Читать книгу White Nights in Split Town City - Annie DeWitt - Страница 9

3.

Early that summer, Mother took a vision of England under her wing. She fell in with Margaret Nydam, the elderly British widow who lived in the studio apartment above the Agway in the center of town. Margaret was Fay Mountain’s only living European transplant. Along with her accent and her collection of Yeats, Margaret boasted purebred old world blood. The Women’s Voting League congregated in her parlor every Sunday where Margaret served scones and cream. Father often called Margaret cultural driftwood. Her influence, he said, floated wherever it was least needed. She was also the town librarian.

Most mornings that summer I awoke to Margaret sitting on the wooden stool next to our kitchen counter where Mother sat when she sorted the bills. Margaret sipped a black coffee. Mother would put out a spread until Margaret chided her enough that she’d finally retire to the table with her cigarette and tea. Mother was constantly extending the life of her teabag with fresh water until the brew was so weak it tasted like a river of stirred up silt. “One of anything goes a long way,” she said.

Margaret arrived in the early hours cloaked in layers of felt and flannel and an old safety pin where she’d thrown up her bangs. Layers, Margaret said, trapped the breeze. A husky body odor emanated from the places where Margaret exposed her pallor to the light. Due to her age and thickness of her hair, the oils made her face glow and gave her hair body. Her long unkempt grays were braided to one side her face. Margaret was not in the habit of wearing undergarments. I had glimpsed her breasts once where they hung away from her skin as she bent over to adjust her stool and pour herself another trifle from her flask. The immodesty of my gaze seemed to impress her.

That morning, the two women were hanging a painting in the kitchen above Old Eagle Back. Margaret sat on the stool observing Mother work.

“What about here,” Mother said, holding the painting at shoulder level against the far wall of the kitchen. “How’s that for height?”

“That’s fine,” Margaret said. “That’s just fine. Mark it off. I’ve got a level in back of the car. I’ll make a dash for it after we finish our tea.”

Mother took the pencil from behind her ear and drew a faint line on the wall over the center of the frame.

The wall had been a focal point of Mother’s recent discomfort. It sat at the far end of the house onto which both the living room and the portico overlooked. The previous owners of the house had been an elderly couple with a fondness for stenciling pastoral scenes onto any stretch of wall that enjoyed some open expanse. To Mother’s mind, the kitchen offered a particularly unforgivable example. The laymen’s handiwork, she felt, was evidence of the house’s age and limited possibility.

“Like Didion said,” Margaret said. “Style is character.”

“Truly,” Mother said. She leaned the print against the wall and stood back to regard it as she smoked.

In truth, I could tell Mother wasn’t entirely sure about the choice of the work. The print had been a gift from Margaret, an old replica from her wall, which Margaret said she’d stared at too long.

“It needs fresh eyes,” Margaret had said, putting the frame into the back of her Volvo one night after the two women had gotten into the sherry.

Mother looked disappointed now with her choice. She’d hoped for something more modern. In the wake of their enthusiasm, she’d ended up with Georgia O’Keeffe’s “Red Hills.”

“There’s a hardness about it,” Margaret said. “It radiates a certain intelligence.”

Mother searched the soft red expanse of the print for the intelligence of which Margaret spoke. In her worst imaginings, I thought, the earthen mass looked not unlike one of the watercolors Birdie would bring home from school. At best, it radiated a kind of optimism.

“It’s a horizon,” Mother said.

“Not only that,” Margaret said. “It’s Texas.”

“Really,” Mother said.

“Truly,” Margaret said. “O’Keeffe attended art school in Chicago. The boys there were always encouraging her to abandon her practice and become an art teacher or a live model. One even went so far as to paint over her work to show her how the Impressionists made trees. At twenty-four, O’Keeffe said she moved to Texas because there were no trees to paint.”

“In that case I understand her prerogative,” Mother laughed dragging long and hard on her cigarette before pushing the smoke out her nose.

“When they got too bored of looking at the horizon,” Margaret said. “O’Keeffe and her sister, Claudia, used to go out and trace the evening stars. They’d take long walks and Claudia would play skeet with the bottles in the road, throwing the bottles up into the air and picking off as many of them as she could before they hit the ground.”

“Don’t tempt me,” Mother laughed.

“You’re a funny woman, Ania,” Margaret said to Mother. “In fact, you’re not so unlike Didion yourself.”

“Come off it,” Mother said by way of encouragement.

“Scout’s honor,” Margaret said. “When the men asked her why she painted ‘Red Hills’ instead of her traditional flowers, O’Keeffe replied, ‘A red hill doesn’t touch anyone’s heart.’”

Mother wasn’t much versed in the ways of Didion. She associated writers of that ilk with the allure she had felt towards the women’s movement that had erupted during her college years. The product of Russian immigrants who had raised their family in a small boarding house in one of New York’s smaller industrial cities, she had avoided her attraction to the movement for practicality’s sake. Her mindset was the product of the immigrant constitution. She’d been taught to keep her brow tipped slightly toward the heavens at all times such that her very posture might raise her up. While her grade school friends were tattooing their books with pictures of Kennedy, she’d attended Republican meetings with her father at the General Electric. The first vote she’d cast had been for Nixon. From a young age she’d wanted to be a part of the American politic, a forecast she associated with the Republican brain. Republicans belonged to a set of wealthy risk-takers with strong characters who made good on their children and their investments. “The future is portended in the rise of one’s cheekbones,” Mother often said. “That slender slope.” Mother had spent one summer of her college career working desk duty at the addictions division of the Red Cross, conducting intake interviews with the Veterans. She’d felt she’d seen enough that summer to know big government didn’t accomplish anything more than organizing people’s worst years.

Mother now spent what evenings she could out of the house. She took night classes that met at the feed store in the center of town. The nights she wasn’t studying, she attended meetings held by The League of Women Voters in Margaret’s studio. Beyond voting, the league was dedicated to promoting speaking opportunities. Mother had begun exercising these around the house with Birdie and I. Despite her conservative politic, Mother was fiercely imaginative and outspoken, attributes ignited by those Sunday sit-ins. Margaret appreciated Mother’s thrift and her libel. She recognized in the young woman a similar passion for bargaining with the world. Despite the gap in their age and their experience, life had lent both women the perspective that the only interesting lives were those lived by people whose subsistence required very little upkeep, yet whose true thriving was provided for by acts of excess. Margaret smoked and threw dinner parties. Socially Mother cavorted with the town’s few peaked progressives. She danced in the kitchen to Elvis. Margaret brought some color back into her cheeks.

“I’m just not sure this print’s particularly modern,” Mother said that morning, regarding the O’Keeffe where it rested against our kitchen wall.

“Look around you,” Margaret chided, “Next to that window, the painting almost looks like a mirror image of your little view.”

“So now you’re saying I’ve bought a house with a dismal view,” Mother laughed.

“Precisely,” Margaret laughed.

“It’s depressing,” Mother said. “Staring at all that red in the distance. It’s like someone rained blood on the mountain.”

“Color overthrows form,” Margaret said. “Really, it’s a very modern idea.”

As if to lend credit to her heritage, Margaret was a gifted photographer. Her husband had worked for the Audubon Society and was rumored to have been a distinguished botanist and nature writer. In an act of affection for him, Margaret had taken up photography and had often accompanied him on his trips. Mr. Nydam had died some years before Margaret came to own her apartment above the Agway—really more of an attic studio than home—which now housed her plethora of nature books, hardcover photography manuals, and a collection of photographic equipment that harked back to another era. One volume documented the mission of an environmental photographer to chart the Earth’s topography, a solitary job performed under some level of duress and extremity of climate. Along with several scrapbooks of newspaper clippings and an indexed library of field guides, the manuals, cameras, and other photographic equipment made up the entirety of the existing relics of Margaret’s husband’s fabled career. I imagined Mr. Nydam, writer, philanthropist, bird enthusiast, disappearing from society for several days at a time, knee-deep in swamplands, charting the growth of exotic flora and fauna while predicting local weather trends based on the migratory patterns of various flocks of sandpiper and wood thrush.

The Nydams never had any children. Margaret was a woman with whom other women could relinquish all memories of childbirth and breast-feeding. She unbuckled herself after dinner and enjoyed a glass of good sherry with the occasional fag. This idea, or some combination thereof, made Mother giddy. She came home from those Sunday evenings at Margaret’s smelling faintly of smoke and brandy, some new book or broach that Margaret had lent her tucked away in her purse.

Father called the group The Separatists.

“Where you going, Rick?” Mother would say those evenings after supper when Father pulled a cigar from his pocket and lit off up the road toward the butte which overlooked the highway.

“A lady needs time for leisure,” Father would say.

I knew Father kept a box of White Owls in the glove compartment of his Bronco. The cigars were individually wrapped and sealed with thin strips of paper on which was displayed the white bird perched on his branch. Below the bird the emblem read: New Yorker, Est. 1887. I’d taken to stealing the tossed wrappers from the backseat of Father’s car.

Those nights Father went out walking, I imagined he found himself looking up at the familial scenes which presented themselves in the windows of the neighboring houses on Fay Mountain. Perhaps he was impressed with the scale of life they presented. The most important goal in life was to author something authentic, he’d tell us. There was something handsome in it. He’d insisted we call him Pop. Father was what he had called his old man. It had too much of the dictator in it, he said.

“So you’re saying O’Keeffe had a certain artificial intelligence,” Mother said that morning.

“I’m saying she had a certain hardness, is all,” Margaret said.

I regarded the print from where I stood in the kitchen. To me, it looked like a reflection of Mother herself, bold and red and sprawling.

Content with their handiwork, Margaret surrendered to the news. Since the war had started, Mother had kept a small television on the counter so we could follow the headlines.

“I’ll never get used to it,” Mother said.

“Used to what?” Margaret said.

“The continuity of all this coverage. I keep thinking they’ve dropped a bomb over there every time my teacups rattle a little in my kitchen. I find myself pacing the house waiting for the sirens to sound.”

“You’re a product of your generation,” Margaret said.

“I’m a product of the space race,” Mother said. “Growing up, I remember looking out the window one winter and thinking the Russian’s had finally bombed us. It turns out it was just the first snow.”

“What sirens?” I said.

“The air raids, baby,” Mother said. “I went to school during the Cold War. Several days a week we had a drill. An alarm would sound and we’d hide under our desks.”

“What were you protecting yourself against,” I said.

“A big red scream, darling,” Margaret said.

“Never mind all that, baby,” Mother said. “Come here and watch the news.”

I tried to imagine what a cold war would look like. I pictured a tundra of ice with soldiers frozen into it. To my mind, the current war in the desert was humorless. The endless shots of the soldiers which plastered the screen at all hours of the day lacked temperature or color. Those evenings Father returned late from work, Birdie, Mother and I ate TV dinners on folding trays in the living room. Mother liked to listen to Brokaw. She watched interviews with the POW’s in silent anticipation. I had recently come upon Mother standing in front of her bathroom mirror one morning imagining that she herself was participating in the coverage. An old college flame of hers had once been a filmmaker. He’d written one screenplay — Did I Wake You Up? For a brief stint in the seventies under his tutelage, Mother had entertained the idea of becoming a newscaster. She and her flame would sit up nights and he would interview her about her reactions to life at her women’s college, which was considering becoming Co-ed.

“What do you make of America’s response to this new war as a child of the Vietnam generation,” I had seen Mother ask herself into the old wooden handle of her hairbrush.

“It has a certain hardness about it,” Mother had replied.

There was, Mother taught me, a certain liberty in reflecting upon the experiences of one’s previous lives.

The news that morning with Margaret and the O’Keeffe was interrupted by a knock at the front door.

“Sorry to interrupt on a weekend, Ma’am,” the Ranger standing on our porch said. “Is your husband at home?”

“I’m sure he is,” Mother replied studying him through the gaps in the screen. “May I ask who’s inquiring?”

“I drove up from town,” the Ranger said, removing his hat so you could see the contours of his face where the sun hit them. “I’m here to inquire about your stream. We’ve had complaints about the pests in these parts.”

Two large, clear gullys of sweat ran down the side of his face. His hair was wet where the hat had been. A uniform often makes a man look older than he is, I thought. To a man of his age, pest was a specimen of experience no larger than biology.

Father must have heard the whine of the screen door. He emerged from the bulkhead where he’d been sorting packets of seeds. A long-winded pride swelled from Father’s chest as he watched the Ranger interacting with Mother. Mother had a way of casting men outside of themselves. It was in such moments that Father was most dumbfounded by his own good luck.

“I can see you located my trouble here, Ranger,” Father called to us, curling the thick, green hose around the underbelly of his arm.

“No trouble,” The Ranger said. “I just came to inquire about having a look around your stream.”

“Is there some issue with my stream?” Father said.

“Well, that depends, I suppose,” the Ranger said stepping off the porch and heading toward the bulkhead where Father was wrapping his hose. “On what you call trouble. There’s been talk of dredging your stream to rid the town of the squeeters and the gnats. A doctor recently built a home on the east side of the mountain. A city man. High-up on his profession. With all the horse farms in these parts, there’s been rumor of equine encephalitis. The doctor’s wife is pregnant.”

The road was thick with bugs that summer. Inside the house, Mother had taken to hanging flytraps in the doorways. The thin, sticky yellow papers hung from the doorframes like rows of gristle. When the breeze came through the windows at night, it shook the papers, unsticking the carcasses that were less deeply embedded and unleashing them onto the ground. In the morning, the linoleum under the doorframe which led to the kitchen was littered with small wings and dried up bodies which Mother swept into the dustpan and threw out over the deck. She said the protein was good for her garden. Every now and again she missed a spot and you felt the crunch of a dried fly underfoot.

Above all things, Father prided himself on reason and what levelheadedness he could offer others less informed about the world than himself. Since moving to Fay Mountain, Birdie and I had been bitten by horseflies big enough to stop a cockroach in it’s tracks. Father knew that doctor’s baby was at no immediate risk. If he had been a betting man, he’d have put money on it. Talk, Father often said, had a reliable pattern. Most of the gossip which made its way to Fay Mountain Road had nearly extinguished itself in town before it reached us. Father took the Ranger out back of the house to the marshland where the stream emptied out just to appease him. Dressed in my bathing suit and Mother’s gardening boots, I accompanied the two men to determine what opportunity might lie dormant in the air.

The heat that day was dry and unsettling. The sun was strong and blocked out all sense of movement. Even the mosquitoes in the swamp seemed to have settled down under the leaves of the trees to find a moist spot in the shade and avoid choking on the dust. The stream coughed out a trickle. The marsh itself looked like a bald piece of earth, dry and cracked in some patches, wet enough in others that the land moved like jelly underfoot. We made our way—the Ranger, Father and I—down to the tributary where the stream emptied out into a small basin. At the mouth of the basin, a beaver had built a den out of twigs and torn bits of burlap, remnants of old feedbags that had been carried downstream from the pastures in the runoff. A green plastic soda bottle had caught on the south face of the den and bobbed listlessly in the water. As we crossed the dam, Father picked up the bottle and stuffed it in his pocket while I made my way toward the left bank of the stream to get a better view of the marsh. There, we surveyed the land for clouds of bugs. “You know those well-to- do folk,” the Ranger said by way of apology. “Always looking for someplace to cast around their improvement. They’d mow their neighbor’s lawn if it would make their own look greener.”

The left bank of the river sat slightly higher than the marshland below it. Amid the floating lily pods and clusters of cato’- nine-tails, it resembled an island around which the earth dropped off. An old white birch stood alone in the center of the island. The tree no longer bore leaves. Instead, it boasted a full head of barren branches whose thin, paper-like bark resembled the skin of a cabbage, nearly transparent in the morning sun.

“Finders keepers,” Father said as he made his way up the bank. Beneath the tree, he hoisted me up by the waist and set me on one of the lower branches.

“Hold on to this,” Father said, handing me the bottle out of his pocket. “If you want to claim a place for your own, you’ve got to learn to tend your land. The Ranger and I are just going to take a quick swing around back of the marsh to see if we can rustle ourselves up some of those baby killers,” he laughed. “Won’t go far enough to let you out of eyesight. You keep a look out, yah hear?”

The two men turned and started for the far end of the marsh.

“Now that’s what I call a little piece of gold,” I heard the Ranger say before they disappeared from earshot. The Ranger tipped his hat in my direction as the two men picked their way across the swamp.

When they had vanished into specks on the other side of the marsh, I slid out of the tree and made my way to the left bank of the river. Seated there, I put the empty bottle to my lips and blew over top of it. Sometimes at night when Father was at the piano, Mother sang a song about going to San Francisco. They called this song their old standard. I tried to remember the tune but nothing came except the sound of air rushing over the hollow glass like the whistle of a train as it grew near.