“If you decide to go,” Dorothy said, “the Miller office can get you passage.”
Still, I was not too certain. Surely even going there would put things back to square one. But just to see John again might turn out well, and London would seem much better for me with him as a companion than it had the one time I visited it in the past. I wrote rather tentatively to say I had my advance on the book. Many letters were suddenly exchanged.
Thanks to Dorothy, I found myself with a reservation on the Queen Elizabeth. Should I take it or not? Indecision kept me awake on a regular basis. One thing only was certain: I did not want to go to Mississippi.
One afternoon, coming into the Clays’ apartment with an armload of groceries, I saw a telegram lying on the floor in front of the door. I knew what it was, but not what it would say. Either way it would define something. For a long moment that rectangle of yellow paper was the most important thing in my world. It sometimes seems I am still standing in the hallway of the apartment complex on the East River looking down at it.
It was from John, as I knew it would be. It said he would meet the boat train in Waterloo Station on June 6.
28
PLACES TO COME TO
ENGLAND was such a place in the summer of 1956. I took the boat train from Southampton to London. Alighting in the gloomy, smoke-smelling reaches of Waterloo Station, wearing, as promised, a big hat, I was thus easily spotted by a man hastening toward me, all but concealed by a huge bunch of red roses.
What did we do all that first day? Some of it is hard to recall. I do not quite know how we wound up strolling around in Richmond Park, but distinctly remember the deer, who were quite close, looking us over, finding us neither alarming nor unfamiliar.
John was eager for me to go down to Cornwall to meet his family. He had already been in touch with them, and a letter for me was waiting.
I had been brought up hearing that all of “us” were of Anglo-Saxon descent and therefore more kin to the English and the Scots than to any of “those others.” It would have been hard going for a freedom-loving Southern spirit to get mired down in an Italian family, and of “those others” I’ve no idea. But certainly the Rusher/Stevens/Walters connection seemed ready-made for a Mississippian’s safe entry.
They lived for the most part on a family estate on the north shore of Cornwall. The gales blew, the gulls screamed, and twice daily the ocean rushed up to the garden wall. But otherwise one might have packed them up and shipped them to the South and found they fit right in.
There were a half dozen aunts and uncles, cousins dropping by, shops where everybody knew the family on sight, eccentricities to spin out as stories through any number of evenings. John’s father, a retired brigadier, had been captured in the fall of Singapore and spent some horrendous years in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp. A high-ranking British officer, enjoying all the perks of empire in both England and India during the years between the wars, was demeaned to working in rice paddies under harsh Japanese command in Manchuria. A panel filled with medals honoring Brigadier Rusher’s services to the nation was modestly displayed behind glass in a corner of the sitting room.
John’s mother, who during the war had got stranded in India, had never really recovered from the strain of those years, though certainly she had admirably managed to “cope.”
Relatives in Kenya and Australia were spoken of. An uncle had run a ranch in Western Canada, which relatives had traveled cross-country by sleeping car to visit. Another had been an Anglican missionary to the Indians in New Brunswick. A first cousin, Anthony Stevens, serving with the Foreign Office, was at that moment settling some “problems” on Cyprus. He was later to be transferred to Belfast in Northern Ireland, another problem area.
I began to get a keyhole view of the extent of British overrule—all those pink countries on the map I studied in grammar school now figured in a living way through John’s kin.
Those at hand were also of some interest. An eccentric great-aunt, who had lived with her late husband in British Honduras, was found in her living room, standing knee-deep in leaves blown by a gale into her thatched-roof cottage. She railed at us for not having come to tea the day before, though she had forgotten to invite us.
Two ancient aunts who lived in nearby Newquay kept tender memories of their late brother, a local hero, who had among many other feats excavated a whole prehistoric village on a spit of land in front of the Rusher garden. Uncle Will Stephens had also discovered a smart boy who was a tin miner’s son and had brought him home, given him books to read, and made him welcome. A. L. Rowse climbed rapidly in school and became a fellow at Oxford and a well-known British historian. An early edition of his book A Cornish Childhood was dedicated to Will Stephens.
As many of the family as could rise and walk came to our wedding in St. Columb Minor, a church built the year before Columbus sailed in search of China. John’s brother, Jim, and sister Jenifer, both employed in London, came by train. Another sister, stationed with her husband on Gibraltar, sent a wire.
The two ancient aunts, having “cut sandwiches” the night before, immediately set off on a bus tour of Wales.
I loved all this ramified local life, distant from London, as Mississippi always felt at a remove from the Yankee world of big urban centers; and I loved the fact that they had taken me in, as though it were a natural occurrence to have a heard-about-but-never-met “Amedican” woman walk in and marry their son (or brother, or nephew).
But our sights were set on returning to Italy in time for John to pick up his work in the fall. We went by the slowest imaginable stages, through Salisbury and by Stonehenge, London, and thence to Paris for a few days, then back into our city of so many memories.
As in the past, Rome was bursting that year with a literary crowd. John Cheever had made a movie sale of one of his Wap-shot books, and had come to Rome with Mary, his daughter, Susie, and son, Ben, determined to live it up. He had no trouble doing so, and before anyone knew quite how it happened he had secured a whole apartment in Palazzo Doria.
Even after some years in Rome I was impressed with the splendor the Cheevers were living in. They had an entrata which opened into an enormous salotto, as big as a ballroom, with decorated ceiling, marble floors, and a fireplace at the far end. There was room here for everything—dining, “receiving,” parties, and family living. There were cooking and sleeping quarters as well.
The Cheevers soon found how difficult it is to be well off in Rome, let alone affluent. (John and I had flourished as poveri amanti, lovingly observed and helped by all, but the minute we set up a middle-class lifestyle in an apartment, with a maid and a macchina (auto), the wolves began to get wind of us and sniff about.) The Cheevers, Mary pregnant with Federico, were thrown into despair early on. Mary called me one day to ask if I could recommend a good maid to her. I had inherited one from our landlady, Iole Felice, a strong, kindly woman, very managerial by nature. I told her to go over to the Palazzo Doria and ask for la famiglia di Signor Cheever, to see what she could do.
Only a few hours had passed before Iole called me to say she was sending me her sister as a maid. Her reason was simple: “I Cheever hanno bisogno di me.” “The Cheevers need me.” As indeed they did. She began to rail at tradespeople and drive down the grocery bill, to shop, cook, and clean and see the children off in time for school.
The relation became a permanent one. In time John and Mary took Iole back to the United States with them, where she flourished. For many years, though married to a greengrocer in Ossining and living in her own house nearby, she remained on call to prepare wonderful meals, and help out for “occasions.” Mary told me that many of John’s stories set in Italy were Iole’s stories. I know that she figures prominently and recognizably in “Clementina,” a fine story about an American couple who take their Italian maid with them to the United States.
We got on just as well with the other Felice sisters, one of whom, Maria, became a necessary part of our life in Rome.
Another call for help came from the Cheevers. This time it was John, asking us to stand as godparents for Susie, who was being baptized as a preliminary to confirmation at the American Episcopal church in Via Nazionale. John Rusher and I had long gone there, he being more inclined to a Low Church service, as held in the American church, than to the High Church leanings of the Anglican congregation. On a cold day in wintry Rome, we stood in the back of the church near the baptismal font and saw Susie safely christened.
I eventually learned from John Cheever that he and Mary had been sending Susie to a school in Rome run by nuns and that she was rapidly turning into a Roman Catholic. I never heard John pronounce against the Roman Church, but he was then, and remained, a good lay Episcopalian. In the United States years later, I once asked him if he still attended church. “Elizabeth,” he said, “every Sunday morning I’m right there on my knees.”
Susie won’t mind my saying, I think, that back then she was a shy, awkward girl, hard to get a word out of. I used to write her frequently, and I still get word from time to time from a different Susie, blossomed into a literary life of her own. Her Home Before Dark is a fine memoir of her parents and her own growing up.
Red and Eleanor Warren had returned to Rome that fall from their cherished seaside fortress at La Rocca, where the weather had become too cold for them to stay. They stayed at the American Academy and we were invited there by them or by Isabel and Laurance Roberts, so that we often saw each other. In evidence, too, were Ralph and Fanny Ellison.
I had never met Ralph, though I had joined with everyone else in admiration of Invisible Man. He had taken notice of The Voice at the Back Door, and seemed to like it, though it is always a good question as to what the African-American really thinks when a white person writes about a racial issue. I suppose my goodwill in the writing must have counted for something. He and Fanny always remained on good terms with us, through all the years. Ralph delighted in recalling a memorable picnic we went on together on the Aniene above Tivoli, when some gypsies camping nearby sent their children sneaking close in to swipe his fine fishing gear and were routed by my husband.
I felt Ralph’s intensity, his intelligence, but most of all, his sense of value. He seemed always to be measuring life in terms of those American values he cherished.
As for The Voice at the Back Door, its adventures, separate now from my own, were pacing along. It was published in the early fall of 1956. David Clay, with whom we stayed pretty constantly in touch, sent the notices. On the whole it was well received, some reviews being positively ecstatic. I remember most of all a review of Brendan Gill’s in The New Yorker. I should be ashamed to admit that I read it so often I could almost quote it by heart. Time gave the book a strong review. To my surprise reviewers all over the South, including Mississippi, found it an impressive novel. It eventually went on to win the first Rosenthal Award of the American Academy. I was told that it was a strong contender for the Pulitzer Prize. The fact is that none was given in 1957.
My mail from readers and others got so heavy that other renters in our palazzo began to ask why so many people were writing me. Most letters were pleasant, some were not. One or two threatened retribution should I dare to come back to Mississippi. I heard through friends that a good many people were “getting very upset with me.”
But both Warren and Eudora Welty had given “quotes” for the book jacket, and many more were forthcoming from other writers as the weeks went by. Before many months had passed, David Clay, acting as my agent, had made a movie sale of the book to MGM. The sum immediately became the kind of nest egg that any couple needs to feel they have put away somewhere.
Paperback rights quickly materialized, as did English publication, and numerous translation rights. It was selected by Time Inc. for its Reading Program and came out in a handsome edition. The movie, through one mischance after another, was never produced, though it was scripted and even cast.
As I see it going on bravely through the years, seldom out of print, I wonder at it as an expression on its own, vital and determining for me, but also joining the deepening current of national realizations and conflicts over race, which continue at full force to this day.
“What’s to be gained by talking about it?” I was asked over and over regarding questions of race. Well, everything is to be lost by not talking about it, I could have replied. And though I had to speak from a young Southern woman’s sheltered experience, my ear was sound, and I knew what I had heard. I also could still hear Laura’s voice, calling at the back door on that fateful night in Carrollton. Some might reckon that her voice goes on calling in these pages.
I said often that I did not write the book to reform anybody except myself. For I also had subscribed to the “Southern way of life,” had thought that my parents and grandparents could not be wrongheaded, that they had lived a correctly reasoned approach, had died in clear consciousness of having done the right thing during time of slavery and war and all the difficult years that followed.
But an accumulation of experience, known or known about, had gradually begun to pile up on the scales and outweigh my received ideas. I wrote to straighten myself out, letting my story and the characters in it lead me on.
I am convinced that writing anything of value takes place in this way. A writer undertakes a work of fiction under a strong impulse, not completely understood, and pursues that original drive through an act of composition, short or long. At the end, if an end can be reached, she stands back and knows that something is there which was not there before, and further knows that she herself is also different than before. Roger Angell, my editor for several years at The New Yorker, once said, “You don’t write because you know but because you don’t know.” He was right.
Foreigners without relations in Italy should always have some outside source of income. We were learning this as a reasonably comfortable life got ever harder to support. We loved Rome, always around us, and the friends we made to enjoy and to keep, but more and more it began to seem that our future should be elsewhere.
John’s mother’s family had originally been early New England settlers, but at the time of the American Revolution had moved north to Canada and were among the founding fathers of St. John, New Brunswick. One grandmother had married an Anglican cleric and so returned to England. John’s sister, now living in Montreal for some years, wrote us glowingly about the life there.
I began to scheme. If we could go there instead of to England, so far away from American turf, why could we not, little by little, think of living in the United States, somewhere in the South? I thus thought it worth a try for my own reasons; John for others.
We left from Southampton by Cunard liner, the Saxonia, in the midsummer of 1958.
Someone has remarked that you should be careful what you wish for because you might get it.
As a little girl, on a winter night, I would go out with my grandfather and stand in the front yard and ask if it would snow. “Maybe,” he would say, wanting what I wished for, “maybe it will.” We would both stand squinting up, thinking we saw flecks of white sparkle in the blackness overhead. About once in four years, we would all wake up to white icing on the magnolia leaves, bunches of snow in the cedars big as squirrel nests, snow spread evenly over the yard and fields beyond.
In Montreal nobody had to wish. When snow came howling out of the north like a vast shaggy presence, it came to stay. The winter of 1958 was one of the worst for blizzards. As I looked out the window of the small apartment we had rented in mid-town into the gray air swarming with flakes, I grew aware of distance, more distance from all else in the world than I had ever imagined. Before they had the telephone and mail service to help out, what had those early people felt when the last boat sailed away eastward on the St. Lawrence before all passage froze?
Yet here was a lively, cultivated city, and even with ice forming on the river and fields of snow, knee-, waist-, and chin-deep, piling up all around, the faces peering from furry hoods were open
and friendly. There were many newcomers like ourselves, from all over Europe, as tribally numerous as Indians. Booted feet came plodding, stamping off the snow. Piles of footgear stood in doorways. For evening parties, mountains of coats piled up in bedrooms.
The U.S. border was only forty miles away, but driving to New England revealed a country suspended in winter, smoke rising from farmhouses, but little sign of life outside. Montreal was the opposite. On the coldest days, it burst with crowds, walking, meeting, shopping. Boys played makeshift hockey in the parks, while children skated in caps and scarves, bundled in padded playsuits.
Our first concerns, like those of pioneers of yore, were purely practical. Down to the nitty-gritty, calculating how far money would go, could we afford a car (at first we took buses); how to risk life in a one-room furnished apartment with kitchenette and let-down bed (much more of this could certainly lead to divorce); was there a fur coat in my future. Fortunately, John soon had work with a firm that manufactured elevators, but after that landed a better slot in Kingsway Transport Company, a trucking line that covered Canada from Halifax to Vancouver. Here he was to work in an office on the western outskirts of the city, near a town named Lachine. After another year of apartment camping, we saw our way to a down payment on a house in that pretty town, part of larger Montreal, but with an interesting history of its own. It lay on the western side of the Lachine Rapids, where the St. Lawrence River runs powerfully over rocks. As this proved a hindrance to the early boating traffic coming into Montreal, a town and commerce grew up there, and exploration parties, one headed notably by Sieur de La Salle, took off from Lachine (China) in hopes of finding the Northwest Passage to the Orient. He found the mouth of the Mississippi instead, and finally died in Texas.
Landscapes of the Heart Page 32
