Body’s all the question. What could be more one’s body than one’s child shaped in one’s womb, blood, flesh, being? Seeking my being in hers before she was conceived, so I conceived her, imagining the small embodiment that I could purely cherish. But when she first moved in me, I knew she was not mine. This was the other, the other life, more purely other than any other, for if it were not, if no charge were entrusted to me, how could I purely cherish it?
So she was born out of me on that last long wave of unutterable pain, and runs free now. She returns, she comes home, home at four in the afternoon, milk and a cookie, can we play by the creek, never yet gone longer than overnight or farther than a school excursion, but she runs away from me. I feel the string stretch, the fine cord of ethereal steel that she’ll keep pulling out so long over the years, so fine, so thin that when she’s gone I’ll hardly know it’s there, not think of it for weeks, maybe, until a sharp tug makes me cry out for the pain in the roots of the womb, the jerk and twist of the heartstring. I feel that already. I felt it when she took her first steps, not to me but away from me. She saw a toy she wanted, and stood up and took her first four steps to it, and fell down on it in triumph. She went where she wanted to go. But I can’t run after her. I must not pursue her, making her my prey. Not even the flesh of my flesh is the one I stumble after, my soul taking its first steps and falling flat, defeated, empty-handed, bawling for comfort.
Oh, the images, how they flock and hurry to me, comforting! lifting me up in their arms to dizzy heights! murmuring like voices heard inside a breast my ear is pressed against, don’t cry, my baby, it’s all right, don’t cry.
Are my images all body, then? Are they soul at all? What are these words to which I have entrusted my hope of being? Will they save me, any more than I can save my child? Will they guide me in my search, or do they confuse and mislead me, the beckoning arms, the glinting eyes, laughter in the fog, a line of footprints leading down to the edge of the water and into it and not back?
I have to think they are true. I have to trust and follow them. What other guide have I than my dear images, my lovely words, beckoning me on? Sing with us, sing with us! they sing, and I sing with them. This is the world! they say, and they give me a sea-borne ball of green glass reflecting the trees, the stars. This is the world, I say, but where in it am I? And the words say, Follow us, follow us! I follow them. The pursuit creates the prey. I come up the beach in the fog from the sea, into dark woods. In a clearing in the woods a dark, short, old woman stands. She gives me something, a cup, a nest, a basket, I am not sure what she gives me, though I take it. She cannot speak to me, for her language is dead. She is silent. I am silent. All the words have gone.
San Francisco, Summer of 1939 Jane
HALF MY LIFE, SINCE I saw the fog come drifting through the Golden Gate. They’ve put the great red bridge across the Gate, and the double bridge across the bay, and made an island full of lights and flowers and towers and fountains in the water, but the fog isn’t any different. It comes in shining over the City in the sun, the crest of a great, slow wave. It breaks slowly and the bridge is gone. The City across the grey water is gone. The top of the Tower of the Sun is gone. The grey water fades away. In a luminous cold grey silence we walk, eating hot, fresh French fries from a paper cone.
I took the child to the City of Paris store to buy her a “real San Francisco dress.” I had told her the ivory-backed mirror came from Gumps, and so we had to go to Gumps. I bought her a good silver-mounted brush. She’d learn to live here in no time. She flicks her eyes sidelong and sees everything. After a day at the hotel she could have been a city child, cool as a cucumber, picking up her fork in the restaurant, flirting out the big napkin on her lap, “I’ll just have ice water, please!” Oh, she’s the cucumber, that Virginia.
But Lily, poor Lily, to think she was born here, in the hospital right up there on the hill, my San Francisco baby, my little Francisca! She stares around her like a wild cow. Her eyes roll. And her hat, oh, land, my daughter in a hat like that. Lily isn’t worldly, is what it is, and I am. I love this city.
If I saw Lafe Herne coming down the street: I thought of it when we passed where the Alta California Hotel used to be. If I saw Lafe come down the street I’d turn and go with him. Even if he had a Santa Monica woman on his arm. He has two arms. I want to tell him that I never found a man but him worth the trouble. He deserves to know that. Not that it would mean much to him. He’d be sorry for me, think I pined, think I meant I made a mistake in leaving him. I made no mistake. What’s love without trust? I made no mistake, but I’d like to see him turn his head and look at me, the flash of his eyes. I’d like to see him. He’s sixty now. It’s all gone. It seems a world away, the Alta California torn down, all Market Street rebuilt, and it’s not that I want to go back. I don’t. What I’d like is to see Lafe Herne at sixty, and walk with him down the beautiful way between the fountain pools and the rainbow iceplant flowers to the Tower of the Sun. My arm in his, the way we used to walk. And watch the fireworks with him, the way we watched them on the Embarcadero, the Fourth of July, a week after we were married. But it doesn’t come round like that. You don’t take hands but once. And I was right to let go.
But I do get tired. In the street outside the hotel when we came back from the fair this evening, the fog was thick, and I was tired, and Lily and the child were worn out. The newsboys were calling, and my heart went cold. I thought they were calling that there was to be war.
Lily
SIX DAYS NOW TILL WE go home. This time the train will be going the right direction. The Coast Starlight, that’s its name, a beautiful name. And the Pullman porter was so kind, making up my berth, making jokes. He called me Missy. You all right in there, now, Missy? But when I woke in the night the mountains were turning outside the window in the moonlight across gulfs of darkness. I want to be home. Six days now. I wear out walking those long, long avenues on Treasure Island, and the wind blows so cold down the Gayway. There are great maps of the world, and a man painting a picture bigger than the side of a house, and Venus rising from the foam of the sea with the winds and the flowers about her. It is all so big, and so many people, so many many people! I can’t keep up with Mother and Virginia. They want to see every sight. They wanted to see the microscopic animals and the huge horse and to go down in the mine. They wanted to see Ripley’s Odditorium, but when the man blew smoke out of the hole in his forehead Mother said, Oh, pshaw, and turned away, and Virginia was glad to get out, too. But then she wanted to see the woman cut in half with mirrors. How do they bear it all? How do they step so boldly out into the street? The cars whiz, whiz by—How do they know which streetcar to take, and where to catch the bus? How do they recognize our hotel among all the other great high buildings all alike? I was walking right past it when they laughed and made me stop. How are they so brave, so at home in this strange world full of strangers?
Virginia
I WILL NEVER IN MY life forget the beauty and the glory of the World’s Fair. I know that glory is where I will live, and I will give my life to it.
The best thing of all was the Horse. We were walking to where the bus comes to take you back to San Francisco, after all day on Treasure Island. We were tired, and oh it was so cold with the wind blowing the fog in, but I saw the sign: THE BIGGEST HORSE IN THE WORLD! And I said, Can we see that? And Gran never says no, except for Sally Rand. So we went in. At first the man was going to say he wasn’t open, I think, but then Gran looked in and said, My land! What a beauty! And the man liked her, and let us in, just by ourselves without any crowd. He took the money and began to tell us about the Horse.
He was a Percheron, mottled grey like the sky over the sea sometimes is. His head was as big as I am. He turned and looked at us with his huge dark eyes with long dark lashes. I felt truly awed in that presence of majesty. He stood in a stall, very patiently, on straw. Beside him the man looked like a little boy. After a while I asked if I could touch him. The man said, Sure, hone
y, and I touched the shining mottled leg at the shoulder, and the Horse turned his head again. I touched his vast soft nose, and he breathed his warm breath on me. The man picked up one of the Horse’s forefeet to show us. Under the coarse, flowing fetlocks, the hoof was as big around as a platter, with the mighty horseshoe nailed on. The man said, Would the little lady like a ride? And Mother said, Oh, no, and Gran said, Would you, Virginia? I could not speak. My heart was great in me. It swelled in my bosom. The man helped me over the fence around the stall and then just swung me up with a kind of push, and I sat astride the Biggest Horse in the World. His back was as wide as a bed, so my legs stuck out, and he was warm. I could touch his mane, which was knotted into many neat, tight, whitish knots down his great grey neck. He stood there gently. We couldn’t go anywhere because he was fastened in his stall. When do you take him out? Gran asked, and the man said, Generally early, before the fair opens up. I take him on a lead up and down the avenues. That would be a sight to see! Gran said, and I imagined it: the great Horse stepping out in the silent morning like thunder, like an earthquake, arching his neck, stamping his mighty hooves.
Coming home on the bus and streetcar I thought all the time about the Horse. When I am home I am going to write a poem. I will imagine in it what I did not see, the stepping of the Great Horse in the fog on silent avenues under the Tower of the Sun, and I will put in it the glory and the majesty that I have seen. For this I was born, to serve glory patiently.
Jane, 1918
I CLOSE MY EYES AND see the fireworks. Flowers of fire opening, falling like bright chrysanthemums over the dark beach. Aahhh! everybody says. Fireworks may be the nearest thing to perfect satisfaction in this world.
All the flags and bunting and speeches in front of the hotel this afternoon. Brave boys, glorious victories, Huns on the run.
I shut my eyes and saw Bruv running on the beach, three or four years old, running ahead of Mary and me. Mother trusted us to watch him all Saturday; it made like a vacation for her working in the store. You girls, keep him in sight! He’d fly along the beach like a little thistle seed. Three or four years old. We didn’t worry about him. He was afraid of going in the water.
Every time I pass the livery stable I think of him on that pretty bay colt he’d ride down onto the beach, summer before last. Every time.
At the Hambletons’ picnic they’d looped red white and blue crepe paper on the fence and stuck flags in every tree in the yard. Willie Weisler kept talking about how he hopes the war will go on so he can enlist. “Even if I am only sixteen I’m big enough to kill krauts, ain’t I? Ain’t I?”
“Big enough fool,” his mother said.
She’s right, too. Talking about killing krauts, with a name like that. And in front of Mother and me. But still it troubled me she’d speak that way to him in front of us. Women talk to their sons that way, like they despise the boy for being something they expect him to be. But men glory in it. Will took Dicky around back of the house right at the picnic to whip him for some insolence, making sure everybody knew Dicky’s so bad he has to be whipped. Making sure Dicky knows it. Boasting.
Even Mary’s always making out Cal to be a ruffian, when the poor child’s nothing but a puppy. All he needs is a pat and a kind word. But that’s just what Mary and Bo won’t give him. Like they thought it was their duty not to. The ruffian in that family is Dorothy. I’m glad she’s taken to playing with Lily. Lily’s too moony, lives inside her head, drifts by like a little moth. “City child,” Mother said, when we were first home. “Never gets her little dresses dirty. As if she didn’t touch the ground.”
“I know I got dirty enough,” I said.
She said, “You weren’t any city child. Where you were born was thirty miles to the next house.”
“Born dirty,” I said, but it didn’t amuse her. Mother’s dignity never did allow for some of my jokes. And now she doesn’t smile. She never looked tired till this year. I know she’s pleased with my taking over the post office from her. I wish she’d go ahead with building up there on Breton Head, on the Property, like she’s always wanted to. I suggested we walk up there, clean out the spring, but she put it off. I wish I could hearten her. If she won’t build up there I wish she’d come live with us, but she’s too independent. Those rooms above the grocery seem so dark now. It’s like her life is dark. I feel that darkness when I’m with her. Yet she takes pride in me, I know that. It is the ground I stand on.
Like chrysanthemums, opening and falling in the dark. I see the fireworks down on the beach in the night, and the breakers gleaming for a moment under the colored sparks. I see Bruv riding in the evening, fast, full gallop down the beach, away and away.
“Well, now, how about a toast,” Will Hambleton says, standing up at the long picnic table, “to the new owner of the Exposition Hotel!”
No doubt now who’s the great white chief in Klatsand. I’ve never understood how Mother gets on so easy with him. She won’t stand for any of his nonsense, and he knows it, I guess. But the way he crowds you and crowds you, with that barrel chest and big face and speechy voice of his, I lose patience. And Dovey cooing. And the pushing, yelling boys, and little Wanita. Now, with her they do just the opposite from what they do to the boys: they praise her for being something they despise. A little dressed-up parrot. She’s a pretty child, but land! those bows and ruffles! and stood up on a chair to recite poetry! “My Country’s Flag.” I got one look at Mother’s face.
I caught that red ruffian Dorothy behind the rhododendrons imitating her to Lily, all lispy sweet, “my tuntwee’s fwag,” and I did long to laugh, but I had to hush her up. Will doesn’t like fun made of him or his. And he comes it pretty high over Bo and Mary. I suppose he only had them at his picnic because Mary and I are friends. I trouble him. I go up to Portland on the train. I lived in San Francisco. Lafe managed a big hotel. I might know something Will Hambleton doesn’t know. I might have an idea in my head. It makes him nervous.
Well, I know what Will would start, if I gave him one word or sign. He may yet, even if I don’t. There’s that look in his face, no mistaking it ever. It’s like smelling something. When they get fixed on you that way, when their body’s attention is on you, you know it like you know it’s a warm day, without thinking. But I think of Will’s body naked, like a big cheese. I think of meeting, at lunchtime? where? some bedroom with the blinds down? It turns my stomach to think of it. And then he’d go home to Dovey. Like Lafe would come home to me.
And that’s why he’d be doing it. Not for love and not for desire. Those are the names they call it, the excuse. Great names, like flags and speeches. What he wants is the advantage. The power. He’s got it over Mother only through his money, and never to his satisfaction. She’s a partner, independent. She isn’t afraid of him. If he got me to cheat with him, he’d have us both at his advantage. And the satisfaction of cheating on Dovey, too. Well, Will, it would be a nice pie if you could eat it, as the joke goes.
I dream sometimes, but there isn’t a man in this county I’d look at twice. I don’t know what I want; I don’t know that I want anything. Only to know some soul better. I don’t know anyone. I never have. Mary, of course, she’s a good friend, we share our whole lives, yet something’s left out. It’s like there’s a country in me where I can’t go. Lafe might have gone there, but he turned away. And other people have that country in them, but I don’t know how to find it.
Lorena Weisler—she makes me think that all I know of her is some person she puts on like a dress. At the picnic, Dovey was going on about some new kind of crochet that Mrs. Somebody from Portland had shown her that uses a special tee-tiny hook and so on, and Lorena said, “Satan will find mischief still for idle hands to do.” She said it in such a mild quiet tone, it went right by Dovey and Mary, and nearly by me. I looked at Lorena. Placid as a goldfish. But there are countries in her. She is a mystery. You live your whole life around the corner from someone, talk to her, and never know her. You catch a glimpse, like a shoot
ing star, a flicker in the darkness, the last spark of the fireworks, then it’s dark again. But the spark was there, the soul, whatever it is, lighting that country for one moment. Shining on the breakers in the dark.
Virginia, 1968
LAST SUMMER, THE NIGHT AFTER Gran’s funeral, Edward Hambleton came up to the house. He always used to call before he came; not that time. I was putting the coffee grounds out on the flower bed, the way Gran did, when I saw him walking up the drive in the evening light. It was a long summer sunset, pale gold deepening to orange and mauve, darkening to red.
Jaye was asleep. She’d been quiet at the funeral, watchful, a little awed. When we got home she thought she’d lost her stuffed lion, her Leo. She began crying, insisting we’d left it at the cemetery. And when I found the little lion out on the deck where she’d left it, she had a tantrum. I had to shut her in her room awhile, though I didn’t want to; I wanted to hold her and cry too. At last she got quiet and we could rock together, silent. She was asleep before I got her into her bed. With Leo on one side, and the old cat on the other, old Punkin. He wanted company, he missed Gran.
So Edward came on foot, alone, and we stood in that flame-colored light in the garden, hearing the sea.
“I loved your grandmother. And your mother,” he said.
He wanted to say more, but I didn’t know what it was, and was not willing to help him say it. My heart was busy with grief and solitude and the glory of the evening. If he spoke I would listen, but I would not be his interpreter, his native guide. I think that it behooves men to learn to speak the language of the country we live in, not using us to speak for them.
The Found and the Lost Page 14