Oral History (9781101565612)

by Lee Smith

  Part Two

  RICHARD BURLAGE: HIS JOURNAL, FALL 1923

  September 5th

  After so strange a journey as I have completed, I find it difficult to marshall my confused impressions into any form which even approximates coherence. Dear God! What a vast and awe-inspiring country we live in; what a wild and various state is Virginia herself, this mountainous region a stranger land than Richmond can conceive of. But first: I intend for this journal to be a valid record of what I regard as essentially a pilgrimage, a simple geographical pilgrimage, yes, but also a pilgrimage back through time, a pilgrimage to a simpler era, back—dare I hope it—to the very roots of consciousness and belief. I make this pilgrimage fully aware of the august company I hereby join: all those pilgrims of yore who have sought, through their travels, a system of belief—who have, at the final destination, found also themselves. I seek no less. I seek no less, I say, even though Victor’s slurred denouncements still ring derisively in my ears.

  It was twilight a week ago—though it seems a month! Victor sat in one of the great velvet wing chairs, which he had pulled to the French window overlooking the garden. The high curved back of the chair made a somber elegant shadow against the lingering light, Victor having left the library, as always, in darkness. His words came at me out of this shadow, a disembodied voice which told my strongest doubts. “How many times do I have to tell you?” The question was rhetorical. “This is it, this is it, and this is all there is to it. You might as well stay here and join the firm.”

  I crossed the room to stand beside his chair. Below us, in the garden, I could barely make out the dim figure of Mother, her pastel dress an ethereal blur against the boxwood as she bent, stood, bent and stood, clipping roses. I could not hear the snip of the silver shears. All I saw was her fading ghostly form as she bent and stood, handing the cut flowers to Mary (Mother’s eternal shadow), Mary who stood silently there behind her on the garden path as she has stood silently behind Mother, “waiting on” her, ever since they were both young girls growing up at Lightsey Plantation, near Gloucester. Mary held a basket. She received the flowers. Mary and Mother did not speak. Mother bent and stood. Mary held the basket. Yet by infinitesimal degrees, it seemed, they moved together up the garden path, progressing as if by some magical process slower than any possible human movement, flowing softly together in their ancient symbiosis beyond the trellis and off into the fragrant August dusk.

  The garden lay shadowed before us, Mother’s pale dress a ghostly blur, the white marble forms of the statues gleaming faintly at intervals through the somehow luminous dusk. The scent of the flowers floated upward to Victor and me by the open window. From somewhere, beyond our walled garden, came the unmistakable tinny beat of a jazz piano, a Victrola recording no doubt, just audible. Mother and Mary had passed beyond sight. Father, I recall, had not returned that evening for dinner. Victor raised his ever-present glass from the Moroccan brass table to his lips, ice tinkling eerily in the darkness.

  “Cheers, Richard,” he said.

  I was overcome, I confess, by the sadness and beauty of that moment, a moment rendered even more poignant by my consciousness that it was to be my last evening at home for many months to come. “My God,” I choked, or something to that effect, the strong emotions smiting my chest like a fist. Beauty, sadness, decadence: Mother and Mary gathering the last of the flowers as night falls over the garden, Victor drinking alone in the library, sequestered by the enveloping velvet wings of his antique chair. (Huge white columns support that house—Grecian columns. It is a house supported by the past, and the past, as we all know, is dead. Yet we perpetuate its anguish, preserve its romance, and appreciate, by God, its beauty.) My consciousness of these things produced in me again that claustrophobia which has caused me, finally, to flee.

  “Listen.” Victor turned suddenly and clasped my arm, squeezing it until I could bear it no longer.

  I cried out in protest.

  “That’s it,” Victor said. He released my arm. “That’s all there is. There is pain, and the absence of pain. Remember.”

  Victor lost his soul in the war, I say, somewhere in France, no doubt, along with his leg, along with certain ideas of conscience and decency I hold dear. And yet I am his brother, and I confess I have had my visions too, my own intuitions of nothing beyond this very day, my own fear of nothing at the core. I realize that Victor is far from unique; a pervasive loss of meaning may have been the cost of our winning the war. (Strange how I can transcribe in this journal the words which I have never dared to voice.)

  “I intend to find out the truth of the matter,” I told Victor then. “I hope to prove you wrong.”

  Victor laughed. Although I could not see his face at that moment, I knew it; I know it now as well as I know my own (in fact, it resembles my own)—the lazy slanting hazel eyes; the high pale forehead; the prominent, almost painful jut of the cheekbones; the aquiline nose; the curling, sensitive mouth.

  “Richard,” he said. “Little Richard, going forth to slay the dragon, that dragon which in all probability he will not recognize even when he finds it. You know,” Victor continued—and this was perhaps the unkindest cut of all—“you know, Richard, I wish you well. God knows I do. And the thing that bothers me most about this so-called pilgrimage of yours is that I’m afraid you will fail through sheer assiduousness.”

  “How’s that?” I asked him.

  “Your expectations are so high,” Victor said. “They’re ridiculous. And furthermore, your tendency is to catalogue a thing to death. Your awareness of experiencing any emotion is likely to get in the way of the emotion itself, so that you think about feeling rather than feel. Do you understand what I’m saying, Richard?”

  “Good evening,” I said.

  I left him there, in the midst of his drunken philosophizing, aware that his words cut all too close to the bone. Yet, hurt as I was, I resolved to turn even this criticism to my own advantage, to extract and digest that kernel of unfortunate truth which I knew his drunken remark contained.

  “Richard!” Victor called out to me as I quit the library, passed through the hall, and started up the wide curving stairs. “Shit,” he said to himself. “Richard!” he called again.

  Mother bustled into the hallway then, making those soothing clucking sounds in her familiar fashion, flashing on the electric lights. “Why, goodness!” I heard her exclaim to Victor. “Why, whatever are you doing here, darling, in the dark? And close that window, for heaven’s sake!” Mother holds tenaciously to her idea that night air is dangerous, bringing Negro illnesses into the house.

  I went to my room without further ado, leaving Victor to his loneliness, Mother to the terrible solicitude which Victor so resents, and Father to the enjoyment of Mrs. Sidley, the mistress he keeps across town.

  In the morning, I bade them all adieu. I kissed Mother on her soft white cheek, shook Father’s hand, and had extended my own hand to Victor when he pushed it aside to clasp me suddenly in his arms and hug me fiercely. “Take care,” he said. Mother sobbed. Father shook his head and made a gravelly noise in his throat. They stood on the front stoop as Thomas brought the automobile around and loaded my bags. I entered the car, he started the engine, and we were off! I looked back, waving, to see the three of them there like a frieze, like a lovely and lifelike frieze on the façade of the Burlage mansion, I thought. Thomas accelerated around the corner onto Ampthill Road; a new chapter in the book of my life had begun.

  I was familiar with the Broad Street train station, of course, having passed through its lofty portals so often in my many trips to and from Charlottesville, trips made—I thought then, in my naiveté—in order to acquire a “gentleman’s education.” God knows, in point of fact, what I actually acquired there: a passing acquaintance with the classics, I suppose, a haphazard knowledge of Latin and French; some sense of history; a love of literature; and last, but by no means least, how to hold my liquor, look a man in the eye, and play—I confess it!—the ukelele. Be
neath its great frescoed dome, the train station was filled with youths as shallow as I now perceived myself to have been only several months prior. They sported cardigans, carried books, and bore their fresh and animated faces like so many gifts. Girls clung to their arms saying good-bye, perhaps, or boarding the train too for Sweetbriar or Hollins. Blond curls, wet red lips, those lovely darting eyes and the way some of them have of staring so boldly, promising all. And giving it, I reminded myself: giving it, but not to me. The war had changed so many things. I was sorry to have missed it, in a way.

  I stood beneath the vast dome of the train station with a sudden sense of irrevocable loss: the happy, close family of my youth, gone; my college days, which now seemed a mere exercise in frivolity, nevertheless gone; Melissa, the girl I had hoped to marry, engaged to another man; my religious faith and the sanguine equanimity with which I had been wont to face the world, gone. The train station seethed with mounting activity as two great engines pulled up on the tracks beyond, roaring. Fiery cinders shot out beneath their giant wheels. Thomas had turned my bags over to the porter and now stood before me, turning his cap in his hands, a dark grinning gargoyle-like reminder of the life I had to leave before I could assume it. In that moment, I felt as lonely as it is possible to feel, I think, utterly cast off from humanity’s moorings, adrift. The travelers’ echoing voices reverberated around my head, a hum as meaningless as my life appeared to me at that crucial moment before departure.

  “Thass yo train, suh,” Thomas said.

  It was so. There was no way to proceed but forward, no course but “All aboard!”

  I gave Thomas some money and shook his hand. Then I rushed out to the platform, my heart thudding as that acrid and exciting smell of cinders reached my nose. I swung up, onto the trembling platform; the whistle sounded; the journey had begun.

  And a fascinating one it proved to be!

  I settled myself in a coach toward the rear of the train, two coaches distant from the dining car. No one took the seat next to mine, but the seat facing me was soon occupied by a young college girl—a schoolgirl, at least, and clearly an incipient vamp—her eyes ringed with some dark substance and her full red lips in a pout. She settled herself with a flourish, pulled a compact from her purse, and powdered her nose. After this pointless exercise in vanity, she treated me to a brilliant meaningless red smile before turning her attention to a fashion magazine. I felt that I was nothing more than an object to her, unworthy of respect or even proper notice. This rankled.

  I was secretly pleased when a cumbersome old country woman with myriad paper parcels claimed the seat next to hers, considerably jostling and discommoding that young fashion plate as she settled herself with difficulty, appropriating well over half the seat. This woman, about sixty-five years in age, gave off a faint, peculiarly musty odor, which appeared to emanate naturally from the great quantity of clothes she wore, all of them discolored and faded to an indeterminate kind of gray. Her lined face was kindly, however, and a large goiter stuck out from her neck. The young lady glanced sideways at this goiter, and shuddered. I smiled. The old woman folded her wrinkled grayish hands primly on her lap, leaned back, and closed her eyes. Was she praying? I wondered. Or sleeping? Never mind. The point seemed clear.

  I had before me an object lesson, I thought: two ways to face the world. One way as embodied by this old woman—simple, unassuming, a kind of peasant dignity, a naturalness inherent in her every move. The other, exemplified by the girl—smartness, sophistication, veneer without substance. I was conscious that I have now opted for the old woman’s way, have thrown in my lot with a creature I would have jeered at a year ago. My present trip to the mountains is indeed a trip to that wellspring of naturalness she symbolized. And I admired my choice: the correct choice, the only choice for a sensitive and moral man in my dilemma.

  But oh! The girl’s very presence across from me brought up so many unwonted images of Melissa: Melissa stamping her little foot and tossing her yellow curls in anger; Melissa with gin on her breath pressing her whole warm trembling body into mine as we stood in the moonlight by the Colonnade; jet beads flying as Melissa danced till dawn, as I stood near the door in misery and watched her. A creature of frivolity, of sensation, and yet—oh, the manly passion she had aroused in me as I held her in my arms! Carpe diem, that was Melissa’s philosophy, yet she threw me over for a man ten years my senior, a man who had served with distinction in the war, a man who had made his fortune early in tobacco. Who could blame her? We had never been formally engaged. And yet—and yet . . . a hint of the girl’s perfume reached my nostrils, bringing with it such pain that I stood abruptly, resolved to go into the dining car or out upon the rear platform until I had fully conquered my emotions.

  “Excuse me.” I stood, nodded curtly, and withdrew. The girl’s eyelids merely flickered; a vein in her temple throbbed blue. The old woman slept on.

  I made my way through two cars to the rear platform, where I stood rocking with the movement of the train, watching as the town of my birth receded behind me. Richmond: I saw only the rag-tag remnants—those sad little houses, row upon row, where fat men sit out on the stoops in their undershirts and the dingy wash flaps on the line. Then the tarpaper Negro shacks, the unpaved streets, and so variously peopled: huge black women with their heads wound in bright-patterned fabric, thin old black men bent over and shuffling along, the giggling high-hipped bronze girls with their jutting breasts, the immaculately fashionable swaggering gent with the yellow hat; and all those dark barefooted children who stood by the tracks to see us pass, impassive as stones with their huge round dark eyes as we came and went. Beyond all this lay the part of Richmond I would see now only in my mind’s eye: Monument Avenue, the wide calm street with those wonderful statues, all that upright Confederate bravery, and the lovely flying hooves. And the intricate grillwork atop the garden walls, the generous wax-leaved magnolias within, the huge columned houses themselves with their shining beveled windows, their wide cypress halls, their glittering chandeliers. Ah yes, I thought. All that. I felt relieved, increasingly relieved, my spirit somehow lightened, as we clattered through the bedraggled edges of Richmond and passed into the flat open country beyond.

  The fields stretched green and endless then, shimmering on either side, Negroes working the cotton, an occasional imposing farmhouse set back up a long driveway, surrounded by shade trees, the dusty country court-towns where we stopped just long enough to toss a mail pouch out and take on parcels. Powhatan, Midlothian, Cumberland.

  In the dining car, I treated myself to a fine, lingering lunch. I nodded to my fellow diners, but spoke to no one. I wondered how I must appear to them—student, young father, man of the cloth? But in those bland faces, I could find no clue. The apple pie was excellent. Virginia rolled past slowly, as a green and fertile dream.

  The girl disembarked at Lynchburg, met by a tall earnest young man who clearly worshiped her. I pitied him as I watched the two of them walk away, fingers entwined, he the willing recipient now of all her baggage. I went back to my seat, napped, and read a bit. The afternoon slowly passed as we rolled westward into the setting sun. My companion slept on. It crossed my mind several times that perhaps she had died, a circumstance which would place me in an undeniably awkward position, but she stirred in sleep just often enough to assure me of her continuing mortality.