Elizabeth Bishop

by Megan Marshall

  A MIRACLE FOR BREAKFAST

  At six o’clock we were waiting for coffee,

  waiting for coffee and the charitable crumb

  that was going to be served from a certain balcony,

  —like kings of old, or like a miracle.

  It was still dark. One foot of the sun

  steadied itself on a long ripple in the river.

  The first ferry of the day had just crossed the river.

  It was so cold we hoped that the coffee

  would be very hot, seeing that the sun

  was not going to warm us; and that the crumb

  would be a loaf each, buttered, by a miracle.

  At seven a man stepped out on the balcony.

  He stood for a minute alone on the balcony

  looking over our heads toward the river.

  A servant handed him the makings of a miracle,

  consisting of one lone cup of coffee

  and one roll, which he proceeded to crumb,

  his head, so to speak, in the clouds—along with the sun.

  Was the man crazy? What under the sun

  was he trying to do, up there on his balcony!

  Each man received one rather hard crumb,

  which some flicked scornfully into the river,

  and, in a cup, one drop of the coffee.

  Some of us stood around, waiting for the miracle.

  I can tell what I saw next; it was not a miracle.

  A beautiful villa stood in the sun

  and from its doors came the smell of hot coffee.

  In front, a baroque white plaster balcony

  added by birds, who nest along the river,

  —I saw it with one eye close to the crumb—

  and galleries and marble chambers. My crumb

  my mansion, made for me by a miracle,

  through ages, by insects, birds, and the river

  working the stone. Every day, in the sun,

  at breakfast time I sit on my balcony

  with my feet up, and drink gallons of coffee.

  We licked up the crumb and swallowed the coffee.

  A window across the river caught the sun

  as if the miracle were working, on the wrong balcony.

  1

  Balcony

  ELIZABETH BISHOP’S BIRTH in her parents’ home at 875 Main Street, Worcester, Massachusetts, on February 8, 1911, was recorded in a baby book, handsomely bound in scarlet grosgrain and titled “The Biography of Our Baby” in ornate gilt letters, that she would treasure all her life. The doctor and nurse attending the 10:45 a.m. delivery signed the first page. A birth weight of seven pounds was entered under “Baby’s Weight” on a chart illustrated with a comical scene of husband, clad in morning suit and bow tie, dangling baby from a hanging scale as wife, dressed in voluminous flowered robe, reaches out to catch the newborn if she should fall. The cartoon parents, dark-haired and prosperous like William and Gertrude Bishop, are united in a comforting concern for their child—“Our Baby”—that Elizabeth Bishop could scarcely have experienced in her parents, and certainly never remembered.

  The weights march down the page, registered weekly through the second month of life, with a satisfying average gain of a half pound at each line. Then the entries shift to a monthly basis—“2d Month: 9 lbs, 14 oz.” (The book also provides a “First Photograph” at two months: smiling, plump-cheeked Gertrude grasps infant Elizabeth firmly with both arms.) Third month: 10 lbs., 12 oz. At the fourth month, figures give way to words: “Mother had to go away with Father & leave Elizabeth for three months.” The alarming sentence crowds the next four lines on the chart (“5th Month,” “6th Month,” “1st Year,” “2d Year”). Then a final entry in black ink: “17½ lbs at 10 months,” out of place on the line reserved for “3d Year.”

  Gertrude and William Bishop, aged thirty-one and thirty-nine at Elizabeth’s birth, had enjoyed a lavish seaside honeymoon in Jamaica and Panama only three years before—sailing, swimming in pools and at the beach, picnicking on a riverbank—amply documented in another cherished album, dated 1908, the year of their wedding in New York City’s fashionable downtown Episcopal Grace Church. William earned a tidy income working as an estimator for his contractor father, John W. Bishop, whose Worcester base of operations provided access to granite quarries in the center of the state while he maintained offices in Boston, New York, and Providence to supervise the construction of such important buildings as Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts and its public library. Born to a ship carpenter with a simple farm on Prince Edward Island, Elizabeth Bishop’s paternal grandfather had joined a late-nineteenth-century exodus of Canadians seeking work in the United States to become one of New England’s great self-made men. “What it is he made it,” read an admiring entry on J. W. Bishop and his company of that name in an encyclopedia of Worcester’s prominent citizens, published the year before his son William’s marriage, lauding John W.’s unstinting hard work, his “rare judgment . . . foresight . . . unerring decision,” and above all his powers of execution: “He reduces every detail to a science, and then studies it in its relation to every other detail, and thus mastering them all comes to know and understand the whole as a man comes to know and understand the five fingers of his hand and how to use them.”

  But William, the oldest of John W.’s eight children, suffered from Bright’s disease, an incurable illness affecting the kidneys, then the fourth leading cause of death in the United States. The younger Nova Scotia–raised Gertrude Bulmer, a lithe ice skater who trained to become a nurse in Boston, seemed to embody the physical health her husband sought. But she could not confer it. Mother’s three-month absence with Father, whether in a quest for a cure or a last vacation, ended with a return to Worcester and William’s death there in October 1911, when Elizabeth was eight months old. The entries on her baby book’s weight chart frame the first tragedy in her life, one she was too young to have the words to describe.

  A few pages later, photographs tell the story. Elizabeth is posed for the camera at six months, dressed in a white gown. It is August 1911, the month of her mother’s birthday, but she is alone in a broad wicker armchair set outdoors on the lawn. In one view she appears to have toppled over onto her side; immobilized in a nest of blankets, she stares stubbornly in frustration at the camera—or is she about to cry? In another, she is seated ramrod straight, gazing imperiously beyond the frame of the photograph, to garden or woods. Already she is “being brave”—“for years and years . . . my major theme,” she would one day write.

  Elizabeth at six months, baby book photo, August 1911

  Dislocations followed, the sort that startle a child with vivid new impressions and force indelible early memories. For a time she traveled between Massachusetts and Nova Scotia with her grieving mother, the second of five children, four of them daughters, of Elizabeth and William Bulmer—or Boomer, as the name was sometimes spelled—a tanner until the trade died out. Elizabeth remembered learning to walk in her mother’s childhood home, her Bulmer grandparents’ house at the corner of Cumberland and Old Post Roads in the center of tiny, primitive Great Village, Nova Scotia: “a homely old white house that sticks its little snub nose directly into the middle of the village square,” she would later say. That day, her mother was away—where?—and she toddled over a soft, rose-patterned carpet toward her grandmother’s outstretched arms and a “blur of plants” on the windowsill, the indoor greenery her grandmother maintained during the winter months when Elizabeth reached her first birthday. She remembered lying on the bed in the room she shared with her mother, watching Gertrude stand shivering in the washbasin as she bathed herself with water from a pitcher—there was no running water in Great Village. Her mother was beautiful, with long dark hair that she pinned up afterward in a pompadour. Elizabeth let her head hang down over the edge of the bed to view her mother upside down—the pretty curves, the vulnerable, defenseless, naked white body—and felt sad. She was a little older now.

  Great Vi
llage, Nova Scotia, postcard view

  Few memories of her mother were beautiful, or simply sad. Her mother hit her sometimes. Worse was the way Gertrude left her for weeks or months—repeatedly—or seemed to be absent even when she was there. At three years old, Elizabeth was visiting Bishop relatives with her mother at the shore in Marblehead, Massachusetts, when a fire broke out across the harbor in Salem. It was a hot, dry day and Elizabeth woke in her crib, stood to watch the red sky outside the window, grasped the white bars of her crib as they too glowed red; the crib’s brass nobs “held specks of fire.” Outside on the lawn below, her mother also watched, her white summer dress turning “rose-red,” Elizabeth forgotten. People arrived in boats, escaping the blaze. Her mother joined neighbors offering “coffee or food,” and Elizabeth called out to her through the open window “and called and called.” Day turned to night, flames engulfed the city across the water, and “I was terribly thirsty but mama didn’t hear me calling.”

  This was 1914, the year the Great Salem Fire consumed more than a thousand buildings and left twenty thousand residents homeless; the year Gertrude Bulmer Bishop was hospitalized for mental illness at Boston’s Deaconess Hospital, where she jumped out a second-story window but was not badly hurt. Gertrude was moved to a private sanatorium in Norwood, Massachusetts, and stayed three months before returning to Nova Scotia and Elizabeth, who had settled there with her Bulmer grandparents. By now Elizabeth had come to view her mother more as one of the Bulmer aunts, and the least reliable of them. Or perhaps not even that—Grandmother and the aunts had become Gertrude’s caretakers. Was it before or after this hospitalization that one of them found Gertrude sleeping next to Elizabeth, holding a knife? Not to use against Elizabeth, but perhaps to ward off the demons—or the provincial authorities—she feared would take Elizabeth from her. Gertrude could not stop grieving for William; what if she lost Elizabeth too?

  Elizabeth’s mother, Gertrude Bishop, ca. 1916

  But Gertrude was first to be taken away. Elizabeth was now five years old, a girl who loved the Baptist hymns and Scottish tunes her grandparents sang, the “pure note” of Mate Fisher’s hammer on anvil in the blacksmith shop next door, the “flop, flop” of dung dropped by Nelly the willful Jersey cow as Elizabeth drove her through the village and up a hill to pasture in the early morning when “the grass is gray with dew.” A girl whose black-and-white patent leather shoes required cleaning before church on Sundays—cleaning with “gasoline” then polishing with “Vaseline,” her grandmother explained as she buffed the little shoes. Elizabeth repeated the rhyming words over and over to herself all day, as enchanted by them as by the pulsing lines she sang while wearing the gleaming shoes: “Holy, Holy, Holy—All the saints adore Thee! Casting down their golden crowns around the glassy sea.”

  Sounds filled her ears, terrifying ones too: her mother’s screams, which could be heard in neighboring houses; the slam of a bedroom door; her grandmother’s weeping. Did she know her mother—so thin now, wraithlike—had tried to hang herself with a sheet, had grabbed her own mother by the throat? Writing from the distance of several decades, Elizabeth Bishop would recall one unending maternal scream and its echo floating over the village, following her as she drove Nelly to pasture. She would not see her mother or hear her mother’s voice again.

  What was said to Elizabeth about her mother’s disappearance? She was in primer class at the Great Village school, daunted by long columns of numbers she couldn’t decipher, although she admired the stacked twin ovals of the number 8, the way it assumed its perfect shape with one twisting motion of the hand. From her grandmother, whose name she shared, Elizabeth had already learned an alphabet that “made a satisfying short song” through the letter g, and she’d pressed on to learn the remaining nineteen. At school, “reading and writing caused me no suffering. I found the first easier, but the second was enjoyable.” She liked forming the letters with the chalk stylus on her slate.

  Elizabeth’s Nova Scotia grandparents, Elizabeth and William Bulmer

  Elizabeth could read or simply knew the meaning of the indelible purple address her grandmother penciled on the package she sent each week to Gertrude in a sanatorium fifty miles away in Dartmouth, across the narrow bay from busy Halifax. Was it imagining that distance, the land and water to be crossed by carriage or automobile from Great Village to Dartmouth, N.S., that made Elizabeth love the two glossy maps—one of Canada and one of the whole world—that hung on her classroom wall, though she was too young to learn geography? (Only third and fourth graders were given lessons from the geography textbook.) If she wished to see her mother, she didn’t say and was not asked. Her mother’s existence—if it could be called that—was shameful. Gertrude was “permanently insane”: Elizabeth would say it later, but not yet. Perhaps there was still hope of change for the better.

  Elizabeth hid her mother’s purple address from Mate the blacksmith, tucked the package she’d watched her grandmother fill with fruit, cakes, wild-strawberry jam, a book of Tennyson’s poetry, or a Bible, under her arm, and covered the names and numbers with her hand as she walked to post it in town, the weekly errand her grandmother assigned to her. Was she walking toward her mother as she approached the village post office, small as a horse’s manger? Could she forget Mother once the package was received by Mr. Johnson the postmaster, placed on the scale by his two hands with two fingers missing (lost to a threshing machine), its weight recorded and postage calculated? After she had seen there was no return mail in the Bulmer box, number 21?

  The routine—sitting in primer class with chalk and slate and lustrous roll-down maps, driving Nelly up to pasture and looking out over Minas Basin’s “wet red mud glazed with sky blue” at low tide, delivering the shameful package to Mr. Johnson—ended abruptly. Elizabeth was “kidnapped,” or it felt that way, by “god-like” Grandfather Bishop and Sarah Foster Bishop, his American-born wife, the other grandmother whom she’d nearly forgotten, and taken by overnight train to live in their mansion home at 1212 Main Street, Worcester, Massachusetts. John W. Bishop “was another grandfather and I already had one I loved,” she wrote thirty years later, confiding in a psychiatrist; along with her mother and aunts, Elizabeth had called her Nova Scotia grandfather, whose cheeks covered in “silver stubble” she happily kissed, “Pa.” The Bishops thought to rescue her from all she loved: barefoot summer days, chalk on slate, oil lamps, even the privy out back. The psychiatrist listened to this story and more, and told Elizabeth Bishop she was lucky to have survived her childhood.

  And she was. By 1917, five of John and Sarah Bishop’s eight children had died, three in childhood, and Grandfather believed it was Sarah’s fault—she “didn’t know anything about children.” Elizabeth too fell ill in the big house, not really a mansion but a sprawling farmhouse at the end of the trolley line, with a billiard room for Grandfather, where he smoked a cigar in the evening, and a many-windowed sewing room for Grandmother, where she tended her canaries, and a Swedish cook and a maid and kind Ronald the chauffeur, and the broad lawn on which Elizabeth had been photographed in a wicker armchair at six months, the grass kept in trim by a hired man. Elizabeth suffered bouts of asthma and eczema, and Grandmother wasn’t the only one who didn’t know what to do with her.

  Elizabeth at Spencer’s Point, Nova Scotia, during a summer visit to her Bulmer grandparents, ca. 1921

  Neither Grandfather nor his one surviving son, Jack, knew when a joke became terrifying to a six-year-old girl used to country ways. She’d learned “good manners” from Pa—“always / speak to everyone you meet,” answer “nicely” when spoken to—but Grandfather Bishop and Uncle Jack liked to tease and threaten and exclude. Elizabeth was not a bad child, even if she and Evelyn, the girl next door, the only daughter of a bank president, sometimes played at being thieves: Evelyn stole her father’s checkbooks and fountain pens from his desk; Elizabeth took a miniature wrench from her grandmother’s sewing room and buried it under an elm tree, along with three potatoes nabbed fr
om the kitchen. Elizabeth was never found out, nor could she find the tiny wrench when she dug for it later. She knew stealing from Grandmother Bishop was wrong, but she also knew she was “bitterly unhappy and lonely.” No one noticed her petty thievery, no one loved her. Elizabeth told Evelyn her mother was dead, like her father. But then she “loathed” herself for lying, for the “hideous craving for sympathy” her lie revealed, the dishonorable longing for a loss she could speak of and mourn.

  When Uncle Jack came to stay, he fawned over Evelyn and ignored Elizabeth, except to tease that “someone needed a spanking or a whipping”—for what?—and afterward to “argue argue” with her grandparents at the dinner table, where the frightened Elizabeth rarely spoke: “I was scared to death of him and he didn’t like me.” That same dining table provided a hiding place, a playhouse beneath the dark mahogany, behind the white folds of tablecloth, reminding her of the flowering syringa bush in Nova Scotia “whose shelter I often shared with a hen.” Grandfather Bishop knew when Elizabeth was playing there. “God-like,” he could be generous too. “I wonder if some little girl would like to take piano lessons?” he asked one day of the child hiding under the tablecloth. And soon Elizabeth was “overjoyed” to be taking lessons with Mrs. Darling, although the young pupil teetered on the piano bench, her legs too short to reach the pedals.