Harriet Doerr (17 page)

And here today, on this spring afternoon, now might as well be then. The old songs are raining on me from the sleeve.

Come to me, my melancholy baby, I can’t give you anything but love, You were meant for me, I cried for you, Thou swell, I’ll get by, Side by side, Someone to watch over me, From Monday on, Always.

After Liz, the rest of us grew up and, one by one, had parties of our own. Eventually, all four daughters of the family married husbands in the room where they had danced.

The living room had a wide fireplace, a piano much practiced on, a wall of books, and a reproduction of the Winged Victory of Samothrace in front of a window at one end. I could come here after school, bring ginger ale and graham crackers, fold myself into a chair, and, undisturbed, read
Missing
by Mrs. Humphry Ward,
Graustark,
or
Les Misérables
for hours among my crumbs.

Directly overhead was my mother’s room. Here she slept in the bed where five of her children were born and where, when the youngest was one, my father died.

Down the hall in a nursery turned schoolroom was the scarred round table where, chronologically, we learned to read and write. Our teacher, Miss Harriet Hannah Hutchins, traveled ten miles each way on the streetcar to fill our minds with words and numbers and how to find Vesuvius on a map.

Miss Hutchins’ skirts swept the floor, failing to conceal a pronounced limp. She wore a garnet ring on her engagement finger, a gold watch on a chain, and in the sun a black straw hat secured to her head by jet pins. The limp, we found out, was the result of a fall from a horse when she was sixteen. The ring was not explained, but all of us assumed that she had once been engaged to a soldier or sailor killed in a war.

From time to time we visited the Hutchins family, who lived among lemon trees in a white Victorian cottage with a front porch crowded with potted ferns and wicker chairs. In one of these, a rocker, sat Miss Hutchins’ mother, an old woman so small-boned, thin-haired, and creased it seemed impossible that even the country air, even smelling as it did of lemon blossoms, could sustain her. Beside her, in a straight chair, sat Miss Frances, Miss Hutchins’ younger sister, so gentle and obviously so good that we sensed she too, if only by her virtue, was somehow soon to perish.

In a corral across the drive, in the flickering shade of a mulberry tree, rested Miss Hutchins’ aging horse, Alec, whom we fed lumps of sugar from flat palms. Then, under the gaze of old Mrs. Hutchins and Miss Frances, we picked handfuls of mulberry leaves to feed the silkworms about to spin themselves into cocoons on the schoolroom shelf.

Once Miss Hutchins invited me to visit her father’s grave. We drove to the cemetery in a buggy behind Alec. I held snapdragons and larkspur, and she held the reins. It was a peaceful afternoon. I remember the clop of Alec’s hooves, the fragrant groves on each side of us, and the high yellow sun above.

Arrived at the cemetery, we observed a moment’s silence, while we stood on the grass beside a grave.

“My father lived to be eighty-nine,” Miss Hutchins said. “He fought for the Union.”

Familiar images gathered. Eliza on the ice. Lincoln at Gettysburg. General Lee and Traveler.

Then we drove back to the cottage in the absolute center of the same extraordinary peace.

Besides the silkworms, a hummingbird’s nest with an egg in it and a stuffed wren were on display in the schoolroom. We found the nest one spring and, six months later, the expired bird, feet-up on a gravel path. Without wasting a second, Miss Hutchins had wrapped it in her handkerchief and carried it to the schoolroom table, where she gutted and repacked it before our astonished eyes.

But what was the stuffing? Sand, grain, dry bread, or simple cotton batting? Did she sew up the feathered breast with darning thread? I saw the bird dead on the path. I saw it stuffed, its beak closed, its claws uncurled, perched on the bookcase. I believe I witnessed the reincarnation. But no matter. All of it, what I saw and what I didn’t, is now the blood and bone of memory.

In the schoolroom during World War I we knitted balls of wool into ragged squares to help the American soldiers. When there were enough of these, they were collected to be sewn into blankets. And what odd blankets they must have been, knitted and purled by half-grown hands out of skeins of favorite colors.

Once you could make a square without dropping stitches, you could go on to mufflers. One day a letter came from an American soldier in France, thanking me for a muffler. I kept the yellowing pages for fifty years, through various changes of address and turnings-out of closets, until finally, once and for all, it disappeared.

Miss Hutchins’ era ended, and we grew out of braces and into poetry. Often, without warning, Margaret, in her middy blouse and serge skirt, would fling open my door as I did home-work and cry, “I have a rendezvous with Death at some disputed barricade,” or “If I should die, think only this of me ...”

She knew all the repetitive poems by heart: “Boots, boots, boots, boots,” “The highwayman came riding, riding, riding,” and “Go down to Kew in lilac time, in lilac time, in lilac time.”

On the evening of the day she bobbed her hair, she struck my door open and called out, “What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why, I have forgotten,” going on with scarcely a pause to “Last night, ah, yesternight, betwixt her lips and mine there fell thy shadow, Cynara, and the night was thine.” And we were both impaled on the words.

Outside the room where these performances took place stretched the sleeping porch. From where I sat, dipping my pen into ink, I had only to take two steps and reach through a window to touch the redwood shingles, feel their rough grain.

Beyond the porch and the lawn, entirely separated from care and cultivation by an evergreen hedge, sloped a wild hillside of oaks, eucalyptus, weeds, and matilija poppies, whose crushed tissue-paper petals unfolded every June into white flowers as big as a child’s face.

Halfway down this hill an ancient acacia, which still produced a few yellow clusters in spring, supported a tree house, consisting of two platforms of pine boards. Its lack of a roof and walls failed to diminish our pleasure in it. Here we played and quarreled and took up candy bars to eat.

Sometimes I had the tree house to myself. Then I would sit cross-legged on the top floor and watch the afternoon turn into night. I realize now that these were my only chances, alone in the tree house, to ache. Without interruption or observers, to ache for the world, and for me in it.

I had left the house where I was born and had a husband and child when Miss Hutchins was brought down by cancer. I took some late roses and a few spikes of lavender to the hospital, and she tried to notice them. She was too tired to speak. It was only when I stood up to go that Miss Hutchins said, in a voice I hardly knew, “The pain is unendurable. I cannot stand the pain.” Then added, “I have talked to the doctor.” She died eleven days, or two hundred and sixty-four hours, later.

 

 

Now all the other houses are raining from the sleeve.

First is an old California adobe my husband and I and our small children lived in for five years. Built in 1816 as a grist mill for a Franciscan mission, it had already been named a historic monument when we moved in. Surviving age, earthquakes, and damage by occupants, the mill stood solid and pristine in a revised neighborhood. A nearby lake had long since been drained, the surrounding fields and groves turned suburb. But the old building, its original acre, inside its high outer wall, was immune to change, out of context and out of time.

“How is it to come in from the street and step through the gate in your wall?” people asked us.

And we said, “Magic.”

For it was all enchanted. The high beams tied with leather thongs, the windows set in walls four feet thick, the whitewashed interior, the border that took the place of baseboards, painted with vegetable colors in an Indian design.

The old mill absorbed anachronisms. No matter that my first typewriter occupied a table in a bedroom or that a model airplane hung from a sycamore tree. No difference the diapers drying in front of the living room fire or the tricycle in the patio. If Junípero Serra himself had walked in, he would only have had to touch the walls to know that he was home.

The garden claimed a few witnesses from the past—a bent black walnut tree, a gnarled olive, and a Castilian rose. Filling up the space around them, orange trees flowered and bore fruit, the red blossoms of a hedge turned into a hundred pomegranates in the fall, and a dozen plants that looked like giant thistles produced long-stemmed artichokes.

On weekend mornings in the old mill, we were often roused from sleep by the arrival outside of unexpected visitors. Some of them came only to look and, if the light was right, take pictures. Others came to work. From our bedroom my husband and I, still in pajamas and nightgown, would gaze down on painters, settled on stools before their easels, or on persons carrying maps who scientifically paced the ground between the walls. These were treasure hunters, searching for Spanish gold.

“The Franciscan fathers are known to have buried it here,” they told us, but the distances on the maps never corresponded to the dimensions of the garden.

Once an elderly man made himself at home with a divining rod and for two April days moved slowly between tree and path, grapevine and agave.

“It’s got to be here somewhere,” he said.

“Is it in doubloons?” we asked, and he nodded.

He left empty-handed, but we agreed with him. It had to be there somewhere.

In the bedroom that used to be a granary I composed a number of poems that rhymed, usually in quatrains, and submitted them to magazines. These, not surprisingly and without exception, failed. Fifty years later I still have the printed rejections. Unlike the handwritten note from the soldier of World War I, they were never lost.

It was from this house, when I was twenty-five, that I first traveled into the interior of Mexico. Not just to a border town, as previously, but to the heart of the country, Mexico City, three days and nights by train behind a steam locomotive.

We stayed in a post-colonial house a block from the Paseo de la Reforma, between the
glorietas
of Diana and the Angel. In the center of one, the goddess of the hunt, circled by traffic, lifted her bow and arrow over thirty mongrels lapping at the basin below. In the second, from the top of a soaring column, a golden angel raised a laurel wreath over buses, trucks, carts, and sidewalks crowded with vendors, beggars, pedestrians, and petty thieves.

The house of our relatives was dark, high-ceilinged, and, except at midday, cold. During a week’s visit, I was never allowed to enter the kitchen, where a barefoot, loose-braided family retainer named Maria de Jesus kept a parrot on a perch above the stove, occasionally encouraging it to fly. Old, gold-toothed, homesick for the distant place where she was born, she survived by re-creating it among the alien pots and pans.

On this first trip to Mexico, I went to an Aztec pyramid, to the canals on whose banks flowers are grown, to the opera house, which sinks lower a fraction of an inch each day, and to a night-club. I see now that in this week I failed utterly to penetrate the surface of Mexico. But was it then that the spell fell on me?

 

 

I have lived most of fifty years in the California hillside house where I write today. But in spite of its long history of Christmases and birthdays, measles and chicken pox, music lessons and menageries, I have little to say of it. As long as I continue to inhabit it, how am I to see it plain and clear? We are not through with each other, this house and I.

When we had lived here nine years, we rented its wisteria vine and windows with views to a safe tenant and moved to a house with a crimson door in Mexico City. This house backed into a hill and had adjacent structures on both sides, so that all its rooms faced front.

To enter, you opened a narrow red door next to a wide red one that closed the garage. Then you continued along a red passageway toward a glass aviary on an upper level. This birdcage served as the fourth and outside wall of the red dining room, which lay directly behind.

And now, out of memory’s sleeve, falls a shower of birds. For in this cage lived crested cardinals, perching listlessly on defoliated twigs or pecking for seeds mixed with gravel on the aviary floor.

While we ate our egg sandwich, or chop, in the blood-red dining room, we gazed at the matching birds. Sometimes one of us rose from the table and tapped on the glass to remind the cardinals that we, too, swam in this crimson sea.

At the end of the first week, we visited a specialist at the pet store.

“Cardenales,”
he said, and fell silent. Then he said, “They are molting,” and we said, “Yes.”

“They have light,” he said, and we said, “No,” and explained that although the aviary faced the street, a pepper tree had grown between it and the sun.

“Caray!”
the man said, contracting
“Caramba,”
and sold us food supplements of vitamin D.

The next day we asked our landlady to remove the cardinals.

“They are better off in the aviary,” she said. “Outside, they would be pecked to death by other birds.”

Was it one or was it two cardinals that died of chronic deprivation during our year’s tenancy? And did we replace them when we left, as we did a few glasses and a cup? But by that time, the whole situation had changed. For as the cardinals declined above, field mice began to enter through a hole in the aviary floor and forage for fallen seed. Even rounder and tamer than the creations of Potter and Disney, the fattening mice somehow compensated for the daily worsening of the birds.

Our dinner guests, entranced, ate with eyes fixed on the glass cage. Like visitors to a zoo, they pondered the mice and the birds. They asked to be invited back.