Читать книгу While Rome Burns - Alexander Woollcott - Страница 20
ОглавлениеIN reading this chapter from an
as yet unwritten autobiography,
you may be in some doubt as to
which is the central figure—the
Lady or the Tiger.
AUNT MARY’S DOCTOR
I saw by the newspapers one morning in the first weeks of 1929 that the doctor who attended my Aunt Mary in her last illness was engaged in writing a book. I did not anticipate an Adlerian treatise entitled The Case of Aunt Mary, or even The Doctor Looks at Aunt Mary. Indeed, I imagined that he had forgotten all about her, for his was a crowded, tempest-tossed life, and she has been dust in the graveyard these many years.
Even into my time the faint, fragrant memory of her still lingered around the house where she and I were born. This is a shabby, rambling old caravansary in Jersey, bleak as a skull in winter. I am afraid it has not been painted since the Civil War. But in the spring, the vines that encase it and hold it up against the winds break into myriad blossoms. In May it is fantastically festooned with wistaria, and when their lavender petals flutter down to the eaves of the veranda roof, the crimson rambler takes up the task of making the old house seem gay and important.
The place is thronged with ghosts. Ghosts, for instance, of the Van Mater slaves, who, back in the early part of the eighteenth century, forged the nails and hewed the beams of the barn that went up in flames in 1919, and whose burial ground still stands between two fields, the wooden crosses long since moldered away, but the soil itself somehow spared each spring by diffident plowmen.
Or ghosts of Washington’s troops, buried, my elders always told me, there on the lawn across the noisy brook that winds through the hazel thicket and cuts across our place on its bustling, undiscouraged way to the sea. Certainly the Redcoat retreat to the waiting ships at the Highlands ran across our fields, and now and again the spring plowing will bring up a bit of salvage. Once the potato diggers came upon a British officer’s sword, emblazoned with a forgotten and almost indecipherable importance.
Then there is the ghost of Mr. Greeley, who used to take his nap in a chair on the veranda, the red bandanna, which would be thrown across his face, bellying rhythmically with his snores, and all the young fry compelled to go about on tiptoe because the great editor was disposed to doze.
And of course the ghosts of mine own people—above all, the ghost of little Aunt Mary. She was a tiny, fragile, merry child, born into a husky and surprised tribe. It was the way of her time to say that she faded like a wild rose from the roadside. She had become a dim legend in my time, but I knew the daguerreotype, with a locket clasping the fichu on her breast, and the black hair parted in the middle above a forehead ivory white. On frosty, moonlit nights I used to think I saw her, with her crinolines and her hood and her mittens, standing half lost in the shadows under the big walnut tree that was an old-timer even in her day.
She was in her early twenties when she died. They spoke of the malady that carried her off as “a decline,” and I suppose that some species of anemia afflicted her. The medical talent available then in Monmouth County was unequal to cope with the sickness that seized her, and the young French painter who was in love with her came up to New York to seek advice and help in the French colony here.
It was 1866—a time when New York looked to Paris for everything, from the corps de ballet for The Black Crook to the styles in bonnets and shawls affected by the lovely Eugénie. And just as anyone with an endocrine perplexity would have turned, a few years ago, to Walter Timme, new come from Vienna with all the latest wisdom about the glands, so in the sixties Aunt Mary’s anxious suitor hunted up a young French doctor, bursting with all the latest theories from the University of Paris. He had come to America to make his fortune and see the world, I suppose, but more particularly to escape from a France ruled by a rouged Napoleon sitting on the nervous edge of a recent throne. Paris just then was unhealthy for radicals and the fiery young doctor, in the days of his interneship, had already tasted the experience of spending two months in the lockup for writing pieces distasteful to the party in power.
Now, in New York, he responded to the call for help from down home. The trip was more of an undertaking in those days. There were no trains running to Red Bank. The young doctor must needs take a boat to South Amboy, and from there travel across country on horseback.
All his new-garnered wisdom was not enough for his task, but in the days when he stood by he proved himself sympathetic and winning and must have made friends with all the family. For afterward, when he was teaching French to a school of young misses up in Stratford, Connecticut, and desired, or at any rate agreed, to marry one of his pupils, it was to my grandfather that he came to borrow the cost of his wedding trip and the price of a fine new suit of clothes.
I never heard whether he settled that score, but I think he must have, for it was a tradition in the family to speak fondly of him. Another baffling detail I cannot supply would explain how, contrary to all the old family customs, my grandfather happened to have the money to lend him.
Aunt Mary’s doctor paid another visit to America in 1922 to make a speaking tour. In the newspaper comment heralding that tour, one viewpoint puzzled my uncles and aunts, as they rocked on the veranda and let their memories run back to the days when the dapper young doctor had come galloping up from Amboy more than half a century before. Being his seniors, they could not understand why anyone should think he was too old to make this tour. Why, he was only eighty-one, going on eighty-two. Perhaps, they decided, he had let the life of Paris sap him, and was, in consequence, poorly.
And now, seven years later, he had outlived them all and, or at least so the cables from Paris reported, was spry enough to be engaged in writing a book. His name, of course, was Clemenceau.
