Odd Jobs (13 page)

How did inhabiting such an antique affect our lives? We joined the local historical society, for one thing. We worked up, for benefit of our fellow first-period owners, a smattering of small talk about gunstock posts, clamshell plaster, purlin-type roof construction, and original brick nogging. First-period houses, mixed in with creditable specimens of the Georgian and Federal styles, were strung up and down our street, called High at one end and East at the other. Architectural conservation was freshly in the air; Ipswich’s old houses, left for centuries to fend for themselves, were no longer being torn down and, rather, were being taken in hand and fixed up by newcomers to the town—commuters and artisans with beards, pigtails, and a regard for history. We ourselves felt part, deeply and effortlessly, of the community because we owned a piece of its past, sleeping and eating in rooms where fourteen or so previous generations had left their scuff-marks.

The straightforward, hearth-centered architecture of our house must have strengthened our family sense. Once we moved, the fact is, things fell apart. The big nut and bolt were holding us together as well. Erwin Panofsky, in his elegant monograph
Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism
, describes the architectural spirit of the medieval cathedrals as one of
manifestatio
—the principle of elucidation and continuous clarification that informs scholastic philosophy. Each rib of the ceiling vault, for example, can be followed down into the compound columns that line the nave. Abbot Suger, the first known architectural theorist of the Middle Ages, wrote of the “principle of transparency.” “And so,” Panofsky tells
us, “did High Gothic architecture delimit interior volume from exterior space yet insist that it project itself, as it were, through the encompassing structure; so that, for example, the cross section of the nave can be read off from the façade.” So, too, the layout of the rooms—two above, two below—can be read off the façades of the houses the Puritans built, and a certain transparency quickens the life within. The beams are plain to see in the rooms; organic grains and irregularities animate the floors and walls; there are no hidden passageways, no cunning closets, no dumbwaiters, no cubbyholes for servants. To wake and work in such a house felt like an honor—a privileged access to the lucid spirit of the New World’s Puritan settlements.

T
HE STRANGE EXPECTANCY
that getting on any train gives us quite outshines whatever pleasurable sensations may accompany climbing into a car or onto an airplane. It is, perhaps, the
threading through
of train travel, the knowledge that its path is inflexibly fixed in steel and spalls and oil-soaked ties, which makes the traveller tingle; or perhaps it is the largeness and throbbing, chuffing power of the vehicle, quite disproportionate to our simple need to get from here to there, that, as with the great steamships of the pre-jet era, spikes the trip with a dash of extravagance, of holiday. One of the cherishable distinctions of the Boston area’s North Shore (as opposed to the South, whose Old Colony Railroad shut down in 1959) remains its possession, through thick and thin, of a working commuter-train.

The line, long under the management of the Boston and Maine and now part of the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, has two branches, which part at Beverly. One, the Gloucester or Rockport branch, continues northeast, up the shaggy middle of Cape Ann, and ends behind a gas station in Rockport, a ten minutes’ winding, downhill walk from a public beach; the other bears due north through the coddled greenery of Wenham and Hamilton and at one time continued on past Ipswich to Newburyport and Salisbury. I was present, over twenty years ago, at a town meeting in Ipswich which debated a motion to subsidize continued train service, or else see it cease. Commuters were much a
minority at that time, but the vote carried, and the Ipswich branch did not wither away, as did its continuation up the coast. Now, I believe, at a time when the automotive passageways to Boston are increasingly congested and bound to get worse as new highways and tunnels are being desperately constructed, the railroad is prized as a regional asset, as precious to the milieu as granite outcroppings, wild blueberries, and lobster boats bobbing offshore. Suave and smooth-rolling new cars made in Canada are replacing the battered Budd coaches with their fractured windows and tattered slam-back seats, and the decaying, abandoned stations are refurbished and decorated with bright metallic maps proclaiming these once-remote outposts part of the metropolitan “T.”

Nahant, a breezy square mile of pasture and cliff connected to Lynn by a thin curve of beach, was America’s first summer resort, and the Eastern Railroad by 1838 was ferrying passengers across the harbor to East Boston and thence by rail to Nahant and Salem. The rails were extended to Beverly and Ipswich and New Hampshire; in 1847 the Gloucester branch came into existence, and seven years later the ferry was rendered obsolete by an overland link, and Gloucester found itself a mere hour from Boston. Joseph Garland’s
Boston’s Gold Coast
reports a native of the time poetically complaining, “A hand of iron had been laid upon the bosom of Essex County.” In his own amply poetic voice, Garland describes the subsequent invasion of the Boston rich:

This proto-West has by now been thoroughly won and tamed. The trains on weekdays sternly carry commuters and shoppers into the city’s dusky, well-worn North Station. On summer weekends, the cars are almost orgiastic with lightly clad city-dwellers being hauled back, coated with salt and sand and sunburn, at the end of a day by the sea. Celtics and Bruins fans have a most convenient time of it, since the arena where both teams play is physically part of the terminal. But even those who
rarely take the train get something out of it—a rumor of motion, a suggestion of potential escape. The first locomotive noisily moves before six; the last sounds its whistle long after midnight. A string of crossings excitingly ding their warning bells and lower their gates. Between the hourly passings, the empty tracks are strolled by schoolchildren, as shortcuts to here and there. Where the rails run west, they reflect the orange sunset; east, the pink sunrise. The tracks’ proximity, at least in the outer reaches, does not seem to depress property values. My own house, up a wooded hill, trembles when the train passes, and the effect is as of a caress, a gentle reminder, like the sight of airplane lights circling in over Massachusetts Bay toward Logan Airport, that an urban congeries lurks over the arboreal horizon.

From either terminus, at Ipswich or Rockport, the train scuds through bucolic landscape for a while, the rocks and trees permitting glimpses of Appleton Farm and the Wenham Golf Course, Lily Pond and Manchester Harbor. Then, on the fringes of Beverly, the houses irrevocably thicken, and a grit of warehouse backs and commercial outlets flies into the eyes. Beverly Station is an ambitious yellow-brick structure that now serves the public only as a restaurant. On the coldest of winter days, with the wind-chill off of the Bass River bitter beyond factoring, the commuters huddle within the doorway to the bar or else in the lee of one of the obsolete baggage-carts that decorate the platform, cemented fast. Once mounted into the train, however, passengers are greeted with a warmth so steamy as to induce instant sleep. Forthwith, there is the sudden adventure of crossing a wide estuary on a railroad bridge narrow enough to give the illusion of riding a Hovercraft. The old oil-soaked wooden bridge burned down a few years ago, and two trains trapped north of Salem for some weeks buzzed back and forth on Cape Ann, like hornets in a bottle, until they were captured and barged back to Boston. The bridge has been rebuilt in concrete.

After the sunny dazzlement of the open water and its scenic flock of boats and its fringe of shingled condominiums, the train takes a dark plunge into the earth beneath Salem, depriving us of the sight of the town’s handsome old heart—the pillared brick mansions the China trade financed, and the civic buildings that have succeeded to the Old Custom House, which gave employment to Hawthorne and a starting point to
The Scarlet Letter
. Perhaps the ominous darkness fittingly memorializes Hawthorne and his ancestor Judge Hathorne, who sat in on the notorious witchcraft trials of 1692. The tunnel ends in a graffiti-rich concrete
trough which was, until recently, the Salem waiting platform—now mercifully replaced by a tidy pair of postmodern pavilions on the side of the tunnel toward Beverly.

Salem’s outskirts shudder into those of Swampscott, a city of dentists, which until recently boasted the most dilapidated station on the line. Then the train takes wing into Lynn, which it enters on high, on an elevated iron platform at the level of the upper windows of the boarded-up factories. So desolate, so scratched and rusted and spray-painted is this spot that one might be in the gutted sections of the Bronx; yet between here and Boston intervenes a spacious prairie of marsh grass and winding saltwater inlet. Nothing—not the car dumps or the gravel yards of Revere, not the swamped sand barges or the skeletal carcasses of abandoned dories—can quite hide the basic grandeur of this amphibious domain, which in summer puts on a dress of shimmering green and in winter entertains a glittering clash of ice and tide. It seems ages until the Chelsea stop, which some trains ignore, and ages more of sidling superhighway stanchions and factory flanks (one advertises
ARISE FUTON
,
The Original Futon Company
) before the train slows its swaying glide through the multiplying tracks and comes to a stop, with a tremendous shout from the conductor, in North Station.

I am always astonished, disembarking from the train, by how many others have accompanied me on the trip, which seems such a solitary, meditative hour of shifting scenery. We are a multitude, all marching in the same direction alongside the train, like a sleeve that floppily follows the direction of a halted fist. We are motley, of all hairdos and ages; at peak hours there are plenty of men in gray suits, but also sturdy working women wearing white socks and sneakers and carrying their heels in their briefcases. Two-tone L. L. Bean rubbers are not uncommon, nor tatty collegiate parkas festooned with dead ski-lift tickets. The train-shed roofs are usually dripping rain or melted snow, and there is always the same red-faced man selling paper cones of roses, and another peddling soft pretzels
à la moutarde
. When a trestle bridge nearer the city burned, in that era of burning bridges, and the short and happy ride ended in a dusty improvised parking lot in easternmost Cambridge, these two small merchants appeared with their carts, without missing (to my knowledge) a single day. We avoid their importunities expertly, walking with a stride simultaneously brisk, wary, and bored; we have become, by a miracle of transportation, city folk.

ESSAYS ON ASSIGNED TOPICS

T
HE TOPIC
appeals, appalls, dizzies, delights. It dwarfs the male pen by much the same scale as the human ovum dwarfs the spermatozoon; that is, by 1,400,000 cubic microns to seventeen, or over eighty thousand to one. If life is a forest, women are the trees. Mothers, grandmothers, aunts, cousins, teachers, classmates, playmates, dates, mates, daughters, editors, reviewers both hostile and friendly—my goodness, how can one generalize about faces and voices whose sum leaves almost nothing of one’s earthly existence unaccounted for? Further, the topic is not only vast but hot, and any word a male ventures upon it will be as inevitably suspect as an accused murderer’s testimony in his own behalf.

Let me, testing the thin ice, begin as far back in time as my memory can reach, with my maternal grandmother, whose beautiful full name was Katherine Ziemer Kramer Hoyer. I grew up in the house she kept. Always serving, serving others: that was the image she projected. She cooked the meals and then herself ate standing up, while the rest of us sat at the table. Her very shape had become bent by slaving; she was a small thin woman in a cotton dress bent over as if constantly peering into a pot. I still remember the strain on her sharp-nosed face as she stared upward at me while I crouched on a lower branch of a tree. That was one of the things women did, I early concluded: they tried to get you to come down out of a tree. She was afraid I would fall, and that possibility had occurred to me also, so I was half grateful to be called down. But the other half, it seemed, needed to climb higher and higher, in defiance of the danger. Society and God wanted me to keep climbing, however
much my heart was on the ground with my grandmother. This ambiguity is with me yet. Dare it, don’t dare it. What do women want? Some of the girls I grew up with climbed higher than I dared, showing their underpants as they ascended.