Landscape: Memory (24 page)

Mr. Dunphy gives me the creeps.

The wind chimes ring a strange, familiar song, but I still can't place it.

22 AUGUST 1915

I'd thought Saturdays would be lazy days, but Mr. Wilson scheduled General Recreation for Saturday mornings (and Duncan's swimming has been set for Saturday afternoons). So I spent yesterday trying my hand at basketball, something for which I have a great deal of enthusiasm but very little facility. Today I slept in with Duncan for the first time since we moved.

We drove each other to delirium, it being so long since. I fancy I can make his body burst one of these times soon, and him mine too. We fell in and out of half sleep, dimly aware of a world that was fully awake and bathed in the day's sunshine. We weren't, and that was fine. I can say so much more to him when my mind is too tired to work. That buzzing, hummed growl comes crawling into my throat, replacing the confusing array of words that normally clutter our conversations. It's a song in my bones. It's like a dog's loving whine, simple and pure. My song has a tune, slippery and erratic, but a tune nonetheless. If I think and try to place it, the whole thing just disappears.

It reminds me of the problem of reading in the dark. You must keep looking to the side to see anything at all.

All my classes have begun and I find it quite exciting to be taught by actual professors and sit in lovely old lecture halls with students taking notes and none of the "flimsiness," as Flora puts it, of Lowell. Military Training is the only blemish on my schedule but I've just decided not to attend. I have no interest in learning the finer points of war or marching around a field with little wooden rifles trying to mind the diagonals. Duncan says it's great fun and I should think of it as a great elaborate game with a multitude of players and simple rules like he does. I don't understand its attraction.

There's that eerie chime again. I think it's a very old song. Like Latin, if ever it's sung.

26 AUGUST 1915

Mr. Dunphy is the chaplain from
The Cautionary Tales,
the one where George blows the house to bits with the cursed balloon. And Mr. Thwing looks rather like George, truth be told. Maybe this is why his face has bothered me, floating in my mind, obscurely wed to the awful chaplain whose death I'd imagined so many times when I was little. My first nightmares came from
The Cautionary Tales.
Evidently they'd lingered somewhere, contributing an unspecific bad taste whenever I saw Mr. Dunphy.

I didn't see Duncan until late in the afternoon (again), a little past five, when I came back from drawing—four hours every Tuesday and Thursday. He'd pushed the room around into our planned rearrangement, two lovely chairs and a small end table gathered in the double bays facing south. He looked up from a big picturebook of buildings and smiled big and bright as I've ever seen, bouncing up from the doubled-up beds and wrestling me back down onto them.

"You," he said. "Why've you been gone so long?"

I rundled my fingers round through his thick brown hair, scritching his scalp and squeezing the soft skin at the base of his neck.

"Drawing goes till five. Tuesday and Thursday. Where were you when I came back after Hygiene?"

"When?"

"Nine. I came back straightaway to have breakfast." I did. Mrs. Dunphy was puttering about in her housecoat, sniffing at old biscuits in the bread box.

"I have Calculus at nine."

I rolled over on top of him. "Hhmmph," I grunted. "I had breakfast with Mrs. Dunphy."

He licked me up my neck, and mimicked me. "Hhmmph. Was it a distinct pleasure?"

Professor Kurtz had mentioned "distinct pleasures" not more than a day ago, though without reference to Mrs. Dunphy. He'd put the emphasis on "distinct."

We'd begun with some sort of ancient ritual recitation, all of us muttering syllables from off the board. They were in Greek and I don't know Greek. Nor does most the class. The portly Kurtz (he'd chosen to wear black academic gowns that day) insisted we recite in unison our reading of these oddly squiggled words and so we did. There were twenty of us, using our voices uncertainly. The professor stood up front booming the correct pronunciations, waving his thickly draped arms like an overweight bat attempting takeoff, and generally inspiring in us a reckless spirit of camaraderie. If an ancient Greek should have happened by I'm certain our "language" would've passed through his ears unrecognized.

"Utterly indistinct," Professor Kurtz whispered into the silence that followed our brief recitation. "Like a babbling brook to a deer." I gazed out the arched window imagining deer afoot in the forest, their soft ears stood up and stiff, listening to the distant babble of the brook.

"The sounds Greek men made in conversation, the melodious songs they sang onstage as drama. Through your mouths they are torn and mangled into noise, reduced to indistinct utterance." I sat in rapt attention now, as he'd brought the topic around to us, and I was beginning to fear his reproach. To my great relief it was not forthcoming.

"But you are not to blame for the ravages of time, the failure of man to preserve what has passed. The perfect song of Aeschylus, the lilting words of Euripides are to you nothing more than air. Loud empty air." I noticed the persistent scribbling of my more mature classmates, some of whom smoked pipes. They seemed to be making records of Kurtz's introductory comments. Eager to keep up, I opened my little pamphlet of "Orestes" and composed a few brief notes on the back flap.

"Greek air," I began. "Noise not song." It reminded me of those frustrating moments when words held nothing for me, as when Duncan ran away and I couldn't find words to say "stay." I know
I
failed, not the words. "Stay" is more than empty air. But it was not enough to say all I felt. This little daydream took me far away, sailing over the bay and above the ferry to watch myself looking back at the Berkeley shore, looking to see Duncan running. I didn't see him then, that day, but I could see him now, remembering, floating a few hundred feet above, in my head. I returned to class with the sharp slap of a yardstick across the tabletop.

"Clear distinction is the essence of a working language." Profesor Kurtz seemed to be addressing this elusive bit of wisdom to me. I scribbled it quickly onto my flap.

"Clear distinctions," I wrote.

"The pleasure distinctions give is communication. Words sit separately from one another, holding and containing some meaningful portion of experience, carving out that simple part and capturing it in a clear sound."

"Distinct pleasures," I scribbled, summarizing a bit.

" 'Desk.' Said, heard. That simple thing held. 'Plate.' 'Cap.' 'Pipe.' Each sound said, heard. Each sound holding the simple thing inside."

"Hold my cap and pipe." Notes were really quite simple, once one got the drift of things. Others were nodding their heads judiciously, in time with Kurtz's steady, even syllables.

Do words hold things inside? I could easily think so. There is no better explanation for the mind's conjuring of exactly that right thing upon hearing the sound of the word. "Cat" is said, and what do I see? A cat, somewhere in my head. It reminds me of Cicero's memory matrices. They were meant to hold whole thoughts of things past. It is that same hope of holding something that is fluid and many-layered inside some frozen, fixed surface. "Cat." As thin and brittle a surface as you'll find anywhere, even at the Fair.

Or "Duncan." Some things words can't hold. They're too big or they never hold still. Somehow they keep exceeding the borders of the word or changing the shape of it. Like the word "fear" can never fully hold the actual experience it is supposed to hold. That's like holding hot molten lead in a thin gum bubble. The edge is indistinct and unfixed. There is no clear distinction.

Duncan and I lay there half-napping in the late evening in our room and didn't say any more. My mouth could not find reliable words to hold what I felt. Kissing him became the only fulfilling alternative. It was something my mouth could offer that was wide and wet enough to carry what I felt across to him.

 
* * * 

29 AUGUST 1915

Flora's arrived in Berkeley and will begin classes tomorrow, only a week late. She'll be taking Professor Brown's course on memory, which I'm in, and Duncan's English course. The rest is a mystery to me, except she's got Ladies' Physical Education. She's asked if she may perform her little rite of spring with me and the five ladies.

She's taken that little room in Mrs. Meekshtais's house, on our recommendation. We bundled all her bags up, tying them by ropes to her motorcar, and she drove off round the bottom of the bay to move in today.

Duncan and I were in the city most of the morning, first with Flora and then at our house, packing up various things to bring back over to Berkeley. Mother dropped in to find out about classes and to gauge my general health and grooming.

We packed the magic lamp and a tiny metal vessel Duncan keeps by his bed, and two carpets, both quite small, one from by the fire and the other from the kitchen. I gathered up the books I'd been reading in the spring, the ones I'd never finished. Mother sat very primly in the window seat and prompted me with questions, gazing out into the street and brushing her short little bob as I packed.

"Does the art instructor use Ruskin?" she asked.

"No," I answered, "though he seemed interested when I told him I'd used Ruskin for the lines. He won't be giving me his own instruction until I'm through with this project." I reached around under my bed for any books I might've let slide there. "He believes one learns best by pursuing independent work."

"Is there any treatment of the history of art?"

The Thousand and One Nights
came out, wrapped in a packing of dust.

"Not in a studio course, Mummy. Don't be daft. I'll take that in the history department, next term."

"Don't call me daft, pumpkin. Many great educators have worked wonders by combining studio time with historical investigation." She smiled a quick smile, drawing the brush down across her bangs. "I'm merely inquiring about those features I've come to expect from higher-quality universities."

"Well, truth be told, I've a feeling Berkeley isn't really so high quality a university." I shared this little confidence, letting her in on an opinion I'd originally thought to hide.

She brought the brush down to her lap.

"Really, pumpkin?" she asked with a tilt of her head. "Why is that?"

"They've required me to take Military Training," I began, inflaming her with what I knew would hit hardest. "And our schedules are so helter-skelter Duncan and I have no classes together and rarely see each other at all until the evening when we're long past pooped out and don't have the energy to beat a flea, let alone do anything together," I went on, getting to what really mattered most to me.

"Military Training?" Mother interrupted. "For you in particular?"

"For
everyone
, Mummy. Every 'able-bodied young man.' " I gave her the horrible truth straight out.

"Oh, pumpkin, tenderness. How
awful
for you." She came across to the bed where I was sitting with my little book. "Surely there must be some proviso for those who object to such folly."

I held my hands in my lap and looked up at her kind face.

"None." And I tilted my head just a touch. "I've not been attending. Because of my objections." I smartly left the nature of those objections vague (which, in point of fact, was an act of utter honesty; my objections
were
vague and purposefully unspecific). "I hope no trouble comes of it."

"And Duncan? What has Duncan done about this requirement?" She rubbed my slumping shoulders sympathetically.

"Duncan doesn't mind," I admitted, after considering a small lie. "He enjoys the exercise and the sheer numbers, as he puts it."

"Simply terrible," Mother muttered, still musing on my fate. "They're dragging you into the army by the back door."

"Not to mention my schedule," I added, returning to the real issue.

"Yes, of course," she agreed. "That awful schedule."