To write ahead, what could that mean? Then a query, a one-liner on the lined page: Where were you on the Eighth Day?
INVENTORY
Maps: of three pretty ships halfway to America; of Cyril O’Connor’s Wall Street and environs long before it suffered its scar; of the rectangular Park across the street—limited, vast; and of the watershed under the Appalachians from whence our city water, Jackie’s Reservoir now for the birds; of the Fall migration, its dramatic urban stop-off in the Greensward. Sifting with care, he came upon shards—a glamour shot of their building, that studio portrait of her grandfather in full prosperity, a Chinaman with a queue porting baskets to a family, the grand vista of Yosemite behind him. The Angel of the Waters, triumphant above the splash. A note to no one in particular! The last cantos of Dante’s Paradiso were discovered after his death when he had presumably arrived at that destination. And a poem she read to him one evening not long ago. In response to discouraging news of the market he brought home at the end of each day, every day. Was she unsteady pulling Whitman down from a forbidden high shelf? Drum-Taps lay, open to the page, the passage faintly marked for his reading:Year that trembled and reel’d beneath me!
Your summer wind was warm enough, yet the air I breathed froze me,
A thick gloom fell through the sunshine and darken’d me,
Must I change my triumphant songs? said I to myself,
Must I indeed learn to chant the cold dirges of the baffled?
And sullen hymns of defeat?
He discovered that these lines had been read out to her brother when our President, playing do-si-do with Russia, proposed once again our antinuke missiles—useless, obsolete—be stuck in Czech soil. Had he not noted, back on the day the Supreme Court said OK to listening in, scanning our e-mails, that her rage petered out? No place to go with a thin bleat of complaint. Let a borrowed poem say it. Let the Park flourish day by passing day—with never enough stories. She had scratched fury, turned to old recipes for comforts of the season, linzer torte and strudel. Turned back in time to when they were first together, proving herself in the kitchen, having proved themselves in bed. And here was the famous shot of Olmsted, the only man he was ever jealous of, rather a stern young fellow in a seaman’s cap, primed to create a world. Well, the photo was famous to her family along with the old prints—Pierrot and Columbine, pantomime lovers in their kiss and make up routine—with her circus folk in the dining room performing their breathtaking feats, showing off for the devout maiden of The Angelus.
She had read to page 733 in War and Peace, marking the confrontation between Napoleon and the Russian emissary as they moved ahead to their bloody war. Girlish !!! in the margin next to the description of the Emperor . . . a white waistcoat so long that it covered his round stomach, white doeskin breeches fitting tightly over the fat thighs of his stumpy legs, and Hessian boots. Her notes—his snuff box, his cologne! trailing down the side of the page, remarked upon the brilliant maneuvers of the scene, the slippery give-take of diplomacy, the rough talk of plain take. He presumed she’d read the love story so far, though this time round, her second chance, notes in the margin revealed how closely she observed the lush setting of the Tsar’s palace, the slippery make-nice that preceded war. Revise, reread, work ahead right up to the end. He must tell her brother, who maintained when she took up her post with the fat library book each long Summer day, then slept on a cot in his room—that she snored.
Thank you for sending back Uncle Tom’s Cabin. As you may have observed, I am a teacher. Unfortunately, I do not think I will make use of Mrs. Stowe’s novel again. Its arguments are flawed, its language too distant for my students. I have no memory of sitting on the ground in the Park. It was a most difficult day.
Best regards, Marie Claude Montour
He opened the FedEx from Macy’s. On her last day, she had found time for his gift, a sweater more plum than red. It zips with ease, though his hand quivers each time he puts it on. Soon that will pass. He will simply enjoy its cashmere embrace as he looks down this day at Short Readings for Dr. Shah—Cather’s The Old Beauty, Beckett’s Company, Twain’s Mysterious Stranger. That’s the list she boldly crossed out. Perhaps not missing the point, though he had lived with her a lifetime, perhaps was not the right word. The point being each one of the readings was about death, immobility, angry old age, not stories for the charming young doctor who had little time to read in emergency, attending to probable death every day. The list was appropriate to herself, to finding her way out of this room with a voice not yet silenced.
The next talent requisite in the forming of a complete almanac-writer, is a sort of gravity, which keeps a due medium between dullness and nonsense, and yet has a mixture of both. Now you know, sir, that grave men are taken by the common people always for wise men. Gravity is just as good a picture of wisdom, as pertness is of wit, and therefore very taking.
—Benjamin Franklin, The Pennsylvania Gazette,
October 20, 1737
December, 1937. At the Rialto, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. My favorite, Grumpy.
Contrary, my father called me, wishing I’d fall for Happy or Doc, not the Prince that’s for sure. Perhaps Disney. He admired conservative gents who made money within the limits of the law.
Our Scene neither animation nor tragedy:For, as I am a man, I think this lady
To be my child . . .
And so I am, I am.
A Printout: Walden, Is It You?
The drama of the day was not my taking the bus in the right direction to confront at last what I’d seen in many photos of the Park, and read of in Olmsted’s papers. My venture was personal. What lies above 96th Street? The question you never would answer.
A wilderness for dangerous games. Well, for city boys pretending to danger, or simply for the thrill of knowing you should not be far from your East Side home scaling these rocks with the janitor’s boy who’d steal a kid’s lunch box, threatened frail old women till they dealt out a dollar. Did you look on from a moral height? We all have need of a Bimbo to take the rap as we watch from a safe distance.
I was no sooner out of the bus, halfway up the steep steps, so many, when I understood I’d come not to discover the dangers of your boyhood revelations so edited they might have been printed in Boys’ Life, which my brother subscribed to, stories of good-family kids escorted from the crime scene having learned their lesson.
Halfway up the steps, bare branches glistened with ice-palace glamour. Three-thirty. I had studied the map, knew my way to the circle of lawn frosted over. Worth the climb to see in the distance the Harlem Meer, saved that for another day. I turned at once to the trail leading down to the Pool. Thought I knew the route from maps and picture books, and the stone outcropping from our scrambles up Monument Mountain. The path was lonely as promised, until the open view of the wildflower meadow mowed low for the season; and there was Vaux’s charming rustic bridge over the silent stream, the dark rocks in the distance walling me from the city. I might have been where the architects wanted to place me in their pictorial semblance of wilderness—the Adirondacks, or the heights overlooking the Hudson. I stumbled—a tree root but did not fall. You see, you must see, this was not an escapist journey. It led me far beyond a disclosure of the guarded stories of your nefarious past. What struck me when I found a place to rest, was the reality of the landscap ers’ contrivance, not the contrivance of reality. It seemed a challenge to nature or God, whichever way you’ll have it. The sun made a mirror of the water. I went close to see the clouds float by at my feet but did not see myself, nor did I want to. Nor, nor—quaint diction. There could be no charm in seeing myself. Reflection being in the mind, it came easy, remembering my way back to when I first read Walden.
She had been, the professor at my girl college, an officer in the Wacs, a commanding presence in the classroom. We were given our orders as to readings in American Lit. She found the writer of Walden feeble, a dropout spinning his lofty thoughts, “flatulent on his beans.�
� She expected our laughter, and let us know Henry David was well fed by his relatives who left him meals he need not pay for. Thoreau was a freeloader, his economics a fraud. Was she envious of his talented instruction? I have forgotten her name but remember her brown oxfords double-knotted and the military cut of her tweeds. Seeing at long last above 96th Street the construction of pastoral beauty, I was furious all over again at the chill bluster of that woman troubling me in the wintertime of my life. Did the spoiler dislike the writer because he spoke out against the war with Mexico when she had served in the War to End All Wars? His essay, “Civil Disobedience,” was never assigned in her class. I would read it in my furious ’60s, should reread it now, stand opposed to our broken social contract, beg to be put in prison if only for one night. But it would seem just another stunt, which is exactly what she called the writer’s protest as she marched us back and forth across the flat parade ground of her hup-two-threeput-downofWalden. Oh, she would never know his house, garden, pond are Paradise enough, a place real and imagined, beyond dollars and dimension.
Postcard: Wish you were here, though this pilgrimage was mine. As I made my way round the shore of the pool, the wind cut through my puffy. The heart thumped its irregular beat as it does when recorded in the doctor’s office. The familiar flutter, no longer disturbing, seemed a warm throb of love. I take it back, did wish you were with me. I headed up the Great Hill. It’s one hell of a climb. There was no one in this sanctuary of a vast public space and no added attractions—statues, Bridle Path, fountains or playing field, no candles to light for peace or the dead—to justify this earthly creation.
This is the light of autumn; it has turned on us.
Surely it is a privilege to approach the end
still believing in something.
Here the mortal architects outwitted nature with nature itself. I was fiercely happy. It could be, don’t you see, imagined. That is allowed in this forgotten corner of the Park, but not in the country beyond that encourages passive activity only; that lets Dumbos like Bimbo serve time and Big Time Offenders go free? Why had I allowed myself to flip to the concealing comforts of Literary Walk and Pinetum, to the charms of a phony castle and guarded revelations of first person?
She had lost herself in the Park. It was The History of the World all over again, arranging events as she wanted them to be.
Mercy is sought for my solo flights in the workroom; and the consequent break of unity in my design—that’s Mrs. Woolf who confessed to a childlike trust in her husband, while we have been sparring. Mercy on me, RC.
On her desk, he finds the blowup of a photo, been there so long he’s ceased to see it. He’s in air force fatigues, not much flesh on young bones, full head of black hair. He had been trained to jump out of planes, pull the rip cord, view the world from above. Oh, just the Florida swamps. Practice only. The battalion sent ahead had been slaughtered when the Germans tried out their V-1 missiles. Then, that war was over before he got his chance.
Weren’t you lucky.
Printout: November 2007 Names of the Dead
Bewley, Kevin R., 27, Petty Officer Second Class
Davis, Carletta S., 34, Staff Sgt., Army
Linde, John D., 30, Staff Sgt., Army
Muller, Adam J., 21, Pfc., Army
Ndururi, Christine M., 21, Specialist, Army
Shaw, Daniel J., 23, Sgt., Army
Walls, Johnny C., 41, Sgt. First Class, Army
Correction: December 18, 2007
A listing of American military deaths on Nov. 8 misidentified the country in which Sgt. First Class Johnny C. Walls was killed. It was Afghanistan, not Iraq.
The last e-mail to her brother: You have surely heard of my fall. I am tidying up my back room after the incident. Though what setting things in order has to do with a skinned knee is beyond me? I’m sorting books, papers, middle-of-the-night notes to myself, the web of possibilities. The plot of the Seasons is unavoidable. It was cold in the Park that day. I had climbed the Great Hill, then cut from the path, what was left of it. Underbrush, broken limbs, neglect not foreseen in a Greensward Proposal, was beautiful to me. I saw that nature might survive our meddling, our once upon a time stories, even the artwork of the Republic. The steps back down to the street glistened in the sun, invited danger. It was then that I fell, as warned, as expected. The greater danger lay behind me, the looming blackness of the humped rock formation like a beached whale. The novel Melville started in New York is not the one he wrote in the Berkshires.
I took your semaphore out to put under the tree with our old toys. Meddling, I dusted it, now the caution arm flops, won’t give its warning of the possible train wreck down the line. Bread pudding—3 eggs, 5 egg yolks, heavy cream—is lethal. I presume you still crave your holiday helping unless otherwise directed. In my recipe files I came across fragments written back when I was into the notion that time bends. My intention had nothing to do with fast trains and synchronized clocks. Three dimensions are all I can handle. Though a math teacher had a walk-on, all I intended was the leap forward, the years flipping by like calendar pages: not where were you when we sang—We will all go together when we go? Where are you now? The more difficult question. I must have set these butter-stained pages aside as I measured out sugar and cream, not knowing the answer. Our mother taught trigonometry, which you mastered, though it was art that she favored, and craft. I suppose I can figure why I’ve stayed up half the night to finish this story of an artist—stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive, God, I loved Travolta in that movie; and why I’m sending the story to you. Time having flipped ahead. I don’t intend a tearjerker. Dickens sure pulled out the stops with those Christmas Books.
His reply: Go ahead, Mims, make me cry. On the other hand, my train set circling the sun parlor floor, the schoolhouse with a little brass bell that never rang, the church’s torn cellophane windows, the fisherman on the bridge over the cracked-mirror stream, the brown cows and yellow sheep not to scale, and the policeman directing the Mitchell Dairy trucks at the crossing of North and Main means nothing to me at all, not even the uncertain headlights flickering on the engine, nothing to me at all. We’re grown up now. Aren’t we?
Studio Visit: The Artist’s Tale
Does one ever get over drawing, is one ever done mourning it?
—Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind
Everything arranged. She has placed the last postcard, posted it, you might say, with a Lucite thumbtack pinning it to the canvas. A murky photo of the Chicago Stock Yards, hand-colored before color was invented for film. The haunches of the cattle glisten, a patent-leather brown. They are being led to slaughter by a fellow with a prod in his hand, his face bright orange under a dun colored cap. The sky, washed-out blue. A dreary scene, but the postcard is one of many. The Poussin, for instance (Earthly Paradise), though reduced to an absurdity, is all dense Edenic growth with a sunlit distance, a small shimmering lake and a celestial figure (God, as we know him?) riding a cloud above, looking down on our first parents, naked as the day they came to the Almighty mind. Eve, center stage, points at the apple tree, urging the reluctant Adam on. You know the story; so did Louis XIV, to whom the painting belonged.
On an easel, Louise Moffett seems to have been copying the Poussin The apparatus of her craft—paint, turpentine, brushes—are displayed on a table nearby. They may be for real or props. Perhaps the copy will always remain half done, those two figures arguing, stuck in their best moment. Mealy or tart; what were apples like back then, or for that matter in 1662? Looking back to postcards posted on canvas, The Ruins of San Francisco City Hall (1906), the gilt dome intact as well as the classical columns at its base. Only the center did not hold. The stretched canvas that displays the postcards is painted black. A big bulletin board, that’s all it appears to be.
Louise wears a painter’s smock, a thrift-shop treasure. You recall the floppy garments worn so as not to soil the artists’ clothes in the atelier photos of Matisse, Mary Cassatt, et al. She places a wooden
palette with dabs of color—some right from the tube, some mixed—on the table, runs her hand over soft sable brushes. The smell of oil paint, a thrill. Deep breathe it. She is a good looker heading toward middle years, her gray hair dusted with leftover gold. Winsome? That may be the word, as though something she once cared for has gone by and she wonders. . . . A sweet wince of a smile as she pins St. Catherine of Siena Dictating Her Dialogues (Giovanni di Paolo, 1460?) to the canvas. One more postcard may be the answer for this particular day.
The studio is an outbuilding, a quarter mile up a path from the white clap-board house where she lives with her family. Her husband is home today, caring for Maisy, down with her third cold of the season. Cyril has gone off on the school bus, no sweater, a ripped T-shirt proving he’s cool. Everything now arranged. North light filters through bare branches of maples. Her studio with a sliding glass door may have been a small barn. Canvases are properly stacked in a loft above, temperature control softly humming, kettle on the boil, tidy kitchenette in a cubby once a stall. Louise, raised on a farm, knows it’s too narrow for horses, perhaps goats for their milk, for cheese. Exactly eleven o’clock when the curator arrives. He has been told to follow the path back, a bit bumpy in this first November freeze. Louise has not expected the driver. Will he come in with Blodgette, who is to look over her new work for a show? She’s expected a tête-à tête. Blodge, still in the black BMW with New York T plates, looks to the driver, taps his watch briefly as if to say he’ll not be long. Through the shingle side of the studio, she hears the blast of music—salsa, Afro-Cuban? No way Blodgette’s choice.
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