We’d all been working in our own quiet ways on that fire escape for some time. It bothered all of us that the inadequate Sunday School facilities, particularly the kindergarten and primary rooms, were fire traps, and we’d been working very hard trying to do something about it. Most New Englanders, including my husband, who may come from Oklahoma but fits well in the New England landscape, will not do today what can be done tomorrow, but we were beginning to make progress. The fire escape was going to be brought up again at the annual church meeting in January, and we all felt that the money would be appropriated and that perhaps we might even get somewhere on building a parish house with proper Sunday School facilities.
When Mr. Brechstein came to our house, full of zeal and enthusiasm and talked about the safety of the kiddies’ bodies as well as their souls, I wanted to tell him, Listen, Mr. B., you’ve just killed all our chances of a fire escape. Don’t you, with all your pretensions to intellect and knowledge of psychology, know that if you want to get something like this done in New England (and most likely in Oklahoma and Okinawa, in Nebraska and Nepal, in Georgia, U.S.A., and Georgia, U.S.S.R.) you have to sell it to a couple of open-minded old residents and let them do the canvassing? But he was somehow so pathetically eager, and he looked, with his balding head with the curly dark hair over the ears, so like a spaniel, that I dug down into my pocketbook instead.
“Fire is something you can’t be too careful about,” Mr. Brechstein said. “Next week we’re having our whole house rewired as a precaution.” He then told me that perhaps his wife might find time to read one of my little books when she had finished the stack of important novels by her bed.
Anyhow, most people forgot the fire escape and remembered the Brechsteins.
“I won’t have that damned Communist telling me what to do.”
“They ought to be driven out of town.”
“They better watch out.”
Of course Wilberforce Smith and his gang were behind most of the talk, or at least gave it the gentle push that was all that was needed to get it going, and if anybody had asked me whom I liked least, Mr. Brechstein or Wilberforce Smith, I’d have been hard put to it to decide.
One afternoon Mrs. Brechstein dropped into the store for some odds and ends, and nobody else happened to be there.
“Why,” she demanded, looking me straight in the eye, “doesn’t anybody like us?” I was too embarrassed to say anything. “No, please tell me. We both know it’s true. I didn’t expect to find intimate friends in a place like this, of course, but—”
“Well, maybe it’s because you didn’t expect to find friends,” I said tentatively.
“But it’s more than that. I can do without friends, with my independent mind, but I don’t understand the feeling of dislike we get everywhere we go.”
“Well,” I fumbled, “you know you’ve talked a good deal about how you bring your children up, about how you never tell them what to do but try unobtrusively to guide their minds to the right decisions? It might be better if you treated everybody else that way, too.”
“What do you mean?” she demanded.
“People around here don’t like being told what to do. It isn’t just the fire escape. It’s everything else. You tell us all how we should run our lives, what we should read and what we should think of what we read, and what kind of wallpaper we should use and what colors we should wear, and even who we should go to bed with.”
“What do you mean by that last remark?” she snapped. And then to my horror a great tear slipped out of one eye and trickled down her cheek. “Of course I know what you mean,” she said. “I’d had too much to drink and I was scared out of my wits by all of you people who knew each other so well. And I did expect to make friends but I didn’t know how. So I said it just to bolster my self-confidence. Of course I don’t go around having affairs. I just thought it would make you—make you—” And she rushed out of the store and got in her car and drove off, leaving her bread on the counter.
I was appalled. And ashamed. Surely we should have realized. All that brashness. All that arrogance. Just a front, and one we should have been able to see through.
Hugh and I talked it over that evening. Mr. Brechstein had come to him, too, with complaints about the unfriendliness of New Englanders, their lack of hospitality, their suspicious natures.
“I don’t think I’ll ever really like them,” I said, “but I do feel terribly sorry for them now. They’ve managed to hit me so often on my vulnerable spots that I never stopped to look at it from their point of view. Pretty Brechsteiny of me, wasn’t it?”
Just after we had first fallen into sleep, that deep, heavy sleep out of which it is almost impossible to rouse, the fire siren started. The wild screech going up and down the scale, up and down, over and over, shattering the peace of the night, pierced insistently through my subconscious, until at last I was aware that I was listening to something. I lay there and started to shiver as I always do when I hear the siren. Up and down, on and on, over and over, the high, penetrating scream probed through sleep. I raised up on one elbow and looked over at Hugh, and he was still sound asleep.
—He’s so tired, I thought,—he’s been working so hard lately, I can’t wake him.
I turned over on my side. Still the siren screamed.—Suppose it was our house, and somebody else’s wife said to herself, My husband’s so tired, I don’t want to get him up to go out in the cold …
I took Hugh’s shoulder and shook it gently. “Hugh. Hugh. It’s the fire siren.” He groaned and rolled over. “It’s the fire siren,” I said again.
Suddenly and all at once he was awake, swinging his legs out of bed, going to the south windows, then the east windows, standing with his bare feet on the ice-cold floor.
“It’s in the center, and it’s a big fire,” he said suddenly, and started to dress.
“Please dress warmly,” I begged. “I know you’re rushing but please don’t forget your boots. You won’t be any help to anybody if you freeze.” Do all men, if their wives don’t plead with them, tend to dash out of the house in midwinter as though it were July?
I got out of bed and went to the window, and the east was lit with a great glow. I thought of all the houses in the center, but the bloody smear was so general that it was impossible to tell where the fire actually was. “It looks as though it might be the church,” I said.
“If it is, thank God it’s at a time when there’s nobody in it.” Hugh pulled a ski sweater over his head.
“And Mr. Brechstein will be right as usual.” I tried to make myself smile. Hugh went downstairs and out into the dark, and I could hear the cold engine of the car cough as he started it. Before he was out of the garage there was the sound of another car hurrying down the road, and then another, from the two farms above us, and then Hugh was following them. I knew that I couldn’t go to bed till he got home, so I pulled on my bathrobe and stood again at the east window looking at the horrible red glare. It was so violent that I could see bursts of flame thrusting flares up into the night. The phone rang and I ran to answer it. It couldn’t be that something had happened to Hugh; he’d scarcely had time to get to the center.
It was my neighbor up the road. “Madeleine, do you know where the fire is?”
“No. It’s in the center. It looks as though it might be the church. Has Howard gone?”
“Ayeh. If you hear where it is, call me, will you?”
“Yes, and same to you, please.” I was too nervous to sit down, to read, to try to write. I went to the kitchen and put the kettle on for tea, then went upstairs and checked the children, tucked them in, walked our little boy to the bathroom, tidied up some clothes that had fallen on the closet floor, picked up Raggedy Ann and tucked her back in beside a small sleeping girl, went back down to the kitchen and drank a cup of tea. There was no possible hope that those flames might be from a chimney fire. I thought of the church, the beautiful church, well over two hundred years old, with the tall white spire visible fo
r miles, with the bell that could be heard for miles too, that tolled for the hours, for births, weddings, deaths.
I looked in the refrigerator to see what I could make into a sandwich for Hugh when he got home. The phone again: my neighbor: “Madeleine, it’s not the church. It’s down the hill to Brechsteins’.”
‘I wouldn’t raise a finger,’ Wilberforce Smith had said, ‘if his house burned down.’ There had even been some wild talk about burning those Commies out.
The phone again. It would wake the children. But no, the fire alarm had not penetrated their sleep; it would take more than the phone to rouse the children. “It’s the Brechsteins’,” I was able to say this time.
It takes more than the scream of a fire siren, more than the insistent ring of the phone, to rouse the children. Were those little beasts the Brechstein boys all right? Little beasts or no, the thought of a child in a burning house is an unbearable one. I rushed upstairs to stand looking at our own children, lying safe and sweet in their beds. Naughty and noisy as they might be by day, at night they looked like cherubs; all children do, and I was sure the Brechstein boys were no exception.
My neighbor rang again. “It’s the wing of the house. Not a chance of saving it, but they might be able to save the main house.”
The wing. The wing was where the boys’ bedroom was.
If it weren’t for our sleeping children, how many of us would have followed our men over to the fire? We were thinking of the Brechstein boys; we were thinking of our men trying to fight the flames; none of us, native or newcomer, could stop our nervous pacing, and the phone was our only relief from the tension.
“Those boys sleep in the wing.”
“Yes. I know.”
“Do you suppose they’re all right?”
“My Johnny gave Peter Brechstein a bloody nose in school today. The kid asked for it, but now—”
“They’ve called the Northridge fire department, too.”
“Yes, and Clovenford.”
I drank another cup of tea. I checked on the children once more. I stood at the window and the glare had died down. There was no longer the bright bursting of flames, and the sky looked only murky and sick, and at last I realized that part of the light was coming from dawn.
A car came up the road, and then another, and then the kitchen door opened and I ran to meet Hugh. His face was black with soot and he looked exhausted. While I fixed him something to eat and drink he began to tell me about it. “It was the wing of the Brechsteins’ house. Burned clear down. But they saved the main house. Couldn’t possibly have done it if everybody hadn’t got there so quickly.”
“But the boys, what about the boys?” I asked.
“Wilberforce Smith went in after them,” Hugh told me. “Burned his hands badly, too, but the boys weren’t touched.”
Relief surged through me. “No one was really hurt?”
“No. Everybody’s okay. Mr. Brechstein worked like a madman. Everybody did.”
“You included,” I said.
“A lot of them are still there. Don’t dare leave while it’s still smoldering.”
“How did the fire start?”
“Nobody knows for sure. Probably faulty wiring.” He stretched and yawned.
“Try to get a nap,” I begged, “before time to get up.”
A nap, of course, was all it was, hardly even that, because we simply lay in our big bed holding each other, taking comfort in touch, the beating of the heart, the gentle motion of breath, holding each other in the manner of the human being in time of danger, sorrow, death.
Then there was the usual rush of getting the children ready for school, Hugh off for the store, and then the phone started ringing, and we were all off in a mad whirl of baking pies and cakes for the men still working in the debris of what had been the long white wing of the house, and collecting clothes for the Brechsteins, and cleaning up the main house so that there was no sign of smoke or water or broken windows, and for a few splendid days thousands of cups of coffee were swallowed and all the tensions were miraculously eased, and the church women held a kitchen shower for the Brechsteins because the kitchen had been in the wing, and Mrs. Brechstein managed not to put her foot in her mouth, and people forgot for an evening who was old and who was new and nobody called anybody else a Communist. It was at least a week before somebody came into the store and said angrily, “Did you hear what the Brechsteins did now?”
Perhaps New Englanders are unfriendly, and perhaps I’ll never understand or like either the Brechsteins or Wilberforce Smith, and perhaps we’ll never feel anything but newcomers in this tight little community.
But where, after we have made the great decision to leave the security of childhood and move on into the vastness of maturity, does anybody ever feel completely at home?
2
Children and grownups ask me the same questions about my stories, though children, less inhibited, ask more: How old are you? How much money do you make?
One standard question from young and old is: Do you write about real people, and about what really happened?
The answer is no. But also yes. My husband says, and I’m afraid with justification, that by the time I’ve finished a book I have no idea what in it is fabrication and what is actuality; and he adds that this holds true not only for novels but for most of my life. We do live, all of us, on many different levels, and for most artists the world of imagination is more real than the world of the kitchen sink.
When my mother apologizes for the many things that gave me a childhood that was rather different from the normal, happy, American ideal, I try to convince her of my immense gratitude. She at least has to admit that I’ve got a lot of material for a lot of books out of it, because every single one of my adolescent heroines is based on my own experience.
When someone comes in to me when I’m deep in writing, I have a moment of frightening transition when I don’t know where I am, and then I have to leave the “real” world of my story for what often seems the less real world, the daily, dearly loved world of husband and children and household chores.
Perhaps the story of the Brechsteins will help sort things out. There are, in one sense, no Brechsteins. I think I made the name up. If we must be psychoanalytical about why I made up that particular name, it was, I fancy, because I was having trouble with my piano—keys stuck, strings broke—and I dreamed of a Steinway or a Bechstein grand. Their story is just one of a series of sketches I wrote one winter of inner and outer cold, and it’s hardly even a story. I wrote it over a decade ago, while we were still living year round in the country, so I’m more able to be objective about it than something written more recently, and it is, in its setting, more overtly autobiographical than most of my stories.
But with this sketch, as with all my stories, the idea simply comes to me and asks to be written; all I am aware of, on the conscious level of writing, is the story, and the imaginary people in it, and if I have, in fact, written from “real life” I’m usually not aware of it for months—or years.
All right. Our house is our house. The store is our store. My husband and I are ourselves. The emotional premise of the sketch, the feeling of being a stranger and sojourner—all this is true. This is the way it is. We did have a difficult time getting a fire escape for the second floor of the church, though probably most of us have forgotten it by now; it’s only this story which makes me remember it, and I haven’t thought about it for years, or how desperately important it was to us then.
We also have a parish house, and notices for town meetings and caucuses are posted where everybody will see them. But there will always, I suspect, be a line, bridgeable but always there, between old and new members in every small community.
There is no Wilberforce Smith. He is totally unlike the two fine first selectmen we have known since we bought Crosswicks. If I try hard to pin him down, he might be a mixture of two or three different people who came into the store, but I’m not really sure, and from my point of view it do
esn’t matter, because who he is is Wilberforce Smith.
As for the Brechsteins, there was a new family in town, from Chicago, who were resented and called Communists because they tried to push World Federalism at a time when an interest in the United Nations was considered un-American. Then there was another family, in the village for one summer only, a mother, father, and barely adolescent girl. The wife had written a scholarly book on the number of times contemporary writers use eight-letter words (or something like that; she used a computer); the husband was a sociologist. We had been asked to be nice to them, to help them feel at home, and I looked forward to someone who might enjoy talking about writing and music.
They turned out to be Brechsteiny, all right. Our girls and their friends finally stopped trying to get along with the “Brechstein” girl, and I thought they were noble to try as long as they did. Mrs. Brechstein certainly made me feel obvious, to say the least. I was not, she made it clear, her intellectual equal, and when she pontificated about her book she bored me, and everybody else. Mr. Brechstein looked down on Hugh for running a grocery store. I think that Mrs. Brechstein actually did make the famous remark about the necessity for a wife to have an affair, but I’m not sure. At the end of the summer they left the village and our lives, and I wish them well.
The fire siren always sends chills of terror through me. There was a night when it blew, when I did not want to pry Hugh out of his needed sleep, when the sky to the east was lit with flame and we did not know, for a long time, where the fire was, when it might have been the church, or any of the houses in the center, when I did all the things that the me of the Brechstein sketch did. It was not a house, after all, but a barn; bad enough, for the loss of a barn is disastrous for a fanner; and not all the cows were saved.
In writing about the Brechsteins I was writing about all kinds of things which were on my mind, my conscious, sub-, and super-conscious mind. After I had finished it, and the story itself reminded me that we are all strangers and sojourners on this earth, I was far more reconciled to not knowing about a Republican caucus than I had been before—though it didn’t stop me from trying to make such meetings generally known. I have my own idea of what is American.
A Circle of Quiet Page 8
