Quarrel & Quandary (26 page)

Looking out from the back door at those same high weeds stretching from the new red brick of the Park View’s rear wall all the way to the flat rock and its X, my mother, like Theresa, saw hallucinatory shapes rising out of the ground. But it was not the devil’s minions she imagined streaming upward; it was their
very opposite—a vision of celestial growths and fragrances, brilliant botanical hues, golden pears and yellow sunflower-faces, fruitful vines and dreaming gourds. She imagined an enchanted garden. She imagined a secret Eden.

Ruby was angry at my mother; he was angry at everyone but me: I was too young to be held responsible for his lost loves and aspirations. But he could not be separated from his love of fecund dirt. Dirt—the brown dirt of the earth—inspired him; the feel and smell of dirt uplifted him; he took an artist’s pleasure in the soil and all its generative properties. And though he claimed to scorn my mother, he became the subaltern of her passion. Like some wizard commander of the stones—they were scattered everywhere in a wild jumble—he swept them into orderliness. A pack of stones was marshaled into a low wall. Five stones were transformed into a perfect set of stairs. Seven stones surrounded what was to become a flower bed. Stones were borders, stones were pathways, stones—placed just so—were natural sculptures.

And finally Ruby commanded the stones to settle in a circle in the very center of the lot. Inside the circle there was to be a green serenity of grass, invaded only by the blunders of violets and wandering buttercups. Outside the circle the earth would be a fructifying engine. It was a dreamer’s circle, like the moon or the sun; or a fairy ring; or a mystical small Stonehenge, miniaturized by a spell.

The back yard was cleared, but it was not yet a garden. Like a merman combing a mermaid’s weedy hair, my uncle Ruby had unraveled primeval tangles and brambles. He had set up two tall metal poles to accommodate a rough canvas hammock, with a wire strung from the top of one pole to the other. Over this wire a rain-faded old shop-awning had been flung, so that the hammock became a tent or cave or darkened den. A backyard hammock! I had encountered such things only in storybooks.

And then my uncle was gone. German tanks were biting into Europe. Weeping, my grandmother pounded her breast with her fist: the British White Paper of 1939 had declared that ships packed with Jewish refugees would be barred from the beaches of Haifa and Tel Aviv and returned to a Nazi doom. In P.S. 71, our neighborhood school, the boys were drawing cannons and warplanes; the girls were drawing figure skaters in tutus; both boys and girls were drawing the Trylon and the Perisphere. The Trylon was a three-sided obelisk. The Perisphere was a shining globe. They were already as sublimely legendary as the Taj Mahal. The official colors of the 1939 World’s Fair were orange and blue—everyone knew this; everyone had ridden in noiselessly moving armchairs into the Fair’s World of Tomorrow, where the cloverleaf highways of the impossibly futuristic nineteen-sixties materialized among inconceivable suburbs. In the magical lanes of Flushing you could watch yourself grin on a television screen as round and small as the mouth of a teacup. My grandmother, in that frail year of her dying, was taken to see the Palestine Pavilion, with its flickering films of Jewish pioneers.

Ruby was drafted before the garden could be dug. He sent a photograph of himself in Army uniform, and a muffled recording of his voice, all songs and jolly jingles, from a honky-tonk arcade in an unnamed Caribbean town.

So it was left to my mother to dig the garden. I have no inkling of when or how. I lived inside the hammock all that time, under the awning, enclosed; I read and read. Sometimes, for a treat, I would be given two nickels for carfare and a pair of quarters, and then I would climb the double staircase to the train and go all the way to Fifty-ninth Street: you could enter Bloomingdale’s directly from the subway, without ever glimpsing daylight. I would run up the steps to the book department on the mezzanine, moon over the Nancy Drew series in an agony of
choosing (
The Mystery of Larkspur Lane, The Mystery of the Whispering Statue
, each for fifty cents), and run down to the subway again, with my lucky treasure. An hour and a half later, I would be back in the hammock, under the awning, while the afternoon sun broiled on. But such a trip was rare. Mostly the books came from the Traveling Library; inside my hammock-cave the melting glue of new bindings sent out a blissful redolence. And now my mother would emerge from the back door of the Park View, carrying—because it was so hot under the awning—half a cantaloupe, with a hillock of vanilla ice cream in its scooped-out center. (Have I ever been so safe, so happy, since? Has consciousness ever felt so steady, so unimperiled, so immortal?)

Across the ocean, synagogues were being torched, refugees were in flight. On American movie screens Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire whirled in and out of the March of Time’s grim newsreels—Chamberlain with his defeatist umbrella, the Sudetenland devoured, Poland invaded. Meanwhile my mother’s garden grew. The wild raw field Ruby had regimented was ripening now into a luxuriant and powerful fertility: all around my uncle’s talismanic ring of stones the ground swelled with thick savory smells. Corn tassels hung down over the shut greenleaf lids of pearly young cobs. Fat tomatoes reddened on sticks. The bumpy scalps of cucumbers poked up. And flowers! First, as tall as the hammock poles, a flock of hunchbacked sunflowers, their heads too weighty for their shoulders—huge heavy heads of seeds, and a ruff of yellow petals. At their feet, rows of zinnias and marigolds, with tiny violets and the weedy pink buds of clover sidling between.

Now and then a praying mantis—a stiffly marching fake leaf—would rub its skinny forelegs together and stare at you with two stern black dots. And butterflies! These were mostly white and mothlike; but sometimes a great black-veined monarch
would alight on a stone, in perfect stillness. Year by year the shade of a trio of pear trees widened and deepened.

Did it rain? It must have rained—it must have thundered—in those successive summers of my mother’s garden; but I remember a perpetual sunlight, hot and honeyed, and the airless boil under the awning, and the heart-piercing scalliony odor of library glue (so explicit that I can this minute re-create it in my very tear ducts, as a kind of mourning); and the fear of bees.

Though I was mostly alone there, I was never lonely in the garden. But on the other side of the door, inside the Park View, an unfamiliar churning had begun—a raucous teeming, the world turning on its hinge. In the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, there were all at once jobs for nearly everyone, and money to spend in any cranny of wartime leisure. The Depression was receding. On weekends the subway spilled out mobs of city picnickers into the green fields of Pelham Bay Park, bringing a tentative prosperity to the neighborhood—especially on Sundays. I dreaded and hated this new Sunday frenzy, when the Park View seemed less a pharmacy than a carnival stand, and my own isolation grew bleak. Open shelves sprouted in the aisles, laden with anomalous racks of sunglasses, ice coolers, tubes of mosquito repellent and suntan lotion, paper cups, colorful towers of hats—sailors’ and fishermen’s caps, celluloid visors, straw topis and sombreros, headgear of every conceivable shape. Thirsty picnickers stood three deep at the fountain, clamoring for ice-cream cones or sodas. The low, serious drug-store voices that accompanied the Park View’s weekday decorum were swept away by revolving laughing crowds—carnival crowds. And at the close of these frenetic summer Sundays, my parents would anxiously count up the cash register in the worn night of their exhaustion, and I would hear their joyful disbelief: unimaginable riches, almost seventy-five dollars in a single day!

Then, when the safe was locked up, and the long cords of the
fluorescent lights pulled, they would drift in the dimness into the garden, to breathe the cool fragrance. At this starry hour the katydids were screaming in chorus, and fireflies bleeped like errant semaphores. In the enigmatic dark, my mother and father, with their heads together in silhouette, looked just then as I pictured them looking on the Albany night boat, on June 19, 1921, their wedding day. There was a serial photo from that long-ago time I often gazed at—a strip taken in an automatic-photo booth in fabled, faraway Albany. It showed them leaning close, my young father quizzical, my young mother trying to smile, or else trying not to; the corners of her lips wandered toward one loveliness or the other. They had brought back a honeymoon souvenir: three sandstone monkeys joined at the elbows: see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. And now, in their struggling forties, standing in Ruby’s circle of stones, they breathed in the night smells of the garden, onion grass and honeysuckle, and felt their private triumph. Seventy-five dollars in eighteen hours!

No one knew the garden was there. It was utterly hidden. You could not see it, or suspect it, inside the Park View, and because it was nested in a wilderness of empty lots all around, it was altogether invisible from any surrounding street. It was a small secluded paradise.

And what vegetable chargings, what ferocities of growth, the turbulent earth pushed out! Buzzings and dapplings. Birds dipping their beaks in an orgy of seed-lust. It was as if the ground itself were crying peace, peace; and the war began. In Europe the German death factories were pumping out smoke and human ash from a poisoned orchard of chimneys. In Pelham Bay, among bees and white-wing flutterings, the sweet brown dirt pumped ears of corn.

Nearly all the drug stores—of the old kind—are gone, in Pelham Bay and elsewhere. The Park View Pharmacy lives only in a
secret Eden behind my eyes. Gone are Bernardini, Pressman, Weiss, the rival druggists on the way to Westchester Square. They all, like my father, rolled suppositories on glass slabs and ground powders with brass pestles. My mother’s garden has returned to its beginning: a wild patch, though enclosed now by brick house after brick house. The houses have high stoops; they are city houses. The meadows are striped with highways. Spy Oak gave up its many ghosts long ago.

But under a matting of decayed pear pits and thriving ragweed back of what used to be the Park View, Ruby’s circle of stones stands frozen. The earth, I suppose, has covered them over, as—far off in Staten Island—it covers my dreaming mother, my father, my grandmother, my resourceful and embittered farmer uncle.

Once, when I had already been married for a time, I went to a friend’s wedding and fell in love with the bridegroom. It happened out of the blue, in an instant, as unexpectedly as a sneeze. I was not responsible for it; it came upon me; it was an incursion, an invasion—a possession, like that of a dybbuk. Or it was what diplomats call an “intervention,” an intact sovereign tract subjected without warning to military fire. Or it was a kind of spell, the way the unearthly music of a fairy-tale pipe casts a helpless enchantment, so that, willy-nilly, you are compelled to dance and dance without surcease.

The bride had a small head and a Cheshire-cat smile. I had known her since childhood. Together, under the heavy-hanging trees, we had gathered acorns and pretended to dine on them. But we were not confidantes; we were not close. We had differing temperaments. She was humorous: her jokiness cut with an icy ironic blade. I was naïve and grave and obtuse. She was diligent at the violin and played it well. I hid when the piano teacher rang the doorbell. She was acutely and cleverly mathematical. I was an arithmetical imbecile. She was tall and I was short: we were seriously divided by our arms’ reach. Often I felt between us a jealous tremor. I was jealous because she was almost two years younger, and even in girlhood I lamented the passing of my
prime. At eleven, I scribbled a story and appended a lie: “By the Young Author,” I wrote, “Age Nine.”

The bride was standing under the wedding canopy in a white dress, her acorn head ringed by a wreath, when lovesickness struck. The venerable image of arrow or dart is crucially exact. Though I had met the bridegroom once before, in the long green darkening tangle of a meadow at dusk—it was a game of Frisbee—I had been unmoved. His thighs were taut, his calf-sinews thick; he had the inky curly hair of a runner on a Greek amphora. The white plastic disk arced into a blackening sky, along the trajectory of an invisible yet perfect night-rainbow. He sprinted after it; his catch was deft, like the pluck of a lyre. He was an Englishman. He was a mathematician. He was nothing to me.

But when I saw him under the wedding canopy next to my childhood friend, I was seized and shaken by a dazing infatuation so stormy, so sibylline, so like a divination, that I went away afterward hollowed-out. Infatuation was not an added condition: it was loss—the strangeness of having lost what had never been mine.

The newly married pair departed for England, by sea, in a sluggishly churning vessel. A shipboard postcard arrived: on the one side a view of the ship itself, all serene white flanks pocked by portholes, and on the other an unfamiliar script. It was the new husband’s. I studied his handwriting—examined its loops and troughs, the blue turns of ink where they thickened and narrowed, the height of the l’s and d’s, the width of the crossbars, the hillocks of the m’s and n’s, the connecting tails and the interrupting gaps. The sentences themselves were sturdy and friendly, funny and offhand—entirely by-the-by. Clearly, composing this note was a lunch-table diversion. “You do it,” I imagined the new wife telling the new husband. In a minute and a half it was done.

For weeks I kept the card under my eye; it was as if the letters of each word were burning, as if the air above and below the letters were shuddering in an invisible fire. The words, the sentences, were of no moment; I hardly saw them; but the letters crazed me. They were the new husband’s nerves, they were the vibrations of his pulse, his fingers’ pressure, his most intimate mark. They were more powerful than the imprint of his face and shoulders, which had anyhow begun to fade. What I remembered was the hand leaping up into the dark to snatch the Frisbee out of the sky. That same hand had shaped these intoxicating yet regimented letters. A mathematician’s letters: as upright and precise as numbers.