Near Canaan

by Liese O'Halloran Schwarz

  I starved away in a cold-water fifth-floor walkup, taking in typing, and at night writing my idiotic little stories. I didn’t know that I was uncomfortable; in fact, I felt sanctified by the whole experience. I was so dumb. I thought I was unique. I had no idea that there were millions like me, or that I was just another Young Thing with a Typewriter and a Dream.

  Dreams. I had a few, and all of them involved New Yorker typeface. I pined after print, and read everything that was being published, all the greats of that time. What must it be like for a young writer now? No Thurber, no Salinger. Everything reading “he goes, she goes,” and no rich descriptions. No one takes any time anymore. Today’s short stories are like sound bites. Pith without context. If I were a young writer today, I’d think seriously of becoming a scuba diver. Or a public school teacher. Something dangerous, and challenging.

  So I wrote and I wrote and I wrote. And I mailed my little stories off with notes which might as well have said Please Sir. And my little stories winged their ways back to me, with other little notes attached, printed anonymous squares which might as well have begun Forget It. We kept up a healthy correspondence, the Editors and I, and I tried not to let it wound me. I’d met some other writers by then, and I’d heard all about the fickleness of editors—how the reception you got depended on their mood, which depended on the quality of their lunch, or how their income tax returns were going, or whether or not their wives were sleeping with them. I believed in my heart that I’d hit a Happy Editor, that the sturdy envelope I’d so carefully sealed up, filled with all of my youthful hopes, would come into his office and find him In the Mood.

  Well, it never happened. I got little square after little square. One kind man wrote a single indecipherable sentence to me in blue ink; I never knew what it said, but it was personal, and I was thrilled. My hopes went sky-high, and I shot off another story to him at once. It came back three months later, looking as though it hadn’t even been read. Can you believe it didn’t even daunt me? I just kept on, typing out my prose in smeary ribbon onto middling bond, messages cast onto the water in bottles of manila, praying for the Happy Editor.

  All the time, something had been creeping up on me. Every writer dreams of her First Novel, and I was no exception. Every now and then I’d get an idea, and I’d chase it down, only to find myself at the end of a trail of words, having lost the scent entirely. I had drawers full of First Novels, some no longer than a chapter, some as long as sixty pages, all of them worthless. So I became stubborn; and when the next Idea came to me, I ignored it, and went on pecking at my short stories, reading Katherine Mansfield and Dorothy Parker, yearning after the first one’s sensibilities, and the other one’s wit. Thank God I burnt all of those efforts, years ago. How embarrassing they were, how motley.

  The Idea wouldn’t go away; it crept around and bothered me at night, until in a kind of a fit, I sat down and wrote at it, to teach it a lesson. Surprisingly, this time it didn’t peter out; I got up from my desk with a little more than twenty pages of copy, and more ringing in my head, waiting to be attended to.

  I’m making it sound so easy. It was months and months of hard work before the thing began to take shape. But when it did, it did with a vengeance, and I lived at my typewriter, skimping on meals to pay for ribbons, resenting the time my clients’ offerings took from my own work. There’s nothing worse than typing someone else’s fiction, when you write your own. And when yours is unsuccessful, the insult goes even deeper. I’d find myself in the wee hours, pounding out someone else’s hashed-up sentence structure, just as it was, not even correcting spelling, crying “Ha!” every time I found a comma splice, and gleefully leaving it in.

  When the Thing was finished, I couldn’t believe it. I held the chapters in both hands, incredulous at its sheer weight. It felt like an infant, and I certainly treated it that way—swaddling it in brown paper and string, marking the name of a publishing house on the outside, and pushing it into the box with my fingers crossed.

  It came back, a heavier boomerang than any of my stories. Halfheartedly, I unswaddled my child, and rewrapped it in new paper, sending it on its way again. Then I got involved in someone else’s deadline, and forgot about the Thing I had birthed.

  The little envelope was a surprise; I hardly ever got letters, and certainly never ones with typewritten addresses. I assumed that the alien which had passed through the letter slot was a notice about library fines. I had a dreadful habit, and still do, of holding on to library books for months past their due dates. I hadn’t any money to pay my fines, and I cursed myself as I slit the letter open.

  Of course it was a check. For an amount that would make any modern author cry with laughter, but which sent me dancing giddily around the room. I was an Author. I sent half the money to my mother right away, and then paid off the library and bought a good dinner and a new typewriter ribbon.

  I sold two novels before my first short story was accepted by a magazine. Not even a very good magazine, at that. Certainly not the New Yorker. But it was enough for me; I’d gotten an agent by then, and I was crafty; I was making enough money to be able to give up the typing almost completely; and while the second went to press, I worked on novel number three.

  Those were wonderful years. Yet frightening ones, too. What if? filled my ears like a promise. What if I’m no good after all? was the loudest. And What if I can’t think of anything else to say? That one was potent, kept me awake until the early hours of the morning. Especially after a bad day. Or I should say, a day of bad writing. I had enough of those to make me wild, although people never believe it when I say so. I get letters, asking me for encouragement; people send me their manuscripts, their own tender children, and beg me to tell them if I think they have any talent. I always write back and tell them it shouldn’t matter what I say. You’ll stop writing if you’re no good. Nobody should write if she doesn’t have to.

  I put my little sister through college, and saw her married to a man from Ohio, who took her away with him, back to his farm. I went to her wedding, but I didn’t go home again, not until my mother’s funeral, and then I was only there for three days.

  Eventually I realized the great truth about New York. You go there in order to earn the right to leave. I had earned my passage, and now I had to choose where I should live. At first, I thought of the south of France, and then of Ireland. Picturesque places. But I don’t speak French, and the prospect of Irish winters didn’t appeal. I didn’t know about the rainfall then. I never considered either of them really seriously; at heart, I expect I always knew where I would go—back home.

  I went there for a visit, touching down in an airplane on the tiny runway miles from my mother’s old house, riding into town in a hired car, feeling like a conquering hero. I’d heard of a house for sale, and I meant to inspect it the next day, but first I wanted to look over my breeding place.

  Do you remember The Odyssey? The part when Odysseus comes back to Ithaka, and doesn’t know it? “What is this land and realm, who are the people?” he asks Pallas Athena. When she tells him he is home, he cries, “I cannot believe that I have come to Ithaka./It is some other land.” Well, that’s how I felt, exactly. The town I had grown up in looked mighty small, and strange, and even the people I recognized were strangers. And they received me as one; all they knew about me was that I’d gone away for a while. None of them had read my books. They’d heard about them, though, and made remarks along the lines of “You use a lot of dirty words, in them stories.”

  I went by Patsy’s old house, which had been ramshackle, on the very edge of town; now it was a smart little dwelling in the middle of a clean residential area. I thought about the bloodstains that were no doubt still clinging to the baseboards in that dingy kitchen, and then realized that that old floor would have been taken up, and the walls stripped, and modern recessed lighting put into the ceiling.

  I went by the old bakery, which wasn’t there any longer. A hairdressing salon stood in its place; I could not e
ven tell by looking if the building was the same one.

  Patsy and Ted lived in an apartment above his stationer’s shop, and to my delight, she remembered me. She showed me around the shop, proudly.

  “We even have a rack for books,” she said, tapping a fingernail against the bright jacket of a paperback romance. “I kept hoping you’d write one, and we could sell it.”

  “But I have,” I said. “I’ve written six.”

  “Maybe they’re not the kind we sell,” she said, dubiously.

  “Probably not,” I agreed. “Do you remember Mrs. Mince?” I asked. “How she sang at night, while we did the baking?”

  “I remember her,” said Patsy. “But I can’t say as I recall any singing.”

  So I came away. I didn’t even look at the house I had thought of buying. I went far from that little town, and instead found another just like it. They treat me here a little like Garbo, have you noticed? When I come out, they peer at me, and they tell visitors about me with pride, and point out this house. I am a kind of national possession to them, whereas at home I was nothing more than Lou the fireman’s daughter, who went off and wrote herself some dirty books. Jesus was a carpenter’s son when he was at home.

  I’m happy in Naples. I’m here half the year, and add a little glamor to the town. In return, I am made to feel as though I have really come home. Home, I’ve decided, is never where you seek it. The old familiar places change, and leave no place for you. You’ve got to scrabble your home out of hard rock, carve Ithaka wherever you find it, and settle in. Otherwise, you might wander all your life, looking.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Treaties

  I AWAKENED STIFF and claustrophobic in my sleeping bag. Beside me, Joan rolled over and groaned.

  “Ugh,” she said. “I feel like I’ve been sleeping in a tree.”

  Bob and Bobby had set out on a last birding expedition, I suspected; they’d left us the embers of their breakfast fire. I poked it up and brewed some coffee; and Joan and I sat in the thin early sunshine and drank it, speaking little.

  The magic of the night before had gone; the other tents were zippered and silent. The campsite was empty, the morning cold; even the coffee, though hot and pleasant, did little to raise my spirits. It had been a good idea to come here; but now it was time to go home.

  I took the tent down while Joan packed the car. Half an hour later we were on the road to Naples. The day before, the drive had been happy, full of daring. Playing runaway, we had almost convinced ourselves; the narrow world had expanded before us, and there had seemed no end to the possibilities for escape. For a while last night by the camp fire it had seemed we need never go back. But the morning light chased away delusion; the music and the darkness were past, and with them whatever harmony had entered into us. Joan sighed beside me, plucking at her skirt, gathering pine needles which had lodged in the weave of the fabric, dropping them into her cupped hand. I settled both my hands on the wheel, driving cautiously, automatically west; toward home, toward whatever lay there, awaiting us.

  Beth’s departure shrank the world smaller; I experienced something new to me, a fitful restlessness, a wanderlust. I saw Naples with new eyes. When the leaves fell, I saw them swirling in slow motion, like the clumsy plastic flakes in a tourist’s toy. I envisioned Beth in New York, a city I had never seen; for want of proper images I put her in Washington, D.C., its wide parkways charged with traffic, rushing past where she stood on the corner, arm crooked before her eyes, watching the stoplight. The streets of Naples seemed smaller and its inhabitants more primitive than ever by comparison with the domain of my fancy. I waited impatiently to hear from her.

  Ironically, as my dissatisfaction with Naples grew, I found a greater welcome there. The center was finished, and received great praise from the mayor; I moved the same crew on to build the adjoining minimall. Devlin gave me a raise in salary, and I bought myself a new car. On the site the men chaffed me about it in their new, friendly way. I listened to their constant profanity with equanimity now, having learned, unwittingly, the great truth: that the conversation of men is largely bluff, falsely and forever contentious. “Fuck you,” I understood, was an all-purpose phrase, like Aloha. Hello, good-bye, thanks a lot; it was all in there, in those two words; and when Walker yelled them down at me above the noise of the machinery, I smiled and waved.

  All the time I waited to hear from Beth. I wanted to know what she’d found, whether she was happy, what the world she’d lunged out into was like. I awakened one morning near Christmas with a deep sense of disorientation. I had lost something, I thought frantically, and, sleep muddled, began searching the bedclothes for whatever it was.

  “You’re dreaming, honey,” said Joan, and I came awake fully then, with my hands bunched up in the covers and my breath coming fast.

  Later in the day I recalled the dream, its creeping sense of unease, faded now. And I understood abruptly what it was that I had lost. The sense of apartness which I had carried everywhere with me since childhood was gone, misplaced like a despised sweater. Sometime in the last few months I had found my place in the world, or at least in my little part of it. In a cascade of revelations, I understood much more: the pattern of my life before, how I had brought much of my suffering upon myself. I was an easy target; any casual remark had found its way unerringly to my private core of shame. I had sown the fertile earth of my uncertainty with the careless speeches and glances of others, and had reaped for myself a gigantic loneliness. I had cherished my apartness, held it close. Now, with the winter wind brushing my face and driving away the last shreds of the morning’s dream, I relinquished my martyrdom. It had been nearly accomplished already, I realized; the dream had come at the end of the process. Without meaning to, I had relaxed into the small, familiar place where I had spent all of my life, even as I was scanning the newspaper for tidings of greater cities and foreign lands. Wanting to leave, I had come suddenly home.

  I heard from Beth at the New Year. I didn’t recognize her handwriting right away; the thin, creased envelope in my mailbox seemed almost intolerably alien. She wrote: Not so different here but different enough, I guess. Staying with my cousin though I think I might leave soon, she hints all the time. I may have a job in the city in the spring. How’s tricks in the construction biz? You wouldn’t believe how tall some of the buildings are here.

  It was a sparse missive, one that told me nothing of her daily life. The disjointed sentences held no breath of Beth, nothing of her grace and wit. The postmark was New Jersey; there was no return address. That, at least, was like Beth: to cast a message out, allowing no possibility for reply.

  I showed the letter to Joan, who commented merely, “How odd.” From her tight mouth, the quickening of her pallor, I presumed that news of Beth was not welcome to her. It stirred, perhaps, some ugly memory. A shoe, shouting, a child’s limp body? I didn’t ask, but folded the letter away. We didn’t speak of it again.

  In superficial ways, Joan had changed very little. As always, she was heavily involved in the lives of her students, although she had stopped inviting them to the house. She continued to write her column; and if there was any difference in Tell Tillie, any new hesitancy or qualm, I never detected it. I read Tillie faithfully, as did the rest of the town; and in 1968, at its annual dinner, the Chronicle presented Joan with the coveted Golden Quill. “In appreciation for many years of wise words,” the editor had said, handing it over. The applause was wild. Joan had become something of a celebrity.

  That year, Dale Miller died. I was frantic—how to get word to Beth? Then I realized that this was exactly the reason she’d given no return address. She was afraid of news like this, bait at the end of a long cast, pulling her back to Naples. Her goodbyes had been permanent ones, I thought sadly; I would surely never see her again.

  I heard from her a few months later, for the second to last time. I’m getting married, she wrote. Maybe. And that was all. From the comfort of my home, cradled in the broad arms of
the Blue Ridge, I sent out a telepathic message: Be happy, Beth. I could be generous; for the first time in my life, I had happiness to spare.

  As we reached the outskirts of town, a gentle rain began. I switched on the wipers, glancing quickly over at Joan, who had fallen asleep. I admired her ability to drop into sleep the way she did, suddenly and with complete dignity. Her eyes were closed; her hair made soft dark wings over her ears; there was a faint tracing of blue at one corner of her mouth. Looking at her, I felt the same intense protectiveness which I had carried before me like a shield these twenty years.

  I turned from one familiar road onto another. Of course I had heard the cliche about knowing a place “like the back of my hand,” but never until now had I attached a deeper meaning to the words. This morning, I saw Joan and myself, moving in our car over the same worn avenues, following the same curves, idiosyncratic as the lines on a palm. My own life line, love line, heart line, here in the map of this town.

  How had I ever feared Buddy? I wondered. He was lost in Naples, a naive scout without a decoder ring. The town had deflected his probing without effort. He was powerless, even pathetic. He was also a potent and uncomfortable reminder, gawky the way I had been, the butt of all humor at Stokes’s, of an evening. Jack’s plaything. The similarities went deep. But I was not like that now, no longer afraid and wandering. I felt a spark of sympathy for him. Like him, I had spent years unknowing.

  I thought of Jack, who had kept himself apart in Naples these long years, segregating himself the way I’d felt segregated before. True to form, the town had tried and sentenced Jack a dozen times over, without any one citizen ever bringing a formal accusation. They muttered about him, and looked askance when he passed. Work slowed down at the garage for a while, but strangers, not privy to the secrets of the town, kept on bringing their cars to him, and he got by. The only other mechanic anybody went to was Reed Darcy, who did shoddy work and overcharged besides. Gradually, work shifted back over to Jack. The vicious talk calmed down, but never quite went away. Beth was right: it had outlived her.