a christmas memory
Dec. 26th, 2002 02:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
purejuicemy entry in the christmas memoir marathon is:
Saleh Nufe Na
My first memory of my father is far away from snow, if not wintry darkness. I don't talk yet. I am making him laugh, in San Juan, by crawling quickly on my bare knees across a sisal rug, turning around, and sitting down, and saying, ha jaja. There was a dark cloud over his head and making him laugh was a way of making nothing out of something. I did not see the dark cloud over his head, nor did my knees sting, until after his death.
My second memory is perhaps two years later; we are on the beach in Africa body-surfing. My mother is emerging wet from the waves in her legendary strapless bathing suit, green with real gold polka dots, which peels down when she dives off ketches into the Caribbean. There are no ketches moored off Africa, only gravelly surf and thunder over Daddy's head while my mother casts her eyes down and smiles. He has been tossing me in the air and I have bitten my tongue. Something about his profile high above me against a pale blue sky edged with brass tells me not to interrupt. I turn my back to them and press a salty wet towel to my tongue.
I have glimpses of him in Africa. Of the barracuda he caught fishing in the gravelly surf -- there was no fresh meat for two years -- how it nearly bit the tip of his thumb off and filled my throat with a two inch bone. Of looking down into a ravine where his 4-wheel-drive Jeep has turned over, and there is blood on the roof. Of seeing him walk up the red-dirt hill toward me, as I stand on the porch, with the cast on his broken collar bone and a drink in his hand, and feeling all was well. Of his killing a rat in my underwear drawer with my toy ball and paddle. Of the moonflower vine he planted in the virtually nutritionless soil next to our concrete bungalow, which I watched open every night and semaphore its perfume into the humid darkness. Of looking to the right from our porch out to the bush where a parting at the edge reveals daddy, bare-chested in his khaki shorts, picking his way through the underbrush in long strides, butterfly net in hand.
I remember my own private life as a four-year-old much more clearly. He was not a part of it. There are photographs of the Christmas tree he made out of palm fronds, and legends about it; I do not remember it. I do remember an Easter bunny I was told he had made out of a bonbon, cotton swabs, and pink paper. I remember with more clarity the snake eggs I found hatching the same Easter morning; whether or not Easter was the actual date of the snake hatching is a question I can't answer. most of my memories corroborate, or did, until my mother began to forget.
I remember sitting across the dining room table from him in south America, with the Andes rising up behind him through the window, that dark cloud over him and snow on top of the Andes. I remember sitting at that table while he said to me, "remember the starving Armenians." The Armenians had last starved during his own childhood, and his religious fanatic parents told him to eat his vegetables by invoking their suffering. I have always associated him with the Andes behind him at the dinner table; he loved to climb and came from southwest Virginia, where the old old mountains still have some height. The story of Willi Unsoeld and the death of his daughter Nanda Devi on the Himalayan peak after which he had named her electrified me when I first read it.
I remember in South America his making a big ceremony out of spanking me at my mother's request, for some crime I do not now remember.
I don't remember the cloud over his head disappearing until Christmas in Virginia.
In those days it was dairy farm country. The hills were cropped by cows and horses, and changed color with the seasons, chartreuse to green to buff with feathery bronze grasses here and there, then white. In those days it still snowed every winter. The cows, Daddy told me, also kept the tree branches at the edges of the pastures cropped as evenly as English topiary to the distance their extended necks could reach.
I played in the barn at the Rameys' dairy farm, with the kittens and the old brindle dog. I toured the milking barn and the milk machinery room, and sat with Mrs. Ramey at the kitchen table, which she kept covered with an oil cloth. On it, she told me, she served dinner at midday to Ramey and her two sons.
Our house was set on the best hill in the place, and had been built around 1830, probably the first house in the valley. Another hill rose higher behind us, another behind and to the right was covered with pine woods -- Achie's Hill, daddy called it. On the right was Charlie Bradley’s hill. He was red-headed and his father had been killed the year before we came when the tractor overturned on him. There was a bare hill straight out the front door and across the valley, one on which the local football coach was to build his fake French chateau years later. To the left was yet another hill, with a gone-with-the-wind porticoed house on it -- a farm house it was, the Rhineharts'. They had a run-down horse farm on the hills which rose up behind their run-down plantation house.
Cultures clashed. Black people lived not on the hilltops but in the hollows; they attended separate schools and made the separate school bus sit and wait for them while they ambled slowly, smiling slyly, looking at me sideways, down the last bit of country road to the bus stop. I recognized the eye contact as homicidal. It hurt but did not frighten me. Neither had the South American children who threw stones at me on the way to school because I was wearing shoes. Gringa jeringa! Mata la wawa! Con su paragua llena de agua! I may well have been annoying, but I hung on to my scuffed, brown, orthopedic little girl oxfords, because neither the brown kids nor the black ones would have been less envious wearing them. By not blinking, I kept the evil eye off me.
There were the remaining farm families, and nestled in the valleys or in the woods were people much like the expats we had met in Africa and South America. People only Daddy had ever seen, people he met on his scouting expeditions -- the Lesbian physician in the modern house behind the sycamores down by the creek. The alcoholic brother of the Secretary of State in a beautiful old house built, as in the 18th century, right by the side of the country lane. The Lesbian headmistress in the former stables behind our house, with whom, Daddy determined, he shared some First Family of Virginia ancestors or acquaintances or cemetary real estate. He had planted around the house some vinca, he told me, that he had brought up from her family graveyard down in southwest Virginia. The Christian Scientists who dwelt in a very modern bungalow high on a hill behind us. Their unfortunate-looking daughter got pregnant by one of farmer Ramey’s sons. I remember coming upon her in her maternity bathing suit at the swimming hole -- only Daddy had ever seen O’Meara, the dentist who owned the pond. She avoided our eyes as she put down her book, arose from her beach towel, did her 10 laps, and disappeared up the hill with her never-to-be-braced buck teeth. All these people were hidden in the hills in those days, before the Redskins coach discovered the valley and built the house which ruined everyone's view.
I remember every inch of the house; I still dream of it. It was the house in which I was to live the longest with my father. It was, I think, the first house in which they unpacked their books.
The legend I told myself until almost yesterday was that Daddy and I walked the beaches of the Caribbean together, and that he told me the names of the shells. The fact is I cannot remember doing this. I can remember pacing Passagrille beach in Florida by myself, aged two, in a bikini made by my mother out of a red bandanna. I remember being embarrassed by the bathing suit, and standing by the blanket of some people who were too obsequious about cuteness. I remember thinking something snarky, along the lines of, have we been introduced?
By holding the whole narrative of my father gently in my mind I got a glimpse just yesterday of Daddy saying, "coquina" to me, perhaps, "these are little coquina shells" about some shells I’d picked up by myself. His voice is gentle and pleased; I think I have the shells in my hand, that they are indigo inside, and I am showing them to him. "Coquina" might be a way of corroborating his intermittent instruction of me in words and things only he could know. It might be a way of locating where we were and how old I was except that coquinas, like us, were everywhere. This too could be a legend; only my dreams tell the truth. Nabokov, in Speak, Memory, says time is a sphere and there is no escaping it; that is very charming but perhaps a little too Slavic for me. I think these worlds continue to exist: the proof is in my dreams, in how my knowledge of my father and his story increases as I keep him in my mind, and how much more forgiving time and the truth are than the legend.
As there was in Nabokov's neighborhood, there was violence in St. Petersburg, Florida, as well: a little Jewish boy whose parents had survived the camps tore down the street toward me, lifted my arm to his lips, and sunk his teeth into my forearm. His parents did not interfere. I can still see the whites around his mother's brown eyes as she smiled at me, nauseated yet not displeased. I was astounded and stood, motionless, staring at the perfect carnal purple indentations of his teeth in my forearm, at him, at his parents. My mother told me to be nice to him.
I watched my cousin press pennies around his nostrils and shoved a sharp toy coin up my nose, which my mother removed with plenty of blood and tweezers. I sat in a red ant hill. I cut myself helping my mother in the kitchen, and still have the St. Petersburg kitchen scar on my left index finger. I tried to see how tightly the holes in a concrete block fit my foot. I removed all the neighbor's eggs from the hen's nests and broke them into the cannibals' chicken mash pan. Only the chickens and I were happy about it. Daddy was not around; he like me was exploring the world. He stayed in the Virgin Islands after we left to pursue what my mother now calls their open marriage.
The fact is the most time I spent with my father was when we lived in Virginia together in the old white clapboard farmhouse. For the first time, his concatenating energy flowed into the house instead of out of it, and the people he befriended were people I myself ran into, people who talked to me about my father. It isn't only that it was the first time he was really around, or that I was old enough to pay attention. It's that we were in one place for four years. He had values I was interested in. I got to follow up and to benefit from the sense of his taking care of me, to see the return in the spring of the jacks-in-the-pulpit he found in the woods on Achie's Hill and brought home to plant in his forest garden under the hundred-year-old Norway maples in front of the house. The piles of fire wood that he chopped. The books he recovered from storage at his family's hometown, books of poetry written by the aunt who had killed herself before I was born, slim paper bound books inscribed in handwriting I determined to be hers (by looking at her signature on the flyleaves of others), "To Bob, from Jim." Daddy always told me she had died of a broken heart, and when I was baptized in Africa -- in what denomination of church no one now living cares or can remember -- I was given her name as a middle name. It was, perhaps, in the old house, that I first saw photographs taken of my father as a child in his own father's garden, and I saw I was his creature, his spit and image, flesh of his flesh. I had the time to read him and to put the clues together.
The room in which the books had been unpacked was a hall. Daddy built crude bookshelves along one side of it, from floor to ceiling, and on either side of the door. The hall had a slanting ceiling and two small windows on the short side of the wall. Underneath these windows my parents put the seven-foot bed they had had custom-made in some cheap foreign land so Daddy's size 13 feet wouldn't hang off the end of the bed. On that bed I read the family books, including about 30 years of National Geographics and my namesake's Lesbian love poetry. I determined too, from reading flyleaves, that my parents had been divorced from each other and had remarried -- how shortly before my birth I was not to know until years later, when my mother turned her papers and business affairs over to me. I read all the Thomas Hardy books my mother was studying for her masters' thesis. Freedom of access to all their books meant the world to me.
Yesterday I was walking down the alley behind my apartment building. I like to let the dog go off leash and have plotted an all-alley walk through the heart of the city. One of the neighbors is excavating the backyard of their townhouse to install a garage. The earth beneath the city always touches me; this earth is red, red like Virginia’s, red like Africa’s, red as if that were the color of terra firma.
Driving through Virginia I always feel at home when I see the earth -- you have to get much farther out into the country now to see earth. I felt at home when I saw the red earth on the website of the college at which my mother taught in Africa; I felt the same when I saw it in Cuba. In Virginia, in the old farmhouse, my family history accrued to me for the first time. I remember seeing my mother and father sitting peaceably together on the back porch in the summer twilight, looking at the fireflies and talking quietly to each other, companionably in love, perhaps. I do not remember another glimpse of them in such a state, though there is a photograph of them, beautiful in their 20s, years before I was born, standing on top of the Andes, holding hands. My memory of the old farmhouse, and the ongoing dream I have of it, must have something to do with that singular vision.
My first memory of the house is of eating on a card table in the garage before it was ready to move into. The garage door is up, the sunlight is dancing in spots through the leaves of the ancient apple tree which shaded the driveway. One of the neighbors -- one I now think was bored to death by his wife and her cooking -- is stopping by for lunch. His wife always said he hated garlic.
The garage, like the hall shelves with their books -- Auntie Mame, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, yielded artifacts of my father's life no one had told me. Up on the shelf was the 14-foot stuffed rattlesnake he'd killed with his butterfly net one day in his youth, stored all those years at his sister's house. There was a freezer in the garage which he filled with zucchini and raspberries to keep the Depression away from us; it did. There were his father's Victrola and his own records. I’d sit in the living room, with its gorgeous red wallpaper, and the glowing white Andean wool rug, scotch-guarded with its own lanolin, and listen to tom Lehrer:
They're rioting in Africa
They're starving in Spain
They're hurricanes in Florida
And Texas needs rain.
The whole world is festering
With unhappy souls
The French hate the Germans
The Germans hate the Poles
Italians hate Yugoslavs
South Africans hate the Dutch
And I don't like anybody
Very much.
There was Walt Kelly singing his own Pogo for President campaign song:
As Maine go o so Pogo go Key Largo,
Otsego to Frisco go to Fargo,
Okeefenokee playin', possum on a Pogo,
Stick around and see the show
Go over Land alive a band o' jive will blow go Pogo,
I go you go who go to go pollyvoo go,
From Caravan Diego, Waco and Oswego,
Tweedle de he go she go we go me go Pogo.
There were college drinking songs from which I learned 18th century fraternity boy Latin, musical comedies like Irma la Douce and classical music of the racier and more florid kind, Puccini, Khachaturian, Orff. Daddy set great store by this music, though he was never around when I listened to it and I never went to a concert with him. The one recording I have of his voice is of him singing Christmas carols. Green Grow the Rushes, Oh, and other ancient mysterious tunes he learned in the 1930s from the expat Brits he found, who were building and administering the railroads hidden in the quieter reaches of the Peruvian Andes. I remember his singing 'On Ilkley Moor' in Africa. I can see and hear him now, sitting at the dining room table in our bungalow in the bush, with his eyes cast down and the light of the window behind me shining on his face. He sang it with an impeccable impressionist's Yorkshire accent, and the consecrated sound of it – on Eeekla Moor ba t’haat – brings back much of the music I heard in Africa – Daddy playing “Cielito Lindo” on the guitar; the muezzin’s call on Radio Pakistan -- the only channel we could get on the shortwave radio; the African drum circles in which my mother and I shuffled ecstatically around; the Kpelle hymns they taught us in the Baptist mission up the road. Saleh nufe na, we sang, Nangwa pelle mu. In my father’s house, there are many mansions.
I could sing them all myself today. As anyone could deduce from the record jackets -- Go Go Pogo to Gaudeamus Igitur – I learned that my father was a linguist, with a degree in Latin and Greek, and a gentleman. Only my mother, who was the granddaughter of a butcher, cared about that. My ancestors materialized around me in the old house as my mother unpacked her trousseau – sheets ruffled with calico by her grandmother, bathmats appliquéd with dragonflies and their transparent organdy wings, fish plates handpainted with indigo shells and sea green depths by the wife of the butcher. She had been deaf, and spent her life in profound silence, making beautiful things, and tall, handsome, long-cheeked, manic-depressive, olive-skinned children. From my father’s family came the anatomically correct Audubon prints of blue herons which hung, beady-eyed and snakeskined, in the kitchen.
If my family came home to roost in the old house, much of my education about what America was took place there as well. From the the Virginia Piedmont palace of Thomas Jefferson, Monticello, came a cardboard broadside of his sayings. Hanging by its red, white and blue silk cord, it yellowed over the years on a peg over the fireplace in the kitchen. I looked at it every day at breakfast. I learned the names of all the commuter highways – Viers Mill Road, East-West Highway -- by listening to the traffic reports every morning on the little blue radio in my room. By not changing the channel, I also learned all about jazz from the same radio station at night. Jack Teagarden, Gerry Mulligan, Blossom Dearie, that inexpressibly cool heroin heaven, was what I did instead of homework. Listening to jazz, I remember looking at an ad for a diamond-studded poodle pin in the back of The New Yorker magazine, and wondering why such an arbiter of taste would purvey such trashy jewels. Rhinestone poodles, yes. But diamond ones were for the sort of people who did not read The New Yorker. Soon I got it, that Cheever, Updike, and the diamond poodle were suburban – adulterers – just as the arbiter of taste, Shawn, the New Yorker editor, and Bob and Ted and Carol and Alice and Daddy and mother and Thomas Jefferson turned out to be, and that I, without ever wanting to be good, could never be. “The tree of liberty,” wrote Jefferson, “must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it's natural manure.”
Truman Capote's account of a Christmas memory in the south is what stirred this one in me, and I have reread Capote to find what it was about what he said that brought my father and Christmas in the old house back to me. It was the fireplace in the kitchen that he mentions, and his cousin's standing to stare out the kitchen window, the trip across the southern fields in winter.
I remember the light which poured through the two kitchen windows of the old house, and the yellow wallpaper with a tiny black silhouette farm, complete with trees and cows, printed on it. I still have the cutting board on which so many family meals were made, and my grandmother’s round oak table, which sat in front of the fireplace, and the 1919 Sears and Roebuck chairs from my father’s family. I remember the striated yellow formica counters, the black coils of the electric stove, and the fire my father would have left burning for me when I got up for school at 6:30. He left earlier, driving in those days, with inverse snobbery, a 1952 Studebaker, once red, with the back seat removed so he could load it up with garbage, I suppose, which he took to the Great Falls dump – the meeting place of the rural community -- every Saturday. The house is always empty in my memory, and in my dreams.
I can remember with precision every creaking floor board of the old house, the wallpaper in each room, and the sound walking through each room made, so that you could tell where anyone in the house was walking. As if I were a camera, I can remember my bed, my window, my dog, going downstairs in the morning for breakfast, the smell of the woodsmoke, the dawn through the kitchen window, walking to the bus, the names of each child who got on the bus, and the countryside, now gone, through which we rode to school. I can hear the countryside in the winter. The slide and thump of snow off the roof, and off the glittering leaves of the holly. The hiss of frozen powdery snow blowing upon itself. The intense pressure of cold on your face, the stinging septum and sinuses, the squeak of boots in the snow.The caw of the crow, the screech of Daddy’s beloved cardinals over the seed he put out in homemade feeders. We ate the squirrels who interfered with the birds’ food; he buried the cats he shot in the asparagus trench; once, when old, he started to cry at the thought of a bird in a cage.
Try as I might I can remember only two moments of walking with my father through the woods. The truth is, he ignored me. Yet this has always been my heroic myth of him, that we walked the beach together and he told me the names of the shells. I loved him, and he loved me, and the proof of my father’s love is I discovered him the same way he lost his black cloud, and discovered the wide world: by tracking -- by ceaseless reading of the signs and footprints and lacunae. And that is my Christmas memory of him, bending over some fox droppings in the forest on Achie’s Hill, full of red berries and seeds, and his telling me they were fox droppings full of seeds and berries. Perhaps it was then he told me that’s how plants were propagated. He pointed out to me that day, too, the ground cedar from which his people made Christmas wreaths; I don't remember the garlands we made from it but the scent of it brings tears to my eyes.
It could not have been that day – for it was winter – that he made creation my cathedral by showing me that trees have ancestors – horses’ tails – equisetum, he called them, growing in Miss Preston’s field. It is a word I could not know if it were not for Daddy. The black cloud is not over his head, I am not making him laugh, the wide world is spread out before him.
There are other gifts of father love that I earned from tracking Daddy – there is no mistaking who my Daddy was, I am he, eye for green eye. Action in the physical universe – I have two pictures of him here, one on the day he was given a WW2 medal, and one of his lank form doing a handstand on the Copacabana Beach – was his medium. Husbandry, classification – if not adjudication, a name for everything in the garden, his fine Virginia accent, chopped wood, love as justice, driving stick, and the power to make the meanest motherfucker laugh, all are gifts I earned from him.
But the greatest one is the one he gave me. One April I went for a walk in the woods down behind Ball’s Bluff with the guy from the Smithsonian who knows all the little woods flowers that grow there, on the site of a savage Civil War massacre that the Confederacy, for once, won.
At the foot of the bluff, a secret garden down behind the small cemetery of Union soldiers in a park notable for its emptiness, there was a stand of bluebells fifty feet long and 15 feet wide, a river of sky blue flowers blooming for their tiny moment in the dappled sunshine of the barely fledged trees. I saw them there. There are worlds like the blue bells in the woods down behind the cemetery at Ball’s Bluff in April. Even if these eyes never see them again, I know that they are there.
Saleh Nufe Na
My first memory of my father is far away from snow, if not wintry darkness. I don't talk yet. I am making him laugh, in San Juan, by crawling quickly on my bare knees across a sisal rug, turning around, and sitting down, and saying, ha jaja. There was a dark cloud over his head and making him laugh was a way of making nothing out of something. I did not see the dark cloud over his head, nor did my knees sting, until after his death.
My second memory is perhaps two years later; we are on the beach in Africa body-surfing. My mother is emerging wet from the waves in her legendary strapless bathing suit, green with real gold polka dots, which peels down when she dives off ketches into the Caribbean. There are no ketches moored off Africa, only gravelly surf and thunder over Daddy's head while my mother casts her eyes down and smiles. He has been tossing me in the air and I have bitten my tongue. Something about his profile high above me against a pale blue sky edged with brass tells me not to interrupt. I turn my back to them and press a salty wet towel to my tongue.
I have glimpses of him in Africa. Of the barracuda he caught fishing in the gravelly surf -- there was no fresh meat for two years -- how it nearly bit the tip of his thumb off and filled my throat with a two inch bone. Of looking down into a ravine where his 4-wheel-drive Jeep has turned over, and there is blood on the roof. Of seeing him walk up the red-dirt hill toward me, as I stand on the porch, with the cast on his broken collar bone and a drink in his hand, and feeling all was well. Of his killing a rat in my underwear drawer with my toy ball and paddle. Of the moonflower vine he planted in the virtually nutritionless soil next to our concrete bungalow, which I watched open every night and semaphore its perfume into the humid darkness. Of looking to the right from our porch out to the bush where a parting at the edge reveals daddy, bare-chested in his khaki shorts, picking his way through the underbrush in long strides, butterfly net in hand.
I remember my own private life as a four-year-old much more clearly. He was not a part of it. There are photographs of the Christmas tree he made out of palm fronds, and legends about it; I do not remember it. I do remember an Easter bunny I was told he had made out of a bonbon, cotton swabs, and pink paper. I remember with more clarity the snake eggs I found hatching the same Easter morning; whether or not Easter was the actual date of the snake hatching is a question I can't answer. most of my memories corroborate, or did, until my mother began to forget.
I remember sitting across the dining room table from him in south America, with the Andes rising up behind him through the window, that dark cloud over him and snow on top of the Andes. I remember sitting at that table while he said to me, "remember the starving Armenians." The Armenians had last starved during his own childhood, and his religious fanatic parents told him to eat his vegetables by invoking their suffering. I have always associated him with the Andes behind him at the dinner table; he loved to climb and came from southwest Virginia, where the old old mountains still have some height. The story of Willi Unsoeld and the death of his daughter Nanda Devi on the Himalayan peak after which he had named her electrified me when I first read it.
I remember in South America his making a big ceremony out of spanking me at my mother's request, for some crime I do not now remember.
I don't remember the cloud over his head disappearing until Christmas in Virginia.
In those days it was dairy farm country. The hills were cropped by cows and horses, and changed color with the seasons, chartreuse to green to buff with feathery bronze grasses here and there, then white. In those days it still snowed every winter. The cows, Daddy told me, also kept the tree branches at the edges of the pastures cropped as evenly as English topiary to the distance their extended necks could reach.
I played in the barn at the Rameys' dairy farm, with the kittens and the old brindle dog. I toured the milking barn and the milk machinery room, and sat with Mrs. Ramey at the kitchen table, which she kept covered with an oil cloth. On it, she told me, she served dinner at midday to Ramey and her two sons.
Our house was set on the best hill in the place, and had been built around 1830, probably the first house in the valley. Another hill rose higher behind us, another behind and to the right was covered with pine woods -- Achie's Hill, daddy called it. On the right was Charlie Bradley’s hill. He was red-headed and his father had been killed the year before we came when the tractor overturned on him. There was a bare hill straight out the front door and across the valley, one on which the local football coach was to build his fake French chateau years later. To the left was yet another hill, with a gone-with-the-wind porticoed house on it -- a farm house it was, the Rhineharts'. They had a run-down horse farm on the hills which rose up behind their run-down plantation house.
Cultures clashed. Black people lived not on the hilltops but in the hollows; they attended separate schools and made the separate school bus sit and wait for them while they ambled slowly, smiling slyly, looking at me sideways, down the last bit of country road to the bus stop. I recognized the eye contact as homicidal. It hurt but did not frighten me. Neither had the South American children who threw stones at me on the way to school because I was wearing shoes. Gringa jeringa! Mata la wawa! Con su paragua llena de agua! I may well have been annoying, but I hung on to my scuffed, brown, orthopedic little girl oxfords, because neither the brown kids nor the black ones would have been less envious wearing them. By not blinking, I kept the evil eye off me.
There were the remaining farm families, and nestled in the valleys or in the woods were people much like the expats we had met in Africa and South America. People only Daddy had ever seen, people he met on his scouting expeditions -- the Lesbian physician in the modern house behind the sycamores down by the creek. The alcoholic brother of the Secretary of State in a beautiful old house built, as in the 18th century, right by the side of the country lane. The Lesbian headmistress in the former stables behind our house, with whom, Daddy determined, he shared some First Family of Virginia ancestors or acquaintances or cemetary real estate. He had planted around the house some vinca, he told me, that he had brought up from her family graveyard down in southwest Virginia. The Christian Scientists who dwelt in a very modern bungalow high on a hill behind us. Their unfortunate-looking daughter got pregnant by one of farmer Ramey’s sons. I remember coming upon her in her maternity bathing suit at the swimming hole -- only Daddy had ever seen O’Meara, the dentist who owned the pond. She avoided our eyes as she put down her book, arose from her beach towel, did her 10 laps, and disappeared up the hill with her never-to-be-braced buck teeth. All these people were hidden in the hills in those days, before the Redskins coach discovered the valley and built the house which ruined everyone's view.
I remember every inch of the house; I still dream of it. It was the house in which I was to live the longest with my father. It was, I think, the first house in which they unpacked their books.
The legend I told myself until almost yesterday was that Daddy and I walked the beaches of the Caribbean together, and that he told me the names of the shells. The fact is I cannot remember doing this. I can remember pacing Passagrille beach in Florida by myself, aged two, in a bikini made by my mother out of a red bandanna. I remember being embarrassed by the bathing suit, and standing by the blanket of some people who were too obsequious about cuteness. I remember thinking something snarky, along the lines of, have we been introduced?
By holding the whole narrative of my father gently in my mind I got a glimpse just yesterday of Daddy saying, "coquina" to me, perhaps, "these are little coquina shells" about some shells I’d picked up by myself. His voice is gentle and pleased; I think I have the shells in my hand, that they are indigo inside, and I am showing them to him. "Coquina" might be a way of corroborating his intermittent instruction of me in words and things only he could know. It might be a way of locating where we were and how old I was except that coquinas, like us, were everywhere. This too could be a legend; only my dreams tell the truth. Nabokov, in Speak, Memory, says time is a sphere and there is no escaping it; that is very charming but perhaps a little too Slavic for me. I think these worlds continue to exist: the proof is in my dreams, in how my knowledge of my father and his story increases as I keep him in my mind, and how much more forgiving time and the truth are than the legend.
As there was in Nabokov's neighborhood, there was violence in St. Petersburg, Florida, as well: a little Jewish boy whose parents had survived the camps tore down the street toward me, lifted my arm to his lips, and sunk his teeth into my forearm. His parents did not interfere. I can still see the whites around his mother's brown eyes as she smiled at me, nauseated yet not displeased. I was astounded and stood, motionless, staring at the perfect carnal purple indentations of his teeth in my forearm, at him, at his parents. My mother told me to be nice to him.
I watched my cousin press pennies around his nostrils and shoved a sharp toy coin up my nose, which my mother removed with plenty of blood and tweezers. I sat in a red ant hill. I cut myself helping my mother in the kitchen, and still have the St. Petersburg kitchen scar on my left index finger. I tried to see how tightly the holes in a concrete block fit my foot. I removed all the neighbor's eggs from the hen's nests and broke them into the cannibals' chicken mash pan. Only the chickens and I were happy about it. Daddy was not around; he like me was exploring the world. He stayed in the Virgin Islands after we left to pursue what my mother now calls their open marriage.
The fact is the most time I spent with my father was when we lived in Virginia together in the old white clapboard farmhouse. For the first time, his concatenating energy flowed into the house instead of out of it, and the people he befriended were people I myself ran into, people who talked to me about my father. It isn't only that it was the first time he was really around, or that I was old enough to pay attention. It's that we were in one place for four years. He had values I was interested in. I got to follow up and to benefit from the sense of his taking care of me, to see the return in the spring of the jacks-in-the-pulpit he found in the woods on Achie's Hill and brought home to plant in his forest garden under the hundred-year-old Norway maples in front of the house. The piles of fire wood that he chopped. The books he recovered from storage at his family's hometown, books of poetry written by the aunt who had killed herself before I was born, slim paper bound books inscribed in handwriting I determined to be hers (by looking at her signature on the flyleaves of others), "To Bob, from Jim." Daddy always told me she had died of a broken heart, and when I was baptized in Africa -- in what denomination of church no one now living cares or can remember -- I was given her name as a middle name. It was, perhaps, in the old house, that I first saw photographs taken of my father as a child in his own father's garden, and I saw I was his creature, his spit and image, flesh of his flesh. I had the time to read him and to put the clues together.
The room in which the books had been unpacked was a hall. Daddy built crude bookshelves along one side of it, from floor to ceiling, and on either side of the door. The hall had a slanting ceiling and two small windows on the short side of the wall. Underneath these windows my parents put the seven-foot bed they had had custom-made in some cheap foreign land so Daddy's size 13 feet wouldn't hang off the end of the bed. On that bed I read the family books, including about 30 years of National Geographics and my namesake's Lesbian love poetry. I determined too, from reading flyleaves, that my parents had been divorced from each other and had remarried -- how shortly before my birth I was not to know until years later, when my mother turned her papers and business affairs over to me. I read all the Thomas Hardy books my mother was studying for her masters' thesis. Freedom of access to all their books meant the world to me.
Yesterday I was walking down the alley behind my apartment building. I like to let the dog go off leash and have plotted an all-alley walk through the heart of the city. One of the neighbors is excavating the backyard of their townhouse to install a garage. The earth beneath the city always touches me; this earth is red, red like Virginia’s, red like Africa’s, red as if that were the color of terra firma.
Driving through Virginia I always feel at home when I see the earth -- you have to get much farther out into the country now to see earth. I felt at home when I saw the red earth on the website of the college at which my mother taught in Africa; I felt the same when I saw it in Cuba. In Virginia, in the old farmhouse, my family history accrued to me for the first time. I remember seeing my mother and father sitting peaceably together on the back porch in the summer twilight, looking at the fireflies and talking quietly to each other, companionably in love, perhaps. I do not remember another glimpse of them in such a state, though there is a photograph of them, beautiful in their 20s, years before I was born, standing on top of the Andes, holding hands. My memory of the old farmhouse, and the ongoing dream I have of it, must have something to do with that singular vision.
My first memory of the house is of eating on a card table in the garage before it was ready to move into. The garage door is up, the sunlight is dancing in spots through the leaves of the ancient apple tree which shaded the driveway. One of the neighbors -- one I now think was bored to death by his wife and her cooking -- is stopping by for lunch. His wife always said he hated garlic.
The garage, like the hall shelves with their books -- Auntie Mame, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, yielded artifacts of my father's life no one had told me. Up on the shelf was the 14-foot stuffed rattlesnake he'd killed with his butterfly net one day in his youth, stored all those years at his sister's house. There was a freezer in the garage which he filled with zucchini and raspberries to keep the Depression away from us; it did. There were his father's Victrola and his own records. I’d sit in the living room, with its gorgeous red wallpaper, and the glowing white Andean wool rug, scotch-guarded with its own lanolin, and listen to tom Lehrer:
They're rioting in Africa
They're starving in Spain
They're hurricanes in Florida
And Texas needs rain.
The whole world is festering
With unhappy souls
The French hate the Germans
The Germans hate the Poles
Italians hate Yugoslavs
South Africans hate the Dutch
And I don't like anybody
Very much.
There was Walt Kelly singing his own Pogo for President campaign song:
As Maine go o so Pogo go Key Largo,
Otsego to Frisco go to Fargo,
Okeefenokee playin', possum on a Pogo,
Stick around and see the show
Go over Land alive a band o' jive will blow go Pogo,
I go you go who go to go pollyvoo go,
From Caravan Diego, Waco and Oswego,
Tweedle de he go she go we go me go Pogo.
There were college drinking songs from which I learned 18th century fraternity boy Latin, musical comedies like Irma la Douce and classical music of the racier and more florid kind, Puccini, Khachaturian, Orff. Daddy set great store by this music, though he was never around when I listened to it and I never went to a concert with him. The one recording I have of his voice is of him singing Christmas carols. Green Grow the Rushes, Oh, and other ancient mysterious tunes he learned in the 1930s from the expat Brits he found, who were building and administering the railroads hidden in the quieter reaches of the Peruvian Andes. I remember his singing 'On Ilkley Moor' in Africa. I can see and hear him now, sitting at the dining room table in our bungalow in the bush, with his eyes cast down and the light of the window behind me shining on his face. He sang it with an impeccable impressionist's Yorkshire accent, and the consecrated sound of it – on Eeekla Moor ba t’haat – brings back much of the music I heard in Africa – Daddy playing “Cielito Lindo” on the guitar; the muezzin’s call on Radio Pakistan -- the only channel we could get on the shortwave radio; the African drum circles in which my mother and I shuffled ecstatically around; the Kpelle hymns they taught us in the Baptist mission up the road. Saleh nufe na, we sang, Nangwa pelle mu. In my father’s house, there are many mansions.
I could sing them all myself today. As anyone could deduce from the record jackets -- Go Go Pogo to Gaudeamus Igitur – I learned that my father was a linguist, with a degree in Latin and Greek, and a gentleman. Only my mother, who was the granddaughter of a butcher, cared about that. My ancestors materialized around me in the old house as my mother unpacked her trousseau – sheets ruffled with calico by her grandmother, bathmats appliquéd with dragonflies and their transparent organdy wings, fish plates handpainted with indigo shells and sea green depths by the wife of the butcher. She had been deaf, and spent her life in profound silence, making beautiful things, and tall, handsome, long-cheeked, manic-depressive, olive-skinned children. From my father’s family came the anatomically correct Audubon prints of blue herons which hung, beady-eyed and snakeskined, in the kitchen.
If my family came home to roost in the old house, much of my education about what America was took place there as well. From the the Virginia Piedmont palace of Thomas Jefferson, Monticello, came a cardboard broadside of his sayings. Hanging by its red, white and blue silk cord, it yellowed over the years on a peg over the fireplace in the kitchen. I looked at it every day at breakfast. I learned the names of all the commuter highways – Viers Mill Road, East-West Highway -- by listening to the traffic reports every morning on the little blue radio in my room. By not changing the channel, I also learned all about jazz from the same radio station at night. Jack Teagarden, Gerry Mulligan, Blossom Dearie, that inexpressibly cool heroin heaven, was what I did instead of homework. Listening to jazz, I remember looking at an ad for a diamond-studded poodle pin in the back of The New Yorker magazine, and wondering why such an arbiter of taste would purvey such trashy jewels. Rhinestone poodles, yes. But diamond ones were for the sort of people who did not read The New Yorker. Soon I got it, that Cheever, Updike, and the diamond poodle were suburban – adulterers – just as the arbiter of taste, Shawn, the New Yorker editor, and Bob and Ted and Carol and Alice and Daddy and mother and Thomas Jefferson turned out to be, and that I, without ever wanting to be good, could never be. “The tree of liberty,” wrote Jefferson, “must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it's natural manure.”
Truman Capote's account of a Christmas memory in the south is what stirred this one in me, and I have reread Capote to find what it was about what he said that brought my father and Christmas in the old house back to me. It was the fireplace in the kitchen that he mentions, and his cousin's standing to stare out the kitchen window, the trip across the southern fields in winter.
I remember the light which poured through the two kitchen windows of the old house, and the yellow wallpaper with a tiny black silhouette farm, complete with trees and cows, printed on it. I still have the cutting board on which so many family meals were made, and my grandmother’s round oak table, which sat in front of the fireplace, and the 1919 Sears and Roebuck chairs from my father’s family. I remember the striated yellow formica counters, the black coils of the electric stove, and the fire my father would have left burning for me when I got up for school at 6:30. He left earlier, driving in those days, with inverse snobbery, a 1952 Studebaker, once red, with the back seat removed so he could load it up with garbage, I suppose, which he took to the Great Falls dump – the meeting place of the rural community -- every Saturday. The house is always empty in my memory, and in my dreams.
I can remember with precision every creaking floor board of the old house, the wallpaper in each room, and the sound walking through each room made, so that you could tell where anyone in the house was walking. As if I were a camera, I can remember my bed, my window, my dog, going downstairs in the morning for breakfast, the smell of the woodsmoke, the dawn through the kitchen window, walking to the bus, the names of each child who got on the bus, and the countryside, now gone, through which we rode to school. I can hear the countryside in the winter. The slide and thump of snow off the roof, and off the glittering leaves of the holly. The hiss of frozen powdery snow blowing upon itself. The intense pressure of cold on your face, the stinging septum and sinuses, the squeak of boots in the snow.The caw of the crow, the screech of Daddy’s beloved cardinals over the seed he put out in homemade feeders. We ate the squirrels who interfered with the birds’ food; he buried the cats he shot in the asparagus trench; once, when old, he started to cry at the thought of a bird in a cage.
Try as I might I can remember only two moments of walking with my father through the woods. The truth is, he ignored me. Yet this has always been my heroic myth of him, that we walked the beach together and he told me the names of the shells. I loved him, and he loved me, and the proof of my father’s love is I discovered him the same way he lost his black cloud, and discovered the wide world: by tracking -- by ceaseless reading of the signs and footprints and lacunae. And that is my Christmas memory of him, bending over some fox droppings in the forest on Achie’s Hill, full of red berries and seeds, and his telling me they were fox droppings full of seeds and berries. Perhaps it was then he told me that’s how plants were propagated. He pointed out to me that day, too, the ground cedar from which his people made Christmas wreaths; I don't remember the garlands we made from it but the scent of it brings tears to my eyes.
It could not have been that day – for it was winter – that he made creation my cathedral by showing me that trees have ancestors – horses’ tails – equisetum, he called them, growing in Miss Preston’s field. It is a word I could not know if it were not for Daddy. The black cloud is not over his head, I am not making him laugh, the wide world is spread out before him.
There are other gifts of father love that I earned from tracking Daddy – there is no mistaking who my Daddy was, I am he, eye for green eye. Action in the physical universe – I have two pictures of him here, one on the day he was given a WW2 medal, and one of his lank form doing a handstand on the Copacabana Beach – was his medium. Husbandry, classification – if not adjudication, a name for everything in the garden, his fine Virginia accent, chopped wood, love as justice, driving stick, and the power to make the meanest motherfucker laugh, all are gifts I earned from him.
But the greatest one is the one he gave me. One April I went for a walk in the woods down behind Ball’s Bluff with the guy from the Smithsonian who knows all the little woods flowers that grow there, on the site of a savage Civil War massacre that the Confederacy, for once, won.
At the foot of the bluff, a secret garden down behind the small cemetery of Union soldiers in a park notable for its emptiness, there was a stand of bluebells fifty feet long and 15 feet wide, a river of sky blue flowers blooming for their tiny moment in the dappled sunshine of the barely fledged trees. I saw them there. There are worlds like the blue bells in the woods down behind the cemetery at Ball’s Bluff in April. Even if these eyes never see them again, I know that they are there.
