If it is evil to care too much for things that have neither mind nor heart, then I am evil. For in the house where I was born, I cared about the tiles around the fireplace, the oak banister broad enough to slide down, even the dumbwaiter, which carried up the trays for those of us in bed with measles, whooping cough, chicken pox, or mumps.
Once, two male cousins, aged eight and nine, sat on top of the dumbwaiter and tried to lower themselves, hand over hand, by its ropes, from upstairs to downstairs, and became stuck between floors. “Let them hang there,” one uncle said. “They can cool their heels,” another shouted down the shaft.
And so it was during all my childhood I touched such things as glass doorknobs, the carved border of a table, the inside of a windowpane when it rained. Outdoors I touched leaves, branches, and stones and still do.
Not long ago, in conversation, my son suddenly said, out of context, “I don’t know much about this business of dying.” As he might have said, “I don’t know much about pruning this boxwood hedge,” or “I never learned much Italian. ”
Relatives lived three canyons beyond ours, in a bigger house on a bigger hill. They had room in their garden for cows, chickens, parrots, peacocks, and some captive deer. There was also a shallow lake, which rose and fell with the seasons. A leaking rowboat and some swans floated on its surface, and as children,. it was entire joy, no matter how wet our feet, to row this boat as fast as possible in the direction of a swan and watch its flight.
On one side of the canyon in this garden stood a newly built Japanese house with paper walls. Sometimes we entered this empty replica through its wooden door, sat on the matted floor, and pretended to have tea from an empty black pot that stood on a low black table. After that, we sometimes put our fingers through the paper of the sliding doors. When the Japanese caretaker caught us at this, he would chase us away, shouting in his language as we fled. I suppose‘teasing and destroying are part of every child’s nature, just as endless reasoning is part of an adult’s, but if I could find the swans and the caretaker now, I would perform a deep Oriental bow of apology.
The elderly relatives who lived in the house ate chicken and eggs and drank milk from their garden and, I suppose, enjoyed the oranges, loquats, and figs from their trees as much as we, as children, did. Train tracks entered one side of the garden. But why? we wondered. Who got off and who got on and where did they go?
When we went, washed and combed, to call on these relatives in their house, we rang the doorbell and then guessed who would answer. It was bound to be McGilvray, the butler, John, the footman, or Alfonso, the valet. If we were lucky, it was Alfonso, a man who liked children, no matter how bad, who would lead us down a long hall to the room where the elderly relatives sat. They were an unusual pair. A divorce had made it possible for him to marry her. She had been a widow and wore mourning for her prior husband as long as she lived. She wore the wedding bands of both husbands on a finger of her left hand. She saw the world through very thick glasses and had a Brussels griffon for a pet. Her present husband, the male elderly relative, had a pocket watch that played a tune. He ignored his second wife’s black dress, black hat and veil, ignored the second ring and the Brussels griffon. He saw her on the other side of the thick glasses.
Now they are buried together in a graceful, perfectly proportioned, circular structure, designed by John Russell Pope. Floored and domed and columned in marble, it stands on grass among trees, not far from where we used to chase peacocks for a tail feather. It is called the mausoleum.
When Alfonso died twenty or thirty years ago, his will provided that flowers from him be laid on these relatives’ graves. A dozen or so of us came on that green, sunny day and heard my oldest sister, Liz, say a few words about our Spanish friend, whose natural state of being was happiness.
I hope, and have left instructions, to have my ashes tossed, or spilled out, into the Pacific Ocean. As I understand it, California law allows the disposition of cremated remains wherever they cause no nuisance. So far, I myself have disposed of four people’s ashes, three times illegally before the new law was passed. Each time the place was the concerned individual’s choice, spoken or unspoken. Under oak trees, in the sea, Mexico.
I suppose I grew up like the rest of my contemporaries, on peaks of rapture and in pits of despair. I loved my piano lessons and even the hours of practicing they involved. How is it that all I have left of those twenty years are a nocturne, a few waltzes, and part of a sonata? Five people in my family played the piano, and, among them, I was the least accomplished. But I am glad now for every Czerny exercise I played, for the thousand repetitions of arpeggios and scales.
School, always a scene of heights and depths, reeled on, taking me from Latin verbs to Virgil, decimals to logarithms, and, in the case of boys, from imaginary encounters to the rejection of the awkward reality. Suddenly at seventeen I grew up, fell half in love, and went east to college.
Six weeks before I left for New England, I was invited to my first prizefight on my first date with the man, then nineteen, I eventually married.
This person, on a July evening of singular calm, took me to a championship bout. Part of a sell-out crowd of 35,000, we sat outdoors, three rows back from the ring, I in flowered chiffon and a wide-brimmed straw hat, whose ribbon fell in streamers down my back.
The moment we sat down, my escort said, “You’ll have to take off that hat.”
During the preliminary bouts, I learned a little about what to watch for and why it mattered. Then came the main event, a contest between two middleweights, Ace “Wildcat” Hudkins and Sergeant Sammy Baker. By the fourth round, blood poured from their noses, ears, and chins, reddening the referee’s white shirt. I watched it spray into the air, along with one or two teeth. Ace Hudkins won the fight.
“Well, how did you like it?” my friend asked, as we drove home.
“I need to know more about the fine points,” I told him, and, over a period of forty-four years, tried, without success, to find the grace and glory in this particular manly art.
The rest of our dates that summer were unexceptional, consisting of movies and long, aimless drives at night. We headed north, east, south, or west, making here a right turn, there a left, circling one, or two, or three blocks at a time, passing dark houses and closed stores, and sometimes coming back to start again.
This was territory we knew and, at the same time, could scarcely recognize. It hung in space between heaven and earth.
My son’s first word was “car, ” and, as of two months ago, his doctor has forbidden him to drive, Now his car is parked outside his house and is visible from several windows. I have forgotten the details of the Chinese water torture we used to hear of, but it must be something like this.
I left California with a classmate named Jane, and some friends came to the train station to see us off. The nineteen-year-old who turned into the man I married was among them and brought with him three dozen long-stemmed red roses. These spent three days and nights in a container of water on the wall of our compartment. I sat on one of the green seats while the landscape disappeared behind me, watched the buds open and, twice a day, added water. Because of this attention, the red roses lasted all the way to Chicago.
“Those flowers!” said Jane.
On the way to Massachusetts, we stopped in New York long enough for me to buy my first and last fur coat, full-length musk-rat, and to
see Good News, Rio Rita, and My Maryland.
When I got to Smith, four special delivery letters from the donor of the roses were in my box, and Northampton was bright with fall. I signed up for music and astronomy and Catullus. Three weeks later, leaves began to drop from trees, afternoons turned cold, and, not far away and visible from my window, a boat started crisscrossing Paradise Pond, while its two-man crew dragged the lake for the body of a student, thought to have drowned herself there.
At this same window, looking in the opposite direction, I might see, a few months later, the mailman making his way toward me through the drifts of snow on Green Street, a letter from across the continent already in his hand.
With friends, I frequented a nighttime waffle shop, returning to my living quarters just before lockout. On weekends we patronized a pastry shop, where each of us ordered half a fudge sandwich. The result of these indulgences was going home for Christmas twenty pounds heavier than when I left.
“You look different,” everyone said, and I was thankful for the straight, short dresses we wore in 1927.
That winter vacation, as far as I can see in my backward glance, was without flaw. Unflawed my unchanged bedroom with its window opening on a sleeping porch. Unchanged our old dog of mixed breed, Carlo, who lay on the chair decreed to be his, sleeping the end of his life away.
As though from a Christmas cornucopia spilled the scent of cedar, fir, juniper, and pine, the holly wreath on the front door, the garland on the stairs, the tree hung with tinsel, cranberries, and popcorn balls. The cornucopia poured out a gardenia corsage kept chilled in our icebox until the second it was pinned on the shoulder of a fringed, white-beaded dress. It rained down a dance and a new musical, The Desert Song, and some perfume named Nuit de Noel. It rained down a man, he of the four special delivery letters and the three dozen red roses.
By June, I had lost twenty pounds in Northampton and enrolled at Stanford, where I spent the next year and a half. Forty-seven years would pass before I graduated.
In the spring, when I was twenty and he was twenty-two and graduating from Stanford, the man who brought me the roses and I decided to get married in the fall. That summer I went to Europe with a friend named Lydia. Her father’s first cousin was our chaperone. Her presence seemed normal in 1930. Of this trip, what I remember most frequently are the events following my purchase of a book. It was June, it was Florence, and the book was a Tauchnitz edition of
Lady Chatterley’s
Lover, bought at a stall near the Ponte Vecchio. We were staying at a
pensione
on the Arno, and it was there I read D. H. Lawrence’s novel, which was banned at that time and for the next twenty-nine years in the United States.
We traveled on to Venice, where Lydia borrowed the book, then on to Switzerland, where, in Zermatt, our chaperone asked to read it. When she finished it, three days later, she pronounced that the book must go at once. That afternoon we walked up a path beside a rushing stream in the shadow of the Matterhorn and followed it to a footbridge, where we stopped midway across the torrent. At this point the guardian of our itinerary and innocence took Lady Chatterley out of her bag.
Did she speak a few words? I only know the three of us watched together as the lovely, clear-printed volume was swept into the rapids and disappeared.
There followed, beginning a few months later, forty-two years of marriage, including two separate pieces of time which, recollected now, impress me as nearly perfect. Later on, after my husband’s death, another came along, and it too approached perfection.
Totally spared by the passage of, not actual, but remembered time are the summers the four of us, as a family, spent at our first beach. These were the years of the thirties, when there was very little right in the rest of the world and everything right where we were. The town was small, well served by one grocery, one drugstore, a post office, and a telephone switchboard for calling out. Telegrams could be sent and received at the train station. I never discovered whether it was the slow economy or the fact that passengers in the cars that sped past on the highway never turned to look that prevented change. But I am convinced that the scattered houses on the beach and on the hill, the expanse of empty sand, the endless and untroubled coming on of days and nights, the slow hours passing unmeasured and unnoticed, were my first intimations of paradise.
As I recall it, the hill was wooded with eucalyptus and pine, with sage and buckwheat in the spaces between. There was a canyon full of honeysuckle, where someone had hung a rope swing from a tree branch. There was a narrow dirt lane lined with nasturtiums, another with morning glories. From the top of the hill, where we walked at sunset, we could see the ocean wrapping itself around the world.
On overcast days we drove to one of Junípero Serra’s missions, where a Franciscan father in sandals and brown habit would point out Spanish and Indian relics in the museum. “The baptistery,” he would say as we moved on, or “The organ,” or “The chalice.” Then all of us, unconnected as we were to churches, would listen with undiminished attention, even though this father had been our guide last time and had shown us these same things.
Then we would be let out of the church and into a walled garden so packed and crowded with fruit trees, vines, and flowers that a hoe, or even a spade, could scarcely find a space between the roots. There was a sundial in this garden, and a hollowed stone bowl for birds to bathe in. An elderly Franciscan was in charge of this modest square of glory, and, on our regular returns year after year, we grew to know him.
“It is beautiful,” we would tell him, pointing out a poppy or a clove pink. “And you have done all this yourself.” And the rope-girdled gardener would point out a sunflower grown from seed.
Then came the summer when, after visiting the chapel and the church, we stepped out into the walled garden and found him gone. A brown-haired, thin young man was in his place.
“Where is the other father who was here for so long?” I asked.
There followed a pause, and I went on, “Did he die?”
The new gardener shook his head, allowed a minute to pass, then said, “He was reassigned.” With that he picked up a watering can and turned his back.