The Adventures of John Carson in Several Quarters of the World

by Brian Doyle

  But I cannot make this account into that sort of wonderful novel; for I wish most of all to capture something of what is, right here around me, right now, in this house, and I could not bear to invent a jot of it—sometimes it is a sin to invent, when the real tale is there to be told; and here are two people of rare grace and generosity, whose lives are more amazing than the most outlandish novels, who spent years traveling toward each other, knowing somehow and not knowing at all their final destination in each other’s hearts; and I alone am given to tell thee of them, having entered their home by utter chance, and been graced to discover not merely landlady and husband, but two riveting friends, two rare adventurers, two gentle lovers whose slightest glance at each other, I can report, having seen it many times, is filled with such mutual affection and wonder, that you would think they married yesterday, and not a year ago come May.

  March 9, 1880, Oakland, California

  Dear Louis,

  Mother says I can call you Louis in my letter because soon we are to be related and related people use first names. I have two first names as you know and while everyone calls me Sam I like that you call me Lloyd. I would like to be Lloyd now. My father is Sam and I am not him. You called me Lloyd right from the beginning which I like very much. I would like to go sailing as much as we can when you marry Mother. She says we can go by ourselves if we want. I would like that. Perhaps we can sail to Sausalito. Mother says we will go to Scotland after you are married. If everyone in Scotland is like you that is a thin country (joke). Isobel and Joe Strong come by once a week for dinner. Joe says he will fix the broken things in the house but he does not get around to it. Isobel is happy you are marrying Mother. She says it is long past time Mother is appreciated for who she really is a wonderful mysterious woman. She says you understand Mother more than anyone else ever. She says she only hopes you don’t cough yourself to death before the wedding (joke). Joe Strong says he will do a sweet of paintings on your wedding day but I don’t think he will get around to it. I would like to fish for sturgeon also if we can sometime. Mother says your friend John Carson knows boats and he can perhaps find us a boat or take us fishing. I saw a sturgeon last week displayed at the fish shop and it was so big it hung over the table at both ends. The shopman said it was fifty feet long but I think he was exasperating about the size. I cannot wait until you live here with us. I am ready to change schools as you and Mother think best. I am excited for Scotland but worried I do not speak any Scotlish. Isobel is happy with Joe but I think she worries like Mother did with my father. Mother does not worry like that with you. Please come visit soon and bring the boat. Remember my name is Lloyd now. You will have to remind Mother who calls me Sam and sometimes when she does that she stops and gets that look on her face that you and I talked about (secret). Mother says to tell you that the lilacs look ready to bloom and the buckbrush did bloom and she planted lilies and asters and has the highest hope for both. She does not have the highest hopes for the shooting stars. Yesterday a deer ate the pea plants but left the monkey-flowers alone. I thought you should know. Write me right back if you can. The postman says your letters are his favorites because of the drawings on the envelopes. His name is Mason but he is not a mason (joke).

  Yrs most sincerely

  S. Lloyd Osbourne

  As I have said before, boarders flowed in and out of the house so steadily that as soon as I recognized a face, chances were excellent it was gone forever the next day, with naught to remember its owner by, than a glove or a hat or a pair of forgotten boots; but as my own tenure in the house grew longer so did my attentiveness to my fellow passengers in the tall wooden vessel, and I recount some of those souls now, partly from sheer wonder at the variety of life, but also now with a novelist’s deeper appreciation of the fact that any ten minutes with any being on earth could produce ten novels, had you the perception and imagination to see the stories waiting anxiously to be told.

  So then, let us begin with some of the women I met in the house. Not residents, I hasten to add—Mrs Carson ran a respectable domicile—but women who passed through the doors as friends and family of residents, assistants to Mrs Carson about the house, and friends and acquaintances of Mr and Mrs Carson. Let me start with the latter, for two in particular stay in my memory.

  One was a woman who was the unsung chess champion of her native country; that is to say it was she who trained, advised, and directed the nominal champion, her husband, who, according to Mr Carson, found this arrangement intimately romantic, and refused to play or travel unless her travel expenses were covered also. She was, according to Mr Carson, a person of the most wonderfully infinitesimal ego; he had met her through her brother, one of his many shipmates, later lost at sea. It was the late brother, said Mr Carson, who had invented a system of signals whereby she might direct her husband during a match, each action or inaction on her part indicating the piece in which he ought to focus his full and fervid attention—she would sigh, stretch, run a hand through her hair, adjust her dress, fiddle with a button, or remain stock-still when he glanced in her direction, and then leave it to him to see what nefarious plot or subtle opening she had seen and would suggest he defend or exploit. “To give him his due,” said Mr Carson, “he rarely does look over at her, and he has played many a match without doing so at all, and between you and me I believe it is the fact of her presence that acts as a boon to him, more than any hint of direction; but once when I suggested this to her, she replied that in all the matches they had played together privately, he had never once beaten her; and that, I say with admiration, is the one and only time I have ever heard her express even a jot of ego; although it is an interesting distinction, if there is one, between ego and pride, and perhaps it was more of an expression of quite justifiable pride in a very rare skill.”

  The other was a woman who had, said Mrs Carson quietly, established a flourishing house of ill repute, in Sacramento, and then had a crisis of conscience, and converted each and every one of her employees to other lines of work, with a remarkable diligence. This was a Mrs Adams, a formidable woman with whom I spent an hour by the fire one cold and foggy morning, and I think I shall always account that hour one of my best spent, for she was a wry and witty woman with no illusions whatsoever about social mores, and every firm conviction about honest right and wrong. “It was wrong of me,” she said, “to profit by sexual activity, and right of me to atone by investing all that profit and more into other activities,” she said. “I hold no truck with religions and their fear of sex, and I cannot bear pompous edicts issued by one soul about the sexual activities of another, but I also could not continue to profit myself by the sexual labor of others, for that is what it becomes, a terrible labor, a cruel slavery, a mean and evil twist of the zest of sex, a gift that should never be sold or bent to other purposes than its design, which is a wonderfully intimate and private pleasure between lovers. It seemed to me finally that I was robbing and enslaving women by pandering to the worst impulses of men, who did not at all wish intimacy, but only their own brief pleasure; and that realization, as well as an epiphany one night, that each girl in my employ was in a very real way my own child, was enough to change my course on a permanent basis.” One of her former employees, she said, had become a detective, one was in Burma in the court of Queen Supayalat, several were teachers, one had become an expert in cordage, and several, after consulting with Mrs Carson, were involved in the buying and selling of properties in and around San Francisco. One was a noted painter of portraits, one had entered religious orders, and one had become a journalist specializing in crimes committed by the upper classes.

  Mrs Carson, as I may have mentioned, also seemed to have a fairly regular rotation of girls from her native Ireland passing through the house, generally for a month at a time, as far as I could tell, and apparently always two by two; in my four months at Bush Street there were eight young women who assisted Mrs Carson with the endless duties of the house, and I recount them two by two, as I met and remember
them. There were Alice and Loretta, who refused to even look at each other, let alone speak civilly, though they worked together all day; reportedly the root of their mutual dislike was a young man in Belfast. There were Mairead and Fiona, both from County Mayo, and both slim as saplings. There were Brigid and Deidre, both from Wicklow, they told me, and Deidre from a forest so deep that no one had ever successfully mapped it; Deidre was of the opinion that the forest did not want to be mapped, and so changed form at will to confound surveyors and land agents. “Indeed, sir,” she said, “there’s men who went into it and never came back out, and are entombed in the trees, men who would have done the woods harm, and the woods would not suffer it, and so took them away into itself, and there are many more stories like this that I have heard.”

  And there were Ailís and her friend Éadaoin, the latter at pains to instruct me that her name in the Irish meant “joyous friend,” which she was, of Ailís, the two of them having been best friends since they were three years old. They had come to America together, “a tale you could tell for years and never arrive at even the middle of it,” said Ailís, mysteriously. I remember those two young women particularly for their singing—they sang all day at their work, most beautifully, in their native tongue, with an apparently inexhaustible supply of songs, for never that I recall did I hear the same song twice. Also I remember that once when a singing teacher stayed a week in the house, he tried with all his might to teach Éadaoin the American song “Shenandoah,” but when she began to sing it for the house one night, out of her mouth came the most horrendous caterwauling, at which she rushed downstairs to her room in tears; Ailís said quietly that their voices only knew Irish, and refused to sing in another language, and that the singing teacher ought to be ashamed of himself, for mortifying Éadaoin’s voice that way—“it will be a week before her voice comes back all shy and fearful, and we will have to coax the poor thing back up into her mouth again; they’re terrible shy, voices are, skittery as wrens in a wind.”

  * * *

  One morning I came down to the kitchen early for coffee and found Mrs Carson preparing to voyage up Pine Street to Octavia, where she knew a man who sold the freshest most succulent oysters in all the bay, but only once every few weeks, when circumstances arranged themselves to allow a shipment; a few people only knew of this resource, as the oysterman would sell only to people he admired and trusted, of whom Mrs Carson was one. The seller was in the habit, Mrs Carson said, of hoisting a signal flag from the peak of his house on Octavia when there were oysters to be had, and as the signal had just been spotted by Éadaoin, as she worked on the top floor, she, Mrs Carson, was on the march. I offered to accompany her, to which she acquiesced politely, and off we went; and so arrived the hour for me to ask her finally about her friend Gérard Harrison, the bear hunter who wore a claw around his neck. I had not forgotten the way she startled and smiled when she had heard of him from Captain Smith; and I remembered too John Carson’s grave respect both for the man and the story of how he had been of assistance to Mrs Carson, a story Mr Carson would not tell, as it was so valuable and crucial for her.

  Up Pine Street we went then, as it rose toward Nob Hill, and crested at Mason, and declined to the west at Leavenworth, and rose again finally to our destination on Octavia; and I will ask the reader to imagine for herself or himself the crystalline morning, one of those middle-March days in San Francisco when the sky is a remarkable and cloudless cerulean blue, and the wind is only the most occasional redolent caress, and the air is filled with the spice of eucalyptus and madrone, sifted here and there with tendrils of lime and lemon; behind us the glittering bay, ahead the prospect of a glimpse of mother sea; and all along our way houses and buildings of every sort of wood and iron and stone, piled and jumbled and shouldered together like rugby players in pursuit of their beloved and slippery ball.

  It was as Pine Street rose gently at Kearny that I asked after the bear hunter, and Mrs Carson smiled and said that she would endeavor to tell me the first half of the story uphill, and the second half downhill, and if she shaped the tale right, we would finish at 680 Bush Street, for Mr Harrison was, in a real sense, responsible for her residence there.

  For a moment she was silent, as we climbed, and then she brought me back to the small irascible man in Montreal—the tiny man she thought to be soilsithe, one of the illuminated beings—the door-porter at the school, who welcomed her and fed her, on the first day she was on this continent, frightened and cold and starving. A tidal moment, she reminded me; and then there was another, she said; “equally unlooked for, equally momentous as the first word of a long story, a story still telling me, as it were.…”

  She had spent the day sleeping in an attic room at the school, the students all being away, and when she came downstairs again at dusk to the kitchen, she found the tiny man in conversation with a man as furred and hairy, you would almost say, as a bear. This was Mr Harrison, she discovered, and he had somehow been summoned by the tiny man, and tasked with escorting her on her journey across Canada; Mr Harrison was adept and familiar with the wilderness, and no better guide could be found in the whole country, nor one more trustworthy as a companion; it turned out that Mr Harrison too had once come to the tiny man for guidance and intercession, at a terribly low point in his life, and he too had been relieved of his burden through the testy intercession of the little porter, and had then in gratitude sworn service to him in whatever capacity, whenever that service was required.

  “I was startled,” said Mrs Carson, “at the idea of a journey across Canada; I had said nothing of such an endeavor, nor even imagined such a thing; but here it was all planned out, and Mr Harrison eager to be away at once, and the tiny man pressing money into my hand, with a look of disgruntled impatience that I remember yet. I stammered, I began to protest; but the porter said, with the oddest sort of rude tenderness, that he was only an intermediary in these things, and that he was in a great hurry to get back to his work, and I should take it from him as inarguable fact that I was headed west, as far west as I could go in this land, and that I was utterly meant to do so, and had been headed in that direction since the morning I met the man on the mountain, and that tiny man had seen this meeting clear as day, not once but several times before my arrival, and once since as a confirmatory message, and he had been instructed inarguably as to what it meant, and I had been delivered to him alone, of all people in Canada, so that he could be of service, which he was attempting to deliver, and that Mr Harrison was himself the service, and that I was egregiously wasting his time and Mr Harrison’s and my own with this hesitant hemming and hawing, and that the sooner we were through his door the better, because his door would quite soon be hammered upon by yet another person who wrongly expected him to accomplish anything at all except by abashed intercession unto those whose feet he was not worthy to wash.

  “All the time he was saying these words he was edging me quite rudely toward the door, and just as he said the word ‘wash’ he pushed me abruptly into the hallway, where stood Mr Harrison silent and smiling, and then he slammed the door, with a loud crash, and that was the last time I ever saw him—to this day when I hear a door slam I think of him, and feel the most complicated rush of emotions. I doubt there is a more intemperate man in all of Canada, a ruder man, a testier man, a more truculent and disputatious man; yet he is an extraordinary man, a man whose whole life and work has been in service to people he does not know and never sees twice, for the most part. In one way he is a slave and another way a man rich beyond our understanding and imagination.”

  And just as she said this, we achieved Octavia Boulevard, and she went to conduct her business, while I waited, pondering her story. That a man can be two men at once, or four, or forty, this I know, too well, I suppose, for I was myself many men as a youth, trying on selves one after another, sometimes through the eyes and arms of others, too; and more than once I was one man one moment and another man altogether the next; so much so that sometimes I lost the actual man
for days at a time, and wandered selfless, as it were. I grew up, I shucked selves, I learned to be one man only, and let him be liked or not as the world wished; and for me Fanny’s love was the final blow to my other selves, for she loved the real man, and has no time or truck with the others, and so, starved of attention, they have fled, and I only am escaped alone to tell thee, as the messenger says to Job, in the Book of Books.

  Walking downhill in San Francisco is an art—it is a controlled fall, more than any sort of orthodox perambulation. You fall slowly, scurrying to keep your legs under you; you lean forward with one part of your body and lean backward with the rest; you must consciously resist the urge to simply surrender to the lure of gravity, and roll headlong down the street, until you eventually plop into one body of water or another; and all this becomes unconscious, the longer you live there, so eventually you hardly notice the peaks and valleys, the laborious up and skittering down, and only at night can you gauge the nature of your walks, by the particular ache of your legs—if your calves complain, you have been going uphill all day, and if your thighs protest, it has been all downhill; and it is the curious nature of this most rippling of cities that it is either one or another, and never both. You would think that the miles climbed up would be equal to the miles skipped down, but not in San Francisco; indeed there are stories of men here who have done nothing but climb uphill their entire lives, and so outdone the most famous alpinists, who only climb one mountain at a time, where San Franciscans climb a dozen a day, while chatting of this and that, and the price of coal.