My parents played the Cole Porter song “It’s All Right with Me.” When Ella Fitzgerald sang, “There’s someone I’m trying so hard to forget—don’t you want to forget someone too?,” these facile, breathy lyrics struck me as an unexpectedly true expression of how it felt to be alive. This was experience at its most private and inarticulate: longing and loss. “It’s the wrong time, it’s the wrong place, though your face is charming, it’s the wrong face.” I was a thirteen-year-old child; I had no one to miss, had lost no one. Yet I suspect most children feel this way, probably all children feel this way, as adults do; they mourn this absence or loss of someone, and sense that unnamable loss as a hole or hollow moving beside them in the air.
Loss came around with the seasons, blew into the house when you opened the windows, piled up in the bottom desk and dresser drawers, accumulated in the back of closets, heaped in the basement starting by the furnace, and came creeping up the basement stairs. Loss grew as you did, without your consent; your losses mounted beside you like earthworm castings. No willpower could prevent someone’s dying. And no willpower could restore someone dead, breathe life into that frame and set it going again in the room with you to meet your eyes. That was the fact of it. The strongest men and women who had ever lived had presumably tried to resist their own deaths, and now they were dead. It was on this fact that all the stirring biographies coincided, concurred, and culminated.
Time itself bent you and cracked you on its wheel. We were getting ready to move again. I knew I could not forever keep riding my bike backward into ever-older neighborhoods to look the ever-older houses in the face. I tried to memorize the layout of this Richland Lane house, but I couldn’t force it into my mind while it was still in my bones.
I saw already that I could not in good faith renew the increasingly desperate series of vows by which I had always tried to direct my life. I had vowed to love an older boy forever; now I could recall neither his face nor my feeling, but only this quondam urgent vow. I had vowed to keep exploring Pittsburgh by bicycle no matter how old I got, and planned an especially sweeping tour for my hundredth birthday in 2045. I had vowed to keep hating Amy in order to defy Mother, who kept prophesying I would someday not hate Amy. In short, I always vowed, one way or another, not to change. Not me. I needed the fierceness of vowing because I could scarcely help but notice, visiting the hatchling robins at school every day, that it was mighty unlikely.
As a life’s work, I would remember everything—everything, against loss. I would go through life like a plankton net. I would trap and keep every teacher’s funny remark, every face on the street, every microscopic alga’s sway, every conversation, configuration of leaves, every dream, and every scrap of overhead cloud. Who would remember Molly’s infancy if not me? (Unaccountably, I thought that only I had noticed—not Molly, but time itself. No one else, at least, seemed bugged by it. Children may believe that they alone have interior lives.)
Some days I felt an urgent responsibility to each change of light outside the sunporch windows. Who would remember any of it, any of this our time, and the wind thrashing the buckeye limbs outside? Somebody had to do it, somebody had to hang on to the days with teeth and fists, or the whole show had been in vain. That it was impossible never entered my reckoning. For work, for a task, I had never heard the word.
SINCE WE HAD MOVED, MY reading had taken a new turn.
Books wandered in and out of my hands, as they had always done, but now most of them had a common theme. This new theme was the source of imagination at its most private—never mentioned, rarely even brought to consciousness. It was, essentially, a time, and a series of places, to which I returned nightly. So also must thousands, or millions, of us who grew up in the 1950s, reading what came to hand. What came to hand in those years were books about the past war: the war in England, France, Belgium, Norway, Italy, Greece; the war in Africa; the war in the Pacific, in Guam, New Guinea, the Philippines; the war, Adolf Hitler, and the camps.
We read Leon Uris’s popular novels Exodus and, better, Mila 18, about the Warsaw ghetto. We read Hersey’s The Wall—again, the Warsaw ghetto. We read Time magazine, and Life, and Look. It was in the air, that there had been these things. We read, above all, and over and over, for we were young, Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl. This was where we belonged; here we were at home.
I say “we,” but in fact I did not know anyone else who read these things. Perhaps my parents did, for they brought the books home. What were my friends reading? We did not then talk about books; our reading was private, and constant, like the interior life itself. Still, I say, there must have been millions of us. The theaters of war—the lands, the multiple seas, the very corridors of air—and the death camps in Europe, with their lines of starved bald people…these, combined, were the settings in which our imaginations were first deeply stirred.
Earlier generations of children, European children, I inferred, had had on their minds heraldry and costumed adventure. They read The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers. They read about King Arthur and Lancelot and Galahad; they read about Robin Hood. I had read some of these things and considered them behind me. It would have been pleasant, I suppose, to close your eyes and imagine yourself in a suit of armor, astride an armored horse, fighting a battle for honor with broadswords on a pennanted plain, or in a copse of trees.
But of what value was honor when, in book after book, the highest prize was a piece of bread? Of what use was a broadsword, or even a longbow, against Hitler’s armies that occupied Europe, against Hitler’s Luftwaffe, Hitler’s Panzers, Hitler’s U-boats, or against Hitler’s S.S., who banged on the door and led Anne Frank and her family away? We closed our eyes and imagined how we would survive the death camps—maybe with honor and maybe not. We imagined how we would escape the death camps, imagined how we would liberate the death camps. How? We fancied and schemed, but we had read too much, and knew there was no possible way. This was a novel concept: Can’t do. We were in for the duration. We closed our eyes and waited for the Allies, but the Allies were detained.
Now and over the next few years, the books appeared and we read them. We read The Bridge Over the River Kwai, The Young Lions. In the background sang a chorus of smarmy librarians:
The world of books is a child’s
Land of enchantment.
When you open a book and start reading
You enter another world—the world
Of make-believe—where anything can happen.
We read Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, and To Hell and Back. We read The Naked and the Dead; Run Silent, Run Deep; and Tales of the South Pacific, in which American sailors saw native victims of elephantiasis pushing their own enlarged testicles before them in wheelbarrows. We read The Caine Mutiny, Some Came Running.
I was a skilled bombardier. I could run a submarine with one hand, and evade torpedoes, depth charges, and mines. I could disembowel a soldier with a bayonet, survive under a tarp in a lifeboat, and parachute behind enemy lines. I could contact the Resistance with my high-school French and eavesdrop on the Germans with my high-school German:
“Du! Kleines Mädchen! Bist du französisches Mädchen oder bist du Amerikanischer spy?”
“Je suis une jeune fille de la belle France, Herr S.S. Officer.”
“Prove it!”
“Je suis, tu es, il est, nous sommes, vous êtes, ils sont.”
“Very gut. Run along and play.”
What were librarians reading these days? One librarian pressed on me a copy of Look Homeward, Angel. “How I envy you,” she said, “having a chance to read this for the very first time.” But it was too late, several years too late.
At last Hitler fell, and scientists working during the war came up with the atomic bomb. We read On the Beach, A Canticle for Leibowitz; we read Hiroshima. Reading about the bomb was a part of reading about the war: these were actual things and events, large in their effects on millions of people, vivid in their nearness to each man’s or wo
man’s death. It was a relief to turn from life to something important.
At school we had air-raid drills. We took the drills seriously; surely Pittsburgh, which had the nation’s steel, coke, and aluminum, would be the enemy’s first target.
I knew that during the war, our father had “watched the skies.” We all knew that people still watched the skies. But when the keen-eyed watcher spotted the enemy bomber over Pittsburgh, what, precisely, would be his moves? Surely he could only calculate, just as we in school did, what good it would do him to get under something.
When the air-raid siren sounded, our teachers stopped talking and led us to the school basement. There the gym teachers lined us up against the cement walls and steel lockers, and showed us how to lean in and fold our arms over our heads. Our small school ran from kindergarten through twelfth grade. We had air-raid drills in small batches, four or five grades together, because there was no room for us all against the walls. The teachers had to stand in the middle of the basement rooms: those bright Pittsburgh women who taught Latin, science, and art, and those educated, beautifully mannered European women who taught French, history, and German, who had landed in Pittsburgh at the end of their respective flights from Hitler, and who had baffled us by their common insistence on tidiness, above all, in our written work.
The teachers stood in the middle of the room, not talking to each other. We tucked against the walls and lockers: dozens of clean girls wearing green jumpers, green knee socks, and pinksoled white bucks. We folded our skinny arms over our heads, and raised to the enemy a clatter of gold scarab bracelets and gold bangle bracelets.
If the bomb actually came, should we not let the little kids—the kindergartners like Molly, and the first and second graders—go against the wall? We older ones would stand in the middle with the teachers. The European teachers were almost used to this sort of thing. We would help them keep spirits up; we would sing “Frère Jacques,” or play Buzz.
Our house was stone. In the basement was a room furnished with a long wooden bar, tables and chairs, a leather couch, a refrigerator, a sink, an ice maker, a fireplace, a piano, a record player, and a set of drums. After the bomb, we would live, in the manner of Anne Frank and her family, in this basement. It had also a larger set of underground rooms, which held a washer and a dryer, a workbench, and, especially, food: shelves of canned fruits and vegetables, and a chest freezer. Our family could live in the basement for many years, until the radiation outside blew away. Amy and Molly would grow up there. I would teach them all I knew, and entertain them on the piano. Father would build a radiation barrier for the basement’s sunken windows. He would teach me to play the drums. Mother would feed us and tend to us. We would grow close.
I had spent the equivalent of years of my life, I fancied, in concentration camps, in ghettos, in prison camps, and in lifeboats. I knew how to ration food and water. We would each have four ounces of food a day and eight ounces of water, or maybe only four ounces of water. I knew how to stretch my rations by hoarding food in my shirt, by chewing slowly, by sloshing water around in my mouth and wetting my tongue well before I swallowed. If the water gave out in the taps, we could drink club soda or tonic. We could live on the juice in canned food. I figured the five of us could live many years on the food in the basement—but I was not sure.
One day I asked Mother: How long could we last on the food in the basement? She did not know what I had been reading. How could she have known?
“The food in the basement? In the freezer and on the shelves? Oh, about a week and a half. Two weeks.”
She knew, as I knew, that there were legs of lamb in the freezer, turkeys, chickens, pork roasts, shrimp, and steaks. There were pounds of frozen vegetables, quarts of ice cream, dozens of Popsicles. By her reckoning, that wasn’t many family dinners: a leg of lamb one night, rice, and vegetables; steak the next night, potatoes, and vegetables.
“Two weeks! We could live much longer than two weeks!”
“There’s really not very much food down there. About two weeks’ worth.”
I let it go. What did I know about feeding a family? On the other hand, I considered that if it came down to it, I would have to take charge.
It was clear that adults, including our parents, approved of children who read books, but it was not at all clear why this was so. Our reading was subversive, and we knew it. Did they think we read to improve our vocabularies? Did they want us to read and not pay the least bit of heed to what we read, as they wanted us to go to Sunday school and ignore what we heard?
I was now believing books more than I believed what I saw and heard. I was reading books about the actual, historical, moral world—in which somehow I felt I was not living.
The French and Indian War had been, for me, a purely literary event. Skilled men in books could survive it. Those who died, an arrow through the heart, thrilled me by their last words. This recent war’s survivors, some still shaking, some still in mourning, taught in our classrooms. “Wir waren ausgebombt,” one dear old white-haired Polish lady related in German class, her family was “bombed out,” and we laughed, we smart girls, because this was our slang for “drunk.” Those who died in this war’s books died whether they were skilled or not. Bombs fell on their cities or ships, or they starved in the camps or were gassed or shot, or they stepped on land mines and died surprised, trying to push their intestines back in their abdomens with their fingers and thumbs.
What I sought in books was imagination. It was depth, depth of thought and feeling; some sort of extreme of subject matter; some nearness to death; some call to courage. I myself was getting wild; I wanted wildness, originality, genius, rapture, hope. I wanted strength, not tea parties. What I sought in books was a world whose surfaces, whose people and events and days lived, actually matched the exaltation of the interior life. There you could live.
Those of us who read carried around with us like martyrs a secret knowledge, a secret joy, and a secret hope: There is a life worth living where history is still taking place; there are ideas worth dying for, and circumstances where courage is still prized. This life could be found and joined, like the Resistance. I kept this exhilarating faith alive in myself, concealed under my uniform shirt like an oblate’s ribbon; I would not be parted from it.
We who had grown up in the Warsaw ghetto, who had seen all our families gassed in the death chambers, who had shipped before the mast, and hunted sperm whale in Antarctic seas; we who had marched from Moscow to Poland and lost our legs to the cold; we who knew by heart every snag and sandbar on the Mississippi River south of Cairo, and knew by heart Morse code, forty parables and psalms, and lots of Shakespeare; we who had battled Hitler and Hirohito in the North Atlantic, in North Africa, in New Guinea and Burma and Guam, in the air over London, in the Greek and Italian hills; we who had learned to man minesweepers before we learned to walk in high heels—were we going to marry Holden Caulfield’s roommate, and buy a house in Point Breeze, and send our children to dancing school?
THE BOYS WERE CHANGING. Those froggy little beasts had elongated and transformed into princes and gods. When it happened, I must have been out of the room. Suddenly here they all were, Richie and Rickie and Dan and all, diverse in their varied splendors, each powerful and mysterious, immense, and possessed of an inexplicable knowledge of arcana.
The boys wandered the neighborhoods now, and showed up at girls’ houses, as if by accident. They would let us listen to them talk, and we heard them mention the state legislature, say, or some opinion of Cicero’s, or the Battle of the Marne—and those things abruptly became possible topics in society because those magnificent boys had pronounced their names.
Where had they learned all this, or more pertinently, why had they remembered it? We girls knew precisely the limits of the possible and the thinkable, we thought, and were permanently astonished to learn that we were wrong. Whose idea of sophistication was it, after all, to pay attention in Latin class? It was the boys’ idea. Everything was. Everyt
hing they thought of was bold and original like that.
Each year as we rose through the grades, dancing school met an hour later, until one year it vanished into the darkness, and was replaced by, or transmogrified into, another institution altogether, that of country-club subscription dances.
The engraved invitation came in the mail: The Sewickley Country Club was hosting a subscription dinner dance several weeks thence.
We showed up at our own country club in pale spaghetti-strap dresses and silk shoes, to board a yellow bus in the snow. There we all were: the same boys, the same girls. How did they know? I wondered which of those remote country-club powers, those white-haired sincere men, those golden-haired, long-toothed, ironic women, had met on what firm cloud over western Pennsylvania to apportion and schedule these events among the scattered country clubs, and had pored over what unthinkable list of schoolchildren to discuss which schoolchildren should be asked to these dances they held for what reason. If you were part Jewish, would they find you out, like Hitler? How small a part could they detect?
We dined that night in faraway Sewickley, at long linen-covered tables marked by place cards. During dessert the band straggled in and set up by the freezing French doors to the terrace. The band struck up, not surprisingly, “Mountain Greenery.” This frenzied sequence of notes had been our cue, conditioned since we were ten. We danced.
Here was a light-shouldered boy who could jitterbug, old style, and would; he was more precious than gold, yea, than much fine gold. We jitterbugged. It was an exultant and concentrated collaboration, such as aerialists enjoy—and I hope they enjoy it—when they catch each other twirling in midair. Only the strength in our fingertips kept us alive. If they weakened or slipped, his fingertips or mine, we’d fall spinning backward across the length of the room and out through the glass French doors to the snowy terrace, and if we were any good we’d make sure we fell on the downbeat, snow or no snow. For this was rock and roll. We danced in front of the band; I wished the music were louder.
An Annie Dillard Reader Page 21