Читать книгу Vista Del Mar - Neal Snidow - Страница 10
Оглавление“Where is the sea, that once solved the whole loneliness of the Midwest?”
—JAMES WRIGHT
MANY THINGS WERE growing. Through the adoption and the first three years of our daughter’s life, I kept gathering images, now not only of Southern California but of other locales of my family’s past. The social-service blankness of questions on the agency paperwork was one sort of stimulus: Describe your childhood. Describe your adolescence. How was discipline handled in your family? Then there were the less-conscious cues: holding the baby, handling toys, glimpsing a child’s motion from the corner of the eye; all these could take you backward out of the flatness of the ongoing.
I believed in glimpses. They were a kind of weaving. Once at a high school reunion I’d gathered with classmates for a group photo, and as we jumbled together with the usual jokes and shuffling around, I became conscious of a sort of cloud of images I realized that I perpetually inhabited in memory and that was now coalescing, just for a moment, into the real, a sweet cubism of faces, glances, corners of eyes, teeth, of chins and hair, necks and shoulders and breasts and backs that had formed around me during my school years in classes, halls, and playgrounds, an infinitude of glimpses familiar as the memory traces of siblings jostling each other brushing teeth or playing in a shaded yard; as an only child I saw this as my own extended body, or as Gary Snyder put it in a poem I liked called “The Levels,” “the soul of a great-bellied cloud.”
I felt this weaving growing around my wife and daughter and me too; it made me want to make a cloud of pictures as well. So I packed the tripod and camera and began to visit places important to my family, Giles County, Virginia; Lincoln, Nebraska; Buffalo, Wyoming; Galveston, Shreveport, Martinsville, and Winchester. As my portfolio of negatives began to grow, I felt ready to follow their glimpses further into the past toward the great-bellied cloud of what seemed my family’s deep time, their glances and lost talk.
FATHER WAS FROM Virginia, Mother, Nebraska. These places, their histories, myths, and landscapes, made my two earliest languages. Each was secretive, inflected, and tonal, drifting from picture to word and back again, a dream of memory in two streams.
For a time, Father’s Virginia tongue was the dominant in our house, carrying itself forward in anecdotes, genealogies, personalities, accents, customs, food, and outlook. This identity was our self-advertisement in the diaspora of Southern California. Father’s rural family had been landed, now had some land, had been farmers and businesspeople, store owners, AAA ballplayers, genteel alcoholic lawyers who rather than attend law school had “read” for the bar—a quadruple-DAR qualified and even First Families of Virginia–sanctified clan, in a mule trace, squirrel stew sort of way.
This language was one of apparent sweetness, humor, courtliness, and loving repetition—yes sir being the characteristic all-purpose note that signaled the small welcome surprise at the world’s fleeting manifold, as in, Yes sir, Daddy’s Packard, or, Yes sir, Gene Tierney—a way of briefly holding something up to the light. This was the gaiety of a big family on their home ground, tramping the Blue Ridge, telling stories. It partook of old rivers beneath limestone bluffs, Norfolk and Western coal trains riding the sides of the canyons, clear-running creeks up on the mountain, dances, revivals, “singing all day and supper on the ground,” Sunday dinners, sisters at a bird’s-eye maple dressing table brushing their hair like Breck girls, flush, triumphant, and nervous with beaus waiting downstairs, old gentlemen in black suits scented with cigar and bay rum, and in the kitchen eccentric country ladies who cooked, cleaned, and kept the family rich in upcountry anecdotes.
In this language, there was also an outer circle of lesser character actors, a county clerk maiden aunt, kissing cousins at dances and socials who did the black bottom to “Whispering” and “Avalon,” a distant-relative moonshiner named Cappy weeping by his pump organ as his wife played “Old Rugged Cross”—Yes sir—surrounded by snoring blue tick hounds, a cast of John Qualen’s, H. B. Warner’s, and Charlie Grapewin’s who populated the endless loop of Warner Brothers and Fox second features, which by and by became Father’s memory of home.
This was the language that contained us for quite a long time. Besides relatives who had also moved west during the war, many of Mother’s and Father’s friends in Southern California were from the South as well, so the soft, rhythmic talk of Louisville and Montgomery and Charleston was deep in the weave. This identity and history, I came to learn, was a mythology in which it was crucial to be deeply invested, hedging, as it did, the unsatisfactory thinness of Father’s postwar California life.
ALTHOUGH FATHER’S NOSTALGIA was seemingly beyond tarnish, eventually the thinness worsened. The Virginia Historical Society road marker with our family name on it—Yes sir—somehow lost its magic, began to look a little silly as snapshot after snapshot over the years drained it of its efficacy to patch the fraying present. One grandmother’s fine crow-stepped home became a golf course clubhouse, another’s, a historic inn and stage stop, was bulldozed to make room for a minimart and VEPCO office. In terms of actual profit, it seemed that the only going concern on the family land had been a limestone quarry, long since traded away to a sharp-dealing uncle who had read his brother’s, my grandfather’s, fatal predilection for nostalgia all too well. When it came time in the early 1940s to split the family land, one brother drew the map while the other got first pick. But the uncle had put all the sentimental hilltops and meadows of their childhood, the old crumbling homesteads and unplowable river views, into one half and the quarry into the other—and when the time came to choose, grandfather, who had also invested in Stanley Steamer stock, couldn’t give up the map of his past, and took the half that had so little future, an allegiance to the principle of nostalgia that has passed directly on to Father and to me, unable to let loose. “If we’d had that quarry,” Father said to me once, “we’d have been all right.” Otherwise, he filled the garage with fetishes of the past, shutters from one old Virginia home bundled and stacked for some indeterminate purpose, a blanket-wrapped horsehair sofa from another that for years held cartons of Snarol and Roundup. Later, as he retired from his retail job and the past began to contract even more tightly to the present, a mid-sixties Corvair once owned by his beloved older sister filled half the garage, strictly non-op on flattened tires but filled inside with a further hedge against chaos, Bonus Buys of toilet paper, Hi-C, and Brawny towels scoured from market shelves on Father’s compulsive late-night shopping sprees at Vons, Lucky’s, and Boys Markets.
Dad at 14, Giles County, Virginia
STILL, THE ESSENTIAL sweetness of this bedrock Virginia language persists; in fact, I have an early memory of standing awestruck and a little scared in the basement of Father’s boyhood home contemplating its uneven Appalachian floor lit by the coal chute, a ridged pure-rock base of soot-blackened limestone, the literal bedrock and skeleton of the New River Valley emerging under the house. Another memory of that time is of rain, the element whose immemorial cascades had helped lay the limestone down in the first place. I had been about three, standing on my grandfather’s front porch during a summer storm, awed at the sheer downpour, the gray volume of water pouring straight into the vast front yard, bouncing like sunlit nails off the road, a roaring of the storm in the cathedral bole of the upper reaches of the maples. And then to run through the house to the back porch where now the same rain was instantly soft, silent, full, hazing the parked cars, the great chromed Buicks in their aura of lost time, and silently falling into the lilacs, forsythia, dogwood, box hedge, and holly of the rear yard—and in between, the old house a honeycomb of rooms, dark wainscoting, closely figured wallpaper, an ecstasy of space and honeyed voices, all for me surrounded in rain.
THE MIDWESTERN LANGUAGE of Mother’s family is more direct, flatter, skeptical, less eccentric or romantic, embellished with schoolroom homilies, catch phrases of the Great War, angers and Bible verses. To come to this history and this talk is first to come to the house in which so much of it took place; in fact, I can hardly think of Mother’s half of the family without recalling the line in Frost’s “Directive,” “This was no playhouse, but a house in earnest.”
Earnest it was, even though this particular house is gone, turned to parking spaces for an ambitious neighborhood funeral home. My cousin Billie pointed out that growing up we all knew the address of our grandparents’ house, a vital statistic: 2626 P Street, Lincoln, Nebraska.
Even years after its demolition, this locale could exert great power. I learned this on a visit in the spring of 2000 having turned my rental car down Twenty-Fifth and P with my photography gear on the backseat. I’d driven from the Omaha airport, and went straight to the address. I hadn’t been to this place for twenty-eight years, but as the familiar look of the street, the trees, the church on the right, the roof lines of the old houses all began to gather in the dusk, I felt a wave of some buried grief come rocketing up out of nowhere. It was literally hard to breathe; I felt blindsided and panicky. Resolutions to go easy on this trip evaporated like dew, and in minutes I was in a cramped, neon-washed liquor store still struggling to get breath as I scanned the dusty and exceptionally overpriced selection of Scotch. Flames spilled across the bill of the clerk’s checkered NASCAR hat, and I was hoping for a similar Pentecostal effect as I headed straight to my room on the top floor of the Holiday Inn where I was soon pouring a triple Black Label into a plastic cup of ice and looking warily out at the capitol of the Cornhusker State in its crepuscular gloom.
Mother’s family had lived several other places, but Lincoln is where they came to, where the children went to high school and college and out into their lives, and where the grandparents lived out their years, saw their last healthy days, and passed away. So it’s the house those on the Midwest side of the family remember most vividly.
As I think back to this dwelling, a place I only knew as a child, a certain sense of loss and disenchantment haunts the effort to return. “Weep for what little things made them glad,” says Frost, surveying the toys of the lost children in the lost village of his poem, and this grief seems part of the problem: so much of childhood’s radiance seems from an adult vantage point a matter of simple ignorance. But in graduate school I’d also run across Robert Duncan’s poem “The Fire,” in which he asks, “Do you know the old language?” I’d found this a helpful phrase since the tongue of our Midwestern life still only comes to me in shards, bits, syllables, phrases—“little things.”
However, as I found in my rented subcompact rolling down P Street in a panic, these archaisms continued to radiate dread and power through a long half-life. Writing about them often had the dangerous feel of unleashing fissionable material.
Burnished, I decided, might be one beginning—a word to evoke a darkened downstairs in Nebraska, the winter end of the day, radiators ticking, a dining room of heavy, burnished wood, silver and china, shelves of violets, floral rings, napkin rings, the outside light silvered through the white curtains and around the green velvets of the plants—the napkin rings we later inherited and from time to time used in our own tract home in Redondo, the suburbs outside our little house themselves abrading endlessly at the past, and Mother pulling the rings out of the drawer radiating their dull sheen of this other primeval dining room in the heartland, setting them out on the table and trembling in a barely suppressed hysteria Father and I know well. Both of us will be standing quite still, nodding to no one in particular that everything will be fine, and Father no doubt thinking back to his own jolly family dinners, the quick Southern give and take celebrated in so many stories. But that escape is much too late now as our house is stretched and racked with the darker, older, prairie structure, burnished as Mother sets these out—I wanted to use these nice things today! Her voice will be childlike, breaking in her throat, eyes blinking wetly, the old absurd heavy floral engraving and ornate monograms now ringed around our fifties linens as she puts them about the dining table in the dining nook in front of the window through which we can see our car in the driveway and the neighbor’s small, rectangular, frosted bathroom window set in its blank field of stucco. Mother is tremulous in an old language of some vast and unidentified hurt that silences our meal down to the odd fork creaking on the Franciscan Apple pattern plates in the ghost of the mahogany luster of the room on P street, the heavy silver rings.
This and the similar brooding locales, the banister from the upstairs, the black phone in the entrance hall, the vague gray magic of the television, the colored glass squares around the front door, the violets in small pots on saucers faintly ringed with the tiny striations of their waterings and the broad-leafed plants on the coffee table in the front room that bled milk white when broken, knickknack shelves and Hummel children looking up from the dark scalloped wood lost and ecstatic, the silent snow light of the big, anger-filled rooms, this was part of the language of burnished.
BACK STAIRS—THIS is another dialect, an older tonality somehow, an earlier layer, historical and therefore more angry in its accumulation of resentments, kitchen walls and steps painted Depression-era green, worn, marked, a patina of footsteps both light and heavy, children scuttling, treads deepening, laboring, Grandmother stumping up these on a winter morning in her navy dress and heavy hose, past the empty 7UP bottles in their neat six-packs waiting to return to the Piggly Wiggly and the dark gleaming bundle of shotguns—Mother pheasant hunting with her dad and his crew along the Platte, in the cold, diffused light of the stairwell a memory of great space, of birds scattering up brilliantly toward horsetail clouds, canvas game bags blood-flecked in the fine autumn light, and the kitchen, the same light green, an oilcloth table, porch to the backyard, the alley and garage, the table where in the 1930s Grandfather wept at the fresh memory of the freight trains covered with boys looking for work trundling slowly in front of him at the crossing where he waited in his car, driving home for lunch from his steady job with the city, managing the street crews, cleaning the streets of Lincoln with a fleet of bright-orange Elgin sweepers. Then twenty years later, at lunch for blissful four-year-old me at the same table, Grandpa with a masterful slow burn traveling his solemn face as he regards the pennies-off coupon dripping mushroom soup he’s spooned up out of his bowl while Grandma shakes with laughter at the stove, a practical joke in aid of the great, unkillable angers of their marriage, I now see, turned into a skit, a wonderful joke. This same silvered light hangs in the stairwell as the light gathers around the darkened faces in old photos, the casual death sign of the double eights of the shotguns’ double barrels resting together against the pale-green wall, while out at the edge of this narrative circulate stories of Omaha friends of friends said to have been killed, like the Clutters, late-fifties prairie-horror deaths. Chased ’em around the house first, according to tart Aunt Evelyn, Grandmother’s sister, connoisseur and chronicler of death and irony, also telling of the newlyweds known somehow to the family who were lost in a tornado—Smashed ’em into a tree and killed ’em both. In this same thin unheated light I can glimpse Mother’s brother as well, in the Italian campaign at Salerno, Monte Trocchio, Monte Cassino, who had never seen his three-year-old daughter, suddenly home from the war riding beside her in the back of a car going to Artesia, New Mexico, to begin life over and she playing with a stick of gum, unwrapping it awkwardly with a three-year-old’s exquisite slowness, the highway and wind, the vast razor of sun cutting down through the car, and he grabbing the gum at last, unwrapping it in a silent frenzy, flinging the paper out the window, throwing the gum at the scared, astonished girl, the women scared, not talking, and he sitting back into the seat, looking out, not talking. Somewhere among this Midwestern hurt there also lies the mysterious trace of Mother’s first husband entangled as well along the risers, the paling light spilling from the upper story, his war bride typing carbons, tying her scarf, March slush along the sidewalks while somewhere in Sardinia this mysterious person her husband lies prone in the nose of his B-26 Marauder as the runway comes up fast, gray and running, when for no reason anyone can ever understand the bomb load detonates, blowing him out through the plexiglass and onto the tarmac crumpled soft and birdlike before the plane’s smoking and tilted wings, a lifeless doctor’s son from Lincoln and the great mystery of the resulting telegram from the War Department in Mother’s dresser drawer never mentioned or explained for years and years. In this space as well, I sense the aura of Grandfather after his stroke, grandson ushered into his hospital room—It’s all right, honey, come on in—and Grandpa sitting up in his gown, bursting into tears, crying out in ululations of stroke, the broken bits of words, inarticulate as a clown, a great Clarabelle towering in the bed, crying, seizing at, patting my hand, the back stairs.
Do you know the old language?
Rock garden in Grandfather’s backyard would be the last utterance. It’s gone now, of course, paved over, the junipers and boxwood shaded with cypress, moss, a view of the trellised back gate to the graveled alley, the flower beds along the alley, gladiolas and zinnias, I can just see him, says Mother now, recalling her father in a park or nursery coming upon a plant he coveted and methodically, studiously, a look of great innocence and rectitude coming over his face, digging at the favored bulb with his heel, leaning down coolly to pocket the pilfered glad in the roar of Mother’s anxiety, her unprotected shame here for some reason palpable in the rock garden, the cousins’ most frightening spot of all, far more than the old basement, yet drawing one to it, hidden up against the back wall of the house, looking across the small lawn to the garage with its Hudson Hornet a gleaming green lozenge hidden within and big early spring clouds floating over. Here was loneliness beyond rescue, the blank dread that has snaked with such great and stately slowness across the years to linger in one life or another; in my mid-thirties coiling back on me with a vengeance, a true Fury, the kindly one not to be trifled with or named to its face, and in the middle of this dark process finding a birthday card addressed to my seven-year-old self from Grandmother, from Nell, who seemed to understand this darkness—the card heartbreakingly addressed from the silent center of the rock garden to “a good boy,” some embattled angelic aura in her signature, the echo of her old saying bless your heart.
Publicly, Mother’s family was generous with reminiscences, often formal and occasional—speeches, women’s club programs, chronicling the past at the children’s request, an elderly aunt videotaped in a flowered dress on her La-Z-Boy, voice cracked and distant, “The children have wanted me to tell about my early years.” But the old language of the house “in earnest” makes a counterpoint to this performance, something darker and slower, more like light than sound, unremarked and unnamed, like the small lodges of the grass at the edges of the field in the Nebraska twilight, the cousins in their childhood running through dead leaves in the last dusk at Pioneer Park, raggedly singing the melody of “Walk Don’t Run” by the Ventures, chests tight with the love of dark so close underfoot in the grass, the shadowed past, the down and in of soul-making. Since so much of this darkness is sad and hurtful, but also heavy with the sweetness of death, of our sweetest dreams of death, that great engine of meaning, the icy ruts of recall, gravel cemented in ice, knots and hummocks of ice at the corners of the parking lots, the bare branches, the gas station turn-ins, the streaked March sky, all claim their own history.
On an early evening in 1935, on a sidewalk outside the home of a fellow clubwoman where she has just attended a meeting, Nell waits silently in the gathering dusk in a stunning, howling rage, paralytic with shame, trembling as the night comes on, the street lights begin to glow, the lattice of tree branches darkening overhead, the calm interiors of the houses glowing now, for no one is there to meet her—there’s been a little mistake, a miscommunication, and no one has come to get her. But in the stark and broken language of acts and gestures that has made its own family history, she has come to the edge of what she can stand, is so beset with shame she cannot go back inside and call, ask to use the phone with a little laugh and show of comic irritation and admit to the other women she’s been overlooked, disregarded, and instead stands on the walk, minute by darkening minute radiating an agony so powerful her daughter, who comes to get her at last, who successfully interprets the mistake, the miscommunication, never forgets this event; in fact, for many years through its long, bruised half-life, she is compelled to reenact such shame, tearfully setting down the napkin rings in the determination that things will be nice, that all will be well despite the encroaching shadow and its negative, the blankness of the stucco present standing placidly outside the window where we silently eat our dinner—the rock garden.
PONDERING THIS BROKEN prairie language of hurt and secret dwelling, I come across Gershom Scholem, contemplating Kabbalah, who notes that “The power of language is bound up in the name, and its abyss is sealed within the name. Having conjured up the ancient names day after day, we can no longer suppress their potencies.” I have always sensed those potencies and that abyss at 2626 and its dusks coming on.
Nell often seemed in touch with cabalistic potencies of her own, antic and odd. Once she looked out the window from her house to the big Presbyterian church looming across the street. Unlike the steepled, comfortably gothic First Baptist to which she belonged a few blocks distant, this building was grand, Louis Sullivan rectilinear, flat roofed, dressed in pink and white stone like a bank, and pilastered like a courthouse adjudicating the Midwestern business of sin and redemption. Noting the steep steps leading into the sanctuary from the street, she imagined pallbearers struggling up them beneath a casket’s weight and remarked that she was glad she was not a member of that church. Why, she said, you’d go to your own funeral standing on your head.
