IN a top floor apartment thousands of miles from here, put away out of the light, there is a small collection of yellow postcards, textured like linen in another generation, each of them turning up the same picture, in black and yellow, of a particular hotel in Pittsburgh, and I think of them as mine. Judging from the autos by the curb, the photograph must have been taken shortly after I was born. As far as I know, I have never stayed in that building. There are no x’s marking windows on any of the cards; nothing is written on any of the backs where it says “Message” and “Address.” The cards are indistinguishable from each other, as though they were new, which in a sense they are. One could say that they have not been used, except that my keeping them has been a use, as I see, and one that has grown without my being aware of it, or trying to imagine its beginning or its end.
For seven years, at least, whenever I have found the cards again—usually as I have been packing to leave, or have just come back and have been looking for something else—they have surfaced apparently unchanged. But each time another interval has ended; I have gone and returned. At the sight of the cards it seems to me that I have done neither, yet my hands holding them again have altered; I am wearing different clothes and supposing some later thing. And I have put them away once more, imagining that I am saving them for another use still to come.
I do not remember now just how I acquired them, and yet I can recall some of the pleasure of it. I know I must have discovered them at about the time of the last, or what I took to be the last, of a series of meetings and partings at the building in the center of the photograph: crossings that marked a sequence which I had come to think of as having a peculiar, as yet indecipherable, significance for me. Coincidental, like the later recurrences of those cards blank on the other side.
It may be that I picked them up first, in surprise, from the dark varnished counter in the lobby of the building in the picture, at some time during the weeks following my father’s death. I had occasion to go into that building from time to time, during that indeterminate period, that season, in which many daily occurrences—bare of habit, and taking place in my parents’ city, which had never been mine—reached me as moments unaccountably remembered, drifting in lighted water, voices in public rooms. A small flood of objects claiming to evoke and preserve fragments of incidents, and around them a whole past that I could not recognize, came into my keeping then, in ways that I immediately forgot.
But by the year my father died I would not have recognized the lobby. Size, shape, light, color, detail—it retained no clear resemblance to what I recalled at the thought of it, no familiar signal of descent from the long, high, sumptuous, green-and-red carpeted, sunbeamed hall, part throne room and part railroad depot, through which I believed I had walked, more than three decades before, as a child. After so long, I had wondered, when I heard the name, and the wonder recurred when I stood again in front of the many-layered facade and it looked unknowable, but there it was. I had kept learning, for years, how much had gone. I had come to believe that the lapse of known faces was definitive. Hearing the name—that echo—and finding myself standing in front of the structure it referred to, were like being remembered, myself, by someone whose face had changed. The glass doors—heavy, glittering panes set in oak—surely they had not been there in that other age. But it had always been summer then, and they would have been held open.
And going in, passing in, conscious of re-entering a place that had been momentous to me, however briefly, in the far past, and once inside seeing nothing, after all, that I seemed to know, I was aware of a single cool, passing breath, certainly, but then the unfamiliarity that met my eyes wherever I turned appeared to be the most natural phenomenon possible, the very thing that I would have expected, altogether consistent with my growing up. The true and characteristic resemblance.
It occurred to me even so—but I was reluctant to ask about it—that the lobby by that time might have been redecorated, buried, perhaps more than once. It was conceivable that the dining room had been radically expanded, or had been built there as a completely new growth, in the execution of an updated business policy. And that the present entrance, through which I had just passed, might not be the way into the old main lobby at all, but to an annex. Or that if it really were the main entrance now, it had been moved as part of a young-blood plan to attract later and different strangers. I realized then that no one in the room would have known anything of the room’s history, if I had been so literal as to raise the matter, and that in any case I would not have known what to ask. Except whether it was the same, and I already had the answers to that.
But it seems just as likely that I first came upon the cards in one of my father’s overflowing caches of paper clips, gummed labels, key chains, emery boards, typewriter erasers, shards of art gum, dry pens advertising funeral parlors in Kittanning, innards of mechanical pencils, keys, amber rolls of scotch tape, miniature paper rulers measuring the names of defunct banks in Weehawken, magnifying glasses, buttons, white plastic letter openers in the shape of files of elephants crossing bridges, hotel stationery, post cards showing airplanes motionless in blue, and vistas of broad empty dining rooms—relics, these last, of the restless, vague, distracted trips of the final two decades of his life, when the endowment policies were maturing. (At the age when I first remember seeing that lobby, he had already spoken to me in praise of endowment policies.) Weeks, months, after he had come back from one of those perennially odd, often impromptu sorties to Cuba, Brazil, the Holy Land, or Hong Kong, he might be found in mid-afternoon, supposedly en route to somewhere or from somewhere in the vicinity; he would be sitting in the living room, without apparent intent, in the green soft chair that had been part of the good or (more rarely) parlor furniture for thirty years, with his gabardine topcoat buttoned, and his hat on, staring across the room at an upper corner. The stare, like the shuffled post-cards, had something to do with his travels and their random nature, but the connection, in both cases, consistently eluded words.
The past itself, the past of others, of places, of his family, most of his own past, seemed to hold no more than a wan, flickering interest for him, apart from a thin collection of dependable references treasured as proofs and names of feelings that he wanted to believe still existed and were his. All his life he used the word “souvenir” as a joke, yet all his life he had been an idle gatherer and string-saver, a harborer of whatever was going free. Periodically, by way of unconsidered justification, he would say of some used trouvaille of his that somebody—often some little child—would be glad to have it, with the implication that he was saving it until he found that person; and sometimes, unpredictably, he did. His worn sympathy for the figure of Ruth, in the Old Testament, never allowed those to whom he spoke of her to forget that she had been a gleaner in the fields. He lingered over the pronunciation of the word “gleaner” with his own illumination. He explained its meaning, for those born too late to have beheld the laudable practice at first hand. My sister was named Ruth.
When, in the years just after the second World War, during a leave from the Presbyterian ministry, he had worked for a large charitable organization concerned with child welfare, one of the activities for which he became known was the setting up and conducting of regional drives to collect used clothing. In those campaigns, as they were called, he was said to have worked as one inspired: his teams collected quantities that broke records. But certain of his superiors criticized his spending so much of his time in the actual collection centers, examining the garments and helping to sort them. More frequently as he grew older he would emerge from his study when other members of the family, and visitors, were sitting talking, and offer someone—child or not—a mechanical pencil, a set of blotters, a comb or a key-ring, out of one of his treasures. He would call it a surprise, and it often happened that the person toward whom he held the thing stared at it with widening unrecognition, and partook of his bewilderment without realizing it. A favorite grandchild said of him, in wonder, that he would give you anything he didn’t want. After he died, I—first with my mother, and then alone—entered the sanctuary in his absence, which was his presence as well. When his desk drawers were pulled open and the lidless spilling boxes of relics were laid bare to anyone, there was still some of the power and smell of idols loitering there, which he had fed into them for years as a reserve of hope. And if I discovered the cards there, I must have drawn them out of that context at once, in a sudden satisfied access of legitimacy, feeling that I had come upon something of my own.
And yet he had known that building—both of my parents had—much better than I could claim to, more intimately and exactly, more practically, and for much longer. They had it in mind like a street, well before that picture was developed, and long before I was conceived. They must have taken it for granted, as one of the unremarkable details of the ordinary world, something natural, before they were married, before they ever met, in the years when they were growing up near to, but unseen by, each other. No doubt each of them knew the name before knowing what it referred to; I could hear something of that in the sound of it as it came down to me from them. The hotel was a point of allusion and importance, a local personage around whom odds and ends of information and experience continually crystalized. My parents never told me what occasions of their own lives, if any, may have been associated with it, and I have no way of guessing what it represented to either of them except some bone of the general past, that past which showed many of the same features to them both, yet appeared to each of them so differently. Certainly they never saw that structure, in all those years, as significant.
Partly because of that, because of its local, contemporary familiarity to them, I cannot be sure that the first time I remember coming to the place was really the first time I saw it. But it was new to me, that time. When I heard where we were going, it was a shape about to appear at last out of its name. My parents alluded to it on the way, with a certainty that both contained and excluded me, as they did in mentioning friends or relatives whom I could not recall ever having met. They were not concerned with explaining, and it was true that the name already seemed old to me too, something that was recurring from a shadowy former age. I was nine. The journey to the hotel was charged with anticipation. It was a bright, hot summer day. We were all dressed for Sunday, which made the streets seem farther away. We would have been dressed like that whether it was Sunday or not. My mother’s cousin Margie was living at the hotel.
My mother had been left an orphan when she was a small child. An Orphan. I knew the fact as I knew our telephone number, but when she said it to someone (in such a way as to make it plain that the subject was one she did not care to pursue) the word always seemed to me famous and empty: public, self-conscious, odd. She set it forth without coloring, certainly, but with a renewed deliberateness. The shock that it conveyed each time was still most profoundly her own. She said she had no family. Not even any first cousins, or none that she knew of. Only what she referred to without names or intimacy as distant relatives. Few emerged from that category as people. Aunt Betty, in Ridgewood: a cousin. My mother’s great uncle Hess and his daughter Minerva, somewhere in southern Ohio. Her cousin Florence, and Aunt Julia, in Cincinnati. And, in a place of particular honor, her cousin—really her mother’s first cousin, Margie.
Almost all that I know about my Aunt Margie I heard from my mother, and a great deal even of what I remember of her is my mother’s projection. Margie, for my mother, was one of the last peaks of Atlantis. She represented family not only in the sense of blood tie and continuity, but in that of shared assumptions, attitudes, conduct, gesture. Margie was perhaps twenty years—a whole generation—older than my mother, but I cannot be sure. It is possible that I do not have a record anywhere of when she was born, or where. She was, as my mother said of her with evident approval, extremely reserved. It was one of the first elements of Margie’s imposing character that my mother mentioned in telling about her, and when she spoke of it my mother was invoking something in Margie that she recognized and depended on in herself. Though she would have made no such claim, it is possible that she felt this reserve of Margie’s to be a distinction that ran in the—all but vanished—family. Margie’s existence confirmed her own.
Anyway, a lady’s age was nobody’s business. To maintain as much was to keep faith with a lost world that was still, for my mother, a private source of strength, judgment and some abiding dream of safety, and this may have been true of Margie as well. I was told from the start that Margie was a beautiful woman and always had been (“her bone structure and her carriage”) and in time I realized that both she and my mother had been beautiful, but common physical vanity was not the guiding principle that consistently led my mother to refuse, lightly but in earnest, to tell anyone the year of her own birth. The secret—the eccentricity—became a piece of family patter. When the census taker came around, in 1940, and laid out his papers on the dining room table, she sent me out before she would divulge what she referred to with a laugh—as though they laid bare an unavoidable impropriety—as her vital statistics. She smiled at her own obstinacy, and called it a woman’s privilege, but I was no longer a child when I knew that she was two years younger than my father, and the plain fact seemed to have given up a ghost. I think it likely that Margie cherished the same form of reticence as a kind of birthright.
My mother, all her life, hated being photographed. I do not know that Margie shared the aversion, though it is hard to imagine her posing obediently for her picture. If she had done so for a snapshot, the likeness would have had the mien of a daguerrotype; but I have never seen a photograph of her. Both she and my mother left succinct instructions for the disposal of their bodies after death. Both arranged to be cremated. Margie requested that her body, until time for its cremation, should be laid out and covered with a sheet. “Nobody,” the words say, “to see my face.”
They corresponded—and called it that. As long as Margie lived they wrote to each other regularly, almost every week. If my mother had not heard from Margie for ten days or more, she would mention it to my father, often at a meal, expressing concern. Sometimes he would not be listening. It would not have occurred to any of them, in those years, to telephone to each other. Because of the expense, certainly. My father and some of the trustees of his church, who had held their offices since long before he came as their minister, were engaged in a feud, and they repeatedly delayed payment of his small salary. My mother rehearsed, in moments of exasperation, how little she had to get by on for food shopping, every week. We knew it had been years since she had had any new clothes. A long distance call, clear across the state, would have seemed a sinful waste, like taking a taxi. (I remember being driven in a taxi only once, when I was a child. My mother, my sister, and I came home all the way across Scranton. It cost thirty-five cents, and I do not know now and did not know then the real reason for the unexampled indulgence. It was late on a cold afternoon and snow was beginning to fall, but none of that in itself would have brought about the decision, and I imagine that it represented, in someone who kept neat accounts of every penny she spent, a passing crisis, a sudden rebellion.) Emergencies were announced by telegram. Still, the mention of the expense would have been merely an explanation, a rationalization of a way of living in which long distance telephone calls had no place. As letters did, sometimes coming unexpectedly from old friends who had been silent for years. My mother left letters open for my father to read, or she read out passages to him. She kept lists—continually revised—of birthdays and anniversaries, and sent cards with letters tucked into them. But the regulars were few. The letter knife on my mother’s secretary-desk, a page-cutter from the age of uncut books, bore a motto embossed on its blade: “Books, like friends, should be few and well chosen.” And the correspondence with Margie had a life of its own. It is hard to imagine what they wrote about at such length and with such regularity. Their lives were not obviously rich in event, and neither of them was given to analysis, description, speculation, or fancy. There was not even much to gossip about. My mother relentlessly reviewed the church activities and recounted the children’s latest. She and Margie read some of the same books and magazines and doubtless commented on those. They exchanged news of their handful of mutual acquaintances. But the rest remains a mystery, which doubtless is how both of them wanted it to be left. It would have been in character for them to destroy each other’s letters, or most of them, after they had read them a few times and answered them. When my mother died there were not many letters from anyone among her possessions, and from all those decades of hearing from Margie, only the final pencilled notes and instructions, and the news of her death, of kidney cancer, in St. Petersburg, Florida, where she had spent her last years.
My mother was alone when Margie died, in May 1946, just after the end of the second World War. My father had enlisted as a chaplain in the army and was stationed in England with the 112th Field Hospital unit. When he announced to the church that he intended to join the Chaplains’ Corps, and during the first months after he put on the uniform and left for training, it was generally agreed that the absence was temporary, that the church would wait and he would come back to it. But probably nobody except the very old and the very young really believed that. How could the church wait? And he had not long been in uniform, and was still coming home regularly on furloughs, when we moved from the old frame twelve-room manse across from the church on Washburn Street, in the part of West Scranton grandly but incongruously referred to as Hyde Park. The manse was sold. I was away at school when the move took place to the other side of town, into an apartment on Madison Avenue, a block from the YWCA, where my mother had taken a job. After the wooden steps, the porches, the echoes, the rattling windows, the attic and cellar, and the high rooms each with its air and time, I came home on weekends to the smell of the respectable small apartment building, pink stucco trowelled into galactic patterns in the halls, imitation red brick linoleum on the stairs, metal casement windows with frosted panes, and the well known furniture crammed into four rooms, or five—and it seemed natural, a proof of growing up, a move into the real world, and without questioning or liking it, I was proud of it. Back from college at holidays, I came up the stairs with a suitcase of dirty clothes, wearing a teal blue overcoat I had earned the money to buy at Samter’s, and imagining that I was a man.
That apartment was never thought of as permanent. My parents clearly planned to have a house again, after the war. The closets of those small rooms were piled with packed rows of bundles, and the storage space in the basement was stuffed. Eventually we moved to a much larger, lighter apartment on the other side of Madison Avenue, where there were rooms for each of us, and places for all the surviving furniture. That move too happened while I was away, and I was led in as a stranger to find the known objects already in their new places, apparently intact but perceptibly removed. The new apartment was at the top of a broad resounding wooden stairwell. There was a large screened front porch over the street, which was never used because my mother said it could not be kept clean. Inside that was the living room, with the good furniture from the almost never used front room at the manse. My mother would set her hat, with its short veil, on the back of the sofa, temporarily, when she came in, before bearing it to its place in its closet. My sister came home many weekends, taking the Luzerne Valley Line to the station a few blocks away, or getting a ride with friends, but through the week my mother returned after work to an empty apartment. She made close friends at the Y, who obviously were fond of her company, but often she came up and made lunch by herself, in her own kitchen. She said nothing about being lonely. Her secretary-desk was in the front room, as it had been at the manse, and it was there that she opened her mail—standing, sometimes with her hat still on—and answered Margie’s lawyer when the news came that Margie had died.
Whatever grief she felt then, whatever loss by impoverishment, diminishment, disorientation, she kept to herself. After her childhood, death neither surprised nor frightened her, and it would have been unlike her—she would have thought it excessive and dramatic—to recognize in Margie’s death the seal at the end of a phase in her life and ours, which it was. She had not been wholly unprepared for the news: Margie had been what they called well along, and her health had been failing. There had been an operation. On May 10, Margie had sent the first note about her illness, from the hospital in St. Petersburg. When the correspondence had been in full health, she and my mother had made each other presents of stationery, and partly because of the resemblance of paper and envelopes, their handwriting looked more similar to me, when I was a child, than it really was. But Margie’s last notes were crowded, edge to edge, across small pieces of cheap paper, and her handwriting had stiffened and regressed.
“Dear Ann,
Just what I am in for I don’t know. Have felt very ill for some weeks and now to-day I have landed in Mound Park Hospital. Have had Xray and tests and they do not seem to know what to think about the trouble in the lower right side with such great pain.
Did so hate to come to a hospital but just could not do anything else for myself. Seems very good so far. Two of us in a nice room. The fun has not started yet—hope it will not be to bad. Wish me luck. Hope all are well.
Love to all
Margie”
Five days later she had written again. My father also was undergoing tests at that moment, in the army hospital at Camp Lee, Virginia, and Margie’s letter began,
“… So sorry for Bill, know what he is going through. They have not found anything so far. Do they put me through!!! Xrays by the 4 or 5s but they have not told much yet. Too much gas to be clear. So nice for you and Bill to have a little trip and I do hope he feels better soon. The pain is just about the same but they have not helped it any at all. Hope they will soon. If I cannot write will get some one to drop you a line if there is any thing to tell…”
Three days later, another note:
“Dear Ann,
One week and one day in Mound Park. Well we do not know what is coming. My first week hospital bill was $114.53 and that not Dr. or Xray I had before I came in and still they seem to know nothing. To-day they have done nothing—I needed one day to catch up without added pain. This is a good hospital and they say the best Drs—it does seem so strange to find nothing …”
And on the 20th she had written to a neighbor who had stayed close to her:
“… If his services are needed, please have Mr. Baynard.
I have been thinking about cremation and that is my wish. Make arrangements as inexpensive as possible. The hospital was so much, total was awful.
Cordially yours
Margaret J Cubbage”
The neighbor had written to my mother that same day to say that an operation was scheduled for the following morning, and that the surgeon said they really did not know what they would find. Margie had died five days later. The immediate cause of her death was surgical shock following the removal of her right kidney.
For my mother, Margie’s death, like her life, had been a link—a last one—with those first lives and deaths that my mother had been born to, but she had no way of saying so, nor any apparent wish to. Except through her puzzlement and vexation at Margie’s will, when its terms were made known to her. Margie had willed all of her material possessions, “All of my worldly effects, real, personal and mixed … unto my cousin, Billy S. Merwin …”—me.
I was startled, as my mother was. I came home from college to learn that the final word about the will had been received from Margie’s lawyer and that my mother had taken care of the necessary paper work, with her characteristic dispatch. There was nothing for me to do. I was referred to throughout the correspondence as Billy.
The rest of Margie’s effects had arrived from Florida, too. They were all contained in one large black and black-green folding steamer trunk, unmistakably a veteran of another generation, a life and a world before mine. I seemed to know it. It was the cousin of trunks that had stood in the attic of the manse, filled with relics that meant things unspoken and unsayable to my parents, who alone were allowed even to go near them, and to open the wailing lids and gaze down into the pools and stand waiting for something, before beginning to peel back the surfaces one by one that were separated from each other only by tissue paper: sharkskin vest, black lace gown trimmed with jet beads, more jet beads, more beads, linen, high boots handed down from someone to be worn once on a night coon-hunt when my parents were young and laughed more, not so long before.
Margie’s trunk did not look mournful to me, whatever I may have expected. Some old, male, benign, button-booted, ruddy-faced friend of hers who wore Panama hats and striped shirts with white collars. Oshkosh Trunk Company it said, on a brass plate on top—a picture of an Indian in leggings, the trade mark, on top of the words. The name too sounded like a family allusion of unremembered origin, a warranty out of some tempered and scarcely current domestic faith. The shipping tags, raw and new, were still dangling from the latches, and there were keys. My mother had already opened the trunk and knew what was in it, besides the clothes, which she had taken out. I did not want those, she told me.
We were standing facing the trunk in the room that was called the little dining room, off the kitchen and the back porch with its gray stilts. The glass-fronted china closet, from the dining room suite, glittered, reflecting the pale curtains. The drop-leaf table was folded back, as it often was, and in its place the ironing board was set up. Margie’s clothes were piled neatly on the dining room chairs, against the wall. Some were already carefully sorted and stacked in brown paper shopping bags. My mother said of the clothes that she was going to get rid of them all, meaning that she was planning to give them to some organization. She was right when she repeated, regularly, that none of us stopped to consider what she might feel. I was not doing so, at that moment, and probably I did not know how to. I was pre-eminently occupied with sex, and my mother knew it, and knew who it was all about just then, and she forbore to comment. Margie’s will, and her trunk standing on several thicknesses of newspaper in the middle of the dusty green imitation Oriental dining room carpet, seemed remote, temporary, improbable. It was not easy, perhaps not possible, for me to give them and the details surounding them what my mother called my full attention. And I was already more advanced than I knew in the habit of not hearing everything my mother said. She knew that too, and she said more than once that she could not conceive what Margie had been thinking of, leaving her clothes to me. Her underclothes. Those folded pieces of loose-knit faded pink jersey that certainly I would never have seen, and would never have wanted to see, in her lifetime. And that she could not understand why Margie had left everything to me in the first place, instead of dividing it equally between my sister and me. My mother had even wondered whether there had been a mistake, but the will was clear. For my part, I found it hard to imagine Margie making her will at all, and thinking of me, or someone who she thought was me. It was hard to believe that the trunk, this grown-up object appearing out of my mother’s absent family, representing a past older than either of my parents, was in fact mine and not one more thing being kept for me. The sense of unlikeliness remained when I took two top corners of the trunk in my hands and, to the accompaniment of my mother’s saying “Just a minute, now, Billy,” and “Be careful,” and of her helping from the side, opened it like a pair of heavy doors.
Margaret J. Cubbage. “Cubbage is an unusual name,” my mother would add comfortably, before someone else did. Margie had never married. My mother had heard it said that there had been an engagement, possibly a secret engagement—they used to do such things—to a young man who had gone away and been killed in the World War. It was not something that Margie had ever referred to. Not the kind of thing she ever would have referred to. She said that she had not married because she had never met a man who did not like coffee, and she would not marry a man who did. My father would laugh happily when that saw was repeated, and confess that he himself loved coffee, strong coffee, percolator coffee. It was a problem finding good coffee when you travelled, and he had even considered taking a percolator with him. Margie, if she was present, would almost certainly be standing, tall and straight (did I make it up, or had I been told, to foster awe, that “she had Indian blood on her side”?) and would stare straight at him with her large, very dark, flashing eyes, as though she were looking down, and perhaps nod. She had taught school most of her life, until her retirement. She would have had no trouble maintaining discipline, in any age. My mother said that Margie had been a fine teacher. Her pupils had been fortunate: she taught them to concentrate.
On the left side of the trunk a tan curtain patterned like old wallpaper hung across the interior. On the right side was a stack of drawers covered with striped Pullman green material. Smell of dust and exhausted lavender, old cotton, and the trunk’s own faint rank green shadowy odor, akin to the odor of a church on a weekday. The worn sides of the drawers stuck. My mother continued to urge me to be careful. Margie’s neighbor, who had written secretly to my mother about Margie’s last operation, had packed Margie’s things into the trunk, though as she said of Margie “She surely had her affairs in order,” and no doubt many of the things had been packed already, when Margie left for the hospital. She may have used the trunk for years, as her chest of drawers, there in Florida where she had no furniture of her own, to speak of. When I was three we had spent one winter in St. Petersburg, for my father’s health, but I could not imagine the room where she had lived there, nor where she had died. I could picture her lying, according to her final instructions, on a table, alone in a bare upper room, covered with a sheet, the windows open toward the sea, the woodwork painted white, and curtains blowing—but I knew it probably had not looked at all like that. When I saw her, in my mind, she was walking slowly with a parasol, under the palm trees on the tinted post cards she had sent to my mother.
The drawers yielded up remnants whose coherence was beyond me, like collections of sea shells. Nothing about them was explained, and they themselves explained nothing. My mother had taken out some of the good things. Some plain silver spoons engraved with the name Cubbage. A small box containing a handful of costume jewelry from the end of the last century and the beginning of this one. She told me that some of those pieces should go to my sister, and they did. Empty wallets. An old empty loose-leaf address book. Things seemed to emerge, as the trunk had done, out of the family itself, and out of some long-worn memory of my own. My mother had retired to the kitchen and stayed there, keeping busy. I called out to her as I found some of the things. A silver watch chain with a silver globe hanging from it. Provenance and history unknown. Some alloy coffee spoons with ecclesiastical figures for handles. They were from Venice, my mother said. Margie had been to Europe. She had used that steamer robe on the voyage. It was a good steamer robe. A wall hanging, appliquéd with Egyptian figures. A notebook containing references to Ibsen: jottings on the plays, and passages copied out in full, one of them asserting the need of protecting ourselves from our friends more carefully than from our enemies. “Margie was fond of Ibsen,” my mother said. “She was a reader.” One by one the objects were doors opening onto nothing. My mother was particularly exercised about the money. She could not imagine what Margie had been thinking of, leaving the whole of that too, to me. And the whole of it, when expenses had been paid—$234 to the hospital, $150 to the funeral home, $70 to the doctor, etc.—came to $1225.65. Margie had had reason to be concerned about hospital bills, and both her attorney and my mother were surprised that there was so little.
“In regard to source of income,” my mother wrote to him, “it is my understanding it was solely her pension, derived from approximately 40 years service. I am somewhat surprised there was no life insurance, in addition to the accident policies. There may be some insurance benefit from the pension fund. It would seem logical that a pension check would have been received to May 25, the date of her death. I am sorry I cannot give you the name of the retirement or pension company from which monthly checks were received.”
But there was nothing more.
At one point Margie had said that she would like to have her ashes scattered from an airplane over Florida, but her will, executed a year before she died, stated that she wanted her remains to be placed in the Cubbage family burial plot in Uniondale Cemetery, Pittsburgh (acquired by one William Cubbage, when it was known as Mount Union Cemetery, in 1863). Two days after Margie’s death, my mother had written to Margie’s neighbor, “The thought of cremation was at first distasteful to me, but when I considered she had requested it for her own good reasons I became reconciled.” In due course she took Margie’s ashes to the cemetery in Pittsburgh and had them buried there. And she put the money into government bonds in her name and mine. I did not need it, for the time being, she said, and she was right.
I had not missed Margie before—that stern, updrawn figure. Her absence struck me for the first time when there was no one anywhere to thank for having thought of me, by herself, and having made me her sole heir, for whatever unknown reasons. The money should not be frittered away, my mother said, thinking, no doubt, not only of me but also of whoever might urge me to drape them in mink. It should be kept for the day when it would provide something I really wanted. So the clothes went their ways, and the rest of the things that had survived the siftings of Margie’s life and death were dispersed, some to be put away once more. What had reminded her of other years and places and people became in turn increasingly distant reminders simply of her—and not even of her but of some figment of her. Mementos. Some were mislaid, or passed into use and were broken or lost. And some stayed with me through more siftings. The money was mentioned less and less often. It became a fact, like something in history: there but not thought of, in a place of its own.
Almost a decade later, after living for five years in Europe, earning little, and that irregularly—but earning it in my own time, tutoring, writing, translating—and with never enough to put anything by, I was in southern France for a few weeks, one July, with a car so old that bets were made about it. That part of the country was still referred to by its inhabitants (and seldom, yet, by the Tourist Bureau) as the Quercy, after a tribe of Gauls whom the Romans called the Cadurcii. It is a region of rivers that flow, for long curving stretches, beneath pale cliffs dropping from upland plateaus. Small, rapid streams such as the Corrèze and the Vézère, flowing through forests, in the northern section. And then broader currents, great shining emanations of the whole terrain—of the caverns underground as well as the hills and pastures and woods under the sky. There are four main rivers: the Dordogne, the Lot, the Tarn, and the Garonne. The Garonne rises in the Spanish Pyrenees, but the sources of the other three are in the highlands of the Massif Central. All four flow westward, and the first three, one by one, join the Garonne, whose estuary enters the Atlantic near Bordeaux.
I was staying in a village on the south shore of the Dordogne, which descends from an extinct volcanic peak, the Puy de Sancy, in the Monts Dore. The pension-hotel had been a castle and an abbey. The walls enveloped an ancient church, with a famous tympanum carved from local marble. Fenelon had lived in the building, and the island just below its windows is called, nowadays, the Isle of Calypso, because it is believed to have been the model for the isle of that name in his novel Télémaque.
It was a rainy summer, and the lush woods near the water hung over the road, green, dark, full of green light and bowing green dusk, with openings framing sights of sloping bright pastures shining from inside themselves, red-brown cows with long horns, grazing belly-deep in grass and wild flowers. Walls of ruined stone buildings loomed through the foliage: remains of shepherds’ huts, vineyard cabanes, pigeon towers, farmhouses, barns. The nearest large city, Limoges, was seventy miles to the north over steep, narrow mountain roads. In the region itself only the few main arteries were paved. Even along the river a dirt and gravel surface wound through water meadows and woods, with holes and washouts in steep places. The hotel put up picnics so that the days were free for exploring.
The old car trundled me through the valley and embodied my own strangeness in that time and country. There were few other cars, and most of them were as old as mine, veterans from the thirties that had spent the war jacked up on blocks in sheep barns and garages in market towns, next to phaetons and carts. When I stopped by fields, under trees, there was no sound of motors anywhere, but only the whisper of the river, rustling of leaves and grass; birds; dogs and cows in the distance. In the afternoons flocks of sheep, and family-sized herds of cows—fours, fives, sixes—took the road in their good time, browsing the rich foliage over the ditches, moved along by children or by old men or women with long sticks. When the rain stopped for over a day there was haying in the meadows: cows with long crocheted face masks to protect them from flies waited, yoked in pairs to two-wheeled blue hay wagons with slanting racks fore and aft, for the load to be built behind them, and they started home as the shadows stretched out across the newly shorn stubble. They had the right of way on the winding roads, which they blocked completely. On the hills the cows leaned into each other, shoulder to shouder. Bunches of hay hung in the trees that bent over the road. Later, when the cows were in their barns being milked, young owls appeared on the shadowy road and stood staring along it, as the nightingales began, late in their season.
The smell of barns drifted even through the market towns that were themselves not much larger than villages, and in the evenings cows swayed through the streets guided by peasants with the same long sticks. Pigs grunted behind arched cellar doors, and were butchered in back alleys, with groups of experts standing around, and the cobbles running blood. The farm dogs appeared to be a random mix, but many of them had one pale and one dark eye. They knew their jobs. They ate soup. The language on the farms was a patois descended from a Languedoc tongue older than the French of Tours and Paris. But the word “peasant,” with its heritage of poverty and of scorn from other classes that still sap and abuse the peasantry, had been relegated, and replaced, in courteous use, by the phrase “country people.” They dominated the fairs as well as the farms. Even in town they sat at table with their berets on and the men held the huge wheels of bread to their chests and cut them with the clasp knives from their pockets, pulling the blades toward them. Bread swelled in the soup, and when they had finished they sluiced out the bowls with wine and drank it off. They were proud of what they called their polyculture: they grew everything, from the corn and wheat and giant forage rutabagas for their animals, to their own black wine and their firewood. Their cash crops were milk and walnuts, wool and lambs, plums, tobacco. The year turned through their harvests. It was common for families to have land scattered here and there—plowland and pasture and woods—and several houses, one of which might be used for drying tobacco and storing corn and potatoes and old furniture. They had survived the German occupation without servility or shame. In the Middle Ages the quality that was said to distinguish the Quercynois was douceur—something more than gentleness and closer to its literal rendering: sweetness.
Across the river, in a village just raised above the valley plain, a gaunt white-bearded Englishman of seventy, who looked as D. H. Lawrence might have looked if he had attained that age, lived in a long old farmhouse that he had bought after some years of managing an estate elsewhere in France, before the war. He had been involved, in his own way, in the English organic farming and gardening movement, and he cultivated his large vegetable garden and his fruit trees with absorbed devotion, as the fulfilment of a faith. He regarded the region as a last promised land, and revered the old ways of the peasants with their soil and their animals, their food, and each other. At the beginning, he said, he had fixed up his house but he had no furniture to put in it, and he mentioned the matter to his neighbors. Soon afterward the town crier, in the village square, after a roll on the drum, had announced that those who had old furniture they didn’t want would do well to bring it out to show to the bearded Englishman; and he had furnished his house that way, for a sum he could afford. Solid pieces carved from walnut and cherry, that had reflected the kitchen fires of generations—some of them fresh from more recent use as rabbit hutches. Now there were two houses in the vicinity that he had agreed to try to sell for their owners.
I went to see them. It seemed far from credible that I could buy—could own—a house in the French countryside, even though the prices then were low. They were very low. Partly, I discovered, because there were empty houses everywhere, in various stages of disrepair, and most of the owners had never thought of selling them and found it hard to believe that anyone from outside the region might want to live in one of those old places. Would I? I was not at all sure, and neither of the ones that the Englishman had to offer presented a temptation. But by the time I had seen them I had begun to play at looking for houses, and I went on playing at it—somebody always knew of another one. It was a pretext for getting to talk with the people and see the villages and the farms and the insides of the buildings. The architecture had changed little, it was said, between the time of the Black Prince and the first World War, and almost nothing had been built since then. Pretending I wanted a house there allowed me to imagine living there, rather than being a tourist, and I had no trouble persuading myself that it was a relatively harmless fantasy. When I was a child I imagined houses, one after the other, in which I lived and had lived in other ages. They were mine, and yet I did not own them. They disappeared, and returned if I remembered them, which seemed as natural as the going and coming of day. Thoreau, in Walden, said of his own imagination that it “carried me so far that I even had the refusal of several farms—the refusal was all I wanted.” And perhaps it was, finally.
The search, and my own more general curiosity, led up out of the valley onto the plateau above it, the causse. The valley life had risen from the deep soil of the river plain and had some of its softness. The soil of the causse, in most places, was a thin layer of red clay, hard, and full of chunks of limestone, over a bed of pure limestone that stretched south some thirty miles to the valley of the Lot, and was the roof of a network of caverns, underground rivers, and tunnels, as intricate as the inside of a loaf of bread. The stone was everywhere, and everything was built of it. Freshly turned up by the plow, it was stained by the rusty shades of the soil. The rain washed it pale gray or yellowish white. Broken, it had the bluish stare of cracked bones in a butcher shop. It weathered to darker grays like long-dead branches, or to a lighter golden gray, and lichens, mosses, ivy grew over it. Walls, and the ruins of walls, knee-high, waist-high, shoulder-high, ran everywhere, embraced the smallest field and pasture, pigrun and patch of garden, skirted huge walnut trees, vanished into oak woods. There were so many stones that what appeared to be buildings in some of the fields turned out to be structures of solid dry masonry, reared in order to get the stones out of the plowland. Some of the barnyards were slabs of solid rock, sloping to pools with a little stagnant water in them where ducks waded. The heat shimmered like the leaves, and the middle of the day resounded with cicadas and the tonkle of distant sheep bells, and smelled of box and hay.
A potholed lane passing under the limbs of two rows of old walnut trees led toward empty sky. On the way, off to the left, across fields, I could make out a few dark red and slate-gray roofs of a hamlet. I stopped before I reached it, pulled the car off the lane and left it in deep grass, by a wall. The hamlet lay along the edge of the causse, overlooking a vast expanse of valley. Hundreds of feet below was the river, and on a hill out in the plain a castle of red stone. Just in front of me, set back from the lane and its walnut trees and tumbled wall, two long stone barns on the break of the slope, each flanked by a small square tower, eclipsed the valley. Beyond them, toward the village, thickets of brambles half again as high as a door almost hid the roofs of a cluster of farm buildings. Last of all I saw, below the lane, the roof of the one that was the house.
Brambles and ivy had grown far up the dark tiles, some of which had fallen away. The side of the building facing uphill toward the lane was invisible, sunk in a dense tangle of brambles and black bryony. A smaller lane led down past it, and from the set of the roof I could see that the house looked out above the tops of unkempt plum and walnut trees to the broad valley spread out like a reflection, below. A dead stick helped part the brambles, some of the stems as thick as a thumb. I pushed through to the door, weathered darker than the gold-gray stone. Beside it an opening in the wall had been bricked up except for a small square through which I peered and saw pieces of fallen wood, a cracked plaster partition, planks of a flight of stairs to a loft, gaps in the floor, and a corner of window opening, under an arch on the far side, where the light came through a quaking curtain of ivy. Making my way back through the brambles, I looked up. Standing in the long dry grass between the barns and the lane was an old man watching me. Straw hat, round lined face, Gaulish moustache, sloped shoulders in a black jacket faded to shadow color, blue shirt open at the collar, baggy gray trousers, a sash like a bandage, an expression neither hostile nor welcoming. The noon sunlight of the causse bleaches the colors from everything, but in my mind he stands out from the surroundings, clear and sharp. He died over a year ago.
He was polite, without giving anything away. He said that he was a neighbor, and that he did not see any harm in looking at the house. He did not volunteer information, but he went on standing there and answered questions while he looked me over. No one had lived in the house for thirty-five years. It had last been used, a while back, for drying tobacco. At one time it had been the village school. That was where he had learned to read and write, in that house. A nun had taught there, a sister. Maybe that was why there were crosses on the ends of the roof, or maybe they were there just because somebody put them there. He had the use of the barns for hay, and for his animals in the winter. The place belonged to a woman who had grown up there and now lived in a small nearby town, with her husband, who was retired.
In the next days, through the haying weather, I came again several times to the wall by the barns, ate lunch under the walnut trees, and floundered through the brambles to the hole in the patch of brickwork. There were birds everywhere: black-capped and white-throated warblers; redstarts, wrens, robins, and swallows; nuthatches; blue, great, long-tailed and coal tits; green woodpeckers, blackbirds, shrikes; nightingales sang close at hand in the middle of the day. I explored elsewhere. I met people who took me to other houses, most of which were beautiful, and I talked with some of the owners, but the game was still a game. The abandoned farmhouse looking out over the valley was the one that kept coming to mind most often, and I thought I should at least see whether I could talk with the owner, if only in the hope of seeing it from inside.
The neighbors’ directions led to another lane off the narrow causse road, and a modernized, stuccoed house surrounded by bits of lawn and ornamental garden. I learned at once, from the trim, energetic, gray-haired woman I had come looking for, that she and her husband the Colonel had lived in the colonies throughout his career, and that since his retirement he had been working as an official, selling tickets at one of the famous caverns where tourists descended in an elevator and stepped into boats for a trip along an underground river. She watched through her smile, but she appeared to accept and approve of my interest in the house, to welcome it, though with a slight surprise. And she told me where to get the key, from a retired railroad employee who lived at the crossroads near the hamlet, and picked the plums in the early summer and gathered the walnuts in the autumn.
He was sitting out on the half-moon stones of his doorstep, a few feet off the road: a short man of wonderful rotundity and labored breath, with a black, patent-leather, visored, railroad employee’s cap on the back of his head. A strawberry nose presiding over his face. Full round lips sunk behind cheeks that almost swelled his eyes shut, so that it was no distance to smile. The last wet half-inch of a home-rolled cigarette moved from his lower lip to his fingers and back again as though it were lit. He heaved himself up, quaking with good will. He said he was in retirement. He laughed at everything either of us said, wheezed amiably, and said he would be happy to accompany me to the house. He settled into the car, for the half mile ride, with visible satisfaction. He held the big key in his fist like a scepter. He talked, pausing only to pull in another breath; his voice was a deep nasal croak. He wanted me to admire the place he was in charge of. He said he grew his potatoes there.
He wanted me to be impressed also with the fact that he did not have the soul of a peasant but was a genuine petit-bourgeois. That was the faith in which he lived and planned to die. He fetched a sickle to hack at the brambles. I had wondered how he could bend over to pick up the walnuts from the grass. I was surprised to see him puff and grunt, but manage to open something of a path through the heavy growth. He had been using a sickle all his life. His accent and his way with it were so rich that I missed half of what he said, and he was hard of hearing, so that despite his talk I learned less than I wanted to.
The inside of the house would not have been alluring, except that it was the inside of that house. Three rooms, each with a fireplace, though only the central one was old and massive, with a huge beam for a mantel. And each room with large, treacherous holes in the floor. There was a tiny window in the main fireplace. He called that room the kitchen. The cooking had been done on the open fire, and the stone arch had once been the place for washing dishes; there was a stone drain at the foot of the wall. From the window opening I looked out through the ivy, and across to the ridge on the far side of the valley, miles away, and down through the walnut leaves to the river.
Parts of the brick and plaster partitions had fallen. I climbed to the loft and skirted more gaps in the floor, fringed with rotted wood. A gable window, and once more the view of the valley and the river. On the basis of what I had learned in recent conversations with owners, most of the beams appeared to be sound. And the walls—stone, two feet thick—seemed solid, as my guide assured me they were. Outside once more, he told me what good potatoes he grew there, and—winking—that there was a fine cellar under the whole house, but too overgrown to get into, at the moment. In the autumn he made eau-de-vie from the plums, he said, and he promised me a drop.
Several days after that visit I went back to see Mme. the Colonel and the Colonel himself, toward the end of an afternoon, and sat on a modern chair and was served home-made ratafia, thick and gold, and store cookies. Yellow panes in the windows colored the light. Orange flowers glowed on the curtains and upholstery. The Colonel was tall, white-haired, soft-voiced, gentle. We talked of the region. I could hear that what they said of it they had said many times before. Perhaps both of them were used to talking to tourists who came to take the boat ride in the caverns. We touched on the salient facts of our lives, reassuring each other cliché by cliché. They insisted that I have more ratafia, more cookies. I supposed that the Colonel would be prudent and cautious, and that she might be tight-fisted, and I saw that it mattered to me, though I still could not imagine that they would sell the house for any sum that I could hope to offer. I had wondered whether she would be willing to sell it separately from the barns, or even apart from all the other buildings, just as it was, but I decided to leave that proposal for later on. They were pleased that I had liked the house upon closer inspection, as though they had made it ready for me. She spoke of the guardian with a shrug of deprecation and a laugh, and of the neighbors with an automatic scorn. They were backward, she said, and it was due to nothing but their own lack of drive. That was the way they were. I asked her at last whether she would consider selling the place. The Colonel turned to her, to make it clear that the decision was entirely up to her.
She said that the house had come to her from her own mother and that she herself had been born there and had grown up there; her eyes filled. But she said she had thought of selling it, for someone to take care of it. Once she had almost sold it to a lady, and then the lady had changed her mind. That had been some years before. She would not sell it to someone who wanted to resell it and make money on it. But she would consider selling it to someone who wanted it to live in. I assured her that I had neither the wish nor the capacity to speculate, and that if the house were to become mine I would hope to live in it. She nodded, inspecting me again, no doubt trying to imagine me living there. I asked her how much she would sell it for. She said she was not interested in making a big profit on it, and that if she sold it, it would be for the same sum she had agreed on with that lady, the other time. She named a figure that I recognized as exactly the amount, in francs, that Margie had left me. We looked at each other for a moment and then shook hands.
Clear enough. In time I came to know the particular ritual and moral importance of the handshake, on the causse. At fairs in the market towns, on cold foggy mornings in late autumn, peasant men in thick corduroys and the wide new-looking berets worn on Sundays and at weddings and funerals, smoke from hand-rolled cigarettes drifting past their creased faces, would clamber over the sides of pens and wade through the gray, heaving, bleating eddies of ewes and lambs—the old caussenard breed, with long legs and Roman noses—clutching at a backbone here and there to judge how dense the meat was along the spine. Bids and rejections would fly back and forth, and at some point in the bargaining one of the participants would try to snatch another’s hand in the course of some emphatic gesture, while the other, if unwilling to conclude the bargain right there, would avoid the grip and fold his hands safely in each other, behind his back. A clasped hand meant a bargain struck firmly and irrevocably, whether the one whose hand was seized meant it to be so or not.
And once Mme. the Colonel and I had agreed on the main concern, she and her husband were at pains to help the details fall into place as comfortably as possible. Of course I would stay to dinner, to celebrate. They led me on a tour of the cement-lined cellar, from which they emerged laden with jars of homemade patés and preserved goose and mushrooms—the big rich cèpes from the chestnut woods—and snails and truffles and bottles of old wine with which to toast every hope awakened by the transfer. The sum she had named was the price for the whole property: the house, the barns, the other outbuildings, the land around them—all of the old farm except its remaining fields and woods and pastures, which were rented out. The conversation moved back and forth from practical plans for concluding the sale, through what I could look forward to in living there, to the vicissitudes of their long career in the colonies. Mme. initiated me into the ways of finding and preparing snails under what she called my own plum trees, and the mysteries of making eau-de-vie and ratafia. She recounted the tropical diseases from which she had suffered, and became eloquent in telling of the worms that had multiplied in her body and travelled through it extensively and succumbed at last only to drastic medical treatment; their bodies were still there. They were dead, but they went on moving through her very slowly, year by year, and she would carry them with her to her grave. “You can feel them yourself,” she told me, and held out her thin ageing arm. “Right here,” she insisted. “Feel.”
Even so, the house was still a long way from belonging to me, or seeming to. Or rather, though the sale went through easily, I remained a long way from having a live sense that the house was mine. That was not just because of the inevitable pendulum swing back and away from the excitement of finding it and the original fantasies of being there, or because I had to leave almost as soon as the first papers were signed, and go back to London to earn a living and some money for basic repairs. Almost from the start the house and the commitments it assumed to France, to rural France, to Europe, began to stir up their opposites in me. I had been away from America for five years and I was homesick. I knew that I did not have enough money to go home and live without forfeiting the self-employed state, the relative independence of the years in Europe. Yet I missed the States, or my own images of the States, in a way that clearly surprised many European friends at the time. I wanted to see what my own country and I had become, since I had left. I resisted the tie to Europe even as I made it and elaborated it. That winter I arranged to have the roof of the house, and the floors, repaired, and a rain water cistern and septic tank built. And the following summer I went back and stayed briefly at a hotel in the valley, visiting the house during the day, to plan the next stage. But I was not caught up, either by the place or the work. It was duty, most of it. Something I had let myself in for. If I had had a chance, during the couple of weeks I was there, to sell the house for what I had put into it, I would have done it, with some regret, but also, I think, with relief: a sense of freedom reclaimed. The next year I did not go there at all. In the spring I was awarded a small fellowship that took me, that summer, to Boston.
The neglected house was not the only unfinished thing in my life that eventually drew me back, reluctantly, and with all the old reservations and misgivings intact, to Europe. It had been almost four years since Mme. the Colonel and I had shaken hands in agreement, when I returned to France, planning to stay in the house until the frost. I had an exhausted closed Bedford delivery van painted dull blue with yellow wheels, a somnolent, sullen hulk that required prolonged cranking through a hole in the front bumper before it could be persuaded, suddenly, to lurch into its routine of bangs and shudders. At its best, on a smooth road, it sounded like a despondent coffee grinder. It was loaded to the sinking point, and I had been driving since daybreak when I made the turn at the crossroads once again in the first twilight, and with a joy that startled me, recognized at the western end of the lines of walnut trees the piece of empty sky. I eased the behemoth through the long grass inside the walls along the lane, and down the slope to the space—cleared of brambles—in front of the door, and let myself in with the long iron key.
House scent of lime and wood aged in shadow. There was no glass in the windows. The floors were covered with rubble from the partition that had been taken down to transform two of the rooms into a single large one with two fireplaces. Swallows had nested above a green tin hanging lamp shade, converting it into an atoll of white droppings. Bats whispered in the beams. I unlashed a rusted cot from the roof of the truck and made my bed between the front door and the big fireplace, in the middle of the main room. The hum of the day on the road drained away. The breeze through the windows smelled of rain and leaves and evening. As the light went, the blackbirds called, and then the first long notes of the nightingales began.
I lay in the dark, listening to the cowbells in the pastures, owls, the flight of bats like a flapping of tongues, the creaks of the old building accustomed to communing with itself. It was the first night, for me, under that roof. I was alone in the cool darkness of the upland, afloat among the farms and woods. The good of lying there in the night air and the night smells and night sounds of the causse and in the immeasurable antiquity of the place, was something I had not even imagined.
The fluttering of the unseen bats receded as they left through one of the empty window frames. Already I was displacing them. I had driven hundreds of miles to that particular patch of old splintered floor covered with dust and rubble. Every decision of mine and of my parents had been leading toward that half ruined, half finished structure, its shadows, its darkness, its smells of must and wood and night, the clear sounds of those bells, the notes of those nightingales in that season. At the back of my eyes the road kept appearing and then fading out like an early film that broke for longer and longer intervals, while the ivy and the elder leaves rustled against the stones of the walls about which I knew what amounted to nothing.
I wanted it to stay like that. I did not want to start trying to find furniture, not even if I were to be as lucky as the old Englishman had been with the crier, in his village down across the valley, miles and years away. At the same time that schemes for repairs and conversions and amenities rose and flickered out in my head. I did not want at all to clear the floor and put panes in the windows, paint the walls, move object after object in through the door and set each in place in the rooms, to be convenient and comfortable and pleasing. I did not want to surround myself with all that credibility and believe in it. I wanted to be there without any of what I had come with the intent of putting there. To remain just as I was at that moment in the night of the foreign room that my claim and presence had only begun to mark and alter.
I woke suddenly with a feeling of oppression and fright. In my dream I had been lying there, right where I was, and a gray, greenish light like a luminous shadow had revealed to me, as though by moonlight or lightning, the inside of the heavy front door, a few feet away. An iron bolt ran across it into the masonry. I do not remember whether or not I had locked the door before going to bed. In the dream I could see that it was tightly bolted. But as I watched, fingers, and then a hand, a left hand, more a woman’s than a man’s but not obviously of either sex, and of no determinate color—the color of the light—appeared around the edge of the door, groping along it. The wrist followed, and part of the arm, and the fingers felt their way to the bolt, which began to turn and loosen. I could hear the bolt grate and the door begin to move. Then I woke. The house was dark and the night was still.
In the morning, as the sunlight came through the opening above the door, I heard the grass swish outside, and a light rap on the parched wood. I raised the latch, to be greeted by the old man who had stared at my first visit to the house, those years before, come now to make me welcome to the village, to show me where he had scythed the grass to the entrance when he had heard I was coming, to offer me tools and hospitality, and to begin to teach me, in a language not my own, what a neighbor is. To tell me, first, as something which he had no trouble accepting, that in the house where he had gone to school, I was at home.
The dream at first seemed to conflict with what I believed I felt about the house. I mentioned it to no one at the time, but as I worked on the building and lived there, and came to see it and the land around it representing different things to me, I thought occasionally that I glimpsed one facet or another of what the dream had been telling me. That autumn, for instance, just as the weather turned cold, after months of hard physical work I caught a fever and lay delirious for days before the symptoms declared themselves as those of a virulent and, it was said, dangerous form of hepatitis, by which time the money had run out—and so forth. Not that I imagined the dream’s content to be nothing but menace and warning. I came to love the place. But the house, any house, is its own story, and this is not the story of that house. Over the months and years the thought of Margie, and her intent and role in my having it, and being there, surfaced repeatedly like the questioning of the dream. There could be no explanation, naturally.
Whatever image Margie had formed of me that had persuaded her, late in her life, to leave to me alone the remnant of her savings and the single trunkful of worn belongings which she had kept until then, it must have evolved from two sources: my mother’s letters, and Margie’s short residence with us in the Scranton manse not long after we moved there. I can only guess at the importance my mother accorded her children in those letters, the confidences and the strain of implicit boasting which served to involve Margie in my mother’s own anxiety and pride. It is not hard to imagine my mother addressing and deferring to the school teacher in Margie, to the woman, the elder, the sympathetic but remote authority, the lone vindication out of that distant pantheon, her family. Margie took, as my mother said, such an interest in the children partly because my mother assumed that she must. That interest was an important element in the complicity between them. Indirectly, and without asking for advice, she invoked Margie’s judgment. It was a way of eliciting her approval. They discussed the latest issues of Parents’ Magazine: the tests and scores evaluating the children’s this and that. They laughed over the phenomenon of competitive parents, and the laughing permitted a further superiority.
The one time that Margie had even seen much of me, the only time when we had been together for long, was during the period when she was living with us in the big brown frame building across from the church, on Washburn Street, when I was ten. I do not remember her arriving, but it seems to me that the trunk I was to inherit was with her then, and that as long as she was living with us it stood open like a chest of drawers in the small room at the head of the back stairs which remained Margie’s room long after she had gone again and it had been occupied by others and used for sewing and storage. On the front stairs of the house we—my sister and I—were warned and expected to walk quietly just because we were to walk quietly on stairs and not scuff. On the back stairs we were to walk quietly for the usual reasons and also because those stairs were just outside Margie’s room. I am not very certain of all the details of the inside of that room while she was living in it, because although the door to it stood open most of the time and I could see in from the top steps, it was an absolutely forbidden place. We were not even supposed to look inside. It was none of our business. A cool light in there, faded yellows and greens, as in the picture of the plump girl sitting on a bench, looking up and listening to a bird in a tree. And there was the radiator that came, for a while, to occupy a place of such importance in the household. The bed—all but a corner of it—was out of sight. Aunt Margie’s bed. Margie’s bed. One of the first things she had done after she got there was to go straight downtown to Stoher and Fister’s, where the good living room suite had been bought, and buy a bed that she approved of. Single, with a high firm mattress and a walnut veneer headboard. It may be that she did not think much of some of the beds in the house, such as the wide, creaking old tin structure that had been my parents’ in the Union City manse. Later, when the subject came up, my father said, if he was being critical of her, that she was high hat, and my mother said she was particular. Her bed stayed in her room after Margie left. At first it supported the pretense that she was keeping it there because she might be back, and it would be waiting for her. When that was gone it remained part of the mark she had made.
Before she came to us it was agreed that Aunt Margie was going to teach my sister and me. There was even talk of our staying home and being taught by Aunt Margie instead of going to school. My parents had a friend out in the western part of the state, south of Erie, who had been a school teacher and then later had taught her own children at home. It was possible, supposedly, to get permission to do that. We had been to visit her and her children. Up until then, when I had only heard of her, I believed that she was Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch. But she was herself. The water from the faucets in her tiny house tasted of sulfur. Her children were older than my sister and me, and my mother said that they were years ahead of other children their age, scholastically. Studying at home, they had learned to concentrate. Besides, my mother was convinced that the standards of the sooty old brick Gothic school around the block on Hyde Park Avenue were far below those of the New Jersey school system, and of the Union City school in particular, which my sister and I had come from, and where she had been in the habit of chatting with the teachers. I welcomed the idea of being taught by Aunt Margie. I would have been happy to stay home from the new school, which I disliked, and where I was younger than my classmates and felt out of place and vulnerable. I kept asking my parents whether they had obtained permission for us to be taught at home, but I could tell before long that the subject was receding from their minds. If I mentioned it to my father he would answer as though he had forgotten that the possibility had ever arisen before. He told me that it was good for me to mingle with youngsters of my own age. (The pupils of my own age were all in other classes.) On the other hand he insisted that I must stay out of rough games, which meant games altogether. “And don’t get overheated at recess,” my mother added. On no account, they agreed, was I to get into fights. If I did, my father said, he would hear of it, and I would be punished severely. “Just walk away from them,” my mother said. After school we were to come straight home and not stop to play. We had the yard to play in.
We did not stay home from school, but Margie taught us just the same. She supervised our homework. She could tell immediately whether we knew our lessons or not. I had always had trouble with arithmetic, and in Union City my mother had taken to leaving a sheet of paper with four problems, one each of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, on the stool beside my bed at night, for me to solve in the morning before coming downstairs. That is the time of day, she would say, when your mind is fresh. Margie sat with us over our schoolwork, and for me she added arithmetic exercises of her own. The time of day did not matter to her. She would sit with us not only after breakfast but also after we came home in the afternoons. I think I liked the arrangement better than my sister did. Inevitably I had picked up some of my mother’s admiring regard for Aunt Margie, and for me too she became a private—a secret—authority. I had more confidence in her than in any of the teachers at school. I realize that she was careful not to conflict with what they may have told me, or with their methods of instruction. But when I had finished homework with her I felt certain that I understood it, even the arithmetic.
Besides, awed though I was, and as everyone else was, by her remote, commanding presence, I liked her. Her attention was unwavering and apparently tireless. She never supplied an answer nor part of one. She was relentless and uncompromising but completely patient: she would stay with whatever it was until it was learned. Most of the time her face was impassive, the large noble features composed, attentive, waiting. Except for those eyes, almost black, and burning. I sat down happily at the big heavy desk in the room we called the playroom, when it was time for her to go over the lessons with me. She stood so straight that no doubt she seemed taller than she was, in her high-necked long dresses of dark solid colors—greens and magentas and blues. Her curled white hair was piled around her head; I never saw it any other way. She put on pince-nez for reading. The light, elusive fragrance around her was probably made up only of soap and powder and lavender sachets left among her clothes. It was impersonal, a disguise of anything physical, but it was always there. She sat beside me to my right, on the side away from the window and a little behind me, her back like a dancer’s, one hand on the desk. Sometimes when the lessons were over, or if it was Saturday and raining, we would play games that were more like tests, or work on puzzles, at the desk. Often then, and almost always when homework was finished, I would catch a glimpse of her rare, anomalous smile: her face creasing, eyebrows rising, the corners of her mouth lifting like curtains drawn up, showing the startling teeth, and the eyes for an instant closer, dimmed, approving.
And I went for walks with her, usually to the end of Washburn Street, to the cemetery, with the family fox terrier, Tippie. In Aunt Margie’s judgment Tippie did not get enough exercise, cooped up on the back porch and allowed out into the yard only when the children were there. Tippie’s nails, as Margie pointed out, were proof of it. They were much too long. They curled. They must hurt the poor dog. Margie took her and had them clipped, and undertook to continue the job herself, but she said that Tippie should be exercised enough to keep them worn down naturally. She led Tippie forth on a leash and strode along the sidewalk wearing solid shoes with the heels only slightly raised, a long dark woolen coat with an amber fur collar, and a cloche hat. She went almost every day, if the weather was right, and if she went shopping, alone or with my mother, she took Tippie with her. If my mother went shopping by herself, she never took the dog. My father seldom walked anywhere. The children were not allowed out of the yard. Tippie, at first, was not used to taking walks. She was overweight and she wheezed. Once, years before, in Union City, some shadowy figure who was staying with us had taken Tippie out shopping along New York Avenue, and on the way back, across the street from the house, Tippie had suddenly pulled loose and dashed for home, and had been run over by a car. I can hear my mother screaming from somewhere, seeing the whole thing, and can hear Tippie yelping, and I watch, helplessly, the white-and-black wheel of small dog spinning underneath the high car, which speeds up, and I can feel the shock and fear for the dog, and outrage at the car. (Tippie sustained nothing worse than a bad fright, an hour of the shakes, and a minor abrasion outlined in car grease along her spine.) But I cannot see clearly who it was, that day, who had been walking Tippie. It may even have been Margie, though I can scarcely believe it, if only because it is hard to imagine Tippie pulling the leash out of her gloved hand, or such a thing happening at all when Margie was responsible.
Nobody else went to the Washburn Street Cemetery just to walk around in there, but if Aunt Margie chose to do it, that was one thing a cemetery was for, whether people realized it or not. Some days she had already been for her walk, by herself, when my sister and I got home from school. No doubt she needed an occasional outing by herself. The cemetery, when she walked in it, was her own place. I knew that when I was there with her. She did not read the tombstones. They were there like the trees. I did not ask many questions. I mentioned, at times, what I had been reading or thinking about, trying to catch and hold her attention. But I do not remember much about our conversations, if that is what they were. I doubt that we talked much. Cemeteries were also places to be quiet, out of respect, starting on the sidewalk before reaching the gate.
I had other reasons for being glad that Aunt Margie was with us. Whether or not I was clearly conscious of it, she was a counterweight to my father. For all her strictness of mien, she was not capricious nor shaming nor hurtful. And I knew, from things that my mother let fall, and from what I remember feeling at the time, that she did not approve of many of my father’s arbitrary and special restrictions, nor of his moody punishments of me in particular. His conduct toward his own children, and especially toward his son—me—was so unlike his way of acting toward other children, with whom he was effusively sentimental, that he was questioned about the difference, then and in later years. He always answered that he treated us, and me, that way, only because of love, and that he was afraid I might get hurt. He would never have admitted that Margie’s presence in the house had any influence on his own decisions and actions, but I do not believe that he indulged his frustrations and disappointments upon any of us as freely as he was used to doing, before that steady and at times disdainful regard. My sense that she did not accept without question the whole of my father’s rule was a relief to me, though inexpressible and perhaps only partly recognized. It revealed to me a breach in what I had come to think was a closed horizon. Up until then, within that tight household, it had seemed that only disreputable outsiders—non church-members, the benighted, the dirty, Catholics, Democrats, foreigners—did not respectfully admire and embrace my father’s superior views, the pastor’s views, which included his harsh and peculiar ways with me, for my own good. But Aunt Margie was Aunt Margie, and her own authority. When we were left in her charge we were permitted, occasionally, to do things that we and she knew were normally forbidden. At the cottage at the lake where we went in the summers, she allowed me to climb trees, though I could not imagine her even giving thought to such an activity. Neither her permissions nor her injunctions were tied to half-fearful invocations of my father in those phrases that I was used to hearing from others: “You’d better not let your father find out about that,” or “You’d better not get hurt doing that. You know what your father would be like.” I was told later of cases in which his wrath had been visited upon me unpredictably and disproportionately, and Margie—as my mother put it—had “taken my part.” In time my mother even came to suggest that my father’s treatment of me had been one of the decisive reasons for Margie’s leaving us and moving away. My mother believed that Margie had felt helpless to improve the situation and had come to fear that by staying with us she would only make things worse, and she could not simply stand by and say nothing. But my mother regretted bitterly and increasingly my father’s behavior toward me and her own inability to counter it, and I have no doubt that some of his resentment of me was directed against her. How much of that Margie saw, and how much of it my mother was conscious of, I cannot tell now. More than either of them knew, perhaps.
But there were other grounds for contention between Margie and my father. She represented my mother’s family, that all-but-vanished cloud of witnesses. My father would have been more comfortable if they had not existed; he took no interest in them and did nothing to encourage hers. For that matter, both of their families were abrasive subjects. My mother felt that she had been treated as an unwelcome outsider by my father’s mother and his sisters, and they had whispered, not always behind her back, that she was stuck-up. My mother invested her own family with attributes of gentility and culture that may or may not have graced them. Certainly, for the most part, they seem to have been better educated and gentler than most of my father’s family. In any event, much of the perennial discord engendered by reference to their respective families arose from their feelings about social position. The dissension was grafted into their lives. They lived with it. My father affected to laugh it off, as though it were a temperamental quirk of my mother’s, a cliché of marriage, something to be expected from women. It was not so imminent a matter, nor so sore, as to prevent members of my father’s family, or my mother’s cousin Betty, or Aunt Margie, from living with us at times to help look after the children. But it was there to undermine the longer visits. Something, from the beginning of each of them, was sure to confirm and quicken it.
And with Margie the question of church membership became a further and covert vexation. Nobody would admit that it was a problem, because it was not supposed to be one. My father and my mother both declared—if the topic was unavoidable—that Margie was free to do as she thought best, although each of them surely was thinking something different when saying it. Church affairs of any kind were officially over my head, and too grave for me to expect an answer if I were so forward as to ask about them. So I am not sure just what happened, but I think that Margie left her letter of church membership with her former pastor in Pittsburgh, and put off becoming a member of my father’s church. After all, no one was sure how long she was going to stay. But my parents regularly explained away and dismissed this form of reservation on her part, natural though it may have been. I seem to remember, also, passing explanations of her going, occasionally, to listen to other preachers besides my father. Her role in his congregation never was defined. She never committed herself to it.
What he felt, I suppose, as her challenge, and his way of handling it, were aired daily in one deathless theme: the heating, or rather the failure to heat, the manse. She had him there, and he had her. It was an old building. When my father had accepted the call to the Washburn Street church, the appropriate officers of the congregation had led my parents through the manse room by room, and later had had it painted and papered throughout for them. By the time we moved there the special woven grass on a pale green ground, which my parents had chosen, lined the lower part of the front hall; the oatmeal stamped into sheaves and flowers covered the front living room walls. And a new marvel—a surprise—dominated the dining room: a wallpaper like a mural or a backdrop, depicting one scene all the way around the walls, in the style current in picture puzzles and on the tops of chocolate boxes: a lake with huge bushes of pink roses hanging over it, swans drifting on their reflections, and broad flights of marble steps with marble urns and banisters, leading down to the water. Everything appeared to be life size. It was called The Garden of The Muses pattern. My mother was not ever sure that she liked it, altogether. At least not as much as, say, I did. She said we couldn’t hang pictures in the dining room. They would fall into the lake. She was more interested in how she was going to keep thirty-six windows clean, and wash and stretch the downstairs curtains. And my father was concerned about how he would ever manage to heat what he soon referred to as that great barn of a place.
The former ministers and their families, some of whose names were scratched in the cement by the side steps to the porch, must have shivered. Coal would have been cheaper in other years, no doubt, and of course the furnace and boiler had been newer. But the house had not been built to be centrally heated. When we moved in there were fireplaces in all the main rooms downstairs except the kitchen and laundry room, and in several of the upstairs bedrooms. We arrived at the end of summer, and on the first chill evenings of autumn, and in the cold mornings, fires of scrap lumber and boxes were lighted in the arched black marble fireplace in the dining room, under the lake with the swans and rose bushes, and there my sister and I dressed before breakfast, and undressed for bed, by firelight. We complained about the cold, but hoped that the arrangement would never change. There were cracks in the floor that could swallow a pencil, and wind rose out of them. The doors and windows rattled in their frames. My father became obsessed with drafts. He would inch softly through the front hall, or up the stairs, as though trying to surprise a thief, and suddenly freeze like a gun dog, raise one hand and call, to anyone, “Come here. Just feel THIS!” And, radiant with vindication, he would hold one’s hand in the right place to catch the cold stream. One by one, to my grief, every fireplace was closed up, plastered and papered over. My parents said they were dirty, besides letting in the cold. Windows and doors were draft-proofed, at least in theory. The furnace was overhauled and a new boiler was put in. The dirt floor of the cellar was covered with cement—which buckled into spectacular craters and broke into shards during its first winter. The summer after that, my father managed to acquire, from a furniture dealer and undertaker in the church (the two callings still went together) a hill of mattress cartons and a load of unwanted wallpaper. And another member of the congregation, an ageing handyman with a hump on his shoulder and a drop on the end of his nose, lugged them all up to the sweltering attic. There I was able to admire his cutting up of the cartons and his nailing of them to the rafters. And afterwards I watched him boil up flour and water paste on the big coal range in the laundry room, and put up the wallpaper with his brushes. It all took him a long time, several months, and through the entire enterprise he whistled one or two phrases, over and over, between his long dingy front teeth. The phrase that he seemed more partial to I never could identify at all. The other, which he also hummed, in certain moods, comprised the first seven notes of “In the Good Old Summertime,” so tunelessly rendered that for a long time I could not tell what it was. But it sounded familiar, so I asked him the name of it. He was hard of hearing, and off on some plane of his own. He seemed to find the question somewhat impertinent, so he pretended not to have understood it. My father could never recognize a tune anyway. My mother shook her head when I asked her what song that was. The implication was that the song was not something for me to concern myself about. It might be improper. In any case I should not ask. Suddenly, one day, I recognized it, like an old friend in weird clothes. When the last roll of paper was up, the attic was said to be insulated.
Even after that, the winter temperatures indoors were unpredictable, and the furnace continued to drive my father to paroxysms of exasperation. He managed to joke about it. It was a magazine-feed furnace. He fed it. He supplied it with magazines—of coal. He christened it Bertha. Big Bertha. He rattled and clanked, and fished out clinkers the size of skulls, and he stoked her, and banked her, and put her to bed. Only to wake in the freezing house and fumble down the stairs in his burst slippers and old gray bathrobe to find out that Bertha had gone out, and that he had to start all over again, in the early morning hours, to try to light her, with the sounds of the struggle clanging through the pipes and radiators of the whole house. To the end of his days he was haunted by drafts. He would detect them in buildings that were no concern of his, and wheel as though catching a pickpocket.
The coal trucks eased down the alley beside the house, and the galvanized chutes were lowered over the green picket fence and the rambler rose, and were lengthened across the narrow bit of flower garden and the brick walk, to the dust-gray cellar windows below ground level, and ton after ton of wet coal slid down them, each shovel load distinct as a loud breath, into the vast heap in the cellar.
The mines have closed since those days, but at the time Scranton still boasted, a little anxiously, of being the anthracite capital of the world. Good coal was probably cheaper there than anywhere. Yet my father told visitors, especially if they were members of his congregation, that it took a lot of his salary—which was about three thousand dollars a year, when eventually it was paid—just trying to heat this old house. He would inform them in detail exactly how much coal he had burned the previous winter. The quantity always sounded as though it had broken existing records, and the listeners gasped obediently. I believe he said that one winter he had burned over seventy tons. “What kind of coal?” they would ask. Most people evidently burned pea coal, crushed fine in the tall breakers at the edge of town. Pea coal flowed easily in the new automatic-feed furnaces. The big companies claimed to have the best quality. Marvin Colliery. D & H cone-cleaned, washed anthracite. The D & H trucks sported a tall blue wading bird—stork, crane, or heron—on the sides, and the motto “You Scratch My Back and I’ll Scratch Yours.” But my father, filled with the subject, explained that it was no use stoking Bertha with pea coal. It just dropped through the grates and was lost in ash boxes. He had to use chestnut, although chestnut, unless it was the very best quality, got stuck in the grates and jammed them. His hearers nodded their understanding and shook their heads in sympathy. And he went on to say that with the quantities he had to burn to keep the pressure up in the boiler, he could not always afford the best, even though some of the officers of the big coal companies were members of his congregation. He had to take what he could pay for, and there was often slag in what he bought. So he had to rake out clinkers from the grates, into the dynasty of buckets, baskets, and ash cans that he heaved and lugged and wrestled, almost daily, up the cellar steps, and lined up beside the back gate to the alley. Sometimes the church sexton helped him, but the furnace never did, and the heating of the house became one with the church trustees who withheld his salary and with whatever in his life had mocked his labors and his persistent show of optimism.
And Margie came long before the efforts at insulation were complete. She was there when the first phase was just being finished—the elementary repairs of the furnace, and the sealing of the more obvious cracks in walls and window frames. My father could still imply that there were improvements under way that no one else in the family really understood, and he could nurse the illusion that he was taking care of the worst of the problem, that he had it well in hand and deserved recognition for that. And from the beginning there was one room in the house that presented no heating problems: his study. He sealed the windows in there, and he maintained the winter temperature somewhere in the nineties—there was a thermometer on the wall, just inside the door. My mother said that heat like that was bad for him, that it made him tired and sallow and liable to catch colds when he went out, but he gave no sign that he heard her. Each of the other rooms had its own temperament, expressed by its radiator. There was a lore of loosening valves to draw the steam up. It was forbidden to remove them, to make it happen faster, and the retribution for doing so, and getting caught—with a roomful of steam, wallpaper and furniture varnish drenched and blistered, pipes racketing, and the radiator chooing like a locomotive—was thunderous. Of the twelve rooms in the house, the one in which the steam rose last, if it ever reached there at all, was the small back room that was Margie’s. Why that room, rather than another, had been given to her, and why she was not moved to a different one, I do not know. The choice may have been hers, and it may have had something to do with privacy. But she did not like to be cold. In this case she took it, increasingly, as a personal affront, and she was right. She too had a thermometer on her wall. She would stand behind her chair at the dining room table, before a meal, and draw herself up when my father came in, return his greeting, and in the pause that followed say, “It was forty-eight in my room this morning.” He would cluck his tongue and shake his head, and say that the men were trying to remedy the situation and that he would see what else could be done about the pressure in the radiators. But Margie’s discomfort probably troubled him less each time she mentioned it. He laughed about her way of announcing the temperature, and imitated her—not to her face. Her comments on the heating conveyed her opinion of a growing number of traits in his character, as they had become apparent to her. She was freezing him out, just as he was doing to her. She must have been thinking about Florida for some time before she bought her Pullman ticket for St. Petersburg.
Why had my father ever consented to invite her—because certainly she did not arrive without his expressed approval? He may even have been the one who asked her to come, if the invitation was put forward in conversation. And he and my mother must have talked it over at length, beforehand. Margie had been asked to come and live with us, not just to visit; we all knew that. And my father had known Margie for years. She had stayed with us at other times. It is hard to imagine those two ever getting along warmly together. Margie was unlikely to have been impressed, beyond a respectful allowance for my father’s being a minister and my mother’s husband. My father was bound to sense her reservation, after a while under the same roof, and to suspect her as my mother’s ally and champion. Maybe none of it had assumed much importance, on earlier occasions. Maybe he had managed—maybe they both had managed—to ignore it. Or he had forgotten, or resolved not to let it matter again, not to pay attention to it. Or imagined that this time it would be different. Many of us learn the same things repeatedly. My mother wanted someone to stay with us, at first to help look after the children, and then to help with the housework. Margie was not thought of in either capacity, but my mother coveted her company, her presence. Members of my father’s family had been with us, lived with us, from time to time—and sometimes their visits too had raised problems. My father may have felt, and my mother may have urged him to agree, that it was her turn.
Margie may have been invited as early as that day like a Sunday when we called at her hotel in Pittsburgh, or in a letter not long afterwards, still redolent of that meeting. It was a time when my father might have been tempted to be expansive. In Pittsburgh we were on our way from Union City to Cincinnati, to the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of the United States of America, where my father was to be moderator. For him, and consequently for the whole family, the office came as a triumph, the more so as it followed several disheartening years. In worldly terms, after the small country churches with which my father began his ministry, the First Presbyterian Church of Union City, New Jersey, had appeared to be, as he might have said, a plum. It came shortly to present large difficulties, financial and personal, and the depression helped to increase them. And from the midst of that, to be chosen to be moderator—I was not sure what a moderator was or did, but it was obviously something of great importance which promised a leap out of our ordinary existence. The General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church sounded to me something like Congress, and my father was going to be head of the whole thing. Almost like the President. Shopkeepers, the teachers at school, friends to whom my mother spoke on the street, seemed properly awed by the importance of the office, but it had to be explained to them. My mother minimized it, modestly, but agreed that it was an honor.
For some time my father had been telling her that he noticed, or thought he noticed, during Sunday services, delegations from other congregations, who had come to hear the sermon. If he was right, they were spies of a kind, and their appearance might result in an invitation to preach at a church that currently had no pastor, and perhaps eventually in a call to consider moving his ministry to another congregation. He had been asked to preach at the Scranton church and had agreed to do so on the way to Cincinnati, in early summer. The young moderator-to-be of the General Assembly arrived with his lovely family.
An elder from the church drove us around town in his new Oldsmobile. He changed his car every two years and recommended the practice. He took us along streets shaded with old trees, past large houses. The street cars swayed and sang differently from the ones in Union City. He showed us the Green Ridge Church, the Elm Park Church, the Scranton family mansion, a coal-breaker, and culm piles. He boasted that there were eighty-one churches in Scranton—a city of between one hundred forty and one hundred forty-four thousand. He said that if he told us the number of years he had lived there he would be telling us his age. He told us. It was over half a century.
We stayed at the Hotel Jermyn. In store windows, on the street outside, there were souvenirs made of polished anthracite. They were so clean that people could handle them wearing white gloves. On the roof of the hotel a pole fifty or maybe a hundred feet high had been set up, with rungs for climbing to the top, where an ordinary round metal dining room tray had been fastened as a platform. A young man and young woman in ballroom dress climbed to the top and danced on the tray, to music from loudspeakers. They were advertising Florsheim Shoes. My father did not approve of dancing, but on this occasion we were allowed to stand on the sidewalk and watch.
The sun streamed through the stained glass windows of the Sunday School rooms, on the corner of Hyde Park Avenue and Washburn Street. Everybody peeked at us during the hymns. The congregation was showing off. It was like Easter. Apparently the visit was a complete success, and even before we left, several officers of the church session told my father privately that he could take their next step for granted: it had already been decided that the church would extend the call to him to come and be their next pastor. The choice was up to him. And it was with that news, on the way to General Assembly, that we stopped, a few days later in the summer, to see Margie at the hotel.
I remember nothing that was said, that afternoon. I was not expected to join in the grownup conversation, or to follow it, or ask questions. There was bright red in the deep carpet. We stood for a while near a dark polished door. Black marble, green cloth, white uniforms, light from empty curtains; a disregarded opulence. Margie’s face floats, motionless there as elsewhere. I imagine I can hear one tone of her voice—which she never raised—but no words. And my sister is younger than I am. It may be that no one now remembers Aunt Margie even as well as I do. I might not remember as much as I do if she had not made that solitary decision to leave every material possession to a distant cousin whom she had last seen nine years before, at the end of his childhood.
In the fifties—in their fifties—my parents moved back to the western part of the state, and my father’s ministry ended as it had begun, in small country churches only a few miles from the same ones where he had preached every Sunday as a young man with his hair cut high above his ears, celluloid collars, and trousers that did not reach to the tops of his high shoes. Once again Pittsburgh was their metropolis. In the sixties the dining room of the hotel in the postcards was used to entertain writers who were giving public readings at the Carnegie Library, nearby, and several times my parents and I had dinner there on such occasions. As the railroads died and the neglected depot became a makeshift bus station, and air travel got its grip, several downtown hotels acquired roles as terminals for the airlines. Limousines and buses to and from the airport pulled in there. Often, in those years, I was met at one of the hotels, when I went home to see my parents. One of them, usually my mother, would be standing on the sidewalk or just inside the glass door, waiting, in the irregular status of those whom the hotel tolerated because of its arrangement with the airlines. My mother knew the doorman, who was a dispatcher. He would be keeping an eye on her car, parked just down the block. Then, more and more often as the drive into town wore on them both, I would get off there and carry my bags a few blocks to catch another bus up the Allegheny River, and would be met, an hour or so later, at a country service station a couple of miles from the small valley farmhouse which was my parents’ home for the last decade of their lives. Or I might speak to the driver and get off a little sooner, at the end of their road, as I did when I went back after my father died in the veterans’ hospital near Butler. I climbed down the pulsing steps, that time, into the green and amber June evening, the cool air still sweet in spite of the new Keystone power plant a few miles away, the woods sharp on the hills, sunlight and shadows stretched across the fields, birds singing that I had heard singing before. And Bea, my parents’ neighbor on the road, was waiting beside her old car, to take me to the house where other neighbors kept dropping by with gifts of food. My mother counted the cakes, in amazement.
During the weeks after my father’s funeral, I made the trip between New York and Pittsburgh a number of times, and when some friend drove me back to Pittsburgh to catch the airline transportation we seldom went all the way downtown, but stopped instead to meet the bus or limousine outside the building that had once been Margie’s hotel. Sometimes my mother came along, and more than one of the visits ended there.
In his last years, my father had been what was termed a minister of visitation. He was an associate of a younger pastor, and his work was limited, in principle, to visiting the sick and the elderly in the congregation. Some of the old people he had known for most of his life, and of theirs. He sat with them and listened. He said that he had come to think that it was all that many of them needed, to have somebody listen to them. And he preached at their funerals. When I was there it seemed that there were always one or two funerals a week. I imagined that my father’s coat, when he came home from a funeral service, had a particular artificial smell. There were matches and ball-points and combs around the house bearing the names of funeral parlors—more of them than ever—and my father spoke as a connoisseur of funeral directors. I thought for a while that so much of such a practice must be depressing, but I came instead to understand that for him that last phase may have been the most valuable part of his whole ministry. My father and the other pastor at the church came to like a young undertaker in Vandergrift with whom they worked frequently. He became a friend of theirs. On the night that my father died, the hospital some fifty miles away called after midnight to say that he was failing rapidly and they did not expect him to live through the night. My mother got up and dressed to drive there, but felt weak, and knew that she should not attempt the trip by herself. She was not sure who to call, at that hour, so she decided to try the young funeral director, who was often up late, working. He promised to come immediately and drive her to Butler, but almost as soon as she hung up the receiver the hospital telephoned again to say that it was too late. When the undertaker arrived he sat up with her until morning.
Afterwards he came to the house regularly to help with post-funeral details, some of them pretexts to see how she was managing. At the end of my last visit to my mother, he had offered, days before I left, to drive me to Pittsburgh. He had said he had things to do there on the day when I was going. He invited my mother along, and she decided to come. That morning we went out under the spruce trees beyond the garden shed my father had built, and stepped over the wet grass and got into the big silver-gray Cadillac with push buttons for everything. The undertaker explained to me, as he had done before, that it was a business car, and had been a bargain. He had intended to take me to the downtown terminal, or even to the airport itself but we ran into traffic tie-ups on the way in. There had been heavy rain for several days, and part of the freeway was flooded. And the radio predicted more rain. He finally agreed with my mother that it would be more prudent to drive, instead, to the nearer terminal: the hotel on the postcards. We took a shortcut and got lost and ran into more traffic, and detours, and the hard rain began. We came to the corner in front of the hotel just as the airport limousine was drawing away from the curb. The light at the corner was red, and the gray Cadillac pulled abreast. The young funeral director hailed the driver. I kissed my mother good-bye. She was wearing a small gray hat with a short veil of the kind I remembered her wearing all my life. The veil felt stiff against my face. I said I would be back, and she nodded. I jumped out into the rain and shut the door, and ran splashing behind the limousine, and threw my bag in. The light had turned green and the Cadillac was pulling away, ahead of us. I could see my mother waving, through the rain-streaked rear window, and I waved back. I never saw her again. We were still in front of that building.