. Old and lucky, but hardly unacquainted with the relentlessness of life. Once, though, as we chased through the house chanting nonsense, refusing to be stuffed into pajamas, to be human, we put a stop to it. I would not say with Woolf that we were happy. I’ve been happier since and hope to be again. But never so free, never again so connected, to my sister, to my parents, to everything in the room. To the copy of a Renoir which depicts us, two little girls in frilly dresses sitting on a sofa with their mother, only their dogs are lacking; to the phonograph, not long since the Victrola, to the music of Oklahoma and the Nutcracker Suite, to the sound of the cello in Rusty in Orchestraville, a birthday present from Peter Abell downstairs, the brittle 78s slipped safely now into their brown paper jackets, their album covers closed; to the wingback chair with its flowered upholstery, to the window sills I dust, to the round pull cord wound with thread, exactly like the one in Stuart Little, to the radiators and the fire escape, all part of our interior and permanent unity, all encoded in the war cry we will recognize as long as we live.

Read to, sung to. Only make believe I love you. It’s only a paper moon sailing over a cardboard sky. Tucked in. The day is over, though many of our toys have not been picked up. They spill out of the closet onto the two child-size rocking chairs, table and stools, onto the floor. The room is too small for us, the closet and bureau drawers crammed with blouses with peter pan collars, with our jumpers, our leggings, snowsuits, and stocking caps, our cable knit sweaters, our dresses with puffed sleeves and sashes, with sailor collars and set-in yokes, trimmed with eyelet threaded with ribbon, with smocking and rick rack and applique, made of cotton, velvet, pique, and dotted Swiss. We have oxfords, red sandals, and patent leather Mary Janes, pocket books and shoulder bags, bowlers, berets, black watch plaid Scottish soldier’s caps with ribbons down the back, straw hats stiff-brimmed and floppy. We have organdy pinafores trimmed in lace in which we look like angels.  Shadows of the evening, bedposts, shape of a car, steal across the ceiling and, framed by my window, across an alley in another building, the last thing I see before I fall asleep is another family with two sisters just like us, but they must be older because they go to bed later, and they sleep in twin beds, not a double like ours. Every night their mother tucks them in. Every night she kisses them, first one and then the other, in their soundless, orderly room. This pantomime, this universal shadow play of lights being put out in apartment houses all over New York, has become for me the prayer we have outgrown, stopped saying: If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.