by Brian Doyle
And of my landlady and her husband. I had come to realize, in my last days in the house, that they had become such dear and close friends, that parting would be wrenching; to think that never again would I listen to John Carson by the fire, or to Mrs Carson in the kitchen, shucking oysters, was terribly sad. In so many ways they had welcomed me into their home and into their hearts, and given a foreign wraith such a harbor as he had never dreamed possible, half a world from his own home, and weak with illness, and as close to penniless as a man can come, and still have a scrap of pride.
Here in their house I had done good work; here in their city I would be married; here in their state I had been welcomed by children soon to be my own; here in their gracious company I had been thrilled by stories from all over the world, by remarkable adventures and expeditions and voyages more wonderful than I could tell in a hundred books, and met their fascinating friends. But here in this house, more than anything, I had been given good friends and true. In whatever years that are left to me, whenever I hear the words “San Francisco,” those salty windy misty hilly words, I will instantly see John and Mary Carson, the one meditating by the fire in his best frock coat, and the other poking her head in from the kitchen, as redolent tendrils of dinner slip past her, to call gently for the man she loves, the man she crossed the world to find. For they did cross half the world each, to retrieve the other, though they could not have explained the powerful yearning then, and cannot even now; but I can marvel at it, as their friend, as a student of wonderful stories, and as a man who himself crossed half the world to claim his love, against all advice and sense. But if ever a human construct ought to be viewed with the most withering suspicion at all times, it is that which we call sense; which is quite often only the frontier of our imagination, sometimes a prison wall we erect around ourselves, fearful of what is beyond.
* * *
Every day now was a last day, and I savored every moment, every detail, every drop. One last night I shucked oysters in the kitchen, and listened to Mary Carson tell me about the little man in Montreal, who sent her tiny bottles of oil from the lamps around his beloved statue of Saint Joseph; she used the oil with the sick in her house, and accounted it miraculous sometimes, depending on the willingness of the patient to believe it so. One last day I walked up Pine Street from the waterfront, and felt the city begin to rise under my feet at Kearny, and watched with a throng of fellow amazed souls as Andrew Hallidie’s new cable car ran up the hill, its passengers fearful and delighted. The long slow climb to Nob Hill, a moment to rest at Powell, and then uphill again to Mason, where the city crests; once again I pass by Hyde Street, and think that Hyde would be a lovely name for a character in a novel; once again, for the hundredth time since I arrived in this city after Christmas, I revel in the scents and airs of the trees—olive and avocado, lime and lemon, the sharp spice of eucalyptus—I think that I could pick that brisk commanding scent of a thousand, and know it to be the most Californian scent of all—along with money and wine, I suppose, and the faint bronze smell of dreams.
To the Presidio, and beyond it the wild windy whip of the Golden Gate; past all the old stone churches, tall and proud and nodding politely to their cousins; around every corner and through every lane and alley, still discovering new views of the sea and bay, even after so many miles of perambulation; through ten, twenty, thirty languages hailing from every corner of the world; past faces of every cast and color imaginable, from pale to pink, brown to black, russet to ruddy; past horses and dogs and supercilious cats; mules and burros and here and there still a cow, quietly munching the neighbor’s roses; once an amused parrot aboard a sailor’s shoulder; and once the tiniest monkey I have ever seen, atop a soldier, and looking very much like a bright-eyed hat.
And one last night I sat with John Carson, and listened to him sail the world, tacking always toward his Mary, drawn by some volition he could not name. One last night he told me stories—of Australia, in which he had wandered deep into the northern wilderness, and come upon a tribe that loved chess and played it brilliantly, and played a ritual living chess game every year when the rains came, the women against the men, the pieces dressed in feathers and crocodile skins, moving at the command of chiefs on a hill, who issued their instructions by running children; sweet it was, said John Carson, to watch a small boy, naked but for a belt of parrot feathers, lead his mother by the hand from one place to another, at which point applause for the grace of the move would fill the valley.
Of Canada, where he and his shipmate, as they wandered Vancouver Island, had rescued a shriveled bear from a pit, and restored it to health with salmon and berries, and been rewarded with an elk calf, carried by the bear to their very campfire; there was a moment to remember all your life, said Mr Carson, my mate and I sitting astonished as the bear placed her thanks at our feet, and we all stared at each other a long moment, with much being said without words being necessary, and then she faded back into the forest.
Of the death of his dear friend Gurumarra at sea near the Navigator Islands, and how and why that had happened, Gurumarra leaping overboard in a storm, and holding up a shipmate overcome by the sea, and then sinking away himself into the depths, with no corpse to be found, though the ship waited there all the next day, in reverence and grief—“Every one of us,” said John Carson, “every one of us, captain included, for there was a man admired by all, and mourned with piercing sadness; I do not think any one of us from that ship ever fully recovered ourselves from that loss, though I am the only one who believes I will see him again somehow, in whatever form we assume in the next life; it was Gurumarra who assured me that who we are persists past who we were, and he was not a man for fanciful belief or religious claptrap. If he told you a thing was so, it was incontrovertibly so, whether you understood it or not.”
And many more stories—of a nearly deaf boy in New South Wales named Henry, whom Mr Carson was sure would someday be that country’s Mark Twain; of a man he met in Ireland, who scoured the ditches and swales of County Mayo for the bones of those who had starved alone and unremarked, and buried their bones in boxes shaped like boats; of a hawk he had known in Scotland, which could read, and answer questions by writing in the dirt with a talon; of a magical book he had been shown once in Wales, which filled itself with different stories according to ideas of its own, and one time would be an adventure, and the next a treatise on philosophy, and yet again a manual about the cultivation of oats.
I think I will always remember that last night by the fire—for so many reasons. It was the apex and culmination of so many other nights like it, swirling with story, with Mr Carson’s quiet voice tendrilling out of the flickering firelight, carrying us around the world; such an ancient habit and joy, telling stories by the fire! How many thousands and hundreds of thousands of years have human beings sat, rapt and riveted, our imaginations thrilling, as a voice came out of the darkness carrying seas and ships, mountains and men, forests and fights, loss and love? And it ended with Mr Carson’s voice shivering a bit, as he said that he too had much enjoyed our hours here by the hearth, and would remember them always with pleasure, even as I went on to what he was sure would be a famous career, for he thought that stories would come to me always, trusting me to tell them honestly, with both verve and humility, trying to tell them well, but not taking overmuch credit for the way in which they were drawn to my imagination like metal to magnet; some people, like you and Mr Clemens, are seanachies, as Mrs Carson says in the Irish—storycatchers, born to hear and share stories, a holy craft, in the end.
And too he asked me quietly, before we parted, to carry Mrs Carson particularly in my heart, and pray for her in whatever way was most comfortable for me; for she was newly with child, and it might be that the prayers of a dear friend, for that is how he and Mrs Carson thought of me, would help steer the child safely through its long voyage in the sea of its mother, and arrive safe in the harbor of her arms at last. To this I said yes with all my heart; and that night I knelt an
d prayed as I had not done since I was a child in stormy Scotland, kneeling by my thin bed in that tiny wooden room at the top of the ship on Bush Street.
* * *
Does every man remember every moment of his wedding day, so that years later he can close his eyes and return there in an instant, thrilled and nervous, and buffing his boots for the ninth time? I suspect so, I suspect so; for I am only one man, but every instant of that one day has remained resident in me as clear and vibrant as the day itself; I can call it up with the snap of a finger, and often I do so in lazy moments, for the sheer pleasure of it; Fanny has caught me smiling secretly, and taxes me cheerfully for living in the past. But to me it is not past, that delicious day, and I live it over again every morning, even now, when I awake, and there she is, my wife; the most remarkable words I know, and me a professional herder and recruiter of words, surrounded by them all day long and into the night.
I buffed my boots that morning, again and again; I paced my room, now empty of all my papers and pens and books, all packed for our honeymoon; I smoked a dozen cigarettes; I said farewell to the ebullient sparrows who had haunted my windowsill, and sometimes hopped into the room, and leapt about looking for crumbs; I stared out one last time at the sprawling city below my wooden tower, the city that had hosted me these riveting months, that had offered me stories and friends and clean salt air, and God alone knows how many oysters; and I went downstairs for the last time.
I confess it here that I paused often along the way, running my hand slowly along the shining old banister, gazing with foolish affection on the doors of the other boarders, taking a strange pleasure in the sheer familiarity of the creaking planks along the staircase, especially the one with divots from a logger’s boots, who came home in his cups one night, and dreamed he was in a log-rolling contest. Mr Carson had told me he had many times bent to replace that board, but never did so, as the pitted surface continually reminded him of the logger, “a good man, a kind man, and a wonderful log-roller, too, twice champion of the state of Oregon,” as he said with a smile.
Past the drawing room, and the fireplace so often flanked by two slouched men and four long legs, aswirl with smoke from cigarette and cigar; past the oysterous kitchen, the scullery, the pantry, the mudroom, the wood-room, the back porch as rigged with lines and set with sheets as any ship at sea, though the house sails were for sleep and the ship’s for speed. And then finally to the long narrow hallway lined with prints and engravings of the sea, and paintings of Achill and Montreal, and hung with the most amazing arcana, from a bear trap to a crucifix carved of walrus tusk; not an inch of that hallway was without adornment, it seemed to me, and I had many times pored the walls, each and every time finding some new detail I had not noticed before.
But this one last time down the hallway I had no eyes for the works on the walls, for the hall was lined with smiling people, and as I stood there agape they reached for me, and clapped me on the back, and pumped my hand energetically, and handed me small gifts of one kind or another (including an imposing clasp-knife, I discovered later), and beamed at me so warmly that I was overwhelmed, and came very near tears. Mrs Carson saw this, and made a brief speech about how it had been a pleasure and an honor to have me as a guest in her house, a pleasure because I was a gentleman and treated everyone with kindness and generosity, and an honor because I was surely destined to be a great and unforgettable author, and the fact that I had lived at 608 Bush Street would go down in history forever, and someday probably there would be a plaque on the wall outside, probably with her name misspelled. This got a burst of laughter, in which I recovered myself, and Mr Carson led me down the steps onto Bush Street.
Up Bush Street one last time, past Notre Dame des Victoires, where the bells pealed resoundingly just as we walked past, causing us to laugh; over busy Powell and Mason streets, past taverns and shops of every stripe, past an ostler and a cobbler, past teams of horses, past a disconsolate donkey, past children of every shade of skin imaginable. It seemed to me that morning that I saw and felt and heard and smelled every grain of the fabric of the city, every redolence and stench, every cry and screech and song, as crisp and clear as if it were my first day there, perhaps because it was my last, and all of my senses were at their full pitch, to carry away as much of the city as possible.
Underfoot the stone and wood, mud and scuff, cobble and duff, and here and there the naked ancient hill itself; I fancied once that I saw an aboriginal footprint in the dust, left long ago by a Miwok maid. Overhead crows and jays, and an occasional gull—that piercing shout is the sound I most associate with San Francisco, even though I have heard it slicing through the moist air of maritime cities from Scotland to Samoa. Down Taylor Street now, past Sutter Street, past an alley filled with swallows, darting and whirling in the most amazing fashion; perhaps there was a cloud of insects trapped there somehow, and the swallows were gorging as seabirds gorge on mobs of bait-fish, but perhaps it was a convocation of swallows for reasons of their own, gathered in an alley holy to them, or one housing a great queen of their clan, now reborn as a girl child; who knows the ways of the world’s other beings, for all our confidence that we hold dominion over them? And finally to Post Street, and the minister’s house; where, waiting for us in a great room by the fireplace, I found my Fanny, and very soon after I took her hand in mine, we were married at last.
It would entail another whole book, or a series of them, to tell the story aright, of that beaming day, let alone our next three lazy delicious days at the Palace Hotel, and then our voyage north across the bay to Napa Valley, where we honeymooned high on a hill amid madrone and manzanita, and rattlesnakes and the most wonderful hot reviving nutritious sun; I do not think I have ever been so happy and healthy as I was those weeks in Silverado, nor do I think I have ever seen Fanny more relaxed, before or since that time; I will always have a chapel in my heart for that sunlit hilltop, with its shy deer and bold snakes. To me it was something like the very cupped gracious hand of California, where Fanny and I drank the first draughts of the marriage for which we had waited so long.
Instead let me leave you with a few last images, and let them sketch the story in brief: Isobel embracing me long and hard after the ceremony, and sobbing with some deep mixture of relief and sadness and joy … Lloyd holding my hand so tightly the rest of the day that it was all I could do to pry it loose when we tucked him into bed that night … the round-faced Reverend Scott beaming as brightly as the moon, and joking about John Calvin’s patently odd terror of dancing, what sort of dunderhead could conceivably be afraid of dancing?… Fanny’s own tears of relief and joy in the back garden of the minister’s house, to which she had repaired, ostensibly to rehabilitate her hair, blown askew by the usual San Franciscan afternoon gale … Mary Carson presenting us with a chess set carved from all the woods of California, so that we would remember that golden land, no matter how far we traveled from it … Mrs Carson presenting us also with a gift from Ailís and Éadaoin, which turned out to be pearls for Fanny, found in a crate of oysters sent from Vancouver Island … Mr Carson handing me a gift which he said had been mailed to the house a week ago, which turned out to be a copy of Mark Twain’s new book, A Tramp Abroad, sent without return address, but postmarked Connecticut … Fanny’s face, as she peered up at me after we had promised our lives to each other, that alert mysterious eager untamed unquenchable face I’d been utterly absorbed by since the first moment I saw it, through a window in a hotel in France …
But let me conclude with one last image for you to carry away, here at the end. Imagine a young Scotsman stepping forth to be married to his great love, the woman he adores, the woman he knows in his heart is the partner of his innermost soul, until death do them part; but he does so in a country far from his own, and far from his friends, far even from his father, who might in other circumstances stand as witness for his only son, in the hour of his wedding. Had I been married in Scotland, or England, I might have had my dear friend Colvin stand with me
, or my beloved cousin Bob; nor did I have a child myself, to stand with me, as Isobel stood with Fanny. I thought about Lloyd, but did not wish to add more weight to the tumult of his life, and him just eleven years old—better to let the boy enjoy the pomp of the day, and enjoy the prospect not of a new father, but at least of a male companion in the family, who might actually pay attention to him, and play and work with him in his adventures and studies, and give him at the least a steady affection, which he so long had lacked.
No, not Lloyd; but there was a man here in San Francisco I much admired, and counted now as a dear friend; a man I hoped to be in correspondence with the rest of my days, a man I trusted, a man who would, I knew for a fact, care for my family, should I be removed from life betimes; and that is the man I asked to stand as witness with me on the day Fanny and I were married on Post Street. He wore his best black suit, John Carson did, and the very boots he had worn on his adventures in several quarters of the world. Worn as they were, they shone with polishing—Ailís and Éadaoin had both had at them, and Mr Carson had attacked them himself twice that morning with barrels of bootblack, as he said—and he told me later that in his opinion they were now composed more of polish than of boot, and that a stiff afternoon breeze off the bay would reduce and scatter them like sand.
When I think of the day that Fanny married me, I think of many things, all of them rich and pleasurable and moving; foremost among them Fanny’s face, in that first moment after our vows, and the desperate happiness with which Lloyd gripped my hand all afternoon and evening. But then I remember, with the deepest pleasure, that such a man as John Carson stood beside me as my companion and witness at that sweetest of moments; and that after I had kissed Fanny, and embraced Isobel, and shaken hands gravely with Lloyd, it was to John Carson that I turned, and, taking his big rough hand, expressed, as well as I could, my most sincere and heartfelt gratitude for his kindness, his generosity, and his friendship. We are all travelers in this world, and the best we can find in our travels is an honest friend; I found such a man one winter and spring in San Francisco, and I hope that in telling you something of his remarkable adventures, I have told you something deeper of his even more remarkable character.