Landscape: Memory

by Matthew Stadler

  If you flew by overhead, say in a Zeppelin, you'd see an impressive city of domes, gargantuan in aspect and harmonious in coloring. The festive avenues are lined with full-grown palm and eucalyptus. The Palace of Fine Arts is swathed in creeping vines and bordered by the finished lagoon, looking like it's been there a thousand years. You might land to the northeast, where the aeroplanes land, or come in by yacht, docking at the marina. Perhaps you'll just drop from the sky, piercing the thin plaster of the Dome of the Ages, breaking your limbs and revealing the flimsy wood lathing that supports these impostors. Father calls it a "glorious masquerade" and still refuses to go, sore, I suppose, about the filling of the swamps. But he's just being fussy and I rather feel as Flora feels that it is just the thing for a young city in these chaotic times.

  Mother thinks she'll be done with her panorama soon and hopes to display it somewhere on the fairgrounds. But she had been hasty in her work, skimming Ruskin and blocking her sketches off by intuition rather than geometry. The result is appealing to the eye but hopelessly out of proportion. I've cautioned her time and again as our work has proceeded, but she pays me no mind.

  "It looks right," she insists.

  "But it isn't right," I tell her. "You've been fooled by the flat surface. It's all in the book."

  "But if it looks right, pumpkin, it is right. We mustn't quibble over aesthetics." This was her accustomed retreat.

  "This isn't 'quibble,' Mummy. This is fact. You're the one who said to use the book."

  "Art cannot be explained in a single book, dearest. We mustn't become slaves to our teachers."

  ''You are getting lazy, that's all," I concluded. "A true picture is drawn through attention to detail. Geometry. Hidden structure. All else is just fancy, vapors of the mind." This was a phrase from my parlor play. It made her mad.

  "The pot ought not call the kettle black, tenderness. A neutral judge would have no trouble selecting the 'true' picture if asked to choose between our two 'fanciful vapors.' You needn't throw stones."

  I thought some about the comparative "truth" of our two pictures and fell into a long silence. Our discussion seemed to have shifted onto dangerous ground, though I wasn't at all certain Mother had even noticed. It was like tugging at a little thread and finding one's guts suddenly spilling forth from a swiftly unraveling wound, the garment and flesh having turned out to be one and the same. I couldn't continue for fear it would never be contained.

  It's just that something troubles me about the Fair, what might count as a "true" picture of the Fair. Something about surfaces. It all seems so wrong. I can't help but feel queasy when I touch the bare wood lathing of an unfinished wall, or imagine the enormously thin shells of those gigantic domes. For all my glib agreement with Flora, the Fair always gives me the shivers.

  I'll look down from the woods at the eastern edge of the Presidio, gazing down from the thick grove of eucalyptus through the scattering ocean mist, and take in that impossible panorama of golden domes and broad, palmed avenues peopled by milling throngs, dwarfed to the size of insects by distance and comparison.

  And then my head feels empty and weightless, as though the wind is blowing through it, and my body becomes sensitive all over, like a shivering. Sometimes I just want to cry. What is it that's begun unraveling? It's all so elusive. To set the truth of my memory clearly down on canvas . . . that thread seemed simple enough. But it's dug suddenly deeper into me, dropped down into my center. Something about the appearance of things unhinges me.

  The only thing that's right is Maybeck's Palace, a hollow ruin built in a hundred days. He's asked that they plant cedars to mimic its broad sweep and that they leave it all be, the building to collapse and decay slowly over the generations that pass as the cedars grow tall among the ruins. I find that reassuring.

  The Plunge

  _______________________________________________

  15 MARCH 1915

  Lincoln Beachey's monoplane collapsed into itself two thousand feet up into the cloudless sky and plunged like a cannonball down into the bay. Beachey drowned and they haven't told his fiancee for fear she will suffer psychic damage. His mother has refused to believe that he died, waiting up late into the night for his return.

  This is what the newspaper said:

  Lincoln Beachey, whose daring as an aviator has echoed round the world, was claimed by the elements he so long defied yesterday afternoon. The new German Taube, in which he had hoped to demonstrate his complete mastery of the air, folded its toylike wings and plunged from a great height into the waters of the bay.

  Before the horrified gaze of 50,000 people who had witnessed his flight from the marina, in front of the Palace of Mines, at the exposition, the peer of all aerial champions went to an end as spectacular as his remarkable career.

  Beachey was on his second flight after having thrilled the spectators with a series of graceful loops and successfully had flown upside down across the blue expanse at a height of 2,000 feet, when the monoplane collapsed on the descent. Quivering for a fraction of an instant like a wounded bird, the machine, shrouded in flame and vapor, hurtled from aloft as a dead weight.

  In that fraction of a moment it was apparent that Beachey, still exerting the nerve that made him famous, endeavored to direct his course for the bay. But the Taube was beyond human control.

  The litter of the wreckage shot into the water between the transports Logan and Crook lying at the Fort Mason government piers. Strapped in the aluminum body of the car, Beachey disappeared beneath the waves. When the rescuers arrived a moment later there was hardly a ripple on the surface. Only a small piece of the wooden frame floated to mark the spot where the hero of the air had gone to his doom.

  Just what caused the harrowing tragedy is a matter of supposition. Even experts and Beachey's mechanicians cannot definitely account for the disaster. The monoplane was faster than anything that the daring aviator had ever piloted and of a type with which he was not so familiar as with the biplane in which he had made over a thousand loops.

  In looping the loop a few minutes before Beachey was evidently in complete control of the machine and also as he made the upside-down flight. It was as he straightened out for the perpendicular dive to the green that the new monoplane failed him. He had often dipped from as great a height in his biplane, but the double wings had withstood the tremendous pressure that was now exerted on the single fan of the Taube. The propeller's revolutions were reduced, for it could be plainly seen turning over.

  Within 500 feet of the earth the wings could no longer hold. They wobbled and closed about the little car, from which trailed a wake of fire and smoke.

  "Oh, God! Beachey is gone!" was the cry that came from thousands of blue trembling lips.

  For a moment that vast ashen-faced throng stood frozen with terror.

  Then hope and panic gripped them alike. Beachey, their hero, the youth who had convinced others of his often-expressed confidence that he would never be killed in his "game," they thought could not have been vanquished by the elements to which he was so closely attuned.

  Mumbling hysterically, they moved in a great mass in the direction where the machine had disappeared behind the outer buildings.

  "Maybe he'll land in the water! Beachey can't be killed!" were now the cries as the throng rushed toward the eastern fence. Even the guards, white-faced too, could not stem that sympathetic tide. Thousands poured through the work gates, tripping and stumbling, before the exposition police mastered the situation.

  But the hope was in vain. Around the transport wharves the crowd swarmed, breathless, only to watch the grapplers and divers pry into the secret of that hideous sight concealed by the bright, placid waves.

  Beachey, "the daredevil of the air," had paid the penalty for his valor.

  A thrilling account, as one should expect from a first-class newspaper. And though I was actually there to witness this tragic plunge, I find my memory is pale in comparison. The actuality was so impossibly indistinct, filled w
ith disjointed actions and bad smells. I was more aware then of the uncomfortable fit of my shoes than the "hope and panic" that gripped us.

  They'll be showing films of the crash at the cinema starting tomorrow and that is what I want to see. It's so much easier to focus one's attention in a theater, and the view is better.

  Mr. Taqdir, with whom Mother and Duncan and I saw the fatal crash, anticipated my incomprehension on the spot. As the crowd pushed and shoved us along through the gates, he gathered us all into his big arms and urged us to face the tragedy bravely.

  "We cannot be passing it over with eyes closed," he announced resolutely. "Face this now, each of us." And we shuffled forward through the frozen throng to peer into the unchanged waters of the bay, looking, I supposed, for bubbles or blood, or the bobbing head of the dead birdman. There was nothing, the deep blue waters surging and lapping as on any other day.

  I looked across the water to the steep green hills and up into the sky, empty and blue. I imagined how cold it must be high above the bay, how small and sad everything must seem from up there. A noisy flock of gulls hovered high above the esplanade, wheeling and squawking, waiting for more garbage to be dumped into the waters.

  "Think now, boys. Fix in your minds what it is you will be feeling," Mr. Taqdir urged.

  My mother, her chin up, stared out across the bay and nodded in solemn agreement. "Very wise, Mr. Taqdir, very wise. We mustn't bury our sadness. It's important, I think, pumpkin, to put pen to paper when we return home. I know how much this young aviator has meant to both of you." And she took Duncan's hand in her own, pulling me close with her other.

  Dear Robert,

  We're dug in deep near Le Touquet, doing what we can to keep the walls from tumbling in. Conditions have gotten a good sight worse as winter has come. Walls collapsing and cigarettes soaked, fires unthinkable and no prospect of exercise lest one's got a talent for dodging bullets and fancies a little stroll along the wire.

  Do you recall Portsmouth? The week Father rented that bungalow with a rotted moss roof and dirt floor? It's been raining nearly that hard for two weeks now. If Mother had strafed us constantly with machine-gun fire you'd have had something a little like my current condition. God, how innocent we were.

  Some terrible offensive is on, it seems. Tolland and I've been stretched to eleven- and twelve-hour shifts the last two days. Cut and sew, cut and sew. The work is disturbingly simple. The numbers are mind-boggling.

  Do send books, I'm in need of distraction. How is the cinema? Do they show films of the war in America? I've seen crews set up here, but never in close. I've another "rest" in a few weeks but not back in Blighty. It'll be months before I'm off the Continent.

  18 MARCH 1915

  I got in a fight at school over the war. I said the way we fight war is stupid and we'd best take a lesson from the insects. They work in organized battalions, in direct confrontations. We used to but now we have sophisticated methods. Alphonse Bull wants to fly aeroplanes in the war and he punched me when I claimed aviators were cowards because they wouldn't fight face-to-face but resorted to tricks like flying over and dropping gas bombs.

  26 MARCH 1915

  We presented Frankenstein this evening to an audience of two, Father and Flora. Duncan ran the Victrola and lights, did all the sound effects, and played all the women in minor roles. I was the narrator, little William, an old blind man and the horrified Scotsman. Mr. Taqdir was Dr. Frankenstein and Mother played the monster.

  We made Mother up beautifully, dainty and sweet like the most proper Gibson Girl, sweeping about in her best floral party dress. She was instructed to speak sweetly, with no hint of gloom or growl, and to walk firm and erect. Dr. Frankenstein, however, was more ghoulish. We made his complexion pale and darkened big bags below his eyes. I wanted a bit of stage blood to drip from his teeth but Duncan convinced me not to.

  Mother murdered me near the end of Act Two.

  It was a difficult scene. I insisted that she not limp or stagger or steal about like a criminal, yet she needed to appear plausibly murderous. Judging from the audience, the effect was more comic than tragic, this upstanding Gibson Girl stepping briskly across the room and strangling a rosy-cheeked boy at play in the flower box. She smiled through the killing, which was unnecessary, and released my limp body to tumble to the floor. The lights went dark as she crept offstage. Dr. Frankenstein gave vent to his agony with doglike howling. All around him his family was being ravaged by the monster. An encounter was inevitable.

  "There in the starry darkness of the moonless mountain night, in the shadows of the sharp tooth of Mount Blanc, the good doctor staggered across the rugged snows to a fate he knew not yet. And in the distance, moving with a staglike swiftness, the form of a woman, much larger and more agile than a normal woman, leaping across the deadly frozen crags toward him."

  The rendezvous was played out in darkness.

  "Why do you hunt me?" the doctor asked, lighting, inexplicably, a cigarette. The orange tip glowed, bobbing and floating there in the indistinct night. The cigarette passed, it appeared, to the monster.

  "You are as the only parent of me," she began, drawing a deep breath of smoke, illuminating her soft face in the orange glow. "You have abandoned me. I am an orphan, helpless, friendless, a monster in this cold world." She flicked a bit of ash to the floor. "You will give in to my one request, as only human decency demands."

  Duncan began a distant howling, the soft cry of the glacial winds sweeping across the broken ice floes, whistling beside the jagged peaks.

  "You torment me," the doctor whispered. "All I value has fallen into your hands." He took the cigarette and held it, undrawn for a moment. "To be protecting what I love most, I will have no choice. What is your request?"

  "I require a mate," my mother said. "One as ugly and unwanted as I, one as ill-fit for this world." She rose and walked to the window, a sillhouette against the evening sky. "You must build me a wife."

  The house was hushed as the doctor took a last drag and flicked the spent cigarette out the window.

  "It is done, I have no choice," he said.

  3 APRIL 1915

  Today I came home from school at lunchtime, which is a very special thing and which I was allowed to do only on account of my mother asking. Mother and Father were both at home and sitting there very stiff and formal with little sandwiches with no crusts and a fruit bowl and soup already served, just sitting there and not eating really except that my father had already finished his soup.

  I could tell straightaway that someone had died or something. Mother swept across the room to me, cooing pumpkin this and pumpkin that and brushing her powdered hand across my cheek. She was all done up with lavender water.

  "I'm moving to Bolinas, little fish," my father announced before I'd even sat down. "Your mother will be living with Mr. Taqdir." And I just stood there and breathed while they both watched in silence. The windows were wide open onto the spring day and birds cheeped and chirped, fluttering past to the feeders. Hummingbirds hummed, poking their long noses into the honeysuckle trailing up the corner of our house and wafting spring smells in all directions. There was even a soft wind to stir the branches and I sat down with no appetite and little distinct feeling, just a vague dread and curiosity.

  "Why are you living with Mr. Taqdir?" I asked my mother stupidly.

  She breathed a quick breath and looked to my father, who was busy with a little sandwich. "Certainly, pumpkin," she began, turning toward me, "certainly You've aware of my fondness for Mr. Taqdir." She paused for assistance, but I sat in dumb silence, unable and unwilling to help her.

  "Yes?" I prompted.

  "Your father and I, dearest," she began again. "Your father and I have agreed that it would be healthy for me to explore my feelings for Mr. Taqdir, in a less encumbered atmosphere." She smiled, as if this were a gift she'd given me.

  I still didn't understand, but couldn't find the words to say so. I looked at my father and he shrugged a little s
hrug, nodding his head to the side and brushing the crumbs from off his hands.

  "They're sleeping together. Max," he said. "They're lovers. I'd rather not stick around for it." Mother crinkled her brow at him. "Anyhow, it's a beautiful time of year to be in Bolinas. I can get a lot done up there."

  I realized I'd been squashing a little sandwich throughout the conversation. Its smooth dry white-bread face had turned a pasty gray in my sweaty soiled hands. It looked like my own dirty face from when I was a fat little kid. All those afternoons, I'd come running home from digging furiously in the sandy soil of the Presidio woods, starting tunnels and smoothing the walls of shallow little caves that passed for headquarters of whatever secret club we'd started that week. I was so milky-skinned and pale. Just a fat little kid with dirt on his face. I had a bunch of sort-of friends, Rolph and Skinny and Paolo, and we played our favorite games over and over, acting out the same adventures over the same ground day after day. Soldiers, Forest Fire, Man on the Moon, Tunnel to China or my favorite. Freight Train— the six or seven of us in a snaking line, our hands resting warm on the shoulders of the next boy up, running through the woods on the winding, treacherous path, just making train sounds. We could play for hours, running silly and breathless into the dusky woods, the dark evening settling in and cold fog filtering through the thick stands of cedar, mothers calling unheard into the night and us running and running, taking turns at the glory of being engine or caboose, running and laughing up Pikes Peak and over the Suicide Leap, too fast through the Chutes, and down through the wild empty woods.