"Well." A pause. "What brung ye up this air way off the branch?"
A good question. Trying to steer the conversation onto her family proved difficult, but ultimately yielded Parthenia's fascinating diagnosis of Sister Violet's yen for self-improvement: "Our mother read the books. We believe it made her tubercular."
A long pause.
"Violet be the same."
Another pause.
"We was all in our family borned with sense. But Violet be the only one to vex herself on wanting to be learned." Born-ed, learned, here was the raw version of Violet's peculiar diction, without the gloss acquired from twenty years of office work. "We was afeared she would turn out like t'other one. The lady doctor that was born-ed here in the town."
"Elizabeth Blackwell?"
"That one. Violet readen a book on her. Mother was afeared of her going away to be learned for the doctoring."
"That would have been an interesting career for your sister."
"Not hardly, sir. T'would of put her in a hazard of hell's fire."
"Medical school?"
"To be learned for the science, yessir. Them men casting aspersion on our Lord's hand in the Creation."
In the dining room, visible through the archway, Sister Violet's lip remained buttoned but her eyebrows nearly reached her widow's peak by the time she finished filing the day's mail. Parthenia took her away then, evidently satisfied the new employer would not threaten her sister's virtue or encourage any interest in the sciences. It explains a good deal about Mrs. Brown: her aloneness in the world, as far from home in this town as any boy from Mexico. Probably farther, given the scalding disapproval of anything "learned." And yet she does carry her origins with her, revealed in the rhythms of speech, the talent for keeping counsel. The unusual respect for silence. Parthenia's silences outlasted her sentences every time, and carried greater weight. How will their tongue survive in a modern world, where the talkers rush to trample every pause?
September 14
Mr. Lincoln Barnes, my Mr. Lincoln. He means well. A second novel makes me "a novelist," says he, and therefore duty-bound to meet my editor in New York. He can't know how entirely it's out of the question. He should invite me to dance with angels on the head of a pin, I'd sooner try, if I could do it from home. But my failure will mean conceding every battle. Beginning with my title, Where the Eagle Eats the Snake.
"Wrong," he pronounced yesterday on the telephone. "People hate snakes."
Well then, wouldn't they be happy to see an eagle tearing one to pieces, sitting on a cactus plant? The dust-jacket art seems ready made.
He is keen to call it Pilgrims of Chapultepec.
Americans take "pilgrim" to mean the fellow in buckled shoes with hands folded in prayer. And the unpronounceable remainder, as dubious as Brand X soap.
Mrs. Brown suggests that for the next one I ought to turn in the manuscript with a title I despise. That way, she says, they're apt to change it to something you favor. A trick she learned while working for the U.S. Army.
September 26
The exhibit, Advancing American Art, is advancing at this very moment toward the National Gallery, packed up on the train with Tom Cuddy as its Shipping Shepherd. And still I have no answer for him. Tommy the golden boy, with the good looks of Van Heijenoort and a better idea how to use them--it's possible he has never been turned down before. On the telephone, he coaxes. Says I have to be there in D.C., he's desperate for backup, certain there is trouble afoot. Congress has called a special hearing to discuss the exhibit after they've had a look at it. And what Tommy said about the Hearst Press is true, Mrs. Brown brought in one of their magazine ads today, a reproduction of one of the "ugly" paintings with the caption "Your Money Bought This!" They suggest a foregone conclusion among soap-buying housewives: your money would be better spent on soap. But with Mrs. Brown their propaganda failed: she is now intently curious about the show.
Paris with Tommy, dear Lord what a vision. (He was dazzling enough in a dim boxcar.) But surely he'll understand there is too much to do here, revisions and galley proofs still ahead. He'll be less willing to understand why Washington is out of the question. To have a look at those modernists, have a drink with old Tom, help him ship out the paintings. Patiently Mrs. Brown waits to send an answer: yes or no. Probably she has already drafted both letters and only needs the word. Such is her efficiency.
We discussed it again this afternoon, or rather I talked. Justifying my absurd fear of travel and exposure, despising it all the while. My face must have been the Picture of Dorian Gray. At the end, when he goes to pieces.
She used the quiet voice she seems to draw up from a different time, the childhood in mountain hells, I suppose.
"What do ye fear will happen?"
There was no sound but the clock in the hall: tick, tick.
"Mr. Shepherd, ye cannot stop a bad thought from coming into your head. But ye need not pull up a chair and bide it sit down."
October 2
The matter is settled, the letter sent. Mrs. Brown provided the solution: herself. She will go along on the trip, make all arrangements, reserve the hotel rooms for both of us in names no one could recognize. No girls in short socks will gather in the halls. We will take the Roadster, she'll carry the money-purse and purchase the gasoline, no strangers need be addressed on the journey. Only Tom, once we arrive at the gallery.
Indispensable Mrs. Brown. She has known all along the problem is not the grippe. But couldn't know how her firm hand on my arm could make many things possible, including walking out the door onto that swaying bridge.
"It appeared you needed steadying," was her diagnosis.
October 12
Poor Tom. And also the forty-odd artists who will suffer from this, but somehow I worry most for Tom. He believed in Advancing American Art, and not just the free ride to Europe. Now he has to hang his head, call Paris and Prague, and explain the show isn't coming. They will dismantle it, sell off these treasures to the first low bid so the Department of State can recover the taxpayers' cash. The boss will make Tommy do the worst of it. The O'Keeffe already went for fifty dollars he said, salt in the wound.
Mrs. Brown and I were more than ready to put miles between ourselves and that debacle. But the journey home was long. The mountain parkway is a strange passage from city into wilderness, hundreds of miles of forest and vale without habitation. Occasionally an apple orchard, fenced by a zigzag of split rails, like a piece of green calico cut with pinking shears. Driving along high ridgetops is like being a bird on the wing, with slopes dropping steeply away from the roadsides, and views opening out to rumpled, hazy horizons. The leaves were crimson, auburn, jade, and gold, lying together in patchwork against the mountainsides. "God's hand bestoweth beauty on the advancing trial of winter," Mrs. Brown quoted. But it looked as if God had turned over the job to a Mexican muralist.
When first I made this drive, the forests were leafless. I told Mrs. Brown about it. Father unexpectedly dead, and then this endless passage into a barren wilderness. I thought I had come to a nation of the interred.
"Then you came to Mrs. Bittle's," she said, "and knew it for certain."
"Old Judd seemed mummified. True enough. But certainly not you or Miss McKellar."
Each time we stopped for gasoline she insisted we take on coffee and sandwiches as well. "Feed the car, feed the driver," was her succinct advice. The gray mass of a storm sat on the mountains to the west, waiting like a predator. In the afternoon it pounced, drenching the view and washing the brilliant leaves into matted sop in the road. The rain on the windscreen was blinding. The wiper had to be cranked every few seconds, and it made for difficult, one-handed driving. Mrs. Brown offered to help turn the wiper lever, but its location overhead above the driver makes that awkward.
"Mr. Ford should have thought to put it over here," she said, "so the passenger could help."
"He knew better. In life's dampest passages, the driver often has to go it alone."
&n
bsp; "I ought to know that. Here knitting socks without one child of my own."
"Is that what you have there? I thought it was an indigo porcupine."
She had a laugh at that. She has eleven nephews and nieces, I learned, and meant to outfit the tribe on this journey, working through socks from top to toe, all from the same massive hank of blue wool. The coming holiday shall be known as "The Christmas of the Blue Socks from Aunt Violet." She worked on a little frame of four interlocked needles that poked out in every direction as she passed the yarn through its rounds.
"Aren't you afraid you'll hurt yourself with that?"
"Mr. Shepherd, if women feared knitting needles as men do, the world would go bare-naked."
What had happened in Washington was an outrage. Yet life goes forward mostly as an exchange of pleasantries on a narrow bridge that hangs above the chasm of outrage. "There's Grandfather Mountain. See, the shape of it. An old man lying down."
"Is it too cold for you? We could stop and get the lap blanket from the back."
"No. I'm warm-blooded."
"We're lucky it's cold. This Roadster overheats famously on hard inclines."
"You don't say."
Grand white clapboard hotels turned up sparsely along the route, their front porches mostly populated with empty rocking chairs. At dusk they began to be lit by the yellow glow of lamplight. Once, just as we passed an inn, a black-skinned man in a red jacket was lighting the porch lanterns one by one, leaning with difficulty around elegant men who sat idle, smoking cigars. Castes of the nation.
Mrs. Brown finally broached the void. "Indigo Porcupine, that could just as well be the name of one of those paintings we saw at the show."
"Yes. Indigo Porcupine Leaping into the Void, that might do."
"Well. I couldn't make out what all they were meant to be. Truly I've never seen the like, Mr. Shepherd. But I'm deeply obliged for it."
"I wasn't going to come until you volunteered as escort. So I'm the one obliged."
"For all, I meant. The paintings and our nation's capital. Going right straight in the hall where the Congress meets."
"Had you not been to Washington before?"
"This is my first time out of Buncombe County."
"Really?"
"Yes sir. I've read the Geographics since I was a girl. My sisters could tell you, I strained for travel like a horse fresh to the bit. But never thought it would happen."
"Mrs. Brown, you make me ashamed. The whole world knocks at my door, and all I want to do is stay home."
"It's a wonder," she said tactfully, working at a tiny sock.
"Well, you're a worldlier person than most of those congressmen. They want Norman Rockwell and statues of muscular horses and nothing new under the sun."
"Even still. There was no cause to speak so rudely. What peeved them?"
"Fear, maybe. The foreign element, that's what Tom thought. They expected to go in the gallery and see old friends, but instead they met strangers. Gashes of color and surrealism. It made them uneasy."
"They didn't say 'uneasy.' They said 'un-American.' I can't see that. If an American paints it, then it's American, isn't it?"
"Not according to Mr. Rankin and the Congress."
Or Truman: If that's art, then I'm a Hottentot. Others said vulgar, obscene, insane, namby-pamby pacifism. Or Stalinist, a perfect irony, from these congressmen who seem as determined as Stalin to suppress creativity among artists. The show scared them out of their wits. The Special Session was a thrashing.
"We should have taken Tom out of that hearing. It was humiliating."
"Your poor friend, he'd worked so. He'll take it hard, will he not?"
"Oh, believe me. Tom Cuddy feels for those paintings about the way you do for your nieces and nephews. He'd knit socks for Winslow Homer, if he knew how. I've seen that in him ever since the civilian services. Moving paintings and sculptures to safekeeping, that was America the Beautiful, for Tom. That was patriotism."
"Bless his heart."
Bless it indeed. Now he's had to hear Congress declare the whole Western world threatened by some paint and canvas. Our finest painters, a menace. One was specifically damned for having urged Roosevelt to come to the aid of the Soviet Union and Britain, after Hitler attacked Russia. Which in fact, Roosevelt did.
The click of knitting needles, the shush of tires through leafy muck. The lozenge of space inside the automobile felt surprisingly safe, like a small home moving through a tunnel of darkness. Mrs. Brown finished off a sock before speaking again.
"Not all the pictures were hard to cipher. Some were plain. The ones with cemeteries and tenement houses got people the most riled, if you ask me. More than the ones that looked like dribble-drabble."
"The Guglielmi and those."
"Why do you think?"
"Congress has to keep up appearances. The paintings were going around the world. We can't let them know we have racial strife and tenement houses."
"My stars, Mr. Shepherd. Europe is lying in a pile. On the news they said Berlin city just dug two thousand graves for the ones that aim to starve to death before spring."
A car blazed by, two bright eyes in the dark.
"They had to dig the graves before the ground froze," she added.
"I understand."
"And London, no better. I read they're allowed nought but four ounces of knitting wool for the year and two yards of material, to cover each person in a family. They must be about naked. What's the harm in those folks seeing some of our troubles?"
"Well, five years of wartime censorship. Old habits die hard. We've gotten very good at pretending everything is shipshape here. Don't you feel that way?"
"What way?"
"That it's a little dangerous to advertise our weak points. Jerry and Tokyo Rose might be listening. Loose lips sink ships."
"They were listening. But the war's ended."
"True. But if it keeps the paintings pretty and all people's whining buttoned up, maybe they'll want a new war every five years."
"Mr. Shepherd, for shame. That is no subject for jest. We can't keep on forever saying the nation entire is perfect. Because between you and me, sir, it is not." The needles clicked in the dark. She must have read the pattern with her fingertips.
"Do you remember the first advice you ever gave me?"
She seemed to think it over. "The pot roast at Mrs. Bittle's?"
"Advice about writing."
"I never."
"Oh, you did. In that first letter. You said Tom Wolfe got himself in hot water exposing the scandals of Asheville, and I was wise to keep my story in Mexico. Here was your advice: people love to read about sins and errors, but not their own."
She considered this. "That's different from putting sins and errors off the map entire. How can it be un-American to paint a picture of sadness?"
"I don't know. But they did not want to see any waves on the domestic waters."
For several minutes she knitted at her sock, evidently struggling not to say any more. At length she lost the battle. "If you're standing in the manure pile, it's somebody's job to mention the stink. Those congressmen are saying we have to call it a meadow of buttercups instead of a cesspool. Even the artists have to."
"Well, but suppose the artist's job is just to keep everyone amused? Maybe get their minds off the stink, by calling it a meadow. Where's the harm?"
"Nobody will climb out of the pile. There's the harm. They'll keep where they are, deep to the knees in dung, trying to outdo each other remarking on the buttercups."
"Well, I write historical romance. I'm sorry to let you down, but any time you're looking for the meadow and buttercups, I'm your man."
"Fiddlesticks, Mr. Shepherd. Do ye think I ken ye not?"
"Do you know me? I suppose you do. Well enough."
"Well enough. You are good to children whose parents are not. You take in the straggliest cats. You are dismayed by the treatment of the Negro. You read more newspapers than Mr. Hearst himsel
f, though it aggravates you to no end. Shiffling through all that claptrap hunting a day's one glory. The rise of the little man somewhere, or the fall of a tyrant."
"Is that everything?"
"About. I believe you stand on the side of the union of labor."
"Well done, Mrs. Brown. You can read me like a book."
Even in the full darkness I could feel her glare, the dangerous force of her. She had those needles.
"Set your photograph on the dustcover, or not, it makes no difference. You are still there, Mr. Shepherd, plain to see. Your first one was about the hatefulness of war, everyone said so. How it fills up the rich men's pockets and grieves the poor ones."
"I see."
"You needn't squirm, Mr. Shepherd. Your words are your own wee bairns. You need not leave them orphaned. You should stand up proud and say, 'Those are mine!'"
Soon we passed through the long tunnel at Little Switzerland, a deeper darkness within the night's blue darkness, like a cave in the sea. Mrs. Brown's knitting stayed in her lap, the strange blue bundle with its armature of needles, like a peculiar pet she could no longer bear to touch. When we reached Mrs. Bittle's she said good-bye, but until then we hardly spoke any more. Both driver and passenger seemed to need all our energies to find the way ahead, staring at the bleakness and the rain.
November 15
A letter from Frida after all this time, opened with trembling hands. Thrill and fear are really the same, inside a body. Her operation a partial success, good news, though she still suffers. The handsome Spaniard she met in New York seems to be good medicine, a sturdy platform from which to forgive. Her grammar was so odd though, barely coherent. The date on the letter was Lev's birthday and the day of the October Revolution, but no mention of either. No more red carnations on the table for old loves, the viejo and democratic socialism. Diego has gone over completely to the side of the Stalinists now. And she, perhaps to the side of morphine.
December 24
A gift: knitted gloves of soft gray wool. What a remarkable sensation, to slide them on and feel each finger fit perfectly in its allotted space. "I noticed you have none," she said. "Or wear none. I thought maybe they didn't use them in Mexico."
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