Detour: Haitian Houses

What follows is a detour from my rambles in Silver Lake and the beginning of another series, to be continued in haphazard fashion, about my family’s move to Haiti in 1950. Additions I would like to make would beget yet other detours. Instead, I’ve lumped a few together here as an introduction:

For years, I have written with the Oxford Book of English Verse directly in front of me on a built-in bookshelf, in my den. By accident or superstition, I have no idea, but it is the hardback 1939 edition I purchased to save my family from shame in the fall of 1953. I have rarely opened it and never memorized the poems assigned for summer reading. Perhaps one of my classmates can tell me what they were. What I wanted was to own it, dated as it was even then, full of obscure dead white male poets like Thomas Love Peacock and Francis Quarles.

I have long since forgiven my beloved Shipley English teacher for her thoughtlessness and too sharp tongue, two of my own bad traits, along with a penchant for hyperbole, often pointed out by my children. Nor do I mean that she intended to malign Haiti. She hoped I would give the English language and its literature a place of supreme importance in my life, as she had done. She needn’t have worried.

A different kind of shame attaches to the terms houseboy and yardboy used below, as politically incorrect today as dead white male poets. I cannot defend the terms, or the social system,  direct descendant of slavery, of which we so easily became a part. This remains a troubling aspect of our time in Haiti as I try to explain to myself what we were doing there. In this piece, I use the lingo of the time, but will return to this question.

I should also mention my choice of French spelling for words in Haitian Creole (Kreyol), old-fashioned and offensive to some, but I prefer it because it’s what I’m used to, and I like to see the relation between the two languages which phonetic spelling obliterates.

I use the pronoun we to suggest my idea of family views, not to speak for other members.

Detour: Haitian Houses

And so I dream of going back to being is the way Frost puts it in Birches, seeing himself, younger, a swinger, bending back his father’s trees until they touched the ground. Not that I want  to be thirteen again. Except to be quicker and smarter with an answer for Miss Y. when she said my family was uncivilized because we did not own a copy of The Oxford Book of English Verse.

Unwittingly, she hit upon it, a favorite expression, a high compliment -- this I understood as a child when my father said that so-and-so was a civilized man.

What sort was that? Certainly not a stuffed shirt, or a panty-waist. or a Southern cracker. To me, it was someone like himself: open-minded, emotional, a reader of literary novels, French policiers, and Haitian history, lover of cities, a traveler, linguist and chess player, someone who had gone to college, drawn to intellectual women, who saw Haiti as something more than a backward country the size of New Hampshire, populated by illiterate former slaves, in which two men might carry a mattress on their heads over the mountains from Port-au-Prince to Jacmel and back, because they could not locate the place where they were supposed to set it down.

This story and others mocking Haitian mentality were popular, making the rounds at morning, afternoon, and evening bridge games, cocktail parties, and during the dice game after golf at the Pétionville Club bar. To many: the American Club. But my father said it made perfect sense. A mattress had high value in a country where many slept on banana mats. Buildings had no numbers, telephones were uncommon and mostly didn’t work. Those guys were far from home, without friends or relatives to turn to. They were stuck, so they played it safe.

All this I should have spewed forth to MIss Y. How dare she! She knew nothing about us. She lived with a Mlle G., enamoured of la civilization française. Mlle G. deemed my French too infused with sub-standard patois for an advanced class, but had complimented me on un joli petit accent Creole (a pretty little Creole accent); surely she would have appreciated the fact that my father read Madame Bovary over and over in French, and in English too, and even in Spanish. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, as he might have said. So there!

I began to think about our early life in Haiti, about the civilization we found in a savage country many Americans had never heard of in 1950. I saw it for the first time in my fifth grade classroom at P.S. 89. Mrs. Oxman gathered us around the globe so everyone could see where I was going. Haiti was a green misshapen horseshoe below Florida, close to Cuba and Puerto Rico, names some of us New Yorkers recognized. A squiggly line meant a border. We resumed long division. Haiti was nothing to brag about. A scrap. A piece of something larger, equally unknown.

In May, my mother, my sister, and I made a quick trip to Oklahoma to say goodbye to my mother’s parents, Grandma and Grandpa Van Dyke. In Norman, our impending move provoked considerable interest. Haiti was in the news. President Dumarsais Estimé had been kicked out, replaced by a military threesome, a triumvirate, a junte. Taking this unexpected and uneasy development in stride, my mother told the local paper she was not afraid. We endured tetanus  typhus, and typhoid shots, were sick for days, our arms painfully swollen. Soon after, back in New York, we boarded a Dutch freighter, the Trajanus, its hold full of flour for my father’s customers, also lard, sardines and anchovies, tomato paste. My sister and I wore our Easter outfits, navy blue wool suits with boleros and detachable white piqué collars, white gloves, traded as we sailed south for the cotton shorts, skirts, and eyelet off-the-shoulder blouses we would wear in Haiti. We were seasick. We sat at the Captain’s table, surviving the four day trip on candied fruit my father’s boss and Pillsbury office colleagues had brought to see us off. From now on my father would be his own boss. The portly Captain feasted on Dutch delights: smelly fish, raw bacon sandwiches. He flirted openly with a Dominican woman, who lived in Haiti, whose name I don’t remember. She was light-skinned, voluptuous in white dresses with low necklines. When the Captain stretched out in a deck chair after lunch, she made space for herself at his feet, leaning forward over him to pop chocolate covered cherries in his mouth.

Already, from the moment I saw it on the map, I was there, immersed in the stuff of Haiti: its littleness, its insignificance in the world, though fought over in the past. A third of a divided island,  French speaking, alien to its neighbors, subject to coups d’état, dependent on imports, a land of dangerous diseases, its sexuality, live, visible, risqué, like nothing ever seen or spoken of in front of children in Jackson Heights.

Our first house in Pacot, close to downtown Port-au-Prince, was pink, identical to every other in Wilsonville, as garish with its maroon and white tiled floors as our second hand Ford coupe was pale and tan. Tall teenage boys dangled their legs over the low front wall, catcalling at our arrival. I held up my doll and learned the word poupée (doll). There were filigreed bars on the windows, rumors of voleurs (thieves), but I don’t remember feeling strange, just excited. That night, my sister and I started out in our own beds, but long before daylight, our family was in bed together, giddy with happiness at being disconnected, no friends, no relations, just us, awake all night. Talking, listening. The isle was full of noises. Alive with laughter, high-pitched exclamations, music, drum beats, crowing roosters, packs of barking dogs.  

We didn’t stay long in Wilsonville. Perhaps the house was too expensive, and Leo, hired by my father to cook and keep house, didn’t get along with my mother. Leo was tall, handsome, suave and knowing, prepared to serve rare fillet with a side of frites for dinner every night. This was Paradise! But my mother found him bossy. Snooty. Behind her back he asked my father what he would like for dinner since what Madame had ordered was presque rien (almost nothing).

Madame she might be, but as long as we lived in Haiti, my mother was never again in full control of her kitchen, populated as it was, dominated, by servants, ants, giant cockroaches skittering for cover if she turned the light on after dark. Once in a while, over the years, she got a yen, but the results were unsatisfactory. Canned corn on the cob (because only field corn was available) nearly killed us; attempts at doughnuts and pizza didn’t come close. Fudge, four different kinds of Christmas candy, peanut butter and chocolate chip cookies -- these we managed, but there was a gradual giving way; our lettuce went untreated, our drinking water unboiled, misunderstood gelatin salads melted, pots and pans, used on charcoal, wobbled, china broke, silver was lost or stolen, while we marvelled at the memory of cooks, who could hear a recipe once and have it, who went to market at five in the morning, brought produce home on their heads using a round wedge of cloth to cushion the rough basket, who taught us to love riz djon djon, leeks, mirliton, pumpkin soup, banana bread, hearts of palm, griot, sauce ti malice, pain patate, hot peanut butter with cassava bread.

Some of these we must have tasted first in what we later called the little pink house in Canapé Vert, another hot, ordinary neighborhood, close to town, where some streets remained unpaved, or partially paved, as ours was. Our new landlord, Capitaine Paris of the Haitian army, was eager to point out the oil drums attached to the side of the house, cleverly collecting, all by themselves, enough water for several hot showers. Even more impressive were the two unfinished sets of wooden stairs which met at a landing between two small bedrooms. Madame should have no fear of exposing herself en deshabille when she could glide down the back staircase early in the morning to consult with her cook: Eliane.

Eliane was a fat country woman. To support her constitution, she drank the oil surrounding anchovies and sardines straight from the tin. To ward off colds, she put on her hat each time she opened the refrigerator. Our backyard was full of packing cases my sister and I played house in, a rectangle strewn with gravel, but the houseboy refused to sweep away the few leaves which fell from the mango tree. Apparently, Madame had not lived in Haiti long enough to know that le garcon qui travail dans la maison ne travail pas dans la cour (the boy who works in the house does not work in the yard). Our dogs in that house were Faso and Friskey, curly tailed, untrainable Haitian hounds. One of them, after nipping the Sunday roast from a neighbor’s table, met death by poisoning.

How charming, how pretentious, how primitive, how ridiculous everything was -- a combination found in many Haitian paintings -- and the woman on the Trajanus, Leo, Capitaine Paris, Eliane, the houseboy, even Faso, the poisoned dog, were artists. Haitian impressionists. Amusing, whether calculating or ingenuous, memorable. They told it like it was; the very houses were instructive. Servants were necessary to survival, not a luxury. Bargaining might be a way of life, but certain rules remained immutable.

Only once can I remember being homesick for New York, missing my friends during the long summer before school started. Too big for this, I sat on my mother’s lap wearing a green and white checked sundress she had made for me. Come to me, my melancholy baby, she sang when I was sad. I can hear her now. She always knew how to comfort me, and soon the moment passed, and Madame du Chatelier began to make our clothes, without patterns, from pictures in Seventeen, the material measured -- bolts imported from Switzerland thumping on dusty counters in backstreet stores -- in the many aunes needed for the full skirts of the fifties.

That summer, my sister and I played with Alley Babe, a tiger-striped kitten, dropped off for us by the sexpot of the Trajanus, first of cats uncounted with which our parents fulfilled the promise which had lured us to Haiti. And we learned to swim because our American neighbor and manager of Pan American had a pool. Another American, wife of an artist on the GI Bill, former Aquacade performer, taught us a rudimentary breaststroke. My mother disapproved of this couple. They were on the fringe, not members of the Club we might or might not join. They peed in the yard, she said, but my father was attracted to bohemians, and joining the Club could be bad for business.

Much of Haitian civilization remained hidden during these early days; we had a lot to learn. But gradually, we were becoming part of an intricately layered society, part of the Haitian economy, as my father engaged in rivalry with Hakim, agent for Gold Medal flour, and later protested the building of a flour mill by rich Texas oil man, Clint Merchison. The taxi fare to the strip of pavement in front of the little pink house was a full gourde (twenty cents, at the time) though, according to my mother, it should have been dix centimes, since we had gone less than two feet into a new zone. The driver tossed the coin she placed behind his head into the street, so great was his pride and scorn. We acquired a new respect for things handmade; thus no two napkins or sisal chairs would ever be exactly alike, and ordering more than one did not make them less expensive. In buying mahogany bowls and furniture, we supported industry and tourism while contributing to irreparable soil erosion.

We soon had a clear idea of our role as blancs for whom the price, though rarely fixed, was always higher. But blancs were cautioned by wealthy Haitians not to pay too much lest they spoil the market for everyone. Begging children pawed my sister and me in the streets, called us shish, laide (stingy and ugly). Because we wore shorts and had freckles, because we were white. And though we liked to walk on the Boulevard Harry S. Truman on the Exposition Grounds, pretending for a minute to be in Miami, we did not say, as other foreigners did, that somewhere else, like Montreal or Trinidad or some American city, was home. And yet, we could never be Haitians. Our kind had been ripped forever from the tricoleur. The Haitian flag was blue and red. We were embarked upon a journey whose end and meaning we could not foresee.

Silver Lake Ramble #2

Papa Legba, an old man with a crutch, stands at the crossroads, an intermediary between our world and the world of the Loa. Haitian Vodun (Voodoo) has many gods, but only Legba, known to speak all human languages, can give permission to break through the barrier, communicate with the spirits. I’ve come to understand, however, that Legba lurks at every carrefour:  in the crucifix, in cathedral architecture, in the image of St. Peter, in a tree trunk with branches or river with tributaries, in the Continental Divide and the design of the human body, in Euclidean axioms, graph paper, the plus sign, and the letters t and x, in the intersections of the NYT crossword puzzle, and in Leonard’s teeming brain, too, as he solves it at lightning speed. And just as surely, Legba is with us in Silver Lake where Maltman bisects Sunset. To cross the street here is to gain access to one of the few mailboxes left in the neighborhood; to the 99 Cent Store (beggars, a disabled man with pet dog out in front); to the mix in the long lines at the cash registers of rich and poor, carefree and burdened, children and adults, black, white, Asian and Latino, along with the occasional hipster looking for kitsch, or someone impatient like me, making a quick hit to pick up flashlight batteries, though tempted to buy more than I can carry, plastic plates that don’t look plastic, tortillas, green and rubbery, made from nopales (pads of the prickly pear cactus), a surprisingly likely looking bottle of wine. Leonard, who introduced me to this emporium, finds himself at home here, Leonard, who contains multitudes, spouts a smattering of languages, always ardent, ever hip, armed with information, consumer and bargain hunter par excellence.

Set foot on this famous boulevard, follow it east or west, lay claim to Los Angeles if you dare. I mean only to point out this juncture as a possible divergence. But I hope you will turn with me instead onto a strip mall of sorts (conversion of  hair salon into upscale convenience store in progress, Filipino bakery, children’s clothing store, raw-vegan restaurant, cafe, apartment house, garage - typical hodge-podge of Silver Lake enterprises, each with its history, long or short, an offshoot recently blocked off, no cars allowed. The official name of this space, now filled with cheap plastic planters, tables and umbrellas, in varying shades of green, is Triangle Park. And, indeed, it is triangular, though nameless until now as far as I knew. In the original grassy section are built-in wooden benches around a stone fountain decorated with Mexican tile work, which puts forth an occasional trickle of water. In the recent past, a place where bums, now called the homeless, hung out, where apartment dwellers, huddled in blankets, swayed and moaned in time to aftershocks the morning after the 1994 earthquake.  At the edge of the park to the east, the Fandango beauty shop, formerly home to Dianetics, and the longtime Conquistador with illustrative murals, one of the first gay neighborhood restaurants. I call this place the Plage - think Paris Plage, a fabrication, an illusion of striped awnings and suntan oil, deck chairs and sand. With such accoutrements does a beach appear along the banks of the unswimmable Seine in summer.  Yet in Silver Lake, the now gutted hair salon - over $100 for a haircut, shampoo, and blow dry - didn’t make it. Natural Mind, it was called, replete with product, on its outer walls an imitation of the hanging gardens of Babylon, all withered now and, secretly, walking along with my head down, though regretting much wasted labor and material, I have cheered death on, chanting, not right for Silver Lake, not right for Silver Lake, under my breath.

But if you wish to dress your androgynous toddler in a houndstooth jacket, little Mao pajama coat, suspenders and bowtie, a pair of blue jeans with 50’s style rolled-up cuffs; if you want anything soy, seasonal, artisanal, sustainable, raw, organic, gluten-free, or vegan; or, perhaps tomorrow, a caramel latte, lox and bagels, and a buttered scone, step right up. Even the red brick vintage apartment house has had its makeover, white roses and picnic table out in front. Remember: vintage and retro are trendy. The word authentic wafts in the wind, as in her relationships are not authentic, also as it applies to clothing, diction, restaurant menus, and more. This is a land of locavores, of foragers, who roast green coffee beans at home. In opposition to all this, is Enrique’s auto and bicycle shop, which might be the model for a Keinholtz installation, life imitating art and vice versa. Enrique must be fiftyish, though he doesn’t look it, pampered as he is by his wife who arrives with platefuls of chicken, rice, and frijoles at midday. Enrique is introverted, preoccupied, a man of few words, mostly in Spanish. Leonard, on flimsy evidence to do with a battery, says he’s a crook, that such bonhomie as Enrique musters for the gringo is all sham. But Enrique has endured fire and earthquake, I counter, lets street artists deface his property, promotes bike riding - the homeless make nests on his doorstep. I plan to stay on good terms with Enrique since, in rolling distance of my house, he will be my mechanic when I can no longer walk to Doug’s.

Many contradictions converge here each Saturday when a Farmers Market takes over the Plage. Then is Enrique in his element, hobnobbing with a farmer from San Diego who sells soursop (cherimoya; corosol in Creole) at six dollars a pound, with the tamale man and the pupusa women who make vegan versions of Mexican and Salvadoran favorites to accommodate local taste.  A form of fusion, I tell Leonard, who insists it’s all ersatz. No real farmers here, just clever cheats who buy fruits and veggies downtown at the crack of dawn, label them organic, jack up the prices for fools. Maybe not even that, they buy it all at Vons or Ralphs. What nonsense. I’ve seen permits, scolding inspectors, a white  farmer from Lancaster with hands like Grandpa Van Dyke’s, callused and swollen, hands around a hoe, deep in dirt. And the summer peach lady, his wife, who conjures the smell of apples crushed to bursting in her driveway when the fall crop is good. She’s missing some teeth, her granddaughter comes along to help her, and she calls me hon, which I want to object to, but don’t. Country ways, I tell myself.

Country ways mean teenagers work instead of playing soccer on Saturday, and even younger children count change, politely wish me good morning. What must they think, I wonder, looking out from behind makeshift counters upon this melee of twenty or thirty-somethings,  middle-agers down from the hills to scavenge like raccoons, skunks, possums, and coyotes; older residents, like me, who haven’t sold their homes to retire in Nicaragua, or moved somewhere nearer their children; straights, gays and lesbians, parents of every variety, coaxing  their children to eat at least part of a $2.75 muffin. There’s a lot of waste here, a lot that gets spilled, spit out, or thrown away. I can’t tell anymore how old anybody is. I fling the term hipster around, conscious of a general fear of enthusiasm, defensive postures and clothing, but not sure just who in this crowd qualifies. Do hipsters have children? In the frenzy of buying and selling, none of this matters. It’s all about produce for the week ahead, bean sprouts and heirloom tomatoes, persimmons, pomegranates, avocados black and green, about stocking up on goat cheese and manchego and hummus and organic honey, sampling all the samples, planning a dinner party with flowers, even if only a few can tell kale from Swiss chard or recognize kohlrabi, and don’t mind looking a bronzino from Greece in the face, in spite of a New Year’s resolution to eat nothing but locally grown vegetables. Tough-minded Asian women drive hard bargains over long beans and greens for pho. Latinas and Latinos, cordial, excessively polite, well-dressed, are clearly of higher status than the Mexican vendors they kid around with. Their accents may be South American, but as the money changes hands, it’s all chistes (jokes) among native speakers who understand each other’s ways. Sharp differences are for a moment erased, as both sides revel in innuendo, fast-paced Spanish, for insiders only.

The Silver Lake Farmers Market has become a destination, and everyone here is making a statement. Unshaven, just rolled out of bed, short shorts on long legs, spike heels, an empire jacket with lion’s head hood, fedoras, sandals and flip-flops, boots, leggings. I pay attention to what I wear to the Farmers Market. I admit it. We’re dressed to kill, all of us. We prepare a face, as J. Alfred Prufrock says, to meet the faces that we meet. Not too dressed up, but not the disgusting sweats I’ve worn to the gym all week. Mostly I don’t want to look old. Though that’s impossible. Or frumpy, which I think I can avoid. And, of course, not too young either, which can be grotesque. Some awareness, some sign that I know what I’m doing, have put together a look. That’s what I go for, but do I get away with it? Well, someone else will have to tell me. I could ask the barista I like who makes me a single shot, decaf, non-fat espresso macchiato, drizzles me a foam heart, knows I prefer a china cup. I flirt, I tip, I tap my foot to the electronically infused music of El Hijo de la Cumbia. I play the whole game, now that I know it’s more than a silly fad, being a good barista, that is. Not many among us can achieve, much less repeat, perfection.

The world in little is the Plage, a microcosm. Where the underworld can meet the elite.  Well, underworld may be going too far. I’ll amend it: underclass. But who doesn’t come is noteworthy too. None of the people I have left behind on Maltman. Not the Cubano, nor El Conejito, nor the German hausfrau, nor Marilyn, nor ever the people who lived in the foreclosed house. Neither do the homeless men venture around the corner on market mornings to be part of the hubbub. For all of these the price and the prices are too high. They cannot afford it, or are otherwise put off for reasons unknown to me. I love the Farmers Market; I buy the expensive corosol because it reminds me of Haiti, but here I can concede Leonard a point. Silver Lake at its worst, he calls it. Hardly that, but the market is no melting pot, nor even in the currently favored metaphor, a tossed salad, in which all ingredients are included, yet remain unique. Instead, it is a dazzling display, an illusion of community. A communal delusion? Magical in its appearance each Saturday and as quickly swept away, leaving the pale green surface, dotted with outsized polka-dots in chartreuse, blackened, cigarettes stubbed out in the planters.

Much later, on another day, the Plage becomes a song at twilight when grass and lifeless fountain, skateboarders doing wheelies, the young and old, glued to iPhones and laptops, who measure out their lives in coffee spoons, break dancers and basketball players, showing off for the assembled audience and for each other, high fives all around, shivering models and photographers, tired mothers dragging school children, single fathers feeding babies, those eternally patient and muzzled dogs merge dreamlike in the drama of a Los Angeles sunset. Perhaps it is the quality of light which best characterizes this unreal city sprawled out upon the Dream Coast, where actors and waiters appear to be interchangeable, where fickle customers and clients, hyper aware of the latest Tweet, can be counted on to desert. Gone already are the children’s clothing store and the raw-vegan restaurant. They say it is the smog that makes the ends of our days here so beautiful, but I discard this rumor. If far away in Russia, a meteorite can enter our atmosphere, warning that one day Apophis, named for the Egyptian god of destruction and death, will collide with Earth, why not see cosmic coincidence here on the Plage?

Thus I return to Robert Frost with whom I began, whose resemblance to Papa Legba, Guardian of the Crossroads, is suddenly clear. Frost, like Legba, is fond of choices, oppositions, of paths diverging in a snowy or yellow wood, fire and ice, vocation versus avocation, walling in and walling out, of the strange pull of death on an active man or woman in the midst of life. Leonard, abandoning swagger, no longer at home in Silver Lake or anywhere, lingered for months at this frontier, bourne of the undiscovered country from which no traveler returns. Frost ponders this too but, unlike Legba, stops short of ushering us in. The boy in Birches only swings towards heaven. Earth’s the right place for love, confirms the poet-speaker. Though much closer to death than the boy, an older man in After Apple Picking also shies away: his ladder points toward heaven still, and in the end he seems to settle, if only temporarily, for just some human sleep. With whom shall I side? With both. With neither. I find myself unripe, unready, as I leave the Plage to continue my walk, swerving onto Griffith Park Boulevard where Found Cat or other sign of good Karma may await us.

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.