by Trevanian
Back in my attic room above a bar on Seattle’s old Skid Road, half the wall above my work table was papered with rejection slips. I didn’t find a publisher for I Never Took You to a Ball Game, Kid. Until now, that is.
A creaking old grain tramp brought me from Newport News to Europe, where I banged around on a pre-war Matchless until it broke down, marooning me in Sicily for lack of spare parts. I worked my way back to Paris. In the 1950s Paris was still the city of Baron Haussmann, Zola, Proust, and the Lost Generation, having not yet fallen victim to the cultural vandalism of inner-city gentrification or the aesthetic vandalism of egomaniacal politicians desperate to leave their mark on Paris. I wrote in ‘brown’ cafes without distracting music or clanging games, or I exchanged ideas and prejudices with other unknown but confident writers and painters, each of us making one small coffee last through the morning. I slept in tawdry hotels and sometimes in doorways or beneath bridges where I earned acceptance among the clochards by bringing vegetable crates from les Halles to burn in the communal oil drum. We would sit with our backs against the escarpment, swapping late-night lies as flames flickered beneath sooty arches. Winter came and we sometimes slept on the metal grills, where up-drafts of warm air from the Métro kept us from freezing. We lay on flattened-out cardboard boxes so the grills wouldn’t bruise our hipbones.70
Spring arrived and I met a young woman who wore long dramatic capes, and whose eyes were flecked with the colors of autumn. We walked across Paris one blustery night as the shifting wind alternately billowed her cape out behind her or enfolded her within it, as I wanted to do. Dawn came while we were talking sleepily in a bar used by bakers on the Ile Saint Louis.
Beautiful and cheerful, she was also a talented painter whose attributes and qualities were totally antithetical to mine. Where I was cynical, she was accepting. Where I was judgmental, she was understanding. I drew my energy from anger and frustration; hers came from health and inner calm. I was a congenital pessimist; she was hopeful... no Pollyanna optimist, but a life-embracing woman making a healthy Pascal’s Bet. I was tough; she was strong; I had impact, she endurance; I was a man of words, she a woman of images. The only thing we shared, other than physical desire for each other, was a sense of the absurd, the utter nonsense that delights the whimsical mind as much as it annoys the earthbound one. It was my inexplicable good fortune that she was willing to marry me, but everyone warned her that our profound differences could not support a long-lasting union.
For many restless years I dragged her and our children from place to place, forever running from my disappointments and self-inflicted injuries, and sapping her creative energy with the task of continual nest-building as I pursued the career best suited to my nomadic life, story-telling.
Things turned out well enough for the woman and two children you met sitting on the stoop outside their new home on North Pearl Street, their shoddy possessions piled around them.
As the film buffs among you will have guessed, Anne-Marie never did replace Shirley Temple. While still a teenager, she escaped the tensions and recriminations of Mother and Ben’s home and fled into an early marriage with a winsome, breezy young man who turned out to have a serious problem with alcohol. Despite the emotional and financial difficulties his drinking caused, they produced half a dozen children, many grandchildren, and a host of great-grandchildren on whom Anne-Marie lavished love and care, and in whom she took, and still takes, great pride. She was widowed relatively young and her life has not been easy, but through all her trials she has developed her ability to find calm within herself. This enviable spiritual resource has helped her to accept life’s injustices without bitterness, and she now lives a rich contemplative life.
Her ship has come in, and it is laden with the peace she always sought.
Mother’s final decline into the kaleidoscopic ooze of Alzheimer’s disease was mercifully rapid. The onset of her dementia had been slow and, in its way, merciful. As sometimes happens, the first things to disappear from her memory were the injustices and resentments she had nurtured and brooded over all her life. Ben vanished from her memory; my father followed soon after; and for the last two years she had no memory of ever having been abandoned or disappointed by any man. She sometimes recalled that she had once been married, but she remained sweetly vague about who he had been, and why he was no longer with her on their little farm on Puget Sound. Sometimes she believed that her husband was the man who was now her doctor, and sometimes her lawyer held this honor, and even, for a short period, the governor of her state. He was always a well-educated man who was also, she would confide with a wink, a great dancer and a real snappy dresser. In fact, she and her husband had won cups for dancing the Charleston. In her later years, she assumed that the big bouquet of Talisman roses and the peck of Northern Spy apples she received on each birthday came from her mythical husband...whichever one it was at the time.
The last year of her life she began to be visited by an Indian princess who came through the dazzling mist of the early mornings to tell her that she was vastly admired by all Indian women, who were grateful to her for getting them the vote. She once showed me a special blade of grass this Indian princess had given her as a token of how proud everyone was of her great success as a tap dancer, a fashion designer and a writer of novels. The fog that thickened around her remained pink almost to the end.
Her ship had come in, and it was laden with the success she had been denied.
After my health declined to the point of being able to work only two or three hours a day, and only with the support of oxygen, I found it difficult to live up to my image as a scrappy outsider going to Fistcity with publisher after publisher over literary, social or political matters. How tough and independent can you be when your wife has to bathe you and help you dress? But I still have good moments. Sometimes, when I have been bundled up and installed on the terrace of my cafe to read or to write letters, I look up and see my wife striding across the ale of our Basque village towards me, her cape flapping behind her. As she approaches she smiles at me, there is a rush of warmth around my heart, and my spirits lift.
My ship came in, too, and it was laden with love.
Mendiburua, Pays Basque, 2004
1This tale is complete without footnotes, but there are also social, historical, political and personal observations available to you. You can download these cybernotes from www.trevanian.com, or have a friend download them for you. Cybernote 1 will deal with ‘bog Irish’. Return to Text
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