by Mary Morris
As I grow older, I develop a horror of large stores. Inside of Marshall Field’s I can barely breathe. My mother has a habit of wandering off, and I’m trying to find her. Once at the Harvard Coop my mother disappears in office supplies. As I race around, looking for her, I bump into two friends I haven’t seen in a while. They ask me how I’m doing, and I reply I’m fine, but I’ve just lost my mother. They offer their condolences.
When I move to New York after college, I can’t walk into Bloomingdale’s or Saks without feeling as if my head will explode. I find a small shop in Manhattan run by two Korean sisters. They help me decide what I’ll look good in. I hardly have to think about it at all. Black slacks, black dresses. Black as often as I can. On my own I buy shoes, bags, jewelry, scarves. I buy them from street vendors and at small craft fairs, from little boutiques. I am always looking for earrings, something to spiff up my hair. I buy things that can’t be returned, that don’t need to be altered. Years later a friend will comment that I accessorize well.
80
India, 2011
MY NEW GUIDE, Vibhav, is about as different from Ajay as anyone could be. He’s bubbly, loquacious. His English is perfect, and he seems to be a man with a plan. He shows up, pretty much dressed for safari in khaki shorts and a khaki shirt, floppy hat. He holds a clipboard and has binoculars around his neck. Unlike Ajay, for whom I had to pay extra, Vibhav is the guide assigned to me during the entire time I’m in Kahna. He is bright and perky as I approach the jeep.
“Ready to go, Miss Morris,” he says. I’m almost expecting him to salute but grateful that he doesn’t. Our driver, Sonu, introduces himself. He speaks little English, but Vibhav explains he is also a good guide as well as a mahout. Sonu’s father is a senior mahout. The role of mahout is handed down by fathers to their sons and begins when a boy is very young. He will receive a young elephant that will be his to train and care for during the duration of the elephant’s life. We will probably run into Sonu’s father on his elephant during the day.
We set off past fields of workers in the buffer zone. This is the land of the Baagh people, who worship the tiger as a god. They also worship the trees and the land. Men, stooped over, are pouring bladders of water down holes. They are catchers of rats and mice, which they will cart back to their villages to roast over flames. Rats and mice are a delicacy. On the side of the road on a large stone slab two girls pound stacks of bullock manure into patties that are drying in the sun. These will provide fuel for their fires and adobe for their houses.
We pause at the gate to Kahna to get our paperwork in order. Then the gate is lifted and we’re inside. We drive down the dusty road with Vibhav chatting away. I miss Ajay’s pensive reserve, but at the same time Vibhav explains a great deal to me. “If you ever meet a tiger in the jungle,” Vibhav tells me, “don’t run. Stand up very tall. He will not recognize you as prey. His prey come on four legs.” I may not be prey, but at the same time I would be encroaching on his territory.
He may not want to eat me, but I have read an account in which a tiger grabbed a man who was tracking him by his backpack and shook him until he broke most of the bones in the man’s body. While the chances of my meeting up with a tiger now are slim, since I am stuck in this jeep, I appreciate the advice. Vibhav gives me this final warning: “So if you run into a tiger on the road, don’t crouch. Don’t take your eyes off of him. And walk backward very slowly.”
I’m having trouble envisioning this. I don’t know many people who under the circumstances wouldn’t run for their lives, let alone walk away backward. I’m impressed with those people who can roll into a ball and let a grizzly bear use them to play soccer. I’d like to believe I’d be the one to crumple to the ground in surrender. But I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t. Once while swimming off the coast of Honduras I found myself being followed by a barracuda—the most feared animal in the Caribbean because it can snap and in an instant rip off a man’s calf. I swam like a madwoman to shore.
“Last year,” Vibhav goes on, “a mahout was killed by a tiger.” Every morning the mahout must go into the jungle to find his elephant, which grazes freely at night. This mahout was out in the early morning, and he came between a tigress and her cubs. Despite his training not to run, he ran. He panicked. He had his walkie-talkie, so he called for help, but the tiger chased him to a tree, which the man climbed. Tigers can’t really climb trees, but then the man fell from the tree and was devoured.
I make a face. “You mean…eaten?”
Vibhav nods somberly, as does Sonu, who seems to be following this story. His father, after all, is a mahout, as is Sonu. The dangers are real. “Okay, so I’ll try not to run,” I tell them and they both laugh.
“Yes,” Vibhav says, “and never come between a tiger and her cubs.”
81
“YOU WERE ONCE WILD HERE,” Isadora Duncan said. “Don’t let them tame you.” As a dancer, of course she understood this. But as a mother, when her children drowned in the Seine, she did not go wild. She went nearly mad. She sought men who would impregnate her, young lovers who would provide new offspring to replace all that she had lost. When that failed, she formed a dance company of girls and referred to them as her children. Many took her last name. And then she died that famous, ludicrous death—her scarf getting caught in the wheel of a car and essentially decapitating her when she was flung from the vehicle. But even in the midst of her deepest suffering, Duncan understood that in her art she had to be wild. She was never meant to be tamed.
82
IN PICTURES from the journey I am like this. Grim-faced. Frowning at moments when I should be laughing. In front of the Trevi Fountain, the Eiffel Tower, Buckingham Palace, I look more as if I’m headed to the dentist than on the grand tour. Even in the pictures where I strike odd poses, mimicking the statues in the Villa Borghese gardens, there’s no expression on my face. These could be the mug shots for crimes I have yet to commit. It is my mother who puts them into the album. I can’t bear to look at them. Yet she’s hardly smiling either. Her unhappiness seems to mirror mine.
It is 1962 and my mother scoops me up and takes me to Europe with her. I am her reluctant traveling companion because my father refuses to go. What went on between my parents was never clear to me. I suspected things that I was too young to understand. When I was very young, their twin beds were pushed as far apart as they could go. I never cuddled between them, but instead bounced from bed to bed like a Ping-Pong ball. When I was about ten, I gave my mother a silky nightgown for her birthday, pink and transparent. I think I picked it out myself—only to have her walk into my room one night and hurl it at me. “I don’t need this,” she said in her fury. I don’t remember when she moved into the maid’s room, but I do remember that she never left.
And now my mother wants to flee. (An art I will perfect myself in the coming years.) And she intends for me to accompany her. But I am a sullen teenager in love with an Irish boy from across the tracks when my mother decides to drag me off to Europe. I know nothing of her scheme when she picks me up one day after school. “Get in the car,” she tells me. “We’re going to get your passport.” I didn’t want a passport, and I didn’t know why I needed one. My summer would revolve around only three things: learning touch typing, spending afternoons at the beach, and being in the arms of the Irish boy. But my mother has other plans.
As we drive south on Edens Highway from the suburbs where we lived to downtown Chicago, she explains. She intends to take me to Paris, London, and Rome as soon as school lets out. It’s clear that she isn’t really asking. My mother rarely asks my opinion about anything concerning me. But that’s beside the point. She wants to get away. She’s never been anywhere really, except to Idaho one summer—a place she detested. And she’s longing to travel. Anyone who knows my mother knows this. Now she wants to do the grand tour.
I’m appalled. “Can’t you ask Dad?” I whine. We both know that my father wil
l never go with her. He hates to go anywhere except to his office, the golf course, or his club. I am to be her reluctant companion, an accidental tourist for six weeks on the road. This is my worst nightmare. “I don’t want to,” I tell her, staring out as the flat Midwestern landscape speeds by.
My mother grips the wheel with her white gloves. “You’re going,” she says.
* * *
—
The passport office is located in a dreary green institutional-type building. Inside, my mother takes a number, gets some forms, and then sits down on one of the gray plastic chairs. As we wait, a woman in some kind of military uniform marches in. She’s wearing high boots and a cap and begins to stomp around, then gives the Sieg Heil salute to me, clicking her heels together. I’m terrified, but my mother laughs. “It’s awful, I know,” she says, “but she’s just crazy.” Still this woman makes me feel that the world I am about to enter is a dangerous place and I’m its reluctant voyager.
A few weeks later an official envelope arrives which my mother hands to me with a flourish as if I am being anointed for something. But for what? Inside I find my passport with the gold seal of the United States on its cover. I flip through its virgin pages, then tuck it into the passport case my mother has given me with my initials inscribed on it. I don’t give this passport much thought. Nor do I understand its secret powers until we arrive in Paris early on a Saturday morning, groggy from sleep, and the French customs official in his dark blue uniform and high red hat raises his stamp and imprints it on my passport. He hands it back to me and welcomes me to France. “Bienvenu, mademoiselle.” I have crossed my first border.
* * *
—
In Paris we stay in the Hotel de Vendôme. My mother admires its canopied mahogany beds, its red damask curtains. She savors peach melba in the evenings and washes her feet in the bidet.
Since I was very little, she’d wanted to go to Paris. She named our first dog Renoir. When I was in grammar school, she insisted that I learn French. (Before I graduated from high school my mother had seen to it that all the grammar schools in our town offered French by the sixth grade.) Every Tuesday afternoon I went over to see poor Monsieur LaTate, who had a nervous tic and seemed despondent as I struggled with the irregular verbs. I was pretty miserable too. But my mother was adamant. She was a Midwestern housewife who belonged more in a literary salon than in a supermarket. And now at last we’ve gotten out of the boonies. We’re in France.
My mother quickly falls in love with Paris. During the day she dresses to perfection in her dark suit with black patent leather pumps, white gloves, and always her strand of cultured pearls. They are a rather cheap strand—something she often complains about—but she wears them everywhere as we clomp around Paris, where she searches for eyeliners and perfumes (Chanel No. 5; Replique, of which she buys boxes to take home), handbags and shoes. She doesn’t care what anything costs. “So broke, so broke,” she likes to say. We are at this time in our lives “comfortable.” This isn’t to last forever, but on this trip she doesn’t bat an eye as she buys me a royal blue cloth coat to match my eyes (“Definitely your color”). She drags me to every Monet and monument she can find. We climb the steps of Sacré-Coeur and find a little bistro where, for the first time, I sip wine, then stagger back to the hotel. We dine on the Seine on a Bateaux Mouche with Paris illumined all around us. My mother doesn’t just visit Paris. She drinks it in.
* * *
—
We push on to Rome, where we stay at the Flora. My mother is sure that Marcello Mastroianni passed us in the street. A handsome young doorman calls me Miss America and flirts with me in a way that I think my mother finds charming. “How is Miss America? Where is Miss America going today?” And we are going everywhere. For the first days, we hire a guide who takes us all over Rome. It seems as if my mother never wants to stop. When he mentions that he is taking us to the oldest market in the city, she asks what she can buy there. “I wouldn’t know, madam,” he replies in his accented English. “It’s been closed for two thousand years.”
My mother is enchanted with it all, even the street sign that reads “Senso Unico,” which she thinks is the name of our street (which, in fact, is the Via Veneto). We have an audience with the pope—and five thousand other people—at the Vatican. The nuns shove to get past us. A priest from Chicago, Father Cozzio, who doesn’t care that we’re Jewish, leads us by the hand. For years afterward my mother will remember his name. One afternoon, we go across the street to the famous Eva of Rome, where we have our hair done. Mine is washed, set, and combed into a fluffy confection that is then sprayed. I hate it. My doorman gives me a wink. “Miss America, what have you done to your hair?” he asks as I walk by.
Back in our room, my mother lies down to take a nap and I stick my head in the sink, comb out my hair, and towel-dry it back to a semblance of its former self. Then I head out on my own. Leaving the hotel, I cross over to the Villa Borghese, happy to be alone, walking in the shade. But it is not long before I begin to hear sharp whistles, the sounds of men calling.
Some follow me shouting “Bella” and other things I don’t understand. It takes me a few minutes to realize that these catcalls are for me. I am both frightened and flattered. I find myself being coaxed into this world of doormen and strange men, and my Irish boy back home suddenly pales. Though I don’t know what they are saying, I understand that I’m on the brink of something and my life is about to change.
From Rome we take a bus to Florence and, as we leave Rome, the bus driver’s wife hands him a lunch pail and takes away his bag of dirty clothes. When they kiss goodbye, he cradles her face in his hands in a loving way. “Italians are so romantic,” my mother says. As we ride along, I gaze out at ruins and cypresses, vineyards and olive trees, until we stop in a small town for lunch. Here another woman greets our bus driver. She embraces him, kissing him on the lips, then hands him a parcel of clean clothes. As he goes to spend his lunch break with her, my mother laughs and laughs. “I don’t get it,” I say.
“Oh you will. One day you will.”
Florence, Pisa, Genoa. We bus across Italy. We head on to Nice, but en route we stop for a night in the seaside town of La Spezia. On a warm summer evening we dine on a balcony with the sea stretching before us. With the sun still shining, we eat delicious grilled fish and sip cold white wine. As she sits, looking out to sea, my mother fondles her strand of cultured pearls. She’s worn them almost every day for years. As the waiter comes to clear, she unwinds the strand over her head. “I’m sick of these,” she says. And, laughing, she hurls them into the sea.
83
India, 2011
THE NEXT MORNING when I open my door Vibhav is there to greet me. He stands in his khaki shorts and safari hat, clipboard in hand, beaming. “Are you ready, Miss Morris? Have you had your tea?” I nod, unable to hide my dismay. Though I spent only a few days with them, I miss Ajay and Sudhir. I want Ajay to be listening to the wings of birds and Sudhir trying to get a python back into a gunnysack. I miss having the best guide in India even if Vibhav is a very nice and, I’m sure, competent man.
I’m as ready as I suppose I’ll ever be.
“Then let’s go.” After more than a week of searching for tigers, I have seen none. Yet Vibhav seems endlessly optimistic. Though I can’t blame the messenger, I recall that troubled flicker that went across Catherine’s face when I saw her back in Delhi. It is just too cold for tigers to be on the prowl. “So how did you sleep?” Vibhav asks as we make our way through the chilly morning air to the jeep. “Are you feeling better?” I nod again though I’m not feeling any better at all. “I think we will go in a different direction today. Tigers are very smart. They know the way the jeeps tend to go and so they head into another part of the jungle. We will try and outsmart them.”
How can I tell him that all I want to do is stay under the covers? With a scarf around my neck and hot-water bot
tle in hand, I can barely talk for fear I’ll start hacking. I think of the method of the servants of the maharaja who sewed white sheets together to flush the tiger out. Perhaps we should try this instead. But Vibhav, who knows I am sick, assures me. We will stay out for only a few hours. “I’ll have you back by noon.”
As we drive along, he points out things I have already seen. He tells me what I already know. Only once does he raise his hand as if he hears something. Then just before noon we turn around. He tells me sadly that today there aren’t even alarm calls. “It’s as if the jungle,” he says, “is asleep.”
84
EXCEPT FOR A BRIEF PERIOD of intense mating and raising her cubs, the tiger is always alone. Like the shark she moves forward. She never backtracks. Unless she has no other choice, a tiger will never retrace her steps. Rather she will move in a circle, eventually returning to where she began. Curiously there are no tigers in Africa. People often make this mistake. They could have easily crossed over from Asia, but for whatever reason they never did. No one knows why.
85
AN ACQUAINTANCE told me something that her grandmother, a great traveler, told her. When you are young, you travel to far-flung places. When you are in your forties, you go to Europe. In your sixties, to Canada and Mexico. And when you are old, see America. I thought I was done with my far-flung places. I was hobbled. And I hadn’t seen forty in a long time.