All the Little Live Things (22 page)

My teachers thought me gifted; eventually I found my way to a scholarship and a part-time job at the University of Illinois—it really is a land of opportunity and there really is such a thing as disinterested human kindness. Or the intention of kindness, for like many good intentions, the help of my high-school principal had mixed results. I was exploded into books and ideas and the company of people so different from those I had known in my maid’s-room, boardinghouse life that they might have been another species. I was in a constant tremble like an overfilled glass. I discovered that I was bright, and it made me drunk to realize it. And it never occurred to me, though I had worked summers since I was twelve, that instead of blotting up teachers’ attention and devouring books I might be out earning some money to make my mother’s life easier. When we’re young, we take so casually every sacrifice offered by the old. At least I did. Also I know that if it had occurred to me she would never have permitted it for one hour. She would have thought even a year, even a semester, a catastrophic wasting of my talents, though I was only sixteen and could have spared it easily.

I had been a child unnaturally self-contained, I had had to learn early to be seen and not heard. I had hidden myself in corners and window seats and backyards and sheds with books or projects of my own, knowing even at seven or eight that the maid’s child would be suffered, and sometimes sentimentally made over, but not indulged. When college blew up all those inhibitions, I must have been insufferable, the sort of cub who would now set my teeth on edge. Anyone who did not accept the opinions that I had developed within the hour, or read in a book ten minutes ago, or advanced in argument because the argument obviously called for them, was an idiot, and apart from thee and me there were a lot of idiots in the world. You know me—I have not substantially changed. Among other things, I remember resolving that I would live without emotion. I had some hot debates in which I disparaged poetry because it was irrational and therefore unreliable. An emotion, I said, was an imperfect thought. I would live in the thin pure air of reason. (Ashes on my head—I was preposterous. Yet I was recognizably the ancestor of the intemperate old fool you know.)

My mother could find no job in Champaign-Urbana, or pretended she couldn’t. After coming down with me from Elgin, where we had been living, she warmed herself for a day among buildings, stadium, lawns full of students and squirrels, and then she went away again, probably out of pure delicacy because she could see she embarrassed me, and got a job in a boardinghouse in Chicago.

I saw her go with relief. Later I hid her letters from my roommate, because I was ashamed of their lined tablet paper and their penciled, misspelled, mixed Danish and English. Though I thought I loved her, and told myself that I would rescue her and bring her to my mansion as soon as I finished college and had set my life on the track to some star, I would not for all the praise I hoped to win and all the money I expected to make have had it known that my mother was a maid of all work in a rooming house, a servant to clerks and shop-girls.

Not too many of her letters had to be read in haste and hidden in a drawer. In December of my first college year, going down cellar to stoke the furnace, she caught her heel in a rotten step and fell. My only visit back to Chicago was to her funeral.

Luckless and deprived, she lies in a South Side cemetery in an unvisited grave, a clumsy Danish servant girl without one relative besides myself on the American continent. She had married, supported, and buried two weak husbands, and thereafter given herself up to making a life for her son. It all reads like one great cliché. But maybe love and sorrow are always clichés, ambition and selfishness and regret are clichés, death is a cliché. It’s only the literary, hot for novelty, who fear cliché, and I am no longer of that tribe.

I hadn’t thought of my mother ten times in twenty years, but in the bad time after Curt’s death she came every night to join the spirit of my dead son. Between them they drowned my heart and mind, for I had to set her devotion to me, which was the best thing in my life until I met Ruth, against my own unwillingness to accept or forgive Curt. Would she have judged me, no matter how selfish and demoralized I might have become? Would she, in my place, have been able to reconcile herself to a scapegrace and give him the uncritical love that I was half convinced, he had been demanding of me? And if she had, would I have approved? Down in my heart, wouldn’t I have thought her sentimental, and abused her for the love I knew I had not earned?

My two ghosts kept Ruth from getting close to me, and they made me sick for what I had done to people I loved, and what they had done to me. If I forgave Curt, I had to forgive myself. And there were the talents I had got from the great Grab Bag—I had failed to make anything of them, but I couldn’t determine whom or what I had failed, for I couldn’t refer myself to any source, tribe, family, region, nation, tradition, gene pool, or anything else to which the wastage of my life could be called a loss. I grew to hate the thin dispersal of my relatives, my mother in Chicago earth and my son in Bucks County, each alone among strangers. And here was I, random and now childless, making meaningless orbits in the Madison Avenue void.

Lose a dog in the woods, no matter how
oscura,
and he will follow the back track to the place where he went in. At past sixty, rather deep in the woods, I was lifting my nose from among the mold and mushrooms to sniff at any cold scent that promised to lead me somewhere. But I could find no place that was mine. The crisscrossing trails of my mother’s life had confused all the scents.

In the end, we made, one after the other, the two moves that are possible to Americans and lost dogs. We smelled our way back to the old country and sniffed for a while around Copenhagen and around the little island of Taasinge in the southwestern Baltic where my mother was born. We learned something, perhaps, but that is another story. What matters is that I didn’t smell one thing that was familiar or that meant anything personal; not a person, not an echo, not a whiff from the past. Europe was cut off, no longer anything to me.

So we did the other thing that Americans and lost dogs can do, we quit trying to backtrack and went forward. We turned our backs on everything remembered and came out to make a new beginning in California. It wasn’t a radical act, in a way. It was a habitual one, it conformed to twenty generations of American experience. We would have pooh-poohed the idea that we were living by the Garden myth, but we were, we are. We expected to become less culpable by becoming more withdrawn. We shook dust from our garments and combed bewilderment like twigs from our hair and we abandoned the woods. I am determined not to fight shadows any more, or sit like a nitwitted old woman sorting guilt and blame. I wouldn’t be surprised if Peck and I were unanimous on the subject of harmlessness, at least in theory. I don’t want to harm anybody, I don’t want anybody harming me.

So you see why this Peck exasperates me? He reminds me of things I don’t want to remember. He threatens me, he endangers my peace. If he and Curtis are the future, then I am an irreconcilable past. They leave me nothing, not even the comfort of blindness, because I think I see them very clearly—as clearly as I see my own incapacity to accept them or deal with them.

And, of course, can’t dismiss them either, any more than I can make up my mind to shoo Peck out of my oak tree.

Well, I have been writing you for two hours, trying to say a little more intelligibly some things I said too uncompromisingly the other day. I have come at you like an old weepy barfly, and cornered you, and taken your hand in my damp hand and told you the story of my sad life. I am a continual surprise to myself: I had not thought I was one to spill my guts in this fashion. Usually I am nimbler at ironies and evasive tactics than at the confessional business. Except to me, none of this that I’ve written you is in any way important. But it is personal and it is serious, two things I have always found it troubling to be.

 

This letter I found recently under a stack of old papers in the study. I had never finished it, signed it, or sent it. But it reminds me that even back in midsummer Marian had begun to force or coax me out of the burrow where I lived with the gophers and the moles and the other creatures of darkness.

If Peck was a threat to peace, what was she?

O
NE KIND OF midsummer day here starts gray, with a cool sweat of dew on the leaves, a smell of wetted oat grass, dark wetness in the angles of fences and on the patio screeds. The sky is obscured by the unmoving unmottled ceiling of high fog that will burn away about ten. Once it does, the rest of the day will be warm and even until the evening chill comes on.

But two or three times in a summer we will get up to find the morning cloudless but milky, with a red sun and a vinegarish taint of smog even up here in the hills. The valley is murked out, the near ridges are dim, the far ones gone. If there is any wind, it is a light drift from the inland valleys. The newspapers will speak of inversions, and record a climbing smog count, until, after three or four days of increasing heat and smarting eyes, the built-in air conditioner that lies off the Pacific shore will move inland and hang over the skyline in rolls of cottony fog, blowing us instantly cool again.

The Fourth of July was one of the red-dawn days. When I got up at seven and went out on the terrace the sun was like an orange through Weld’s orchard. The air was sour and still. Between the cinderish bricks of the patio the screeds were warping upward at the ends. Thinking how that brick lawn would radiate heat later, I had a disloyal moment of yearning for the cool grass and broad-leafed shade of rainier climates.

Catarrh had left nothing on the mat. He was not a summer hunter. The first year he had eaten a lot of lizards, but they obviously disagreed with him and he had given them up. He was too lazy to hunt widely, and once he had cleaned out the vermin from the immediate yard in the spring, he relapsed into apathetic snoozing in the flower beds and scavenging the occasional bird that broke its neck against the windows.

I was congratulating myself that at least, now the adobe had dried like cement, Catarrh’s spring extermination would last. Then I walked around the house and discovered that within the past twenty-four hours a gopher had come boring straight under the walk, leaving collapsing bricks in his wake, and was already throwing up mounds of dirt in the rose garden.

These things make me swear out loud. They’re infallible, they find your weakness like heat-seeking missiles. The walk was my only remaining weakness, for within half a year of completing the patio itself, all laid on sand and with sand swept between the bricks as the landscape plan specified, I had discovered that the system was not made for gopher country, in which it got undermined, or for adobe soil, which in the dry season cracked so wide that all the sand went down to China and the bricks caved after it. I had already taken out the entire patio—nine thousand bricks, a brick at a time—and relaid it section by section on a concrete pad. But I hadn’t yet got around to the walk. Presto, this pest finds it.

It is not easy to trap gophers in the loose earth of a flower bed. The usual result is that they kick your trap full of dirt and pack the hole so tight you can’t pull it out. But I couldn’t leave this vermin loose among the roses; I would have to deal with him after breakfast. So I went inside and plugged in the percolator and\ made toast and orange juice and grilled a couple of little breakfast steaks and carried the tray into the bedroom, where Ruth was just stretching herself awake. For a woman who rather scorns physical indulgence she takes a suspicious pleasure in the last luxurious half hour of morning sleep. We breakfasted in the bedroom as usual, with Catarrh curled up on the electric blanket, and after breakfast we read aloud in
Il Gattopardo
for nearly an hour. Ruth insists on these exercises, lest we deteriorate. Only after the Italian lesson did I get out and start for the rose garden with a spading fork and a couple of traps. By then it was already hot.

You can tell a gopher’s general direction by the way the lateral mounds lie. Dig across the line of these and you cut his main tunnel. This is the only effective place to set traps, one facing each way. His instinct is to plug up the place where you have broken into his passage, and backing over the trap dragging dirt under him with his forepaws, he backs his behind into the pan and is speared just behind the forelegs by the sharp wire jaws.

The mounds here ran irregularly toward the comer of the house. As I dropped the tines of the fork to the ground, estimating the angle, I was indulging in a fantasy, thinking how it would be for some ambitious gopher, digging along by that radar or sonar they seemed to possess no less than porpoises, if he ran into the solid gunnited wall of a swimming pool. Aha, he would say to himself, they’re protecting something really precious here. Look how solid, observe how immovable, see how deep. They value this, whatever it is, but they can’t keep it from me. Claws that dig in adobe will never be blunted by cement. Away he digs into the concrete, his full length, twice his length, and pauses for a breather and goes at it again. By his sonar he can hear the wall getting thinner. The cement under his claws becomes damp, then wet, and he thinks, Yea, by God, I’m almost there. I’ll bet it’s a freshly watered flower bed full of roots, or maybe a cold frame of tomatoes, my favorite. And
whulp
comes the whole swimming pool into his face.

Oh happy culmination. Oh well-deserved denouement. But this one I would have to get the hard way. I stepped down on the fork and sank it full length and pried upward.

It came up heavy and struggling. The dirt broke away and left a knot of black and white coils that clenched around the tines. Right out of the earth in one motion, when I had expected only clods and hopefully the dark opening of the tunnel, came this king snake that had lain secretly under my feet.