Читать книгу I Dwell in Possibility - Toni McNaron - Страница 17
ОглавлениеPart of my coming to consciousness as a feminist has been a growing understanding that my mother was indeed an artist, whose media included church work, flower gardening, and decorating her home. In the South of her youth, girls seldom resisted the cultural pressures to marry and become mothers. My mother seems genuinely to have enjoyed her home and family. But the person talented enough to win a music scholarship surely must also have needed creative outlets. The intensity with which she carried out her Altar Guild duties, planted new bulbs, arranged flowers throughout the house, or created beauty in our living room impressed me even as a young child. As I struggled not to fear or suppress my own creativity, I believe I watched Mamie more closely, looking for clues to becoming a woman with deep longings for aesthetic and spiritual fulfillment.
I frankly have no idea what would have been done about my spiritual training without my mother’s influence. Whatever Daddy may have believed about Christianity or any other religious system, he felt no need to attend church or to discuss religion with me as I was growing up. Once he did tell me that the part of the Bible he liked best was Psalm 1, so I read it repeatedly, trying to discover some clue about him or me or God. The psalm speaks angrily about the ways of the wicked being like “chaff which the wind driveth away,” and of the wicked themselves perishing. One’s only hope seems to be not to walk “in the counsel of the wicked” or sit “in the seat of the scorners,” which to my father may have meant doing tax forms free for people whom the world deemed unworthy. To my young mind, however, these images called up harshness and punishment; they advocated strictness to the letter of the law if a person wanted to escape terrible consequences. I did not find the God behind this psalm appealing and was not surprised that my father preferred to stay home on Sundays and read the paper.
But Christ was important to my mother, and she talked to me about him often. Her stories centered around a nice man who helped everyone, judged people not by their actions but rather by their inner wishes, and worked breathtaking miracles without a wand or vial or any of the aids that characters in my fairy tales needed. My mother also made sure I attended services with her regularly and that I found a serious personal belief system.
My experience with Christianity was aesthetic more than it was either theological or doctrinal. I loved the smells, sights, sounds, and, after confirmation, tastes that surrounded my hour in church. Being an Episcopalian was largely a sensory matter. Kneeling and rising at moments of joy and thanksgiving excited me. As I grew more ardent in my practice, I stayed on my knees throughout the Communion service. Some people knelt until it was their pew’s turn to go up to the altar; the few who became my models resumed this distinctly less comfortable posture after they returned to their seats, witnessing more directly to the rigorous nature of the event.
Almost every Saturday afternoon, my mother went to church to perform some volunteer service. She waxed the floors twice a year, polished the pews every two months, washed and ironed altar linens once a month, and served altar duty at least that often. I asked to go with her because I liked being in church when no one was there. Cool even in summer, the atmosphere made me feel eerie—not scared exactly but more like someone in a fairy tale, stepping back in time. While Mamie did her chores, I walked or crawled around under pews, smelling the stale candle wax and lingering scent from the past Sunday’s flowers. As I got older, I sometimes sat praying hard at the innermost rail reserved for the rector or bishop when he visited yearly for confirmation. My prayers were selfish, full of requests for more friends and less work around the house, for longer vacations and fewer days in school. I felt holy and important, very much an actor. I still remember standing outside myself, watching me on my knees, thinking, “God will surely hear me this time and show me a sign.” My Bible story pictures showed blind men suddenly seeing, lame old women throwing down crutches, and lots of people eating from the same few fish and loaves of bread. Our Sunday school teacher told us these scenes were miracles proving Christ’s power as God and confirming the faith of some believers. I thought I was a believer and wanted something dramatic to happen. Since questioning came to me quite young, I needed a sign to show that I could keep believing. If Mamie came upon me kneeling so devoutly, she smiled and gently encouraged me to move back to a regular pew, saying, “Now, honey, I’m glad you’re praying but not here where Bishop Carpenter does. You come back here to our family pew and pray all you want.”
My mother insisted that going to church in the wrong frame of mind lessened the experience. Rather than forcing me to say prayers or make lists of my wrongs, she suggested we leave time to read together from the Bible before going to service. Once we had eaten a light breakfast and dressed, including putting on our hats but not our gloves, we sat on my bed to prepare. Until I was about ten she read to me—always psalms—but from then on, I was expected to take my turn. We read our favorite psalm: the twenty-fourth for me; the ninety-first for her. Mine spoke of “clean hands and a pure heart,” of not lifting up one’s “soul unto vanity” or swearing deceitfully; I felt exhilarated just thinking about the “everlasting doors” through which the “King of Glory” would enter (heaven I assumed), and hopeful that I might “ascend the hill of the Lord” someday. Mamie’s was all about protection in the face of one’s direst enemies—“the pestilence that walkest in darkness,” and “the destruction that wasteth at noonday.” The “thou” of this psalm survives while ten thousand fall at his right hand and a thousand at his side. I caught my breath to think of the angels who could keep “thee” from dashing a foot against a stone or from falling at all. And I simply thrilled to hear, “Thou shalt tread on the lion and the adder, the young lion and the serpent shalt thou trample under foot.”
Fired and comforted by our readings, we donned our gloves and set off for Christ Episcopal Church, some ten or twelve blocks from home. At the Communion rail I left my troubles (Why did my schoolmates shun me? Would I ever have a teacher who interested me? Why couldn’t I have an Erector Set when lots of boys I knew were getting them?), nagging guilt (I should have taken the garbage out before Mamie had to ask me three times; I ought to have memorized every word of my history lesson so Daddy would be really proud of me for getting a perfect score; I must start keeping my fingernails cleaner so Mamie won’t have to worry so about my unladylikeness), even surface shame (Why had I lied to my teacher when she asked if I had helped Billy Mayo with his math? Would I really be punished for wishing my mother would stop badgering me to pick up my clothes before I left my room to go take a bath? Was I mean not to care that my playmate from across the street had gotten a rope burn when I lassoed him?). I was certain as I melted the awkward wafer and swallowed watered-down wine that I ingested calm and a powerful shield of protection. At no time did I seriously believe that these were even symbolic of Jesus’s body and blood; they were a way to unify my ragged parts, to heal my raw places.
By the time I was ten, I was helping Mamie set up the altar for early Communion. I handled the objects that made church possible: beaten silver pitchers; a smooth silver plate that held little flat wafers that I eventually learned had no taste and often stuck to the roof of my mouth; linen napkins each with a beautifully embroidered cross and meticulously stitched border; the wine cup with its silver outside and gold inside, decorated with cross and dove; the choir cross on its polished wooden pole. As I carried that cross from its locked closet, where it was stored during the week, into the dimly lit nave and buckled it into its leather halter at the head of the choir stalls, I imagined myself a monk attending his Lord on some solemn occasion. All the objects seemed mysterious and came to inhabit my fantasies about escape and rescue, this time of a kind man named Jesus whom all the officials wanted dead. I imagined myself running to warn Jesus about the mean Pharisees who were coming for him, or beating up Sadducees who tried to trick him, or (most exciting fantasy of all) scaling the cross in time to cut Christ down before he died so the world could benefit longer from his good ideas.
When I was twelve, I learned names for all these holy toys—cruet, paten, chalice—and became fascinated by the changing seasons of the church year. Every time we went from one to the next, all the altar fittings changed color—from lime green to royal purple, white on holy days, black for Good Friday, scarlet for saints’ days. Green and purple lasted the longest, causing me to conclude that there was a relationship between peace and growth, majesty and sacrifice. The symbolism for each color was woven into my daily thinking by the time I was in high school. Watching Mamie handling altar cloths or ironing little chalice napkins with more attention than she gave to Daddy’s shirts impressed upon me that the house of God deserved my utmost care, that its ornaments were even more precious than the ones at home.
All through high school and college, as my Protestant friends drifted away or actively revolted against their religions, I increased my piety. My love for language and poetry kept me religiously active even when I knew that the theology no longer moved me. The Book of Common Prayer is after all a work of major literary merit, written in the sixteenth century by Thomas Cranmer, slightly before the King James Bible group completed its monumental task. At eighteen, I had invested Cranmer with mammoth physical and spiritual dimensions and felt personally attached to a man who could write such powerful prose. My favorite parts were the Collects—short readings intended for specific occasions such as sickness, travel, times of the day, the seasons. Some were also for people in certain circumstances or professions: prisoners, teachers, men at sea, the poor and dying. The imagery, the simplicity of diction, the uncanny understanding of the human condition and the human heart touched me. Phrases still float to the surface when I am extremely happy, sad, or tired: “O Lord, support us all the day long, until the shadows lengthen and the evening comes, and the busy world is hushed, and the fever of life is over,” “Bless all who teach and all who learn,” “Deliver us, we beseech thee, in our several callings, from the service of mammon,” “Relieve the distressed, protect the innocent, awaken the guilty.”
By attending chapel several times a week as a college student, I discovered a service—evening prayer—I had never attended at home, full of such sheer poetry as, “Let the floods clap their hands, and let the hills be joyful,” or “He hath showed strength with his arm; he hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.” Only Shakespeare and Keats evoked comparable shivers or yielded comparable rewards to my mind and spirit. During my senior year in college, partly to render service to the Episcopal Student Center and partly to satisfy my curiosity, I formally analyzed the Communion service only to discover that its structure was not unlike any well-made drama. Beginning slowly and quietly, the service builds gradually through recitations, prayers, and confessions spoken by the entire congregation. At the climax, when host and wine were elevated, my excitement rose with them. As I eagerly awaited my turn to walk the length of the aisle, I felt as if I were on my way to see a close friend. The fact that he was permanently out of town was softened by the mystical connection I could achieve by “receiving the sacrament.”
The Episcopal church seldom mentions heaven and never deals in hell; the confessions indicate that through our daily actions, we make our own here on earth. The best mode of living is to recognize how we “have erred and strayed from Thy ways like lost sheep.” Our best plan for salvation is to stop doing “those things we ought not to have done,” and initiate “those things which we ought to have done.” To succeed in this essentially ethical rather than theological program promises “health in us.” In the midst of one of my several emotional crises during college, I looked up “salvation” in the dictionary and found that its root had to do with health of the spirit. As adulthood crept nearer and seemed more frightening, I needed such health badly. I spent increasing time in meditation and religious study, reading about Joan of Arc and the desert fathers, wondering how they escaped having to date and marry.
This vast store of magic and comfort might not have been mine without Mamie’s need to exert herself in devotion to her church and her equally clear need to have me accompany her. I can only conjecture to what extent her seemingly domestic labors in church were in fact powerfully aesthetic for her. But I know that the church buoyed my mother. After a childhood and youth lived in the heart of a privileged South, she chose to make her life with a man who moved her to a dusty, industrial, working-class area. Her tastes were elegant and expensive, yet my father never made more than an adequate salary. Finally, Mamie’s health was problematic for the last fifteen years of her life. On the one hand, her stamina was amazing to watch and hard to match, as I learned when we spent a month on vacation together. She outwalked me and was undaunted by attending nine plays in seven days in New York City. But her neuritis and arthritis clouded many of her days and pained her nights, and her shortness of breath scared her. Evenings when her body must have seemed strangely at odds with her spirit, Mamie would ask me to sit on the side of her bed and read that familiar Ninety-first Psalm to her slowly, sometimes twice for good measure. After my father’s death, she told me repeatedly that without the church and her faith she could not have gone on. Yet that faith manifested itself in dailiness, never becoming theoretical or doctrinal.
She showed me how crucial a woman’s view of Christian theology can be, and when I read Barbara Meyerhoff’s moving account of a community of elderly Jews (Number Our Days), I understood perfectly what one of the women meant by “domestic religion”—a string of daily rituals over which the women in a family preside, that “makes the adrenaline flow” and “changes your entire view on things.” Underscoring the femaleness of this phenomenon, a speaker insists, “These things were injected into you in childhood and chained together with that beautiful grandmother, so ever since infancy you can’t know life without it. . . . [I]n this domestic religion, you could never get rid of it. You could not just put it aside when you don’t agree anymore. When it goes in this way, I describe, Jewish comes up in you from the roots and it stays with you all your life.”
I no longer attend church services or adhere to the formal belief system of my past, but when I enter cool, dimly lit churches, tears come unbidden but familiar. I remember my mother, specifically and tenderly, going about her housewifely duties at church, infusing her and my very breath with something deeply spiritual and unforgettable, something that rises above creeds and denominational hypocrisies, something I cannot “put aside because [I] don’t agree anymore.”
My mother’s yard and garden were legendary in our community. The actual gardening, which went on almost all year, began six months before I was born. Moving from their former house because the new arrival necessitated their having more room, my parents had also bought the vacant lot next door. During her last months of pregnancy, Mamie planted hundreds of iris and jonquil bulbs, sitting on a pillow and sliding down the inclining slope of our yard. That space became a magnificent display of flowers and shrubs.
At its very center stood a terra cotta birdbath. From that core fanned out a series of ever-widening circles bordered by rocks that were always kept in place and free from choking weeds. Within the first circle, surrounding the birdbath, old-fashioned pinks covered the entire ground area. The next somewhat wider circle contained special varieties of jonquils with multicolored centers; Mamie spaced these further apart to allow the best growing conditions for the bulbs and the best viewing for us. Concentric to this middle bed, the largest circle completed the central bedding expanse and housed gorgeous rose bushes in varying shades of red, yellow, and orange.
A second bordering system, made up of long, rectangular beds in which annuals were grown from seed, ran parallel to the lot line. Mamie had a major objection to the idea of using bedding plants. Perhaps it was an attempt to save money somewhere in her life, but I suspect that her motives stemmed from a desire first to watch seeds sending up shoots and then to separate the seedlings with her own hands.
These long edges of the garden area were especially showy at the height of summer: tough zinnias with their scratchy stems; brilliant marigolds, cosmos, dahlias, daisies of many varieties; sweet william and alyssum, baby’s breath, ageratum, dwarf marigolds, tiny zinnias, blue phlox, fever few.
At the end of a bed that edged the property line grew the strangest and most wonderful of all Mamie’s flowers—spider lilies. Their blossoms, at the tops of very tall single stalks, were deep fuchsia with slender tendrils. At their centers were tiny stamen with fuzzy black ends. They had no leaves and were airy and royal. When I moved to the midwest, I searched unsuccessfully for such a lily.
In our backyard there was a magnolia tree that had been planted in 1940 when I was only three. As I waited impatiently for it to grow, Mamie told me gothic stories of mammoth magnolias in Selma, where she had grown up in the first decades of the twentieth century. Our tiny tree had been given to us by a family friend whose father was a judge in the small town of Camden, in the heart of agricultural Alabama. Our friend fancied that having the sapling in her yard would help my mother survive in industrial Fairfield, reminding her of a gracious era vanished with her childhood.
By the time I was in high school, that magnolia was still only about three or four feet tall and was not giving my mother what she wanted most—sumptuous white blossoms, shade from the flaring heat of the sun, and that unmistakably sweet aroma. Then, one day, we were out driving in the country just outside Fairfield when we spied a magnolia tree in full growth and bloom. Nearby stood an old farmhouse to which my father walked to ask the woman of the house if he might buy a bloom or two for his wife. She agreed, and from that day onward, when Mamie was having a special celebration during late spring or summer, Daddy drove out to “our” magnolia, as we thought of it, and brought back a precious blossom or two. My mother lovingly washed off ants or other small bugs that had taken up residence in the spacious hollows and floated the massive flowers in a sterling silver bowl in the center of our dining room table.
Though the magnolia stayed small, we boasted a gigantic oak nearby. Around the base of this great tree, Mamie planted snowdrop bulbs. She said they hardly ever did well for her, but a few survived the damp winters and numerous squirrels who loved the taste of their leaves. They bloomed in February as the true harbinger of spring. All through January, from the time I was eight or nine until well into my teens, I watched them closely, going out back and turning over a few of the leaves my mother so scrupulously placed over them to hide them from the squirrels and to keep them warm. Finally a day would come when the first yellow-green showed above the mulch and dank earth. On that day, Mamie would let me remove the leaves and pour the first water lovingly from a kitchen pitcher. When the snow drops bloomed, I would sit beside them, drawn to the perfectly marked spot of green in the center of each scallop of each bloom. They were special because they were the only flower we grew that was green and because when I looked at the blossoms hanging their heads, I felt less alone in my shyness.
As soon as I knew about saving money, I began to reserve portions of my allowance each year for a special present. Two months before Mamie’s September birthday, I looked through fancy iris catalogues, chose one specimen variety and proudly sent off my seven or eight dollars. She had never grown specimen iris. The hundreds that bloomed down our hillside were plain white, deep purple, sky blue, or lemon yellow fringed in brown. My mother loved those gifts from me because they allowed her to have one of a kind. Greeted with total enthusiasm, each year’s iris was planted immediately in a bed made specially for the collection I had promised in a card accompanying the first bulb, which was called Black Orpheus.
Though my mother’s talents for interior decoration were always in evidence, at Christmas time she outdid herself. A small touch that nonetheless delighted every child who came into our house was her wishbone tree. Mamie would buy the tiniest tree she could find at the YMCA lot, place it on a tier-top table in the living room, and hang on its delicate branches scores of gilded wishbones, saved from Sunday chickens and from the big hens she boiled up periodically for salad. All around this display were little boxes wrapped and bowed, each containing some bright trinket from the ten-cent store. Each child was allowed to select a wishbone from the tree and pull it with Mamie. The child who got the lucky piece took away a prize in one of the boxes. Those who got the unlucky piece received a handful of hard candies. Since Mamie seemed to enjoy the event as much as the children, everyone won.
Aside from this small ornament to cheer up children, everything about our decorations was a major production. Our front door project involved hours of hard scratchy work. I was allowed to help, so I know what it entailed. Around the facing, Mamie hung a swag of long-needled pine cuttings, intertwined with lights. She made her own swags because none she saw was thick enough for her taste. During my high school and college years, she and I would sit on the kitchen floor for hours, securing small clumps of pine to fat rope by wrapping picture wire around the sprig and then tying that to the rope. These clumps were overlapped like roofing shingles, the end result being a thick mass of pine with no hint of a rope beneath. Once we had tacked the swag to the wooden frame of the door, it remained to lace strings of multicolored lights through that mat of greens. I soon grasped that the swags sold at tree lots or florists were sparser in order to make it easier to attach lights. But my mother knew that expediency did not always coincide with beauty, and she chose beauty every time.
