The house is stamped with the particular superstitions of his childhood. When Walker passes the laundry chute, he feels the never-chanced urge to slide down its dark tunnel and land in a bale of towels. Standing at the door of George’s room, he still experiences the primal discomfort of the parental double bed. He gets waylaid in Grandfather’s Library, as it was called when he was a boy, a room he was allowed to visit only when Charles was present. This seems to have been a rule that extended to George as well; Walker cannot remember ever seeing his father in this room. But that may have been the result of predilection: George, busy with rainfall charts and crop yields, had no time for books. All these years later, the room still harbors the aura of the illicit. It is a gentleman’s library from an earlier time, filled with crackle-bound volumes about science and astronomy along with Aristotle and Shakespeare. Grandfather Charles was sent East to university, and when he returned to take up his place in the family business, these books must have been all that was left of a buried intellectual ambition. Walker doesn’t know that this is true. He is doing what he does instinctively: imagining the stories that the objects around him tell. He was only three when his grandfather died and, although he knows it cannot be possible, he has distinct memories of the day. The family was gathered around the table for Thanksgiving. They were eating jellied consommé with filigreed spoons. Charles, complaining of indigestion, pushed his chair from the table and then walked upstairs, past the dark and somber oil portrait of Theodore Dodge, a painting that always frightened Walker because of the man’s yellowed skin and penetrating gaze. Fifteen minutes later, when Grandmother Naomi went upstairs to check on him, Charles was already dead. Walker knows that his recollection must be made up of recounted stories, and that his image of his grandfather must be a construct derived largely from photographs. But the moment feels visceral to him as does his memory of standing in the doorway of this library after the death was announced. His mother sat on the wicker settee with Alma on one side and Beatriz on the other. The three women held hands and cried unabashedly. He had wanted to go to his mother but he could not cross the threshold into the forbidden room.
Walker knows his grandfather principally by the possessions that remained in the house for years after the man died. His field boots sat on the porch. His three-piece suits hung in a closet off the upstairs hallway, smelling of mothballs. When Walker opened the door—something that he liked to do to test his bravery—the slight wind made the wooden hangers shift and clack against one another, causing the dark suits to animate in a slow, ghostly fashion. At some point, Walker’s mother had enough of the clutter and packed the suits and boots and walking sticks off to charity. Somehow, the books in the library escaped her efforts to clear the house of its past, or maybe she felt the library’s inviolable aura, too.
Walker takes his time looking through the books. He will keep some, especially the early western novels and a few of the first editions. Others he will offer to the local library. What they pass up he will bring to a bookseller he knows in San Francisco who will appreciate the trove and be honest with Walker about its value. As he pages through certain books, he sees that some are home to the debris of his grandfather’s life, an empty seed packet perhaps used as a bookmark, a prayer card from the church Walker attended as a boy where he perfected the art of hiding his own treasures inside hymnals—comics and paperback stories of sports heroes. Tucked between the pages of Ramona is a Christmas list from 1941. Uncle Edward was given a subscription to Lone Scout magazine. George received the prize of a Heathkit. Walker pulls a heavy book of collected poetry off a shelf and sits down on the wicker settee. The padded cover of the volume is embossed with gold and the pages are tissue-thin and fragile. Stuck between two of them is a yellowing piece of newsprint. The deckled edges nearly break off as Walker unfolds it.
He recognizes the photograph instantly. The image is so familiar that it seems like one excavated from personal memory, the way he can summon the exact contours of his favorite childhood Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots although he has not seen them in thirty years. The woman holding her baby. Those two backward-facing children. A splotch of ink mars the woman’s forehead, a printing fault he often runs across in old newspapers. Even in this faded image it is still possible to see the dirt on the backs of the children’s necks. Walker remembers the year Isaac wanted to dress as a hobo for Halloween. The costume—Walker’s oversized jacket and pants, streaks of Lisette’s eyeliner on the boy’s cheeks to mimic dirt—was an uncomfortable reminder of all the times Walker’s father had castigated him for having a lazy and entitled character. “You could be one of them!” George would say, gesturing angrily toward a window as if a farmworker had miraculously appeared on the front lawn to remind Walker of his unearned luck.
Walker has occasionally used the photograph in his classes and he is familiar with the bare facts of the woman’s story: the frozen harvest, the unsuccessful search for work. He remembers something about a broken-down car. Walker glances at the poem on the facing page called “The Highwayman,” which is unfamiliar to him. He scans the first few stanzas. He whistles a tune to the window, and who should be waiting there, But the landlord’s black-eyed daughter, Bess, the landlord’s daughter, Plaiting a dark red love-knot into her long black hair. The murder ballad of dark nights and doomed love rolls rhythmically toward a grand, melodramatic finish. A lowbrow choice, Walker thinks, for a man who read Euripides, but a discovery that begins to add flesh to the cardboard notion he has of the grandfather he barely knew. Walker turns back to the article. He wonders if the Dodge camps were as awful as the one described, if the children wandered aimlessly during the days, unschooled and unattended by parents who were in the fields, if the smells of putrefaction carried from the unsanitary facilities caused people to cover their noses and mouths with kerchiefs, if there was always the threat of fire from open flames lit inside tents to ward off the nighttime cold. He is certain the answer is yes, although he is ashamed to realize that he has never spent any time studying the labor history of his own family. If Charles was any kind of humanist—and to judge from the contents of his library, he was—Walker can imagine the article pricking some free-floating guilt on the man’s part, which may account for why he saved it. Perhaps he even took action based on some newfound sense of justice. But Walker can equally imagine that Charles would have read the article, recognized his complicity, and then performed the moral calculus that made it possible to convince himself that the Dodge camps were not as bad as the one described. Walker knows what it takes to create a business on the scale of the Dodge enterprise, and it is not a social conscience. Maybe Charles was drawn to the strange combination of blunt truth and ineffable mystery in the woman’s gaze or by those two children facing away as if they had no particular identity but were only two of the thousands of children trapped by fate. Or maybe he was struck, as Walker has always been, by the baby who knows nothing but the warmth of his mother’s skin and the smell of her milk and who does not yet realize the circumstance it has been born into. Walker folds the article and replaces it between the pages of the book. It is never simply the particular discovery that piques his historian’s curiosity. It is the next question that matters: Out of all the millions of objects that were tossed into the trash bin of time, why did this one survive?
• • •
After one day at his father’s house mostly spent moving piles of papers from one table to another, Walker asks for help. Angela is between home-nursing jobs and welcomes the extra work. She arrives with Beatriz who still has the zeal for organization that Walker remembers from when she was his niñera and demanded that he keep his toys in the boxes she had carefully marked: camiones, bloques de construcción, soldados de juguete. Back then it was Beatriz’s mother, Alma, George’s niñera, still employed by the family as the majordomo, who looked on like an aged general seeing to it that a battle plan was well executed. Now Beatriz assumes the overseer’s role, seated comfortably in an easy chair
, her arms folded over her heavy chest. The sunlight angling in through a window catches her chin whiskers. Beatriz says she is glad Alma did not live to see her Jorgecito die. It would have killed her, she adds, and she and Angela and Walker laugh at the feeble joke. Mi hijo was what Alma had called George. My son, even when he was grown and had taken over the farm. Walker remembers his father’s uncommon humility whenever Alma was near, how he would put on a jacket if she said it was cold outside or how he would stub out his cigarette in her presence be-cause she thought that smoking was a dirty habit.
The three of them spend days sifting and organizing. The work is exhausting and unexpectedly emotional. Angela and Beatriz are practical about getting rid of useless fripperies like the plates with the unnerving big-eyed children Walker’s mother collected, while at the same time they are mindful that items that strike Walker as valueless will be of interest to someone else. They seem to hold in their minds the exact layout of any number of their relatives’ homes and know that a certain chair will fit perfectly in a cousin’s kitchen or that a brother-in-law who is a fool for a game of dominoes will find a great use for an old folding card table. Beatriz reveals herself to be the quiet keeper of Dodge lore and she makes sure that Walker holds on to a certain hooked rug his mother made when she was pregnant with him, even though they all agree that the pattern of amoebic blobs is hideous. Beatriz demands that the set of iced-tea tumblers go to Walker’s brother, whose young children will surely be delighted by the built-in glass straws just as Walker and his siblings were, and as George was before that. Each of the three is occasionally caught off guard by sorrow. When this happens, the other two pause in their zeal to toss and save until the moment passes.
During a lunch break, when they eat the gorditas Beatriz brought from home, she reminds them that she and George are milk siblings. Beatriz is only six months older than George, and her mother, Alma, nursed both of them for a time.
“This is why I am tan pequeña,” Beatriz says, using the English-and-Spanish blend that she and Walker have communicated in since he was a child. “Your daddy, he steals all la leche!” She lets out a great, mirthful laugh.
“He was your first playmate,” Walker says.
She waves a warning finger. “Señora Naomi no permita que se.”
Walker shakes his head at his family’s entrenched caste system, but Beatriz does not acknowledge the hypocrisy. A childhood of living among housekeepers and gardeners has made Walker familiar with the protective deflection of people who are privy to a family’s intimacies but must play dumb as part of the contract of their employ.
As the days pass, Walker becomes weighed down by all the trivialities that make up a life—a dish filled with paper clips, a half-used tin of shoeshine, the bathroom drawer jammed with crusted tubes of ointments and the medicine-cabinet shelves imprinted with rust from cans of shaving cream. There are moments of poignancy—the worn-down toothbrush, the shot glass on his father’s desk that contains a black Super Ball Walker remembers from his childhood, a special high bouncer that he played with incessantly, driving his father crazy with the arrhythmic noise. He wonders if his father felt sentimental about the ball. But Walker is projecting. The ball might have landed in that glass randomly and spent years untouched except by a maid’s dutiful feather duster. George probably never noticed it.
There are other discoveries. The top shelf of a hallway closet holds a cache of broken mousetraps. Finding them, Walker is seized by frustration. What possible purpose could his father have had in keeping these things? What churlish parsimony would cause him to think that he could find some use for forty rectangular pieces of wood and coils of unsprung wire? In these moments Walker feels as he did when he was a boy and the sound of his father’s drawling, slightly nasal voice or the sight of him cleaning the wax from his ear with the earpiece of his glasses would drive him wild with repulsion and shame.
“¿Qué pasa con el sótano?” Beatriz says when they have managed to pack up most of the first and second floors of the house.
“The basement,” Angela says, translating the unfamiliar word. “She wants to know what you want to do about everything down there.”
Walker remembers the basement as a cold, unfinished space that housed a clanking furnace and two industrial-sized and water-stained sinks. He was terrified by the mangle that lived there, and on laundry days, he would watch, mesmerized, as the wrinkled sheets were fed between the lips of the rollers only to come out the other side perfectly pressed. He lived in fear of Beatriz’s warning that if he stood too close, the monster would grab his shirttail or a wisp of his hair and he would be sucked in and flattened.
“The appliances will be sold with the house,” Walker says.
“No, no,” Beatriz says, marching over to the basement door.
He helps her down the steps, and Angela follows. The temperature drops by at least ten degrees. He waves his hand in the air until he makes contact with the piece of string that hangs from the bare fixture. The yellow light illuminates a room filled with boxes.
“What is all this?” Walker says unhappily. He opens a box and pulls out a back issue of California Farmer from 1955. Once again, his anger wells up and he allows himself a petulant thought: perhaps his father saved all this useless junk simply to burden Walker with the problem of dealing with it, turning history into insult. He explains to Beatriz and Angela that he has to get back to his teaching and that he will return another time to deal with the contents of the basement.
“Mrs. Rosalie and Mrs. Evelyn,” Beatriz says, insinuating that Walker’s sisters will not be happy with the delay.
“I can’t do this anymore,” he says with more passion than he intended.
Beatriz puts a sympathetic hand on his cheek. “Tranquilizate,” she says as she did when he was young and he would retreat to the kitchen after a fight with his father. She would give him a glass of milk and a slice of cake and continue her work. Her calm would go a long way toward convincing him that the rage he felt would not ultimately destroy him.
• • •
Angela’s husband arrives in his pickup and makes trips to and from the house, taking various items to the dump, the local thrift shop, and the homes of relatives. Walker rents a U-Haul to hitch to the back of his car so he can bring the boxes of books he’s saved to San Francisco as well as the wicker settee, which is the one piece of furniture he has decided to keep. On Friday afternoon, the women hug him gently and then leave. He sits on the railing of the wraparound porch and drinks a beer, watching trucks and cars drive away from the groves carrying the last of the day’s workers. The irrigation system goes to work now, and as the sun makes its final descent, the last glinting rays pick up the sprays of water for a brief moment before the trees become indistinct shapes against the dusk. When he was a boy, Walker imagined that the house was the Dodge farm and that the land was somehow ancillary to the beating heart where he lived and played and studied and fought. Now that the house is empty he cannot quite convince himself that these acres have a purpose without the anchor of the home. The land seems as weightless as a cloud that will float away on the next strong wind.
Back inside, he walks the empty rooms. He knows his father would not have been emotional about the house. He might even have been happy to know that it was finally being released from its oppressive familial duty. George had been ambivalent about carrying on the Dodge traditions. He insisted his children live up to this ambiguous set of values called “the Dodge name,” which mostly had to do with never using their status to advantage. But he would not allow his shirts to be monogrammed in the family style and he refused to have his portrait painted so that it could stand in the town hall alongside the images of Charles and Theodore. Walker and his siblings spent their summers in the groves along with the migrants, picking oranges or driving the water truck. They were never paid. When Walker complained about working for free, George made him a deal: he would give Walker
the wage his pickers earned, and in return Walker would pay for all the food he ate at the house, rent for his bedroom at fair market value, and a prorated portion of the gas and electricity. After a month, Walker was happy to relinquish his paycheck in favor of unlimited access to the refrigerator. But when Walker discovered The Communist Manifesto and The Other America, he regularly accused his father of everything from labor exploitation to noblesse oblige. “Why don’t you just sleep with his daughter while you’re at it?” Walker snarled one year, as his father left the house for his ritual day-after-Christmas meal with the family of his Mexican foreman. George did not respond but simply left Walker alone in the front hall, nursing his Pyrrhic victory: Walker’s desire to disappoint his father had produced exactly that, and he spent the night ashamed not of his father but of his ineffectual self.
He should head back north before it is late, but he is too exhausted to make the drive. He takes out his computer, settles onto the floor of the empty living room and searches for information about the famous photograph. A number of related links appear. As he quickly peruses them, he recognizes the usual mix of the scholarly and amateur he finds whenever he searches the Web. Most teachers will warn their students away from the perils of unqualified sources. But Walker is always drawn to lay accounts. They can be wildly subjective and unreliable, but looked at another way, they are windows into eccentric curiosities that have their own value. He cross-references the links as best he can and discovers this: The woman’s name was Mary Coin. She was born in 1904 or, according to some articles, 1905. She was either full Cherokee or mixed blood. She had six children or seven. An article compares the photograph to the Pietà both in its composition and in the way it serves as a ritual image. Someone has written about how the absent father in the photograph allows the viewer to take on the role of patriarchal savior. A feminist academic has written a dissertation about the photograph in terms of cultural theories and prejudices surrounding twentieth-century ideals of motherhood.
Mary Coin Page 18
