Dorothea,
Would you mind making one teensy weensy concession to modernity? _Get_ a cell phone. Or, failing that, get that ancient rotary wall phone in your house fixed, because this business of leaving messages with that nutty Russian woman who lives up the road has just gotten ridiculous. Today she was telling me about her toenail fungus and the herbal remedies she's been trying, and the success or failure of each. The other day she was asking me for Mother's recipe for scalloped oysters, and advice on what brand of canned cranberry sauce was the best. I was like: sorry, honey, but my mother is in the hospital, or has just gotten out of the hospital, and I really don't have time to exchange Thanksgiving cookery tips on the phone with you or serve as a dial-up herbal apothecary.
Anyway, Dorothea, I don't honestly think that your Swiss Family Robinson lifestyle will be compromised in the least if you have a phone. You're 59, remember, and what with your bum knee and propensity to fall off ladders and chop off pinky fingers while digging up potatoes I don't think having a phone handy is an imprudent idea, now, is it? Think of how pleasant having a phone would be! We could dial each other up for a spur-of-the-moment chat and gossip session (ha!), and I could keep you up to date on Mother's condition without having to deal with addled, irritatingly chatty Russian go-betweens or write _letters_, of all things, which is terrible for my repetitive stress problem. My wrist is already aching, and all of Mother's pens seem to be out of ink. I don't think I even know how to _write_ with a pen anymore. This letter will be brief.
Mother's much better--that's the long and the short of what I wanted to say. She spent the first day home from the hospital in bed with her ratty fox stole draped about her shoulders, like some old dowager Marie Dressler would play in a 1930s film, and all of her horrible cats draped over all the other parts of her. These animals are a real nuisance, I have to say--they climb on everything, including the dining room table and the piano, and run around her feet so much that it's a wonder she hasn't fallen and broken her hip. Then too they have an pathological aversion to me, probably because I keep shooing them out the back sliding door whenever I get the chance! They're supposed to stay indoors at night, but (don't tell Mother) I've been locking that mangy orange one--Hiram--out to keep it from scratching on my door at three a.m. I do have to get a little sleep, and it's hard around here with Mother rattling around in the bathroom three and four times a night, and listening to talk radio at 3:00 a.m. at a crazily loud volume.
Since the day before yesterday, Mother's been creeping around a bit on her cane, eating a little (mainly Ritz crackers and pimento cheese), and--surprise, surprise--appearing punctually at cocktail hour for the first of several bourbon highballs and her nutritious evening meal of canned herring in sour cream. I'm trying to limit her to one (highball) but she's so sneaky that it's difficult; every time I look around the golden liquid has mysteriously crept up another inch in her glass. The doctor doesn't like it at all, but what am I going to do? The woman's eighty six; if she wants to drink, I say let her. (But God how she scares me, teetering around on that cane.) Anyhow it's not her drinking that's her problem, it's her lungs. Wouldn't it have been nice if she had quit smoking when the Surgeon General's report came out instead of waiting until she was 77 or 78 and mildly emphysemic? But you can't tell her anything. Three times a day she has to withdraw into her bedroom for her breathing therapy, which involves hooking an oxygen tube around her head and inhaling this medicine for thirty minutes. She was trying to do it in front of the fire in the living room until I put a stop to that; the last thing we need is some catastrophic explosion on top of anything else!
But oh my God, Dorothea, you can't imagine how truly dismal this town is. Downtown is boarded up except for a few discount furniture places and a dollar store that sells cheap gimcracks; there's nowhere to eat except "Appleby's" and "Hardees" and some godawful buffet place called the "Pinetop Inn" that Mother used to go to with Evie on Sundays. The old Charles House has been sold and will be torn down next spring, Mother tells me, without a trace of melancholy. She's never been one to be sentimental about the past. Aren't we lucky that she didn't follow through on her threat to move us back here after she and Father split? Where would we be today, I wonder, if she had? You'd likely be some doctor's wife, vast and wide-hipped in bright floral prints, active in the church and with Women Aglow or something, and I'd be--what? Maybe some paunchy antiques dealer with some hunky "kept boy" assistant, making monthly trips to Greensboro or someplace to see traveling productions of "Cats" and "Fiddler on the Roof" at the Civic Center. Well, maybe we'd have found a way to escape! Anyway, everyone looks sad and beaten-down and of course terribly _big_ here: fat not in a jocund, laughing, merry-peasant like way, but just miserably, sadly, woefully heavy, as if it were a disease they had caught quite by accident.
Some of the young people, such as these thick-necked, swaggering boys with little feathery moustaches I was looking at when I was in the ABC package store the day before yesterday (replenishing our booze supply for Thanksgiving Day), are rather fetching, I must confess. I was afraid I was a little too obvious in my ogling, but then I remembered that I'm protected from any "bashing" episodes by the invisibility syndrome that afflicts everyone after 45 or so: one simply ceases to have any sort of noticeable physical presence for the young; one becomes one of the gray, anonymous shades shuffling around decrepitly in the background, a ashen frieze of the wrinkled and superannuated. Such a fate wouldn't be quite so painful, I don't think, if one's appetites, shall we say, would fade and shrivel away in the same way, and at the same time, that our faces and bodies do. But these importunate wishes persist, I see now, long after the ability to act on them or inspire them in others dies away--they go on, it seems, to the very grave.
Our Thanksgiving wasn't very festive, but neither of us was in an especially festive mood. With some ham that a neighbor lady kindly brought, and some leftover potato salad from KFC, and some canned yams that I dressed up with chopped pecans and sugar, we had a semblance of a meal, washed down with some cheap Zinfandel Mother had stashed away in her liquor cabinet. Not very appetizing. Afterwards we retired to the sitting room to watch some BBC miniseries thing with bug-eyed, faintly hysterical-looking ladies in nineteenth century dress creeping fearfully around some dark English manor house with candles, pursued by sinister men in frock coats. Can't remember what it was--these BBC/Masterpiece Theater things, of which we've been watching quite a few, begin to run together after a while. Mary Renfroe called while it was on to see how Mother is doing. She can't come visit just now because of her new baby, who has a cold, but promises to pop up for a weekend after the New Year, which will cheer Mother, I think. She has always thought highly of her, as you know.
I'll be back home next week, provided that my plane isn't hijacked by an Islamic terrorist and crashed into the Empire State Building. After being away for a week, I find I'm dying to get back to NYC, though for the past few months I've been absolutely dying to get out. It seems now that there's no place I'd rather be, perversely enough.
When I get back we must sit down and have a talk, Dorothea, about what we're going to do about Mother next. She has that woman Prellie coming in each morning to dust and surreptitiously pocket little packs of sugar and sheets of fabric softener and toilet paper rolls, but my feeling is that she needs much more that now--a permanent home-health-care person, or (God forbid) some nursing home/assisted living type place. Naturally Mother says she'd rather die, and in fact in her more melodramatic moments claims that she'll see to it that she _does_ die if it comes to that. Despite all of these morbid avowals, however, I somehow think that if she were going to voluntarily kick the bucket, as she's been darkly threatening to for ten years or so now, she'd have done it by now. Something keeps her here with us, I'm not sure what. It's not religious belief, because she claims to have none, and it's not friends, because all of hers are either dead or senile, like poor Evie.
Maybe it's us, Dorothea--did you ever think of that? She keeps on living for us. Jesus, what a sad thought. It's enough to make you cry.
Get a phone, Dorothea! Get a phone!
Love,
Maury
Sunday, July 15, 2007
Thursday, July 12, 2007
January 19, 1935
Dear Miss Lavinia Charles,
You don't know me, but I know you, ha ha! You _and_ your family, and your ways. Like everybody else who lives in this town, how could I not? I can't pick up the paper without reading in the society column that "Lavinia Charles is home for the holidays from the State Normal School, visiting her mother and father, Henry and Caroline Charles," as if anybody gave a damn, as if nobody else's child had gone off to school and come home to visit, or "Caroline Charles hosted a tea in honor of Miss Claudia Wallis, who will be departing next week to winter on the French Riviera in the company her mother, Mrs. Preston Beauregard Wallis." I can't walk down Main St. without seeing your family's big Packard sweeping by, carrying you all to church, to the Country Club, or out to the covered bridge for a picnic, and all of you inside dressed up to the nines, with hats and jewels and gloves on, looking out at the rest of us passing by on foot like we were savages in Africa. I can't so much as stop by your front gate to look at your flowers without getting a mean look from one of your servants on the porch, who are as haughty and proud as you all, though they are just common dirty negroes, no better than the rest. And until recently I couldn't go in Aubrey's without having your mother sweep in, veiled and bejewelled and grand as the Queen of Sheba, and break ahead of everyone in line with her little breathless "Excuse me." "Excuse me, I simply must get by." "Excuse me, I have business with Mr. Aubrey." "Excuse me, I have a package waiting for me at the counter." Parting the crowds with a little wave of her black gloved hand, as if the rest of us didn't have any reason to be there. As if the rest of us could just _wait_.
But lately it seems as if the queen has fallen from her throne! Now she scurries around town in ragged dresses and sunhats the likes of which I've never seen before--like something the dog got to--running up and down the streets like a "lady of the evening" who didn't manage to get home before dawn. Now if you so much as meet her eye she jerks her head around like a bee stung her. Now she doesn't so much as dare to set foot in Aubrey's or appear at church, too ashamed to show herself before the eyes of God and her neighbors, I guess. I'd be ashamed too, if I had done what she has!
For you see it seems that she's not so discriminating anymore about the company she keeps! Oh no, she's become very democratic! If you're a strapping young buck with strong shoulders and a sunburned neck, slim waist and sturdy muscled thighs, you're in high cotton with her! Oh yes, you can become great friends with her, the closest, most intimate kind, be ye ever so common, be ye lacking in teeth or sense or the ability to read or write, even! If you're handsome enough, you can even get to know her in the Biblical sense!
I guess the queen didn't think anyone would notice. I guess the queen thought that we were all too stupid to see what was going on right before our eyes. I guess she thought if we did see, we'd keep quiet, because everyone who lives in this town knows that it's a law written in stone that one is never to speak a word against the Charles family, oh no, heaven forbid. Heaven forbid one should say the least little unflattering thing about such august pillars of our community, who have given so much money to the church and to the children's home and for the monument for the Civil War dead and for the new fountain in the park. Oh no, we're supposed to keep quiet, smile at you when you pass by, let you break ahead of us in line and look down on us and walk all over us even while you parade your licentiousness and lust and immorality right before our eyes.
Well guess what? I see. I know. And I'm not the only one, believe me. The difference with me is, I'm telling what I've seen. I'm not keeping quiet--at least not for free! Because I don't think that money and position and a front pew in St. James's and a silver tea service and silk and lace should allow you to get away with what the rest of us would be strung up in front of the courthouse for. Because I don't think the best manners and piano lessons and finishing school at Brenau entitle one to engage in behavior that would make a streetwalker blush!
So if I were you, Miss Lavinia, I'd think very carefully about what I've said, very carefully indeed. I'd do more than think. I'd take whatever steps were necessary to preserve the last shred of honor your family possesses, before it's too late. And it soon will be, believe me, if it isn't already, ha ha!
Sincerely,
A concerned citizen!
You don't know me, but I know you, ha ha! You _and_ your family, and your ways. Like everybody else who lives in this town, how could I not? I can't pick up the paper without reading in the society column that "Lavinia Charles is home for the holidays from the State Normal School, visiting her mother and father, Henry and Caroline Charles," as if anybody gave a damn, as if nobody else's child had gone off to school and come home to visit, or "Caroline Charles hosted a tea in honor of Miss Claudia Wallis, who will be departing next week to winter on the French Riviera in the company her mother, Mrs. Preston Beauregard Wallis." I can't walk down Main St. without seeing your family's big Packard sweeping by, carrying you all to church, to the Country Club, or out to the covered bridge for a picnic, and all of you inside dressed up to the nines, with hats and jewels and gloves on, looking out at the rest of us passing by on foot like we were savages in Africa. I can't so much as stop by your front gate to look at your flowers without getting a mean look from one of your servants on the porch, who are as haughty and proud as you all, though they are just common dirty negroes, no better than the rest. And until recently I couldn't go in Aubrey's without having your mother sweep in, veiled and bejewelled and grand as the Queen of Sheba, and break ahead of everyone in line with her little breathless "Excuse me." "Excuse me, I simply must get by." "Excuse me, I have business with Mr. Aubrey." "Excuse me, I have a package waiting for me at the counter." Parting the crowds with a little wave of her black gloved hand, as if the rest of us didn't have any reason to be there. As if the rest of us could just _wait_.
But lately it seems as if the queen has fallen from her throne! Now she scurries around town in ragged dresses and sunhats the likes of which I've never seen before--like something the dog got to--running up and down the streets like a "lady of the evening" who didn't manage to get home before dawn. Now if you so much as meet her eye she jerks her head around like a bee stung her. Now she doesn't so much as dare to set foot in Aubrey's or appear at church, too ashamed to show herself before the eyes of God and her neighbors, I guess. I'd be ashamed too, if I had done what she has!
For you see it seems that she's not so discriminating anymore about the company she keeps! Oh no, she's become very democratic! If you're a strapping young buck with strong shoulders and a sunburned neck, slim waist and sturdy muscled thighs, you're in high cotton with her! Oh yes, you can become great friends with her, the closest, most intimate kind, be ye ever so common, be ye lacking in teeth or sense or the ability to read or write, even! If you're handsome enough, you can even get to know her in the Biblical sense!
I guess the queen didn't think anyone would notice. I guess the queen thought that we were all too stupid to see what was going on right before our eyes. I guess she thought if we did see, we'd keep quiet, because everyone who lives in this town knows that it's a law written in stone that one is never to speak a word against the Charles family, oh no, heaven forbid. Heaven forbid one should say the least little unflattering thing about such august pillars of our community, who have given so much money to the church and to the children's home and for the monument for the Civil War dead and for the new fountain in the park. Oh no, we're supposed to keep quiet, smile at you when you pass by, let you break ahead of us in line and look down on us and walk all over us even while you parade your licentiousness and lust and immorality right before our eyes.
Well guess what? I see. I know. And I'm not the only one, believe me. The difference with me is, I'm telling what I've seen. I'm not keeping quiet--at least not for free! Because I don't think that money and position and a front pew in St. James's and a silver tea service and silk and lace should allow you to get away with what the rest of us would be strung up in front of the courthouse for. Because I don't think the best manners and piano lessons and finishing school at Brenau entitle one to engage in behavior that would make a streetwalker blush!
So if I were you, Miss Lavinia, I'd think very carefully about what I've said, very carefully indeed. I'd do more than think. I'd take whatever steps were necessary to preserve the last shred of honor your family possesses, before it's too late. And it soon will be, believe me, if it isn't already, ha ha!
Sincerely,
A concerned citizen!
Saturday, July 7, 2007
December 9, 1974
Lavinia, honey,
I hope I did not sound as if I did not approve of your plan to move back here when we spoke on the phone yesterday evening! I think it is a lovely idea! It is just that I was so shocked--and surprised. To think that you, who have traveled the world and lived in New York and goodness knows where else, would want to come back home to settle after all these years. That did surprise me, but you were always one for surprises! But after I thought about it a little last night as I was lying awake--I had gotten cold, and I turned on the electric blanket for the first time this season (Peggy gave it to me, though I told her I didn't want one, but now I can't do without it!)--I decided it wasn't so surprising after all. After all, we are getting on in years, and I suppose it is natural that when we reach our time of life we begin to want to be near to the people and places we knew and loved best as children. We need all the love and closeness we can get at our age, don't you agree? And I can guarantee that you will have that here--love.
I do hope you won't be bored, tho'! Of course, you were always such a great reader, and I know books will keep you company and occupy your mind when you get weary of us. But books can only do so much! Fortunately there is a lot else here to keep you busy. There is church, for one thing--for you that would be St. James. They have a wonderful organ, and a perfectly wonderful director of music to play it! Leonard and I used to go to their Christmas concerts, but since he died I seem to have lost interest. This year, however, Lucybell Cauthon has made me promise to go with her, mainly because she can't drive anymore and needs someone to take her--and to help her get up those big stairs on her walker. She is practically _crippled_ with arthritis, one affliction I am free of, thank the Lord! It would help if she would lose some weight--that must be murder on her knees. But I suppose eating is the only consolation she has in her declining years. Getting fat is one danger of living here, I must warn you! I had to completely swear off bread and sweet things earlier this autumn, for all of my pantsuits had gotten so snug around the middle. I did treat myself to some of Annie Maud's wonderful lemon squares at a little shower we had for her niece Melanie--I figured I deserved a reward for being so good! I helped myself to some potato chips too, though they were also "off limits!" Annie Maud had put out some sour cream dip I couldn't resist, with little chives cut up in it. She always does things up so prettily.
Melanie--the niece--is marrying a widower whose first wife was killed in a car accident here two Christmases ago. She (Ruth Ann was her name, she was the sweetest thing) was coming home after the Christmas Eve festivities in the fellowship hall at First Methodist. She was struck down while crossing Main, right in front of the church--a truck driver, and he was drunk. They couldn't even have an open casket at the funeral, because her head was severed from the rest of her body. And she had two darling little blond children! Well, the Lord works in mysterious ways, and I see His hand at work in this marriage, providing those lovely children with a new mother who I know will love and cherish them as if they were her own. Melanie is a lovely girl too, though she has a protruding front _tooth_ I wish she would see to. I said to Lurlene when we were watching a little fashion show Melanie was in at the Country Club last summer, I said, wouldn't Melanie be a _beauty_ if it weren't for that tooth! She looked so cute in those little tennis dresses she was modeling, so trim and petite. But when she opened her mouth to smile I had to turn my eyes to the pretty flower arrangements. It quite spoiled the effect!
Mercy, I have wandered away from my point again--"digressed," as old Reverend Saxon used to say about his sermons, which ran on and on until old senile Miss Wallis would holler out "What's your point?" from the back pew! Oh: the other thing I was going to tell you about was the literary club I belong to--that might interest you. In fact I talked to Eula, the president, when I called her up this morning to see how she was doing, and I mentioned that she might have a new recruit! She went on a Caribbean cruise and came back with dysentery. She is a little better now, though she still has to run to the bathroom nearly every hour--in fact she had to excuse herself to visit the toilet while I was talking to her. Anyhow we don't read anything "heavy," but we have read some wonderful books, and our discussions at our meetings can be quite stimulating! I hosted the club last meeting, and served my floating island for dessert, and that got raves, much more so than the Fig Newtons that Gladys Aubrey served last time. Somebody should have said something to her about that, but she is sort of "off" lately--repeats herself over and over--and so nobody dared. So we just munched in silence. Anyway she never could cook worth a toot, so perhaps it was for the best. She used to send egg custards over here that were practically _raw._ Anyway we read a biography of Stonewall Jackson. Next time we are reading a novel by Eugenia Price, I forget which right now, but I am enjoying it. It is sort of a mystery story with lighthouses and such--I read a little of it before bedtime every night, but I only manage a few pages before I start nodding off! Age, I guess.
Then there is the bridge club, but I don't know whether you will be interested in that. To be honest I am not sure I would recommend joining just now. We have a new member, Priscilla DeLoach, a Baptist, who refuses to play for money--not even so much as a dime--and so ruins the fun for everybody. She closes her eyes and says a little prayer before each game. Isn't that silly! Fortunately she may not be able to play for a while after she has surgery on her bunions next month, so that will give us a nice break.
As for where you will live, there are some lovely "ranch" homes on that ridge up by the Country Club that might suit you to a tee. You can see for miles and miles up there, all the way to the foothills on clear days. Alva Lee lives up there and is always complaining about the deer eating up her daffodils and such, but don't let that put you off. She is so grumpy, and stingy (she sits by me in church and puts only a quarter in the collection tray each Sunday, even though she's rich as Croesus)--just make sure you don't live by her.
Isn't it sad that you can't move back into the old homestead, which is still vacant ten years after old Mr. Ponsonby died? But I imagine you wouldn't want to fool with a house that big at your age--I don't know how anyone ever managed, they're so hard to keep up and heat, goodness knows. I feel such fondness for that house, though of course I never lived in it and rarely ever set foot in it. One time as a child some little girls dared me to run up on the porch and look in the windows, and I did, and when I got up there and peered in I found myself face to face with your mother, who was arranging some dried flowers on top of the piano. She smiled at me kindly and waved at me to come in, but I ran, why I don't know. I remember that she invited my mother in when she had stopped to admire some of the hollyhocks in the front garden, and she came home laden with all manner of plants and flowers--mother-in-laws tongue and peonies and roses and herbs and whatnot. She said your mother was so nice to her--served her iced tea in gold-rimmed glasses, and gave her a little glass fawn she'd brought back from Venice! She would never hear an ill word spoken of your mother after that, even when people said she had started getting peculiar. Goodness, that was so long ago, wasn't it? But it seems just like yesterday, sometimes!
Oh, one advantage to living here is that you will be much closer to Patricia, of course. I do not like to pass on idle "gossip," but I do not think that that marriage is long for this world, judging from I have heard from a friend who lives down there--and from the little that Patricia will let on. She can be so secretive! It has nothing to do with dear Patricia, of course, but with that Dan. I've always regretted that she married him. He has such airs and acts like he hung the moon. When they visited here last spring he spent the whole time sitting on his neck on my living room love seat (which isn't really for "sitting," though I didn't tell him so) reading while Patricia and the children and I went out visiting. And then went out and got himself a hamburger rather than eat the casserole I had spent all day making! Anyway, I pity poor Patricia and those children, though she will never let on that anything in the least is the matter. But I can tell something is wrong because she has lost weight. And she has cut her hair in the most peculiar, most unflattering way--like a boy's sugar bowl cut. She said one day she just got tired of having all that hair blowing round her face and grabbed a pair of shears and started hacking. I remember combing and braiding her lovely hair when she was a girl. It was so soft, and went on forever, all the way down to her waist. Well, I never could tell that girl a thing, she is so headstrong in some ways--except where that Dan is concerned!
Well, I have run on too long, like always, Lavinia. But let me say again how very excited I am about having you so close by again after all these years! Keep me up to date on what you decide, and know that my little guest room is open to you when you come down to hunt for a new home. I have put an electric blanket on that bed too in addition to the afghan I crocheted, so you need not be afraid about keeping warm.
My two pretty little cardinals have just come to my feeder, so that means it must be almost time for my stories. The little birds visit at nearly the same time every day, it is uncanny! At any rate I must go get a stamp for this letter before the postman comes. I am always running after him waving a letter for him to mail.
Wishing you and your family the merriest of Christmases!
Affectionately,
Evie
P.S. Some little girl at church gave me all these darling little candy cane stickers, and I am spending them all on you!
I hope I did not sound as if I did not approve of your plan to move back here when we spoke on the phone yesterday evening! I think it is a lovely idea! It is just that I was so shocked--and surprised. To think that you, who have traveled the world and lived in New York and goodness knows where else, would want to come back home to settle after all these years. That did surprise me, but you were always one for surprises! But after I thought about it a little last night as I was lying awake--I had gotten cold, and I turned on the electric blanket for the first time this season (Peggy gave it to me, though I told her I didn't want one, but now I can't do without it!)--I decided it wasn't so surprising after all. After all, we are getting on in years, and I suppose it is natural that when we reach our time of life we begin to want to be near to the people and places we knew and loved best as children. We need all the love and closeness we can get at our age, don't you agree? And I can guarantee that you will have that here--love.
I do hope you won't be bored, tho'! Of course, you were always such a great reader, and I know books will keep you company and occupy your mind when you get weary of us. But books can only do so much! Fortunately there is a lot else here to keep you busy. There is church, for one thing--for you that would be St. James. They have a wonderful organ, and a perfectly wonderful director of music to play it! Leonard and I used to go to their Christmas concerts, but since he died I seem to have lost interest. This year, however, Lucybell Cauthon has made me promise to go with her, mainly because she can't drive anymore and needs someone to take her--and to help her get up those big stairs on her walker. She is practically _crippled_ with arthritis, one affliction I am free of, thank the Lord! It would help if she would lose some weight--that must be murder on her knees. But I suppose eating is the only consolation she has in her declining years. Getting fat is one danger of living here, I must warn you! I had to completely swear off bread and sweet things earlier this autumn, for all of my pantsuits had gotten so snug around the middle. I did treat myself to some of Annie Maud's wonderful lemon squares at a little shower we had for her niece Melanie--I figured I deserved a reward for being so good! I helped myself to some potato chips too, though they were also "off limits!" Annie Maud had put out some sour cream dip I couldn't resist, with little chives cut up in it. She always does things up so prettily.
Melanie--the niece--is marrying a widower whose first wife was killed in a car accident here two Christmases ago. She (Ruth Ann was her name, she was the sweetest thing) was coming home after the Christmas Eve festivities in the fellowship hall at First Methodist. She was struck down while crossing Main, right in front of the church--a truck driver, and he was drunk. They couldn't even have an open casket at the funeral, because her head was severed from the rest of her body. And she had two darling little blond children! Well, the Lord works in mysterious ways, and I see His hand at work in this marriage, providing those lovely children with a new mother who I know will love and cherish them as if they were her own. Melanie is a lovely girl too, though she has a protruding front _tooth_ I wish she would see to. I said to Lurlene when we were watching a little fashion show Melanie was in at the Country Club last summer, I said, wouldn't Melanie be a _beauty_ if it weren't for that tooth! She looked so cute in those little tennis dresses she was modeling, so trim and petite. But when she opened her mouth to smile I had to turn my eyes to the pretty flower arrangements. It quite spoiled the effect!
Mercy, I have wandered away from my point again--"digressed," as old Reverend Saxon used to say about his sermons, which ran on and on until old senile Miss Wallis would holler out "What's your point?" from the back pew! Oh: the other thing I was going to tell you about was the literary club I belong to--that might interest you. In fact I talked to Eula, the president, when I called her up this morning to see how she was doing, and I mentioned that she might have a new recruit! She went on a Caribbean cruise and came back with dysentery. She is a little better now, though she still has to run to the bathroom nearly every hour--in fact she had to excuse herself to visit the toilet while I was talking to her. Anyhow we don't read anything "heavy," but we have read some wonderful books, and our discussions at our meetings can be quite stimulating! I hosted the club last meeting, and served my floating island for dessert, and that got raves, much more so than the Fig Newtons that Gladys Aubrey served last time. Somebody should have said something to her about that, but she is sort of "off" lately--repeats herself over and over--and so nobody dared. So we just munched in silence. Anyway she never could cook worth a toot, so perhaps it was for the best. She used to send egg custards over here that were practically _raw._ Anyway we read a biography of Stonewall Jackson. Next time we are reading a novel by Eugenia Price, I forget which right now, but I am enjoying it. It is sort of a mystery story with lighthouses and such--I read a little of it before bedtime every night, but I only manage a few pages before I start nodding off! Age, I guess.
Then there is the bridge club, but I don't know whether you will be interested in that. To be honest I am not sure I would recommend joining just now. We have a new member, Priscilla DeLoach, a Baptist, who refuses to play for money--not even so much as a dime--and so ruins the fun for everybody. She closes her eyes and says a little prayer before each game. Isn't that silly! Fortunately she may not be able to play for a while after she has surgery on her bunions next month, so that will give us a nice break.
As for where you will live, there are some lovely "ranch" homes on that ridge up by the Country Club that might suit you to a tee. You can see for miles and miles up there, all the way to the foothills on clear days. Alva Lee lives up there and is always complaining about the deer eating up her daffodils and such, but don't let that put you off. She is so grumpy, and stingy (she sits by me in church and puts only a quarter in the collection tray each Sunday, even though she's rich as Croesus)--just make sure you don't live by her.
Isn't it sad that you can't move back into the old homestead, which is still vacant ten years after old Mr. Ponsonby died? But I imagine you wouldn't want to fool with a house that big at your age--I don't know how anyone ever managed, they're so hard to keep up and heat, goodness knows. I feel such fondness for that house, though of course I never lived in it and rarely ever set foot in it. One time as a child some little girls dared me to run up on the porch and look in the windows, and I did, and when I got up there and peered in I found myself face to face with your mother, who was arranging some dried flowers on top of the piano. She smiled at me kindly and waved at me to come in, but I ran, why I don't know. I remember that she invited my mother in when she had stopped to admire some of the hollyhocks in the front garden, and she came home laden with all manner of plants and flowers--mother-in-laws tongue and peonies and roses and herbs and whatnot. She said your mother was so nice to her--served her iced tea in gold-rimmed glasses, and gave her a little glass fawn she'd brought back from Venice! She would never hear an ill word spoken of your mother after that, even when people said she had started getting peculiar. Goodness, that was so long ago, wasn't it? But it seems just like yesterday, sometimes!
Oh, one advantage to living here is that you will be much closer to Patricia, of course. I do not like to pass on idle "gossip," but I do not think that that marriage is long for this world, judging from I have heard from a friend who lives down there--and from the little that Patricia will let on. She can be so secretive! It has nothing to do with dear Patricia, of course, but with that Dan. I've always regretted that she married him. He has such airs and acts like he hung the moon. When they visited here last spring he spent the whole time sitting on his neck on my living room love seat (which isn't really for "sitting," though I didn't tell him so) reading while Patricia and the children and I went out visiting. And then went out and got himself a hamburger rather than eat the casserole I had spent all day making! Anyway, I pity poor Patricia and those children, though she will never let on that anything in the least is the matter. But I can tell something is wrong because she has lost weight. And she has cut her hair in the most peculiar, most unflattering way--like a boy's sugar bowl cut. She said one day she just got tired of having all that hair blowing round her face and grabbed a pair of shears and started hacking. I remember combing and braiding her lovely hair when she was a girl. It was so soft, and went on forever, all the way down to her waist. Well, I never could tell that girl a thing, she is so headstrong in some ways--except where that Dan is concerned!
Well, I have run on too long, like always, Lavinia. But let me say again how very excited I am about having you so close by again after all these years! Keep me up to date on what you decide, and know that my little guest room is open to you when you come down to hunt for a new home. I have put an electric blanket on that bed too in addition to the afghan I crocheted, so you need not be afraid about keeping warm.
My two pretty little cardinals have just come to my feeder, so that means it must be almost time for my stories. The little birds visit at nearly the same time every day, it is uncanny! At any rate I must go get a stamp for this letter before the postman comes. I am always running after him waving a letter for him to mail.
Wishing you and your family the merriest of Christmases!
Affectionately,
Evie
P.S. Some little girl at church gave me all these darling little candy cane stickers, and I am spending them all on you!
Saturday, June 30, 2007
April 3, 1935
To my family:
I knew that I would have to die in the end when this began; I knew that it was the price that everyone, most of all my family, would ask of me. I am not afraid now to pay it. I do it willingly. I do it without complaint. I do it gladly. Here is my body: take it and do with it what you will.
There was a time when I trembled at the darkness gathering ahead of me. There was a time when it frightened me to realize that I had passed the last place on the road where I could turn back safely, without anyone knowing. It was like traveling at night on the highway south of town to Cuthbert, when you pass the Lambert farm and head under the arching oaks and the road bends left into the pines, the twilit pines, and suddenly the light is gone, and you are in the deepest, darkest countryside. I looked back and saw the lights from the last houses flashing at me, beckoning me home, calling,come back, come back . I looked back and saw the light on the courthouse tower, flashing at me like a beacon: this way, this way. But I kept going. I kept going. And once I had gone so far that it was impossible to turn back the fear left me. It has never returned. And now that I have almost come to the end of my journey, the place you have prepared for me, I know that I shall not lack the strength and the courage to walk the last few steps.
Because you see I know that it was all inevitable now; I had no choice. Everyone has wished this on me. Though you may not have realized it, you all have wished me to die. You have wanted it, every hour, every minute--always. As I was putting on your stockings in the mornings, holding your little kicking legs firm so that I could draw them on right. As I was passing the sugar dish at breakfast, smiling at you, asking if you had slept well. As I glanced up at you through the windows of the front parlor where I was outside cutting flowers, and you two ducked your heads to the side to laugh at some joke. As I was coming back in the evening from helping Miss DuBose write a letter to her daughters, holding my skirt to the side as I ran to get back in time to see to your father's supper. You all wished it. Everyone has wished it. Except one person. Only one.
My mother wished it. I see that now. I laughed too much. I cried too easily. I felt everything too passionately, I had sick headaches, I trembled at the slightest whisper. The faintest apprehension caused my heart to pound. My mother shut me in the bedroom with the camphor handkerchief at my temples and chamomile tea. She said, do not cry, for it will disturb your father, and your sisters. She said, do not laugh, it will make them misbehave. She said, do not stare so, they will think you are a lunatic. She set me to sewing tiny red flowers on the rims of the sofa cushions. She set me to making a hooked rug for Aunt Lillian. The red flowers burned themselves into my eyesight, into my brain, a searing red band slashing across whatever I saw. The red flowers started the terrible throbbing in my head. My mother said, do not move until you have finished that row. Do not set your needle down.
My husband wished it. He said, do not talk so loud and so merrily. He said, do not sleep past dawn. He said, I want you seated across from me each morning at the breakfast table, do not take your coffee on the porch. He said do not play that song at the piano, it is vulgar and coarse. He said, you are thickening around the middle, you will need a girdle soon, you must reduce. Meanwhile his wide belly swelled, his body grew white and thick and flaccid, and he pressed himself upon me at night, and I lay with my teeth clenched and my eyes shut tight so that I would not see, so that I would not scream, so that I would not cough up what was rising in my throat.
He said, you are ill, even though I was not. You are hysterical. And he put me in the white room with the door locked, and the doctors came, and a nurse with a shiny blood-colored mole on her upper lip and a crushed finger. She said it was an iron, an iron fell on it when she was a baby. I was sickened by it, I could not bear for it to touch me. I would not allow her to touch me.
I tried to die but they would not have it that way, the way I wanted it. They wished for me to die slowly, in small fractions. A scrape here. A pinprick there. A small burn on the arm, an incision on my breast. A scab that is peeled open every morning, that is never allowed to heal, that runs puss and blood constantly, secretly, under white clean cloth.
My children wished it. They suffocated me, pushing their hot trembling bodies against me, groping at me with their wet warm sticky hands, touching my cheeks, my abdomen, my hair, my breasts. They disgusted me with their smells, whether sweet or rank, with the spit that came from their mouths, the urine that came from between their legs, their excrement. I saw my face in theirs and turned away in horror. For at one time there was just one of me, just one to do away with, and now there were three: three errors, three blights, three running sores. I had propagated, and now the wrong could never be righted, the slate never wiped clean.
Unless I took it upon myself to do it. I considered doing it. I stood above their beds night after night, listening to their snuffling, the soft hissing of their breathing, and thought of how best to do it, and when. It would have been so easy. I loved them then. I felt the deepest tenderness for them on such nights. Pity and tenderness and love. It was not their fault that they had been born. It was not their fault that I had not put a stop to the horror inside me in time, and that it was now inside them--was them.
I did not do it. As soon as I put my hands to their throats and felt the blood rushing there I found I could not. And so they lived, though they should not have. And took revenge on me for letting them live by wishing me dead. More than wishing. Killing me.
They grew older and apart and distant from me, the eldest especially. They laughed at me, at how I could not pour the coffee straight and drew faces on the edges of the church program and wheeled Miss Dubose out into the country to see the sunflowers and crouched in the garden in an old sunhat. They whirled about me, moving quickly through the rooms, while I stood against the wall watching them, my palms pressed close to the plaster. Their laughter and energy and movement drew the life from me. My face became gray and drawn; two lines descended from my eyes to my jaw, marking the places where my tears travel. A flecking of coffee-colored marks appeared on my hands, the bridge of my cheeks, my forehead, like the spots mold and dampness make on old wallpaper. My husband took to sleeping in another room. No one touched me now--only the faintest fluttering of hands about my shoulders sometimes, a mouth approaching but never quite meeting my cheek.
A boy loved me. That is the miracle. He helped me up from where I had fallen among some Queen Anne's Lace while I was taking old Mrs. Waldrop some sweet fresh butter and a sack of tomatoes. He put his arms around my shoulders, he touched the scraped place on my cheek. He had eyelashes lighter than his skin, and sun-bleached hair so pale it was almost white. His face was smooth, his kiss was like a child's. He always had ovals of dirt under his fingernails, because he was a worker. But I did not mind. Because he touched me as if there were no shame in it. Because he opened my dress and looked upon my body with wonder and without surprise, as if there were nothing wrong with it. Because he sang to me, softly, with his lips pushed up against my ear: The waltz you saved for me. Because he waited for me night after night, even when I could not come. Because he gave me things--an old brass ring, a porcelain dish, a cake of sweet-smelling soap. Maybe they were stolen, that is what some have have said. I do not know or care. They are the only things anyone has given to me of any worth. The only things.
A boy loved me. That was the miracle. But it is also why I must die. For I knew even as he held me in his arms that such bliss as this was not permitted in this life. I knew even as he kissed me that I should have to pay for it, for every kiss and touch and meeting of hands, when it was discovered. I have known since childhood that to love, to truly live, is the worst crime of all, and that one must pay for it with one's life. I have known this, and so I am not afraid or grieved that I must die now.
I knew that I would have to die in the end when this began; I knew that it was the price that everyone, most of all my family, would ask of me. I do it gladly. I do it willingly. It is what you all have wanted.
Most of all you, Lavinia.
Bury me in my white dress, the one torn at the hem, with the lace collar. Put my white brooch at my neck.
Follow the provisions of my will exactly, especially what I have said regarding Essie. You will find it in the top drawer of my vanity, next to my handkerchiefs.
Burn this letter.
Burn all of my letters.
Mother
I knew that I would have to die in the end when this began; I knew that it was the price that everyone, most of all my family, would ask of me. I am not afraid now to pay it. I do it willingly. I do it without complaint. I do it gladly. Here is my body: take it and do with it what you will.
There was a time when I trembled at the darkness gathering ahead of me. There was a time when it frightened me to realize that I had passed the last place on the road where I could turn back safely, without anyone knowing. It was like traveling at night on the highway south of town to Cuthbert, when you pass the Lambert farm and head under the arching oaks and the road bends left into the pines, the twilit pines, and suddenly the light is gone, and you are in the deepest, darkest countryside. I looked back and saw the lights from the last houses flashing at me, beckoning me home, calling,
Because you see I know that it was all inevitable now; I had no choice. Everyone has wished this on me. Though you may not have realized it, you all have wished me to die. You have wanted it, every hour, every minute--always. As I was putting on your stockings in the mornings, holding your little kicking legs firm so that I could draw them on right. As I was passing the sugar dish at breakfast, smiling at you, asking if you had slept well. As I glanced up at you through the windows of the front parlor where I was outside cutting flowers, and you two ducked your heads to the side to laugh at some joke. As I was coming back in the evening from helping Miss DuBose write a letter to her daughters, holding my skirt to the side as I ran to get back in time to see to your father's supper. You all wished it. Everyone has wished it. Except one person. Only one.
My mother wished it. I see that now. I laughed too much. I cried too easily. I felt everything too passionately, I had sick headaches, I trembled at the slightest whisper. The faintest apprehension caused my heart to pound. My mother shut me in the bedroom with the camphor handkerchief at my temples and chamomile tea. She said, do not cry, for it will disturb your father, and your sisters. She said, do not laugh, it will make them misbehave. She said, do not stare so, they will think you are a lunatic. She set me to sewing tiny red flowers on the rims of the sofa cushions. She set me to making a hooked rug for Aunt Lillian. The red flowers burned themselves into my eyesight, into my brain, a searing red band slashing across whatever I saw. The red flowers started the terrible throbbing in my head. My mother said, do not move until you have finished that row. Do not set your needle down.
My husband wished it. He said, do not talk so loud and so merrily. He said, do not sleep past dawn. He said, I want you seated across from me each morning at the breakfast table, do not take your coffee on the porch. He said do not play that song at the piano, it is vulgar and coarse. He said, you are thickening around the middle, you will need a girdle soon, you must reduce. Meanwhile his wide belly swelled, his body grew white and thick and flaccid, and he pressed himself upon me at night, and I lay with my teeth clenched and my eyes shut tight so that I would not see, so that I would not scream, so that I would not cough up what was rising in my throat.
He said, you are ill, even though I was not. You are hysterical. And he put me in the white room with the door locked, and the doctors came, and a nurse with a shiny blood-colored mole on her upper lip and a crushed finger. She said it was an iron, an iron fell on it when she was a baby. I was sickened by it, I could not bear for it to touch me. I would not allow her to touch me.
I tried to die but they would not have it that way, the way I wanted it. They wished for me to die slowly, in small fractions. A scrape here. A pinprick there. A small burn on the arm, an incision on my breast. A scab that is peeled open every morning, that is never allowed to heal, that runs puss and blood constantly, secretly, under white clean cloth.
My children wished it. They suffocated me, pushing their hot trembling bodies against me, groping at me with their wet warm sticky hands, touching my cheeks, my abdomen, my hair, my breasts. They disgusted me with their smells, whether sweet or rank, with the spit that came from their mouths, the urine that came from between their legs, their excrement. I saw my face in theirs and turned away in horror. For at one time there was just one of me, just one to do away with, and now there were three: three errors, three blights, three running sores. I had propagated, and now the wrong could never be righted, the slate never wiped clean.
Unless I took it upon myself to do it. I considered doing it. I stood above their beds night after night, listening to their snuffling, the soft hissing of their breathing, and thought of how best to do it, and when. It would have been so easy. I loved them then. I felt the deepest tenderness for them on such nights. Pity and tenderness and love. It was not their fault that they had been born. It was not their fault that I had not put a stop to the horror inside me in time, and that it was now inside them--was them.
I did not do it. As soon as I put my hands to their throats and felt the blood rushing there I found I could not. And so they lived, though they should not have. And took revenge on me for letting them live by wishing me dead. More than wishing. Killing me.
They grew older and apart and distant from me, the eldest especially. They laughed at me, at how I could not pour the coffee straight and drew faces on the edges of the church program and wheeled Miss Dubose out into the country to see the sunflowers and crouched in the garden in an old sunhat. They whirled about me, moving quickly through the rooms, while I stood against the wall watching them, my palms pressed close to the plaster. Their laughter and energy and movement drew the life from me. My face became gray and drawn; two lines descended from my eyes to my jaw, marking the places where my tears travel. A flecking of coffee-colored marks appeared on my hands, the bridge of my cheeks, my forehead, like the spots mold and dampness make on old wallpaper. My husband took to sleeping in another room. No one touched me now--only the faintest fluttering of hands about my shoulders sometimes, a mouth approaching but never quite meeting my cheek.
A boy loved me. That is the miracle. He helped me up from where I had fallen among some Queen Anne's Lace while I was taking old Mrs. Waldrop some sweet fresh butter and a sack of tomatoes. He put his arms around my shoulders, he touched the scraped place on my cheek. He had eyelashes lighter than his skin, and sun-bleached hair so pale it was almost white. His face was smooth, his kiss was like a child's. He always had ovals of dirt under his fingernails, because he was a worker. But I did not mind. Because he touched me as if there were no shame in it. Because he opened my dress and looked upon my body with wonder and without surprise, as if there were nothing wrong with it. Because he sang to me, softly, with his lips pushed up against my ear: The waltz you saved for me. Because he waited for me night after night, even when I could not come. Because he gave me things--an old brass ring, a porcelain dish, a cake of sweet-smelling soap. Maybe they were stolen, that is what some have have said. I do not know or care. They are the only things anyone has given to me of any worth. The only things.
A boy loved me. That was the miracle. But it is also why I must die. For I knew even as he held me in his arms that such bliss as this was not permitted in this life. I knew even as he kissed me that I should have to pay for it, for every kiss and touch and meeting of hands, when it was discovered. I have known since childhood that to love, to truly live, is the worst crime of all, and that one must pay for it with one's life. I have known this, and so I am not afraid or grieved that I must die now.
I knew that I would have to die in the end when this began; I knew that it was the price that everyone, most of all my family, would ask of me. I do it gladly. I do it willingly. It is what you all have wanted.
Most of all you, Lavinia.
Bury me in my white dress, the one torn at the hem, with the lace collar. Put my white brooch at my neck.
Follow the provisions of my will exactly, especially what I have said regarding Essie. You will find it in the top drawer of my vanity, next to my handkerchiefs.
Burn this letter.
Burn all of my letters.
Mother
Wednesday, June 27, 2007
February 12, 1984
Dear Mother,
No, I don't think it is a good time for you to visit. It is too cold, and this house, as I have told you before many times, has no central heat, none whatsoever. We have a wood stove in the kitchen and another in the big front room, and I have a little space heater that I use in the little corner where I have my piano. It doesn't work well--only one of the coils lights up--and I have to wear gloves when I play, with the fingers cut off so I can feel the keys. Sometimes my fingers ache so from the cold that I can barely move them.
The other thing is that we have no indoor plumbing, which means you would have to go out the back door to the outhouse when nature calls. That is not such an unpleasant thing when it is spring, or summer--in fact it is quite lovely to sit there on a summer night, with the crickets going, and the owls calling (actually that is more early fall). But in winter it is miserable; you really learn to develop an iron bladder holding your pee so that you don't have to get up in the middle of the night. Yes I know you are used to roughing it but you would not like this. Wait until spring and then we will see. We will see, but I can't guarantee anything.
Actually Stig isn't terribly well just now. It isn't his hip so much. That is actually improving a bit, with the help of the cortisone injections a doctor in town is giving him in exchange for some of his photographs. He is doing--was doing--a series on animal footprints, deer and bear and whatnot, in the soft mud near the river bank, and the doctor, who fancies himself an eccentric mountain man type, really took a shine to them, lucky for us. The trouble now is with these terrible panic attacks, or attacks of fear. I don't really know what to call them, but they are terrifying for him and for me. Sometimes he will wake up in the night and call out in a voice that is almost unrecognizable to me, an awful frightened old woman's voice, reedy and plaintive and yet angry all at the same time. He tells me that when it happens he feels, or dreams, that someone has just thrown a dark burlap-like material over him that smells of death and dirt, like a funeral shroud, and suddenly he cannot breathe. Then he feels the touch of cold hands on him through the fabric--rough, indifferent, business-like hands, like the hands of an undertaker, pushing and kneading at him. It is at this point that he begins to scream. I have been sleeping in the front room by the stove this week because it has been happening so often. Last night, thank God, he slept the whole night through. Let us hope that this is the beginning of a trend.
The doctor says that these attacks may have something to do with the car accident, which happened five years ago this week. A deer hit them, as I believe I told you. His daughter was seriously injured, and is now paralyzed from the neck down. Sometimes we get hand-painted greeting cards from her. She paints with her mouth, actually, holding the brush between her teeth, and this woman who runs a gift shop in the town where she lives with her mother sells them, apparently in large quantities. Sometimes I tell Stig she ought to send us a little of the money instead of the cards, which we could really do without. Frankly they're hideous, ghastly--angels and birds and smiling suns and the like. I actually think that the cards are part of some perverse, twisted scheme of the mother to exact revenge from Stig, whom she naturally holds responsible for the wreck, though it wasn't his fault. She's a very disturbed person and I wouldn't at all put it past her. She works at a waitress in a vegetarian restaurant and wastes all her money on a psychic in some feckless attempt to determine if her first husband, a truck driver who was in big trouble with drug dealers, is still alive. She has the hair-brained idea that she is somehow going to have him declared legally dead and get money from some insurance policy he had, I'm not sure how and I don't think she does either. She has an IQ of about 60, I should think. The only time I saw her she was skipping down the street in a pink rain poncho with a gardenia behind one ear, and wild red hair done up in a crown of braids, like someone out of Willa Cather. Stig sends her and the daughter, whose name is Cora, money whenever he can, though I know she blows it on the psychic or on drugs. What can I do? He loves his daughter, though he hasn't been able to see her lately because it brings on more of the attacks.
No, we do not need any money, but thank you very much just the same. We are managing quite nicely, all things considered. The potatoes and corn and tomatoes I put up in the fall have seen us through most of the winter, and the doctor sometimes gives us some venison from deer he has shot in the mountains. Then we have lots of canned things. I have some piano students in town too. There is a girl there, the daughter of rich back-to-nature NYC escapees who are remodeling a big craftsman-style house close to downtown, who is quite talented, but lately she has decided that she is more interested in being a poet with a capital P, very much on the Edna St. Vincent Millay model--cigarettes and wispy gestures and boozy mournful promiscuity and rhymed couplets. Which is a pity, because she's a much better piano player than she is a poet. The other students are some elderly retirees who need something to do and a soccer-playing teenage boy with a tin ear who wants to play Scott Joplin rags of all things. He's absolutely hopeless but works harder than the girl so I keep on trying. I'm also doing some faux-painting of marble and wood for this rich lady who lives a couple of miles up the road. I do some housekeeping for her too--a bit of dusting and laundry. She has MS and can't get around well. Somehow we manage.
Yes I heard about Dan's marriage to that Margot woman from Maury, who evidently keeps in regular contact with him, though I don't remember any particular rapport or closeness between them in the past. I haven't heard from him in ages, no doubt because of what I said to him at Patricia's memorial service. No, it wasn't tactful or kind of me, but I think it needed to be said, after everything Patricia had to put up with from him. What a disgraceful abasement this marriage is for Dan, but in a way I feel that it is a proper and fitting fate for someone of his low, vain, cravenly narcissistic character. Margot is the perfect mate for him, really--obsequious and flattering, and absolutely ruthless to anyone who expresses doubts about his supposed genius, and the value of his pitiful handful of dry scholarly monographs on Pater and Symons or somebody. God how boring. I pity the children, Mary Renfroe most of all, who saw through Margot quite young. I'll never forget meeting them at a restaurant and Mary Renfroe crying to me in the coat room over something Margot has said. But then at the table she and Margot were both joking about how the waiter poured the wine ineptly just when Dan was raising his glass, sloshing wine on his sleeve, so evidently there is some understanding between them. Poor kid--that's all I can say. Sid is a more hardy, sturdy, self-enclosed type; I don't think Margot can do much damage there, thank God, though she will try her damnedest.
As for Patricia, she seems much more distant to me lately, much more remote. There was a time after her death when her presence was, I don't know, so vivid, so alive for me. I was always looking up from wherever I was sitting and expecting her to come bustling through the door at any second, newspapers and galley proofs under her arms, flinging her scarf carelessly aside and shaking out her hair in that peculiar shivery, cat-like way she had, and telling me about some idiot at the press, mimicking them with scary accuracy. And I was always hearing her singing. She really had the loveliest untrained lyric soprano--she could have been an excellent Susanna or maybe even a Countess. But now she is taking her place among the other dead I have known, joining their sepia-colored ranks, fading into an anonymous grayness, like the groups of bystanders that you see in old photographs of people in city streets. I suppose it is because I am getting older, and she died so young, really. That is what happens to the dead, especially those who have died young--we leave them behind; we are distracted and consumed by the aches and pains and worries of middle and then old age; the new experiences that we have, and that the dead did not live long enough to have, fall upon them like a soft layer of new dirt, covering them up further, obliterating them from our view.
Maury has a new young man--has he told you? Probably not; he is always so cagey about his private life, especially with you. It would have been nice had he waited longer after Paul's death, I think. It has only been a year and a half, after all, and this young man, this boy--honestly--is terribly young. He was doing some cloisonné for the people in the apartment across the hall and burned his hand, and Maury ran over and bandaged him up, and I suppose fell for his faun-eyed long-lashed dark good looks and flowing locks, which he is quite vain about (the day they visited here he was constantly glancing at his reflection in my big china cabinet's glass). He is awkward and shy and yet cockily self-confident and has all the ruthless self-involved heartlessness of the young--and a shrewd awareness of the fluttering of hearts he sets off in those around him. There's something of the sleek, devious petted animal about him. This will not end well, I am sure (for one thing Maury is 42, and this child can't be more than 23), but Maury is smitten--and in some mistaken way thinks he deserves this, after all he endured with Paul. Poor Paul.
Mother, I worry about you in that God-forsaken town, with no one but poor dim Evie to keep you company. Have you made friends? Have you surrendered your scruples and pride and started playing bridge, for God's sake? I'm still amazed that you could pull up all your roots and head back south, after all these years up above the Mason Dixon. I can't understand it, but then I've never lived down there, and don't hear the call of ancestral voices beckoning me back home. Carry me back to old Virginny--Jesus, I'd rather die. But you were born and bred there, so I suppose it's different for you. Take care of yourself, and do me a favor, please: watch the evening cocktails, will you. The last time I was down there I must say I was a little taken aback by the imbibing that was going on after six. Doubtless you'll say it's none of my business, and you'd be right, but you're my mother, and anyway I've always been matter-of-fact and tactless with those I truly care about. Among whom I do number you, believe it or not.
Lately I have been playing hymns from the Cokesbury hymnal--can you imagine? It's because they are simple, and don't tax my hands too much when they're cold and stiff (which is most of the time), and because they console me, oddly enough, though they mean nothing to me in a religious way. "O God our help in ages past" is my favorite: the last verses about time are quite lovely, don't you think?
A thousand ages in thy sight
are like an evening gone;
short as the watch that ends the night
before the rising sun.
Time, like an ever-rolling stream,
bears all its sons away;
they fly, forgotten, as a dream
dies at the opening day.
O God, our help in ages past,
our hope for years to come,
be thou our guide while troubles last,
and our eternal home!
Peculiarly, though, the last lines don't touch me deeply. Despite (or perhaps because of?) all the uprootings and dislocations I knew as a child--the constant moving from place to place, the endless sequence of squalid tenements and shared houses (do you remember Maia, the tarot card reader who tried to take over our bedroom?)--I don't feel any real longing for an eternal home, for some fixed unchanging abode in the sky. This messy, dilapidated temporary home is enough for me. For now, at least.
Love,
Dorothea
No, I don't think it is a good time for you to visit. It is too cold, and this house, as I have told you before many times, has no central heat, none whatsoever. We have a wood stove in the kitchen and another in the big front room, and I have a little space heater that I use in the little corner where I have my piano. It doesn't work well--only one of the coils lights up--and I have to wear gloves when I play, with the fingers cut off so I can feel the keys. Sometimes my fingers ache so from the cold that I can barely move them.
The other thing is that we have no indoor plumbing, which means you would have to go out the back door to the outhouse when nature calls. That is not such an unpleasant thing when it is spring, or summer--in fact it is quite lovely to sit there on a summer night, with the crickets going, and the owls calling (actually that is more early fall). But in winter it is miserable; you really learn to develop an iron bladder holding your pee so that you don't have to get up in the middle of the night. Yes I know you are used to roughing it but you would not like this. Wait until spring and then we will see. We will see, but I can't guarantee anything.
Actually Stig isn't terribly well just now. It isn't his hip so much. That is actually improving a bit, with the help of the cortisone injections a doctor in town is giving him in exchange for some of his photographs. He is doing--was doing--a series on animal footprints, deer and bear and whatnot, in the soft mud near the river bank, and the doctor, who fancies himself an eccentric mountain man type, really took a shine to them, lucky for us. The trouble now is with these terrible panic attacks, or attacks of fear. I don't really know what to call them, but they are terrifying for him and for me. Sometimes he will wake up in the night and call out in a voice that is almost unrecognizable to me, an awful frightened old woman's voice, reedy and plaintive and yet angry all at the same time. He tells me that when it happens he feels, or dreams, that someone has just thrown a dark burlap-like material over him that smells of death and dirt, like a funeral shroud, and suddenly he cannot breathe. Then he feels the touch of cold hands on him through the fabric--rough, indifferent, business-like hands, like the hands of an undertaker, pushing and kneading at him. It is at this point that he begins to scream. I have been sleeping in the front room by the stove this week because it has been happening so often. Last night, thank God, he slept the whole night through. Let us hope that this is the beginning of a trend.
The doctor says that these attacks may have something to do with the car accident, which happened five years ago this week. A deer hit them, as I believe I told you. His daughter was seriously injured, and is now paralyzed from the neck down. Sometimes we get hand-painted greeting cards from her. She paints with her mouth, actually, holding the brush between her teeth, and this woman who runs a gift shop in the town where she lives with her mother sells them, apparently in large quantities. Sometimes I tell Stig she ought to send us a little of the money instead of the cards, which we could really do without. Frankly they're hideous, ghastly--angels and birds and smiling suns and the like. I actually think that the cards are part of some perverse, twisted scheme of the mother to exact revenge from Stig, whom she naturally holds responsible for the wreck, though it wasn't his fault. She's a very disturbed person and I wouldn't at all put it past her. She works at a waitress in a vegetarian restaurant and wastes all her money on a psychic in some feckless attempt to determine if her first husband, a truck driver who was in big trouble with drug dealers, is still alive. She has the hair-brained idea that she is somehow going to have him declared legally dead and get money from some insurance policy he had, I'm not sure how and I don't think she does either. She has an IQ of about 60, I should think. The only time I saw her she was skipping down the street in a pink rain poncho with a gardenia behind one ear, and wild red hair done up in a crown of braids, like someone out of Willa Cather. Stig sends her and the daughter, whose name is Cora, money whenever he can, though I know she blows it on the psychic or on drugs. What can I do? He loves his daughter, though he hasn't been able to see her lately because it brings on more of the attacks.
No, we do not need any money, but thank you very much just the same. We are managing quite nicely, all things considered. The potatoes and corn and tomatoes I put up in the fall have seen us through most of the winter, and the doctor sometimes gives us some venison from deer he has shot in the mountains. Then we have lots of canned things. I have some piano students in town too. There is a girl there, the daughter of rich back-to-nature NYC escapees who are remodeling a big craftsman-style house close to downtown, who is quite talented, but lately she has decided that she is more interested in being a poet with a capital P, very much on the Edna St. Vincent Millay model--cigarettes and wispy gestures and boozy mournful promiscuity and rhymed couplets. Which is a pity, because she's a much better piano player than she is a poet. The other students are some elderly retirees who need something to do and a soccer-playing teenage boy with a tin ear who wants to play Scott Joplin rags of all things. He's absolutely hopeless but works harder than the girl so I keep on trying. I'm also doing some faux-painting of marble and wood for this rich lady who lives a couple of miles up the road. I do some housekeeping for her too--a bit of dusting and laundry. She has MS and can't get around well. Somehow we manage.
Yes I heard about Dan's marriage to that Margot woman from Maury, who evidently keeps in regular contact with him, though I don't remember any particular rapport or closeness between them in the past. I haven't heard from him in ages, no doubt because of what I said to him at Patricia's memorial service. No, it wasn't tactful or kind of me, but I think it needed to be said, after everything Patricia had to put up with from him. What a disgraceful abasement this marriage is for Dan, but in a way I feel that it is a proper and fitting fate for someone of his low, vain, cravenly narcissistic character. Margot is the perfect mate for him, really--obsequious and flattering, and absolutely ruthless to anyone who expresses doubts about his supposed genius, and the value of his pitiful handful of dry scholarly monographs on Pater and Symons or somebody. God how boring. I pity the children, Mary Renfroe most of all, who saw through Margot quite young. I'll never forget meeting them at a restaurant and Mary Renfroe crying to me in the coat room over something Margot has said. But then at the table she and Margot were both joking about how the waiter poured the wine ineptly just when Dan was raising his glass, sloshing wine on his sleeve, so evidently there is some understanding between them. Poor kid--that's all I can say. Sid is a more hardy, sturdy, self-enclosed type; I don't think Margot can do much damage there, thank God, though she will try her damnedest.
As for Patricia, she seems much more distant to me lately, much more remote. There was a time after her death when her presence was, I don't know, so vivid, so alive for me. I was always looking up from wherever I was sitting and expecting her to come bustling through the door at any second, newspapers and galley proofs under her arms, flinging her scarf carelessly aside and shaking out her hair in that peculiar shivery, cat-like way she had, and telling me about some idiot at the press, mimicking them with scary accuracy. And I was always hearing her singing. She really had the loveliest untrained lyric soprano--she could have been an excellent Susanna or maybe even a Countess. But now she is taking her place among the other dead I have known, joining their sepia-colored ranks, fading into an anonymous grayness, like the groups of bystanders that you see in old photographs of people in city streets. I suppose it is because I am getting older, and she died so young, really. That is what happens to the dead, especially those who have died young--we leave them behind; we are distracted and consumed by the aches and pains and worries of middle and then old age; the new experiences that we have, and that the dead did not live long enough to have, fall upon them like a soft layer of new dirt, covering them up further, obliterating them from our view.
Maury has a new young man--has he told you? Probably not; he is always so cagey about his private life, especially with you. It would have been nice had he waited longer after Paul's death, I think. It has only been a year and a half, after all, and this young man, this boy--honestly--is terribly young. He was doing some cloisonné for the people in the apartment across the hall and burned his hand, and Maury ran over and bandaged him up, and I suppose fell for his faun-eyed long-lashed dark good looks and flowing locks, which he is quite vain about (the day they visited here he was constantly glancing at his reflection in my big china cabinet's glass). He is awkward and shy and yet cockily self-confident and has all the ruthless self-involved heartlessness of the young--and a shrewd awareness of the fluttering of hearts he sets off in those around him. There's something of the sleek, devious petted animal about him. This will not end well, I am sure (for one thing Maury is 42, and this child can't be more than 23), but Maury is smitten--and in some mistaken way thinks he deserves this, after all he endured with Paul. Poor Paul.
Mother, I worry about you in that God-forsaken town, with no one but poor dim Evie to keep you company. Have you made friends? Have you surrendered your scruples and pride and started playing bridge, for God's sake? I'm still amazed that you could pull up all your roots and head back south, after all these years up above the Mason Dixon. I can't understand it, but then I've never lived down there, and don't hear the call of ancestral voices beckoning me back home. Carry me back to old Virginny--Jesus, I'd rather die. But you were born and bred there, so I suppose it's different for you. Take care of yourself, and do me a favor, please: watch the evening cocktails, will you. The last time I was down there I must say I was a little taken aback by the imbibing that was going on after six. Doubtless you'll say it's none of my business, and you'd be right, but you're my mother, and anyway I've always been matter-of-fact and tactless with those I truly care about. Among whom I do number you, believe it or not.
Lately I have been playing hymns from the Cokesbury hymnal--can you imagine? It's because they are simple, and don't tax my hands too much when they're cold and stiff (which is most of the time), and because they console me, oddly enough, though they mean nothing to me in a religious way. "O God our help in ages past" is my favorite: the last verses about time are quite lovely, don't you think?
A thousand ages in thy sight
are like an evening gone;
short as the watch that ends the night
before the rising sun.
Time, like an ever-rolling stream,
bears all its sons away;
they fly, forgotten, as a dream
dies at the opening day.
O God, our help in ages past,
our hope for years to come,
be thou our guide while troubles last,
and our eternal home!
Peculiarly, though, the last lines don't touch me deeply. Despite (or perhaps because of?) all the uprootings and dislocations I knew as a child--the constant moving from place to place, the endless sequence of squalid tenements and shared houses (do you remember Maia, the tarot card reader who tried to take over our bedroom?)--I don't feel any real longing for an eternal home, for some fixed unchanging abode in the sky. This messy, dilapidated temporary home is enough for me. For now, at least.
Love,
Dorothea
Sunday, June 17, 2007
July 23, 1975
Dear Aunt Vinnie,
We're here at the beach until early next week, Dan and the children and I. That may perhaps surprise you a little; no doubt you've heard about the troubles we've been having via Evie, who despite being dense about so much has the most uncanny ability to sense marital discord in her midst (maybe because she's experienced so much of it herself!). Well, to her lasting disappointment, I'm sure (she never could stand Dan, as you know), but probably not to yours, we're back together again. For how long I can't say--after all the upheavals of the past few months I'm hesitant to say that the storm, if that's what it was, is past. We're trying it out--living together again, that is--and taking it a day at a time. So far it seems to be working, but I'm not holding my breath.
For the past few days it hasn't been any figurative marital storm I've been worried about, in any case, but rather this monster out in the Atlantic, which fortuitously switched direction at the last moment and headed towards Canada. The couple we were sharing this house with got antsy and left, but we foolishly took a chance--and the happy result is half a week more of blissful solitude. Not that we didn't get on with the couple, an older professor and his Dutch wife: both of them are very charming people. She has a kind of abrupt European peremptoriness that generally annoys me, but her plainspoken bluntness was actually kind of tonic after several weeks of walking on eggshells with Dan, who tends toward the elliptical and the cryptic. Nevertheless I did grow a bit weary of her relentless criticism of my fitness as a mother! She thinks me an awful one, neglectful and too indulgent by turns, all because I let Sid sleep with us one night and accompanied Mary Renfroe to the outdoor shower, which scares her (evidently I was supposed to let her soldier it out alone), and then let the children play with some bones they had found on the beach (possibly poisonous). But I took it all in stride, reminding myself that she's no great shakes in the mother department either, with her drug-addict son.
At any rate, Dan. To tell the truth my feelings towards him at this point are more of pity and disappointment than of anger, though that flares up quite frequently. It's rather sad to see him limp back home, all tongue-tied and deflated and abashed, having come to the realization that he doesn't perhaps have what it takes to make a clean break with me and start a new life with someone else. I feel for him, truly--in some perverse way I would have liked to see him succeed, though it would of course have been devastating to me personally. But I knew this thing with that girl was never going to amount to anything; really I think it was all some sort of grandiose fantasy he had cooked up in his head, spurred on by her obligingness and passivity and endless willingness to please. Who is she? Why, a little shy, feline, petite, cat-faced yankee girl from upstate New York or some such place, one of his students (I know--it all sounds so banal), with a tiny little whirring voice like a wind-up doll's. An art major. There was a period when she was over at the house a good deal, babysitting and helping with the children. Actually I rather liked her--she's witty and very observant, and good with the children, honestly. But also simultaneously morbidly sensitive and harshly critical of others--not such a surprising combination, really. Some of the things she would say to me about Dan's colleagues and fellow graduate students truly took my breath away with their viciousness. Anyway, something about her cloying precocious little-girl unforgivingness and prim rectitude appealed to Dan, who likes to think of himself as someone who doesn't suffer fools gladly. And off he went and promptly made a fool of himself, and a fool of me too. That's the thing about marriage--if one person does something dishonorable and foolish, then the other is automatically compromised, dragged down to that same level of stupidity and banality.
Well, I'm not having it; I'm not going to be the "wronged wife." I'm happy he's back--honestly I am--but now that he is I'm not going to listen to his endless apologies and self-flagellating talk, or respond in kind with recriminations and wifely aspersions. The proof, I say, is in the pudding. In some ways my willingness to start over with him seems terribly corrupt and old-world; maybe I should have instantly filed for divorce when he walked out, and slammed the door firmly shut when he started making noises about coming back. But who am I to be so lofty and imperiously virtuous when it comes to marriage--with my family's history?
So he's back. And the children are certainly glad to see him, particularly Mary Renfroe, who I think believes this whole debacle was somehow my doing. Such a daddy's girl, she is. I fear for her, I really do; she's really too observant for her own good, too sensitive and alert to adult emotions and conflicts swirling about just over her head. "Are you still mad at Daddy?" she asked me the other night when we were out at the shower. I don't want her to be morbidly attuned to that kind of thing, like I was--like I had to be, for my own survival--as a girl; I want her to be free and sloppy and self-centered and messy, and live the life of a child, not the life of some wizened, prematurely sagacious miniature adult. But I don't know what to do about it.
Right now I'm sitting in the semi-dark kitchen, whose sole bulb as burned out, doing this index for a friend of mine by the daylight coming in through the open windows. Dan's taken the children out for a long walk so I can finish it: thoughtful of him. But obviously I'm not making much progress, since I put it aside to write to you! But this is much more enjoyable, I assure you. And calming. It's low tide; the big booming surf of earlier this morning has quieted to a limp plashing. Someone has a transistor radio going on in the next house, playing a song I hate, something about love will keep us together. I feel quite sleepy actually. Perhaps I'll sneak in a nap before they come back.
Last night I woke up when the tide was in and the surf was roaring, and I sensed that Dan was too, and we lay very close together, our hands clasped together, not speaking. And do you know I felt blissfully happy. Blissfully. And that seems to be enough, lately.
Let me know when your moving date is so that I can come up and help you. Though my married life is a mess, I'm quite good at bringing some order to domestic chaos. But of course you're far more accomplished at that than I.
Love,
Patricia
P.S. You may not get this until after we get home--I don't know if we'll get down to the village post office again before we leave.
We're here at the beach until early next week, Dan and the children and I. That may perhaps surprise you a little; no doubt you've heard about the troubles we've been having via Evie, who despite being dense about so much has the most uncanny ability to sense marital discord in her midst (maybe because she's experienced so much of it herself!). Well, to her lasting disappointment, I'm sure (she never could stand Dan, as you know), but probably not to yours, we're back together again. For how long I can't say--after all the upheavals of the past few months I'm hesitant to say that the storm, if that's what it was, is past. We're trying it out--living together again, that is--and taking it a day at a time. So far it seems to be working, but I'm not holding my breath.
For the past few days it hasn't been any figurative marital storm I've been worried about, in any case, but rather this monster out in the Atlantic, which fortuitously switched direction at the last moment and headed towards Canada. The couple we were sharing this house with got antsy and left, but we foolishly took a chance--and the happy result is half a week more of blissful solitude. Not that we didn't get on with the couple, an older professor and his Dutch wife: both of them are very charming people. She has a kind of abrupt European peremptoriness that generally annoys me, but her plainspoken bluntness was actually kind of tonic after several weeks of walking on eggshells with Dan, who tends toward the elliptical and the cryptic. Nevertheless I did grow a bit weary of her relentless criticism of my fitness as a mother! She thinks me an awful one, neglectful and too indulgent by turns, all because I let Sid sleep with us one night and accompanied Mary Renfroe to the outdoor shower, which scares her (evidently I was supposed to let her soldier it out alone), and then let the children play with some bones they had found on the beach (possibly poisonous). But I took it all in stride, reminding myself that she's no great shakes in the mother department either, with her drug-addict son.
At any rate, Dan. To tell the truth my feelings towards him at this point are more of pity and disappointment than of anger, though that flares up quite frequently. It's rather sad to see him limp back home, all tongue-tied and deflated and abashed, having come to the realization that he doesn't perhaps have what it takes to make a clean break with me and start a new life with someone else. I feel for him, truly--in some perverse way I would have liked to see him succeed, though it would of course have been devastating to me personally. But I knew this thing with that girl was never going to amount to anything; really I think it was all some sort of grandiose fantasy he had cooked up in his head, spurred on by her obligingness and passivity and endless willingness to please. Who is she? Why, a little shy, feline, petite, cat-faced yankee girl from upstate New York or some such place, one of his students (I know--it all sounds so banal), with a tiny little whirring voice like a wind-up doll's. An art major. There was a period when she was over at the house a good deal, babysitting and helping with the children. Actually I rather liked her--she's witty and very observant, and good with the children, honestly. But also simultaneously morbidly sensitive and harshly critical of others--not such a surprising combination, really. Some of the things she would say to me about Dan's colleagues and fellow graduate students truly took my breath away with their viciousness. Anyway, something about her cloying precocious little-girl unforgivingness and prim rectitude appealed to Dan, who likes to think of himself as someone who doesn't suffer fools gladly. And off he went and promptly made a fool of himself, and a fool of me too. That's the thing about marriage--if one person does something dishonorable and foolish, then the other is automatically compromised, dragged down to that same level of stupidity and banality.
Well, I'm not having it; I'm not going to be the "wronged wife." I'm happy he's back--honestly I am--but now that he is I'm not going to listen to his endless apologies and self-flagellating talk, or respond in kind with recriminations and wifely aspersions. The proof, I say, is in the pudding. In some ways my willingness to start over with him seems terribly corrupt and old-world; maybe I should have instantly filed for divorce when he walked out, and slammed the door firmly shut when he started making noises about coming back. But who am I to be so lofty and imperiously virtuous when it comes to marriage--with my family's history?
So he's back. And the children are certainly glad to see him, particularly Mary Renfroe, who I think believes this whole debacle was somehow my doing. Such a daddy's girl, she is. I fear for her, I really do; she's really too observant for her own good, too sensitive and alert to adult emotions and conflicts swirling about just over her head. "Are you still mad at Daddy?" she asked me the other night when we were out at the shower. I don't want her to be morbidly attuned to that kind of thing, like I was--like I had to be, for my own survival--as a girl; I want her to be free and sloppy and self-centered and messy, and live the life of a child, not the life of some wizened, prematurely sagacious miniature adult. But I don't know what to do about it.
Right now I'm sitting in the semi-dark kitchen, whose sole bulb as burned out, doing this index for a friend of mine by the daylight coming in through the open windows. Dan's taken the children out for a long walk so I can finish it: thoughtful of him. But obviously I'm not making much progress, since I put it aside to write to you! But this is much more enjoyable, I assure you. And calming. It's low tide; the big booming surf of earlier this morning has quieted to a limp plashing. Someone has a transistor radio going on in the next house, playing a song I hate, something about love will keep us together. I feel quite sleepy actually. Perhaps I'll sneak in a nap before they come back.
Last night I woke up when the tide was in and the surf was roaring, and I sensed that Dan was too, and we lay very close together, our hands clasped together, not speaking. And do you know I felt blissfully happy. Blissfully. And that seems to be enough, lately.
Let me know when your moving date is so that I can come up and help you. Though my married life is a mess, I'm quite good at bringing some order to domestic chaos. But of course you're far more accomplished at that than I.
Love,
Patricia
P.S. You may not get this until after we get home--I don't know if we'll get down to the village post office again before we leave.
Tuesday, June 12, 2007
June 30, 1979
P
It's almost dark. The kids are gone to Aunt Vinnie's. I'm sitting at the little table in the front hall, the thing you used to call the escritoire, the writing desk you inherited from your mother. Through the windows on either side of the door I'm watching the last of the day go. There's a little gray left, a little sulfurous orange, around the rims of the trees. But the night is almost upon us. I can hear the cicadas, that torrent of summer insect noise, through the shut door. Once upon a time we'd be sitting out on the front porch drinking a salty dog in the tumblers with the coin pattern, on a summer Saturday night such as this. But you're gone now.
You're gone. I know that. Every cell, capillary, every inch of skin on my body hums with that knowledge, howls with it. It's as if a knife has gone through this house and through me, slicing your presence away, gouging it out, then coming back to scrape away any little lingering trace of you that remains. Scraping and cutting and gouging and tearing.
There are moments when the fact of your absence is so obscenely, piercingly vivid that tears wouldn't do justice to it, screams would be banal. I was standing in our bedroom yesterday morning, looking at the plastic cup with the long straw on your bedside table that you'd been drinking out of near the end, and a pair of those long support stockings you had to wear draped over a chair. Your blue terrycloth slippers were on the floor next to it, the ones with the roses on the toes. And I simply stood there and took it in, and the horror of your absence, coupled with the awful vividness of your remembered presence, crescendoed, thrummed in my ears until it seemed that my heart must stop, my eyes must stop seeing, the light must go out. But none of that happened. I continued to see. My heart continued to lope along. The light continued to come through the window. I heard birds from outside. I picked up a belt I'd let fall on the floor the night before and hung it on the doorknob of the closet. I left the room. So evidently you don't die of this. Not the way you'd think you would, not the way you want to.
And then there are moments, half hours, whole hours, when your death is a numb sad abstraction, both real and unreal, felt but somehow kept at a distance. During those times I fill out the paperwork, begin the cleaning out of your things. During those times I see and talk to people. Sometimes I even laugh. I laughed today when I rode with Peter to school to get a folder from the office and we saw that hippie Jesus man, the philosophy grad student that crazy elderly lady in the cafeteria used to call a "sissy." He was pedal-pushing his way across the quad, standing up on his bicycle, his hair streaming behind him, with that embroidered bag slung over one shoulder. And Peter said something that reminded me of how you climbed in that second floor window at Dorcas's when she was locked out and how you came out the front door and mistakenly let it shut behind you, and had to climb in again. I laughed then too. Do I need to say that it felt in some sense like a betrayal. And yet I was glad to laugh.
And then the choking vividness of it comes back. Then it recedes. Then it comes back. Anything can start it; its comings and goings occur according to no perceptible schedule, are brought on by no clear stimulus. Turning on the faucet in the bathroom can start it. So can seeing your things in the cabinet, your bottle of Witch Hazel, for instance. So can anything--the sun on the metal rim of the garage door in the morning. Your geraniums. Your handwriting on the calendar by the refrigerator, the one with the sunflowers. You were penciling in dates well into the fall: Laura's opening, the beach. "Start Peggy's route." That's what you wrote on September 16. I have no idea what it means but it meant something to you and now I shall never know. None of us shall.
And of course I'm remembering you when I sleep, which isn't much. Then it almost seems that I forget what has happened and have to remember again when I wake up. And I'm remembering you when I'm awake. I'm remembering awful things, the last weeks, the last days, when you couldn't stay at home anymore though you wanted to. Because we couldn't keep up with keeping you clean. And keeping the sheets clean. And the bleeding. And how you swatted at one of the children when they were sitting on the edge of the bed, how you made a feeble motion with one of your hands, a gesture of barely sentient anger, impatience, blind rage, and the children and I looked at each other and began to cry. And how you looked at me when they took you. I don't know whether you could really see me or not by then, I don't know whether you saw anything during the last few days. You had your eyes open at the last, and when you died. I remember that: how quickly it came in the end, after all those months of slow decline, bumpy downward progress. A ragged breath, then silence. Then silence. One second you're there with me, the next you're gone, gone with a completeness I never could have imagined, though I did try to imagine it beforehand. I could never have really imagined it beforehand.
And I'm remembering things about you I don't even remember ever remembering, things that never had even the status of memories in my mind. And yet here they are, vivid and precise, released from some dark corner of my brain, rushing forwards into consciousness along some synapse that has begun, for whatever reason, transmitting signals after a long period of dormancy. They're like messages from outer space, in a way: inexplicable, uncanny, without precedent. A day in summer, soon after we met, for instance. In the grass below the willows behind the dorms, at college. I was braiding your hair, badly but I was braiding it, because my sisters used to let me braid their hair. It surprised you and amused you that I could do this. Your head was on my knee, turned to the side; you were reading The Education of Henry Adams, the part about the Virgin and the dynamo, which annoyed you. And as I was braiding I saw your face from an angle I hadn't seen it from before. I saw a fullness underneath the chin I hadn't noticed before, I saw a mist of nearly vanished freckles on the bridge of your cheeks, a residue from childhood. I saw the whitened strip of skin where the red of your lips merged into your cheek. I saw that your eyes, making a succession of tiny jerks as they followed the print across the page, were a darker blue than I had thought, a lustrous cerulean. And I thought, with that startled wonderment that comes over you when the unexpected reality of some other person's presence strikes you, truly makes itself felt: I don't know her, and yet I do. I don't know her. Who is she? Who is she? I don't really know.
Did I ever? Did I ever know you? Sometimes it seems to me that I never did, not wholly--I only knew a tiny quadrant, like the small part of the moon that is edged with light. And now we shall not know each other anymore, we shall not know each other any better. The time of knowing what we had not known before about each other, the time of discovery, of seeing what we had not seen, is over. For you and for me.
Those years we had: what were they? What are they now? Now that they are over, they are a single long moment to me, something that can flash before my eyes in a single instant. All those years, all those apparently endless random moments of sudden glances at each other over coffee in the morning and bickering and seeing the shadow of your head on the pillow when I woke in the night and catching sight of your face in the kitchen window over the sink as I backed out of the driveway and the lovemaking and the sound of you running water in the bathroom and nursing the children and looking for the leash for the dog in the hall closet and picking up a fork that dropped on the floor while you are washing dishes--all of that broad swath of time that was our life together is now reduced to a sequence of memories that can be compassed in a single moment. All done. All over. All memory now. All nothing, really. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.
And yet everything to me. Everything.
Everything.
Farewell, Patricia, goodbye. Goodbye.
D
It's almost dark. The kids are gone to Aunt Vinnie's. I'm sitting at the little table in the front hall, the thing you used to call the escritoire, the writing desk you inherited from your mother. Through the windows on either side of the door I'm watching the last of the day go. There's a little gray left, a little sulfurous orange, around the rims of the trees. But the night is almost upon us. I can hear the cicadas, that torrent of summer insect noise, through the shut door. Once upon a time we'd be sitting out on the front porch drinking a salty dog in the tumblers with the coin pattern, on a summer Saturday night such as this. But you're gone now.
You're gone. I know that. Every cell, capillary, every inch of skin on my body hums with that knowledge, howls with it. It's as if a knife has gone through this house and through me, slicing your presence away, gouging it out, then coming back to scrape away any little lingering trace of you that remains. Scraping and cutting and gouging and tearing.
There are moments when the fact of your absence is so obscenely, piercingly vivid that tears wouldn't do justice to it, screams would be banal. I was standing in our bedroom yesterday morning, looking at the plastic cup with the long straw on your bedside table that you'd been drinking out of near the end, and a pair of those long support stockings you had to wear draped over a chair. Your blue terrycloth slippers were on the floor next to it, the ones with the roses on the toes. And I simply stood there and took it in, and the horror of your absence, coupled with the awful vividness of your remembered presence, crescendoed, thrummed in my ears until it seemed that my heart must stop, my eyes must stop seeing, the light must go out. But none of that happened. I continued to see. My heart continued to lope along. The light continued to come through the window. I heard birds from outside. I picked up a belt I'd let fall on the floor the night before and hung it on the doorknob of the closet. I left the room. So evidently you don't die of this. Not the way you'd think you would, not the way you want to.
And then there are moments, half hours, whole hours, when your death is a numb sad abstraction, both real and unreal, felt but somehow kept at a distance. During those times I fill out the paperwork, begin the cleaning out of your things. During those times I see and talk to people. Sometimes I even laugh. I laughed today when I rode with Peter to school to get a folder from the office and we saw that hippie Jesus man, the philosophy grad student that crazy elderly lady in the cafeteria used to call a "sissy." He was pedal-pushing his way across the quad, standing up on his bicycle, his hair streaming behind him, with that embroidered bag slung over one shoulder. And Peter said something that reminded me of how you climbed in that second floor window at Dorcas's when she was locked out and how you came out the front door and mistakenly let it shut behind you, and had to climb in again. I laughed then too. Do I need to say that it felt in some sense like a betrayal. And yet I was glad to laugh.
And then the choking vividness of it comes back. Then it recedes. Then it comes back. Anything can start it; its comings and goings occur according to no perceptible schedule, are brought on by no clear stimulus. Turning on the faucet in the bathroom can start it. So can seeing your things in the cabinet, your bottle of Witch Hazel, for instance. So can anything--the sun on the metal rim of the garage door in the morning. Your geraniums. Your handwriting on the calendar by the refrigerator, the one with the sunflowers. You were penciling in dates well into the fall: Laura's opening, the beach. "Start Peggy's route." That's what you wrote on September 16. I have no idea what it means but it meant something to you and now I shall never know. None of us shall.
And of course I'm remembering you when I sleep, which isn't much. Then it almost seems that I forget what has happened and have to remember again when I wake up. And I'm remembering you when I'm awake. I'm remembering awful things, the last weeks, the last days, when you couldn't stay at home anymore though you wanted to. Because we couldn't keep up with keeping you clean. And keeping the sheets clean. And the bleeding. And how you swatted at one of the children when they were sitting on the edge of the bed, how you made a feeble motion with one of your hands, a gesture of barely sentient anger, impatience, blind rage, and the children and I looked at each other and began to cry. And how you looked at me when they took you. I don't know whether you could really see me or not by then, I don't know whether you saw anything during the last few days. You had your eyes open at the last, and when you died. I remember that: how quickly it came in the end, after all those months of slow decline, bumpy downward progress. A ragged breath, then silence. Then silence. One second you're there with me, the next you're gone, gone with a completeness I never could have imagined, though I did try to imagine it beforehand. I could never have really imagined it beforehand.
And I'm remembering things about you I don't even remember ever remembering, things that never had even the status of memories in my mind. And yet here they are, vivid and precise, released from some dark corner of my brain, rushing forwards into consciousness along some synapse that has begun, for whatever reason, transmitting signals after a long period of dormancy. They're like messages from outer space, in a way: inexplicable, uncanny, without precedent. A day in summer, soon after we met, for instance. In the grass below the willows behind the dorms, at college. I was braiding your hair, badly but I was braiding it, because my sisters used to let me braid their hair. It surprised you and amused you that I could do this. Your head was on my knee, turned to the side; you were reading The Education of Henry Adams, the part about the Virgin and the dynamo, which annoyed you. And as I was braiding I saw your face from an angle I hadn't seen it from before. I saw a fullness underneath the chin I hadn't noticed before, I saw a mist of nearly vanished freckles on the bridge of your cheeks, a residue from childhood. I saw the whitened strip of skin where the red of your lips merged into your cheek. I saw that your eyes, making a succession of tiny jerks as they followed the print across the page, were a darker blue than I had thought, a lustrous cerulean. And I thought, with that startled wonderment that comes over you when the unexpected reality of some other person's presence strikes you, truly makes itself felt: I don't know her, and yet I do. I don't know her. Who is she? Who is she? I don't really know.
Did I ever? Did I ever know you? Sometimes it seems to me that I never did, not wholly--I only knew a tiny quadrant, like the small part of the moon that is edged with light. And now we shall not know each other anymore, we shall not know each other any better. The time of knowing what we had not known before about each other, the time of discovery, of seeing what we had not seen, is over. For you and for me.
Those years we had: what were they? What are they now? Now that they are over, they are a single long moment to me, something that can flash before my eyes in a single instant. All those years, all those apparently endless random moments of sudden glances at each other over coffee in the morning and bickering and seeing the shadow of your head on the pillow when I woke in the night and catching sight of your face in the kitchen window over the sink as I backed out of the driveway and the lovemaking and the sound of you running water in the bathroom and nursing the children and looking for the leash for the dog in the hall closet and picking up a fork that dropped on the floor while you are washing dishes--all of that broad swath of time that was our life together is now reduced to a sequence of memories that can be compassed in a single moment. All done. All over. All memory now. All nothing, really. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.
And yet everything to me. Everything.
Everything.
Farewell, Patricia, goodbye. Goodbye.
D
Wednesday, June 6, 2007
October 16, 1934
C--
Why you aint come like you said you would last night. Why you aint come. I waited in the barn til way past midnite up in the hayloft, there wont enough light to see my watch by but it was after 3 when I clumb down the ladder and left be cause I heard the courthouse bell in town ring. I waited even tho I was cold, be cause I knew once you came and I was holding you close we would be warm enouf to stand the chill. Frost might come and we would not pay it no mind. With us lieing so close together. With our bodies pushed together close. With our hands in one anothers. With our breath on each others skins. I knew we would warm each other but you aint come and the chill got to me in that cold damp hay and so I lef. Must of been 2 I thout I heard footsteps and I thout it was you but it wont nobody, old Mr. Shelton maybe or a deer. But not you. Not you.
And then to day you pass me strate by on Main Street without so much as look at me. You walk strate by me into Aubreys like I wont even there. Your eyes that are customed to laugh and dance when we are with one another like stone, and your town hat on your head and your bag held close and your hands that have touched the most secret place in white gloves. Walk strate by and the glass door of the store swung shut behind you. But your dauter looked at me as she was going in behind you. Yes she did. I seen how her eyes looked me over, up and down, up and down. She has the fast eye. And I thout if one wont another will. If one wont another will. Maybe since you wont come your dauter will and how would you like that. All I have to do is look at her the right way and she will come to me, that I know. And how would you like that.
But I dont want your dauter I wont you come tonight promise you will or else I dont know what Ill do. Tonight. Dont say no. Dont be late. Come up the later and wear your stockings so I can hear the sound they make as they come off the ssss as they peel down your leg. Just come. Just come
T
Why you aint come like you said you would last night. Why you aint come. I waited in the barn til way past midnite up in the hayloft, there wont enough light to see my watch by but it was after 3 when I clumb down the ladder and left be cause I heard the courthouse bell in town ring. I waited even tho I was cold, be cause I knew once you came and I was holding you close we would be warm enouf to stand the chill. Frost might come and we would not pay it no mind. With us lieing so close together. With our bodies pushed together close. With our hands in one anothers. With our breath on each others skins. I knew we would warm each other but you aint come and the chill got to me in that cold damp hay and so I lef. Must of been 2 I thout I heard footsteps and I thout it was you but it wont nobody, old Mr. Shelton maybe or a deer. But not you. Not you.
And then to day you pass me strate by on Main Street without so much as look at me. You walk strate by me into Aubreys like I wont even there. Your eyes that are customed to laugh and dance when we are with one another like stone, and your town hat on your head and your bag held close and your hands that have touched the most secret place in white gloves. Walk strate by and the glass door of the store swung shut behind you. But your dauter looked at me as she was going in behind you. Yes she did. I seen how her eyes looked me over, up and down, up and down. She has the fast eye. And I thout if one wont another will. If one wont another will. Maybe since you wont come your dauter will and how would you like that. All I have to do is look at her the right way and she will come to me, that I know. And how would you like that.
But I dont want your dauter I wont you come tonight promise you will or else I dont know what Ill do. Tonight. Dont say no. Dont be late. Come up the later and wear your stockings so I can hear the sound they make as they come off the ssss as they peel down your leg. Just come. Just come
T
Sunday, June 3, 2007
Tues. July 28, 1992
Dear Jean,
Dan and I are up at the lake house until mid-August: bliss! No phone, no television, no radio, even, though Dan did bring along some ancient tape recorder to listen to Telemann and Bach cassettes in the mornings while he's working (very tinny and staticky--I don't know how he can stand it). No unwanted interruptions from Saskia stopping by to narrate the latest Herman saga and then invite herself to dinner (and get unpleasantly drunk on our box wine--she's gotten in the habit of refilling her glass without asking); no hectoring letters from Dan's mother about Aunt MaeMae, who is in a period of religious mania just now (but when hasn't she been?). Just cool mountain air, morning swims in the lake followed by a few hours in my studio, a nap in the afternoon, drinks at five on the deck, dinner, early to bed. A walk sometimes to Talbot's General Store down at the other end of the lake, sometimes a meal with this peculiar couple who lives a mile down or so (the woman with the crow--I've told you about her). What can I call it but bliss?
It hasn't been all enchantment, I'm afraid. Mary Renfroe rumbled in last week as she had threatened to do in the company of her boyfriend, a shaggy near-illiterate ruffian of a boy with frizzy dreadlocks and body odor so intense my temples would start throbbing when I got within eight feet of him. Tattoo of a spider web on his back and several gold teeth. Called me ma'am fifty times a day, evidence of his fine upbringing in Moultrie or Cusseta or some such delightful place in South Georgia. To tell you the truth that got on my nerves more that the _smell_--I have never gotten use to southern folderol and smiling laying-it-on-thick mama's boy mannerliness: so tiresome. At any rate he's a a delightful catch, and absolutely par for the course for Mary Renfroe, who has, shall we say, unconventional taste in men. Did I ever tell you about Kevin, the religious studies major who took a vow of silence during Lent one year and then came up with Mary Renfroe to visit us one weekend? Actually it made things wonderfully simple--conversation was limited to do you want me to pass the salt and the like. Can you imagine if he hadn't been mute and treated us to disquisitions on Bonhoeffer and Barth, as he apparently was liable to at the drop of a hat? That would have been agony. But at least he was mildly attractive, in a clerky sort of way. This present fellow--Dalton, I think--has no physical charms to speak of, just a kind of simian animality. I can't imagine what Mary Renfroe sees in him. To me this fling or whatever it is is simply an exercise in sheer perversity, sheer willfulness, sheer self-defeating cutting-off-her-nose-to-spite-her-face determination to saddle herself with the most unsuitable boy imaginable. Well, maybe the sex is hot.
But actually their visit didn't turn out to be quite the nightmare it promised to be when they first roared up in his station wagon, a backfiring horror of a vehicle that they are proposing to drive up up to the Blue Ridge mountains to camp out with some friends of Mary Renfroe's from that ritzy school she attended. I don't think they'll ever make it, but if they do maybe the friends can talk some sense into her: someone must, and I never have been able to. The first night, true, they treated us to a session of noisy lovemaking in the guest bedroom that literally had me blushing--I could feel my face burning in the dark! It felt positively indecent, vaguely incestuous, even, to have to listen to it. (Dan claims to have slept through it--liar.) This is how it must have been when we all lived in grass huts and caves: listening to the grunting and groaning and intimate keening of your nearest and dearest in the next bed, or next hammock or animal fur pile or whatever. But then the next morning Dalton did help out Dan clean out his boat, which has been needing it forever, and he even managed to get the lawnmower in the shed out back working and volunteered to mow the grass by the dock. And while he was doing manly things with Dan outside Mary Renfroe helped me make lentil soup.
At first things were quite icy and tense--the girl can sulk like nobody's business, and she was in a state of glum, dolorous Weltschmerz that day due to some quarrel with Dalton (maybe just post-coital tristesse)--but once we got to chopping vegetables she warmed up and suddenly we were laughing with that gleeful, totally out-of-the-blue silliness that sometimes used to overtake us in the midst of our worst quarrels years ago. She was telling me about Dalton's odd sexual proclivities (apparently he actually likes to be spanked, which seems so quaint and old-fashioned nowadays, doesn't it?) and how he doesn't know his multiplication tables or who the vice president is and thinks Ireland is in Russia or something. But very smart with mechanical things. She knows it won't last. Then why are you with him? I had to ask. Because he's nice to me: that was her response, can you believe it? She said she'd never had a boy be so courteous, so gentle, so nice to her. I said sure he's nice--they're always perfectly _nice_, that type, even when they're beating you black and blue and lynching blacks and burning crosses and whatever else they do. Perfectly impeccable down-home manners all the while. Not the most politic thing to say, I'm afraid; it brought back her sulkiness with a vengeance. Margot, you know he's not like that, she said frostily. And when she turned to put some chopped carrots in the pot--her face was sort of turned to the side--she looked so much like Patricia it nearly took my breath away. Patricia could get terribly lofty on you in the same way Mary Renfroe can, insufferably aloof in a kind of martyred, nun-like, reproachful, wounded way, as if you'd insulted a saint. But mainly it was her looks--with her hair cropped short and with all the weight she's lost she looked startlingly like Patricia did during her last spate of illness, a gaunt Maria Falconetti with henna-colored hair, if you can imagine that. And of course instantly I began wondering, as I always have, whether she knew about Dan and me when her mother was sick. You know this now; it won't be a shock to you, I'm sure, but the marriage was falling apart, and Dan was about to leave her when Patricia got sick. And then he stayed with her until the end. Few people know that about Dan, and what he went through for her--his children, I think, least of all.
At any rate all's well that ends well. They left the next morning after a midnight swim in the lake--very imprudent, with those rednecky people across the lake getting drunk and zooming back and forth in their motorboat, and then Mary Renfroe and Dalton were both pretty tipsy too on this godawful Everclear stuff they brought. But breakfast was cordial--I made blueberry pancakes--and our farewells were sincere and heartfelt: I think they did enjoy their stay, and Mary Renfroe actually kissed me before getting in the car, something she hasn't done since she was twelve, I think. And Dalton did improve a little on acquaintance, or maybe it's simply that one inevitably succumbs to that leaping puppy-dog gregariousness and eagerness to please, no matter how much one tries to resist it. And he has a lovely complexion--I hadn't noticed that before. Just the smoothest, most flawless, babyish skin underneath all that dirt and tattoos. When he was bending over to put his knapsack in the trunk I could see how downy and soft it was on the back of his neck.
Since they've been gone, the bliss has returned, but it's been a tremulous haunted bliss, shot through with sudden troubling memories and occasional shadows. I'm doing watercolors again--something about this milky mountain mid-summer light always makes me reach for them. It's an eerie, gauzy light, especially in the early mornings; you always think the haze is about to part and reveal to you something, something epiphantic and final, and you're not sure whether you want to see it or not. But you keep looking for it. You do.
An unforgivably solipsistic letter, obviously--I won't ask for pardon. Just write me an equally solipsistic and self-centered letter in return, please, telling me all about the Baltic trip--I'm eager to hear. Oh and Elizabeth's recital, and the orchids; I'm so envious of you, for mine invariably die. Did you bring me back a fragment of amber perchance? I shall be eternally grateful.
Dan, who's doing just fine, fifty-two and fit as a fiddle after his angioplasty last April, sends his love and regards.
Love,
Margot
Dan and I are up at the lake house until mid-August: bliss! No phone, no television, no radio, even, though Dan did bring along some ancient tape recorder to listen to Telemann and Bach cassettes in the mornings while he's working (very tinny and staticky--I don't know how he can stand it). No unwanted interruptions from Saskia stopping by to narrate the latest Herman saga and then invite herself to dinner (and get unpleasantly drunk on our box wine--she's gotten in the habit of refilling her glass without asking); no hectoring letters from Dan's mother about Aunt MaeMae, who is in a period of religious mania just now (but when hasn't she been?). Just cool mountain air, morning swims in the lake followed by a few hours in my studio, a nap in the afternoon, drinks at five on the deck, dinner, early to bed. A walk sometimes to Talbot's General Store down at the other end of the lake, sometimes a meal with this peculiar couple who lives a mile down or so (the woman with the crow--I've told you about her). What can I call it but bliss?
It hasn't been all enchantment, I'm afraid. Mary Renfroe rumbled in last week as she had threatened to do in the company of her boyfriend, a shaggy near-illiterate ruffian of a boy with frizzy dreadlocks and body odor so intense my temples would start throbbing when I got within eight feet of him. Tattoo of a spider web on his back and several gold teeth. Called me ma'am fifty times a day, evidence of his fine upbringing in Moultrie or Cusseta or some such delightful place in South Georgia. To tell you the truth that got on my nerves more that the _smell_--I have never gotten use to southern folderol and smiling laying-it-on-thick mama's boy mannerliness: so tiresome. At any rate he's a a delightful catch, and absolutely par for the course for Mary Renfroe, who has, shall we say, unconventional taste in men. Did I ever tell you about Kevin, the religious studies major who took a vow of silence during Lent one year and then came up with Mary Renfroe to visit us one weekend? Actually it made things wonderfully simple--conversation was limited to do you want me to pass the salt and the like. Can you imagine if he hadn't been mute and treated us to disquisitions on Bonhoeffer and Barth, as he apparently was liable to at the drop of a hat? That would have been agony. But at least he was mildly attractive, in a clerky sort of way. This present fellow--Dalton, I think--has no physical charms to speak of, just a kind of simian animality. I can't imagine what Mary Renfroe sees in him. To me this fling or whatever it is is simply an exercise in sheer perversity, sheer willfulness, sheer self-defeating cutting-off-her-nose-to-spite-her-face determination to saddle herself with the most unsuitable boy imaginable. Well, maybe the sex is hot.
But actually their visit didn't turn out to be quite the nightmare it promised to be when they first roared up in his station wagon, a backfiring horror of a vehicle that they are proposing to drive up up to the Blue Ridge mountains to camp out with some friends of Mary Renfroe's from that ritzy school she attended. I don't think they'll ever make it, but if they do maybe the friends can talk some sense into her: someone must, and I never have been able to. The first night, true, they treated us to a session of noisy lovemaking in the guest bedroom that literally had me blushing--I could feel my face burning in the dark! It felt positively indecent, vaguely incestuous, even, to have to listen to it. (Dan claims to have slept through it--liar.) This is how it must have been when we all lived in grass huts and caves: listening to the grunting and groaning and intimate keening of your nearest and dearest in the next bed, or next hammock or animal fur pile or whatever. But then the next morning Dalton did help out Dan clean out his boat, which has been needing it forever, and he even managed to get the lawnmower in the shed out back working and volunteered to mow the grass by the dock. And while he was doing manly things with Dan outside Mary Renfroe helped me make lentil soup.
At first things were quite icy and tense--the girl can sulk like nobody's business, and she was in a state of glum, dolorous Weltschmerz that day due to some quarrel with Dalton (maybe just post-coital tristesse)--but once we got to chopping vegetables she warmed up and suddenly we were laughing with that gleeful, totally out-of-the-blue silliness that sometimes used to overtake us in the midst of our worst quarrels years ago. She was telling me about Dalton's odd sexual proclivities (apparently he actually likes to be spanked, which seems so quaint and old-fashioned nowadays, doesn't it?) and how he doesn't know his multiplication tables or who the vice president is and thinks Ireland is in Russia or something. But very smart with mechanical things. She knows it won't last. Then why are you with him? I had to ask. Because he's nice to me: that was her response, can you believe it? She said she'd never had a boy be so courteous, so gentle, so nice to her. I said sure he's nice--they're always perfectly _nice_, that type, even when they're beating you black and blue and lynching blacks and burning crosses and whatever else they do. Perfectly impeccable down-home manners all the while. Not the most politic thing to say, I'm afraid; it brought back her sulkiness with a vengeance. Margot, you know he's not like that, she said frostily. And when she turned to put some chopped carrots in the pot--her face was sort of turned to the side--she looked so much like Patricia it nearly took my breath away. Patricia could get terribly lofty on you in the same way Mary Renfroe can, insufferably aloof in a kind of martyred, nun-like, reproachful, wounded way, as if you'd insulted a saint. But mainly it was her looks--with her hair cropped short and with all the weight she's lost she looked startlingly like Patricia did during her last spate of illness, a gaunt Maria Falconetti with henna-colored hair, if you can imagine that. And of course instantly I began wondering, as I always have, whether she knew about Dan and me when her mother was sick. You know this now; it won't be a shock to you, I'm sure, but the marriage was falling apart, and Dan was about to leave her when Patricia got sick. And then he stayed with her until the end. Few people know that about Dan, and what he went through for her--his children, I think, least of all.
At any rate all's well that ends well. They left the next morning after a midnight swim in the lake--very imprudent, with those rednecky people across the lake getting drunk and zooming back and forth in their motorboat, and then Mary Renfroe and Dalton were both pretty tipsy too on this godawful Everclear stuff they brought. But breakfast was cordial--I made blueberry pancakes--and our farewells were sincere and heartfelt: I think they did enjoy their stay, and Mary Renfroe actually kissed me before getting in the car, something she hasn't done since she was twelve, I think. And Dalton did improve a little on acquaintance, or maybe it's simply that one inevitably succumbs to that leaping puppy-dog gregariousness and eagerness to please, no matter how much one tries to resist it. And he has a lovely complexion--I hadn't noticed that before. Just the smoothest, most flawless, babyish skin underneath all that dirt and tattoos. When he was bending over to put his knapsack in the trunk I could see how downy and soft it was on the back of his neck.
Since they've been gone, the bliss has returned, but it's been a tremulous haunted bliss, shot through with sudden troubling memories and occasional shadows. I'm doing watercolors again--something about this milky mountain mid-summer light always makes me reach for them. It's an eerie, gauzy light, especially in the early mornings; you always think the haze is about to part and reveal to you something, something epiphantic and final, and you're not sure whether you want to see it or not. But you keep looking for it. You do.
An unforgivably solipsistic letter, obviously--I won't ask for pardon. Just write me an equally solipsistic and self-centered letter in return, please, telling me all about the Baltic trip--I'm eager to hear. Oh and Elizabeth's recital, and the orchids; I'm so envious of you, for mine invariably die. Did you bring me back a fragment of amber perchance? I shall be eternally grateful.
Dan, who's doing just fine, fifty-two and fit as a fiddle after his angioplasty last April, sends his love and regards.
Love,
Margot
Saturday, May 26, 2007
April 2, 1961
Dear Dorothea,
I forgot to tell you in the letter I just mailed that I have met the sweetest boy! Well, I'm not sure others would use that term to describe him, but to me he is quite adorable, though he carps and complains all the time and says something unsettling to me every time we see each other. The other day he told me I was looking "blowsy," all because I wore a handkerchief to chorus practice due to having just washed my hair. Then this afternoon he told me that I could stop the fluttery Nicole Diver act, for this was a benighted college in the provincial South, not the French Riviera. And I haven't even read that book or scarcely any Fitzgerald at all! At any rate I told him he was a typical embittered, disillusioned _scion_ of the fallen southern gentry--a Quentin Compson type, if you like (I wasn't going to let him get away with making literary references without coming back with one myself)--and thank God I didn't have to carry around any aristocratic baggage of that kind, since my family were all humdrum shopkeepers and clerks. (Of course that isn't strictly true: your mother can't be classed in that phylum!) He got red in the face and couldn't come back with anything smart! Of course that made me like him more.
Oh, I haven't even told you how he looks. Well, he's no Tab Hunter! Very thin and tall, and already going bald at the crown of his head, wears glasses (dark and horn-rimmed). But he has the sweetest long-fingered hands (today I could hardly keep myself from grasping one of them when I was sitting next to him in the caf) covered with soft brown hair and he has green eyes! I'm not lying--they really are green. Today we were walking by the chapel in full sun and I looked carefully and made sure. Earlier I had thought they might be merely hazel, a much more prosaic shade. But they really are green. And he has a full mouth that turns up at the edges a little. Very aristocratic looking--a cleft chin too! I would really hate him if I didn't like him so much!
We're singing Elijah, and none too well. The sopranos are very off. The alto, some lady from town, is wobbly. She ruined Jezebel's solo. Dan says--did I mention his name is Daniel?--he says the part where Elijah contends with the priests of Baal is so poignant; it makes him sympathize with the Baal worshippers, who are the losers, he says, in the "God sweepstakes." Dr. Whaley was red-faced with annoyance at that remark. Dan says Elijah is like a big juicy rich Victorian fruit cake: dense but without any real substance, and no nutritional value. I love it though. I cried at the end during our last run-through, and lost my place. Did I tell you that Dan has the sweetest baritone voice? I told him that he ought to be singing Elijah himself but he says he doesn't have the heft, with his "feeble Pelleas voice."
Must go now--I have a trig exam to study for, and I need to get in the shower before all the hot water is gone. (Some of these girls, these damned horse-riding debutantes-to-be-girls, take forever to bathe.) I'm not going to appear at practice with my hair wet again! Tell me more about life in New York, and about _Johann_--I'm dying to hear what comes of that! I don't think I would lend him any more money, and as for him sleeping on your daybed--well, my dear girl, take care!
Love,
Pat
I forgot to tell you in the letter I just mailed that I have met the sweetest boy! Well, I'm not sure others would use that term to describe him, but to me he is quite adorable, though he carps and complains all the time and says something unsettling to me every time we see each other. The other day he told me I was looking "blowsy," all because I wore a handkerchief to chorus practice due to having just washed my hair. Then this afternoon he told me that I could stop the fluttery Nicole Diver act, for this was a benighted college in the provincial South, not the French Riviera. And I haven't even read that book or scarcely any Fitzgerald at all! At any rate I told him he was a typical embittered, disillusioned _scion_ of the fallen southern gentry--a Quentin Compson type, if you like (I wasn't going to let him get away with making literary references without coming back with one myself)--and thank God I didn't have to carry around any aristocratic baggage of that kind, since my family were all humdrum shopkeepers and clerks. (Of course that isn't strictly true: your mother can't be classed in that phylum!) He got red in the face and couldn't come back with anything smart! Of course that made me like him more.
Oh, I haven't even told you how he looks. Well, he's no Tab Hunter! Very thin and tall, and already going bald at the crown of his head, wears glasses (dark and horn-rimmed). But he has the sweetest long-fingered hands (today I could hardly keep myself from grasping one of them when I was sitting next to him in the caf) covered with soft brown hair and he has green eyes! I'm not lying--they really are green. Today we were walking by the chapel in full sun and I looked carefully and made sure. Earlier I had thought they might be merely hazel, a much more prosaic shade. But they really are green. And he has a full mouth that turns up at the edges a little. Very aristocratic looking--a cleft chin too! I would really hate him if I didn't like him so much!
We're singing Elijah, and none too well. The sopranos are very off. The alto, some lady from town, is wobbly. She ruined Jezebel's solo. Dan says--did I mention his name is Daniel?--he says the part where Elijah contends with the priests of Baal is so poignant; it makes him sympathize with the Baal worshippers, who are the losers, he says, in the "God sweepstakes." Dr. Whaley was red-faced with annoyance at that remark. Dan says Elijah is like a big juicy rich Victorian fruit cake: dense but without any real substance, and no nutritional value. I love it though. I cried at the end during our last run-through, and lost my place. Did I tell you that Dan has the sweetest baritone voice? I told him that he ought to be singing Elijah himself but he says he doesn't have the heft, with his "feeble Pelleas voice."
Must go now--I have a trig exam to study for, and I need to get in the shower before all the hot water is gone. (Some of these girls, these damned horse-riding debutantes-to-be-girls, take forever to bathe.) I'm not going to appear at practice with my hair wet again! Tell me more about life in New York, and about _Johann_--I'm dying to hear what comes of that! I don't think I would lend him any more money, and as for him sleeping on your daybed--well, my dear girl, take care!
Love,
Pat
May 12, 1953
My dear little Patricia,
Thank you for your sweet note. I am glad you are settling in at Aunt Evie's and getting on so well at school there. Evie is a dear woman, a little flighty at times, but with a core of steel. Did I ever tell you about how she killed a copperhead that had gotten into our room one night when I was a child? I woke up and heard a pounding and saw her crouched on the floor in her little flannel robe, hammering that snake to death with one of Mama's old heavy irons. There is no telling what might have happened if she had not spotted it, for our baby sister Marcia was sleeping in her crib in the same room. Poor Marcia, the diphtheria took her when she was only two. She was a dear baby who laughed all the time. But I know she is in a better place now, in Jesus's loving arms. Anyway I have every faith that Evie will take good care of you until we can be together again.
They have just fed us lunch and now we are allowed to sit on the porch a spell. The food is fair, not good but nothing to make you sick. The other day they served us some custard that was like my mother used to fix. But the potatoes were lumpy. From the porch I can see live oaks in the distance, near the river bank. In the haze they look sort of like weeping angels, all hunched over in their robes, stretching out their arms in consternation and remonstrance. One of the groundkeepers ran over a yellow jacket hive near one of the trees the other day and was stung badly. But today he is out in the grass again, mowing what he did not finish. He has a poultice on his arms one of the kitchen women made him. They say it will be a hot dry summer and it is already miserable here. The ceiling fans do little to ease the sweltering heat.
There is not much company to speak of here. Some of the patients are so sick they cannot speak or so much as look at you, and when they do their eyes are vacant and cold. Others mumble and cry out in the night. Sometimes when I gaze upon them it is difficult for me to believe we are members of the same species, God forgive me.
There is one nice man here, a real scholarly type with a great shiny domed bald head and wire-rimmed glasses. He can discourse on Fichte and Hegel and Kant for hours. Surprisingly he has a sweet tenor voice. The other night he sang "Ah, may the red rose live alway'" to the accompaniment of the piano playing of one of the nurses. It was delightful. Some of the other patients wept. But then he forgot the last sad verse about the departed flowers and became so upset he rushed from the room. The only trouble with him is that he counts things--the tiles on the floor, the windowpanes, his own heartbeat. You will be having a nice conversation with him and suddenly he will start mumbling numbers under his breath. And once he starts that it is as if you are no longer there. I don't know that he will ever get well. One of the nurses told me he was here last winter and had to come back again. And he was doing so well at his post at the university.
I know I am improving every day and that I will soon be strong enough to take you home with me again, and we will live together once more like a father and daughter should. I am taking daily exercise and eating well. There are times when I think of your dear mother and her loss is as fresh as it was the days just after she left us. In some ways the pain is far more keen than it was then. There are moments when it is as if a shadow descends upon me and I cannot catch my breath from the suffocating misery of not having her near, and the knowledge that she is gone forever. But then thirty minutes later I am smiling again. I am smiling because I know that of course she has not left us. In fact she is very close by us at all times.
Do you want to know how close? There is a framed picture in my room of a fishing boat with its nets and tackles drooping over the side. Behind it there is a small hole in the wall, just big enough for somebody to look through, though there is nothing inside it but the dark inside of the wall. One day I pressed my ear to the hole--I do not know why--and suddenly I heard your mother's voice, calling my name. It was so shocking that I cried out and the nurses had to come and put me to bed. All that I night I wept and moaned into my pillow, for it seemed a very frightening thing to hear your mother's voice, without warning, out of the blue. I thought that maybe I was getting worse, that perhaps there was something truly wrong with me, which I had never thought before.
But the other day when they were not watching I put my ear to the hole again, just to make sure my mind was not playing tricks on me. And I heard her voice again. This time she said much more, in a normal speaking voice, clear and distinct. She spoke to me so matter-of-factly and plainly, just as she used to from her place on the other side of the breakfast room table in the morning. She told me we need not worry about her, for she is in a place filled with love and shining light. She said she is watching us every hour, every day, weeping with us as we weep, laughing as we laugh, giving us strength to carry the heavy burden of grief we must bear. It is her burning wish that we live together as a family once more. And she is certain we will, once I am well again. And I know that I soon will be; hearing her voice has done more than any of the treatments I have received here to set me on the path back to health.
This morning when I put my ear to the hole I was distressed not to hear her voice, though I waited for some time. But I know that it will not be long before she speaks to me again. Now that the silence that death had placed temporarily between us has been broken, I am confident that we will be in everlasting contact, and that the love we shared during this lifetime will continue on and on, growing stronger and stronger, binding us together in a bond that death can never break.
Keep the faith, my dear Patricia, and be strong, supported by the knowledge that we will soon be together again--maybe sooner than you think!
Give my love to Evie.
I am,
as always,
your loving Father.
P.S. Let us keep what I have told you about your mother a secret between you and me. I know what people would think if they knew. Let it be our happy little secret to be joyfully silent about. We will cherish it together, trusting in what your mother has promised us. I believe what she has told me, and I know that you, my loving daughter, will too!
Thank you for your sweet note. I am glad you are settling in at Aunt Evie's and getting on so well at school there. Evie is a dear woman, a little flighty at times, but with a core of steel. Did I ever tell you about how she killed a copperhead that had gotten into our room one night when I was a child? I woke up and heard a pounding and saw her crouched on the floor in her little flannel robe, hammering that snake to death with one of Mama's old heavy irons. There is no telling what might have happened if she had not spotted it, for our baby sister Marcia was sleeping in her crib in the same room. Poor Marcia, the diphtheria took her when she was only two. She was a dear baby who laughed all the time. But I know she is in a better place now, in Jesus's loving arms. Anyway I have every faith that Evie will take good care of you until we can be together again.
They have just fed us lunch and now we are allowed to sit on the porch a spell. The food is fair, not good but nothing to make you sick. The other day they served us some custard that was like my mother used to fix. But the potatoes were lumpy. From the porch I can see live oaks in the distance, near the river bank. In the haze they look sort of like weeping angels, all hunched over in their robes, stretching out their arms in consternation and remonstrance. One of the groundkeepers ran over a yellow jacket hive near one of the trees the other day and was stung badly. But today he is out in the grass again, mowing what he did not finish. He has a poultice on his arms one of the kitchen women made him. They say it will be a hot dry summer and it is already miserable here. The ceiling fans do little to ease the sweltering heat.
There is not much company to speak of here. Some of the patients are so sick they cannot speak or so much as look at you, and when they do their eyes are vacant and cold. Others mumble and cry out in the night. Sometimes when I gaze upon them it is difficult for me to believe we are members of the same species, God forgive me.
There is one nice man here, a real scholarly type with a great shiny domed bald head and wire-rimmed glasses. He can discourse on Fichte and Hegel and Kant for hours. Surprisingly he has a sweet tenor voice. The other night he sang "Ah, may the red rose live alway'" to the accompaniment of the piano playing of one of the nurses. It was delightful. Some of the other patients wept. But then he forgot the last sad verse about the departed flowers and became so upset he rushed from the room. The only trouble with him is that he counts things--the tiles on the floor, the windowpanes, his own heartbeat. You will be having a nice conversation with him and suddenly he will start mumbling numbers under his breath. And once he starts that it is as if you are no longer there. I don't know that he will ever get well. One of the nurses told me he was here last winter and had to come back again. And he was doing so well at his post at the university.
I know I am improving every day and that I will soon be strong enough to take you home with me again, and we will live together once more like a father and daughter should. I am taking daily exercise and eating well. There are times when I think of your dear mother and her loss is as fresh as it was the days just after she left us. In some ways the pain is far more keen than it was then. There are moments when it is as if a shadow descends upon me and I cannot catch my breath from the suffocating misery of not having her near, and the knowledge that she is gone forever. But then thirty minutes later I am smiling again. I am smiling because I know that of course she has not left us. In fact she is very close by us at all times.
Do you want to know how close? There is a framed picture in my room of a fishing boat with its nets and tackles drooping over the side. Behind it there is a small hole in the wall, just big enough for somebody to look through, though there is nothing inside it but the dark inside of the wall. One day I pressed my ear to the hole--I do not know why--and suddenly I heard your mother's voice, calling my name. It was so shocking that I cried out and the nurses had to come and put me to bed. All that I night I wept and moaned into my pillow, for it seemed a very frightening thing to hear your mother's voice, without warning, out of the blue. I thought that maybe I was getting worse, that perhaps there was something truly wrong with me, which I had never thought before.
But the other day when they were not watching I put my ear to the hole again, just to make sure my mind was not playing tricks on me. And I heard her voice again. This time she said much more, in a normal speaking voice, clear and distinct. She spoke to me so matter-of-factly and plainly, just as she used to from her place on the other side of the breakfast room table in the morning. She told me we need not worry about her, for she is in a place filled with love and shining light. She said she is watching us every hour, every day, weeping with us as we weep, laughing as we laugh, giving us strength to carry the heavy burden of grief we must bear. It is her burning wish that we live together as a family once more. And she is certain we will, once I am well again. And I know that I soon will be; hearing her voice has done more than any of the treatments I have received here to set me on the path back to health.
This morning when I put my ear to the hole I was distressed not to hear her voice, though I waited for some time. But I know that it will not be long before she speaks to me again. Now that the silence that death had placed temporarily between us has been broken, I am confident that we will be in everlasting contact, and that the love we shared during this lifetime will continue on and on, growing stronger and stronger, binding us together in a bond that death can never break.
Keep the faith, my dear Patricia, and be strong, supported by the knowledge that we will soon be together again--maybe sooner than you think!
Give my love to Evie.
I am,
as always,
your loving Father.
P.S. Let us keep what I have told you about your mother a secret between you and me. I know what people would think if they knew. Let it be our happy little secret to be joyfully silent about. We will cherish it together, trusting in what your mother has promised us. I believe what she has told me, and I know that you, my loving daughter, will too!
Saturday, May 19, 2007
January 16, 1953
Dear Claudine
Yes I still here at the Poker house. Everybody come and gone for Miss Louisa's funeral and now I here alone with Miss Patricia and Mr. Poker. I can't stay here much longer with them, this a crazy house. Mr. Poker, he ain't been right since she died. All night I hear him walking in the bedroom up above mine at night, the room where Miss Louisa breathe her last. He go back and forth, back and forth, talking. Crying too. Going through her clothes and spreading them all on the bed and pressing his face down in them, smelling for her. I know cause I saw him, when the door was crack open. One time he got the child up out of her bed to pray with him way pass midnight in the bitter freezing cold. Had her down on the floor with him on her knees and she ain't got nothing on but her little cotton nightdress. I march up there and raise the child up and say Mr. Poker, this child stay in my room with me tonight, she need her rest and I do too. Miss Patricia she follow me like nothing wrong. She climb up in the bed next to me like it was hers, lean her head back on the pillow next to mine. She don't sleep though. Don't cry neither. She lie there so still and straight. I say go on and sleep now, go on and sleep, but she don't. About three I ask her why she ain't slep and she say she thinking about how cold her mama must be in that ground. I say don't you know your mama in heaven with Jesus? She don't say nothing. She turn on her side and face the wall.
Miss Louisa she fade so quick, I never seen nobody go so fast. It was like she wanted to hurry on through her sickness and get the dying over with as quick as she could. Wouldn't take no food cep an egg I would fix for her with a little milk whip up in it. She said I believe I take a little egg like you fix me, but no bread, no butter, no meat. She sit up in bed and write out her funeral service, letters. She got her jewelry box out and portion it out. She leave this to her sister, this to somebody else. She tell me get down this box and she write somebody name on it, wrap this up in newspaper and put it over here. She terrify me, the way she sat up so high in bed, her head prop up against the bolster, all gaunt and drawn, and her eyes burning, telling me do this, do that. I say Miss Louisa please let me ease you back in bed so you can rest, but she refuse. She say she got too much to do and too little time to do it.
Only when the end came near did her pride slip. Then she cry out for Jesus, for mercy, then she moan from the pain. She say what Jesus suffered on the cross was nothing compare to what she living through, with something eating her alive inside. She say let it be soon, let it be soon, it hurt too much to take one more breath, like teeth cutting into her flesh. And then late one night she tell me something, clutching my hand so hard I thought she'd crack my bones. She said Mrs. Charles left me some money in her will when she died but that her and her father fix it so I wouldn't get it. She cry out and ask me to forgive her. She wail so loud that Mr. Poker came in to see what was the matter. And by the time he was gone she was asleep, her breathing rough, catching every time she breathe out like she might not draw in another.
Next morning I came in and she was sitting up in bed like she feeling better. She had put her lipstick on and comb her hair herself. And I ask her what she meant last night about a will and she act like she don't know what I mean. She say bring her robe, she think she get up a spell. But she never rose from that bed again. Because near about 11:00 she start breathing real ragged again and she lay there a long time with her eyes open with her head turn toward the window, but she don't see nothing, just breathe slower and slower, rougher and rougher. Mr. Poker went to get the doctor but by the time he get back she was gone. Her breath catch a final time, she breathe in once more, a long strained breath, then she still. She so still, lying there with her eyes open that don't see nothing no more. I had to close them myself.
I habent told nobody about the will. I don't know who to tell or what to say. Ain't nothing to say, like as not. The will is made and the money gone and Mrs. Charles and Miss Louisa is dead and I'm here in this crazy house with a man who ain't right in his head and a child who ought not be here. I say to Mr. Charles this child don't blong in this house, she need to be where somebody can look after her. And if she go I go. My hip bother me too much to be running around this cold house. Yesterday it pop as I was carrying a tray up the stairs and I nearly dropped it. I put some salve on my side Brother Webb prepare for me but it ain't help none.
Give my love to Drucie. I in close five dollars for her books. Tell her to study hard and get her lessons every night cause she smart enough to do something sides carry trays and run around for white folks.
Love,
Essie
Yes I still here at the Poker house. Everybody come and gone for Miss Louisa's funeral and now I here alone with Miss Patricia and Mr. Poker. I can't stay here much longer with them, this a crazy house. Mr. Poker, he ain't been right since she died. All night I hear him walking in the bedroom up above mine at night, the room where Miss Louisa breathe her last. He go back and forth, back and forth, talking. Crying too. Going through her clothes and spreading them all on the bed and pressing his face down in them, smelling for her. I know cause I saw him, when the door was crack open. One time he got the child up out of her bed to pray with him way pass midnight in the bitter freezing cold. Had her down on the floor with him on her knees and she ain't got nothing on but her little cotton nightdress. I march up there and raise the child up and say Mr. Poker, this child stay in my room with me tonight, she need her rest and I do too. Miss Patricia she follow me like nothing wrong. She climb up in the bed next to me like it was hers, lean her head back on the pillow next to mine. She don't sleep though. Don't cry neither. She lie there so still and straight. I say go on and sleep now, go on and sleep, but she don't. About three I ask her why she ain't slep and she say she thinking about how cold her mama must be in that ground. I say don't you know your mama in heaven with Jesus? She don't say nothing. She turn on her side and face the wall.
Miss Louisa she fade so quick, I never seen nobody go so fast. It was like she wanted to hurry on through her sickness and get the dying over with as quick as she could. Wouldn't take no food cep an egg I would fix for her with a little milk whip up in it. She said I believe I take a little egg like you fix me, but no bread, no butter, no meat. She sit up in bed and write out her funeral service, letters. She got her jewelry box out and portion it out. She leave this to her sister, this to somebody else. She tell me get down this box and she write somebody name on it, wrap this up in newspaper and put it over here. She terrify me, the way she sat up so high in bed, her head prop up against the bolster, all gaunt and drawn, and her eyes burning, telling me do this, do that. I say Miss Louisa please let me ease you back in bed so you can rest, but she refuse. She say she got too much to do and too little time to do it.
Only when the end came near did her pride slip. Then she cry out for Jesus, for mercy, then she moan from the pain. She say what Jesus suffered on the cross was nothing compare to what she living through, with something eating her alive inside. She say let it be soon, let it be soon, it hurt too much to take one more breath, like teeth cutting into her flesh. And then late one night she tell me something, clutching my hand so hard I thought she'd crack my bones. She said Mrs. Charles left me some money in her will when she died but that her and her father fix it so I wouldn't get it. She cry out and ask me to forgive her. She wail so loud that Mr. Poker came in to see what was the matter. And by the time he was gone she was asleep, her breathing rough, catching every time she breathe out like she might not draw in another.
Next morning I came in and she was sitting up in bed like she feeling better. She had put her lipstick on and comb her hair herself. And I ask her what she meant last night about a will and she act like she don't know what I mean. She say bring her robe, she think she get up a spell. But she never rose from that bed again. Because near about 11:00 she start breathing real ragged again and she lay there a long time with her eyes open with her head turn toward the window, but she don't see nothing, just breathe slower and slower, rougher and rougher. Mr. Poker went to get the doctor but by the time he get back she was gone. Her breath catch a final time, she breathe in once more, a long strained breath, then she still. She so still, lying there with her eyes open that don't see nothing no more. I had to close them myself.
I habent told nobody about the will. I don't know who to tell or what to say. Ain't nothing to say, like as not. The will is made and the money gone and Mrs. Charles and Miss Louisa is dead and I'm here in this crazy house with a man who ain't right in his head and a child who ought not be here. I say to Mr. Charles this child don't blong in this house, she need to be where somebody can look after her. And if she go I go. My hip bother me too much to be running around this cold house. Yesterday it pop as I was carrying a tray up the stairs and I nearly dropped it. I put some salve on my side Brother Webb prepare for me but it ain't help none.
Give my love to Drucie. I in close five dollars for her books. Tell her to study hard and get her lessons every night cause she smart enough to do something sides carry trays and run around for white folks.
Love,
Essie
Tuesday, May 15, 2007
Sunday afternoon, February 25, 1979
My children--my dear children. My dear Sid, my dear Mary Renfroe--
I'm lying here in bed, listening to you all running in and out the front door, checking to see if the snow the weather man has forecast is falling yet. The door slams, opens, slams again; I can feel an icy chill creeping under the coverlet from the winter air you've let in the house. Now I can hear one of you yelling from outside. Have you spotted the first snowflake, perhaps? So much excitement, so much commotion over what I am afraid will be not much. No, not much in the way of winter weather. I don't think there will snow; I think all of this blustery dampness will end in nothing but chill rain, at most maybe some sleet and freezing drizzle. A glassy coating on the trees--that will be something to see, at least. Nevertheless you two are convinced that snow is on the way. I'm sorry, I truly am. I know how much you all had been looking forward to it, and perhaps staying home from school tomorrow. But there will be, for you, other ice storms, other snows.
It's funny, just this moment I'm remembering the ice storms of my childhood, how we'd go outside and carefully peel away the icy molds the frozen rain had made on the leaves of the camellia in front of our house. How delicate they were, and how faithful to the leaves' shape--every vein and ripple was duplicated in the ice's surface. You could see every detail if you held the ice-leaves up to the light. We'd admire them a while, then pop them in our mouths, a leaf meal. Why I'm remembering this I don't know; it may be the stuff I'm taking, these godawful drugs. A thousand memories, a thousand trembling fallen leaves of memory I thought I'd lost forever, have come back to me these past few months from wherever they'd been blown to. Some of them I don't want to come back, some I do. It seems I don't have any choice about what I get to remember, so I just let them come. I just let them come.
It's not an approach to dealing with things that I find easy. I'd much rather marshall them into orderly piles--color-coded piles, perhaps! This pile I'll sort through on Tuesday, this one on Wednesday at 10:00 p.m., after you two have gone to bed. It would be quieter then. But I've discovered these past few years that there are a lot of things that are beyond my power to shape or organize. I just have to take them, however they come, and when, and no matter what they are. Lately I've just been sort of welcoming them. Oh, you want me to accept that too, on top of everything else? Well hand it over, I say, hand it over; I'll find somewhere to put it. That top shelf, maybe? But there are some things that are so much harder than others to take that I can hardly begin to think how I'll accept them. But I'm learning. I'm learning. And by the time I have to hold out my hands for them I hope I will have learned to take them gracefully.
Which brings me to why I'm writing. I think we all know by now that I may not be able to be here with you much longer. None of us really knows, of course; I've had so many setbacks and rallies these past few years that I've given up making any guesses about what may or what may not happen in the near future! But I think that it's safe to say that I've reached a place where the treatments that were working aren't really working anymore, and there isn't much else to try. And I'm sicker and weaker, as I'm sure you've noticed. I think we all sense and know that. I've tried to be honest with you about it, your father has too. At times we've let hope get the best of us, and perhaps allowed ourselves to be a little more optimistic than we really should have been. But of course there was reason for hope! We had a miracle, after all. I've had these last few years with you that I really wasn't supposed to have; I stole time that wasn't rightfully mine, and got away with it! That was a true miracle, and I can't be angry or bitter about it now that it seems that I'm on the other side of it, that I've had it and now it's over. It was a miracle, and I'm deeply grateful; I can't ask for more.
Because you see I'll be with you now, much more than I could have been if I'd had to go when the doctors were thinking I might originally. You've seen more of me (maybe more than you would have liked to at times!), you know me better (maybe things you didn't want to know!) now than you did then; you have more memories or me--the memories of near-adults, not the hazy, murky memories of children. And so I'm confident that I'm going to be with you, I'm going to stick. I'm going to go on being with you in a way I never could have if I hadn't had these years. That's the real miracle.
I'm going to be with you. When I say that I don't mean like some spirit or fairy-godmother or angel or anything silly like that. I had a foolish old aunt who told me when my own mother died that she would always be "watching over me" from above, an idea I came to find rather macabre and upsetting, to tell you the truth. The notion that one is being "watched over" by some angel, however benign, isn't very pleasant, let me tell you. No, I mean I'm going to be with you in the way that someone who has loved you, who has known you well, is always with you, worked into your muscles and sinews and skin, embedded so deeply in your memory that you can't say goodbye to them even if you wanted to.
And you will want to--that is something I know. You'll think about me and dream about me (oh the dreams!) till you wish you didn't. There will come a time when you'll be very angry with me, full of resentment and bitterness. You'll say, why did she say this, do this, why didn't she do that, why did she leave us? Why was she such so stupid, so thoughtless, so impossible? It is perfectly all right and natural for you to be angry with me: that is what I want to tell you. It is all right. I don't mind. It is all right to be sad for me, to pity me, to laugh at me, to ridicule me, and to love, to hate me, even, in succession, or all at once, as you grow older. It is good. Because it means that I will be growing and changing along with you as you go through life and think and feel differently about me, instead of staying the same, like a photograph on a wall that never moves, that never changes its expression.
I'm going to be with you--I'm not going far. It's just an instant away, it's just a moment. It's just a few molecules of air away. It's nothing. I'll be there, whatever happens, whatever you decide to do or be, whatever mistakes you make, whatever unpleasant things come your way. And you will make them, they will come your way. But I know that you're good and talented and smart and brave enough to not be ground down by them, not be diminished by them, not be deceived into living a less full or courageous life than you deserve because of them.
Once I can recover a little energy and feel a little less queasy I am going to come downstairs and see what you all are up to. You've been so good most of the afternoon, letting Mommy rest, but now that's over. You're bickering, I call tell that--you just threw something, Mary Renfroe, I think, a big sofa pillow or book. I'll put a stop to all that. The next thing I'll do is tell you to put that awful handheld football game your father let you buy away, Sid. I can hear its beeping all the way up here. Then I'll clean up the newspaper funnies you've strewn all over the floor and see what sort of mess you've made in the kitchen: I'm sure it's a wreck. If I'm not mistaken somebody was running the blender. Then maybe I'll see what can be done in the way of supper before your father comes home from his office; I think it would cheer him so much if he could see me put a meal together. I'm going to do all these things when I come down. But right now I need to rest a little longer. I need to rest. And do you know it's rather pleasant to lie here and simply listen to you all carp at each other and misbehave and stomp around like elephants? It's lovely, it's heaven, in fact--I could go on listening to you forever, if I could.
I think it really is snowing now! I just saw some flakes out the window, falling by the streetlight down by the corner, which has just come on. You two were right; I ought to have believed you. And now you've opened the front door again to see the falling snow--I can feel the chill draft against my face up here in bed.
I love you both so very much. Never forget that. Never forget it.
Mom
P.S. I don't know when you'll get this. Maybe much later, maybe not for a long time--when you're ready. Maybe never; I simply don't know.
And now I'm going to put down this notebook and pen and turn out the light for a while.
I'm lying here in bed, listening to you all running in and out the front door, checking to see if the snow the weather man has forecast is falling yet. The door slams, opens, slams again; I can feel an icy chill creeping under the coverlet from the winter air you've let in the house. Now I can hear one of you yelling from outside. Have you spotted the first snowflake, perhaps? So much excitement, so much commotion over what I am afraid will be not much. No, not much in the way of winter weather. I don't think there will snow; I think all of this blustery dampness will end in nothing but chill rain, at most maybe some sleet and freezing drizzle. A glassy coating on the trees--that will be something to see, at least. Nevertheless you two are convinced that snow is on the way. I'm sorry, I truly am. I know how much you all had been looking forward to it, and perhaps staying home from school tomorrow. But there will be, for you, other ice storms, other snows.
It's funny, just this moment I'm remembering the ice storms of my childhood, how we'd go outside and carefully peel away the icy molds the frozen rain had made on the leaves of the camellia in front of our house. How delicate they were, and how faithful to the leaves' shape--every vein and ripple was duplicated in the ice's surface. You could see every detail if you held the ice-leaves up to the light. We'd admire them a while, then pop them in our mouths, a leaf meal. Why I'm remembering this I don't know; it may be the stuff I'm taking, these godawful drugs. A thousand memories, a thousand trembling fallen leaves of memory I thought I'd lost forever, have come back to me these past few months from wherever they'd been blown to. Some of them I don't want to come back, some I do. It seems I don't have any choice about what I get to remember, so I just let them come. I just let them come.
It's not an approach to dealing with things that I find easy. I'd much rather marshall them into orderly piles--color-coded piles, perhaps! This pile I'll sort through on Tuesday, this one on Wednesday at 10:00 p.m., after you two have gone to bed. It would be quieter then. But I've discovered these past few years that there are a lot of things that are beyond my power to shape or organize. I just have to take them, however they come, and when, and no matter what they are. Lately I've just been sort of welcoming them. Oh, you want me to accept that too, on top of everything else? Well hand it over, I say, hand it over; I'll find somewhere to put it. That top shelf, maybe? But there are some things that are so much harder than others to take that I can hardly begin to think how I'll accept them. But I'm learning. I'm learning. And by the time I have to hold out my hands for them I hope I will have learned to take them gracefully.
Which brings me to why I'm writing. I think we all know by now that I may not be able to be here with you much longer. None of us really knows, of course; I've had so many setbacks and rallies these past few years that I've given up making any guesses about what may or what may not happen in the near future! But I think that it's safe to say that I've reached a place where the treatments that were working aren't really working anymore, and there isn't much else to try. And I'm sicker and weaker, as I'm sure you've noticed. I think we all sense and know that. I've tried to be honest with you about it, your father has too. At times we've let hope get the best of us, and perhaps allowed ourselves to be a little more optimistic than we really should have been. But of course there was reason for hope! We had a miracle, after all. I've had these last few years with you that I really wasn't supposed to have; I stole time that wasn't rightfully mine, and got away with it! That was a true miracle, and I can't be angry or bitter about it now that it seems that I'm on the other side of it, that I've had it and now it's over. It was a miracle, and I'm deeply grateful; I can't ask for more.
Because you see I'll be with you now, much more than I could have been if I'd had to go when the doctors were thinking I might originally. You've seen more of me (maybe more than you would have liked to at times!), you know me better (maybe things you didn't want to know!) now than you did then; you have more memories or me--the memories of near-adults, not the hazy, murky memories of children. And so I'm confident that I'm going to be with you, I'm going to stick. I'm going to go on being with you in a way I never could have if I hadn't had these years. That's the real miracle.
I'm going to be with you. When I say that I don't mean like some spirit or fairy-godmother or angel or anything silly like that. I had a foolish old aunt who told me when my own mother died that she would always be "watching over me" from above, an idea I came to find rather macabre and upsetting, to tell you the truth. The notion that one is being "watched over" by some angel, however benign, isn't very pleasant, let me tell you. No, I mean I'm going to be with you in the way that someone who has loved you, who has known you well, is always with you, worked into your muscles and sinews and skin, embedded so deeply in your memory that you can't say goodbye to them even if you wanted to.
And you will want to--that is something I know. You'll think about me and dream about me (oh the dreams!) till you wish you didn't. There will come a time when you'll be very angry with me, full of resentment and bitterness. You'll say, why did she say this, do this, why didn't she do that, why did she leave us? Why was she such so stupid, so thoughtless, so impossible? It is perfectly all right and natural for you to be angry with me: that is what I want to tell you. It is all right. I don't mind. It is all right to be sad for me, to pity me, to laugh at me, to ridicule me, and to love, to hate me, even, in succession, or all at once, as you grow older. It is good. Because it means that I will be growing and changing along with you as you go through life and think and feel differently about me, instead of staying the same, like a photograph on a wall that never moves, that never changes its expression.
I'm going to be with you--I'm not going far. It's just an instant away, it's just a moment. It's just a few molecules of air away. It's nothing. I'll be there, whatever happens, whatever you decide to do or be, whatever mistakes you make, whatever unpleasant things come your way. And you will make them, they will come your way. But I know that you're good and talented and smart and brave enough to not be ground down by them, not be diminished by them, not be deceived into living a less full or courageous life than you deserve because of them.
Once I can recover a little energy and feel a little less queasy I am going to come downstairs and see what you all are up to. You've been so good most of the afternoon, letting Mommy rest, but now that's over. You're bickering, I call tell that--you just threw something, Mary Renfroe, I think, a big sofa pillow or book. I'll put a stop to all that. The next thing I'll do is tell you to put that awful handheld football game your father let you buy away, Sid. I can hear its beeping all the way up here. Then I'll clean up the newspaper funnies you've strewn all over the floor and see what sort of mess you've made in the kitchen: I'm sure it's a wreck. If I'm not mistaken somebody was running the blender. Then maybe I'll see what can be done in the way of supper before your father comes home from his office; I think it would cheer him so much if he could see me put a meal together. I'm going to do all these things when I come down. But right now I need to rest a little longer. I need to rest. And do you know it's rather pleasant to lie here and simply listen to you all carp at each other and misbehave and stomp around like elephants? It's lovely, it's heaven, in fact--I could go on listening to you forever, if I could.
I think it really is snowing now! I just saw some flakes out the window, falling by the streetlight down by the corner, which has just come on. You two were right; I ought to have believed you. And now you've opened the front door again to see the falling snow--I can feel the chill draft against my face up here in bed.
I love you both so very much. Never forget that. Never forget it.
Mom
P.S. I don't know when you'll get this. Maybe much later, maybe not for a long time--when you're ready. Maybe never; I simply don't know.
And now I'm going to put down this notebook and pen and turn out the light for a while.
Tuesday, May 8, 2007
Saturday, March 31, 1956
Dear Mama,
Thank you for the chocolates. I shared them with some of the other girls on my wing. Nobody wanted to eat the kind with pink jelly stuff inside them, but there is a fat girl named Elspeth who will eat anything and I gave them to her. She has asthma and is excused from P.E. class--lucky. Is asthma something you can catch? If you send chocolates again please send Whitman's. Theirs are better than Schrafft's.
Last Saturday Hermione's mother came for the day and invited me to have lunch with them in town. She brought her man friend along. His name is Nicola and he is very good-looking, with black curly hair and very white teeth. Also he is very much younger than Hermione's mother. I asked Hermione if they would get married and she said no, he is just one of her mother's amours--that is the term she used. We went to the restaurant in the hotel in town, the Lockley. You should have seen the waitresses in there when he walked in, they nearly fell all over themselves trying to be the one to take his order. Usually they look so sulky and mean. There is one there with a big bottom and and a tower of frosted hair who is especially nasty. One time she said that Hermione had bedroom eyes already at thirteen and that if she didn't stop looking at the busboys the way she did she was going to end up in trouble, and it was lucky it was her mother was so rich, because she could probably pay to fix it if she did. Even she tried to act nice, and smiled at us. When she did that I could see why she never does smile--she has a big gap between her teeth, which are big like a rabbit's.
Nicola kissed me on both cheeks when he left, like they do in France. He is trying to be a painter. Do you think he knows Alfred? Probably not. I don't think Alfred knows anybody that young. Hermione says she is going to invite me home one weekend to her mother's weekend place on Long Island. There is an old lady who lives there, a sculptor, who gives garden parties on the weekends and Hermione says that her mother will take us. She says that she will lend me one of her dresses if we go--nothing I have is nice enough.
I am clearing the tables in the dining hall in the evening as part of my work scholarship. I do not mind. I have a way of stacking the plates up on the trays so quickly that everyone wonders how I do it. They think I am going to break them, the way I fling them into piles, but I never do. Some girls stay late after they've finished eating to watch me do it. It is fun. The women in the kitchen call me Rita on account of my red hair.
Alfred wrote me a short letter back in the fall but I have not heard from him since. It was written on a piece of old cardboard with some kind of Chinese characters on one side, I could hardly read it. He said he had sold a painting, is that true? It probably didn't help much if he did. I am sorry that he is no longer living at home but you always said it would come to this in the end.
I don't know if I can come home during the holidays. Hermione said something about me spending spring break with her but I don't know if it will come to anything. If I do come home you must have the piano tuned. Last time I was there the lower octaves so out of tune I could barely stand to play it. I am working on some Schubert impromptus for my piano lesson. Miss Plotz says I have talent but have no discipline, and no real technique. She says it may be too late to change my bad habits at my age, even though I am only 14. But she often says mean things like that to get me to practice more.
Tell Maury he owes me a letter. He has only written me two since I've been here and I've written him I don't know how many. Hug Katschen for me--I miss her. I hope her arthritis is better.
Love,
Dorothea
Thank you for the chocolates. I shared them with some of the other girls on my wing. Nobody wanted to eat the kind with pink jelly stuff inside them, but there is a fat girl named Elspeth who will eat anything and I gave them to her. She has asthma and is excused from P.E. class--lucky. Is asthma something you can catch? If you send chocolates again please send Whitman's. Theirs are better than Schrafft's.
Last Saturday Hermione's mother came for the day and invited me to have lunch with them in town. She brought her man friend along. His name is Nicola and he is very good-looking, with black curly hair and very white teeth. Also he is very much younger than Hermione's mother. I asked Hermione if they would get married and she said no, he is just one of her mother's amours--that is the term she used. We went to the restaurant in the hotel in town, the Lockley. You should have seen the waitresses in there when he walked in, they nearly fell all over themselves trying to be the one to take his order. Usually they look so sulky and mean. There is one there with a big bottom and and a tower of frosted hair who is especially nasty. One time she said that Hermione had bedroom eyes already at thirteen and that if she didn't stop looking at the busboys the way she did she was going to end up in trouble, and it was lucky it was her mother was so rich, because she could probably pay to fix it if she did. Even she tried to act nice, and smiled at us. When she did that I could see why she never does smile--she has a big gap between her teeth, which are big like a rabbit's.
Nicola kissed me on both cheeks when he left, like they do in France. He is trying to be a painter. Do you think he knows Alfred? Probably not. I don't think Alfred knows anybody that young. Hermione says she is going to invite me home one weekend to her mother's weekend place on Long Island. There is an old lady who lives there, a sculptor, who gives garden parties on the weekends and Hermione says that her mother will take us. She says that she will lend me one of her dresses if we go--nothing I have is nice enough.
I am clearing the tables in the dining hall in the evening as part of my work scholarship. I do not mind. I have a way of stacking the plates up on the trays so quickly that everyone wonders how I do it. They think I am going to break them, the way I fling them into piles, but I never do. Some girls stay late after they've finished eating to watch me do it. It is fun. The women in the kitchen call me Rita on account of my red hair.
Alfred wrote me a short letter back in the fall but I have not heard from him since. It was written on a piece of old cardboard with some kind of Chinese characters on one side, I could hardly read it. He said he had sold a painting, is that true? It probably didn't help much if he did. I am sorry that he is no longer living at home but you always said it would come to this in the end.
I don't know if I can come home during the holidays. Hermione said something about me spending spring break with her but I don't know if it will come to anything. If I do come home you must have the piano tuned. Last time I was there the lower octaves so out of tune I could barely stand to play it. I am working on some Schubert impromptus for my piano lesson. Miss Plotz says I have talent but have no discipline, and no real technique. She says it may be too late to change my bad habits at my age, even though I am only 14. But she often says mean things like that to get me to practice more.
Tell Maury he owes me a letter. He has only written me two since I've been here and I've written him I don't know how many. Hug Katschen for me--I miss her. I hope her arthritis is better.
Love,
Dorothea
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