That’s where the dream ended. It had been so vivid, replaying events just as they had happened the previous summer, all except for the fact that Florence had been with them. She hadn’t. She’d been too sick to accompany him when he’d taken Michael to camp. Maybe the dream was a good omen.
Still groggy, Edward rose from his bed and went in to check on her.
When he entered the room it was too dark to see. He listened for her breathing, and was relieved because he could hear it coming in an unforced and steady cadence. He gently closed the door.
He wrote to Ruth:
Mrs. Sapir is still very weak and has a good deal of fever. She had some very bad days lately but is apparently doing better now. The doctors give me to understand that she will without much doubt get over the operation itself. Meanwhile the operative wound naturally prevents the pad from being tightened all it should be for proper collapsing of the lung, so that the effect of the operation on the lung abscess cannot be properly judged for some time.
* * *
The next morning when Edward looked into the bedroom the sight before him startled him. Florence was asleep, her body rising and falling with shallow, rapid breaths. But it was not that. It was that her form looked fuller, as though inflated.
He moved closer.
Her skin was pink, an unnatural pink, and crinkled. The texture looked something like an inflated balloon that had lost some of its air. This wasn’t right. He touched her cheek. It was hot, much too hot. Seeing that she was still asleep, he turned and went out the door, closing it gently behind him. He stood there for a moment, his heart pounding, not sure what to do. He went to the kitchen and in a hoarse voice asked Nadya to come take a look. She followed him back into Florence’s room.
They stood over the bed. Nadya touched her cheek. With effort, Florence raised her arm up into the air. She cried out in a feeble warble, “Oh please, oh please…”
Edward looked to Nadya. “What should we do?”
Florence cried again, “Please, please help!”
The arm was bloated, the skin too hot.
“Oh, dear God,” said Edward.
The doctor was called but within a few hours Florence was dead.
A few days later, on April 24, Edward wrote the following to Ruth:
The operation was in vain. Poor Florence breathed her last early Monday morning. A general sepsis had set in. My mother and all the children are here now.
* * *
In early May Edward returned to Ottawa. Upon entering his neighborhood he was confronted by that riot of color that accompanies a Canadian spring. Housewives were in their front yards, dressed in gay cotton dresses. Many were crouched in their flowerbeds, planting seeds or tending to the young buds that were already pushing their way up. Several of his neighbors called out to him as he passed.
Once on his front porch, Edward noticed that the shoots had come up in Florence’s flowerboxes. Entering the parlor he found the room lighter than he remembered it, presumably because his mother had aired it out.
He walked into their bedroom. The door to the closet was closed, a benign-looking door, painted off-white, like every other wooden surface throughout the house. This was the plank of wood that protected him from a reality he didn’t want to face. He dreaded opening it. When he did, the anguish of that moment did not disappoint.
He stood in front of the blouses and dresses, looking at the colors his wife had chosen for her own. Reaching out for her favorite blouse, a peach-colored silk tunic with three-quarter-length sleeves, he pressed its soft folds of cloth against his lips.
Later that day he wrote to Ruth:
There’s nothing deader than the past of physical personality, only it so shocks and startles one to learn this. Today the familiar voice falls on our ear and we never think to look certainty in the face and recognize it for but heavily conditioned hope. Tomorrow we search all creation in vain for the same voice.
Edward was, at age forty, a widower, left alone to raise three young children. He had no idea how he was going to move forward from this point. He was grateful to count Ruth as his friend. He wrote in the same letter:
Death for myself does not seem such an evil, then why should it for Florence? Well, I suppose it is partly because I had always hoped the future would soften and reinterpret some grievous stretches of the past. That was a selfish motive, like absolution held in reserve. But there was also the feeling that Florence knew so well what to make of life, if only given her due chance.
In the days and weeks that followed, no matter how he tried, he was unable to move beyond the part he had played in his wife’s death:
And the most terrible part of it all for me is the steady, grinding realization that these last terrible three years, link on link, are but the result of my own criminal wantonness that all the tragedy might so easily have been avoided.
12
THEY DANCE FOR RAIN
And now the clouds have listened to the insistent measure of the song, to the rhythm of forty dancing feet, to the beat of their turtle shell rattles.
—RUTH BENEDICT
Summer 1924
Around the department it was known that after office hours, on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, good conversation and a cup of strong tea could be had in Professor Boas’s office. These gatherings were well attended by the clutch of female graduate students who doted on “Papa Franz.”
On this particular afternoon, the unspoken subtext was Ruth Benedict and the abrupt change she had made in her travel plans to go to Zuñi. She now planned to leave for the pueblo three weeks ahead of schedule. When Dr. Boas had pointed out that by accelerating her departure she would miss Sapir’s conference in Toronto, she had met his inquiry with a half smile.
Bunny Bunzel, secretary of the department, was tending the kettle. Bunny was a short girl with dark brown hair, a sallow complexion, and a hatchet-shaped profile. As usual she felt strangely diminished standing next to the tall and elegant Mrs. Benedict, who in her mind resembled a classical Greek statue.
As Bunny set out the cups, Ruth strained on her tiptoes to reach the shelf where the tins of tea were stored. Suddenly one of the canisters slipped from her hand, scattering tea leaves across the floor. When Bunny looked she noticed that Ruth’s hand was shaking.
Once the tea had steeped, Bunny poured some for Ruth and herself. Standing next to Ruth, cradling the cup between her hands, she said, “You know I’ve been thinking. I’ve saved a few dollars for a trip to Europe, but I don’t really know if I want to go. It doesn’t excite me.”
Ruth was stirring sugar into her tea.
Bunny took a tentative sip of tea. “What if I went with you to New Mexico instead?”
Ruth looked at her. “Really?”
“I’m a good stenographer,” said Bunny. “I can take down folktales and interviews in shorthand, and do all our typing.”
“I think that would be completely wonderful,” said Ruth. “Are you sure?”
“I think so,” said Bunny, taking another sip. “I’ll talk to Papa Franz.”
When the room emptied out and Dr. Boas was putting on his jacket, Bunny approached him and suggested that perhaps she could accompany Ruth to Zuñi and work as her stenographer.
Dr. Boas heard her out before he snorted, “What are you going to do? Type? Don’t waste your time.”
Bunny was dismayed.
“Do a project of your own. You’re interested in art?”
“Yes?”
“Well,” he said, “they make pottery there. Go with her to the pueblo. Do a project on the relationship of the artist to her work.”
* * *
Six weeks later, in the inky light of dawn, Ruth Benedict sat on the concrete steps of the one-room post office in Gallup, New Mexico. Next to her an excited Bunny Bunzel paced back and forth.
The train had delivered the two women to Gallup the night before. A coal-mining town that supplied the fuel for the transcontinental railroad, Gallup was considered the last civilized stop
before Zuñi, which was some thirty-eight miles away, on the eastern border of Arizona.
Bunny had been told that soon the rainy season was going to start, but she didn’t believe it. The air was bone-dry. Looking up the long dirt highway that stretched straight as a plank out of town, she could see, rising above the sagebrush, the sunbaked wooden sheds that housed the coal miners.
A boy led two horses to the front of the post office, to where an old mail wagon waited. The rig appeared to be something out of the previous century, consisting of a large rectangular box sitting atop four spindly wheels. Amid the general commotion of neighing and stomping, the horses were hitched, trunks lifted, and leather mail sacks heaved into the wagon. A few moments later the driver instructed the women to climb aboard, cracked his whip, and they were on their way.
Once outside Gallup they creaked along a dirt trail, rutted by furrows, potholes, and small gullies, ascending to a high broad plateau hemmed in by rugged mountains of red and white sandstone. The landscape, as they traveled through it, was cut by deep canyons and densely forested with thick conifers. As they moved west, the land began to open up, and before them stretched a wide plain, covered by low-lying sage, greasewood, yucca, and small cacti. Arroyos crisscrossed the landscape like seams on a sunbaked face.
Looking down from on high, Bunny could see a dry riverbed with a tiny thin trickle of water at its center. This, she presumed, was the Zuñi River. She searched for words that might trigger a conversation with her traveling companion, but the newness of their surroundings seemed to have rendered Ruth even less accessible than usual.
They rode in silence until they reached a vista.
“Look,” said Bunny, “that must be the red terraced hillock of Zuñi.”
Stretching out before them were the flat terra-cotta roofs of about thirty buildings, clustered around a plaza. Here and there the silhouette of a person could be seen, standing on a roof. The sight was peaceful, welcoming.
* * *
By the time the mail wagon reached the outskirts of the pueblo the sun had gone down. Coals glowed inside pits in the ground, sending swirls of white smoke into the air. Pervading the air was the unfamiliar and delicious aroma of roasting corn. Entering a small central plaza, Bunny and Ruth found themselves surrounded on all sides by the rough mud walls of houses, two stories high, with flat roofs covered with dirt. Ladders were propped against the side of nearly every building. The windows, such as they were, were small rectangular openings, so high in the walls that they seemed to be designed only for ventilation.
Climbing down from the wagon, the women began to walk through the plaza, looking for someone, anyone, to direct them to the home of Margaret Lewis, their Zuñi host.
Mrs. Lewis had been described to them as a former schoolteacher and “an extremely well-educated Cherokee” who had assisted Elsie Parsons on several of her excursions. Mrs. Lewis had promised to provide them with a clean place to stay and a list of potential informants. She was, in short, the linchpin of their fieldwork.
Seeing an open doorway, and what appeared to be a figure standing within its shadows, Ruth walked toward it. Bunny followed.
Suddenly Ruth was face-to-face with the gray-seamed face of an ancient soul who appeared to be neither male nor female.
Ruth asked in broken Spanish for directions to the home of Margaret Lewis.
The individual stared back impassively.
Ruth tried again.
The person said nothing.
Ruth turned around and went back outside.
Bunny said, “What was that?”
Ruth said, “I don’t know.”
A few other people had emerged from their doorways. Ruth approached one of the men, Bunny following a few steps behind. Ruth asked again for Mrs. Lewis, and the man shook his head. While Ruth was trying another way to ask for directions to the Lewis house, a young man approached her and gestured toward an adobe building. Leading them into a dark room, he pointed to a metal grate. On the other side of the grate sat a large wooden box. Ruth and Bunny crept forward to see what it contained.
The box held mail.
“All the letters in the box are unopened,” said Ruth. “And there’s one of mine. It’s addressed to Margaret Lewis.”
The enormity of their predicament was beginning to dawn on them.
Margaret Lewis was not picking up her mail. She had either left the pueblo, or she was dead. They no longer had a sympathetic local to oversee their stay in Zuñi, nor did they have a place to sleep.
Ruth addressed the man in Spanish, and he responded in Zuñi. Neither of them understood the other. His voice rose in volume, causing others to gather around. In the midst of the tumult a young woman stepped forward. She introduced herself as Flora Zuñi, a teacher at the government school. In broken Spanish she confirmed what they already had surmised. Margaret Lewis was no longer living in the town.
Flora invited them to come back with her to her family’s home.
They walked through the dark lanes, their path lit by a crescent moon. By the time they reached the periphery of the pueblo there were only a few scattered houses. Flora led them into one. An old woman was tending something inside an open-faced oven. Flora introduced Ruth and Bunny to Catalina Zuñi, her mother.
A few days later Bunny sent Dr. Boas an account of their entry into the pueblo:
Well two days—or is it two years—ago we set up housekeeping a la Zuñi. Mrs. Lewis is no longer here so we have been thrown on our own resources.… It seems that Mrs. Lewis has gotten herself badly involved in the religious rumpus, and as a result did not get a school appointment for next year. Nevertheless, our hearts went down to our toes when we got here and found her gone, and our letters lying undelivered in the post office. We went to Flora as a next resort and were received like princes and rented from her a house on the edge of the village where we are more than comfortable.
Within two weeks the women had settled into their routines.
Bunny spent several hours a day with Catalina, the undisputed master potter of the pueblo. Ruth liked to work with the old men, settling on Nick Tumaka as her primary informant. While Nick recited the sacred stories in a singsong voice, Ruth positioned herself so she could hear out of her good ear, taking notes “with flying pencil and aching arm.” Despite Nick’s high status within the community, it turned out he was something of an outsider, having once been tried for witchcraft and “hung by his thumbs” until he confessed. Ruth swore that Nick’s information was reliable but Bunny wasn’t so sure. Writing to Boas, Bunny called Nick “an old rascal who wants to see which way the cat jumps.”
* * *
By late July of 1924, Ruth had discovered in herself a great fondness for Zuñi. It had come over her in a rush. The landscape, as she perceived it, was inspiring. She wrote:
Serpents lengthening themselves over the rock
Indolently desirous, feel the sun
Cover their flanks with sweetness …
With great anticipation she waited for the Kachina ceremonies to begin. She’d heard it said, again and again, that the dances would bring on the torrential rain the community so needed.
Ruth was also waiting for a letter from Edward. Although he had warned her that corresponding with friends, while in the field, was trying, it had proved more difficult than she had imagined. She found herself watching for the mail wagon, day after day.
She knew that he was profoundly depressed. In a recent letter he’d said:
Most of my days and nights have been spent in numbness, articulated with regrets. If I had done so and so earlier or not have allowed the operation or not have allowed the extraction of the teeth, all might have been different. It is impossible to avoid this sickly reverie of what should or might have been. The last wasting days went by so unexpectedly and so stealthily that as I look back on them it seems hard to realize I was there at all.
Eventually, she knew, he would emerge from his numbness, and then what? Her relationship with Edward w
as changing and she wasn’t sure what direction it was heading.
Ruth had become acquainted with Edward while he was married and inaccessible. She was married, too. She had been comfortable with the boundaries their other commitments enforced, content to let their feelings remain unspoken. Now Florence’s death had tipped the balance by removing the center of the triangle. As one side of their special construct collapsed inward, pushing Edward toward Ruth, the space between them had shown itself to be in danger of disappearing. So disconcerting was this new dynamic, Ruth wasn’t sure how to react.
When she’d informed Edward that her trip to Zuñi made it impossible to attend the conference in Toronto, he’d put up a protest, saying he was “sadly disappointed,” and that he’d been “counting on seeing her.” He’d gone so far to say that he’d lost his enthusiasm for the entire enterprise and, at this point, “would pay out cash not to have to go to Toronto.”
For her part, Ruth believed it was far better to avoid a face-to-face encounter, at least for the time being. Distance and the passage of time would allow their emotions to find their natural level.
Edward loomed as large as he ever had. Only now it was no longer his marriage that held him at bay, it was Ruth herself.
* * *
On the morning of the Kachina dances Ruth found a seat along the perimeter of the plaza. When the masked and brightly costumed dancers appeared, they walked in two long double file rows. With their bodies bent a little forward, head and shoulders loose, their feet pounded the rhythm of the dance into the earth.
At some point during the ceremonies Ruth heard a deep rumble sounding from above. She looked up. Great black clouds were moving across the horizon, filling the sky to its zenith. Suddenly raindrops began falling, great translucent drops, splattering the red terra-cotta buildings, releasing a distinctly medicinal odor. She breathed in the scent, looking around. People were standing on the flat roofs of the buildings, their arms out-stretched, their palms facing up to the sky. No one ran for shelter.
The Zuñis’ petition to the gods had succeeded. Ruth wrote, “The song only rises a little louder, and a quiet happiness at heard and answered prayer moves the people of the pueblo.”
Coming of Age Page 13