She becomes aware of a memory pushing up from the bottom of a secret sea, breaking off from the accrued strata, coral hard, lying there unmoved by tides. It fights its way to light and air. When it emerges it is full-dimensioned, whole.
It is the previous year, and the month is May. They are on the road from Nice to Genoa. Elliot is driving. She is the passenger. They have just crossed the border. The guidebook says that Ventimiglia is one of Italy’s most important flower markets. Ann has never seen so many carnations. Fields of them rise to the hills on the left and slope to the sea on the right. They line the road that stretches ahead, and she has forgotten where they began. They are being gathered in straw baskets, clove pink, spice red, candy-striped pink and white, pink and red.
On both sides of the road, men and women sell them at stands. Dozens are tied together to make a single bunch, sometimes all one color, sometimes mixed.
Ann sees a man standing ahead of them on the right. He is importuning them with all the flowers his hands can hold. Ann supposes that their fragrance hangs about him like incense. He is hatless and wears sandals. They are about to pass him. She hasn’t had time to say “Stop.”
Then, in an impact as clear and sudden as the clash of cymbals, Ann’s eyes meet the eyes of the vendor. Their smiles meet and fuse. The second is held in timeless suspension, like a rain-drop on a spiderweb.
His arms, lifting the carnations like lanterns, are open in an encompassing embrace. They hold the terraced vineyards and the twisted pines, they hold the marble figures and the tapestried palace walls, the tile on hillside houses and the stone on Roman roads.
Long after they have left the vendor behind, Ann turns to Elliot. His lips are moving, and she supposes he is dividing liters of gasoline. She waits for a moment, then touches his arm. “Back there,” she says, forgetting that her vagueness would annoy him. “Back there, we could have stopped. We could have bought flowers.”
3
The Extinguishing of Great-Aunt Alice
Great-Aunt Alice broke her hip when she was eighty-two. Walking about her garden one summer night, she fell over a hose that had been left across a brick path. She lay there until morning with her cheek pressed against candytuft and her feet on a clump of white dianthus. Her thoughts, rising like star shells over the pain, were various. She remembered the girlhood excursion when her long poplin skirt caught in the spokes of her bicycle. She remembered when the chipped beak of her grandfather’s grotto-blue parrot had clamped onto her finger until it bled. She remembered the gestation and delivery of Theodore, her son. And she earnestly hoped that she would be found when daylight came by her driver or her gardener and not by Theo.
During her three-week confinement to a hospital bed, the only family visits Great-Aunt Alice endured with grace were those of her great-niece, Elizabeth, then eleven years old. Elizabeth brought strange maps she had drawn of India, France, and Peru, striped with rivers, crocheted with mountains, shaded with forests, dotted with wheat, rice, and corn, red-circled with capitals, and all bounded by shores of a thousand parentheses. She brought recent school compositions, which might start, “When I give my dog, Old Moll, a bath she smells like seaweed,” or “Things I hate: roller coasters, Brussels sprouts, The Phantom of the Opera.” Great-Aunt Alice felt more akin to the second generation than to the intervening one. Her son, niece, and nephews tended to cloud issues. Elizabeth and Great-Aunt Alice shared the same crystal vision.
Through the open door of her hospital room, Great-Aunt Alice sometimes heard protracted weeping. It seemed chronic rather than acute, a way of life rather than a trauma. During the fifth night of her stay she woke in the dark to the sound of steady sobbing beyond the foot of her bed. Switching on the light, she saw a woman sitting in the visitor’s upholstered armchair. Long strands of uncombed white hair fell over her shoulders, and she was naked. Great-Aunt Alice understood very little about senility, everything about eccentricity, and was not alarmed. She first rang for the nurse, then regarded her caller. The sunken red-rimmed eyes, the mouth half open in lament, the sagging lines of the body, shaped like a wrinkled winter pear, gradually took form as a painted image.
She has struck a pose, Great-Aunt Alice thought, and wished for the reincarnated presence of Picasso or Matisse.
With her new artificial hip, Great-Aunt Alice regained much of her former mobility. She resumed attendance on Sunday mornings at her church. This was a modest ivy-covered stone structure in a decaying section of the city. Here it was that she had gone to Sunday school. She recalled coloring and cutting out pictures of David and Goliath, and of the baby Moses lying swaddled in his craft among the reeds.
Great-Aunt Alice, an inveterate nonbeliever, went to church because she always had, just as she took off her glasses when men were present, and called her car the machine. At an Easter service, she suffered a severe muscle spasm at the beginning of the Apostles’ Creed. Feeling sharp pain, she rose at once, tall and erect as always, to tower over the lilies at the altar and the bowed heads of the congregation until she felt she could walk unassisted and without a limp.
Soon after the hip operation, Great-Aunt Alice became the victim of a series of small strokes. These were apt to cause temporary spells of what her doctor called disorientation. At the onset of one particularly trying lapse, when Bridget, her close friend and cook of forty years, was in Ireland for her sister’s funeral, and Theo was away at a college reunion, Brooke, Elizabeth’s mother, had to have Great-Aunt Alice admitted to a nursing home. Or, put more accurately, locked up.
The patient imagined that she was vacationing at a second-rate motel and, being naturally gregarious, soon had a dozen acquaintances among her fellow guests. One of these was an ash-blond widow, willowy to the point of emaciation and given to apologetic coughs. It was to her, one tedious afternoon, that Great-Aunt Alice said on impulse, “Let’s go out to tea.” Shortly after that, the two ladies exited through the empty kitchen, thus eluding their wardens.
Once on their own, they walked a few blocks until they reached the freshly sprinkled lawns and flower beds of a residential neighborhood. In the driveway ahead of them, a woman was backing her compact station wagon from the garage of a whitewashed bungalow.
“There’s a taxi,” exclaimed Great-Aunt Alice, hurrying on and signaling the driver with an urgent wave. She and her friend approached the car, now idling at the curb, opened the door to the back seat, and got in.
“To the Maryland Hotel, please,” said Great-Aunt Alice. She had conjured out of a rainbow kaleidoscope of the fragmented past the site of her first dancing class and her first lemonade served on a palm-shaded terrace by a waiter wearing gloves. The Maryland Hotel, with its gilded chairs lining the paneled walls of the ballroom, its gold-and-crystal chandeliers, its polished floors, and Great-Aunt Alice herself in tucked dimity and high white buttoned shoes, were now of one flesh with thirty stories of concrete and black glass. That is, if Great-Aunt Alice, and her niece Brooke, Elizabeth’s mother, and inevitably Elizabeth, were correct in their notion that nothing was ever lost. That the theaters they once played could produce on demand the voices of Maude Adams, Ethel Barrymore, and Harry Lauder, the boards of the great stages the faint tapping above the orchestra of Anna Pavlova dancing backward aux pointes. That the tree still held all the birds that ever sang there.
The driver of the station wagon wore thick, brown-rimmed glasses and a lime-green pantsuit. She had planted both feet on the ground when she was one and a half, and an aura of common sense hung about her like the aroma of wholesome food. Today she had realized at once that she must pilot the rudderless into safe waters, and set off with purpose and without surprise.
On arrival at the police station, she took the desk sergeant aside and hazarded a guess that her passengers were from one of several nearby institutions for the failing aged. The sergeant picked up the telephone.
Meanwhile Great-Aunt Alice and her friend had been served coffee by a pair of young policemen, and the four sat together,
two chairs having been drawn up to face the bench next to the wall. Great-Aunt Alice, assuming they were midshipmen, immediately began an account of the June prom at Annapolis in 1901. After their second cup of coffee and some packaged Nabiscos from a vending machine, the sergeant interrupted to report that a car was waiting to take them home, and the ladies entered a black-and-white automobile whose revolving red lights and siren were temporarily stilled.
The nursing home, when finally hunted down by the police sergeant, had called Theo’s apartment and found him there, returned prematurely from his alma mater. He had made a thorough search of the anniversary classes and encountered only eight alumni of his year, all so altered by time and varying levels of despair that none recognized the others.
Theo, reached in time, was standing at the yellow stucco entrance of the nursing home to meet his mother when the police car drew up and discharged its two passengers. He still wore his straw reunion hat, a boater whose ribbon band bore in golden numerals the year of his graduation.
“Theo, dear,” his mother said. “We’ve had a lark. So many young men, and such good manners, They wined and dined us.” Then, aside, “I don’t have my purse. Would you give the driver something?”
In a later, lucid period, Great-Aunt Alice, perhaps more perceptive than the family would acknowledge, filled out a Living Will, the instrument by which she expected to be discharged into eternity with a minimum of fuss, discomfort (as agony is often called), and the inept ministrations of Dr. Hilford, the family physician. The esteem in which he was originally held had been undermined long since by familiarity.
“Doctors should be strangers,” Great-Aunt Alice always said. “The only common meeting ground should be the examining table.”
From the Living Will she deleted clergyman, lawyer, and doctor as witnesses and wrote in driver, gardener, and hairdresser. Once this was executed, she sent a copy to Theo, who wished neither to antagonize nor to encourage her.
“Gee whiz, Mother,” is all that he was known to have said. Theo had married late and been left a widower early. He remained alone, having sought in vain for a mate as considerate and self-effacing as Amy. For his first wife, fifteen years younger than he, had skidded in a dense fog off a coast road and died on the rocks below. Even now, thirty years later, he often said to himself, She might have chosen a different route.
Great-Aunt Alice’s driver and gardener were a father and son named Joe. Big Joe, small and wiry, took care of the garden, and Little Joe, tall and muscular, drove Great-Aunt Alice about in her machine. When the car was not needed, Little Joe helped his father with the flower beds and ryegrass lawn, occasionally trying out inventions of his own. One of these was his rooting out of two eucalyptus stumps by means of a personally conceived mixture of explosives. The force of the ensuing blast flattened one wall of the toolshed, lifted its roof, and splintered the old water tank above it.
Big Joe and Little Joe were originally Portuguese, from the Azores, and without demurral or curiosity signed the document at her request.
The hairdresser was Oliver, born in Cheapside, London. Great-Aunt Alice associated him, because of his address, his name, and his accent, with Shakespeare, Dickens, and a nurse she once had who called her Halice.
She had patronized his shop for years. When she suffered her penultimate stroke and could hear and see but not speak, Little Joe delivered her weekly, by car and wheelchair, to Oliver’s mirrored booth. Here he brewed and shared a heady concoction of frivolity, fantasy, and unswerving friendship. Great-Aunt Alice had concluded that in time of need Oliver would be of more use to her than oxygen.
Later on, this proved to be the case. When Great-Aunt Alice was at last brought low, not to rise again, Oliver went to the room where she lay, unconnected to any life-prolonging apparatus. Three pillows were behind her, and her eyes were closed. Oliver opened his black case, took out a brush and comb, and arranged her hair. After that, he stepped back to survey her.
“ ’Igh style’s your style,” he said loudly, in the event that she could hear. And yes, he detected the remote beginning of a smile. Or believed he did.
Two weeks after Great-Aunt Alice died, Theo found a note in her bed table drawer. It must have been written on various occasions, months ago. The separate lines, penned and penciled, slanted independently across the page. For a moment, he thought it was a verse, unpunctuated.
Theo, it was headed.
Your father’s Mesopotamian journal might
Perhaps the piano tuner should
The Helen Traubel roses need
I had hoped
Part III
Mexico
1
The Seasons
Yellow is the color of fall. The cottonwoods burn with it, and only flowers that are yellow go on blooming. At the edges of fields, against unmortared stone boundaries, in roadside ditches, grow all the wild daisies in the world. They are gathered in armloads and carried in sheaves on the backs of burros to the cemetery, where each grave is a raised mound of stone and rubble. The burial place, bare of grass or trees, is contained within its crumbling adobe walls on the fringe of the village—perhaps because the soil discourages digging—and is known as the pantheon. In this way station to heaven are honored the spinster aunt who had to beg, the father and son who died five years apart of cirrhosis, the twelve-year-old boy who jumped high enough to swing on a high-tension wire.
On the November evening of All Souls’ Day, the flowers are lavished on the dead. By midnight, the barren holy ground, where children play by day with bone fragments, is drowned in yellow. Lit by an extravagance of candles in front of the crosses, the daisies almost grow again. They cover the names: Salvador, José, Rosita, Panchito, Paz,
Sometimes in winter, but rarely, snow falls. It forms an unlikely icing on the tops of adobe walls and red clay pots. It piles up on the branches of pepper trees and freezes the geraniums. Icicles hang from the corrugations of the roof. The magueys, usually wreathed in shirts and dresses hung out to dry, now shine with snow like any pine or fir. Only a few remember the last time. Don Bernardino, who grew up on an hacienda before the revolution and can’t read or write, says it was forty years ago. He says, “There was ice an inch thick in the water bucket. My pinto calf died.” Then he forgets the phenomenon at hand, the blanched fields, the capped mountaintops, and says, “As soon as we were twelve, we went with the men into the fields. We worked from sunrise to sunset, fourteen hours in summer. They paid us in lard and beans.”
The three plum trees flower in February, when it is sometimes winter and sometimes spring. Their knotted branches support profusions of white. “They are like wedding veils,” says Angela, who never married. If it turns cold, the blossoms may freeze before the buds set. If one night’s wind rattles the roof and shrieks at the door, by next morning the shriveling petals will lie in a thick mat on the ground.
These winds rush up the canyons and tear branches from the trees. They snatch off sombreros and the cardboard that covers the chicken shed. Concha, who will complete her seventy-fifth year in April, is crouched in the sun against the peeling wall of the post office. She watches a half-smoked cigarette blow over the cobbles to her feet. She lights it with a wax match from the box in her apron pocket.
Sucking in the smoke before the wind takes it, she regards the plaza where unnamed dogs skirmish among the drooping callas. Leaves and scraps of paper have been caught up in a whirlwind of dust and carried over walks and cement benches to the door of the church, where they are deposited just as the parish priest comes out. His habit is lifted by a gust, disclosing brown gabardine trousers. He makes for the post office and notices Concha, who rises with difficulty from her shelter to kiss his hand.
Summer comes suddenly, and all the desert turns oasis. Every afternoon cumulus clouds pile up over the mountains. The apocalyptic sky is referred to as pretty. “How pretty,” says the store-keeper, who pastures three cows in an arid field on the outskirts of town. “How pretty,” says the carpenter
’s wife, dragging a tin tub to catch the possible runoff from the roof.
When there is a storm, the thunder rolls up the mountain and down the cobbled street. It stifles the backfire of the passing truck and silences the church bell ringing for vespers. It mutters imprecations in the distance. The lightning forks into an ash tree, into the windmill tower, and finally into the transformer, causing a power failure that may last all night. In the flash there is a second’s eternity of total exposure, the plow left in the furrow, the dented pot on the fire, the woman’s face in the cracked mirror.
The cloudburst that follows drenches the chickens and the cats. It drips through holes in roofs to muddy the dirt floors. It carries excrement to the arroyo, which is now in flood. It pours from the varied terrain of the hills in torrents and rivulets. It sweeps across open spaces in curtains of shifting density.
When it is over, the obstinate ground yields to unsuspected seeds. Patches of short-stemmed flowers appear among the stones like colored lace. The air smells of wet clay and washed leaves. Children splash in pools and puddles. Some are barefoot, some wading in shoes. One little girl is soaking her turquoise-blue pumps. She has abandoned herself to laughter and doesn’t see the puppy shivering on the step. Or the damp red bird in its wooden cage on the wall. Or the first faint green spreading down the slopes to arrive at last at her own house, where her mother is saying, “What a miracle!” And her father, “Now we’ll have chiles. Now we’ll have corn.” He will buy her an ice cream stick to eat standing in her wet blue shoes.
2
Harriet Doerr Page 4