Читать книгу The Bowl with Gold Seams - Ellen Prentiss Campbell - Страница 8

Chapter One

Neal and I married almost straight out of high school. The war accelerated things and determined the timing, but we’d been heading there ever since we met in 1932, in the first grade at the Common School in Bedford. We claimed each other like kin and as friends long before we were sweethearts.

The Common School sat in the heart of town, across the street from the cemetery, surrounded by churches and homes, along a long alley between the Courthouse and the Jail. My father walked me to school the first morning, from the Jail where we lived: a hulking, Victorian structure that combined house and prison. To me it was just home, spacious and comfortable, with leaded stained glass in the transom above the broad front door, oak floors and wainscoting, a front parlor and a dining room, a big kitchen and a neat pantry. There were two bedrooms upstairs, his and my smaller one in the turret. Just as a New England farm house may be linked to the barn, our house connected directly to the cell block through a thick metal vault door. Every evening, my father changed out of his uniform and bathed, as though washing away the soil of the job before cooking our dinner. We lived our family life behind the triple locked steel door, separate from the cells. At Christmas, he would bring me with him into the cell block, delivering the holiday meal, cards, and gifts. Occasionally, my father took a young inmate, a raw farm boy who’d gotten into trouble, under his wing. He’d tutor him in the kitchen. I sat beside my father, absorbing the reading lesson, learning that people could do bad things without being bad people.

***

“Why can’t I stay home? I know how to read,” I asked the first day of school, standing at the edge of the school yard, hanging onto his warm hand. He’d braided my hair. I had on a scratchy starched dress instead of soft, well-worn overalls.

“There’s more to learn,” he said. “Thee will have a fine day. School is thy job now, Hazel.” The building was tall and imposing, with a mansard roof above the second floor. I hesitated at the edge of the school yard, trying to hide behind my burly father, peering out at the milling children on the sloped yard in front of the school. Boys gathered acorns from the huge oak tree, a Peace Oak planted at the school at the end of World War I. They threw the acorns at each other. Girls squealed and ran back and forth along the fence line. It didn’t look like fun to me.

The bell rang and suddenly the children formed two lines, girls and boys, in front of the separate entrances. My father pushed me toward the end of the girls’ line, prying my fingers loose.

“Is she scared?” said a boy, a latecomer, strolling up to us instead of joining the line.

He was so skinny, the knobs of his elbows looked sharp. Scuffed shoes stuck out beneath his pants’ frayed cuffs. He reminded me of the wooden clogging puppet I’d seen at the County Fair. The stiff whirls in his wheat-colored hair stuck up in random tufts, the way fields looked just after being mowed, before the grain is bundled into tidy bales. He was smiling, a broad, open grin. He was missing a front tooth. I had a missing tooth in exactly the same spot!

“Look,” I said, scrunching up my lip, pointing at the gap.

“We’re twins! I’m Neal Shaw, I’m six and I’m going to first grade. Who are you?” He spoke fast, the words tumbling out.

I looked up at my father.

“Introduce yourself,” he said.

“I’m Hazel Miller. I’m seven. Going to first grade, too.”

“Why she’s so old?” he asked my father.

“My father was teaching me,” I said. “Now I have to go to school.”

And then the teacher was calling from the porch, “Girls and boys, girls and boys, hurry along please.”

Neal shot across the yard to the tail end of the boy’s line. My father kissed the top of my head and tapped my back, pushing me toward the school like a marble into a chute.

Once inside, I passed through the girls cloak room. It smelled of rainy days and a long summer’s emptiness. I followed the girls into the hallway and discovered we were with the boys again. The Common School had segregated entrances by sex; a remnant from an earlier time, but inside everything was coeducational. All of the children were white. The few Negro children in town went to a separate school near the rooming houses where black chauffeurs and maids stayed while their employers vacationed at the Springs Hotel down the road.

The older, bigger children were racing up the stairs. Drowning in the hubbub, I stood stock still.

“Hi, Hazel,” said the boy from outside, coming up beside me. “First grade is over there.” I followed him, like a duckling imprinted on the first moving creature she sees. He became my friend, my beacon.

Neal and I were twins, in some ways. He too was an only child, and a half-orphan like me. But his father drank and would run the family hardware store into the ground before we graduated high school. Neal never knew what happened to his mother; he wasn’t even sure if she had died or simply disappeared. I knew everything about my mother. Her name—Helen—began with an H, like mine. My birthday, June 30, 1925, was the day she died. Every year after cake and candles at home, my father and I took a Mason jar of violets to her grave in the Dunning’s Creek Friends Meeting cemetery. Her high school graduation picture and wedding portrait stood on our mantelpiece, beside her clock. My father wound it every Sunday with a special key. Keys were a big part of our lives—the clock key, the ring of keys my father wore to lock the cells, and the doors between our house and the cells. But the front door of our house was never locked. Bedford was that kind of town.

After class ended that first day, neither Neal nor I had a mother waiting for us at home like the other children.

“You can stay after and help me if you like,” said Miss Logan. A kind, intuitive teacher, helping us with her generous attention. Standing in as a surrogate mother, as other teachers would, and as I often have for my kids. All our teachers at the Common School were single women. Once married, they had to retire. We were their practice children.

Miss Logan showed us how to pound erasers against the brick wall.

Neal slammed the felt hard. His arms were long and he could reach much higher on the wall. His fingers were long, too. Spider Fingers, the kids would call him in a few years when he’d grown so fast he was lanky and lean.

We raised clouds of white dust, and sneezed and laughed and choked.

“You’re a good reader,” he said to me.

“It’s not hard. My father showed me.”

We finished the erasers and brought them in to Miss Logan. She was sitting on her desk, laughing and talking with one of the teachers from upstairs.

“Thank you, children. See you tomorrow.”

I started home along the alley.

“Can I come with you?” he asked. Always, from that first day, when he asked a question, he looked at me intently. He really wanted to know what I was going to say. He stared so hard his forehead creased a little.

“I guess so,” I said.

“You live here?” he said, when we reached the Jail.

“In the house part.”

“Are you afraid?”

“No,” I said. “My father teaches them to be better.”

“Does he whip them?”

“No!” I said. “We’re Quakers. My father doesn’t believe in that.”

“Mine does. What’s a Quaker?” He fixed me with that intent curious gaze.

“We believe there’s a little piece of God in everyone.”

“How does it get in?”

“It’s just in there, my father says.”

“How does he know?” He was pure curiosity, not doubting or teasing.

“He learned in First Day School, when he was little.” I told him that my father came from Philadelphia, and Quakers started Philadelphia. Quakers started all of Pennsylvania. My mother and her family were Quakers, too, from near here—Dunning’s Creek, where my father and I went to Meeting, and I went to First Day School.

“What meeting?”

“Meeting for worship. You listen, to hear the still small voice inside.”

“What does it say?”

“Anything. Maybe from the Bible.” I took him up our front stairs and through the screen door.

“This is pretty nice, for a jail.”

“It’s the house, silly,” I said.

“Who are they?” Neal asked, looking up at the photographs on the golden oak mantelpiece above our tiled fireplace.

“My mother. My grandparents,” I said. “Me, in the bonnet. My grandmother is the one holding me.”

“You sure have a big family.”

“Not really. My mother is dead. And all the grandparents.”

“So you don’t have anyone. Like me.”

“I have my father.”

“And now you have me.” I got milk from the ice box, and cookies from the ceramic jar shaped like an apple with a stem.

“These are good,” he said. He’d eaten three. My father said two was enough, moderation in all things. But Neal looked so hungry and happy, pressing the crumbs on the table and licking his finger.

“My father made them.”

“Does he cook for them?”

“Yes,” I said. “Same as for us, just more.”

I heard the sound of locking and unlocking. My father was coming through. He had to duck his head, so as not to hit the door sill. Neal looked into the dark corridor, his eyes wide again, trying to see into the cell block.

“You brought a friend home,” my father said. “Looks like it’s been a fine day.”

“Hello, Mr. Miller,” Neal said.

“You may call me John, please,” said my father. He was respectful with everyone, young and old, inmate and free, but he didn’t use titles: first name and last name in formal situation, but no honorifics.

His Philadelphia family included a long line of attorneys who had gone to Swarthmore. But after he graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, he wanted to run a jail—according to Quaker principles. The Way opened for him, as he said. A job opened, actually, and he came west to the foothills of the Alleghenies, to Bedford. He attended Dunning’s Creek Friends Meeting, eight miles out of town, and spotted my mother his first Sunday. Her high school graduation picture and her wedding picture show clouds of dark hair, and large, watchful eyes. She was the only child of a family who had settled the valley and founded the Meeting in 1800, when western Pennsylvania was a wilderness frontier. I spent weekends and summers on my maternal grandparents’ farm, until my grandfather died clearing brush when I was three. My grandmother died that same summer. The farm went to auction, and my father put the proceeds of the sale aside for me. “For Bryn Mawr College,” he told me, from the beginning.

Neal stayed to supper that first night, and often, afterward. His father didn’t seem to care or notice. He learned about setting the table. And my father showed him about cooking. We would talk over dinner. My father loved the pleasure of table talk, had taught me to save up morsels of my day to share. I’ve read about the effect of early maternal loss, and have seen it among some of my kids. But I grew up secure, taking love for granted, as all children should and the fortunate ones do. We had more than enough love to share with Neal.

My father washed the dishes, we dried. We would sit at the kitchen table and do homework after doing the dishes. Later, Neal would walk home down the hill to his house across the river. Even children with watchful parents walked everywhere, alone or with friends, then.

That very first day of school set the pattern for our eight ensuing years at the Common School. We would stay after and help our teacher decorate bulletin boards in the drafty entry hall, marking the season with construction paper leaves which gave way to Pilgrims and then snowflakes, silhouettes of Washington and his cherry tree, Lincoln and his axe. On the way home we would collect walnuts and line them up across the road to enjoy the mess created by passing cars. We lobbed snowballs at each other, and if I managed to hit him first he would drop and howl in mock pain. In spring, we would take off our shoes and socks, hike up our itchy woolen long johns, and go barefoot on tender winter-soft feet.

Kids teased us sometimes about being friends. K-I-S-S-I-N-G! First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes baby in a baby carriage. The teasing seemed to roll off Neal. He would just shake his head, shrug, and smile; at ease with himself, truly comfortable in his own skin. I preferred his company to that of girls. Girls were skittish about visiting a jail, and their mothers wary, too.

When I was ten, my father gave me a two wheeler, and let Neal use his bicycle. Neal had started his growth spurt by then, and his legs were long and easily reached the pedals. It took me longer to get the hang of it, to trust the balance, but with Neal’s encouragement and my father’s steadying hand on the bicycle seat, I finally got it. After that, our narrow valley world had no limits for us. We could bike to the Coffee Pot, a round cinder block building with convex windows, painted silver with a decorative red spout and handle. Even the line of rust dripping down the tarpaper beneath the spout was accidentally perfect, as Neal pointed out to me one day as we sat at the picnic table outside sharing a root beer. Or, on longer summer afternoons, we would cycle along Route 220, above the rushing water of Shober’s Run, out to the Bedford Springs Hotel. We’d hide our bikes in the shrubs by Naugel’s Mill on the edge of the resort property and hike in.

The hotel shimmered, magical as the Taj Mahal I’d read about in National Geographic. The main building had a white colonnaded porch and upstairs balconies decorated with gingerbread fretwork like doilies on a valentine. The golf course stretched into infinity down the narrow valley. We speculated about how rich you had to be to stay there.

We sampled the spring water and declared it stinky. Every Bedford school child knew the Indians had discovered the water, eight miraculous mineral springs. We waded in it, to test whether it would work for us. Would it soothe our bug bites, the way it had cured open sores for the Indians and the white settlers? That’s why the first hotel had been built here, after all, in 1805. That’s why presidents stayed here—well, not the famous ones, but Polk and Buchanan. And the first transatlantic telegram from England to America arrived here. People still called Bedford the Jewel of the Alleghenies. “I’m from Bedford, Jewel of the Alleghenies,” Neal would yodel as we hiked the trails. We sneaked in to swim in Lake Caledonia. We sat in a hillside pavilion (I loved that word, pavilion) above the hotel and spied on guests playing croquet on the lawn below. Sometimes, in the last summer before high school, I felt a quickening in the air between us, and would look at him and catch him looking at me. We’d run then, spooked on the darkening path. We hid and ambushed each other—grabbing each other, rough-housing. He was all bone and muscle. Once, by accident, he touched my chest and we broke apart, stunned.

“Boo! I’m John Brown on the lam from Harper’s Ferry!” he shouted.

“Oooo,Oooo,Oooo … I’m the lost pioneer child come to get you!” I retorted.

Our friendship, our kinship, changed in high school. Not uncommon, I know now, for best friends—especially a girl and a boy—to grow apart in puberty. But then it was the end of my world. In the black and white graduation portrait of our eighth grade class, I stand on the third step of the porch outside the Common School. My expression is worried, severe as though I intuit the coming changes. Neal, tallest of all the children, is on the top step, grinning, as though he anticipated his coming popularity, knew that for him the roller coaster was rising.

Neal grew into his raw-boned frame and became handsome, a rising star on the football team. He was such a good athlete; it didn’t matter about his father, or that he came from the other side of the river. He travelled in a pack of admirers, boys and girls. At first he tried to include me, calling me to join them in the cafeteria, but I hung back. So we parted; no rift, just drifted apart, perhaps like twins who need to separate.

I joined the yearbook, the newspaper, the literary magazine. But for me, solitude has always been the best cure for loneliness, and I spent hours in the library, or reading on my window-seat.

“We don’t see much of Neal,” my father observed.

“I see him at school.” Actually, I felt his presence. I didn’t need to see him to feel him nearby. In class I sometimes watched him, covertly, and occasionally caught his eye on me. And at home football games, seated high on the back of the bleachers, I felt a thrill of pride when his teammates carried him around the field. And a stab of jealousy when the girls clustered around.

“I want you to have piano lessons,” my father said. My mother’s piano, a mahogany Chickering upright, had stood in our parlor as just a silent piece of furniture. “With Grace McKee.”

Grace McKee lived alone in her family’s fine Queen Anne house on Juliana Street, just two blocks from the Common School, near the Library. It was hard to judge how old she was. My father’s age, about. She was pretty in a quiet way. Her hair was blond and permanent-waved. She wore cotton shirtwaist dresses she tailored herself on the treadle sewing machine upstairs, and smelled deliciously of lavender cologne. There was a designated room for everything in Grace’s house: music room, library, sewing room, dining room, and parlor. Even a small greenhouse where she grew orchids, and lilies—the conservatory, she called it. And she had attended a different sort of conservatory in Pittsburgh, to study music. I studied her house like a spy, a cultural anthropologist, sniffing the lozenges of sandalwood soap in a china saucer on the washstand, admiring the oil paintings in heavy gold frames, wading across the deep jewel-toned carpets, coveting the doll collection brought home by a missionary grandfather. She let me open the glass-fronted bookcase in the hallway where the dolls lived. My favorite was the Japanese doll with her paper-white porcelain face, four tiny silk kimonos, and four wigs. I was far too old for dolls, and had never cared for them before. But I carefully changed her kimonos, changed her wigs as the seasons passed.

Grace had cool, delicate hands. She showed me how to place my fingers on the ivory keys and how to arch my wrists. Learning to play required my complete concentration. The absorbing focus of the lessons proved an oasis. My father often came, just before the lesson ended. The front door clicked open and Grace sat even a little straighter on the piano bench beside me and touched her hair. He sat behind us in the cane bottomed rocker to listen. I played for him, and then Grace would play. She used the pedal when she played for him, and the piano responded like a different instrument from the one I’d just had my lesson on.

“Stay for dinner,” she would say, and sometimes we did, eating by the light of candles in her formal dining room. Simple meals served on thin china—cold roast chicken, aspic salad—simple meals that required forethought, time and preparation in the earlier part of the day. She poured water from a crystal decanter. I let myself imagine what it might be like, if my father and Grace married, and I had one of the high-ceilinged bedrooms upstairs. She loved him, I believe, but my father was married to his job, and in some quiet way, still married to my mother. I understand how that can be.

The explosions in Pearl Harbor invaded the protected valley of Bedford my sophomore year. My father and I listened to the radio one dark Sunday in December and our cozy familiar kitchen felt cold and drafty.

The boys were galvanized, excited by the far away danger and opportunity for escape. Soon in yearbook club meetings, we were re-writing profiles for graduating seniors who had enlisted at the recruiting station in Altoona. My favorite English teacher started a knitting club and I joined. She was as good at teaching handwork as literature and we contributed miles of scarves to the war effort. We never doubted how useful they would be.

The Bedford Springs Hotel closed down, the frivolity of vacations suspended and gasoline rationed. The Keystone Naval Training School rented the hotel and The Mountain Navy came to town, to the delight of merchants and the young women and teenage girls in town. My father’s friend, the editor of The Bedford Gazette, said the grand ballroom on the second floor was set up with tables of receiving sets, earphones, and wires for the trainee radio operators. The private dining room where President Buchanan had received the first transatlantic cable from Queen Victoria was converted into a control room for transmissions, and the lounges became classrooms for theory and typing.

The former high school football coach came out of retirement to direct athletics for the trainees—touch football, softball, and mush-ball games on the golf course, volleyball contests on the hotel lawn, ping pong tournaments. The sailors practiced hand-to-hand combat on the lawn too, according to the photo on the front page of the newspaper. Some girls took after-school jobs at the Springs. They said the hotel had un-rationed supplies of Coca-Cola for the sailors and their guests, and poolside dances and hay rides to Lake Caledonia.

There was a new feature in The Gazette: “The Service News.” My father read it quietly, somberly. He was a convinced pacifist, and the deaths deeply troubled him. But so did the events in Europe and he said, to me and in Meeting, that it was not after all so easy to know what was right. Everyone in town followed who enlisted, who shipped overseas, who was home to “enjoy a ten-day furlough.” Some boys I knew made the sort of headlines no one wants. Missing, Now Dead; Supreme Sacrifice; Killed in Action. By my senior year, gold stars were shining in windows along every residential street in town. Boys I had known would not return from their adventurous escape to far-away places like Burma and Nanking.

And then that spring a local disaster came. A strange light filled the night sky just before I heard the siren calling volunteers to the Fire House down the block. I ran downstairs. The bolted vault door between the kitchen and the passageway into the cell block was open. He never left it ajar.

“Dad!” I called into the dark hallway. My voice bounced off the steel walls. “There’s a fire!”

“I know!” He walked toward me. “It’s the high school. I’m evacuating the cells. The Fire Department needs help. My men and I are on the way. Stay here.”

And I saw them, the half dozen prisoners, behind him in the dim light. That was my father’s way, trusting people to do the right thing given the opportunity.

I watched him from my turret bedroom, walking with his inmates down the block to the Fire House. I watched them emerge, dressed in boots and heavy rain gear, and walk toward John Street. My father and his prisoners joined the long, losing battle to save the school on John Street.

Much later, when they came back, smudged and weary, I helped him make a vat of cocoa, and he and the men sat in our kitchen to drink it. And then he thanked them for their efforts, and locked them back in their cells.

The science wing had been saved, but the rest of the building was ruined. We squeezed into the gymnasium upstairs in the Common School, one giant classroom, for the remainder of the year. Science classes were still held at the high school.

Back in the Common School, sharing the odd makeshift classroom space of the gymnasium, things changed again between me and Neal. After the fire, we fell into the habit of walking together from the Common School across the cemetery to chemistry class in the surviving wing of the high school. And on a soft spring afternoon, as we walked between the graves, the lilac buds just beginning to swell, he asked me to go with him to the senior dance.

Grace McKee made my dress—taking apart a formal of her own, with fabric scarce and rationed. She fitted and pinned as I stood in her stuffy upstairs sewing room until I grew dizzy. She came to our house to do my hair the night of the dance. Grace unrolled the rag curlers and brushed and pinned the chestnut waves. I felt like a movie star and almost did not recognize myself!

Neal and my father were waiting together in the parlor when I came downstairs, floating in the cloud of organza and tulle.

“You look beautiful,” Neal said.

“You remind me of Helen,” said my father. And looking at my mother’s picture on the mantel, this time, I thought it might be true.

The entire town lined Juliana Street to watch the couples parade up the driveway to the Common School and then climb the stairs to the gym, decorated for the evening as a vineyard with purple balloons and green crepe paper. Our music teacher cued up records on the gramophone. Paper Doll, and My Heart Tells Me. I’d practiced dancing with Grace McKee—but found it easier to dance with Neal. It felt familiar, not strange, to be close to him as he held me and rested his chin on the top of my head and we swayed among the couples as Bing Crosby sang, softly, May I Love You.

Walking home that night, holding hands, we kissed in the alley between the school and the Jail. And he told me his news. He was deferring his football scholarship to Penn State. He and his best friend Joe had gone to Altoona to enlist in the Army. Joe had been turned down because of his bad leg, but Neal was going. “As soon as we graduate.”

D-Day came, just days before graduation.

“Will you still be going?” I asked, hoping he’d say no.

“Yes,” he said. “Of course. It’s not over yet.” He grinned at me, excited.

Grace McKee hosted a graduation dinner for me, and for Neal.

“Best wishes to you both, and to Neal’s safe return,” my father said, raising a glass of iced tea. He had neither criticized nor supported Neal’s choice to enlist. “Each must follow the voice of conscience, Hazel,” he had said.

The night before he left, Neal took me for dinner at the Ship Hotel. The invitation pleased me. My father and I never ate at restaurants, and the Ship had a bar—which he did not approve of. But he let us go.

Neal drove us out of town in his father’s rusty pick-up, through the village of Schellsburg, up Route 30 west to the mountainside inn. The Ship had been built with a deck, and portholes for windows, and it clung to the steep slope of the mountain like a boat on a wave. Even the furniture inside was nautical. Neal dropped a nickel in the telescope at the railing beside the parking lot. We counted off the three states and seven counties promised on the plaque beside the coin-box. We ate at a window table overlooking the valley.

After dinner, back in the truck, I slid across the torn seat, almost snagging my skirt on a spring. I looked at his strong fingers with the square nails as he held the steering wheel. He smelled very faintly of sweat, but mostly of Lifebuoy soap. I wished we would never drive down from the top of the mountain, just drive further and further west.

“Want to drive up to the overlook?” he asked.

He parked by the guard rail at the Bald Mountain Overlook. Leaning on the truck, we watched the moon rise. Clouds blew in, covering the moon, filling the valley below.

“Do you think an ocean looks like that?” I asked.

“Don’t know yet, I’ll tell you,” he said.

I shivered.

“You’re cold,” he said, opening the truck door and boosting me inside. We kissed. He tasted of our after-dinner peppermint. With my tongue, I found the space between his teeth. He leaned over me, and I lay back in the cramped space, eager and yearning for the weight and warmth of him—but Neal pulled away, and drove us down the mountain back to town.

He stopped at the curb beneath the Jail. The glow of my father’s reading light shone through the curtain on his bedroom window.

“Joe’s taking me to the station in Cumberland tomorrow. Will you come?” Neal asked.

“Yes,” I said.

And we kissed good-bye for the night, a long, lingering kiss.

The next day, I sat between Joe and Neal on the drive. No one spoke as Joe drove us over the mountains, past rocky farms and orchards, to Cumberland, just beyond the Maryland border. Neal and I held hands. Too soon we descended into Cumberland, the Queen City, busy and important at the confluence of rivers and railroad lines.

We kissed on the station platform, and when the whistle blew it sounded like it was announcing the end of the world.

June 30th, my birthday, my father opened his roll top desk after the cake, before we left for our annual visit to my mother’s grave with our jam jar of violets. He withdrew a small, narrow box from one of the pigeonholes. Inside, a rose gold locket on a fine chain rested on white cotton batting. I snapped it open and found a tiny print of her high school graduation portrait. My own dark eyes looked out of the tiny frame.

I had a job at the Coffee Pot for the summer, the morning shift. Crossing off days on the calendar, I counted down to Neal’s furlough. He would arrive home after basic training at the end of August and then he would ship out. Soon after, I would leave for Bryn Mawr College.

I read and re-read his letters. “Got your box of cookies and the fudge from Miss McKee. They really came in handy. I’m learning blackjack. One fellow lost $45! Don’t worry, I’m careful. Yesterday we were out in the athletic field for two hours. We had to do the obstacle course. It’s a low hurdle, high hurdle, an alley to run through, an eight foot barrier, a tunnel thing, and a creek to broad jump. Two guys had to be carried back to the tents. Nothing else to say now, so I’ll close. Your friend, Neal.”

I wrote back, trying to spin something interesting from my quiet routine.