by Greyspid
As for the son - Michael’s mother’s father - he had drunk himself to death after the loss of his wife, a ’beautiful’ Irish-American girl, from the Mission District of San Francisco. Nobody wanted to talk about ‘Mother’ and it soon came clear that ‘Mother’ had committed suicide. ‘Father,’ who drank unceasingly until he had a fatal stroke, left his three children a small annuity. Michael’s mother and her sister Vivian finished their education at the Convent of the Sacred Heart, and went into genteel occupations. Uncle Michael was ‘the spitting image of dad,’ they said with a sigh, when he had fallen asleep from his cognac on the sofa.
Uncle Michael was the only salesman that Michael ever knew who could sell people things while he himself was sitting down. He would come back to Gumps, drunk from lunch, and sit there, flushed and exhausted and merely point to the beautiful china, explaining everything from his chair, while the young customers, couples soon to be married, made up their minds. People seemed to find him charming. He did know all about fine china, and he was a terribly nice guy.
This gradual education regarding his mother’s family illuminated much for Michael. As time went on he came to see that his mother’s values were essentially those of the very rich though she herself did not know it. She went to see foreign films because they were fun, not for cultural enhancement. And she wanted Michael to go to college because that’s where he ’ought* to be. It was perfectly natural to her to shop at Young Man’s Fancy and buy him the crew-neck sweaters and button-down shirts that made him look like a prep-school boy. But of middle-class drive or ambition she and her sister and her brother really knew nothing. Her work appealed to her because I. Magnin was the finest store in town, and she met nice people there. In her leisure hours, she drank her ever increasing amounts of wine, read her novels, visited with friends, and was a happy, satisfied person.
It was the wine that killed her eventually. For as the years passed she became a ladylike drunk, sipping all evening long from a crystal glass behind closed doors, and invariably passing out before bedtime. Finally one night, late, she struck her head in a bathroom fall, put a towel to the wound and went back to sleep, never realizing that she was slowly bleeding to death. She was cold when Michael finally broke down the door. That was in the house on Liberty Street
which Michael had bought and restored for his family, though Uncle Michael was gone by then, too, of drink also, though in his case they had called it a stroke.
But in spite of her own lassitude and final indifference to the world at large, Michael’s mother was always proud of Michael’s ambition. She understood his drive because she understood him, and he was the one thing that had given her own life true meaning.
And Michael’s ambition was a raging flame when he finally entered San Francisco State College in the fall as a matriculating freshman.
Here, on an enormous college campus amid full-time students from all walks of life, Michael felt inconspicuous and powerful and ready to start his true education. It was like those old days in the library. Only now he got credit for what he read. He got credit for wanting to understand all the mysteries of life which had so provoked him in years past when he’d hidden his curiosity from those who might ridicule him.
He could not believe his luck. Going from class to class, deliciously anonymous among the great proletarian student body with their backpacks and their brogans, Michael listened, rapt, to the lectures of his professors and the stunningly clever questions asked by the students around him. Peppering his schedules with electives in art, music, current events, comparative literature, and even drama, he gradually acquired a true old-fashioned liberal arts education.
He majored in history finally because he did well in that subject and could write the papers and pass the tests, and because he knew that his latest ambition - to be an architect -was quite beyond him. He could not master the math, no matter how he tried. And in spite of all his efforts, he could not make the grades that would admit him to a School of Architecture for four years of postgraduate study. Also he loved history because it was a social science in which people tried to stand back from the world and figure out how it worked. And this is what Michael had been doing ever since he was a kid in the Irish Channel.
Synthesis, theory, overview — this was utterly natural to him. And because he had come from such an alien and otherworldly place, because he was so astonished by the modern world of California, the perspective of the historian was a comfort to him. He liked above all to read well-written books about cities and centuries - books, that is, which tried to describe places or eras in terms of their origins, their sociological and technological advances, their class struggle, their art and literature.
Michael was more than content. As the insurance money ran out, he went to work part-time with a carpenter who specialized in restoring the beautiful old Victorians of San Francisco. He began to study books on houses again, as he had in the old days.
By the time he received his bachelor’s degree, his old friends from New Orleans would not have known him. He had still the football player’s build, the massive shoulders and the heavy chest, and the carpentry kept him in fine form. And his black curly hair, his large blue eyes, and the light freckles on his cheeks remained his distinctive features. But he wore dark-rimmed glasses now to read, and his common dress was a cable-knit sweater and Donegal tweed jacket with patches on the elbows. He even smoked a pipe, which he carried always in his right coat pocket.
He was at age twenty-one equally at home hammering away on a wood-frame house or typing rapidly with two fingers a term paper on ‘The Witchcraft Persecutions in Germany in the i6oos.’
Two months after he started his graduate work in history, he began to study, right along with his college work, for the state contractor’s examination. He was working as a painter then, and learning also the plastering trade and how to lay ceramic tile - anything in the building trades for which anyone would hire him.
He went on with school because a deep insecurity would not allow him to do otherwise, but he knew by this time that no amount of academic pleasure could ever satisfy his need to work with his hands, to get out in the air, to climb ladders, swing a hammer, and feel at the end of the day that great sublime physical exhaustion. Nothing could ever take the place of his beautiful houses.
He loved to see the results of his work — roofs mended, staircases restored, floors brought back from hopeless grime to a high luster. He loved to strip and lacquer the finely crafted old newel posts, balustrades, and door frames. And always the learner, he studied under every craftsman with whom he worked. He quizzed the architects when he could; he made copies of blueprints for further examination. He pored over books, magazines, and catalogs devoted to restoration and Victoriana.
It seemed to him sometimes that he loved houses more than he loved human beings; he loved them the way that seamen love ships; and he would walk alone after work through the rooms to which he’d given new life, lovingly touching the windowsills, the brass knobs, the silk smooth plaster. He could hear a great house speaking to him.
He finished the master’s in history within two years, just as the campuses of America were erupting with student protests against the American war in Vietnam and the use of psychedelic drugs became a fad among the young who were pouring into San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury. But well before that he had passed the contractor’s examination and formed his own company.
The world of the flower children, of political revolution and personal transformation through drugs, was something he never fully understood, and something which never really touched him. He danced at the Avalon Ballroom to the music of the Rolling Stones; he smoked grass; he burned incense now and then; he played the records of Bismilla Kahn and Ravi Shankar. He even went with a young girlfriend to the great ‘Be In’ in Golden Gate Park where Timothy Leary told his acolytes to ‘tune in, turn on, and drop out.’ But all this was only mildly fascinating to him.
The historian in him could not succumb to the
shallow, often silly revolutionary rhetoric he heard all around; he could only laugh quietly at the dining table Marxism of his friends who seemed to know nothing personally of the working man. And he watched in horror when those he loved destroyed their peace of mind utterly, if not their very brains, with powerful hallucinogens.
But he learned from all this; he learned as he sought to understand. And the great psychedelic love of color and pattern, of Eastern music and design had its inevitable influence on his esthetics. Years later, he would maintain that the great sixties revolution in consciousness had benefited every person in the nation — that the renovation of old houses, the creation of gorgeous public buildings with flower-filled plazas and parks, the erection even of the modern shopping malls with marble floors, fountains, and flower beds - all this directly stemmed from those crucial years when the hippies of the Haight Ashbury had hung ferns in the windows of their flats and draped their junk furniture with brilliantly colored Indian bedspreads, when the girls had fixed the proverbial flowers in their free-flowing tresses, and the men had discarded their drab clothes for shirts of bright colors and had let their hair grow full and long.
There was never any doubt in his mind that this period of turmoil and mass drug taking and wild music had borne directly on his career. All over the nation young couples turned their backs on the square little houses of the modern suburbs and, with a new love of texture and detail and varied forms, turned their attention to the gracious old homes of the inner city. San Francisco had such houses beyond count.
Michael had perpetually a waiting list of eager customers. Great Expectations could renovate, restore, build from scratch. Soon he had projects going all over town. He loved nothing better than to walk into a broken down, moldy Victorian on Divisadero Street
and say, ‘Yeah, I can give you a palazzo here in six months.’ His work won awards. He became famous for the beautiful and detailed drawings he could make. He undertook some projects without architectural guidance at all. All his dreams were coming true.
He was thirty-two when he acquired a vintage town house on Liberty Street, restored it inside and out, providing apartments for his mother and his aunt, and there he lived on the top floor, with a view of the downtown lights, in exactly the style he’d always wanted. The books, the lace curtains, the piano, the fine antiques — he possessed all these things. He built a great hillside deck where he could sit and drink up the fickle northern California sun. The eternal fog of the ocean-front frequently burned off before it reached the hills of his district. And so he had captured - it seemed - not only the luxury and refinement he’d glimpsed those many years ago in the South, but a little of the warmth and sunshine he so fondly remembered.
By the age of thirty-five he was a self-made man and an educated one. He had netted and socked away his first million in a portfolio of municipal bonds. He loved San Francisco because he felt that it had given him everything he ever wanted.
Though Michael had invented himself as many a person has done in California, creating a style perfectly in tune with the style of so many other self-invented people, he was always partly that tough kid from the Irish Channel who had grown up using a piece of bread to push his peas onto his fork.
He never entirely erased his harsh accent, and sometimes when he was dealing with workmen on the job, he would slip back into it entirely. He never lost some of his crude habits or ideas either, and he understood that about himself.
His way of dealing with all this was perfect for California. He simply let it show. After all, it was only part of him. He thought nothing of saying ‘Where’s the meat and potatoes?’ when he walked into some fancy nouvelle cuisine restaurant (he did actually like meat and potatoes a lot and ate them whenever it was possible, to the exclusion of other things), or of letting his Camel cigarette hang on his lip when he talked, just the way his father had always done.
And he got along with his liberal friends principally because he did not bother to argue with them, and while they were shouting at each other over pitchers of beer about foreign countries where they had never been and would never go, he was drawing pictures of houses on napkins.
When he did share his ideas, it was in a highly abstract way, from a remove, for he felt like an outsider in California really, an outsider in the American twentieth century. And he wasn’t the least bit surprised that nobody paid much attention to him.
But whatever the politics involved, he always connected most truly with those who were passionate as he was — craftsmen, artists, musicians, people who went about in the grip of obsession. And an amazing number of his friends and lovers were Russian-American Jews. They really seemed to understand his overall desire to live a meaningful life, to intervene in the world - even if in a very small way - with his visions. He had dreams of building his own great houses; of transforming whole city blocks, of developing whole enclaves of cafes, bookstores, bed-and-breakfast inns within old San Francisco neighborhoods.
Now and then, especially after his mother died, he’d think about the past in New Orleans, which seemed ever more otherworldly and fantastical. People in California thought they were free, but how conformist they were, he reasoned. Why, everybody coming from Kansas and Detroit and New York just reached for the same liberal ideas, the same styles of thinking, dressing, feeling. In fact, sometimes the conformity was downright laughable. Friends really said things like ‘Isn’t that the one we’re boycotting this week?’ and ‘Aren’t we supposed to be against that?’
Back home, he had left a city of bigots perhaps, but it was also a city of characters. He could hear the old Irish Channel storytellers in his head, his grandfather telling about how he’d snuck into the Germans’ church once when he was a boy just to hear what German Latin sounded like. And how in the days of Grandma Gelfand Curry - the one German ancestor in the entire tribe - they’d baptized the babies in St Mary’s to make her happy and then snuck them over to St Alphonsus to be baptized again and right and proper in the Irish church, the same priest presiding patiently at both ceremonies.
What characters his uncles had been, those old men who died one by one as he was growing up. He could still hear the talking about swimming the Mississippi back and forth (which nobody did in Michael’s day) and diving off the warehouses when they were drunk, of tying big paddles to the pedals of their bikes to try to make them work in the water.
Everything had been a tale, it seemed. Talk could fill the summer night of Cousin Jamie Joe Curry in Algiers who became such a religious fanatic they had to chain him to a post all day long, and of Uncle Timothy who went nuts from the Linotype ink so that he stuffed all the cracks around the doors and windows with newspapers and spent his time cutting out thousands and thousands of paper dolls.
And what about beautiful Aunt Lelia, who had loved the Italian boy when she was young and never knew till she was old and dried up that her brothers had beaten him up one night and driven him out of the Irish Channel. No dagos for them. All her long life mourning for that boy. She had turned the supper table over in a rage when they told her.
Even some of the nuns had had fabulous stories to tell - old ones like Sister Bridget Marie who had substituted for two weeks when Michael was in the eighth grade, a really sweet little sister who still had an Irish brogue. She didn’t teach them a thing. She just told them tales about the Irish Ghost of Petticoat Loose, and witches - witches, can you believe it! - in the Garden District.
And some of the best talk in those times had been merely talk of life itself - of how it was to bottle your own beer, to live with only two oil lamps in a house, and how they’d had to fill the portable bathtub on Friday night so everybody could take a bath before the living room fireplace. Just life. Laundry boiling over a wood fire in the backyard, water from cisterns covered with green moss. Mosquito netting tucked in tight before you went to sleep. Things now probably utterly forgotten.
It would come back to him in the oddest flashes. He’d remember the smell of the linen napkins w
hen his grandmother ironed them before putting them in the deep drawers of the walnut sideboard. He’d remember the taste of crab gumbo with crackers and beer; the scary sound of the drums at the Mardi Gras parades. He’d see the ice man rushing up the back steps, the giant block of ice on his padded shoulder. And over and over those marvelous voices, which had seemed so coarse then, but seemed now to be possessed of a rich vocabulary, a flair for the dramatic phrase, a sheer love of language.
Tales of great fires, and the famous streetcar labor riots, and the cotton loaders who had screwed the bales into the holds of the ships with giant iron screws, singing as they worked, in the days before the cotton compressors.
It seemed a great world in retrospect. Everything was so antiseptic in California sometimes. Same clothes, same cars, same causes. Maybe Michael didn’t really belong here. Maybe he never would. Yet surely he didn’t belong back there. Why, he hadn’t seen the place in all these years…
He wished he’d paid more attention to those guys in those days. He’d been too afraid. He wished he could talk to his dad now, sit with him and all those other crazy firemen outside the firehouse on Washington Avenue
.
Had the oak trees really been that big? Had they really arched completely over the street so that you gazed down a tunnel of green all the way to the river?
He’d remember the color of twilight as he walked home late after football practice, along Annunciation Street
. How beautiful the orange and pink lantana pushing through the little iron fences. Ah, was there a sky so purely incandescent as that sky, changing from pink to violet and then finally to gold over the tops of the shotgun cottages. There could not have been such an unearthly place.
