But the taxi had already magically appeared by the ER drive.
A somber instinct kicked in. I wanted nothing personal, and no effort. No sweet husband, no solitary walk up the hill in first light. I wanted a hired carriage, I wanted to sit in state, to be conveyed from death back to life. Not to walk, not to drive, not to make any effort, not even to talk to my true love who wants to comfort me. Simply to be carried in the hired embrace of the yellow cab, suspended a while longer.
I noticed the taxi was freshly washed. This too seemed important.
The streets were empty. They felt old-fashioned, like the streets of my girlhood before the freeways. We followed the rise of Kellogg my parents would have taken on their way from Banfil and the West Seventh flats to Miller Hospital in 1946 in the driving snow. You were born in a blizzard! She often noted that—the drama, the witchy wink of omens, little people doing their stagecraft under the ho-hum surface of our life, sussing out significance.
The taxi glided past the History Center, then past the giant bulb of the Cathedral, turned down Summit, the avenue that so bedeviled Scott Fitzgerald. Then left onto Laurel, my street, our street, the street of my life and my love. And, as I always remember, the street where Fitzgerald, first literary hero, was born just two blocks farther up.
The taxi pulled up to our door. The driver had a soft voice, the voice of a forgiving priest in the confessional. He said the fare was $5. He apologized. It wasn’t really $5, he said, it should only be $3, but the company had this $5 threshold for short trips.
“That’s okay,” I said. But I discovered, rooting around in my purse, that I only had a $20 bill. The driver didn’t have change for a twenty. “Listen,” I said, “you keep the change. Really. My mother just died. She’d want you to have a drink on her.”
“I’m very sorry to hear that, ma’am,” he said.
For the first time I wanted to sob—to be called ma’am. He wouldn’t take the twenty. We had a little decorous argument about that. But he wouldn’t take it.
“You just go in now,” he said. Now he had the voice of a severe father. Not my father, but someone’s. “You go in.”
It seemed I had to obey him. I opened the door to the rest of my life, this new life without a living link to the old world, and he said, as if he knew all about me, “Well, now that’s the end of an era for you.”
Her last gift—that the first person to befriend me in the new age would be a man who understood the meaning of history.
For months, years, our conversations had been crazy, dialogue written by a committee of little people—trolls and elves conniving to give her vivid language but no sense, a cruel finish to the deft storyteller at the breakfast table with her acute eye for detail. And me, trailing along as usual, giving in to lunacy. And in the end, not unhappy about it. Wasting my life. Just gliding in the slipstream of that voice, the tatters of what was left of her spun-silk descriptions.
Your turn, she used to say, rising from the chipped kitchen table, mashing her cigarette in the toast crumbs on her plate. Come on, you’ve got the gift of gab. My turn to tell her something, a story, a funny bit from school, a sharp needle of detail plucked from the haystack of our flyover lives. But what did she want to know? What was I meant to tell her?
“You never confide in me,” she would say, aggrieved. A frequent complaint. All my life she wanted me to tell her—what? “I’m praying for you,” she said.
She wanted me to open my cold heart. More than that. Love was okay, but she always grasped beyond the heart. I always thought my brother fled to the West Coast to get beyond that claw. I didn’t blame him. It was the soul she was after. And never any doubt that the soul existed, and that I was keeping mine from her. The sliver of self smoldering within.
“Is it about me?” she said only a few weeks ago, asking what I was working on, always pushing me to work. I need a copy for the Archive. It was the last time we really spoke, her hand in mine, glass of Chardonnay next to her, the two of us sitting by the big nursing-home aquarium. Is it about me?
Sort of, I said, not knowing what venom this might draw. Not, until this moment, hearing the avidity in the question. And Dad. And St. Paul. The greenhouse. And you—of course you’re in it.
“Good,” she said, tough as Eddie Hadro in his green visor, the crusty Pioneer Press night editor casting his eye over my copy on my first newspaper job. “Good. It’s about time.”
She dropped my hand to reach for her glass. I like it here, she said. The view.
We settled back in our deck chairs. Just sat there, side by side, taking in the bracing salt air, and faced without dismay the gauzy hinge between sea and sky, the limitless horizon dividing the elements, the disappearing point where we were headed.
Acknowledgments
To the reader, a family memoir appears to be a solo performance. But its author knows otherwise. I remain happily indebted to a chorus of family and friends whose voices have buoyed up my own. Terrence Williams, first reader, keeps me going. Stephen Williams, Rosemarie Johnstone Weinstein, Lynn Freed, Phebe Hanson, Thomas Mallon, Edward Hirsch, and Andrea Barrett made all the difference at critical moments. Annette Kobak confirmed my faith in the memoir. Thanks as well to early editorial responses from Carol Houck Smith and our sorely missed Frederick Busch. Ann Patty, my dashing and inventive editor, gave me a new home and new hope, and who knew how much fun line-editing could be until David Hough put his laser eye to my prose? My agent, Marly Rusoff, and her indispensable partner, Mihai Radulescu, have been the great champions of this book and of all I hope to accomplish as a writer. To these and to all those now lost, except to memory, who formed the world of this book, my abiding gratitude.
About the Author
PATRICIA HAMPL is the author of five memoirs—A Romantic Education, Virgin Time, I Could Tell You Stories, Blue Arabesque, and The Florist’s Daughter—and two collections of poetry. She has received a MacArthur Fellowship, among many other awards. She lives in St. Paul, Minnesota.
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