It’s queer that I think words, now Mother’s dead, that I didn’t often use even in my mind, before. She wouldn’t have wanted that said. Not that she was prissy. It’s queer how the words change and change the world. When I left Lafe she didn’t approve, but she never said I should go back to him. You did what you could, she said. But she’d be ashamed of a divorce. That wasn’t one of the words she wanted said.
I’m not ashamed, but I don’t want it, that sour end. Now I know I hoped for more. No more daydreams now of us both old, him falling sick, coming here, coming back. I’d give him the south room, and care for him, bring him soup and the newspaper. And he’d die, and I’d cry, and I’d go on just the same, but it would have come round again, come whole. But it doesn’t do that. It doesn’t come round.
He didn’t think even to ask about Lily. Forgot he had a daughter.
So I’m to be a divorcée. Stupid fancy Frenchy word. Why’s it only for the women? Isn’t he a divorcé? With his woman who owns “beachfront property in Malibu,” but I’ll bet she doesn’t. I’ll bet she wants to own it. I’ll bet there’s some kind of dealing going on under the table, finagling, and Lafe fell for it, the way he always did. A taste for high meat. Poor Lafe. Poor me. I’ll never be a widow. I’ll never know where he’s buried.
After his letter came I needed to walk, down on the beach, get the sky over me. The waves were like pearl and mother-of-pearl, coming in out of a sunlit fog. I had my walk down to Wreck Point. When I came back there were some summer people on the beach, there’s always people now. That family staying at Vineys’ and some from the Hotel. There was a thin boy who made me think straight off of Lafe. Twelve or thirteen, still just a child. He ran out into the water where the creek goes out to sea, the low-tide pools and shallows, such a handsome boy, kicking his feet up high, his cap pulled way down over his eyes and his nose in the air, splashing, prancing, clowning for his family, light as light. I thought, Oh, what happens to them? My heart wrung itself like a dishcloth—what happens to the lovely boys?
And then another boy, a little one. A whole family was going in a line, dragging along, worn out, been on the beach all day, it’s their holiday and they can’t waste it. So they were trudging along up to the dunes, and the littlest one was behind them all, standing crying. He’d dropped his collection of gull’s feathers. He stood with sandy feathers all around his feet, crying, Oh, I dropped all my feathers! Tears and snivel running down his face, Oh, wait! Wait! I have to pick them up! And they didn’t wait. They didn’t turn around. He was six, maybe seven, too big to be crying for feathers. Time to be a man. He had to run after them, crying, and his feathers lay there on the sand.
So I came home thinking about little Edward Hambleton. They all call him Runt. The three big boys, and that mincing Wanita cadging candy every afternoon, Will of course, even Dovey calls him Runt. Dovey’s afterthought! Will says, sneering, as if he’d had no part in him. Edward’s no afterthought, they just never thought at all. Maybe that’s why the child’s not like them. Little bright fellow, he’s taken a shine to Lily, follows her around, calling her Willy. Bright and sweet, and they never turn around to him. Never hear a word he says. Will pays the child no attention at all except to hit him. All in play, he says, toughen the boy up, he says. And I saw Dicky terrify the child, Get your hand out of there! What d’you think you’re doing here! An eighteen-year-old bullying a child of five. Well, no doubt they’ll manage to make a man of Edward. According to their lights.
Sometimes I wonder about myself as if I was another person I was looking at: Why did she come back to Klatsand? Why ever did she bring that child back here to raise? And I don’t know. I loved California, I loved the city. Why did I hightail it right back here to the end of nowhere as soon as the chance came? Running home to Mother, yes, but it was more than that. When I was up there on the Property yesterday, walking the fence line against that lumber company cutting the east side of the Head, I was thinking about how I could start putting up a house there, like Mother and I used to talk about. How many times have I thought of that? A thousand times. And I thought, If I sold out my half-interest in the store to Will Hambleton, like he’s been hinting at for a year now, I could put that money into real estate. I could buy that land off Main south of Klatsand Creek; there’d be ten house lots there. And the easternmost end of it would be a prime location for that lumber and supply yard Mr. Drake was talking about in Summersea last month. Jensen owns the land. He’d sell to me. If I had the cash. I’ll never have it postmistressing. And it would be a relief to quit being a partner to Will Hambleton. Between keeping an eye on his hands and keeping an eye on his accounts, I told Mary, it’s like doing business with a bull elephant, you have to watch both ends. If he can’t snake his trunk around you, he’ll sit down on you.
But it’s all here, my life’s all here. I take Lily in to Portland as often as I can, I don’t want the child benighted. If she marries away from Klatsand, I’ll be glad. There’s nobody here for her; maybe when she begins to go out with the high school crowd, she’ll meet some nice young people. I’ve thought I should send her to St. Mary’s in Portland for her last year or two. Mary talked about sending Dorothy. I’m not sure about that. Only I know that I’m fixed here. My soul goes no farther than Breton Head. I don’t know why it is. All I ever wanted truly was my freedom. And I have it.
Virginia, 1935
I ALWAYS LIKED WHAT I drew before, and everybody liked it. But today I tried to draw the elk for Gran. I could see it, just like we saw it up on the Property, and like the elk on the cup in the window. I wanted to make it for her birthday. I drew it, and it was this thing like a cigar with sticks coming out of it. I went over the lines, and then I took black and made the lines thicker. It was so bad then I scribbled it out, and took a new piece of paper, and I drew really, really light, so if I got a line wrong I could erase it, but it was just the same. I could see the elk but all I could draw was a big stupid ugly nothing. I tore it up and tried again, and it was worse, and I began crying and got mad. I kicked the table leg and it fell over, the stupid old card table in my room, and all my colors got broken, and I began screaming, and they came.
Mother picked up the colors, and Gran picked me up and made me sit on her lap till I stopped yelling. Then I tried to tell her about the elk and her birthday present. It was hard, because I couldn’t breathe right from crying, and I felt sleepy with her holding me. I could hear her voice inside her saying I see and That’s all right then, and then Mother came and sat down on the bed too. I leaned on her to find out if I could hear her voice inside her too. I could, when she said, Time to wash your face now, Dinnie.
But I didn’t have a present for Gran’s birthday, so I told her about the cup. I told her I tried to make an elk like the one on the cup at Viney’s store. So after lunch she said, Let’s go see that cup. We went to Viney’s and it was still in the window. The elk has what Gran says is a wreath around it, and looks majestic. Why, I think that is a majestic elk, Gran said. We went in, and she bought it for herself with a nickel, but she said it was her birthday present from me, because if I hadn’t found it for her she never would have owned it. Mr. Viney said it was a shaving mug. I guess it is for shavings. I said maybe she could use it for her coffee and she said she guessed she’d rather keep it for show on the chiffonier beside the Indian basket and the ivory mirror from San Francisco.
Lily, 1937
I WAS SITTING ON THE couch in the front room, mending, an hour after sunrise of the clear winter day. The sun struck in through the east window straight across my work. It freed itself from the spruce branches and struck my face a blow. I closed my eyes, blind with the beating of the light. Warmth shone itself through me, clear through soul and bones. I sat there, clear through, and I knew the angels. I was pierced with light and made warm. I was the sun. The angels dissolved into the radiance of the sun. They are gone.
After a while I could open my eyes. The warmth was my own breast and lap, and the piercing brightness
had gone into a beam of light that struck across the air. Dust motes drifted in the beam, moving silently like worlds in space and shining like the stars they say are suns, all of us drifting together and apart, the shining dust.
Virginia, 1957
A STRONG WOMAN WHOSE STRENGTH is her solitude, a weak woman pierced by visionary raptures, those are my mothers. For a father no man, only semen. Sown, not fathered. Who is the child of the rapist and the raped?
They never tell if Persephone had a child. The King of Hell, the Judge of the Dead, the Lord of Money raped her and then kept her as his wife. Did she never conceive? Maybe the King of Hell is impotent. Maybe he is sterile. Maybe she had an abortion, there in Hell. Maybe in Hell all babies are born dead. Maybe in Hell the fetus stays forever in the womb, which they say is Heaven. All that is likely enough, but I say that Persephone bore a child, nine months after she was raped in the fields of Enna. She was gathering flowers there, spring flowers, when the black chariot came up out of the ground and the dark lord seized her. So the child would be born in the dead of winter, underground.
When the time came for Persephone to have her half-year with her mother, she climbed up the paths and stairs to the light, carrying the little one well wrapped up. She came to the house. “Mother! Look!”
Demeter took them both into her arms, like a woman gathering flowers, like a woman gathering sheaves.
The baby thrived in the sunshine, grew like a weed, and when it came time for Persephone to go back down for the autumn and winter with her husband, her mother tried to convince her to leave the child with her. “You can’t take the poor little thing back to that awful place. It’s not healthy, Sephy. She’ll never thrive!”
And Persephone was tempted to leave the child in the big, bright house where her mother was cook-housekeeper. She thought how her husband the Judge looked at the child with his white eyes like the eyes of a poached trout, his eyes that knew everybody was guilty. She thought how dark and dank it was in the basement of the world, cramped under its sky of stone, no place for a child to run, nothing to play with but jewels and silver and gold. But she had made her bargain, as they called it. Betrayed, she had eaten the fruit of betrayal. Seven pomegranate seeds, red as her own blood, she had eaten, betraying herself. She had eaten the food of the master and so she could not be free, and her child, the slave’s daughter, could not be free. She could only ever be half free. So she took the baby in her arms and went down the dark stairs, leaving the grandmother to rage in the great, bright, empty house, and the rain to beat on the roof all winter.
Sky was Persephone’s father and uncle. Hell who raped her was her uncle and husband. There was another uncle yet: the Sea.
The years passed, and Persephone and her daughter came and went between the dark house and the light. Once when they were upstairs in the world, Persephone’s daughter slipped away. She needed a light foot and a quick eye, for the mother and grandmother never let her out of their sight; but they were busy in the garden, in the kitchen, planting, weeding, cooking, canning, all the housekeeping of the world. And the girl slipped away and ran off by herself, down to the beach, to the shore of the sea. Running like a deer, the girl—what was her name? I don’t know Greek, I don’t know her name, just the girl, any girl—she ran to the beach and walked along beside the sea. The breakers curled over in the sunlight, white horses with their manes blown back. She saw a man driving the white horses, standing in his streaming chariot, his sparkling salt chariot. “Hello, Uncle Ocean!”
“Hello, Niece! Are you out alone? It’s dangerous!”
“I know,” she said, but did she know? How could she be free, and know? Or even half free, and know?
Ocean drove his white-maned horses straight up on the sand and reached down to seize her, as Hell had seized her mother. He reached out his large cold hand and took hold of her arm, but the skin sparkled, the bone was nothing. He held nothing. The wind blew through the girl. She was foam. She sparkled and flickered in the wind from the sea and was gone. The King of the Sea stood in his chariot staring. The waves broke on the sand, broke around the chariot, broke in foam, and the woman was there, the girl, the foam-born, the soul of the world, daughter of the dust of stars.
She reached up and touched the King of the Sea and he turned to foam, sparkling white, that’s all he ever was. She looked at the world and saw it a bubble of foam on the coasts of time, that’s all it ever was. And what was she herself? A being for a moment, a bubble of foam, that’s all she ever was, she who was born, who is born, who bears.
“Where’s the child got to, Seph?”
“I thought she was with you!”
Oh, the fear, the piercing fear in the kitchen, in the garden, the cold clutch at the heart! Betrayed again, forever!
The child comes sauntering in at the garden gate, tossing her hair. She’ll be scolded, grounded, given a good talking-to. Aren’t you ashamed of yourself? Shame on you! Shame! Shame! And she’ll cry. She’ll be ashamed, and frightened, and consoled. They’ll all cry, in the kitchen of the world. Crying together, warm tears, women in the kitchen far from the cold sea coasts, the bright, salt, shining margins of the universe. But they know where they are and who they are. They know who keeps the house.
Jane, 1935
I’VE BUILT THE HOUSE, MOTHER. On your land, our land, the old Kelly place, the Property on Breton Head. Money goes a long way these days, and I’ve saved for ten years now. Burt Brown was glad to get the work, because nobody’s building much. All the frame is lumber from the old hotel, the Exposition, where I waitressed, where I met Lafe. John Hannah had it taken down last year. Take what you want, he said, and he built two houses and I built one with the lumber, the fine clear fir, the paneled doors, the white oak flooring. It’s a good house, Mother. I wish you could have seen it. You kept the houses and farmed the farms your husbands bought, you bought and sold properties, you gave me the Hemlock Street house, but never had a house of your own. Lived upstairs behind the grocery. But you always said, I’d like to put a house up there on Breton Head, up there on the Property.
Last night I slept in it for the first time, though the walls aren’t finished upstairs, nor the water connected, nor a thousand things yet to be done. But the beautiful wide floors lie ready for the years, and there’s a cedar shake roof, and the windows look out to the sea. I slept in my room above the sea and heard the waves all night.
In the morning I was up early and saw the elk come by. The light was just enough to see them cross the wet grass and go down into the woods. Nine of them going along, easy in their majesty, carrying their crowns. One of them looked up at me as it stepped on towards the dark trees.
I got creek water, and made coffee on the fire, and stood at the window of the kitchen to drink it. The sky turned salmon red, and the great blue heron flew over, coming up from the marshes of the creek. I never know the heron as it flies, at first. What is the slow, wide-winged figure in the sky? Then I see it, like a word in a foreign language, like seeing one’s own name written in a strange alphabet, and recognizing it I say it: the heron.
Summers of the Fifties, Summers of the Sixties
SUMMER VISITS, VISITS HOME, COLLEGE vacations, taking the train clear across the continent from those eastern shores heavy with history and industry, heavy with humanity, those old cities, ancestral, self-absorbed. Home from the college they called nourishing mother, alma mater, though to Virginia it seemed an old man, rich, famous, a grandfather, a great-uncle preoccupied with great affairs, scarcely aware of her existence. In his generous, opulent mansion she learned to live quietly, a poor relation, a good girl. Getting better all the time. But summers the train went home, across the prairies, through the mountains, away from his world, west.
She and Dave were married by a justice of the peace. “You’re sure you don’t want to ask your mother to come?” he said earnestly. She laughed and said, “You know we don’t go in for weddings much in my family.” They honeymooned in New Hampshire and Maine, at summer
houses of his parents, his cousins. His fellowship paid his tuition, they lived on what she earned typing and editing theses and term papers. Dave’s first visit west was the summer he was finishing his dissertation.
Gran moved down into the Hemlock Street house with Mother so that the young couple could have the house on Breton Head to themselves, no old women in the way, she said. So that Dave could work without being distracted. Men can’t work in holes and corners, he needs a place to spread himself, Gran said. After a day or two he moved Gran’s oak worktable from the west window downstairs and put it against an inner wall. He said it distracted him to see the sea when he looked up from his writing. It disturbed him to see the sea in the wrong direction, he said. The sun doesn’t set in the sea, I’ll be glad to get back to reality, he said. Great scenery out there, he would say when he was back in his world. Wide-open spaces, right between the ears. My wife comes from Ora-gahn. He said it as if it were a foreign word. It was funny, endearing to her, that he could not pronounce the name of a state of the union. I thought it was Shenek-toddy till I went east, she said. He was incredulous. Anyone knew how to pronounce Schenectady. It was not funny.
Summer, summer mornings waking in the wide bed at the wide window of the west bedroom, the first thing this side of sleep was the sky above the sea. And all through sleep and waking was the sound of the sea hushing and lulling away down at the rocks under Breton Head, the unceasing and pacific sound. Dave wrote late, stayed up always until two or three, for it wasn’t real work to him unless it turned night into day, rearranged the world to suit. He would come to bed in the dark, keyed up from his writing, full of a dry, electric tension, rousing her. In the dark, roused, Virginia would pull him into the beat of the sea, the tidal swing, and then the long lulling and hushing into sleep, sleep together, together. Birds would wake her with insistent choruses at dawn. She would go out into the first light. Twice that summer she saw the elk go by between the forest and the house. The sun came up late above the blue Coast Range from the deserts, the prairies, the old cities. Later, at ten or eleven, Dave would come down, sit mute with coffee cup in hand, wake slowly, get to work at the table facing the wall, writing and rewriting his dissertation on “Imagery of Civilization in Pound and Eliot.” Telephone calls to his thesis director, hours long, a panic over a lost footnote. She was lazy, giving herself up to the sun and the wind, walking down on the beach, making jelly of wild plums, playing at housekeeping in her grandmother’s house. When she wrote something she put it aside unfinished. It was disloyal to write. Her work would sap and drain the energy that must be his for his hard, his important work.
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