Summer was that field on the high shelf above the ocean, the meadow-larks rising, the bobolinks swinging on the timothy. It was that dance of joy, that dance of life, that perfect union with the summer day, exact accord with all the little flying creatures and the business they accomplished, something physical about it, visceral, planted very deep in memory, singing with the larks, skimming with the swallows, everything barging up, blowing up, buzzing, humming, floating—all the white, the innocent daisies, the oxeyed daisies, the buttercups, and the grasshoppers transparent as the grass, hopping, springing, squatting, working their horses’ jaws, making spittle on the grass blades, and some of them with wings shaped like little fans, opening and shutting them with such a clack and clatter, flying in every direction, the butterflies descending noiseless on this flower and on that, spreading the velvet and the satin, here the yellow, there the purple, the cat’s eyes, the tiger’s stripes. Running here, running there, and something in her crying out to that blue, mysterious element beyond the dunes to wait, to keep its distance, to allow her still a little longer to belong completely to the earth.
It was that swift descent upon the beach, the surf strong, the waves breaking. Something pretty terrible about it—getting it in one fell swoop, the fury of the breakers carried back to crash and echo in the dunes, waves running up the shore in all their sound and smother, the wild cold smell of the salt spray inducing maniac excitement. Up the path of the waves shrieking, down the hard wet slope again, the waves springing, leaping forward, and one more terrible than all the others standing up in its intolerable beauty, seeing the jellyfish and seaweed and the flung sand churned within its glassy caverns, hearing amid the roar and thunder that little dreadful music of the bubbles breaking, opening their lips on air, on sand, on stone.
Autumn was the orchard where she used to come to bury katydids and spiders, and a state of the clammiest contentment—the air webbed with all manner of tiny tunes and gossamer occurrences, gnats humming, flies and bees and hornets droning, shining threads attached to no visible bough or leaf or spider slack in the bright air, wings flashing, vanishing, bits of down and fluff and feather disappearing in the blue, appearing in the sunlight, those fat worms squirming loose from the grave she opened, and the sepulchral smell of the autumnal earth.
But not a word of all this recorded in that manuscript, she thought as she rose to take her novel from the desk where it had lain so long unread.
FOUR
Miss sylvester turned the pages of the manuscript, and moved at once into that dim abyss of time where recollections dawned, where rooms gave off their smells, their voices and associations. That sense she’d had of coming from nowhere into somewhere very large and most important back upon her in all its original assertiveness, she seemed to be groping rather blindly through her grandmother’s home in Brookline.
How large the rooms had seemed—immense, falling away into echoing vistas, overfurnished, over-subdued by the weight of all those Victorian possessions. There was the wide hall, with doors opening on the double parlors, the library, the dining room, and at the end of the hall, and directly opposite the front door, that staircase, of splendid proportions, branching off with carpeted stairs and a balustrade on either side to meet a balcony halfway up and ascend again in all the majesty of its double flights to the floors above. Here more than elsewhere the large and lavish manner of the household had seemed to her exhibited. People ascended and descended. Some took the flight to the left, some the flight to the right. Maids in black dresses tricked out in clean white caps and aprons answered bells; they ran up and down in a flutter of apron strings and messages to be delivered; they came bearing boxes of flowers, candy boxes, boxes from the milliner’s and huge important-looking boxes from the dressmaker’s. Something about that stairway—the echoing rooms above and the echoing halls below that intimated the cramped, the meager, the not to say demeaning nowhere from which she had emerged into all this hustle and bustle, and how frequently she must have wondered, peering through the banisters, traveling up and down, what in the world she was doing amid all this important traffic.
Downstairs the large rooms, their lofty doors and ceilings, the high windows draped in heavy lambrequins and curtains, seemed to diminish her height and give her a curious sense of walking very lightly on her feet. All was reflection, scintillation—mirrors, chandeliers with pendant lusters, lamps, statuary, porcelain vases, marble busts, marble mantelpieces reduplicated down a vast extension of the scene.
There had been—most awe-inspiring of all the apparitions—old George the butler, carrying trays, announcing visitors. There were uncles, cousins, acquaintances engaged in animated conversation. Some sat down, some stood up, and anyone was likely at any moment to make a grab for her, to hold her at arm’s length and exclaim, “Oh, this is the Sylvester child.” The difference in the behavior of the sexes was very noticeable indeed. The ladies’ laughter was light and musical, they affected the most decorative attitudes, their dresses fitted them closely, their waists were incredibly small, they wore the loveliest of hats. The gentlemen guffawed and gesticulated. They were extremely elegant. Some had beards carefully trimmed, some had mustaches meticulously combed, some wore clothes that gave them a curious robinlike appearance, some were dressed in coats which lent them a grave, ministerial look. The young men, with the notable exception of Lucien Grey, had clean faces and were more graceful and appealing than their elders. Young or old, male or female, they all had the unmistakable look of being very fashionable indeed.
Arriving with a heart from which all references had been erased, and bringing with her not a sight or sound or smell that might illuminate the past and thus explain the present, she’d had perforce to reconstruct it all as best she could. Vaguely realizing there was mystery behind her and a conspiracy of silence imposed upon a time when with a legitimate equipment of parents she must presumably have lived elsewhere, she had been accompanied by a curious sense, not only of trying to rediscover them, but in a measure of attempting, you might say, to find herself.
All was at first confusion, people holding her attention, flitting off again, an inflection of speech, an exaggeration of dress or gesture, the bird on Cousin Cecilia’s hat, the way Great-Uncle William shrugged his shoulders, the scent that issued from a gown or handkerchief, a reprimand, some emphatic expression of opinion—figures, personalities, characters coming at her, retreating, coming at her again with an accentuation of their tricks of speech or gesture, their private queernesses and mannerisms, until, lo, behold, what with piecing all the impressions together, responding to them with the uncanny sharpness that her position of insecurity somehow or other induced, she became acquainted with her grandmother and grandfather, the formidable great-aunts and uncles, her beautiful Aunt Eleanor, and Lucien Grey, with Cousin Cecilia Ware, and her pretty, frivolous Aunt Georgie. She observed them with a kind of spellbound attention and was never without a feeling that they were actors taking part in a series of improvised scenes and exhibitions, fascinating but not altogether enjoyable. Something seemed to be lacking, some warmth, some sense of being attached to people and things, and not just suffered to walk around among them.
Difficult to tell what exactly happened when in that crowded world to which she had become attached, rooms, conversations, people and the manners they carried about with them, shifting and changing as they did in memory, but there was a certain emotional climate which persisted throughout those first winters in Brookline, induced by plans, postponements, preparations—bringing Aunt Georgie out into society, getting her successfully married. The entire house vibrated to these events, and as it comes back to her, all this stir of talk and preparation seemed to have sharpened and increased a feeling she carried uneasily about of being somehow or other responsible for holding up the schedule of events, arriving as she had in a shroud of mourning that suspended all festivities and left all projects hanging in the air. It must have been the “coming out” which her arrival had actually delayed.
But nonetheless, the great occasions became inextricably combined in mood and in memory, and as far as her responses to them went, they seem now to have taken place but once, and to have brewed in her heart exactly similar impressions. And how she had been able, amid those glittering displays of family pride and power, to make out that she in her small person represented something that had run amok in worldly calculations it is impossible to explain. Wandering about amid those tides of merriment, congratulations, laughter, and with the strains of flute and fiddle, the fragrance of innumerable hothouse flowers, the subtlest perfumes wafted to her from the circulating ladies, heightening her emotions and inscribing on her sensibilities God knows what of melancholy pleasure, she had been most certainly aware that she stood somehow for misfortune, not to say disgrace.
That daughters must marry into their own class and maintain their position in society was an essential doctrine held by both her grandparents. For what earthly reason had they elected to marry and bring them into the world if not for such alliances? The roots and reasons for these assumptions she was, naturally enough, unable to plumb, but somehow or other she had been able to pluck from the very air around her, through hints and inflections, through words and phrases far from clearly understood, the realization that her mother had brought disgrace upon the Fosters and the Chamberlains, and though she was completely ignorant of the story attaching to her parents, she seemed to have suspected very early in the game that her mother had never been properly “brought out” nor decently married.
Some talk overheard among the servants about a runaway match should have set her right on the details, but knowing nothing about matches except that she was forbidden to strike them because of fire, and runaways in this connection suggesting fire engines—horses running to a fire, the phrase served only to confuse. All this was presently cleared up, but for a while she knew only that her mother had died and “gone to heaven,” as good old Irish Annie frequently assured her, “to live with God,” and as she heard nothing at all about the other parent she simply had taken it for granted that he was also dead and residing happily in heaven.
An inclination on everybody’s part to act as though she had come parentless into the world could not, very naturally, persuade her that this was the case and there was that house that had for some time had the power, whenever she so much as thought about it, to scare her out of her wits, a symbol of her dreadful, her demeaning past. This nightmare sense of it came to her full-fledged out of that incident that had occurred on a spring morning in the nursery when certain shabby trunks and boxes from “the house in Pinckney Street” were brought down from the attic to be unpacked. Grandmother Foster supervised the whole performance and there had been something about her expression, the way she handled, smelled and sorted out the various articles—blankets, sheets and little undergarments, dresses, coats and jackets, undoubtedly her own—that had suggested as she watched her from the floor where she remembers she was seated the very direst kind of poverty; and when she heard her add, “These will be quite suitable for Joe, I understand his daughter has a brood of little girls,” the final touch of the macabre and dreadful was put upon her speculations. For was not Joe, the old man who came out from Boston to assist the gardener (Dago Joe as Annie called him), an Italian as well as a Dago and had she not somewhere ascertained the fact that her own father was an Italian and learned moreover that he was a musician, and was it not most logical to jump to the conclusion, having in this musical connection only a hand organ to rely upon, that he was a Dago organ-grinder? Anyway it was thus she’d made it out, leaping wildly from one association to the next, as she sat there on the floor and watched her grandmother handling, sorting, smelling those little garments, and heard her in that high and lofty way she had bestowing them upon that scary old man, and from that day on and for some time afterwards poverty, parents, Pinckney Street were trammeled up together, to breed in her imagination a series of the most sordid and frightening pictures—men and women with tattered sleeves and toes protruding from their shoes and wearing the most disreputable of hats, lurking in area-ways, poking in the ashcans, children with uncombed hair and uncouth manners playing in the gutters and in the vicinity of garbage cans, and naturally enough, the Dago organ-grinder with his organ and his monkey and his cup extended grinding out his scary tunes.
Just how long this ghoulish sense of her forgotten past prevailed she cannot be quite sure, but she remembers perfectly the day that it was dissipated and the delight and surprise that she experienced and how then and there her mind escaping the dark and horrid speculations seemed to run at once toward new and happier conclusions and how she was immediately furnished with a succession of the most romantic, comforting, and comfortable beliefs.
Oh, the vividest memory of that experience comes back—the cold crisp weather, the sharp astonishment, the unutterable relief, driving on one of those rare occasions when she went to town with her grandmother in an open sleigh, that delicious sense she had of almost sliding along on air, all so smooth and swift and sunny. Her grandmother beside her silent in her sealskin coat, then suddenly leaning forward and saying to the coachman in her peremptory way—“Turn here into Pinckney Street—stop at twenty-eight.”
Pinckney Street! To say that she was filled with horror, with a kind of dreadful expectation is to put it mildly. The sleigh turned. My goodness gracious! How astounding—bewildering indeed! It was a very pleasant kind of street, not perhaps as elegant as other streets she’d seen, but none the less tidy, clean. They stopped at twenty-eight. Could this be perhaps the house, the awful house of her imaginings? There were curtains in the windows, the stoop was well swept. The footman jumped down, climbed the steps, rang the bell. What a pleasant house! What a pleasant street, clean, tidy—people on the sidewalks were dressed in the most respectable clothes, no uncouth children played in the gutters, there were no terrifying women in tattered clothes with unkempt hair picking over garbage cans; not a drunken man in sight.
The door was opened, a maid appeared and took the letter. The footman descended the steps, clambered to the box. The horses neighed and shook their bells and pranced away.
What relief, what joy! Her parents had not lived in a place of horror, in a dreadful slum. Her father was not, he had never been a Dago—no Dago could have lived in such a street! And then and there her mind went skipping in and out of words, incidents, references she didn’t even realize she’d remembered; and with a speed, a brilliance that was nothing short of unbelievable, piecing this and that and utterly discarding all that had been distressing and confusing, the runaway horses and the fire engine as well as the monkey and the organ-grinder retreating forever into limbo, her parents’ gallant little love affair came to her as clear as day and infinitely brave and true. Of course that runaway match meant simply this, that her mother had run away with the Italian musician, who had married her and brought her to Pinckney Street to live. Just to think of her having had the courage to do such a thing—defying and standing out against Grandmother Foster, who, as far as she’d been able to discover, nobody dared so much as contradict. Gracious, how she must have loved him! Why, he had not been an organ-grinder at all. Far from that! Suddenly, in a flash of what must have been sheer clairvoyance, she’d got it all exactly right, brushed as she had been in that miraculous instant by the memory of what Grandfather Foster had said when he’d come upon her in the parlor at The Towers sitting on the musical chair, “The Overture to William Tell, your father’s favorite tune,” receiving instantly (the silvery tune the chair gave off perhaps assisting in this feat of memory and intuition) the picture of a dark Italian elegantly attired standing up before her straight and slender, playing on a flute.
Doubtless the fact that he had played in the Symphony Orchestra got hitched to all these intuitions at a later time, so curiously do recollections lapse and come together in the mind, but in retrospect it seems to her she’d got the whole thing in that bright moment straight. The sleigh continued to slip merrily alo
ng, and oh how proudly she surveyed Pinckney Street, how she regretted that she was not living there as she must have done before she remembered anything about it. However, she could bear to be without her parents if she could cherish in the thought of them such a romantic story—keep them forever beautiful and brave—mysteriously touched by death.
FIVE
The years did not diminish her treasure, which due to the consolations of good Irish Annie added the joy of anticipation to the satisfaction she somehow felt in the possession of parents who had, according to Annie, so beautifully “gone before.” The idea of joining them in heaven began to dawn, and presently took on all that could be imagined of the gala and familiar as well as the supernatural and divine. Heaven became for her a very actual place, and she found no difficulty at all in combining the joys of earthly greetings on the part of those long separated and bereaved with states of more seraphic and transcendent bliss. It seemed simple enough to imagine an ambient where they were invested with the human as well as the angelic condition. Since it existed both in her mind and heart and memory, she required for its architecture no more than what her eyes had looked upon with wonder and delight—the morning and the evening clouds together with all the bright stars strewn upon the sky and all the lovely flowers growing in the grass. It was a place immense and capable of infinite extension, with clouds perpetually opening to reveal unending corridors—vistas of mountains, valleys, rivers, seas. So vast indeed as to allow all the dead and all the living, those who had died before and those who at some time in the future would be dead, to meet and recognize each other and to renew their earthly ties at just that instant when clothed in their flesh and bones they had been so rudely torn apart and where among all these human and bodily reunions divine and incorporeal changes were perpetually taking place—children turning into angels, parents flying about on angelic wings and God Himself at the center of all the light and splendor forever welcoming the newcomers—bidding them draw a little nearer to His throne.
Many Mansions Page 4
