He was sometimes mistaken for the British actor C. Aubrey Smith on his travels, my grandfather, and when people came up to ask for his autograph, he always obliged them but always signed his own name. There was a marble bust of Venus de Milo in the living room in New York, and I remember as a child being there alone with him once as he sat in his chair across from my grandmother’s with his glass in his hand. I felt his eye upon me, and shy of him, tonguetied, not knowing what else to do, I wandered over to where the bust stood and, with no sense of what I was about, reached up and touched one of the cool, white breasts. I can hear his short, dry laugh still—as short and dry as his martini and wickeder. It was the future that I had touched without knowing it, but he knew it. The day would come. The curtain would rise. I was humiliated. His moustache was damp with gin. Not a word was spoken. It was a moment.
“Oh, it was so many years ago,” my grandmother says, “and there were so many of you then, all four of my children alive still, and how little I dreamed then the terrible things that—” and suddenly she is dabbing at her eye, her voice in a tremble. “Never mind,” she says. “Tears are an old Scharmann custom.”
But of course she had dreamed them—the terrible things—maybe not the ones that actually happened when their time came, but others no less terrible and even more so for all I know. All her life she was a worrier, brooding like a hen over terrors to come almost as though to hatch them out into reality would be a kind of relief because there at least she could come to some sort of terms with them as in her dark dreams she could not. So when they did come—her husband and two of her sons falling like dominoes before their time, a fortune all but lost—she was ready for them in her way, found strength somewhere for surviving them. She would never have said that it was in God that she found it. If she spoke of God at all, it was always as le bon Dieu with an obscure little smile on her lips, a smile that was an only half satiric little curtsy in the direction of a belief which she herself did not hold but was perhaps not altogether willing to dismiss out of hand either any more than she would have dismissed it out of hand if a child had said he believed in fairies or the Man in the Moon. Who could tell, after all? But from her German forebears—free-thinkers and radicals who had come to this country during the troubles of 1848—the strongest faith she inherited was faith in hard work, in being careful with your money, in families staying together through thick and thin even unto the third and fourth generation of kaffee-klatsching cousins, in the strength that comes with facing even what is vastly stronger than yourself.
Sayings of her father, old Hermann Scharmann, came easily to her lips. “Never put on your bathing suit without going in the water,” he said. He was a tyrant, a tycoon, a self-made man who through breweries and real estate was able to leave each of his many children a grand piano and more than money enough never to starve. As a child he had gone with his parents to California in the Gold Rush, his mother and a baby sister dying on the way to be buried by a river at Christmas time, and the rest of them barely able to pan enough gold to keep themselves alive before they finally limped back to Brooklyn where they had started from. My great-grandfather liked being thought of as a Forty-niner, even though he was only a child at the time, and when he had his father’s memoirs of the trip privately printed many years later, it was his own picture, not his father’s, that he had printed as the frontispiece. “Never put anything off because of the weather,” he said, and from the look of his picture—those bulging eyes, those jowls, that fierce goatee—it is easier to imagine the weather’s putting something off because of him.
Like her father, my grandmother had little patience with weakness, softness, sickness. Even gentleness made her uncomfortable, I think—tender-hearted people who from fear of giving pain, or just from fear of her, hung back from speaking their minds the way she spoke hers, let the Devil take the hindmost. Only once can I remember her having been gentle in her way, responding to gentleness gently. It was a day or two after the death of her eldest son, my father. We must have gone to her apartment for lunch, my mother, brother, and I, and Grandma and my mother had lingered over their coffee, talking to each other about the young man whose love they had fought each other for over the years. The dining room doors were open, and their voices drifted out with the smell of their coffee to where my brother and I were waiting for it to be time to go home to whatever home was just then. “With malice toward none,” we heard my mother say. “With charity for all,” and then the murmur of my grandmother’s voice more terrible in its gentleness than it had ever been in its wrath, then the tinkle of a silver spoon against a china cup as those two old adversaries found it possible for perhaps the only time in their lives to weep together over a life that neither of them had had whatever it might have taken in the way of gentleness or strength to save.
But she came out of it in the end on the far side of tears, and my clearest memory of her is sitting dry-eyed by the same window, in the same chair, with that same small radio at her elbow, and one of the bedspreads that she was always crocheting out of linen thread spread out over her knees. It is Wagner again, only Die Götterdämmerung this time. It is the twilight of the gods. Valhalla is about to go up in flames. My grandmother sits there, the oldest living survivor. Like a rock at the edge of the sea, she bears the marks of the storm. Sharp edges have been pounded smooth. Parts have crumbled away altogether because though you can ignore the weather, you cannot alter it. But the rock still stands, bird-spattered and barnacled, a fixed point for the rest of us to steer clear of in one sense and to steer by in another, to get our bearings by. “Your father was gentle,” she says. “The world is not gentle.” It is less Siegfried suddenly than my father who lies there on his funeral pyre. “Der Reinste war er…laut’rer als er liebte kein And’rer,” Brünnhilde sings with the burning torch in her hand. “He was the truest…no other loved so truly.” But then, “Trog keiner wie er!” “None broke like him!” she cries—whoever it is lying there broken, broke, heart-broken, and heart-breaking as she touches his pyre with her torch. The little Philco’s tubes rattle like teeth as the music flashes and swells and then dwindles to a single flute. The crochet hook is still.
My grandmother’s jokes tended to have something medieval about them—heavy, wooden, with little art but made to do hard service. There was this preacher once, she says, preaching his sermon from his pulpit in his long black gown. It was such a hot day that he had put nothing on but the gown that morning and was as naked underneath as the day he was born. He got so wrought up over his sermon and was pounding and stomping around so hard up there that suddenly the platform gave way beneath him and he was pitched almost into the laps of his congregation with his black gown tossed up over his head. “May anyone who looks be struck blind!” he yelled out, and the whole congregation dutifully clapped their hands to their eyes with the exception of one old woman who let two fingers slip apart just enough for a chink to peer through. “I’ll risk one eye,” she said.
My grandmother was the old woman, of course. No doom she ever dreamed can have been as dark as the one that finally overtook her, but with no faith to fall back on, other than such faith as she had in herself and such faith as she had left in what was left of her family, and with no God except le bon Dieu, whoever and whatever he was, if indeed he was anywhere at all, she never pretended that things were other than they were. She never armed herself against the world with bitterness or capitulated to it with despair. She looked at it bare, and she looked at it hard, and for a wonder she was never blinded. “Farewell,” sings Wotan, “my brave and beautiful child.”
As for me as a child, I was no braver than I was beautiful, nor, up to the age of ten, did I have anything out of the ordinary to be brave about. But at the same time, for a child—especially a bookish, rain-loving, inward-looking child—even the ordinary can at times require bravery enough. The hearth broom with the face of a malevolent dwarf. The servant’s child, floating face down in the canal in front of the shingled house one mornin
g—fished out and resuscitated, but appalling, shameful somehow, as it lay there puddling the weathered planks of the dock with the water that ran from its nose and mouth as the breath came rattling back. The circus horse, white as milk and brilliantly bridled, balking outside the great tent with a man beating it about the face and eyes with a stick. The green frog that some cousins and I tossed back and forth by one of its legs like a green toy until at last it broke like a toy and the slippery life came spilling out. The unexplored rooms on the third floor, and the new nurse who did not understand her instructions and thus did not know that it was all right for my brother and me to stay up an hour or so later to dye Easter eggs, but packed us off to bed at the usual time where we lay in the dark aghast at the sudden knowledge that much of the time we lived at the sufferance of strangers.
But if strangers and strange sights can shake the world of children, it takes the people they know and love best to pull it out from under them like a chair. Into the same Georgetown garden where Mrs. Taylor showed me the tough, white gristle of a soul, my other grandmother came one day. Naya was the name I had given her for reasons long since lost to history. She was as different from Grandma Buechner as a lamp to read by is different from the twilight of the gods. She was a superb solver of crossword puzzles and a reader of French novels. She smoked cigarettes in white paper holders and watched the world go by. She played wistful tunes with one finger on a Steinway grand. She held me enraptured by tales of the past, evoking in dazzlingly spoken paragraphs a whole world of Dickensian freaks, relations and friends, like adopted cousin Nelly Dunbar, with her oiled ringlets and Armenian blood, who would filch pink soap from the family linen closet and peddle it on street corners; and Tante Elise Golay, who carried a watered silk reticule to restaurants so she would have something to empty the sugar bowl into when the meal was through; and Naya’s step-grandfather, Amasa Barret, who was blind as a bat and told her—when as a child she asked him what the name Amasa meant—that what it meant was “a burden,” and she could have bitten out her tongue. If Grandma Buechner was a rock with the rough seas of her life all but inundating her at times and yet immovable, impermeable, intractable to the end, then Naya was the old gray gull who rode it all out on the skin of the storm. The waves might rise like Everest above her or sink like the Valley of the Shadow beneath, but with her back to the wind and her wings tucked tight, Naya rarely ruffled so much as a feather. I see her knitting a scarf in a wicker peacock chair with the Blue Ridge mountains blue behind her, or under a beach umbrella in pleated white linen with her brave old Indian eyes on the far horizon, or, when she was well into her nineties, writing, after we had taken our first child to see her for the first time, “It was a noble deed to make the long journey down here, and the joy of seeing you two and your bewitching little fairy daughter more than compensates me for the ignominy of substituting an old crone in a dark little room for the Naya of legend.”
In any case, of all the giants who held up my world, Naya was perhaps chief, and when I knew she was coming to Georgetown for a visit that day, I wanted to greet her properly. So what I did at the age of six was prepare her a feast. All I could find in the icebox that seemed suitable were some cold string beans that had seen better days with the butter on them long since gone to wax, and they were what I brought out to her in that fateful garden. I do not remember what she said then exactly, but it was an aside spoken to my parents or whatever grown-ups happened to be around to the effect that she did not usually eat much at three o’clock in the afternoon or whatever it was, let alone the cold string beans of another age, but that she would see what she could do for propriety’s sake. Whatever it was, she said it drily, wittily, the way she said everything, never dreaming for a moment that I would either hear or understand, but I did hear, and what I came to understand for the first time in my life, I suspect—why else should I remember it?—was that the people you love have two sides to them. One is the side they love you back with, and the other is the side that, even when they do not mean to, they can sting you with like a wasp. It was the first ominous scratching in the walls, the first telltale crack in the foundation of the one home which perhaps any child has when you come right down to it, and that is the people he loves.
There were other cracks, of course. My brother and I had misbehaved at lunch for days, and at last, for the sake of having a peaceful meal by herself for once, my mother dressed up in a coat of my father’s and one of his hats and had word sent up to us that a little old man had come to eat that day. So we stayed upstairs, needless to say, too timid to think of lunching with a stranger, and I remember looking down through the bannister and seeing at the dining room table somebody who was both a little old man yet somehow also my mother; and again what had always seemed solid as a rock showed signs of cracking in two. Or the time my father was sick in bed for a day or two. That was all it took: my father sick, on whose health the foundations of the world were based; my father in bed when I knew that unless he stayed on his feet, the winds would die and the crops fail. Or, later on, my father coming in to say good-night and standing there at the foot of our beds with his hands on his hips and his face clammy and gray as he threw back his head and laughed in a way that made me know as surely as I knew anything that something had gone terribly wrong with his laughter. Something had gotten broken in it. Something in it was in danger of breaking him, breaking all of us. And the time he wanted the keys to the car, and my mother gave them to me and told me that he had had too much to drink and not to let him know where they were, no matter what, so that I lay in my bed with my pillow over my head and made no reply to his endless pleading because I could think of no reply that I could possibly make.
I no longer know what my father looked like, it has been so long since I saw him last, and have only photographs to remember his face by—a young man in a sailor’s uniform, or sitting behind a desk in his first office, or lying in the sand in his swimming trunks and striped jersey top. But from somewhere deeper within myself than memory, and from what I have been able to find out over the years from people who knew him much longer and better than I, I can still summon up something of the feel of who he was. He was a gentle man, as my grandmother said, handsome and conscientious and kind. He was a strong swimmer who played water polo at college, and a good dancer, and could go nowhere, the family joke was, without running into at least six friends. He knew Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald from his Princeton days and knew waiters and barbers by their first names. People I doubt he would have remembered remember him still. As the oldest of four children, he was the one who shepherded the others through Central Park to school and from the start seems to have been given responsibilities beyond his years. Even in pictures of him as a small boy, he looks harried, seldom if ever smiling, as though he knew that as soon as the shutter snapped, it would all begin again—my grandmother saddling him with more, I suspect, than a small boy’s share of her own dark burdens, his younger brothers and sister looking to him for some kind of strength, some kind of stability, which he must have had to dig deep into himself to find, having barely enough at that age, I can only imagine, to get by on himself. And then when he got married, and his two sons were born, and the crash of ’29 came, there was a whole new set of things to be harried by as he moved from job to job and place to place, always bent on doing better by us, establishing us on some surer, more becoming ground.
He worked long hours and he worked hard at whatever minor executive job he happened to have at the time, but on weekends at least he found time to be a father. In an inlet full of jellyfish that stung, he taught me how to swim. He taught me how to ride a bike by running alongside with his hand on the handlebars till I started to get the hang of it, then taking his hand away and letting me roll along on my own till I wobbled finally into a hedge but knew how to do it from that day on. When at the age of nine or so I asked a pretty girl named Virginia with shampoo-smelling hair to go to the movies with me (it was Eddie Cantor in Roman Scandals), he drove me to pick her
up and explained on the way that she would probably keep us waiting a little because that was what pretty girls did, and he was right. When he came to say good-night, he would give my brother Jamie and me what he called a “hard kiss,” which was all sandpapery whiskers and snorts and struggle. I remember sitting in the back seat of a car, with him and my mother up front, singing songs like “Me and My Shadow” and “That’s My Weakness Now,” remember eating dark Swiss chocolate and salty French bread with him on the long drives he took us on sometimes, remember one winter drive back over the Allegheny mountains from Pittsburgh when it was so cold that he gave the only blanket there was to us in the back seat and had to stuff newspaper under his coat to keep warm himself. I remember seeing the movie of Green Pastures with him—the great fish-fry in Heaven with De Lawd and his black angels—and driving down to the Quogue beach afterwards to see the moon rise like an angel over the incoming tide.
These were the bright times, the happy once-below-a-time times, but for a child even the bright times have, like the moon, their dark side too; and even below the time when time starts, the time to come can still cast a shadow. Any house where my father and mother were was home to me, but for that very reason, whenever they left—even for a day, even for an evening—it was home no longer but a house with walls as frail as paper and a roof as fragile as glass. My fear was that they would never come back.
Modern American Memoirs Page 11
