Tolstoy and the Purple Chair

by Nina Sankovitch

  I woke to take a midnight walk in Ireland in Claire Keegan’s short story “Walk the Blue Fields”: “The blue night has spread itself darkly over the fields . . . spring has come, dry and promising. The alder is shooting out, her pale limbs brazen. . . . All around the air is sharp with the tang of wild currant bushes. A lamb climbs out of a deep sleep and walks across the blue field. Overhead, the stars have rolled into place.” I’ve always wanted to go to Ireland, having read and reread Yeats all those years during college and beyond, and now I’ve been.

  In “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” Yeats writes,

  And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,

  Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;

  There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,

  And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

  This was one of my favorite poems because it reminded me of where I grew up, beside a lake, but also offered something new and different, the seclusion of a small cabin, “of clay and wattles made.” What the heck was a wattle? It didn’t matter to me. I just wanted to live again by the shore, and to live for the first time in a small cabin beside “bean-rows” and a “hive for the honey bee,” to be where the crickets sing (I knew that sound well) and the evening is “full of linnet’s wings.”

  Linnet? Again, no idea, but I was seduced. The mixture of the familiar and the new was intoxicating.

  But I also wanted what was old and long gone. Having lost my sister, my craving to go backward in time, to revisit when she’d been alive, had grown stronger. I wanted to take a vacation to the Evanston of our childhood. I’d choose summertime, when we girls were allowed to stay up late and we spent our evenings outside, playing tag and hide-and-seek and dodgeball with the neighborhood kids. When we became tired of running around, we just dropped, falling into a heap of children lolling on the grass. When we felt hungry, the older kids, like Anne-Marie, organized the younger ones to go back into houses, retrieving popsicles or peaches, or even better yet, money for the approaching ice-cream truck.

  The gassy smell of the truck and its loud jingle taped to replay over and over came long before the sight of the truck itself, farting down the street with ice-cream cones and sandwiches and bars. After eating our ice-cream bars my sisters and I stayed outside, sitting on the front steps until our parents called us in. Fireflies skirted over the lawn and into the bushes and trees. We never talked about what we would do when we grew up. Sitting together under the open night sky, watching the fireflies light up and go dark, then light up again, there was no question that we would do whatever we wanted to do. Anything was possible.

  I went back to that place and those feelings when I read Kevin Canty’s story “Burning Bridges, Breaking Glass” from his collection Where the Money Went. Although the plot of the story revolves around an older man and his affair with a younger woman, the background is pure midwestern fecundity, the wild fertility of possibility offered by long evenings and huge open spaces and endless starlit skies. Canty writes about “the perfume of a Midwestern spring, gasoline and rose and tar, the sounds of people gunning it in the distance, the constant hiss of the interstate, the sounds of breaking glass and laughter, the sound of life itself.” For me, it was summer, not spring, when I heard those sounds and smelled those smells, and the story pulled me back into childhood.

  The narrator in “Burning Bridges, Breaking Glass” feels the same pull backward. He is a middle-aged man with an alcohol problem, trying to put an end to his drinking by spending two weeks at an expensive spa in the desert. There he meets Karen, the wife of a doctor. He falls in love with her, and after she leaves, he decides to follow her home to Ohio.

  Rossbach finds Karen in Ohio, but more important, he rediscovers the place and time of his youth, the “full glorious spring with flowers bursting out of driveway beds and bees everywhere.” I become exhilarated by the background of a midwestern spring, just as Rossbach finds himself entranced with the same phenomenon. As he began recovering evidence of his childhood, the “pink-and-purple spring he had forgotten,” so did I.

  Rossbach immerses himself in “the bright bee-loud afternoon of full spring” where “cherry trees in the parking lot blossomed in pink, snowing pink and white petals onto the cars parked beneath them.” Remembering those “days at seventeen of just feeling himself in his body, the spring of it, the miracle,” Rossbach feels “the green fuse still lit in him, the spark”: possibility in his life has been reignited.

  I finished reading that story with my own “green fuse lit,” my own youth recovered. I remembered lying in bed at night with the windows opened to let in the warm summer air. From the bed, I could hear the traffic on Golf Road and the radio playing on the neighbor’s porch. I smelled the dankness of freshly turned earth in our garden, the sweet scent of cut grass, and the smoky smell of barbecues. The smells and sounds were like an invitation to me, a summons to run out and join the universe. I was older then, beyond hide-and-seek games and waiting for the ice-cream truck, but I still believed my future was limitless. I knew that the breeze coming in from the window was full of promises of adventure and love and fun, promises just waiting to be fulfilled.

  Books were my time machine, my vehicles of recovery and reignited bliss from childhood and beyond. Knut Hamsun’s Dreamers brought me back to college, and to the spring evenings when I found myself embracing a newly beloved male beneath a flowering tree. Hamsun renders the hormonal fever of spring in all its bewildering power: “It was spring again. And spring was almost unbearable for sensitive hearts. It drove creation to its utmost limits, it wafted its spice-laden breath even into the nostrils of the innocent.”

  Dreamers is set in a small town on the Norwegian coast around the turn of the century. After being pent up all winter, the citizens of this coastal town let loose under the winds rolling in off the sea, liberated by the smells of warming soil and budding trees and blooming flowers. The characters in Dreamers indulge in lusty dreams of love and fortune, desire born out of sudden sun and heat: “It was weather for dreams; for little fluttering quests of the heart. . . . From every rocky islet came the calling of birds . . . and the seal thrust up its dripping head from the water, looked round, and dived again down to its own world below.”

  Emotions and desires settle down as spring turns to summer: “Corn and potatoes growing; and meadows waving; herring stored in every shed, cows and goats milking full pails, and rolling in fat themselves.” There is a bountiful supply of food, and of dreams as well: “Summer is the time for dreaming, and then you have to stop. But some people go on dreaming all their lives, and cannot change.”

  Lucky people, to dream all their lives. A certain profound optimism is required: the belief that dreams can come true. And I realized there was yet another reason for me to be on my reading quest. To get back to that place where I was sure of all my dreams. The smell of the grass, the stars heavy in the humid sky, the warm brush of air against my cheek, all were embedded into my brain. The memories lined up as a fence, and I was safe in the enclosure. I was ten years old, and all my tomorrows waited, a whole world just for me. Or I was eighteen years old again, kissing under a budding apple tree and sure that my whole life would always be filled with the same intensity of desire and intention.

  After I read Dreamers, my mother told me that Knut Hamsun had been a favorite author of my grandfather. I was delighted to hear it. I shared Hamsun now with my grandfather, a man I hadn’t known well but whom I loved. I wondered what escape he found when reading Hamsun. I pictured my grandfather sitting in a white cane lawn chair in a patch of sun before a drift of spring green trees. The scent of white lilac bushes floats toward him over the grass. He never could have imagined a granddaughter of his reading Hamsun in a cat-stinky purple chair in Connecticut beside a window wide open to summer breezes. Two readers caught up by the place and season of one book, for very different reasons but with the same result: a love of the story told, and t
he comfort of the place offered, a place in time and in the world. An escape, a vacation, a recovering of memories. Travel did not have to be solitary. A book shared was an escape with company.

  Even when I read a book where the story had nothing to do with an experience of my own, I found resonance from recovered memories, and an escape from the present. In “The Loneliness of the Long-distance Runner,” a short story by Alan Sillitoe, a boy is sent to a Borstal, an English reform school for delinquents. Our boy Smith has been very delinquent, robbing a local bakeshop and hiding the money in an old drainpipe just outside the ramshackle house he shares with his family. He’d turned to robbery in an effort to recapture the brief moment of bliss his family experienced upon receiving the death benefits of his father: “I’d never known a family as happy as ours was in that couple of months when we’d got all the money we needed.” When a terrible rain releases the stolen money right in front of an investigating copper, Smith is sent off to the Borstal.

  But life isn’t all bad in the reform school. Smith is recruited for the cross-country team and set to train for a countrywide competition. His early-morning runs out into the countryside provide him with both solitude and escape, and he looks forward to them as the best part of his day.

  I had nothing in common with the Smith boy, and yet in his description of the early-morning runs, I recovered a very distinct memory of an early-morning walk I took in my late twenties. I was at an environmental conference in the Adirondacks, staying in a farmhouse about three miles down the road from the conference center. After the first day of meetings, excited about everything we were going to accomplish in the coming months, I headed back to my farmhouse for a good night’s sleep.

  During the night the weather turned very cold, and in the unheated upper room of the farmhouse, I slept badly. Even wrapping myself up in all my clothes, I could not get warm. Finally I just got out of bed. I headed out into the last darkness of the night, the air frosty and still all around me. If I was going to be cold, I’d rather be outside, moving around, than shivering in a narrow hard bed.

  As I walked, the sky began to lighten over the far mountains. The sun rose before me, doling out sunlight in strips along the frost-whitened grass. I walked in gravel that broke like ice beneath my shoes, and fall grasshoppers, released by the coming warmth of the sun, jumped before me, guiding my way. As I walked, I noticed everything around me. The flattened grass glinting under the sun. The bordering bushes sparked red with color. The trees, black and stark against the sky, and the mountains beyond, purple under a haze of pink and apricot. The fresh air pricked against my cheeks, and I took breath into my lungs in big gulps. I felt as if I could fly, borne away up into the mountains by the pure energy coming up from the awakening ground and racing now through my veins.

  I was just like the Borstal boy, running out in the morning, the world fresh and open all around him: “As soon as I take that first flying leap out into the frosty grass of an early morning when even birds haven’t the heart to whistle, I get to thinking and that’s what I like. . . . Sometimes I think that I’ve never been so free as during that couple of hours when I’m trotting up the path out of the gates and turning by that bare-faced, big-bellied oak tree at the lane end.” I recognized that feeling of “never been so free”—that was how I felt that morning in the Adirondacks.

  To go back in time was to return to when I felt optimistic and unbounded, back before my sister died. Everyone has a before and after, the times of our lives divided by an event of loss or suffering or hardship. For me, the event was the death of my sister, unexpected and too soon. In the months after Anne-Marie died, I lost all faith in the future. I took my sister’s death as a sign that the whole world no longer waited for me.

  But I was wrong. Through this year of reading I was recovering that “green fuse still lit” of possibility. Not only were books carrying me away on escapades of new experiences but the people and places and atmospheres created by authors were also bringing me back to those times in my life where I looked forward to tomorrow.

  How to live? Engaged in the present but willing to take vacations to other places and other times. My future depended on it. We all need to escape once in a while, from the big and little pressures, heartaches, and disappointments of daily life. I need to escape from the place where Anne-Marie no longer lived, and go back to when we were both alive, back to when what lay ahead seemed endless and wonderful.

  Books are the frigate to wherever I want to go. My future is not infinite, I know that now. But my life is as full of possibility as it had been when I was just a girl, sitting out on the front steps with my sisters, eating ice cream and watching the fireflies flicker on and off over the darkened lawn.

  Chapter 18

  The Answers That Mysteries Provide

  I realized it was my decision whether I would interpret the ending as unjust and unsatisfactory and suffer because of it or decided that this, and only this, was the fitting ending.

  BERNHARD SCHLINK,

  Self’s Murder

  I CAN SEE IT NOW: A YELLOW HAT FLOATING ON WATER, brown hair spreading out all around. I first read The Scarlet Ruse by John D. MacDonald thirty years ago, and I still remember how Travis McGee had cut the hair himself, shearing the woman and then attaching her lost locks to the hat. The hat was flung out into the bay, creating an illusion to capture the bad guys. “It was better than I hoped. It was spooking her. She floated out there, dead in a raft. I wondered if she had ever really been able to comprehend the fact of her own eventual and inevitable death. Today, my friends, we each have one day less, every one of us. And joy is the only thing that slows the clock.”

  Wisdom from a mystery, one in a series of twenty-one color-coded books written by MacDonald, every one of them read by my father and most of them by me too, over the course of the long, hot, humid days and nights of Chicago summers.

  A book doesn’t have to be part of the canon of great literature to make a difference in the reader’s life. I was seventeen when I first read MacDonald’s line “Joy is the only thing that slows the clock.” The underlying avowal of letting go of misery and exulting in rapture, big and small, is more relevant to me now than it was then, but even back then it sparked something in me, and it stuck with me. Not only because it was from a MacDonald mystery, and reading MacDonald was an addiction I shared with my father, but because mysteries as a genre have something to say to all of us about the world, and our efforts to make sense of our place in it.

  Growing up, everyone in my family read mysteries. Especially in the summer, we worked our way through volumes of murders, disappearances, and other acts of treachery and deception. There was nothing better than being the last ones still on the beach, panting our ways through gripping stories of twists and turns. My father spent his summers with the two Macs: John D. MacDonald and his Travis McGee novels and Ross Macdonald and his Lew Archer series. My mother preferred Rex Stout and P. D. James, Anne-Marie loved Agatha Christie, and Natasha was devoted to Dorothy L. Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey. I started early on with the racecourse mysteries of Dick Francis and kept pace with my father’s appetite for MacDonald and Macdonald.

  The first summer I spent working in New York City, Anne-Marie gave me an open invitation to come out to the house in Bellport. After a seventy-hour workweek, weeks at a time, it was bliss, when a break finally came, to head out of the sticky, greasy heat of a New York City summer and arrive in the salty, breezy air of eastern Long Island. I arrived carrying nothing more than a swimsuit and a pair of shorts. Anne-Marie provided everything else I needed, from suntan lotion to my own room at the top of the house. The room was empty but for a twin bed with a green-and-white comforter faded with washings, a spiderweb-decorated floor lamp, and a woven basket filled with New York magazines going back to the 1970s.

  My first weekend out there, I found a treasure trove of mysteries. One floor below my attic room was Anne-Marie’s office, a space lined with books. One side was all academic books, treati
ses on architecture, tomes of philosophy, and journals on art history and critical theory. The other side of the room was lined with narrow shelves tightly filled with novels, poetry collections—and mysteries. I reread my way through works of Agatha Christie, volume after volume, during that first summer as a New Yorker.

  Even before they could read, Anne-Marie started my kids on the summer mystery tradition. She sat with them out on the porch in Bellport, translating all her Tintin books by Hergé from French to English, thrilling them with The Castafiore Emerald, The Blue Lotus, and The Black Island. When they got older, she would walk with the boys over to the Bellport library. There they would wander together through the children’s stacks. Using Anne-Marie’s library card (which I still have in my wallet—light blue with the navy logo of a seagull standing on a pile of books), they checked out Nate the Great mysteries by Marjorie Weinman Sharmat and Elizabeth Levy’s Something Queer mysteries.

  The first summer after Anne-Marie died, the boys, Jack, and I went out to Bellport to visit Marvin. Pulling up into the gravel driveway out back, I realized that I expected to see Anne-Marie coming across the grass to meet us as we disgorged from our car. But of course she didn’t. She was gone; we had scattered her ashes the month before off Bellport’s beach on Fire Island. How could I come out to this house without her waiting there for me? I stayed in the car as the boys tumbled out and made their own way across the grass, banging in through the back screen door, shouting out for Marvin.

  I finally got out of the car that day and went inside to join everyone else. During the afternoon we spent there, I went up to Anne-Marie’s office and ran my hand over the row of Agatha Christies. I reached for Ten Little Indians, then put it back. I wasn’t ready yet to reread a book I’d shared with my sister. I sat in the old gray chair facing west over the hedge planted just a few years earlier and already growing high, and I cried.