—Willy Pogany
In my dormitory room, my choice single, looking down on the quad, I could see the watchman on his rounds. No Sea Monsters or Red Knights to trouble a girl, no Peeping Tom come over from Amherst College seven miles away. My grandfather, as a young workman, had laid the stone walks at Amherst when Olmsted’s landscaping firm refurbished the campus. That’s how he heard there was this place of learning, Smith College for girls. That’s why my mother was sent here to study mathematics and German, which may be why I dutifully turned from the window to devote myself to the next adventure of Percival, the boy with a bleeding lance sent in pursuit of grail, bowl, vessel or casque. The rag rug on my floor was braided by an educated woman filling her days with craft. She had chosen these scraps from the worn clothes of her husband, her children, fragments with the sniff of our bodies upon them. Her thin lavender coat, the best she could afford, was looped round the red vest Bill wore at Christmas before his waist gave way to belly. It may have been that night when I turned from the lamplit quad, gloomy but safe, that I first understood my mother’s rug braided with memory was lumpy, not beautiful, that it was never meant to be useful. No more than a story.
Waiting to hear from my brother, long as we’re still standing. Sent him the short tour, Andromeda, et al.
Who is this Pogany? I gather jack of all trades, did that swell scene in your lobby. Every post office had a mural, Works Progress Administration, courtesy of our President.
Not till ’34. Willy was never on the dole, but that desolate gold city, the sorry descent of the emigrants. He may, after all, have been more than a touch political.
Mims, we’ll be coming around noon on Thursday. Must have turnips, creamed onions.
I had not told you the full story when we ran through the nightly news of the kids large and small. You’d bought tickets to Macbeth. That would be later in the season. We spoke of missing the little house in the Berkshires, but wasn’t it best, what with the price of heating oil? I could no longer manage the garden, put it to sleep for the season. We tracked the many presidentials, a fresh form of entertainment; were enchanted with one or another member of the press—last week how lame her questions, this week how sharp his reply. The message has long been the medium, an observation with no bite. Outrage was out of fashion: its gasping rhetoric of little hope. And wasn’t I really, in my notes on the Cheerleader with playground permission to torture, writing an in-house memo?
In house. I had not held to my promise. My confinement in the tower these days had an alternate ending. I turned from the bleak horizon that cuts across Pogany’s mural separating his road-show Eden from the chill city of tomorrow, walked back past Perseus transforming himself—killer to lover—and marched out the front door. Did it snow midtown? Had you stuffed the wool cap in your pocket? In my mini-climate it was snowing, the blustering rain swept away. Snow fell gently, translucent on the pavement. I felt a cheat not telling you, confessing. OK, I walked out the double doors—no coat, hat, scarf—to the doorman’s wonder, crossed to the Park. As yet, the snow did not conceal the Bridle Path, or decorate dead heads of viburnum, the black limbs of cherry trees. Whiteness was a scrim, false hope the show might soon begin: prelude of lute song, paisley shawl from a trunk in the attic. Dr. Shah, free of emergency, reads a slim novella, my mother cuts a navy blue strand of my brother’s confirmation suit. The set is splendid with the tropical fern of the kids’ terrarium. An El Dorado kind of place with you as lenient judge of my folly. And I, an ancient Columbine, go it alone, leave this good scene, climb the slippery slope to the Reservoir Track, flirting with disaster. All I want: my footprint in the first snow of the season, faint proof that I still venture.
Daybook, December 10, 2007
ALL THAT GLITTERS
We have gone back to our custom of nightly news. Watching the world go by with a glass of wine, witnessing the heft of one more sandbag to the levee. Market up. Market down. Online, I sign up for the war to end, the one in Iraq; and—late, late again for that very important date—order Advent cards for the little kids, Hanukkah gelt for you, my love, your only religious observance an indulgence in chocolate coins.
Pasta pot on, isn’t that where I started this account of last days?
Last of your Seasons.
I stand corrected. You want me to turn from gloom—a heartbeat away—to the comforts of my back room. Well, it’s no spa—hot tub, herbal massage. I’m still mad as Quixote, the spindly knight. Lost in the tragedy of my bookishness, I share with the Don the illusion that tales are the true documentation of life. Wouldn’t he be surprised to find that his flapping windmills are transformed into powerful creatures these days. Let me take Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table off the shelf, find my place at “Uranium” in which the heavy metal of destruction appears in a story. A hoax has been perpetrated upon the writer. Cadmium, that’s all the scary substance is when tested. Levi envies the liar his boundless freedom of invention . . . now free to build for himself the past that suits him best, to stitch around him the garments of a hero. Sounds familiar, and furthermore—the story brings to mind Hans Blix, the gallant diplomat who poked around for heavy metal in Iraq to come up empty. Best not go there, yesterday’s news. Cindy Sheehan? Lost her son in the war, walked cross the country to let us know.
Furthermore, we head into the joyous season. You recall a family occasion, taking the bus up Amsterdam Avenue to St. John the Divine. Swaying to music of the spheres, we celebrated the Winter Solstice. That expedition brought on by the progressive school my daughter attended, the one that had her reading beyond grade level, that taught history—Contemporary to the Present. Contemporary was the Age of Aquarius. The headmaster kept the legends of his youth on life support for his beautiful people—his students who went on to tougher courses in life. I approach the longest night without a cyberfriend; with you in rational disbelief, with that daughter’s cultural reach suggesting Christ share Christmas with the cultural devine; with my brother’s wife correcting proofs of her study: The Virgin Mary, Monotheism and Sacrifice, Cambridge University Press.
You said: We had a grand time at the spiritual hootenanny. I suspect you came up with this memory of the Solstice as a distraction. You’re clever in your attempt to amuse while keeping me under house arrest. For all the world, you now sound like my brother: I thought you were attending to the Park across the street. Time running out. Do Olmsted, Mims. Go for the gold.
FLO: AMERICAN IDOL
There is something biblical about Olmsted marrying his dead brother’s wife. Or mythic—it’s the way the gods behave. All is ordained—failure, death, transformation—afterlife granted. Frederick Law Olmsted limped. Trying out a new horse, he was thrown from the buggy, not the first accident in a life of recoveries. Mary and the baby were not injured. For many weeks he must heal, watch the workmen pry rocks from the soil of Pigtown, where the Irish squatters had lived in mud and pestilence before the territory was declared parkland. He watches the work in the Park from a window in the old Mount St. Vincent Convent, now split into offices and apartments for his family and his partner’s, Calvert Vaux. He has recently been appointed (1859), with Vaux, Landscape Architects and Designers of The Central Park.
Directly across the avenue, the outcropping of rock is massive. It cannot be moved, must not be blasted. The Designers have figured it into the Park as God’s gift, or Nature’s, to wall out the city, though the city with its noise and congestion has not yet moved this far uptown. Olmsted is a moralist, not a religious man; God is assigned to his peripheral vision. When he was a youngster, he suffered some problem with his eyes, sumac poisoning suggested in the biographies, or maybe Fred did not want to study up like his brother, toe the line at Yale, where he dropped in for a semester to study chemistry. He is thirty-eight, a self-confessed dilettante, has left several careers behind—dry-goods salesman in the family store, seaman, farmer. Journalist and publisher were more to his liking. He had begged money from his father so that he might belong to th
e gentlemen’s club of a “Literary Republic.” An autodidact—man of letters, God help him, as many of his class hoped to be, though now he is a Landscape Architect, a title never figured, not even when he worked long hours with Vaux on The Greensward Proposal, designating Play and Parade Grounds, Lake, Terrace and woodland clusters of trees.
Mary Olmsted stands in the doorway of his room. He is bedridden, can’t move to a draft man’s perch to study the transverse route at 96th Street, one of Vaux’s many inspired plans to keep the Park free of traffic. It is steamy August, no breeze from the ravaged land across the way. Fred can’t turn to see his wife, though he knows she is there. He frets about absence from his duties. The crew clearing the devastated land should be working in the lower regions, where development is further under way. Mary comes to stand by his side. She is girlish, pretty in a white dressing gown, though remarkably pale. Before John Olmsted died, he had written to his brother, Don’t let Mary suffer while you are alive. Early this summer she has borne Fred a son. Now he is a family man for sure. Though not experienced at this job of creation, he is confident the Park will be born of rich soil excavated where ponds are intended. All carefully planned with Vaux: The deepening of the soil in all parts of the park is highly necessary, and the sub-soil must be loosed and fertilizing material mingled with it. He sees that the men prying rocks out of the ground have wrapped their heads in bandannas so sweat tears of their labor will not blind them. Mary brings him accounts just delivered: Shrubs have come in beyond the estimate of 16 cents per, exceeding the $50,000 for trees at an average price of 33½ cents per. Care of trees now planted has mounted beyond the
$10,000 allotted. When pain streaks from thigh to knee to ankle, Olmsted reaches for his wife’s hand. Their son will die of cholera the next week, end of August.
I turn back to his floundering youth. Fred was underwritten by his father in experimental farming. In Connecticut, later Staten Island. A farmer with literary aspirations. Like Jefferson and Thoreau, he cultivated. Like Virgil, for God’s sake, in his story of a gentleman farmer who, while at war, wrote home about the planting of trees, the breeding of his cattle, of his crops and the care of bees:And someday, in those fields the crooked plow
Of a farmer laboring there will turn up a spear,
Almost eaten away with rust, or his heavy hoe
Will bump against an empty helmet, and
He’ll wonder at the giant bones in that graveyard.
—Georgics I
Turn back to the farm on Staten Island, family property we’re told. Fred often crossed to the city, a clubman with influential friends, men with connections. Olmsted declared himself a journalist, assigned the farm to his brother, traveled to the South, territory unknown. Politically provocative, his journalism was a hit up North and in abolitionist England.
An account in the city papers, Washington DC, of the apprehension of twenty-four “genteel coloured men” (so they were described). . . . On searching their persons, there were found a Bible; a volume of Seneca’s Morals; Life in Earnest, the printed constitution of a society, the object of which was said to be “to relieve the sick and bury the dead.”
I can think of nothing that would speak higher for the character of a body of poor men, servants and labourers, than to find, by chance, in their pockets, just such things as these.
—Frederick Law Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom, 1855
In Journey in the Seaboard Slave States, fault him for Cracker and Negro dialect, but his travels were read as powerful news of “the economic mistake of slavery.” Fault him for his paternalism, bringing along the blacks who, according to his plan, could buy their way out of slavery on the installment plan. Free labor, a lofty phrase avoiding the racial and physical brutality he observed when writing from the South. He understood the South as another country.
I’m not a fit biographer for FLO, can’t come up with a dark underside or portray him as a flawed hero yet more than a superb grounds-man notable for manipulating the live stuff of nature. His touch of moral arrogance—share that with him, I’m told. His dedication to modest living, book learning, the persuasive power of civility, I might call upon as a corrective to our greed, our embrace of schlock culture. My gentility is a crock; his was real.
That was a grand graduation speech, Mimi. Don’t put yourself down.
I’m waiting till death do us part. He’s too large, you see, yet too near. I walk in his Park most every day. Fred’s not up for caricature like dear old Columbus, nor a CliffsNotes romp, life and times—Raleigh. She was right, George Eliot, the grand lady novelist who disliked biography: the best history of a writer is contained in his writing. FLO’s urgent news written on the road from the South, his many letters, lengthy proposals, that’s his best bio. At the end, his mind shattered; still, he wrote a plea that his gentle namesake, the Fred who survived, must get his fair share of the landscape business.
We’re a pair, Dancing with the Stars, not likely, me with the cha-cha heart, Fred with that gimpy leg. When the time came, he couldn’t sign up for the war. His infirmity consigned him to the pressing trials of his job in the Park. In The Official Papers, he is honest and direct, elegant as in The Greensward Proposal, chatty in his letters to Mary. He’s entitled to lose his cool in a resignation letter, long and very angry: To the Board of the Commissioners of The Central Park, January 22, 1861. Politics—should have known—money and authority withheld from the grand project under construction, withheld by the Comptroller of the Park Commission, Andrew Green.
Hard as it has been, I love the park. I rejoice in it and am too much fastened to it in every fiber of my character to give up, if I did not see that [to] go on so was out of the question—for me.
To come back to the grand question of the cost of the work and the estimates. Am I responsible for the cost of the work, for the errors in estimates, for false information under which you have acted? Am I Sir?
Then I am an imposter.
I am not an imposter.
Cut back in job and title, he directs good works of the Sanitary Commission, just founded to heal the diseased and wounded, bury the Union dead. The name of the Commission is accurate; the circumstances on battlefields, troop trains and ships, unspeakable. Begging for funds, he knocks on doors in the Capital. The battlefields are littered with soldiers dying of dysentery, diphtheria, cholera. Wounded lie on the streets of Washington. Troops in the field are poorly outfitted for whatever the season. He appeals to the Union League Club, to women sewing shirts for soldiers, strong-minded women who founded the relief committee. After the defeat at Bull Run, he writes to Mary:Sanitary Commission, Washington, D.C.
Treasury Building, July 29, 1861
Beloved!
We are in a frightful condition here, ten times as bad as anyone dare say publickly. . . . The demoralization of a large part of our troops is something more awful than I ever met with.
Tell all our friends to stiffen themselves for harder times than we have yet thought of. Unless McClellan is a genius as well as a general . . .
Meanwhile, the elms on the Mall are settling into their second year. The Seasons are coming to life in the design of Jacob Mould, artist and engineer. Plump grapes, pecking birds, bees in their honeycombs will adorn the steps of Calvert Vaux’s Bethesda Terrace. The artisans Italian, I presume.
The Park is ever on his mind. When, or if, Olmsted goes back full time, it will be to oversee finishing touches—drainage systems, a stream, a gorge. He hangs in with his Park appointment, demoted to less than half pay. The Sanitary Commission—commendable, poorly paid. He writes to Mary of the deserters, spoiled for soldiers at Bull Run, then adds: Write to me and make the best of our affairs. I could not flinch from this now if it starved us all to stay. Noble thought, yet Fred’s war work is abandoned for money. Here’s a cut of his life I’d like to give a swift pass (biographers not allowed): We’ll be two thousand down, he writes Mary. In a misreading of Emerson’s “Self-Reliance,” he signs on to be the Superintendent o
f the Mariposa Mining Corporation, 1863. The Gold Rush back in ’49: now all that glitters is schist (Columbus and Raleigh redux). The company’s books are beyond artifice in trade—now ya see it, now ya don’t—a shell game. He’s out in California on his own, makes the best of it. It’s El Dorado time.
Fred’s better prospects lie with the natural world. He had gone West by way of the Panama Canal, where the flora, strange to him, was heavenly indeed. San Francisco is a rowdy port; its magisterial cliffs hover over the Pacific, bleak and uncultivated. In Mariposa he resists, then is stunned by primordial wilderness, the magnificent scale of Yo-semite, the violent cut of canyons, their towering heights, broad sweep of its valleys, the giant Sequoias.
To Mary, Bear Valley, 1863:
They don’t strike you as monsters at all but simply as the grandest tall trees you ever saw. . . . You feel that they are distinguished strangers [who] have come down to us from another world,—but the whole forest is wonderful.
Grandeur before fruited trees.
Mary is spending the summer in Litchfield, Connecticut, settling into the customs of her New England family. He writes from Bear Valley: I would much prefer that the children never heard a sermon, if they could attend worship of a decorous character without it. And among sermons, the dullest and least impressive, the better. Often as I read FLO, he comes across as lonely, the word bleating through news of his days, urgent requests for tents and haversacks for camping, or a pause in the flow of geographic detail, lets Mary know he is forsaken. Now she’s with the children on Staten Island. Fred sends her word of tasks that must be accomplished before the winter back home. He writes to Ignaz Pilat, Gardener in Chief of the Park, describing in detail the tropics observed as he traveled through Panama. Then, as though he has quite forgotten that the Park is no longer in his care, he speaks of the pictorial and emotional use of light and shade, the tropical density of undergrowth: There are parts of the ramble where you will have this result, in a considerable degree, after a few years—the lower stratum being a few shrubs that will endure the shade and the upper low-spreading-topped or artificially dwarfed trees, assisted by vines.
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