Spanish Mind

What expression, common in Spanish, can be found in the English word socks?

I was going to begin with a long disclaimer, a list of my disqualifications to write on this subject,  an admission of flaws I see in my own arguments, and an acknowledgement that much of what I want to say is not unique to Spanish. I decided instead that a tease, the somewhat absurd riddle above posed by Señorita Unamuno, daughter of the philosopher Miguel de Unamuno, my first Spanish teacher (Connecticut College, 1957), would be more appropriate. My pronouncements here are to be taken lightly; they are altogether subjective and without scholarly backing, fifty years’ worth of drifting thoughts, impressions, and ruminations provoked most recently by failed attempts on my part to encourage students I tutor to think in Spanish, or at least to contemplate what I call Spanish mind.

Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech. (Genesis)

Se me cayó (he fell from me), was what she said when I got up there, nothing to quiet my racing heart. A thud overhead – I must have been cooking dinner. Infant David’s blood and bones on the tile, limbs broken, skull crushed. She denied it all. Conchy (short for Concepción) was young, pretty, passionate, ignorant and superstitious, pregnant, a prophetic dreamer, seamstress, and naive painter – also my live-in baby-sitter from El Salvador. No, no. Don’t give me that. You dropped him! I don’t know what I said. We were both agitated, but David was fine. The wind knocked out of him for a minute maybe but, made of rubber, he bounced. And Conchy was right, of course. He got away from me would be an acceptable translation. Babies are slippery, as anyone who has changed a diaper knows, and our table was make-shift, the not quite wide enough top of a built-in chest of drawers. Still, to the end of my days, she will have dropped him. Something (Anglo-Saxon? English? American?) makes me mistrustful of a language in which one cannot take full responsibility for dropping the baby or the ball. Dejar caer (to let fall) comes close but is not, to my mind, the same thing. Here was the Tower of Babel; it was 1971.

 As an English teacher, I am quick to advise Use the active voice – Rule 14 in The Elements of Style, by Strunk and White. Choose I took a trip to Boston, rather than the less vivid, awkward and wordy, a trip to Boston was taken by me. Spanish, however, encourages passive constructions like se me cayó, se me olvidó (it was forgotten by me). Sex, eggs, and travel may enchant or merely please me, but I cannot outright like them. English is all self-assertion, all I, I, I. I like, I want, I miss, I hurt. In Spanish, I, so often, like the other personal pronouns, buried in a verb, is diminished. In saying Me gusta, me hace falta, me da pena, I am less an actor than a victim of circumstance.

In Thailand, touching someone on the head, showing the bottom of one’s feet, and raising one’s voice are offenses a tourist must be careful to avoid. Though tempted to disobey, just to see what would happen when one of our guides knelt at my feet, I found these injunctions reasonable. When I first arrived in El Salvador, however, I was surprised at linguistic warnings. “If you see a Salvadoran eating,” my father said, “be sure to say buen provecho” (may it do you good). This made me nervous. Why should I intrude upon a stranger’s lunch? On the other hand, failure to speak up could brand me an ill-wisher or worse, a food poisoner. “Never say quiero (I want), always use quisiera” (I would like). Be gracious, undemanding. Assume a virtue, though you have it not.

Does the language we think in affect the way we think? Nature or nurture, chicken or egg? Questions endlessly puzzling, very likely unanswerable, but amusing to think about. Take the subjunctive, almost lost to, often hidden in English, but in Spanish pervasive. Do you have an opinion, are you going on a journey, meeting a train? Put up a red flag. To inhabit Spanish mind is to be drenched in doubt, to think at every turn of what we cannot count on, what we cannot know. English mind, on the other hand, proceeds with confidence and far less deference to others. Compare: espero que Roberto vaya, quieren que salgamos, saldré antes de que vuelvan with their English equivalents: I hope Robert goes, they want us to go out, I will leave before you arrive. Spanish beats a retreat from the present and the future to project instead an infinitude possibly retrograde to our desires; anticipate opposition, Spanish seems to say. Robert may not go to the party, we may never leave, you may never arrive. I can be certain that I am happy about the idea, but not that Maricela and Juan will marry. His parents can give him advice, but Diego may not take it. Even when the first clause in a sentence begins with I doubt or it is not certain, the second clause must be in the subjunctive creating double doubt; in Spanish, doubt feeds upon itself and multiplies. What good is probability if it must end in doubt? To speak Spanish is to cast into the void our emotions, wishes, hopes, expectations, exhortations, commands, and demands. The subjunctive, after all, is not a tense, but a mood, an attitude, time out of mind, like Keats’s Grecian urn: thou silent form dost tease us out of thought as doth Eternity.

The present subjunctive in Spanish is used in dependent noun clauses that mark events or states that the speaker considers not part of reality or of his/her experience. This, a quotation from The Ultimate Spanish Review and Practice (Gordon and Stillman, McGraw Hill), is the heart of the matter, the point at which grammar recedes and philosophy takes over. Spanish is in league with Plato, not Aristotle, with Berkeley, not Descartes. A shaving cut, that quick spurt of blood, can bring relief, but in Spanish it will be momentary. There in the next clause lurks the epistemological qualm. In Spanish, we will always be jousting with windmills like Don Quixote, lingering with Calderón de la Barca in a land of illusion where toda la vida es sueno, y los suenos suenos son (all of life is a dream, and dreams are only dreams), wending our way, across continents and centuries, to multiple levels of reality in the libraries and labyrinths of Borges, to the magical realism of Garcia Marquez’ Macondo, to the intense, haunted world of contemporary Spanish novelist Javier Marías. These writers, like Garcia Lorca, have el duende—imp, elf, fairy, goblin, ghost-- the mysterious, Dionysian, supremely Spanish dark bull of the soul.

 Where is Sancho Panza when I need him? A sidekick, a bit of comic shtick. Serf, peasant, flunky. Although I concede that Sancho and the Don are in some sense two sides of the same person (of the national character? of Cervantes?), Sancho Panza reminds me of the porter in Macbeth who serves more to deepen the tragedy than to relieve it. Looking for a more substantial counterweight, I summon  the prayer of St. Francis for its series of neat oppositions: where there is hatred, let me sow love, where there is doubt, faith, and so on. With expressions of faith, Spanish is loaded: adiós, Dios guarde, gracias a Dios, ojalá! Primero Dios is my favorite. Literally, God first, God before all. But here I come full circle, for this is nothing more than fatalism, reliance on what I cannot see or know, at least not while in residence on earth. Faith, it turns out, is but a dream of heaven.

Does uncertainty breed humility? I think it may. To me, the simplest words of welcome in Spanish (pase adelante, come in) sound haughty and condescending—a great favor is being conferred. To be invited to use the intimate pronoun tú has something of the same flavor. Aurora Reyes (descended from kings?) from Nicaragua has been my housekeeper for twenty years or more, but we continue to use the more formal usted with which we began our acquaintance. We tread carefully lest one of us demean the other or presume too much. When I need to pass Aurora on stairs, I may not charge ahead, stepping on the vacuum cord, nearly shoving her out of the way with a perfunctory sorry, excuse me, or nothing; I must remember to say con permiso (with permission). Must I bow and scrape? In Spanish, I must. Perhaps this is why they are still lisping in Madrid, bowing and scraping to King Ferdinand I (1751-1825) of Castile. Salvadoran school boys study castellano, not español, but Italian is not called Tuscan. Americans do not pahk our cahs at Hahvad Yahd because JFK was president. Why do Conchy and Aurora work for me and not the other way around? When does self-effacement become self-abasement? I extend my sympathy to the people of Catalán battling to preserve their native tongue.

At the various embassy parties I attended while living in El Salvador in 1963, Latin American diplomats and military men with polished hair and shoes clicked their heels and kissed my hand, their strings of perfumed names, announcing paternal and maternal heritage, trailing behind them. Carlos María Bustamante de Los Angeles Herrera, a sus órdenes! For a thrilling moment, they were mine to command but, too young and inexperienced to tease or test them, I asked for no more than caviar and champagne. Passivity, ultra- sensitivity, exquisite politeness, consciousness of one’s position, inflated pride. Taken together, these “Spanish” qualities speak to me of politics, of hierarchy and authority, of a top-down society. To get rid of thee and thou implies equality among us, to emphasize I is to take control, to accept responsibility, to put oneself forward without fear of offense. English is sturdier than Spanish, rough and tumble, devil-may-care. But for democracy and freedom we suffer consequent losses. Intimacy in English is reserved for poetry and prayer; in almost eliminating the subjunctive, we give up niceness of thought, subtlety, precision, and diplomacy. We risk arrogance, foolhardiness. We neglect decorum, ride roughshod over beauty. On a visit to Madrid, I found the soft sound of the ceceo (lisp) more than attractive; the refrain, a las cinco de la tarde (at five in the afternoon), in Lorca’s famous poem about the death of a bull fighter, La Cogida y La Muerte (literally, The Goring and Death), cannot be heard properly without it. Indeed, the ceceo became irresistible, and I fell into it easily—not at all the speech impediment I had imagined.

Any foreign language, but Spanish in particular, is for me a flirtation, an encounter with an extravagant and wheeling stranger such as Desdemona found in Othello. All thrills at the beginning, this other, this sped-up and heightened learning, these miracles of equation and communication, mastery and power. Alas, this phase is never lasting. It’s always harder than at first I thought it would be. The other is intractable and profound. Though many things fall into place, there is always more to learn. I hit a plateau, the slog of marriage. Because most of the time I no longer have to, I stop looking up words. Guilt sets in, my purpose wanes. I settle for knowing in part, for getting by. To progress, I require immersion, smothering, which will not come my way again. I continue to study along with my students; I have occasions almost daily to speak, read, and write. But in spite of this, Spanish remains peripheral to my world, an extra, a luxury, an amusing indulgence, trivial in the end. How I would love to testify de mi alma, de mi vida, de mi corazón! But these are not my words. It is in English that I live and move and have my being

As I get older, I begin to accept that imperfection is the way of things, though English mind does not admit this readily. English has no match for the imperfect tense in Spanish, only approximations in such phrases as while I was doing my homework, we used to go to the beach every summer, we always spent Thanksgiving at Grandma’s. How odd this seems! As John Lennon said, Life is what happens to you while you’re making other plans. The imperfect tense is designed to take into account the way two events in the past collided, a kind of continuous overlap in which one action is forever suspended as another becomes complete. This seems to me a mirror of life itself. So much in our experience is never finally over, as we sense a constant invasion of the present by the past, in waves, in images, in snatches of poetry and song.

 My live-in helper Conchy did not stay with us long; she hastened like one possessed to marry, to produce two daughters, Wendy and Nancy, to learn enough English to become a school receptionist, to move with her family to San Bernardino. Yet she remained with us as we remembered her anxiety over the fact that David had not been baptized, the pictures of the Virgin she pasted to the wall next to his crib, the halo of bottles she placed around his head so she could sleep late in the morning, the two pairs of scissors in the sign of the Cross on the floor to confound the Evil Eye. It would not surprise me to learn that she baptized him herself, or took him off to la iglesia Santa Inez when I wasn’t looking.  We slept and dreamed on her embroidered pillow cases, laughed, though appalled, at a weaning method she devised: a little Tabasco on a bottle’s nipple. We danced at her wedding and felt the potent mix of spiritual, material, and erotic impulses at her first daughter’s quinceañera.  She wrote her name on the insides of drawers and in other odd places; my granddaughter Farah now sits on the wooden chairs she painted with nursery rhyme themes for Farah’s child-father, Davicito. And Conchy thought of us. Shortly after Ernst died, having remained out of sight for years, she called, because the death of someone in our family had come to her in a dream.

Alive we are imperfect, incomplete; death itself is not an ending for those who live on. In 1992, as a kind of research for something I was writing, I tagged along on a trip to El Salvador with members of All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena which, at that time, sponsored a sanctuary house for Salvadoran refugees. We toured the country in a darkened jeep, visiting settlements of people displaced by the civil war which was still going on. I think we dispensed some dollars and supplies, but the main idea of the visit was to show solidarity, to walk side by side, sleeping in hammocks, bathing in rivers, digging latrines, if only for a few days, to listen and take part in discussions. A woman standing in a cornfield is my most vivid memory of that trip. Me conformaba, she said. I got used to it, I adjusted, I conformed myself. To the killing of her husband and two sons, to the annihilation of friends, neighbors, home, and village. Over and done with in English, but in the Spanish verb, reflexive and imperfect, her struggle and grief continued.

What is the answer to the riddle of language which unites and divides us? Angle of vision, window to an inner world? Most of us have no choice but to live in the language we were born to. Spanish, dream infused and imperfect though it may be, is to its native speakers as mundane and familiar as a gum wrapper or a pair of socks. Eso sí que es!

World War II, Part Two Continued

Here at last in these true stories was my crash course in World War II and its consequences. I listened and learned. Saw, not as in a fiction or a dream, not in a textbook, but firsthand, indelible damage reverberating through surviving generations. Lack of empathy; guilt (o full of scorpions is my mind); paranoia (these things must not be thought after these ways; so, it will make us mad); heart trouble (literal and figurative); depression (full-on or dispersed in bouts as in Ernst’s case); cynicism, deracination, alienation, withdrawal, silence, and despair. It was not that Ernst’s most immediate relatives had experienced the worst. They were alive in Los Angeles after all. In America they had prospered and multiplied, making my family look poor and stunted. It was the kiss, the camera coming in for a close up, the casual intimacy of the horror intruding itself at a bris, Bar Mitzvah, or wedding – the bride and groom, giggling, fearful and embarrassed, suddenly fragile, swaying on chairs above the hooting crowd. At Purim or Passover, those bloodthirsty glad occasions where I, subversive, found myself thinking with pity of Haman’s ten sons hanged upon the gallows, or those innocent Egyptian infants not passed over by the angel of death. I was the enemy with my German looks. Fraulein, Fraulein, they called down to me, young men on a telephone pole on the Boul’Mich in Paris. In one European city after another, I was taken for Dutch or German. Rotwein oder weiswein? the shopkeeper asked me in Trieste. Rotwein, I answered, enjoying the masquerade, escaping quickly to avoid detection.

My otherness stood out in all directions: no money, no jewelry, no make-up or nail-polish, not coiffed by a hairdresser, no Hebrew, no Hungarian, no Yiddish. No. Not by any stretch. I woke up on trial in The Merchant of Venice: eyes, nose, internal organs, height, weight. I was hung in the balance and found wanting. People who looked like me had caused Ernst’s family untold pain; my presence in their midst exacerbated it.  Rumors that we were getting a divorce circulated; Ernst took the calls from various cousins at his office. His mother, he thought, was behind them. Fifteen, twenty years later, she called him herself. A gorgeous rich widow she’d found him, he should get a divorce. I and my no account adopted children could be paid off. We laughed and laughed, my heart in the grip of a fist. I remembered a plunge I made once from a sun-heated rock into Lake Superior, forgetting how cold the water would be.

Spit on the name of Jesus, Ernst was taught. Gentle Jesus, meek and mild, who became a little child. Did they really do this, I wondered. Had he? Out the window at a bumper sticker? On passing a church, in the midst of conversation? Spit on the Inquisition, on the Crusades, on the Infallibility of the Pope. Spit on Hitler and his henchmen. Though not a believer then or now, I draw a line at Jesus. And I pick a quarrel with the book of Job. Among the blessings which the Lord bestows upon Job’s latter end are seven sons and seven daughters. But these, as I read the King James Version, are not the same sons and daughters he destroyed, while they were eating and drinking at their eldest brother’s house, in the first chapter. A goldfish, even one with character, can be replaced. A turtle brought home from the circus, dislodged  by the cat from the white enamel dish where he has been living happily for weeks, eating torn lettuce bits, crossing laboriously over his very own bridge, can, when found dead in the dust balls under the bed, be replaced. Even that naughty cat, Velvet Gown Sugar Plum Sugar Pie Shaw, can be replaced. But no person, living or dead, can be.  I was always careful on my way home from school. Step on a line, you break your mother’s spine.

A childish impulse, and wicked, but it was wormwood, wormwood. An inauspicious beginning for a newly married couple. Thank God, I thought then, Ernst wasn’t really one of them. He didn’t believe, he didn’t practice. Indeed, he was not a frog. Not even really a Jew. Did I go so far? I would not say so now.  Now that my own dead are mounting: grandparents, parents, husband, a lover, boyfriend G, seven members of my high school class of 49 girls according to my count so far, friends and friends of friends, two of my closest, both born in 1940. Ernst was a mensch, concerned with a Jew’s highest calling which is Tikkun Olam, an obligation to repair the world. Sometimes he found it necessary to turn a garment inside out. Never forget might become Always remember. Always remember that Moorpark spelled backwards is Kraproom. I quote him out of context, catch him in a jesting moment, in a characteristic lightning-quick response to a freeway sign, but spoken with such seriousness that I still plumb it for meaning. I believe it was, among other things, Ernst’s answer to religious rigidity, to rigidity in any form, orthographic included. In eating trayf, in sprees of drinking and spending, in earsplitting renditions of Jezebel, in his work as a sole practitioner taking on law suits no one else would touch, and in marrying me (he could have had a nose job or a trip around the world, two bribes proffered by his parents), there was something of Sir Toby Belch, who spurns Puritan virtue in favor of cakes and ale in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, who declares, I’ll confine myself no finer than I am. And even more of Falstaff. Not the cowardly Falstaff, but Falstaff the shape shifter and cheater of death.

No one dies in the Merchant of Venice which ends in the manner of Shakespeare’s comedies with three weddings. Yet there is no let up, no true meeting of hearts and minds. Bitterness and betrayal linger in Antonio’s loneliness as his friends pair off; in the mockery Shakespeare makes of courtship, more vanity and lusting after wealth than love; of marriage, as three intelligent women marry feckless men, as he subtly foreshadows trouble between Shylock’s daughter Jessica (who has eloped with her father’s money) and her Christian husband Lorenzo, although they might seem to bring opposing worlds together; of the law which permits the grotesque bond of flesh and bends to clever tricks of language; of the very quality of mercy, so eloquently invoked by Portia, only to be all but negated when she vengefully agrees to Antonio’s ruling that Shylock must convert to Christianity, thus supporting Shylock’s earlier claim that Christians, so like him in being made of blood, flesh, and bone, have taught him to revenge. The play exposes a chasm between a religious Jew and some nominal Christians which cannot be bridged, and beneath the fairy tale, as in a mirror, lie faults in friendship and kinship, in business and marital partnership, in relations between servant and master. This society, civil on the surface, is cruel and treacherous. Unjust. Uncivilized.

I longed, and still long, for some of Ernst’s chutzpah, for the force and radiance of personality, the access of compassion and generosity which would catapult me beyond resentment, denial, and the deep hurt I continue to feel on Ernst’s behalf. Which would allow me to see and know – Ernst’s father before the war, dark and dapper, sporting a mustache; his mother, spoiled and sexy, negotiating the muddy streets of Deutchkreutz in expensive high heels – as well as to be seen and known, as Saint Paul says we one day will and will be. I think Ernst longed for this too. Talk to them, ask questions, he urged, but this was beyond my imagining, and in time his parents, his brother and sisters, their wives, husbands and children, his many aunts, uncles, and cousins disappeared from our lives for months, even years at a time. Both we and they blew hot, blew cold; we met again, again, and again as though for the first time. His brother never looked me in the eye or spoke to me. Not once in twenty-eight years, though we sometimes found ourselves in the same room.

I never called Ernst a dirty Jew, as his mother said I would. He said a story I wrote was anti-Semitic. I said I didn’t think it was. Nothing came of this unless it was survivorship, a piece of gobbledygook foisted upon me by the Disney Cancer Center. It’s mine now; my name has been inscribed; I’ve been sent on my way with a list of club rules and required behaviors. To insure the best outcome. Nothing so raw as the Merchant; at Disney, an atmosphere of muted cheer prevails. I stick to facts on the ground. On October 16, 1967, with an insouciance I can no longer summon, I married Ernst Lipschutz, a second generation Holocaust survivor. For better and worse. The wonder is that Ernst’s break with his family did not poison our lives. In fact, we were happy. On balance. In the main. Our life was full of friends and furniture and rugs and paintings and children and movies and books and plays and work and travel and dinners in and out, full of noise and music and the neighbors complained.  It wasn’t survival, it was fun. Another suspect word, but it is the right one, not too heavy, though perhaps too light.

I have written about World War II and the Holocaust to show how events from which I was almost entirely disconnected, thought over and done with, seized me, made me complicit, though I was but a child and can remember almost nothing of that time. I’m surprised to discover that for this I am grateful. Amazed in the knowledge that the twentieth century is behind us, that my generation is wasting, yet in this small act of witness and remembrance, I am born again.

Coda

I began with Thomas Hardy, but will end with E. M. Forster who pooh-poohs doom and gloom. In Forster’s novels, death may be violent or sudden, but it does not stalk; coincidence is ordinary, not ominous. A chance meeting at the National Gallery in London between lovesick George and Lucy (now engaged to someone else), both recently returned from Italy where they met, is explained in the following way in A Room With A View: Looking at Italian art, there you are, and yet you talk of coincidence and Fate. You naturally seek out things Italian, and so do we and our friends. This narrows the field immeasurably we meet again in it.

Ernst met Dewitt Peters in 1971, on his first trip to Haiti. Peters, who founded the Centre d’Art in Port-au-Prince in 1944, and is generally credited with bringing Haitian artists to the attention of the world, was gone by then of course.  But here were two young men, though separated in time, connected in their love of Haitian art and in determination to make it better known. And here in the background once again was World War II, for Peters was a conscientious objector, one of a group of English teachers sent by the U. S. Department of Education to bolster Haiti at a time of isolation brought on by the Nazi submarine blockade.

On that same trip, Ernst and I visited Erich Meinberg’s mahogany factory looking for souvenirs to take home to our friends. We stepped in out of the glare, and the two men shook hands. You are a lantzman, Mr. Meinberg said. Like an electric shock, dazzling as sunshine, the word ran through me. My links to Mr. Meinberg fell away. He was a foreigner in Haiti, in business for himself like my father; my mother admired his wife with whom she drank tea and exchanged books and gossip at the Colony Club on Friday afternoons; his daughter was one of those children on the playground at Union School, known for her brains, a couple of grades below me, a friend. All negligible. I think I was jealous. Hardly betrayed, but certainly left out. Call me cousin, countryman, tribesman, fellow wanderer, secret sharer of suffering. Mon semblable, mon frère. It was as though Anne Frank had materialized and stood among us. It was cool in here, our noses full of sawdust; the orderly factory hummed and buzzed. Soon we had made our purchases and were back outside. In the broiling heat. In the blazing sun.

Haiti the Magic Island, Forster’s narrow field.

World War II, Part Two

And as the smart ship grew

In stature, grace, and hue

In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.

                  The Convergence of the Twain, Thomas Hardy

Where I could have or should have but didn’t has been my theme. I have come to see World War II as the Iceberg lying in wait for the Titanic, converging with my marriage. Sleeping Beauty also comes to mind, or the Frog Prince in reverse.

At P.S. 89, Queens, we still were too close to it when I was in the early grades. Although kids running pell-mell and helter-skelter on 88^th Street in Jackson Heights were already calling each other communists by the time I moved to Haiti in 1950, the Korean War about to begin, World War II, I think, had not yet passed into history even by the time I was in high school. Punic and Peloponnesian, Wars of the Roses, French and Indian, Franco-Prussian, Napoleonic, Crimean, Spanish- American, Revolutionary and Civil, the War to Make the World Safe for Democracy.  Wars I have studied, maps I have made. Alliances, treaties, ententes, détentes. A diet of worms. I can hardly blame my teachers. World War II came in a rush, in June, when even teachers couldn’t wait for summer to begin. The headmistresses at Shipley (my high school boarding school in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania), former Presbyterian missionaries in China interned by the Japanese during the war, did their best. Once a year, we girls had the privilege of sitting at Center Table where Miss Speer, a bit stiff, and Miss Wagner, double chins wobbling, sometimes told stories of the day that lived in infamy, Roosevelt’s voice coming to them cracked and broken over the radio.  They taught us to use chopsticks, an invaluable skill, but I got a better idea of rats, lice, and torture in the Japanese camps from The Three Came Home with Claudette Colbert. Two of the Hiroshima maidens came to Shipley while I was there. Swaddled in kimonos, faces powdered, taking mincing steps, they were no more than dolls to me, callous teenager that I was.

In college, I took a course called Intellectual History of America, but in my memory we spent most of the time establishing the Puritan work ethic, dodging fire and brimstone coming at us from Jonathan Edwards’ sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” In London where, in 1960, there were still some bombed-out buildings and, particularly at the University of Sheffield, I brushed up against the war, though I could not name it. A kind of humility and lack of expectation in the populace, even among school and college students, a dowdy modesty in women, the speed with which a queue would form. Sheffield was dingy and gloomy; English food was terrible. Some of what I sensed can be put down to cultural differences.  The rest was a hangover, a slowly dissipating fog.

That year I spent Christmas in Munich with my boyfriend G. Though our relationship was chaste, we took a doppelzimmer in a pension where the chambermaid cleaned the window sills with a toothbrush and placed a small fresh fir tree at the foot of our bed every other day, announcing, das tannenbaum ist kaput, before whisking the old one away. G and I took part in the family’s tree-lighting ceremony, let ourselves be jostled by shopping crowds in the streets and on trams, ate sweets with almond paste, took our coffee mit schlag. It was Frohliche Weihnacten everywhere we went, until at last on Christmas Eve it was quiet in front of the Frauenkirche, its twin turquoise domes inspired by the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, lightly frosted with snow.  Much of the heavy damage done during the war to this beautiful medieval church had already been repaired so that from the outside at least it looked perfect, and it was hard to imagine that there might be a single person in Munich who was not celebrating Christmas. Then we were off to New Year’s Eve in Trieste where the streets were certainly dangerous, but not because bombs were slipping silently from bays. No, it was (to us) a crazy Italian custom, out with the old, in with the new. It was furniture, some of it quite heavy, and pots and pans, raining down in hilarious bursts from apartment windows, as G and I, high on champagne, ducked and weaved our way home from a party.

All the way to Europe, and still I found it easy to avoid World War II. I should have studied history instead of English, been more thoughtful, more serious, not the dizzy blond – who would never learn anything – my 5^th grade teacher in New York said I was, older, a different person. Because everything I would need to know later had already shown up at recess at Union School in Port-au-Prince, between 1950 and 1953, where I attended grades 6, 7, and 8 in an old wooden building, someone’s elegant home at one time, now standing leaky and somewhat dilapidated on the Champs de Mars. Hatless, unprotected by sunscreen, I jumped rope and was lousy at soft ball in an open yard among our classrooms, ate radish, black pepper, and cream cheese sandwiches on airy white bread full of holes from Peters Bakery. It was Madame Peters herself who explained to my mother that no one in Haiti could remember every other day. Daily then, Madame Peters supplied us with delicious loaves, with baguettes, brioches, and coconut tarts I hunger for today, and with important information. No one in Haiti can remember every other day grounded us in our new country and became a favorite family saying.

Haiti in the early 50s was a place of escape, employment, survival, defeat, enterprise, freedom, failure, banishment, hiding, and forgetfulness. My father sometimes talked in these terms. These were the best years of his life, he later wrote, thinking back. But while we were living there, he sometimes said he was in exile, Haiti was out of this world. He had a big competitor, Hakim, full of tricks, the agent for Gold Medal flour. I remember my father’s outrage when Hakim imported hot roll mix, put up a neon sign, two daring novelties. How long could my father maintain the edge necessary to support us?  Wasn’t coming down here a cop out, evidence that he couldn’t succeed in the good old USA? He had no regular salary, only sales’ commissions, no pension plan, no health insurance. For us and for others, existence was precarious.  There was a boy in my class who lived in the shadow of his father’s suicide. Tall, handsome, quiet, not much of a student.  A German boy.  It was thought, it was rumored, that his father was a Nazi. I don’t know what his family lived on. I remember his mother’s tired, strained, baffled face. Port-au-Prince was full of Germans. Some were well-established old timers. When my father’s business expanded to include exporting coffee and additional agencies, he hired a manager and a secretary, Mr. Streitwolf, married to a Haitian, and his daughter, Miss Streitwolf. Jules Wiesel was one of my 8^th grade teachers, an explosive man with an accurate aim when he threw chalk and erasers and, once, a box of silver scissors, classroom size, at wrong answers. He taught me almost everything I know about English grammar; he praised my writing. More thrilling, he sent me with others to fetch beer and cigarettes at the Café Rex, dark and inviting, full of smoke, men talking business and politics, at the end of the school’s long driveway. Where Mr. Wiesel came from, how long he had been in Haiti, or why he appeared alone there, I never knew. But there were certainly Jewish parents and grandparents among my acquaintance who could have told me about Hitler’s death camps from which they had only recently arrived.

The various backgrounds of the children I went to Union School with (I can list offhand Haitian, American, Dominican, Trinidadian, Canadian, Swiss, Dutch, Danish, German, Syrian, Lebanese, Venezuelan, Argentine, and Austrian, often in exotic three-way combinations) meant little. We were growing up inside an art explosion, a political powder keg, a stronghold against Communism, a sophisticated world capital, a miserable, poverty-stricken backwater, recipient of foreign aid, a market for U.S. goods, a tourist destination, an elite society launched on the backs of slaves, insular, tradition-bound, a deeply religious country in which Catholicism and Vodou were mysteriously intertwined, the Pearl of the Antilles, a lethal Paradise beset by hookworm, dengue fever, and malaria, where yaws could leave a hole in a face where a nose used to be. Haiti was sensuous and licentious. What in the US was called deviance, miscegenation, was everywhere in flower. How much of this seeped into us on that playground? We made and unmade, made and kept friends according to our whims and inclinations. We swam and drank Kola at birthday and slumber parties. It was an ordinary childhood like no other.  I will make Haiti my excuse. I could marry anyone I pleased, anyone who pleased me.

To invoke Hardy’s universe of doom, of human pawns predestined, seems melodramatic even to me. And yet I find it apt. Though naive, I was arrogant in my way, unaccustomed to rejection, unacquainted with grief. Have I changed so much? Before I had cancer I thought my escape due at least in part to some virtue in me, something I was doing right. It was because of my genes, my diet, my exercise program. But to all of these, cancer was indifferent. We took our time, Ernst and I. We drifted far afield of the coincidence of having been in Brooklyn on the same day in April, 1940. We let grass grow under our feet. But it amuses me to think that Ernst went ahead to Los Angeles to check out the place, as a proper husband should, leaving me to circuitous detours to Haiti, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Michigan, England, and El Salvador, before he sent for me – through G, of course, link to the past, conduit to the future, who brought us together by finishing his PhD on time and landing a job at UCLA. G and I agreed to meet in Denver and drive to the Coast. The West Coast! The sound of it excites me even now. In fact, I was there already, a little further south, teaching English in El Salvador, the only country in Central America which turns its face exclusively toward the Pacific.

Did the earth move when I met Ernst? I will say that it did and skip the rest: our first meeting and courtship, his father’s resulting heart attack, which made Ernst cry like the Japanese officer in the Three Came Home, our broken engagement. These I push aside for now to uncover the hardness of heart I eventually developed in relation to my in-laws. To talk about the deaths that ensued once we decided to go ahead with our plans. No Here comes the bride, no Mendelssohn (though he was Jewish), no amor vincit omnia, no time heals all wounds, no but some of my best friends are Jews. Such old saws were shattered, along with my belief that love for a child, even a second son, however prodigal, would outweigh any religious identity or collective idea. Ernst was dead to his family. Though they did not rend their clothes, cover the mirrors, and sit shiva, they could no longer see him as their son, potential producer of Jewish children, to replace those who died in the Holocaust.  I had not heard the word used in this way before. A holocaust, total destruction, horrific, might happen here, there, or anywhere. But this thought, among many others, I learned to suppress. I took a vow of silence on the subject of Israel, ate little, spoke less. I wished they would give me the tiniest glass of slivovitz like the one his father was drinking.

The Holocaust scorched the whole earth, subsuming the depression, economic and political causes of the war, Winston Churchill and Mussolini, Stalin and Roosevelt, pity for the rape of German women, frozen Russian soldiers, the French resistance, the blitz, Pearl Harbor, and the atomic bomb. I had learned more than I thought about World War II, but it was all for nothing. Shakespeare, Dickens, Wagner, and T.S. Eliot went up in the conflagration. Arabs and olive trees, people with dark skin, schwartzes. I admired a painting of two handsome couples on a cousin’s wall, one of the women in a hat such as Trudy wore in my baby book. Those were our parents, I was told, they perished in the Holocaust. Someone’s mother in Poland had gone to the hospital never to return. Her husband and children later jumped from one of those cars on the way to Auschwitz. A boy of twelve afraid to reveal in a public bathroom that he was circumcised, another afraid to show his broken arm to a doctor. We were sipping cognac on an afternoon in spring at the Beverly Hills hotel, eating pastries like the ones G and I consumed in Munich. It was next year in Jerusalem, it was kosher for Pesach. It was the Holocaust for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Ernst’s mother stuffed her children’s mouths with chocolates to keep them from crying at a border crossing. Always those ill-defined borders, unnamed forests they crawled through. She went back to Deutschkreutz after the war to look for my people, found no one.

Some say the world will end in fire,

Some say in ice.

From what I’ve tasted of desire

I hold with those who favor fire.

But if it had to perish twice,

I think I know enough of hate

To say that for destruction ice

Is also great

And would suffice.

                  Fire and Ice, Robert Frost

World War II, Part One

The sun was warm but the wind was chill,

You know how it is with an April day,

When the sun is out and the wind is still,

You’re one month on in the middle of May,

But if you so much as dare to speak,

A cloud comes over the sunlit arch,

A wind comes off a frozen peak,

And you’re two months back in the middle of March.

            
                 Two Tramps in Mud Time, Robert Frost

I was born on April 1, 1940, in Brooklyn Hospital, Brooklyn, New York. It was snowing, and the Germans were invading Norway. Snow was general all over Ireland, Joyce writes in his famous story, “The Dead,” and in enumerating the things and people, living and dead, upon whom it is falling, he effectively buries his birthplace. There are people who say they can remember being born, but I am not one of them. I use my mother’s words, not mine. Could she look out the window, or did someone tell her it was snowing? Was it falling in all five boroughs, in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and the New England states, across the Canadian border, in Norway? Skiers, I have heard, could make their way cross country into neutral Sweden to escape Nazi occupation. But it’s quite probable that on the first of April in New York there was no more than a snow flurry, not the kind of snow that sticks to the ground, much less enough to bury anything or anyone. News of the war in Europe, I imagine, was far more general. It was on the radio, on the lips and tongues of doctors and nurses. My father no doubt mentioned it, whatever he had heard or seen in the paper on his subway ride from Manhattan to Brooklyn.

Like Joyce, I was not entirely pleased, when the time came to be aware of such things, with the place of my birth. My parents were living in Manhattan which is where I would have been born but for Dr. Wallace, my mother’s obstetrician, who delivered babies at Brooklyn Hospital. For a long time, I deemed this an insufficient reason. My parents should have arranged for me to be born at the red hot center of things, not in remote, low class Brooklyn, to which I had no ties and rarely visited. I did not bury Brooklyn, I ignored it. When asked where I was born, or to fill out a form, I answered New York City.

The Germans in my mother’s narrative could not be so easily dismissed. They were on the move in Europe and, although the United States had not yet entered the war, were present at my birthday. Ich bin eine Deutsche. At least one quarter of me is.  My great-grandparents on my mother’s side, Anna Deindorfer and Phillipe Frick, were pioneers in Indiana in the 1800s. My grandmother, Margaretha Rosina Frick, spoke German growing up, and German exclamations of exasperation lingered in her speech throughout her life. My father also spoke a little German learned in an isolated German-speaking community in Montana where he taught school as a very young man. To interact with German-Americans was in the ordinary way of things for both my parents. As children during World War I, they had been taught to disapprove of prejudice against those of German descent, so I suppose there is nothing strange in the fact that they hired, one after the other, between 1940 and 1944, two German nannies to take care of me while they were at work. They left me at home with the enemy! Trudy and Ida could have been spies! Of course this is nonsense. They were harmless young working women, immigrants who needed jobs. I’m sure they kept me clean and happy.

 I have a photograph of Trudy pushing my baby carriage, a fabulous perambulator, though it looks to be second-hand, and Trudy is pretty fabulous too in a stylish suit and Marlene Dietrich hat. She left me a scrap of a German song which goes something like this: Hop, hop, hop, / Ferchen lof gallop, / Iber something, iber something, / Hop, hop, hop…I know the tune well, hear the words in my head and spell them as I hear them. My accent is good (hop leans toward hope), but much is missing, too much time has elapsed. A song to bounce a baby on a knee by. Every child in Germany knows it, perhaps. I hope someone out there will recognize it, correct my spelling, tell me what it means, though I think I have the gist. A song of innocence, I think, not like Trot, trot to Boston to buy a loaf of bread. /  Trot, trot home again, the old horse fell dead. Yet how I loved that song when I was little, slipping, almost falling, through my father’s knees before he caught me. Safe. I was safe, with never a thought for the poor old horse.

Ida, less defined, less real than Trudy, also left some words behind her: Ida likes it. This to encourage me to eat something but, as the story goes, I refused. Ida could eat it, if she liked it so much. My parents were talkers, story tellers, mimics. In their repetitions in later years I sensed their delight in my combative spirit, in my unwillingness to follow a fuhrer. These words had a special meaning for the three of us, for us only, and now only for me, the last person in the world who remembers them, packed as they are with my parents’ voices and the built-in benches around the table in the tiny dinette where we had lamb chops, baked potatoes, and broccoli for dinner.

Ida and Trudy. Trudy and Ida. Surnames and citizenship unknown. Who were they really? What did they do all day? It was a small apartment. Surely German efficiency would have made short work of housekeeping. They were glued to the radio, that’s what, as was everyone else in America in 1940. Woody Allen shows this convincingly in Radio Days .Pretty soon I refused to say the alphabet, not beyond ABC. After that, I said New York. Sometimes you get a lemon, a friend remarked about some stubbornness in his own daughter, but I’m sure my parents thought the same of me. Would this kid ever get it? What was wrong with her? But it was Trudy and Ida, it was the war, it was WABC, New York.  Hearing organ music in church, I asked, Is there any news on? I was on alert, I was tuned in.

Except that I wasn’t. Of the war years I remember almost nothing. What follows is a blank, a negative, the other side of the record. The first movie I saw made me cry, not the movie I think, but a newsreel must have frightened me. When he was turned down by the Army because of near-sightedness, my father became an Air Raid Warden, but I cannot remember pulling down the shades or any gear associated with this office. My mother’s younger brother, William Eston Van Dyke, Yeoman 1^st Class, was on a dangerous ammunition ship close to Pearl Harbor, but I connect no anxiety with him, only the song that begins Bellbottom trousers, coat of Navy blue,  nor can I think of anyone of our acquaintance who lost a son, brother, father, or uncle. We lived in an apartment with two spacious wings, six to eight apartments on each of eight or nine floors. My parents had many friends and colleagues. There must have been someone. Yet, in my mind, it all boils down to the dotted swiss dress I wore to the movies, to the Chinese man-doll, with a braid down his back, my uncle Bill brought me after the war. His china face was an exotic mystery, his several silken robes a delight to put on and take off. We shopped at the A&P and must have used ration books, but I don’t remember them. The A&P had wooden floors, coffee grinders, butchers with bloody aprons. The tongue lolling huge and hideous behind the glass case had somehow impossibly been lodged once inside a real cow’s mouth. At home, my mother and I tossed a package of margarine back and forth until the orange dot of color spread throughout to make it look like butter. We had a Victory Garden the size of a handkerchief, roped off with string, its seed packages displayed on Popsicle sticks. I may have eaten the radishes we grew, but I see that plot of ground best from our kitchen window three floors up.

For me, the war, like our Victory Garden, was far away. I was protected by my youth and by my parents. Blond hair and blue eyes protected me. I was not a member of a persecuted tribe. And in this state, compounded of innocence and ignorance, I persisted through elementary and high school, into college and beyond. I don’t know when or why Trudy left my parents’ employ, but Ida was fired. Because she listened to the radio too much, made suspicious phone calls, was really a spy after all? Or was this just a conversational gambit, teasing speculation, family joke? Don’t move, I commanded my dolls, a delicious absurdity, but when viewed as something Ida said to me, these words had a sinister, Teutonic ring which was finally too much even for my open-minded parents.

In search of cheaper rent and more green space for children, we moved at some point to Jackson Heights, Queens. Another undesirable address. To think that my bachelor father once lived on MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village, as his flat red book of French verbs tells me he did, is galling to me. When we visited old friends there, rising to the top floor in a cage-like elevator, the quaintness of the Village called to me. But my mother was pregnant. She’d already given up smoking when I was born; now it was her job, her career as it turned out, as a case supervisor, with a hotline to Mayor LaGuardia, for the New York Department of Welfare, and household help, all the romance of her early married life. In recounting all this later, she seemed to speak without regret. Times were hard; things were scarce. My sled was a ski-sled, so-called, and on this inferior piece of wartime manufacture I flew downhill in the much-prized vacant lot at the end of our block, in Queens, on runners made of wood instead of metal.

During a space of time in 1944, pregnancy and illness made my family turn inward. A month or so before my sister Elizabeth was born on March 28, my father came down with a serious case of pneumonia and, because of a shortage of hospital beds, he was treated at home. I remember visiting nurses, dark rooms, prohibitions, a new doll I named Elizabeth who came to a bad end in a city sewer. I think my father would have died without Etta Parr, a childhood friend of my mother’s from Oklahoma, then a Navy nurse stationed nearby. Sulfur drugs (Penicillin had been invented, but was not yet widely available) cause excessive sweating, but Etta knew how to change the sheets for a man too weak to sit up while she did it. Part New York cop, part ministering angel in her dark blue uniform with white stripes and gold buttons, blond hair puffing out around her cap, Etta took charge. She brought us butter and sugar and nylon stockings from the PX. I got the chicken pox, a form of revenge for having been sent to stay for a week with friends on Long Island, for being kept from my mother for hours at a time. My father got them too. And then it was over, the war on our private battleground, apartment 3M, which stood for Melville, Marguerite, and Marian, as I believed. Convalescing, my father and I moved into the living room, the sunniest room. My hair, which had grown long, was brushed out, felt thin. He sat in the wing chair, his beard sprouting around the remaining pock marks dotted with calamine lotion, but neither of us retained a scar. When she got big enough, we made room for my sister in her own middle, the four of us together in my parents’ double bed on Saturday and Sunday mornings.

When Ernst and I met in Los Angeles in 1964, we considered ourselves an unlikely pair. Ernst was born, probably at home, on September 30, 1936, a second son to his Orthodox Jewish parents, Margaret and Joseph Lipschutz. The town was Deutchkreutz, the country uncertain. He seems to have come from a kind of no-man’s land, a remnant of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a mythical place to be colored in on a map as part of a history lesson. His naturalization papers record Austria, but his mother said it was Hungary. Perhaps some division in the town, which still exists though free of Jews, makes sense of this. I sometimes think of going there to see for myself the muddy market town I imagine from my Internet searches on one side, city sidewalks on the other. Though his father was quickly released after being arrested in 1938,on a trumped-up charge of stealing made by a household maid, the family, with the new addition of a baby girl, fled to America, leaving mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins, friends, languages,  worldly possessions, even names behind. Mispronounced, mistranslated, transformed, abandoned, denied. High-sounding Sigmund, Ernst, and Renata were un-American, or had they become ugly, German, names?

What were the chances that Ernst and I would marry in Los Angeles, on October 16, 1967? We reveled in our differences, in the upheaving of family, nationality, tradition, culture, and religion our union required. In haste and in confusion, in sorrow and terror, his family boarded the Hansa. On what day of the month, in what continental or English port I do not know, but for us that was a lucky day. We looked for signs, thinking of the world, as Baudelaire does in his poem, Correspondances, as a forest of symbols through which we dimly perceive the profound unity of Nature. As Ernst’s family fled the Nazis, our relative positions shifted; we moved from unnumbered possibilities into a zone of probability in which the likelihood of our marriage could flourish.  Our mothers’ and my grandmother’s names were variants of the English Margaret. To us, a meeting point. As was Brooklyn! For Ernst was on Mott Street, in Williamsburg, on the day I was born. Ernst was safe. For his sake, I have resurrected Brooklyn, which is chic these days, so I can say without shame that I was born there. Nor am I ashamed of being partly German, though among Jews, especially if asked a direct question about them, I prefer to bring forth my Scottish, Irish, Welsh, and Dutch forebears. Bavarians are the softer Germans, I tell myself, and who would give up a link, however tenuous, to Beethoven or Bach?

War and winter bared their teeth on April 1, 1940, but did not seize me. Spring soon followed, and World War II came to its eventual end. I wish I could remember the ticker tape parade, the dancing and kissing, the embracing of strangers on the streets of New York, but they are lost to me. I will pass on instead the excellent advice Dr. Wallace, long since forgiven for his defection from the center of the world, gave to my mother as she was leaving Brooklyn Hospital with me in her arms: “Don’t let her make a goop out of you, Maggie!”

                                                      Time let me play and be

                                                Golden in the mercy of his means                 

                                                                                          Fern Hill, Dylan Thomas

Footnotes

                 

The Thane of Fife, he had a wife; where is she now?

                                                                             Macbeth, Act V, scene 1

Can a blog have footnotes? Am I breaking any rules? I wanted to add that the Shaw Records, mentioned last month, were compiled by Harriette F. Farwell and published in Bethel, Maine, by E.C. Bowler, in 1904. Although her name does not reveal it, she must be related to our line of Shaws, because she refers to a common ancestor and dedicates the work to her brother, Eben Shaw Kilborn, who supplied funds for the enterprise. According to Farwell, the line of American Shaws she traces from 1594 to 1882 came originally from the Scottish Highlands, though some resided in England before coming to America. In a preface, she includes the following quotation from Clans of the Scottish Highlands, by Robert Roland MacIan: Antiquarians and genealogists assent to the tradition that the Shaws are descended from MacDuff who aided Malcolm III, the rightful heir to the Scottish throne, in overthrowing Macbeth in 1056-7.

At twelve or so, I pored over this book, in a race with Haitian termites, busily boring their way through it in secret, leaving lace-like pages, full of holes. For a developing consciousness of identity and place in history, it was perfect. But the initial thrill of generation soon palled; I got lost, swamped in begats, which reminded me of passages in the Old Testament I always skipped. I think now that pointed searches might be the way to attack it: work, wars, politics, religion, participation in government, who made that first westward move and why? At the moment, though, I find myself stuck at the very beginning, struck by my man Macduff. Not the historic Macduff about whom I know next to nothing, who may or may not be my relation, but the Macduff who appears in Shakespeare’s MacBeth.

What is a man? Shakespeare asks. Not just once, but in play after play. Sometimes he means a human being but, in the case of Macduff and others, his interest is in masculine gender. How far can a man lean toward Woman and still be Man? Shakespeare’s women are various and sometimes powerful, but I don’t find in them the same preoccupation with definition that I do in his men.  In array and disarray, in Bach-like counterpoint, Shakespeare parades an inexhaustible supply of men before us, some so driven by a single humor as to be caricatures; others, like Hamlet, Iago, and Shylock, so deeply drawn that we shall never fully sound them.

 Boozer, schmoozer, simpleton, bumpkin, prince, pauper, king and courtier, Puritan, knave, bastard, tyrant, pimp. Yes-man, kiss-up, brown nose. The young man, hot and rash, the bachelor, confirmed and unconfirmed, the shrew tamer, the unrequited lover, the foolish, fond old man, the dotard. The jealous husband. The second son. The helicopter father, the father fleeced and betrayed. Pirate, cut-purse, highwayman. Dandy, fop, coward. Merchant, soldier, scholar, slave. Blackamoor, Jew, Turk, and Christian. The hero and the holy man. The fool, the madman, clown, and court jester. The actor and the mime. The boy actor playing a woman, playing a man.  Man naked in the storm, or decked in borrowed robes. Spy and counter-spy. The unbridled hedonist. The man who never thinks, and the man who thinks too much (this is where Horatio begins to look good). The suicide, the murderer, the gravedigger who turns up a grinning skull. The ghost.

 It’s time to haul out the computer, the ordinateur, as the French call it, to make sense of this jumble, to see why Macduff stands out. A computer can certainly tell us how many times the word man appears in Shakespeare,  maybe even when it means man and when human kind, and when, if ever, Shakespeare uses the word woman, in this second way. How many jobs and professions, high and low, are represented, how many are married with children, how many go to war, how many are gay. Such lists could be fascinating and telling in themselves, but they would not satisfy. I used to get students to play a game with me, to line up characters from a particular play on a continuum between two poles:  good and evil, appearance and reality, music and noise. Pick any pair you like; then move them about like counters. What shall we do with Hamlet’s Uncle Claudius, who has murdered Hamlet’s father by pouring poison in his ear? Perhaps he truly loves the queen and satisfies her sexually. He kneels, we overhear him praying. Doesn’t that count? It might, but not in this case, because Claudius cannot repent and compounds his crimes at the end of the play. Claudius, go to the end of the line!

Or how about a different kind of Match.com? A sort of oracular Dear Abby. Feed in descriptions of your friends and relatives, and up pops the verdict: Your father is Capulet: he’ll be sorry he kept you from Romeo, but only after you’re dead. Your girlfriend is Lady Macbeth: she’ll upgrade your social and professional status, but don’t let her have a baby lest she dash its brains out. Your buddy is Falstaff: carouse with him now, but be sure to dump him before he ruins your career plans. Or plug in famous public figures like the Kennedy brothers, Gandhi, Qaddafi, Martin Luther King Jr., Elliot Spitzer, and John Edwards. How do they stack up? The other night I saw Kissinger on TV. He looks pretty good, sounds just the same, was surprisingly kind to Obama, I thought. Can we find a place for him between salvation and damnation, his exact niche below God and the angels in the Great Chain of Being, now that he’s white-haired and relatively harmless, in late-night hugger-mugger with Charlie Rose?

Why bring up Shakespeare after Waiting for Godot? Post-Einstein, post-Sartre, post Pinter’s silences, post-Hannah Arendt and the banality of evil. Read a post-apocalyptic novel instead, The Road, by Cormac McCarthy, or In the Country of Last Things, by Paul Auster. Read the book of Revelation. We’ve been looking forward to the end of the world since the beginning, or so it seems. Stop reading altogether, as some pundits predict we will. But where is the computer with a mighty moral nose? A computer to delineate every gradation in a single trait, to take on the human comedy entire, as Shakespeare does, even if he shows us nothing but sinners. In Hamlet, or in Hamlet’s father, I think he comes close to a model man. Ophelia sees in Hamlet an Elizabethan idea of perfection: The courtier’s, soldier’s, scholar’s eye, tongue, The expectancy and rose of the fair state, The glass of fashion and the mold of form, The observed of all observers. But when she speaks these lines, Hamlet is already a fallen creature, quite, quite down. Hamlet, in turn, hero-worships his father, speaks him a splendid epitaph, half acknowledging that he wasn’t perfect: He was a man, take him for all in all. I shall not look upon his like again. Exactly what I would say of my own father! Too bad Hamlet got there first.

 When the Ghost speaks for himself, however, he disappoints, appears self-pitying and selfish. OK, he’s a soul in torment. But why does he ignore the heavy burden he lays upon his son, the train of evil he sets in motion? A student once raised her hand to ask if parents could command children from beyond the grave. No doubt hers was a temporary adolescent anxiety, but an excellent question, I thought, worthy of study and meditation. What do the dead expect from us, what duties do we owe them? A ghost, of course, is but a shadow of a man, a spirit merely, no more perhaps than a figment of imagination, far, far beyond earthly concerns.

Macduff, however, is made of solid flesh. If you know the story, you know how brilliantly Shakespeare sets up the circumstances in which Macduff, surrounded by cowards, bullies (including Lady Macbeth, an unsuccessful male-impersonator who confuses ambition, unprovoked aggression, and cruelty with masculinity), and murderers, will strut and fret his hour upon the stage. But even if you don’t, three short speeches should convince you of Macduff’s contribution to Shakespeare’s exploration of manhood. In the first, Macduff expresses amazement and horror at the deaths of his wife and children, ordered by Macbeth, who has lately killed the too-trusting King Duncan and usurped the Scottish throne: What? All my pretty chickens and their dam At one fell swoop? Here, all that is conventionally feminine, the prettiness and domesticity of a hen with chicks in a barnyard, has been destroyed by rapacious “male” power in the form of a bird of prey, a hell kite. Macduff, who might have stood between them, has been called away from home and country by typically male concerns: politics, honor, duty, and destiny. In England to gather support for a showdown with Macbeth, the terrible news about his family disarms him, catches him naked. Advised to Dispute it like a man, Macduff answers: But I must also feel it as a man.  He is not ashamed to express raw emotion, or to acknowledge that a husband and father is as much a man as a warrior: Sinful Macduff, They were all struck for thee. Macduff knows he should have been there. In this recognition, brief and sudden though it is, Shakespeare achieves a balanced merger of Man of Action with Man of Sensibility. Compare the brooding Hamlet whose indecision and delay bring his play to a near standstill. Or Laertes, who takes no time to weep for his drowned sister Ophelia, but rushes instead to collude in a treacherous plot with Claudius for which he pays with his life. Chastened Macduff goes on to defeat Macbeth but, at the same time, points the way to contemporary notions of shared housekeeping and stay-at-home fathers.  Though it’s still news, I notice, when a politician weeps (shorthand for womanish behavior) in public.

Who can forget at one fell swoop, forever embedded in our language, though the deadliness has gone out of it with the loss of fell as an adjective. My mother often used this phrase to describe an action both swift and complete – no sense of quotation in it, though she could quote Macbeth and had a particular fondness for the line in which sleep knits up the raveled sleeve of care.  Sirene has her grandmother’s high school text in which she writes what must be her teacher’s pronouncement: one of most powerful scenes in any play. A typical tenth grader, impressed, but not yet ready to venture her own interpretation, or to say why or what was so profound. More sophisticated readers see that Macduff’s monosyllabic Anglo-Saxon, as opposed to Latinate English, its imagery drawn from familiar surroundings, suggests that plain speaking he-men can be eloquent. Think Humphrey Bogart.  Ironically, Macbeth himself, in response to Lady Macbeth’s taunts that he is less than a man when he hesitates at first to murder King Duncan, delivers an even more potent summation, setting a limit he is about to exceed: I dare do all that may become a man; Who dares do more is none. Alliterative, aphoristic, and paradoxical, these lines remind me of Lyndon Johnson, who proclaimed, we want no wider war, even as he sent more troops to Vietnam. Of the many U.S. senators and citizens who admired George Bush because he kicked butt, but later came to regret the war in Iraq. Of Obama, explaining his pursuit of the war in Afghanistan while accepting the Nobel Prize for Peace.

It pays to attend to who says what in Shakespeare. The most beautiful lines in The Tempest come out of the mouth of the monster Caliban. Admirable though he is, Macduff is not the hero of the play. That title belongs to regicide Macbeth, an eerie adumbration of Papa Doc Duvalier, who moves from vaulting ambition, to traffic with dark spirits, to hallucination and near-madness, to licensed killing sprees by hired thugs, until he is so far steeped in blood he cannot turn back, until paranoia sets in, a fear of opposition that can never be assuaged combined with an implacable will to stay in power.  Seen in this light – and Aristotle can supply other reasons having to do with recognition and reversal – Macduff seems a poor player, drafted by Shakespeare to swing his plot around; someone, after all, must turn this tide in the affairs of men, restore the kingdom of Scotland to order. In fact, we know very little about Macduff and can only guess at his future. Will he remarry, produce more children, participate in a coup, lose his life in battle, turn cynic, become a wise, old hermit of the highlands? No one knows or cares. Nor can Macduff do more than the plot requires. Though he may be aware that Malcolm, the rightful heir, is weak and devious, he cannot choose a better king. His imagination, like his world, is narrow, clannish. Macduff is no metrosexual; he probably wouldn’t want Hilary Clinton for a wife. Shakespeare could certainly fashion a suitable husband for her, but not a perfect man. Like a modern novelist, Shakespeare invites our participation. We must construct the model out of shreds and patches, much as we invent ourselves.

 Some understandings are years in the making. At some point I lost interest in the facts of my family history and chose the fictional Macduff to be my cousin. How many times did I hear my mother say at one fell swoop, uncomprehending even after I had read the play, before I found the poem by Gerard Manly Hopkins which begins, I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day. I was far away from her in college when I figured out what fell meant, and further still from any idea of what depression might be like. Years again before I taught Macbeth so often I knew the text by heart, bending the ears of innocent sophomores till they cried hold, enough!  Still, I won’t apologize for my literary rants. I cannot help it that a certain electrical impulse or alignment of genetic code makes me want to go on listing male types in Shakespeare to the end of time. I recommend King Lear, Leontes of The Winter’s Tale, and Prospero of The Tempest for further solutions to the puzzle of manhood. But I do realize that other triggers exist in others to create different but equally heady delights. I once challenged a friend to tell me what was so great about biology. She felled me with two words: “It’s life!”

To be, or not to be; that is the bare bodkin

That makes calamity of so long life;

For who would fardels bear,

till Birnam Wood do come to Dunsinane,

But that the fear of something after death

Murders the innocent sleep,

Great natures second course,

And makes us rather swing the arrows of outrageous fortune

Than fly to others that we know not of…

But soft you, the fair Ophelia:

Ope not thy ponderous and marble jaws,

But get thee to a nunnery – go!

Mark Twain

Fresh Breeze

My heart is warm with the friends I make,

And better friends I’ll not be knowing,

But there isn’t a train I wouldn’t take,

No matter where it’s going

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Like a fresh breeze from the clean prairie. This was how my friend C. and I struck my father in 1958 or ‘59, two Connecticut College girls, down to meet him, up from Port-au-Prince on a business trip, for lunch at the Commodore Hotel in New York. This characteristic handy saying was one of the ways he had devised for keeping the prairie with him all his life. Look at all the snow, he might say, looking down at the royal palm trees from my bedroom window in Port-au-Prince. Cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey is another expression familiar to me from childhood. People where he was born, in Fessenden, North Dakota, put on their long underwear in the winter and didn’t take it off till the spring thaw. Although he lived in Haiti, El Salvador, and Southern California from 1950 onwards, he was never without an overcoat – the last one, boxy and black, hangs in my downstairs hall closet. And through his many readings of Main Street, he spent a lot of time with the residents of Gopher Prairie.

I formed this idea last summer while reading some autobiographical essays my father wrote in 1966, for a creative writing class at Cal State L.A. I had read them before, but paid them scant attention. They were filed away somewhere and, when he died, I marveled at how little he had left behind. Not only was there no money to divide or property to fight over, there was not a single material object, neither pen, nor watch, nor book edition, of any value. Just these suddenly precious pages. Here he establishes himself in his time and place, a misfit in Fessenden. He was near-sighted, awkwardly tall for his age, and thin. His parents’ divorce embarrassed him, set him apart. An oddball, he calls himself, no good at hunting gophers with the other kids. Pegged early as a bookworm, he didn’t want to lick anyone; he wanted to study French.

He talks about being a Boy Scout, Hopalong Cassidy, horse markets and wheat harvests, grain elevators, land grants, a farm implements business owned by an uncle, and T.L. Beisicker, the richest man in town; President Harding, the Teapot Dome scandal, an earthquake in Tokyo, a fight between Jack Dempsey and Tommy Gibbons, a ban on the study of German in high schools during World War I, and popular songs like Oh Frenchie, Frenchie, and You, You Tell Her, ‘Cause I, I Stutter Too Much. His prodigious railroad lore (names and numbers of trains, arrival and departure times, separate waiting rooms for men and women, wooden platforms, round houses, freight yards and depots, switch engines, the making up of trains, yard bulls and more) betrays a profound longing to leave this territory where his does not belong, but which is still beloved, and is home. He is an embryonic Sherwood Anderson, Willa Cather, Sinclair Lewis. Grandchildren: Emily, Nicholas, David, and Sirene! Great-granddaughters: Lucie and Farah! These are authors you must read if you would understand your ancestor and an important theme in American literature. He packed in a lot, but he didn’t get far; his narrative stops abruptly in 1923. I wanted more. So Melville Austin Shaw (1903-1983), not cancer, was the inspiration for this series.

I began to notice things he never let go of, like his boyhood self, like the prairie. Late in life, he went back to the house where he was born, amazed to see how many trees had grown up in that flat and windswept place. Even at sixty-four, it still rankled that he had never completed his B.A. Here’s how that came about:

In the spring of 1923 I was a junior at the University of Minnesota and a front desk clerk at the Plaza Hotel, working a shift from 5pm to midnight. I was 20 and had just finished my final examinations for the quarter when, on a June afternoon, in walked Wesley Davis, a young Montanan I had known for some years, but had not seen for quite a while. We did a lot of talking, and Wes convinced me that in the four years I had spent in the big city of Minneapolis, I had grown soft and stale, that the city was no place to live for anyone who had once experienced the big sky and wide open spaces, the plains, mountains, rivers, and forests of Montana. He held that clerking in a hotel was degrading, a stultifying occupation. He said that I could easily find some more elevating work among the friendly, warm-hearted, firm handshaking and generous people of Montana. He suggested that my evenings could be better spent in a pool hall or going to a country dance. This was music to my ears as I had only had 3 nights off in 3 years. I resigned my job at the Plaza the next day.

Did not having that diploma hinder my father socially, or in his working life, when college degrees were far less common than they are now? I remember talk of the Wharton School in our New York days, so perhaps it kept him from getting an advanced degree. But once settled at Pillsbury Mills, making use of his romance languages major to handle their extensive business in Latin America, entertaining the big Latin customers, finding decent accommodation for Haitians and Brazilians (not so easy in New York at the time), that nagging worry might seem to have been behind him. On he went to the Pillsbury and other agencies in Haiti and, eventually, to his appointment as Commercial Attaché to the U. S. Embassy in El Salvador. Yet, almost as soon as he retired, he set about to earn those few remaining units.

What we refuse to let go of, what we come back to as we grow older. How circular our lives sometimes seem. Are we onions, peeling off layer after layer, to lay bare nothing? Or avocados, with centers fixed and firm? The core of his being, we are prone to say. Perhaps we have no choice but to remain true to ourselves. What, then, allows us to let go? The Haiti chapter is over was another of my father’s sayings, one it pained me to hear. But these days I find myself rehearsing it, dreading it. I mean to go back, to volunteer as an English teacher. But do I have what it takes at my age to face the ruin and chaos that is Haiti today? Not to mention my ties and responsibilities here, or my fear of running out of money.

Certainly there were closed chapters in my father’s life. Like me, he exaggerated and invented. Told lies, hid guilt, kept secrets. I know very little about his family and find myself uncertain of what I half-remember. Unlike my mother, who kept in steady contact with her faraway relatives, my father chose to maintain distance. Many details were filled in for me by my mother, who was protective of my father and had her own ideas. Scraps, rumors really, are what I am left with. After his parents’ divorce (who divorced whom?), his father, a lawyer and a judge, took off for the West Coast, married a red-haired manicurist closer to his son’s age than his own, drank too much, died young. My father writes, without a hint of emotion, that he was not fond of him. I have photographs of both sets of my mother’s grandparents, but not one picture of my grandfather, George K. Shaw, Jr. The Shaw Records, which trace our family line to the Earl of Fife in the Scottish Highlands and, more consistently, to one Roger Shaw, who shows up as a selectman, Town Clerk, and landowner in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1636, notes his birth in Bay City, Michigan, August 24, 1874. A brother Benjamin, who died in childhood, follows him, and there the Records end.

I hang on to our lunch at the Commodore which stands out because I went away to boarding school at thirteen and saw my parents rarely. My father had in mind the coffee shop, but I quickly convinced him that only one of the hotel’s more expensive restaurants would do. In the background were the many shrimp cocktails, steaks, and parfaits I had been treated to by the fathers of wealthy school friends. Play-actor that he was, Daddy absorbed in my sense of the occasion. I was immensely proud of him. C.’s father was dead, but here was mine. He was beaming. He was wearing his overcoat. So evidently pleased to see and be seen with us, to talk to us, and to listen to what we had to say. He had a contagious laugh, a way of leaning into conversations, sometimes taking on a foreign accent in English in order to conform to a companion. C. and I were lively, attractive, intelligent, and well-read. Not yet twenty, poised for independence. And he was still young enough himself, successful enough, to see us as we were, and as emblems of much more, without envy. My selfishness, my thoughtlessness, my penchant for style over substance, especially when it comes to restaurants, are on flagrant display here, but they are not important to this story. We talked, we ate, he paid, and we were all three satisfied. I know what my father was thinking: that he was almost done with me; that the little bird would fly away from the nest. If my fancy eastern schools had left their mark, so be it. Children belong to the world, he always said, not to their parents. I had been hearing these wise sayings of his since I was little, but it would still be many years before I could accept them.

In my mind’s eye, I see my young, long-legged father. He is skating on the frozen Yellowstone, camping on a bed of pine needles on the bluffs above Forsyth, scolding his sister Marian for acting countrified, jumping on the iron ladder of a freight car, with forty dollars in his shoe, to ride along with hobos who urge him to join the IWW. Yearned for big cities, and dinkier ones, lie ahead: Minneapolis, Portland, Seattle, and New York where, in 1933, he will marry my mother, still a little girl in Des Moines. In 1934, Marian will die her terrible early death and, in the early forties, my sister and I, with our high price tags, our expensive educations, will be born. He will travel to Ketchikan and Rio. To Sao Paulo, Recife, Fortaleza and Caracas. To Managua and Tegicigalpa. He will know Port-au-Prince and Cap Haitien, Mirebalais, Port-de-Paix, Les Cayes, and Jeremie, all the Haitian outports so important to his business in the fifties. Paris, London, and Rome. Los Angeles and San Francisco, where he died. All unimaginable. All yet unordained. Just now, in 1916, he is a boy in short pants with a new pair of glasses, riding the transcontinental North Coast Limited with Marian in a bright red coat, his mother and step-father Bert Edminster, and their baby Bobby, to their new home in Forsyth, Montana. Beisicker has made Edminster, spendthrift, back-slapper, and Elks Club man, the manager of a bank.

Forsyth turned out to be a cow town with hitching posts and log buildings right along Main Street. When the ice melted on the Yellowstone, a raging river covered the town. No matter. The street signs and the numbers on buildings will impress him. Forsyth was a railroad division point, a county seat, the largest town between Miles City and Billings, a distance of 150 miles. He didn’t stay there long; in an attempt to run away, he wound up back in Fessenden, living with his grandmother, finishing high school. Nevertheless, he is on his way. The train has a valet, a maid, and a barber. He visits the observation platform, eats in the diner, and goes to bed in the Pullman car only to stay awake all night, lifting the curtain over his window to see Bismarck, Mandan, and Dickinson alight in the darkness, to catch glimpses of North Dakota.

As I was his, so is he my fresh breeze from the clean prairie.

Boomalaka, Boomalaka,

Sis boom bah,

Fessenden High School,

Rah, rah, rah!