“So he . . .”
“He knows I’m pregnant. I saw him in June just before I came up home. He’s very guilty and very happy, just what he likes best. I don’t mean it was intentional. My diaphragm leaked.” She stopped speaking, feeling her face and throat throb red. False, flip, all of it. She felt her grandmother’s deep resistance, not disapproval, not judgment, but resistance: a wall. She felt herself outside the wall, flimsy and wordy, cheap. Nothing in Jane Herne’s life had come cheap, she thought.
“So,” Jane Herne said, seeking words. “How will you . . . will your teaching in Southern California . . .”
“I’ve discussed it with the chairman. They’re giving me the spring term off. They’re being really nice about it. This is where being Mrs. is helpful. Is necessary, actually. But I can get a divorce afterwards. Talking with you, I guess I see what I ought to do is tell Dave I do want a divorce. And file for it if he won’t agree. Oh, God. I hope he agrees.”
“That’s all right,” her grandmother said stiffly. After a pause she added, with more ease, “You generally get what you want, Virginia. Make sure you want it.”
She thought that over for a while. “The baby. And the job at UCLA. That’s what I want. And the next book of poems. And the Pulitzer Prize. All right?”
“Well, you’ll earn what you get. You always did.”
“Not the baby. I guess I kind of got him free. What do you think, is it time for a boy in this family?”
Jane Herne looked out the west window to the sky above the sea. “You don’t earn them,” she said. “They don’t belong to you.”
Fanny, 1918
MY FAT EASY BABY, MY sunny Johnny, good child, safe child, never did any harm. Never a worry to me, and I never worried over you. My boy’s not in trouble. A kind, steady fellow, and they all know it, they all like Johnny Ozer. Even when I saw the terrible pictures in the magazine I only thought of those poor foreign men. So far away. All the smiling faces in the Portland station, the young men in the train windows smiling, waving their hands, waving their hats, all the pretty girls waving. The stories about the doughboys, and the jokes, and the jolly songs, over there, over there, the drums rumtumming over there. It’ll be good for Johnny, a year or two in the Army, see the world. Toughen his hide a bit, Will Hambleton said, you’ve got a mama’s boy there, Fanny, let him go, make a man of him. A man in a ditch in the mud choked to death by poison gas. I never said don’t go. I never said don’t go. I didn’t know, but why didn’t I know? Why didn’t I fear for him? Why didn’t I fear evil?
I lost my son. So they say. She lost her son. As if he was something I owned, a watch. I lost my watch. I lost my son. I was careless, I was a fool. But you can’t keep him. You can’t put him in your pocket, pin him to your dress. You have to let them go. With little sister Vinnie down by the pond, in the hot morning, making mudpies, we called it, shaping the sticky clay of the pond bank into figures, horses, houses, men. Set them on the muddy bank to dry. Forgot them, and they picked up the water, they slipped back into mud. I came again in the evening and there were only lumps and smears of mud on the mud, shapeless, not men any more. Make a man, make a man of him. Fool woman, you didn’t lose your son. You threw him away. You let him go, you sent him, you forgot him and he turned to mud.
The knuckly red hands, the way he ducked his shoulder. His soft voice. He was a bright, soft boy. He would have made himself a man, a good man, a real one.
Oh, Servine, I am sorry. I am sorry, Servine, he would have done you proud.
He was crazy to get into that uniform. He thought that would do it. That’s what they all said. How could he know? At twenty years old? I should have known. But I didn’t fear evil. I didn’t say to him the uniform won’t do it, you do it yourself, John Ozer. I feared for his lungs, there in the dusty valley, on the dairy farm, that’s why I ever came here to Klatsand. When he was a tiny boy he’d laugh and cough and cough. I feared for his lungs, and I let him go breathe poison gas. I cannot breathe now. I want to tell him to fear evil, fear evil, my good son, too late.
Jane, 1967
I WATCH THE LIGHT ON the ceiling, the moving light that shines up from the sea. I lived my life beside the sea, that great presence. All my doings were here, my business among the others in the world, but all along it was beside me, that other world.
I did what most of us do, pretending to keep our own world out, wrapped up in our skin, keeping ourself safe, thinking there’s nothing but me. But our world goes through and through us and we through it, there’s no boundary. I breathe in the air as long as I live, and breathe it out again warmed. When I could run, I ran down the beach and left my footprints behind me in the sand. Everything I thought and did the world gave me and I gave back. But the sea won’t be taken in. The sea won’t let tracks be made on it. It only holds you up if you flail your arms and legs till you’re worn out, and then it lets you slip down as if you’d never tried to swim. The sea is unkind. And restless. All these long nights I hear its restlessness. If I could get to the east windows I could look out to the Coast Range, the blue mountains always shaped the same. They let the mind follow their curves against the sky just as they let your feet walk on them. And lying here I watch the clouds, and they’re not restless, they’re restful. They change slowly, melting, till the mind melts among them and changes as silently. But the sea down there bashes its white head against the rocks like an old mad king, it grinds the rocks to sand between its fingers, it eats the land. It is violent. It will not be still. On the quietest nights I hear the sea. Air’s silent, unless the wind blows hard, and earth’s silent, except for the children’s voices, and the sky says nothing. But the sea yells, roars, hisses, booms, thunders without pause and without end, and it has made that noise since the beginning of the world and it will go on making that noise forever and never pause or stop until the sun goes out. Then will be death indeed, when the sea dies, the sea that is death to us, the uncaring otherness. To imagine the sea silent is terrible. It makes me think that peace hangs like a drop of spray, a bubble of foam, in the tumult of the waves, that all the voices sing out of the unmeaning noise. It is the noise time makes. Creeks and rivers sing running to the sea, singing back into the unbroken tuneless noise that is the one constant thing. The stars burning make that noise. In the silence of my being now I hear it. The cells of my body burn with that noise. I lie here and drift like a drop of spray, a bubble of foam, down the beach of light. I run, I run, you can’t catch me!
Lily, 1943
WHEN EDWARD HAMBLETON WAS A little boy he loved me and I loved him, little Runt, running to me red-faced and smiling, yelling, Hi, Willy! at the top of his voice. He thought my name was Willy. Because of hearing his father called Will, I guess. I called him Little Buddy. And he is my brother truly.
May and the Hambletons call his baby Stoney, but his name is Winston Churchill Hambleton. When he came early, they telephoned Edward at Fort Ord, and he said, Name him Winston Churchill. A boy needs a good name in times like these, he said.
These are the dark times. When Mother and Mary and Lorena Weisler and Hulse Chock sit talking after the newscast about the Pacific Theater, the cities in Italy, I think we live in a world that has all gone dark so that there’s only the radio connecting people, and we here away out on the edge of it, on the edge of the sea where the war is. With the blackout, the town is as dark at night as if there were only forest here again. As if the town had never been and there was only the forest at the edge of the sea.
These are the dark days. Mother said that once about the other war, about my uncle John who was killed in France. Those were the dark days, she said. I can’t remember him, only a shadow between me and the west windows in somebody’s house, tall and laughing. And I remember riding on a horse with somebody walking along beside holding me, and Mother said that would have been Uncle John, because he worked at the livery stable for a while, and would give me rides on an old pony around the yard. And he would ride like the wind down the beach, she
said. He was twenty. He was in the trenches, that was how they said it then. Edward is twenty-two now. In the South Pacific Theater. Like an actor on a dark stage. He hasn’t seen the baby. I wonder if he is dead. They say it can be weeks before you hear. They say letters come from men that are dead, sometimes after they have been dead for weeks or months.
There is no use loving him. It’s like a letter from a dead man. There’s no use my loving anybody but Mother and Dinnie and Dorothy. I know Dovey Hambleton hates me for living here. We say good morning, Lily, good morning, Dovey. All these years. She never speaks to Dinnie. Dicky’s other children are in Texas, she was talking about them to Lorena in the store, but she stopped when I came in. They are Dinnie’s sisters, her other granddaughters. Those words are like knives: daughter, granddaughter. I don’t say them. They cut my tongue. I say Mother, but often it cuts my tongue when I say it. Only there is Dorothy, my friend. She was never not my friend. That is a word as sweet as milk.
Dorothy’s hair is turning blond, so she dyes it back to red now. Since she had her babies her neck and ankles have got thick. She doesn’t move the way girls move, light and free, the way Dinnie goes down the street all legs and ponytail. Dorothy was like that when we used to play down by the creek, playing house all afternoon, playing weddings with our dolls. Now she’s heavy and open and slow, like a red cow, beautiful. She knows everything. She doesn’t worry. It doesn’t worry her that Cal and Joe are in the war. With her the war isn’t like a black empty theater but more like a construction site, men in trucks, busy. Cal’s in a lot less trouble now than he was with that logger’s wife in Clatskanie! she says. Army’s the safest place for him! And Joe’s driving a laundry truck at some base in Georgia. My war is with a million dirty skivvies, he wrote Dorothy. She reads me his letters. They’re funny, he is a kind man. She misses him but she doesn’t really miss him, she doesn’t need him. She is complete. Like a round world. I love her because she looks at me out of her round whole world and brings me in, so that I’m not out at the edge, under the open sky. I can’t walk on the beach, under the open sky, by the sea, not since the war started. Not since the angels. They’re gone, but I still fear their wings, out there. Oh, Lily, she says, stop mooning. Oh, Lily, if you aren’t the craziest! What do you think, Lil, is that baby of mine cute or is he cute? Lily, will you keep the kids this afternoon, I have to go up to Summersea. Lily, is that daughter of yours bright or is she bright? Dorothy can say all the words. She’s not afraid. She is my true love.
Jane, 1966
“ANGEL CHILD,” LILY SAYS WHEN Jaye runs to her with a question or a flower. “Come to Lily, angel!”
Her arms are thinner than the child’s arms.
I’m seventy-nine years old and I have no idea what love is. I watch my daughter dying and think she never was much to me but heartbreak. But why does the heart break?
I don’t understand it. I don’t know right from wrong. I thought Lily was wrong to stay home and not have the treatments. I thought Virginia was wrong to come here to be with her. Leaving everything she’s worked for, the university, throwing it away. She says they’ll take her on full-time at the community college in Summersea next year. She says she wants that. Wants to stay here. I thought she was wrong to have that child, some man’s child she didn’t even want to marry. It all seemed wrong to me. What do I know? I couldn’t have managed without her. I can’t look after Lily. Can’t lift my arms. Can’t pick up the cat, have to wait for him to jump in my lap, come on, old Punkin, and he teases me, sits and washes his face first. And that nurse. The cancer nurse.
They say the word right out, now. Never had it in the family, save for that thing Mother told me of: her mother in Ohio had what looked like a little seed stuck to her toe, and flicked it off without much thinking, and it bled all night long so the sheets were ruined. But she never got it, nor Mother, nor I.
I can’t abide the woman. “The medicine makes them dopey,” she says, or “They don’t know what’s best for them,” right in front of Lily, as if Lily were a baby or an idiot! But she’s strong and knows her business, I guess. And Lily is patient with her. Patient with everybody, everything. Always. Lily shames me.
I breathe free when Virginia comes in with the child, and the nurse goes. Evenings, the four of us, Jaye asleep and Lily drowsing along, Virginia and I sit and talk, or she grades her papers, or we play cribbage. I win, generally. It’s one thing Virginia’s no good at. I told her the other night, you win the prizes for poetry, but don’t ever take up cards for a living.
Lily was right to want to die in her own house; Virginia was right to let her. I didn’t want her here. I didn’t want my daughter here to die. Or live. But she didn’t want to come here. She was born in the City, but her life has been in the house on Hemlock Street. She never was away for as much as a week, but for that one trip to the World’s Fair, before the war. But her daughter will live here, in this house, my house. The daughter conceived in the bed the mother is dying in. In that little room. The rhododendron bushes outside the window. Virginia answered me straight, the way she does: Yes, she said, yes, if you leave me the house on Breton Head I will live there. She said, I love Los Angeles but I have work to do, and I do it better here. What about your teaching? I said, and she said, I will do it as well here as I would there, and she laughed. If you leave me the house, she said, I will live in it and Jaye will grow up in it.
That gives me pleasure. She gives me pleasure. She looks like Lafe, the way she carries her head. She glances sidelong, her eyes flash. I thought she was wrong to let Lily have her way, wrong to have the child, wrong to come here to live, but I guess we think when a woman’s free she’s wrong.
I miss my freedom. Running down the beach, clear to Wreck Point, barefoot, alone.
When Edward came yesterday, I thought while we were talking, this is the nearest I come to running down the beach these days. Talking with Virginia, talking with Edward. When we talk I’m still on the move. As if the mind were a beach, the long empty sand, the waves, the sky. Virginia and I talk about people, students and teachers at her college, writers she meets when she travels to her prizes and meetings, people in town here, people I used to know. She likes to hear about the town back when I was growing up, and the San Francisco years. But that’s a fairy tale to her. Edward’s not all that much older than her, but he’s got an old mind. Maybe it was being in the war. But even as a boy he was thoughtful. Virginia flies, flies like a heron, often I can’t follow her. Edward plods along trying to see his way, trying to think things out, trying to know what’s right. She’s free; he seeks his freedom. I admire that in him. And a man that a woman can talk honestly with is a rare man. Edward got all the honesty in the Hambleton family.
Now and then I do stop and say, in words, in my mind: Edward is Virginia’s uncle by blood. And I wonder if he ever thinks about that. We’ve never talked about it.
I never spoke to Will Hambleton from that day on. The day she told me.
Twenty years. Passed him ten thousand times on Main Street. Passing a dog, nothing.
He learned soon enough to send somebody else to the post office, Wanita or Edward or one of the grocery clerks, for the mail or to buy stamps or send parcels. I wouldn’t wait on him. If he came in, I went to the back till he was gone. Stood there. At first my face would burn, then it was nothing to me. I’d find something to do till he was gone. Sometimes other people would come in while he stood there, and I’d speak to them, ask them to wait or come back later. I know what people here thought of crazy Jane Herne at the P.O., holding a grudge for twenty years, pretending a man doesn’t exist, and Will Hambleton who owns half the town at that. I don’t say I was right. I don’t say I was wrong. I was doing what I could.
Will Hambleton brought up his eldest son to do evil and rewarded him for doing it. I could have forgiven the boy, I suppose, if there was any reason to. But not the man. I do not see a reason to forgive him.
I did what I could, and it was nothing. What can you do t
o evil but refuse it? Not pretend it isn’t there, but look at it, and know it, and refuse it. Punishment, what is punishment? Getting even, schoolboy stuff. The Bible God, vengeance is mine! And then it flips over and goes too far the other way, forgive them for they know not what they do. Who does know? I don’t. But I have tried to know. I don’t forgive a person who doesn’t try to know, doesn’t want to know if he does evil or not. I think in their heart they know what they do, and do it because it is in their power to do it. It is their power. It is their power over others, over us. Will’s power over his sons. His son’s power over my daughter. I can’t do much against it, but I don’t have to salute it, or smile at it, or serve it. I can turn my back on it. And I did.
Virginia, 1972
STILL I ELUDE MYSELF. THERE is a shape. The sea-fog will take shape, form: an arm, the glint of an eye, footprints in a line above the tidemark. I have to pursue, for the pursuit creates the prey. Somewhere in these mists I am.
Body’s not the answer. Maybe it is the question. In the fulfillment of sexual desire I have found the other not the one I seek. I believed what all the books said; though my mothers did not say it, I believed it: The other is the foundation. But I built nothing on that foundation. A firm ground it may be, but a foreign one, the country of the other. I wandered in his kingdom, a tourist, sightseeing—a stranger, bewildered and amazed—a pilgrim, hopeful, worshipful, but never finding the way to the shrine, even when I read the signposts that said Love, Marriage, and followed the highroads beaten wide by a million feet. A failed crusader, I never got to the holy place. I built no fortresses, no house even, only shelters for a night, tents of leaves and branches, like a savage. Ashamed, I left that country, his great, old country, stowed away, sailed off to the new world. And there I sought the new life.
The Found and the Lost Page 13