Harriet Doerr (18 page)

The house with the red door had a flat roof, where clothes were washed and hung to dry. On the roof, which was 7,500 feet above sea level, the air was like sea air, light and crisp. If not for the hill behind the house, we could have stood there, looked over the city, its parks, palaces, and slums, and beyond, over farms; fields, and Indian ruins, all the way to the volcanos, Popo and Ixti, the two lovers under the snow.

 

 

Years later we took possession of the second white adobe in our lives. This one was in central Mexico, a day’s drive from the capital, at the edge of a village of little water and few trees, a place whose inhabitants burned and shivered according to the season within a circle of barren hills. But not barren at all, of course, if you count rocks and their formations. Almost as soon as we arrived, trucks started bringing loads of these rocks to our house, for a wall, for a border, for some steps. When the mason split them, they broke in halves of all shades of rose and green and sand. Some had blue streaks. Some were specked with gold. Each was as individual as a piece of jade. You knew them best by touching them, by moving along the half-finished wall, your hand sliding from one rough surface to the next. Dry, hard, complex, indifferent, they were the fiber of our world.

“How old are they?” you might ask.

“Ay, quién sabe?”
the mason said. “As old as all of it,” and he would wave an arm from one horizon to another, encompassing mountains, fields, cows, goats, a church dome, the hoist tower of an idle mine, geraniums in a pot, a lizard on a tile. He had no thought of millenniums of fire and ice, of convulsions at the planet’s core. The mason only meant the rocks were as old as the day when the whole idea occurred to God.

The true sound of Mexico is not the braying of the burro or the baying of the coyote, nor is it the plaint of the beggar or the passion in a song. The true, infallible, recognizable sound is the pounding of the mason’s chisel against stone.

Our early mornings in this place were all alike. We woke in our square, beam-ceilinged room first to sunrise, then, in this order, to cockcrow, church bell, birdsong, and the rhythmic chipping away of stone. We bathed and brushed our teeth to the sound of it, spoke and ate to it.

We met the mason on our first day in the village. Twenty-five years later, when I left for the last time, his son, a master of the same craft, stood in the driveway to see me off. He was one of a small crowd that had gathered. When the last things, my thermos and my sandwich, were in the car, I shook hands with each one—the watchman, his daughter and grandson, the cook, the carpenter, the electrician-mechanic turned majordomo, the boy who gardened, and the man who every spring borrowed our empty field to plant his corn.

When I looked back from the gate, they were all still there, and I almost stopped to lean out and wave again.

But such a thing was impossible. They would have thought I had forgotten something and come after me to help.

I would have had to say, “Oh, no, I’ve left nothing behind,” and thank them again. I would have said, “See for yourselves. It is all here,” and, for the second time, left it all behind.

 

 

Eventually some Mexican stones found their way to my California garden. Geodes sometimes appear when ivy is cut back. A rock that was once the color of amethyst has taken a permanent place under an orange tree. Birds drink from a shell carved from
cantera,
the marble of Mexico.

“Do you want to keep these rocks?” asks the gardener, whose mother as a child fled a village not far from ours during the revolution of 1910. He looks at half a dozen ore samples, some still showing copper, some still showing lead, scattered without purpose along a brick border.

And I say, “Yes. Keep them,” knowing that as soon as his back is turned, I will take one up and immediately enter that other garden two thousand miles to the south. It is noon and hot. I can pick the first ripe fig. I can touch the first hard-fought-for rose.

 

 

From the desk where I write today, I face a window three-quarters full of sky. At my left hand is a chip of copper ore that shows azurite. For no other reasons than these, I see all at once that everything is possible. I have recovered my houses. Now I can bring back the rest, picnics and circuses, train rides and steamers, labels on trunks, and wreaths for the dead on front doors.

I have everything I need. A square of sky, a piece of stone, a page, a pen, and memory raining down on me in sleeves.

In the middle of an April night in 1919, a plain woman named Edith Fisk, lifted from England to California on a tide of world peace, arrived at the Ransom house to raise five half-orphaned children.

A few hours later, at seven in the morning, this Edith, more widely called Edie, invited the three eldest to her room for tea. They were James, seven; Eliza, six; and Jenny, four. Being handed cups of tea, no matter how reduced by milk, made them believe that they had grown up overnight.

“Have some sugar,” said Edie, and spooned it in. Moments later she said, “Have another cup.” But her h’s went unspoken and became the first of hundreds, then thousands, that would accumulate in the corners of the house and thicken in the air like sighs.

In an adjoining room the twins, entirely responsible for their mother’s death, had finished their bottles and fallen back into guiltless sleep. At the far end of the house, the widower, Thomas Ransom, who had spent the night aching for his truant wife, lay across his bed, half awake, half asleep, and dreaming.

The three children sat in silence at Edie’s table. She had grizzled hair pulled up in a knot, heavy brows, high cheeks, and two long hairs in her chin. She was bony and flat and looked starched, like the apron she had tied around her. Her teeth were large and white and even, her eyes an uncompromising blue.

She talked to the children as if they were her age, forty-one. “My father was an ostler,” she told them, and they listened without comprehension. “My youngest brother died at Wipers,” she said. “My nephew was gassed at Verdun.”

These were places the children had never heard of. But all three of them, even Jenny, understood the word “died.”

“Our mother died,” said James.

Edie nodded.

“I was born, the oldest of eight, in Atherleigh, a town in Devon. I’ve lived in five English counties,” she told them, without saying what a county was. “And taken care of thirty children, a few of them best forgotten.”

“Which ones?” said James.

But Edie talked only of her latest charges, the girls she had left to come to America.

“Lady Alice and Lady Anne,” said Edie, and described two paragons of quietness and clean knees, who lived in a castle in Kent.

Edie didn’t say “castle,” she said “big brick house.” She didn’t say “lake,” she said “pond.” But the children, dazzled by illustrations in Cinderella and King Arthur, assumed princesses. And after that, they assumed castle, tower, moat, lake, lily, swan.

Lady Alice was seven and Lady Anne was eight when last seen immaculately crayoning with their ankles crossed in the tower overlooking the lake.

Eliza touched Edie’s arm. “What is gassed?” she said.

Edie explained.

Jenny lifted her spoon for attention. “I saw Father cry,” she said. “Twice.”

“Oh, be quiet,” said James.

With Edie, they could say anything.

After that morning, they would love tea forever, all their lives, in sitting rooms and restaurants, on terraces and balconies, at sidewalk cafés and whistle stops, even under awnings in the rain. They would drink it indiscriminately, careless of flavor, out of paper cups or Spode, with lemon, honey, milk, or cream, with spices or with rum.

Before Edie came to the Ransom house, signs of orphanhood were everywhere—in the twins’ colic, in Eliza’s aggravated impulse to pinch Jenny, in the state of James’s sheets every morning. Their father, recognizing symptoms of grief, brought home wrapped packages in his overcoat pockets. He gave the children a Victrola and Harry Lauder records.

“Shall we read?” he would ask in the evening, and take Edward Lear from the shelf. “ ‘There was an Old Man with a beard,’ ” read Thomas Ransom, and he and his children listened solemnly to the unaccustomed voice speaking the familiar words.

While the twins baffled everyone by episodes of weight loss and angry tears, various efforts to please were directed toward the other three. The cook baked cakes and frosted their names into the icing. The sympathetic gardener packed them into his wheelbarrow and pushed them at high speeds down sloping paths. Two aunts, the dead mother’s sisters, improvised weekly outings—to the ostrich farm, the alligator farm, the lion farm, to a picnic in the mountains, a shell hunt at the beach. These contrived entertainments failed. None substituted for what was needed: the reappearance at the piano or on the stairs of a young woman with freckles, green eyes, and a ribbon around her waist. Edie came to the rescue of the Ransoms through the intervention of the aunts’ English friend, Cissy. When hope for joy in any degree was almost lost, Cissy wrote and produced the remedy.

The aunts brought her letter to Thomas Ransom in his study on a February afternoon. Outside the window, a young sycamore, planted by his wife the year before, cast its sparse shadow on a patch of grass.

Cissy wrote that all her friends lost sons and brothers in the war and she was happy she had none to offer up. Wherever one went in London, wounded veterans, wearing their military medals, were performing for money. She saw a legless man in uniform playing an accordion outside Harrods. Others, on Piccadilly, had harmonicas wired in front of their faces so they could play without hands. Blind men, dressed for parade, sang in the rain for theater queues.

And the weather, wrote Cissy. Winter seemed to be a state of life and not a season. How lucky one was to be living, untouched by it all, in America, particularly California. Oh, to wake up to sunshine every morning, to spend one’s days warm and dry.

Now she arrived at the point of her letter. Did anyone they knew want Edith Fisk, who had taken care of children for twenty-five years and was personally known to Cissy? Edie intended to live near a cousin in Texas. California might be just the place.

The reading of the letter ended.

“Who is Cissy?” said Thomas Ransom, unable to foresee that within a dozen years he would marry her.

James, who had been listening at the door, heard only the first part of the letter. Long before Cissy proposed Edie, he was upstairs in his room, trying to attach a harmonica to his mouth with kite string.

 

 

Edie was there within two months. The aunts and Thomas Ransom began to witness change.

Within weeks the teasing stopped. Within months the nighttime sheets stayed dry. The twins, male and identical, fattened and pulled toys apart. Edie bestowed on each of the five children equal shares of attention and concern. She hung their drawings in her room, even the ones of moles in traps and inhabited houses burning to the ground. Samples of the twins’ scribblings remained on permanent display. The children’s pictures eventually occupied almost all one wall and surrounded a framed photograph of Lady Alice and Lady Anne, two small light-haired girls sitting straight-backed on dappled ponies.

“Can we have ponies?” Eliza and Jenny asked their father. But he had fallen in love with a woman named Trish and, distracted, brought home a cage of canaries instead.

Edie and the Ransom children suited each other. It seemed right to them all that she had come to braid hair, turn hems, push swings, take walks; to apply iodine to cuts and embrace the cry that followed, to pinch her fingers between the muddy rubber and the shoe. Edie stopped nightmares almost before they started. At a child’s first gasp, she would be in the doorway, uncombed and minus her false teeth, tying on her wrapper, a glass of water in her hand.

The older children repaid this bounty with torments of their own devising. They would rush at her in a trio, shout, “We’ve ‘idden your ’at in the ’all,” and run shrieking with laughter, out of her sight. They crept into her room at night, found the pink gums and big white teeth where they lay floating in a mug, and, in a frenzy of bad manners, hid them in a hatbox or behind the books.

Edie never reported these lapses of deportment to Thomas Ransom. Instead, she would invoke the names and virtues of Lady Alice and Lady Anne.

“They didn’t talk like roustabouts,” said Edie. “They slept like angels through the night.”

Between spring and fall the nonsense ceased. Edie grew into the Ransoms’ lives and was accepted there, like air and water and the food they ate. From the start, the children saw her as a refuge. Flounder as they might in the choppy sea where orphans and half-orphans drown, they trusted her to save them.