Welcome Home

by Lucia Berlin

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  Table of Contents

  A Note About the Author

  Copyright Page

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  In memory of Fred Buck and Helene Dorn

  Foreword

  “I’ve lived so many places it’s ridiculous … and because I moved so much, place is very, very important to me. I’m always looking … looking for home.”

  —Lucia Berlin, interview (2003)

  The first writer I ever watched at work was my mother, Lucia Berlin. My earliest memories are of my brother Mark and me riding our tricycles around our Greenwich Village loft while Mom pounded away on her Olympia typewriter. We thought she was writing letters—she wrote a lot of letters. On our long walks around the city, we would stop at a mailbox almost every day, where she would let us drop her envelopes through the slot. We loved to see them disappear and hear them fall. Whenever she received a letter, she would read it to us, often making a story out of whatever had been delivered that day.

  We grew up listening to her stories. We heard a lot of them, and sometimes they were our bedtime stories: her adventures with her best friend, Kentshereve; the bear that kept them captive when they were camping; the cabin with the magazine-page wallpaper; Aunt Tiny up on the roof; Uncle John’s pet mountain lion—we heard them all more than once. They were stories from her life and many would find their way into the stories that she later wrote and published.

  When I was around six, while exploring a closet, I discovered a typewriter case. Inside was a folder with “A Peaceable Kingdom” written on the front. It was a story about two little girls selling musical vanity boxes all around El Paso. It was the first thing I ever read that wasn’t a children’s book. It was then that I realized my mom wasn’t just typing letters, she was writing stories. She explained to me how, a few years before, she had been published in magazines. She showed me copies of them and let me read them. After that, I often pestered her to let me read what she was working on, to which she would say, “When I’m finished.”

  It would be another seven or eight years before she started finishing things enough to let me read them. By this time, she had two more sons (my brothers, David and Dan), was divorced from her third husband (our Dad, Buddy Berlin), had moved to Berkeley, and was struggling to make ends meet as a teacher at a small private high school. Amid the chaos (or because of it), she wrote more than ever. Most nights, after dinner and our favorite TV show, she would park herself at the kitchen table with a glass of bourbon and start writing, often continuing late into the night. She usually scribbled longhand with a ballpoint pen into spiral notebooks, though occasionally we would be awakened by the sound of her typewriter, often drowned out by her favorite song of the moment being played over and over on the stereo.

  The first stories she finished around this time were ones she had started in New York and Albuquerque in the early sixties. These soon gave way to more personal stories born out of bad situations and personal tragedies, resulting from her worsening problem with alcohol. After losing her teaching job, she took on a series of different jobs (cleaning woman, telephone operator, hospital ward clerk) that would provide rich source material for new stories, as would time spent in drunk tanks and detox wards. Despite any setbacks, she continued to write and soon began to get published again.

  Years later, the last thing she had me read was an early draft of Welcome Home, a series of remembrances of the places she had called home. She had originally intended it to be simple sketches of the places themselves, with no characters or dialogue. These were the stories from her childhood that we had heard when we were kids but now in sequence and no longer masquerading as fiction. Unfortunately, time ran out and the last version of the manuscript ends in 1965, the last sentence unfinished.

  During her life, Lucia wrote hundreds, if not thousands, of letters. Included here are some of our favorites from the same time frame as Welcome Home. Most of them are letters written to her good friends Ed Dorn and Helene Dorn between 1959 and 1965. It was a time of drama, growth, and upheaval, and the letters offer a fascinating look into the mind of a young mother and aspiring writer in the throes of self-discovery.

  We give you Welcome Home; stories, letters, and photographs from the first twenty-nine years in the life of a unique American voice.

  —Jeff Berlin, May 2018

  Welcome Home

  Alaska, 1935

  Juneau, Alaska, 1935

  Ted and Mary Brown, Juneau, 1935

  The Browns’ house in Juneau

  Lucia, born November 12, 1936

  Juneau, Alaska

  They said it was a sweet small house with many windows and sturdy woodstoves, screens taut against mosquitoes. It looked out on the bay, onto sunsets and stars and dazzling Northern Lights. My mother would rock me as she gazed down at the harbor, which was always crowded with fishing boats and tugs, American and Russian ore ships. My crib was in the bedroom, where it was either very dark or very bright all the time, she told me, without further explaining the long and short lengths of the seasons. The first word I spoke was light.

  Mary Brown and Lucia, Juneau, 1937

  Ted and Mary Brown, Mullan, Idaho, 1937

  Mullan, Idaho

  My earliest memory is of pine branches brushing against a windowpane. This house was in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, at the Sunshine Mine. Massive oak trees had branches almost parallel to the ground and squirrels raced back and forth on them as if on highways.

  I recently read that the scent of flowers, especially roses and lilacs, actually was much more intense years ago, their perfume now diluted by hybridization. True or not, my remembered Idaho perfumes are more vivid than any flower today. The apple blossoms and hyacinths were literally intoxicating. I’d lie on the grass beneath the lilac tree and breathe until I became giddy. In those days I also would spin around and around until I was so dizzy I couldn’t stand up. Maybe these were early warning signs and lilacs my first addiction.

  The Browns’ house in Mullan, 1937

  Lucia, Mullan

  I had never heard about pussy willows, so I was astonished to see fur growing on a stalk. I waded the icy stream to reach them, soaking my shoes and clothes. I wasn’t allowed to go outside after that; I might have drowned or been swept away.

  I slept on a Murphy bed. These were common then, beds that closed up inside a closet during the day. There were no rugs and very little furniture in this big house. Creaks. Echoes of wind in the trees, the splatter of rain against glass. Sobs in the bathroom.

  At night sometimes my parents played pinochle with neighbors. Laughter and smoke floated up the stairs to my room. Finnish and Swedish exclamations. Lovely, the cascade of poker chips and maraca ice cubes. The particular way my mother dealt. Quick hiss of a shuffle, a crisp slap slap slap as she laid down the cards.

  I watched the children go to school every morning and later I could hear them playing kickball and jacks, spinning tops. I played inside with Skippy, my “dog,” a small coffee percolator tied to a bathrobe belt. My mother read mysteries. We both looked out of windows and watched i
t rain. At first it is scary, then beautiful, when you wake up to the day of the first snow.

  My father came home from work tired and thick with grime, his eyes startled rings of white with emerald green inside.

  On Saturday evenings we walked down the hill to town. A general store and post office, jail and barbershop, a drugstore and three bars. We got a Saturday Evening Post and a giant-size Hershey bar. Sensible crunch of snow beneath our galoshes. We started home after dark, but it was as bright as day, with Idaho stars shattering the sky. The light of stars was definitely brighter then, too.

  Marion, Kentucky

  Snow and cold that quickly turned into a sultry southern spring with catalpa, peach, and apple blossoms. Birds everywhere, irrepressibly jubilant. Butterflies. I had to stay on the boardinghouse veranda, which was painted glossy black and mopped by glossy nigras. “Don’t let her call them that,” my father said to my mother.

  “I’m from Texas. Should I say darkies?”

  “Colored, for God’s sake.”

  The colored maids and cooks and waiters all talked to me.

  There were no other children at the boardinghouse. The miners in Marion were single men, Mexicans, mostly, hundreds of them living in barracks. The people in the boardinghouse were engineers like my father, assayers, geologists, a bricklayer with a mustache who laughed with my mother on the veranda. The only other woman guest was a health nurse. Her breasts were so enormous she had to eat sitting sideways. I couldn’t stop looking at them until my father spanked me for staring at her bosom. Then just the word bosom gave me the giggles but I couldn’t stop saying it, singing, “Bosom bosom bosom.” The nurse traveled to different schools, treating impetigo and ringworm with Gentian Violet.

  We lived in one hot room with a ceiling fan and a mosquito net, a balcony big enough only for me. All the guests used a mildewed and foul-smelling bathroom down the hall. Sometimes I came into our room and my mother was crying, but she said, “No, I’m not, you hear?” She read mysteries lying on the bed in a peach-colored slip.

  Lucia, Marion, Kentucky, 1939

  The boardinghouse, Marion, 1939

  We only went out from the boardinghouse three times. Once the bricklayer took us for a drive into the country. Rolling green hills with cows and horses and then a farm with pigs. Enormous pigs as big as cars with mean little human eyes. My father drove us across the Mississippi River. He cried, looking across the expanse of it, and said we were blessed to live in America. My mother called him a sentimental sap. He took us to a big city where we rode on an escalator. I got jacks to play with on the veranda but couldn’t learn how. I tried to rename Skippy Gentian Violet but it didn’t take. Fireflies. Fireflies. Fireflies.

  Deer Lodge, Montana

  In Deer Lodge we lived in a one-bedroom log cabin at the Lonesome Pine Motor Court. Cozy, with a western motif. Brands on the lampshades. Curtains and bedspreads with cowboys and Indians on them. Paintings of broncobusters and Indian braves. Hiawatha in a canoe. I slept on the pullout couch next to a wonderful radio. During Bible shows I’d shout back at the little speaker, “Yes, Jesus is my blessed redeemer!” The Shadow, Fibber McGee, Jack Benny, Let’s Pretend. I got the giggles whenever I heard the song “I Ain’t Got Nobody,” because my mother called my vagina my body, said never to play with it.

  In Deer Lodge my mother had a friend, Georgia, whose husband, Joe, worked the same shift at the mine with my father. They lived next door, came over every Sunday for coffee and coffee cake my mother baked. She didn’t usually cook, so she was really proud of this cake. It was always snowing outside; blazing heat came from the kitchen oven. The house was steamy, fragrant with cinnamon and vanilla. Everyone had pink shiny faces and laughed.

  During the week the men were so tired they could barely get their boots off. They ate without talking and fell into bed. On Saturdays they’d all drink bourbon and play bridge and laugh. On Sundays my father and Joe took turns reading the funnies at breakfast, then lay on my bed and read the rest of the paper while the women washed up and did hairdos, rolling pompadours over hair-rats, making waves with clamps. They plucked their eyebrows and manicured their nails while the men listened to football games on the radio. I’d lie between them on the bed-couch, coloring, loving the cheers of the crowds, the frantic announcers, the men’s hollering or socking each other’s shoulders, their miner’s smell of Camel cigarettes and beer and soap. Miners always smell like soap, surely because they get so dirty.

  Lucia, November 1940

  Helena, Montana

  In Helena we lived in a loud apartment where my parents slept on the Murphy bed and I on a canvas cot. Outside the back door the cream popped up from the milk bottles every morning. There was an ice storm and the trees sounded like shattering glass. I learned to read. All I really remember of Helena is the library, the green cover of Old Mother West Wind, the worn blue Understood Betsy. I believed that Understood Betsy had been written especially for me, that somewhere there was a person who wanted to tell me about her.

  For weeks before the first snow my father took me up into the mountains every Saturday. We carried winter supplies to an old prospector who had lived alone up there some fifty years. Flour and coffee, tobacco, sugar, dried beans, salt pork, oatmeal, candles. Heavy stacks of magazines: The Saturday Evening Post, Redbook, Field and Stream.

  Lucia, Blue, and old Mr. Johnson at his cabin, 1941

  Camping and trout fishing above Helena

  It was a long hike up a trail we had blazed the first day. He let me slash the bark; the sap is still pungent in my memory. Tucked into the edge of the lush intensely green meadow was Johnson’s cabin. It was an unpainted hut, really, with windows that looked like eyes and a door that was a goofy crooked smile. Tall grass and wildflowers covered the roof like a festive hat. I would lie on the roof under the blue sky, nudged and licked by dogs and goats. My father and the old man sat below me on nail kegs, drinking coffee, looking over gold nuggets he had panned, looking at all kinds of rocks, hmming and exclaiming over them. My father listened for hours to the old man’s stories. Now I wish I had listened but then I just wanted to lie on the roof in a silence broken only by Steller’s jays and the playful goats and dogs.

  Before we left, my father went into the woods to drag back logs and branches, chopped them into stacks near the door. I carefully tore out pages from magazines and glued them onto the walls with flour and water paste, careful so as not to wet any of the text. The idea was to have a tight patchwork of pages all over the cabin, from floor to ceiling. All through the dark days of winter Johnson would read the walls. It was important to mix up the pages and magazines, so that page 20 might be high on a north wall and 21 on the bottom of the south wall.

  I believe this was my first lesson in literature, in the infinite possibilities of creativity. What I knew for sure was that his walls were a great idea. He would have read through the magazines very quickly if the pages were consecutive. This way, since they were not in any order (and usually the previous or following page was pasted to the wall), whenever he read a page he had to invent the story that went with it, amending it sometimes when, days later, he would find a connected page on another wall. When he had exhausted the potentials of his cabin he would repaper it with more pages in a similarly random order.

  His goats and dogs lived inside with him once the snow began. I liked to imagine them all curled up on the old brass bed, watching him in his long johns as he read his walls by candlelight. He said when he got cold in bed he’d just pull up another goat.

  Lucia with Blue

  Mullan, 1940

  There was an outhouse a short distance from the cabin, although he said he usually just pissed off the porch. There was also a toilet seat, centered like a throne on top of a hill. “That’s for thinking,” he said. “Go on up, we won’t look. You can see half of Montana from up there.” It seemed as if I could see it all.

  Mullan, Idaho

  This time we lived in one of the tarpaper cabins just a
bove the mine. Churning and clackety-clack of engines and generators, pulleys screeching, whirring. Chains clanked. Welding rods sizzled. Scrapings and hisses and thuds. Rocks crashed and rumbled from shovels into trucks, onto conveyors. Trams creaked and rattled, whistles keened, groaned, piped. Different whistles all day and night. Men cursed and hollered day and night too, especially at night when saws would whine and all the screeching sounds turned into monsters. On the morning of the first snow, it was miraculous to see the chains and riggings, the gears and chutes transformed into glistening intricate lacework. The snow made the mine seem delicate and almost quiet. Young Mexican miners played in it like children.

  There were barracks full of miners, single men, Mexicans and Finns and Basques. Most of them didn’t speak English and were far from their countries and families, my father said, trying to explain why they drank and fought so much.

  There was a baby now, my sister, Molly. Her crib was in my parents’ room. I slept on a Murphy bed in the main room, which stayed down and was a couch during the day. I missed the radio. Now it was in the bedroom, where the baby was supposed to be asleep.

  The only heat came from a potbellied stove. In the morning when it was just light enough to see my breath steam I waited for the clank of the stove door handle. In a few minutes would come the snap and crack of the wood starting to burn, the tumble of a shovelful of coal. Cheerful sound of the percolator, the flick of a match on my mother’s thumbnail, chunk of my father’s Zippo. They let me give the baby her bottle while they had coffee. She was cozy in bed with me. She wasn’t interesting, but she liked my songs. “If your head scratches, don’t itch it, Fitch it. Use your head, save your hair. Use Fitch shampoo.” And “I ain’t got no body, ain’t got nobody to carry me home.”