Modern American Memoirs

by Annie Dillard

  George and I were miserable, choking down the chocolate cake or custard, whatever gift had been given us that day by our sainted mother—there was no easy Attitude to take. I had only the beginning of a notion when I was in grammar school of my father’s delight in his own rhetoric. The next night he’d strike quite another pose—fully clothed, indeed, sporting a well-tailored suit from Fenn-Feinstein in New Haven—we’d all be taken through some intricate legal proposition that had come up at lunch in the Stratfield Hotel, or, the Latin and Greek roots of our common English words would be expounded and he would have a “sliver, darling—ah, that’s not a sliver now” of our dessert. Charming and urbane, he was the most interesting father in the world and we were his radiant family. We sat late at the table and played with our crumbs. My mother’s demure laugh pleased me, though of course it was not Laughter or Joy in the nobler sense as I well knew. Our passions at home were too muddled to ever be cast in the classical mode.

  The tension between my father and mother must often have come to a head at suppertime: the mortgage, the kids, the inner knowledge that they were both meant for better things. And the other nights—the alternate mood of our family meals was as sparkling as a good scene out of a Depression comedy.

  “Oh, Bill!” our mother said, time and again. “Oh, Bill!” A perpetual girl, she was never dismayed for an instant by one of his wild stories. Her role of the innocent must be displayed like a talisman for good luck. The pact that my parents had drawn up between them had so many clauses—that he should bully her, captivate her, honor her: that she should suffer his folly and respect him: all his windy force against her steady will and self-effacement.

  It was the psychiatrist’s inevitable suggestion to me so many years later that my father was the dominant figure.

  “Oh, no,” I said.

  “Your mother, then?”

  “There is no answer to that question.”

  And I still cannot find my way through their intricate contract. My Looking and Listening at the dinner table were deeply troubling, yet they were easy exercises compared to the more heroic material I watched my parents enact—my father’s raised fist of Anger or the white muslin folds and fading roses of what I once believed to be my mother’s Unrequited Love.

  The gliding vowels and The Attitudes were most probably an adaptation of the old Delsarte Method, techniques not so much for the stage as for the dead form of tableau vivant and the recitations expected of young ladies. The notion was farfetched, that I would ever nestle into the curve of a grand piano at some church social or stand in a drawing room flanked by potted palms, clear my throat, take the position of Welcome, left then right, balanced just slightly over the ball of the foot. In the phantom world evoked by Mrs. Holton I did recite. There in her parlor I acted out the poems and monologues memorized during the week with fitting gestures, speaking from the diaphragm so that I might be heard in the last ghostly row of her imagined auditorium. I’ve lost track of all the sentimental verses that were once in my head, but some of the frisky pieces, thought appropriate for a girl my age, remain. One began: “I went to the dentist along with Aunt Nell,” and reached its height of hilarity under the drill. Another featured “takeoffs” on a row of gullible hicks watching a cowboy movie. I was in great demand. I never attained the Brahmin ballroom for my stage but appeared often on the wood platform of Saint Patrick’s School built one step up from the cement floor where big spiders and bubble-gum wrappers clogged the drains. I recited beautifully whenever Monsignor Lynch came to visit, when the diocesan supervisor came down from Hartford to inspect our classes (perfect classes, presumably, since no changes were ever deemed necessary). When the parents came once a year, dressed in Sunday clothes, I recited an elevating poem and did the darling piece about the dentist as an encore. Dick Ferucci gave them “Ave Maria” on his violin. Mary Morton, a giddy girl, fumbled over the piano keys: “The Barcarolle,” “Country Gardens.” A few flashy types, new in the neighborhood with the defense plants’ hiring, tap-danced and did acrobatic splits. We all sang “To Jesus’ heart all burning/With fervent love for men.”

  I recited at birthday parties and when company came at Christmas and Easter. “Cute” I must have been up to a certain age, insufferable. Then Mrs. Holton delved into her file cabinet and brought out yellowed sheets of paper—the great readings of English poetry and prose, all of our literature clipped and pasted up for the genteel recital. I was Puck, Richard II, Portia, Lear, Mr. Pickwick, the Ghost of Christmas Past, Sir Philip Sidney, Tennyson, Matthew Arnold and, as they say, many, many more. These selections were not memorized but read off the yellowed sheets, the lines preserved in the small blurred print of an ancient typewriter. My final elocutionary triumph came in the eighth grade. I was given a dramatic monologue which I was led to understand only an individual of great talent and sensitivity could deliver. By this time I knew that in some spooky way the work Mrs. Holton entrusted to me could only have been performed by Ruth, gone from us forever with her fresh rose wreath and sickly smile. This last recitation was of the moment—the words of a British mother saying goodbye to her children as they were about to sail off to the safety of America during the war, while she stayed behind courageously, bombs soaring overhead. “Chin up, Gerald. That’s Mummy’s boy. It’s going to be such fun, the tall buildings…and the Statue of Liberty will be there in the harbor with her torch of freedom to welcome you. Pam, my little one, what’s this…not tears?” Farewell (to the right), Bravery (center), Sorrow (left).

  I moved myself to choking sobs in rehearsal. The nuns were thrilled. I don’t feel shame now but wonder, as though it were not me at all but some other self with a preadolescent idea of the tragic, a puppet girl babbling a text that must have been clipped out of a church newsletter or a women’s magazine. A friend of mine, now a distinguished guardsman of our culture, was made to recite the Gettysburg Address when he was a boy before the entire city of Gloucester, standing out in a mist in front of the statue of the noble fisherman. Painful, funny, but his act was no more ludicrous than my version of the brave British mum waving her kids off: “It’s only for a while, Pam. This frightful mess will soon be over. Write to me, darlings. No, Gerald, we must never say goodbye.”

  Departure was almost as good as death in this despairing wartorn world. A boy I loved moved out of town to an army base. I mooned about the house and ate…“Oh, my darling, be brave.” I had pimples coming on and “difficult days” when I should not ride my bike or swim. Without warning there was a miraculous coming of age: I began to see the nonsense of my afternoons with Mrs. Holton and felt that I had been badly used. By this time I went freely into her neat refrigerator to get myself a glass of ice water. There at the kitchen table I saw two places laid for supper. The stage was set to unfold the steady disappointment of their lives: Louise and Herbert face each other over another silent meal.

  I was humiliated by my past performances. I forced my mother to make excuses for me: it was understood that with Latin and algebra, field hockey in the afternoons at the convent school I now attended…There was a cool friendship of sorts that continued between the ladies, Christmas cards, infrequent phone calls. I was lectured on how lucky I was to have been “exposed” to Mrs. Holton. I saw only the ladylike speech and scrim of empty gestures that was meant to separate me from the hard realities of life. Each adolescent Love and Fear was different. I threw the Delsarte Method out as trash: my responses to my father and the games he played with us each night were unpredictable and often graceless.

  This should have been the end, but a few years later, when I went to public high school, I was involved in a cheap incident that shocked my parents (the particulars hidden, fortunately, in some obscure corner of my mind). In this crisis, as with George’s stutter, my mother treated the disease of my rebellion as a surface wound. Mrs. Holton was resurrected. This last effort to save me lasted only a few weeks before I declared myself one of the damned. Not elocution this time, but etiquette—an orrisroot and a
lmond-water finishing process lay in store for me in the silent parlor. Herbert was dead and Mrs. Holton lived on in her perfection. She had assembled on the clean cloth of the dining room table, books and pamphlets from the Emerson School. A lady always carries her head high. Her beauty is enhanced if the lips be slightly parted. She sits with care. She may cross her ankles but never the knees. But all was not superficial deportment: I was to beware of the double entendre and its lowly offspring, the smutty story. On these unforgivable occasions, thrown in with men of little breeding, et cetera…I was to turn my head decisively away or say with stern demeanor, “I do not understand.”

  I was in love with an Italian boy and we walked the North End at night, kissing between streetlights. His three buddies like a Mafia escort trailed half a block behind. He sang with a big band in the Ritz Ballroom at Pleasure Beach on Saturday nights but we knew my father would never in a million years let me go to a dance hall. We walked down back streets to a pizza parlor where we sat alone feeling each other under the table while his friends were posted guard in the booth behind.

  Good-natured laughter is permitted in the home but is not tolerated on the street or in a public conveyance. I must subdue a gloomy mood before entering society. I must practice walking with a book balanced on my head and, above all, not afflict the world with any dismal account of my circumstances. “It is presumed,” Mrs. Holton said, “that each one has trouble enough to bear without being burdened with the sorrows of others.”

  My boyfriend was diddling with me. He had a girl, a smoldery Italian beauty who took the secretarial course and it was presumed—each one has joy enough—that they would marry. I loved the smell of him and the strange beads of sweat that sat on the flat tip of his Sicilian nose and were brushed against my cheek when we embraced.

  When I was in college Mrs. Holton died. Months before, she had called my mother and asked if I might come to visit during spring vacation. So on a chill bright day, the forsythia improving the small front yards of Bridgeport, I drove out to the Fanny Goodwin Home for elderly ladies. Her room had the familiar photos, clean linen doilies on the tables, plants and a hot plate. We drank Nescafé. I said that her elocution lessons had served me well. I was constantly asked to speak at college meetings and I announced the Glee Club from one end of New England to another, speaking from the diaphragm, sliding my vowels, spitting my D’s and T’s. She offered me one of two decorative plates as a keepsake. They were both Oriental in style and I felt that I stood in such a false position with her that I grabbed the worthless one, a turn-of-the-century Japanese thing, and left the deep-blue Canton china behind. Then she gave me a grocery carton filled with all the materials of her trade—the monologues, the typewritten selections from literature and the glossy cream-colored programs which memorialized those lofty evening recitals at the Emerson School. She walked down to the car with me past the old girls rocking in the sunshine on the porch and stood on the lawn, head high, lips slightly parted, and affecting me with nothing more troublesome than her Pride and Unguarded Love, she bid me a classic Farewell.

  I’ve often wished that I had that piece about the Second World War, but it’s gone. When I divorced, the box was left behind in New Jersey—in a leaky cellar that flooded in a hurricane. I said to hell with it and the family photographs, my Smith yearbook, early manuscripts washed away too: I was getting on with my life. Of least importance was that box of Mrs. Holton’s. Good riddance to the bloated eloquence of perfectly enunciated poesy, the techniques of good behavior which had not implemented my salvation. I am not the lady I was meant to be.

  When my husband, my ex-husband, came to pick up our daughter for the weekend visit he said: “I’m sorry about the mess in the cellar…all your papers.”

  “It’s okay.”

  We stood in the doorway of my apartment with our little girl’s overnight case between us while she shuffled through a shopping bag of her favorite toys. We weren’t hardened to our circumstances. We dawdled and laughed a lot. He said he could not braid her hair. Finally they started on their way, but turned to look back up the flight of stairs. I stood above them on the landing, posturing, hand to heart. “Chin up. That’s Mummy’s darling.” I laughed and struck the Attitude of Bravery. “It’s going to be such fun. We must never say goodbye.”

  FREDERICK BUECHNER (1926-)

  Frederick Buechner is the author of twenty-seven books—thirteen novels and fourteen works of nonfiction. Born in New York, he attended Princeton University and Union Theological Seminary. He is an ordained Presbyterian minister and a full-time writer.

  Buechner’s most recent novel is Son of Laughter (1992). His chief work consists of four novels published in the 1970s and brought together in 1979 as The Book of Bebb. Lion Country, the first in the Bebb tetralogy, was nominated for the National Book Award. In 1980, the unrelated novel Godric was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.

  His memoirs include The Sacred Journey (1982) and Now and Then (1983).

  from THE SACRED JOURNEY

  How they do live on, those giants of our childhood, and how well they manage to take even death in their stride because although death can put an end to them right enough, it can never put an end to our relationship with them. Wherever or however else they may have come to life since, it is beyond a doubt that they live still in us. Memory is more than a looking back to a time that is no longer; it is a looking out into another kind of time altogether where everything that ever was continues not just to be, but to grow and change with the life that is in it still. The people we loved. The people who loved us. The people who, for good or ill, taught us things. Dead and gone though they may be, as we come to understand them in new ways, it is as though they come to understand us—and through them we come to understand ourselves—in new ways too. Who knows what “the communion of saints” means, but surely it means more than just that we are all of us haunted by ghosts because they are not ghosts, these people we once knew, not just echoes of voices that have years since ceased to speak, but saints in the sense that through them something of the power and richness of life itself not only touched us once long ago, but continues to touch us. They have their own business to get on with now, I assume—“increasing in knowledge and love of Thee,” says the Book of Common Prayer, and moving “from strength to strength,” which sounds like business enough for anybody—and one imagines all of us on this shore fading for them as they journey ahead toward whatever new shore may await them; but it is as if they carry something of us on their way as we assuredly carry something of them on ours. That is perhaps why to think of them is a matter not only of remembering them as they used to be but of seeing and hearing them as in some sense they are now. If they had things to say to us then, they have things to say to us now too, nor are they by any means always things we expect or the same things.

  It is the way I used to see her on late Saturday afternoons in winter that I remember my Grandmother Buechner best. She sits in her overstuffed chair with the lamp behind her unlit, though New York City is turning gray through the window. On the sill at her elbow, her squat little Philco is playing Wagner. She knows the libretto by heart as she also knows by heart how to crochet in the dusk with her silk and scissors lying on the great shelf of her bosom. Wotan is singing farewell to Brünnhilde—“Leb’ wohl, du kühnes, herrliches Kind! Du meines Herzens heiliger Stolz”—while twelve stories down on Park Avenue, taxi horns echo the music’s grieving. “Farewell, my brave and beautiful child, the life and light of my heart,” sings Wotan as, ringed round with fire, Brünnhilde sinks into an enchanted sleep. Leb’ wohl. Then Rosa the maid comes in with her Essen ist fertig, Frau Büchner to announce dinner, and my grandmother heaves her great weight out of her chair and with the aid of her stick and my arm makes her way to the dining room table of cold chicken, radishes, rye bread, and lebkuchen left over from Christmas. She talks of the tanten—how Tante Anna said of her, “Louise always tells me I’m naive, but what she means is I’m stupid,” and of how Tante Anna
phoned not long before to say that she had fallen and broken the bone in her eye. “The bone in her eye!” my grandmother says and laughs till out of her own eyes the tears roll down.

  She talks of her father, Hermann Balthazar Scharmann, and of how walking back from luncheon at Lüchows, he would keep hurling his cane yards ahead on the pavement, pedestrians be damned, and then pick it up without breaking his stride to keep himself trim. “I’m too old,” my grandmother says. “Somebody should shoot me,” but of course we none of us dared. Instead we would bring her presents on her birthday, which Heaven help us if we forgot, and she would sit there in her chair by the window refusing to open them. “Whatever they are,” she says, “I know I’m not going to like them.”

  She was the rich one of my two grandmothers, the holder of the purse strings. She could be an unholy terror, and when the terror was at its unholiest, Rosa would answer the doorbell with the single word Grenma, her hands in the air and her eyes rolled heavenward. My grandmother spoke her mind with terrible honesty, in German to Rosa and in English to the rest of us. But if her wrath burned hot, it also burned quick and was gone in a devastating flash. She never smoldered. And it was the same with her grief. Suddenly her voice would tremble, her eyes brim, over some ancient hurt, some remembered loss or failure. She never submerged her feelings but rode them like a great wave just the way, as a child, I often saw her ride the real waves too, swimming out to the barrels through the high Long Island surf as fat as Rinkitink but bobbing like a great cork, unsinkable, ocean-proof. Then back to the big shingled summer house by the canal, where ducks quacked for breadcrumbs and bees buzzed among the honeysuckle, and all through the house there were bowls of flowers—black-eyed Susans, wild roses, cattails—and cold crab in the ice box, cold beer, and lemonade in crockery pitchers, a mocha torte with ground almonds in it that took two days to make. My grandmother played croquet with her tennis-playing sons and golf-playing daughter, held her mallet one-handed and off to the side as she had learned to from the years when she needed that one hand free to gather up the long skirts of her girlhood. Her tow-headed grandchildren played hide-and-seek on the lawn as the dusk deepened and my grandfather poured out the evening martinis on the veranda.