The Gift: Novel

by Hilda Doolittle

  UNLESS A BOMB FALLS …

  “Morning coffee, lunches and teas as usual unless a bomb falls on the building.” So read the notice at H. D.’s local restaurant, The Tea Kettle. Then, one morning: “more open than usual.” The waitresses were still sweeping up broken glass. And they were very apologetic. “Sorry, only cold cuts and salad today, we seem to have lost our gas main.” They provided good scalding tea, however—brewed on a camping stove. Life had to go on, and so it did; cheerfully and sometimes grumpily—unless and until a bomb fell on the building.

  Bryher had moved into H. D.’s apartment—close quarters for two such turbulent spirits. To accommodate the material overflow she rented storage space in the basement. When the raids intensified, she hauled in two lumpy mattresses and created a private shelter. There they spent many noisy nights. As soon as the All Clear wailed, they went back upstairs, breakfasted, and started the working day.

  Bryher was the housekeeper and provider: off early, heading every queue. She left the house with a clutch of empty string bags, and always managed to fill them. She returned laden like a pack pony. Then she went to her chaotic room— papers strewn all over the bed and under it, typewriter teetering atop a spindly tea table—and attended to her correspondence; average, twenty letters a day. She also wrote a novel based on the management and clientele of The Tea Kettle. And started another about the Battle of Hastings. With the door open, the telephone ringing, and Mrs. Ash the charlady mopping, and popping in for chats.

  H. D. needed structure, total privacy, and the strictest schedule. Notebooks laid out in neat piles, pencils sharpened the night before. Everything ready, set to go—unless a bomb fell on the building. She got a good headstart while Bryher was off on her rounds, and finished before Mrs. Ash came. Two, three hours at the most. Every day, seven days a week. “Just going over some old stuff,” she said. “I don’t expect anything to come of it, but it’s healing to the psyche.” She volunteered no more, and I certainly wasn’t going to inquire. “When I talk about my work,” she once told me “it skids and shatters and gets away.” To this day, I never ask a writer what he or she is “doing.”

  Normally a voracious reader and eternal student, she now found it hard to concentrate on her beloved books. There was plenty of time in the afternoons and during the long evenings, but the times were “disintegrating”—one of her key words. Her psyche refused to lose itself in the printed page. So she turned to needlework. It kept her hands busy and freed her mind to soar or to settle, to enjoy BBC concerts, to converse with her friends. She kept it in a floppy brown bag along with the wool—lovely soft skeins of every shade. She always brought it out after tea, and worked away while guests lingered on. When they left, she continued till dinner time. She completed an elaborate masterpiece which hangs on my wall. Strange hybrid animals prowl an overladen fruit grove. She started another. I have that too—same bag, same wool, undamaged by time or moth. I will finish it for her someday.

  We were together one evening, just the two of us. She was stitching, lost in thought. I was reading. Bryher burst in on the peaceful scene to announce that the apple jelly had exploded and ruined her books. For some unexplained reason, she kept supplies in the back of her bookcase. A jar had leaked. Drama, consternation. A very special jar, Fortnum & Mason, prewar apple jelly, which she was saving for Edith Sitwell. Would it do? We sampled it on the spot. It had crystallized on top and turned runny at the bottom, and fermented; it was really quite nasty throughout. Edith would have to settle for black currant, as yet intact.

  The incident triggered H. D.’s memory. Other apples, the orchards of Pennsylvania, the woods she wandered with her brothers Alfred and Eric. “Brothers … ?” I interrupted. I knew Harold and Melvin; I knew of Gilbert, killed in the First World War. Here were two new uncles. Why had they never been mentioned? Were they undesirables, black sheep of some kind—or illegitimate? I was quite indignant.

  “Only half brothers. My father’s first wife died and he married her sister.”

  “You never told me—”

  “Oh well, it was all so long ago and there seemed no point in bringing it up.”

  Long ago and far away and enough reminiscence for the day. I left it at that. She never revealed much about her early background; she merely dropped bits of information now and then. My father was out of the picture, so my relatives were all on my mother’s side—and on the other side of the world, the States. A few of them came over. Uncle Harold and Uncle Melvin. And my grandmother and her sister, my great-aunt Laura, whom I loved dearly. They baby-sat when Bryher and H. D. traveled. But they both returned to the States when I was still a young child. Aunt Laura outlived my grandmother by a few years. I never saw either of them again.

  My late grandfather sounded awesome. An astronomer. I visualized him as a bearded sage, like Copernicus in The Child’s Book of the Heavens.

  Now, as I read The Gift I see that I wasn’t far wrong. Professor Charles Doolittle was “a path-finder, an explorer” so intent on his work that he literally froze to the telescope. His beard and whiskers had to be thawed out at regular intervals. The household revolved around him, especially the women. Everybody was understandably traumatized when he staggered home late one night, incoherent, bruised, and smeared with blood. Little Hilda never recovered from the shock, nor is the mystery explained within the context of the book. A letter was discovered recently. It appears that the Professor stepped off a moving trolley. Maybe he forgot to press the stop button, maybe the driver didn’t hear it. The passenger stepped off into space and took a nasty tumble. Anyway, he survived. His loved ones rallied and bandaged him and nursed him back to health.

  Although he was a genius and a dominant figure, he seems to have been a man of great personal warmth. He cared deeply about his family and observed all the traditions—Christmas and birthday celebrations, summer excursions to huts and parks and lakes.

  It was an extensive family. Five sons and a daughter, uncles and aunts and cousins, and old grandmother Mamalie. A distinguished family too.

  Mamalie’s father. Grandpa Weiss, was a superlative clockmaker. He also played the trombone, and kept bees. We have inherited one of his clocks. It has traveled far—down through the generations, down to the Southern Hemisphere, following Uncle Melvin to his post in Buenos Aires; and back to New York and out to Long Island. A local artisan rebuilt it for us; he was greatly impressed by the beauty and craftsmanship. Outwardly, it has recovered from its sea changes. But we are chary of its mechanism and delicate balance, and unable to give it the full time attention it requires. So it stands in our parlor, a friendly silent presence, set at 7:15.

  Uncle Fred was put to work in a drugstore—a singularly inept choice of career. All he cared about was music. Yes, they finally admitted, he had artistic gift. They let him follow his true vocation. He later founded the Bach Choir, and the famous Bach Festival, still an annual event in Bethlehem.

  Mama—my grandmother—had a talent for painting. She was musical too; she sang in the choir. A fortune-teller predicted that she would have a child who was exceptionally gifted. She withdrew from the competition. She never painted or sang again.

  The gifted child was, of course, Hilda. Little Hilda, who had no inkling of it for many years to come. The book is written entirely from a child’s point of view.

  Where did the Gift come from? Was it in the air? Or inherited? Where did it originate? Probably with Mamalie, whose gift was weird—psychic recall. She could remember things that happened before she was born. Maybe she was a frustrated historical novelist who talked her books. The present was a jumble. She mixed up names and faces, current dates, places. She confused Hilda with Cousin Aggie. The child ignored the mistake and curled up for a late night chat which tu
rned into a lengthy seance. Hilda/Aggie was mesmerized. She knew she had to keep the old lady talking; otherwise she would go to sleep and never finish the story. Worse still, she might lapse into German, the incomprehensible language of her forebears. Already, she was dropping words like Gnadenhuetten, and Wunden Eiland.

  The first Moravians settled in eastern Pennsylvania, probably welcomed by the Quakers, who were more tolerant than New England Protestants or Southern Catholic states. These early worshipers came from England, the Low Countries, and various parts of Germany. They took refuge on Count Zinsendorff’s estate in Moravia. He organized their transatlantic journey. Thus a polyglot group founded Bethlehem. The language spoken was a species of German, the tongue of the majority.

  The Moravians are not to be confused with the Amish or other Pennsylvania Dutch sects, from whom they differed by having a livelier interest in learning and culture. Music was an essential part of their lives. Many of the Moravians were skilled artisans. Their work is evident in the church and academy buildings of Bethlehem.

  Their belief was a literal following of the Bible, and they were especially peace-loving. They soon made friends with the Indians, many of whom they converted, even to the extent of turning nomadic warlike tribes into peaceful tillers of the soil like themselves.

  They devised an original and enchanting method of communication in those pre-telephone days. A quartet of trombonists gathered on a balcony atop the church tower, facing the four points of the compass. The changes they played were familiar to all. One heralded a birth, one sounded an alarm, another a death—and so on. Every citizen, musical or not, was trained to interpret the notes drifting out over the town and countryside from those golden horns.

  Wunden Eiland—Isle of Wounds. There must have been occasional dissensions, tribal clashes, and confrontations.

  Mamalie rambled on, further and further into the past. The child couldn’t take it all in. She pieced it together, later. She became aware of “the Thing”—synonymous with the Gift—atavism, transmigration of souls, the weight of past events. She couldn’t understand it. She felt haunted, trapped within it. Never free until “again there was a whistling of evil wings, the falling of poisonous arrows, the deadly signature of a sign of evil magic in the sky.” The London Blitz, that unreal—and all too real—time, which she describes in the final chapter, or epilogue. When writing was her therapy. Some of it was wrought from direct experience:

  An incident here and there,

  and rails gone (for guns)

  from your (and my) old town square

  The Gift provided escape. Her mind was obviously deep into it and far away, on the afternoon of the exploding apple jelly.

  The original manuscript of The Gift was much longer. Judicious cutting has not affected the spirit, or the quality, but has made a better book.

  Forty years have passed since The Gift was written. The Gift continues on, following its own course. It can’t be pushed or pulled. I ponder my oldest son’s interest in astrophysics, his way with the written word, and his great appreciation of music. His three siblings are also “into” literature and the arts. Their musical tastes might seem eclectic, but it’s all part of the whole. I’m sure Uncle Fred would have loved the Beatles.

  On September 10th, H. D.’s birthday, we travel to Bethlehem. Hospitable friends have entertained us there over the years, always after funerals. We now meet annually, to celebrate a happy occasion. There is a reading, and a tea, and a twilight procession to Nisky Hill Cemetery. We lay flowers alongside the beautiful inscription—“Greek flower; Greek ecstasy… —saving some for the other Doolittles and Wolles. Professor Charles Doolittle and my grandmother and Aunt Laura. And Uncle Gilbert and Uncle Fred. All weathered and mossy, barely legible. And Uncle Harold, Uncle Melvin, and Aunt Dorothy—shiny new by comparison.

  Just beyond this enclave there is a stone book, half open, and anonymous; the pages are blank. An innocent’s grave, maybe. A baby, or a fragile young girl, whose life was an open book. Or a renegade whose story could not be told. A venerable scholar—or a poet. The Gift, in another family.

  PERDITA SCHAFFNER

  The brain comes into play, yes, but it is only

  the tool. … the telephone is not the person speaking

  over it. The dark room is not the photograph.

  Death and its Mystery, Camille Flammarion

  DARK ROOM

  There was a girl who was burnt to death at the seminary, as they called the old school where our grandfather was principal.

  For a long time we were under the impression that we had two fathers, Papa and Papalie, but the children across the street said Papalie was our grandfather. “He is not,” we said, “he is our Papalie.” But Ida, our devoted friend, who did the cooking and read Grimm’s tales to us at night before we went to sleep, said yes, Papalie was our grandfather, people had a grandfather, sometimes they had two. The other grandfather was dead, he was Papa’s father, she explained. But the girl who was burnt to death, was burnt to death in a crinoline. The Christmas tree was lighted at the end of one of the long halls and the girl’s ruffles or ribbons caught fire and she was in a great hoop.

  The other girls stand round. There is Mama, who is a tiny child, and Aunt Laura, who Mama said was the pretty one, two years older, and Aunt Agnes in her long frock, who in the daguerreotypes and old photographs looked like the young mother of the two little girls and the three boys, the uncles.

  Mamalie had married twice; there was a picture of one of Aunt Agnes’ family in a wig with a sword; he had been at the Court of Czar Alexander, in Russia; that was a long time ago. Aunt Agnes’ children were young men, almost like uncles. There had been eight altogether; five grew up. There had been a little girl; and in our own plot at Nisky Hill, there was a little girl who was our own sister and another little girl who had been the child of the Lady who had been Papa’s first wife. But the girl in the crinoline wasn’t a relation, she was just one of the many girls at the seminary when Papalie was there and she screamed and Papalie rushed to her and Papalie wrapped a rug around her, but she is shrieking and they can not tear off her clothes because of the hoop.

  “Why are you crying?” This is Mama and her younger brother, little Hartley. Mamalie finds them crouched at the turn of the stairs under the big clock that Mamalie’s father had made himself.

  “It is a grandfather clock,” we said proudly, “and it was made by Mamalie’s family.”

  “Ah, so it is really a grandfather’s clock,” one out-of-town visitor remarked; we felt indifference, even irreverence in her unfamiliar low drawl. Wasn’t it a thing to be proud of, that Mamalie’s father made clocks? We were very proud of it. Mamalie’s father had even been asked to Philadelphia to sing in a great choral-service; he kept bees and he played the trombone at the Easter service in the old graveyard when we went out and said the Lord is risen indeed and watched the sun come up over the graves.

  But “why are you crying” was Mama and little Hartley, it was not Hilda and little Harold. Hilda and little Harold did not creep under the clock and cry, but it was the same clock.

  “Why are you crying?”

  Mama, who was older, said, “We are crying because Fanny died.” Mamalie laughed and told us the story of Mama and Uncle Hartley crouching under the clock, which was our clock in our house now and our great-grandfather had made it and kept bees and been asked to Philadelphia to sing, even at a theater or an opera house.

  “They were crying,” Mamalie explained, when we wondered why she laughed about it, “because Fanny died.”

  “But why is it funny?”

  “Well, you see they couldn’t possibly remember Fanny. Fanny died before Hartley was born, and your own mama was just a baby, how could she remember Fanny?”

  I wondered about that. Mama was crying about Fanny. Why did Mamalie think it funny? Mamalie did not seem to think of Fanny, Mama did not speak often of little Edith, and the other little girl was not mentioned. Ida said it was better for us
not to share Edith’s flowers on her April birthday with the other graves, with the Lady, and with Alice. We felt somehow that this was not right, but there were things we did not understand.

  We had spread Edith’s pansies equally on Alice’s twin grave and then borrowed from both of them for the Lady who was not our mother but the mother of the two (to us) grown men, our brothers, who were finishing their work at the university across the river; their names were Eric and Alfred. But Ida said the flowers were meant for Edith and “your mama would feel hurt.” We did not follow this, but had been sent with the basket of pansies and pink-and-white button-daisies for Edith’s grave, so we collected the pansies and daisies from the flat tops of the other graves and gave them back to Edith. And then there was Fanny, difficult to find in the crowded plot where Mamalie’s and Aunt Agnes’ other children were. There was Elizabeth Caroline for instance, who had been Aunt Agnes’ and Uncle Will’s first baby. But Fanny, among them all, had become a myth; she was a family by-word. “Why so sad, Helen?” Mamalie might say. Then Mama would answer, perhaps too suddenly, too swiftly, forcing the expected “Mimmie, of course, you know why. I’m crying because Fanny died.” And they would both laugh.

  I seemed to have inherited that. I was the inheritor. The boys, of whom there were so many—the two brothers and later the baby-brother, the two half-brothers, the five grown Howard cousins, not to mention the small-fry, Tootie, Dick and Laddie (who lived with their parents, our Uncle Hartley and Aunt Belle in the house next to ours, on Church Street)—could not really care about Fanny; little Hartley had cried only because his tiny older sister was crying. I cared about Fanny. And she died. I inherited Fanny from Mama, from Mamalie, if you will, but I inherited Fanny. Was I indeed, Frances come back? Then I would be Papalie’s own child, for Papalie’s name was Francis; I would be like Mama; in a sense, I would be Mama, I would have important sisters, and brothers only as seemly ballast. Why was it always a girl who had died? Why did Alice die and not Alfred? Why did Edith die and not Gilbert? I did not cry because Fanny died, but I had inherited Fanny. Mama cried (although I had seldom seen her cry) because Fanny died, so Mama had cried. I did not cry. The crying was frozen in me, but it was my own, it was my own crying. There was Alice—my own half-sister, Edith—my own sister, and I was the third of this trio, these three Fates, or maybe Fanny was the third. The gift was there, but the expression of the gift was somewhere else.