Return Trips (19 page)

Once I talked to a Berkeley woman who also admired and liked Elizabeth, and that woman said, “Oh, Elizabeth is so wonderful. You can do absolutely anything you want around her. Say anything.”

Well, that was entirely to miss the point of Elizabeth, I thought. I would never knowingly have expressed a trivial or mean-spirited thought to Elizabeth; her own elegant, supremely intelligent demeanor forbade it. And actually one of the reasons that I so much liked Elizabeth was that she, as the phrase goes, “brought out my best.” With her I was less trivial and mean, and much more intelligent, more finely observant than usual, and if not elegant at least restrained. Judson and I have talked about this, and he says that he felt the same. “Elevated,” is a word he used. “Ennobled, even,” Judson said.

This is the much abbreviated story of Elizabeth’s life, as I pieced it together from stray remarks, tiny glimpses over our years of conversation, and all our letters.

She was born not in Vienna but in Paris, and later, before the Anschluss, she had studied in Vienna. Her parents were deported to camps in Germany, where they died (very little about this from Elizabeth). After the war she studied in Florence, in Bologna, and at Oxford. In addition to those places she had lived in Lisbon and in Cuernavaca, and in her Mexican beach town, San Angel. And in New York and
Boston. She had been married three times, twice divorced, once widowed—but of those relationships I know nothing. Once she spent some time at Lake Tahoe with a man who was trying to get a divorce in Reno but did not (out of character, this intimate glimpse arrived in a letter, like a present, when she knew that I was having some troubles of that nature). When I first knew her she was living in Boston, out in Berkeley on a studying visit. Later she moved down to New York. And later still, she moved to San Angel, to her small house in the manzanita thickets. For good.

That first summer in Berkeley Elizabeth and I saw each other mostly for late afternoon swims. We also went to the Berkeley and the Oakland art museums. Elizabeth looked as actively as she listened, as intently. I can see her: a small woman in something elegantly plain, gray linen, maybe brown, bending forward to see yet more clearly, her eyes narrowed in the effort, as she stands before a big canvas of some enormous, primitive animals, by Joan Brown.

Elizabeth was especially fond of that Oakland museum; to my great pleasure she preferred it to the San Francisco MOMA. “So much less pretentious,” she remarked, quite accurately, I thought. “A more
real
museum, and architecturally it is marvellous, a beauty.”

I have said that most of my talk with Elizabeth was impersonal; however, I do remember one conversation which became intimate, oddly enough having to do with our noses.

I had spent too many hours the week before just lying beside the pool, ostensibly studying for the bar, actually worrying about my life, as I enjoyed the sun. As a reward for that self-indulgence my nose first blistered, then peeled (I have inherited my mother’s white Irish skin, my father’s Polish-Jewish nose).

“I wish it would peel away,” I said to Elizabeth, as though
joking. “Peel down to a tiny snub nose, like my mother’s. Why did I just get her skin?”

Elizabeth laughed, accepting my joke, but she said, “You’re too tall for a tiny snub nose, Minerva. Besides, yours is distinguished, like an Italian Renaissance lady.” And then she sighed. “But I know about hating noses. For years I despaired of mine. And Minerva, I had more reason, you will admit. I am a very small woman with a very large nose.”

“But yours is beautiful!”

“Ah! There, you see?”

We both laughed then, in the end-of-August almost cooling air, an hour or so before the sun would set.

In September Elizabeth went back to Boston. My parents came home, and I moved back into my own small Oakland apartment; I studied hard, I spent time with friends and with my lover, with whom I quarrelled a lot—on whom I made, according to him, impossible demands.

And I began what was to become a rich and wonderfully gratifying correspondence with Elizabeth. (I have it still, now boxed and tied up with heavy string. I always mean to take it out for rereading, but so far I have not.) It turned out that for us both letters were a form of conversation. I have sometimes even thought letters more satisfactory and God knows safer than most human contact, and it is possible that Elizabeth felt so too. In any case we wrote to each other quite often, and generally at some length. Only on trips Elizabeth might confine herself to postcards, with beautiful pictures: Venice, Spoleto, Siena.

And even cards from Elizabeth had the unique, quite unmistakable sound of her voice. I have sometimes had quite the opposite experience, very likely everyone has: the stiff, ungiving letters from friends who in person are both warm
and amusing; dull letters from people one thought bright. Elizabeth’s letters and her cards were exactly like herself, including her very slight, to-me-delightful mistakes in English.

Then, over the next months and the following years everything in my life went black, and wrong. I had passed the bar, and got a job with an okay firm in Oakland, specializing in labor law; but I felt that I was overworked, too many sudden trips to Chicago or Los Angeles, for depositions. Worse, I began to have serious doubts about the law itself, or rather about its current practice, its practitioners. My lover left for New Haven, with his wife. I got along with my parents even less well than usual, and I quarrelled in a serious way with a couple of longstanding friends. I was very tired. I imagined myself as a piece of old elastic, all gone gray, all the stretch and give worn out.

Well, a classic depression, but no one’s depression seems “classic” to the person enduring it. And in my case, such over-exposure to shrinks made it hard for me even to think, This is a depression, this too will pass. I did not even consider the possible aid of some therapy.

The very weather that year seemed inimical: a long fall and winter of cold rain, ferocious winds, followed by a spring of no respite but more cold and winds, a perpetual black-gray fog, looming up from the bay.

I had not written to Elizabeth that I was depressed, or whatever I was, but she may of course have sensed it. I did write about the frightful summer weather, the dark fog and cold, the perpetual wind.

Elizabeth wrote back that she would be in her house in Mexico for all of November, and that I must get some time off and come to visit her then. “I know how it is with long cold summers,” she wrote. “You believe them to last forever,
as sometimes they do. But maybe the idea of a warm white beach and many flowers will help a little to get you through the next few months.” She further explained that she had already promised “such guest quarters as there are” to another friend—“a poet, Judson Venable, you might sometime have read him?” I had not.

But that is how I came to spend two weeks of that November in Mexico, my first trip to Elizabeth’s house. Which in many ways changed my life.

As though to test my stamina, even September and October, which are often the nicest months in Northern California, that year were terrible; black heavy rains, and more rains, with dangerous flooding, mudslides near the coast. Dark, relentless winds. I packed for Mexico in a state of disbelief, jamming the light cottons recommended by Elizabeth into my seabag. And I boarded the plane that dark November morning still unconvinced that weather anywhere would be welcoming, and warm.

After seven hours that were alternately boring and turbulent (more tests!), including a frantic, high-stress changing of planes in Mexico City, in a smaller plane we flew toward a range of sharp green mountains, between perilously rocky peaks and over jungles, levelling at last toward a flat blue sea, and beaches. A white airstrip surrounded by green jungle growth.

Getting off that plane and walking down the ramp was like entering another atmosphere; I swam into warm, moist, delicately scented air, into an embrace of warmth and flowers. I began to smile, and for most of the time that I was there I felt that smile, which was interior as well—that November, and sometimes I did think how strange that it should be indeed November, the dark, funereal month of death and sorrow and ashes, especially in Mexico.

And—there was Elizabeth, small and lightly tanned, reaching up to kiss me on both cheeks, saying “Ah! Minerva, how good it is that you are here. But how thin, how pale! We must work to change you—”

I was embarrassingly close to tears, and only murmured that I was glad to see her too. I was grateful for the activity involved in stowing my bag into her improbably pink jeep. “I had not before driven a jeep, perhaps it is fortunate that it comes in so ridiculous a color,” Elizabeth laughed, very happily.

We jolted over a deeply potholed road, through a shaded stretch of jungle, all wildly, diversely green, toward a small, shabby cluster of buildings, a town at which I barely looked, for there ahead of us was the sea: glinting, green and blue, white-waved, dancing out to a pale-blue sky. And everywhere flowers, bougainvillea, hibiscus, vines and bushes blooming in all possible shades, pinks and reds and purples, other blossoms of the smallest, most delicate yellow white. And butterflies, and birds.

“The place where you stay may not be entirely to your taste,” Elizabeth was saying. “But you will be so little there. Mostly, it is very close to where I am.”

She was right about my hotel, Del Sol: a cluster of bright new cottages around a pool and bar-restaurant—less than entirely to my taste. It was garish and sometimes noisy, populated as it was by young Texans and Germans. None of which mattered at all, as I was almost never there. That first day Elizabeth dropped me off with brief instructions. “You must take what time you need to collect yourself. Then walk out to the beach and turn left. Not too many yards to the end is a road leading up into the woods, and there you find my small house. It is brown, with a porch.”

I collected myself for fifteen or twenty minutes, washing and changing to my lightest cotton dress, wrapping a bathing
suit in a towel, and then I walked out to the beach and turned left. It is not too much to say that I already felt myself another person, in that air—Elizabeth’s air.

Her house was not quite as easy to find as she had said. I hesitated in front of a couple of shacky cottages, and then I walked on up into some dark manzanita woods, the trees here and there overhung with heavy moss, thick vines. And there was Elizabeth’s house—it had to be: a small square brown structure, over half its space a generous porch, the wall that faced the sea entirely of glass.

On the porch was a broad woven hammock on which someone obviously had slept (“Judson”?); there were rumpled pillows, a thrown-aside light blanket. Next to the hammock some big dark leather sling chairs.

And Elizabeth, coming out to greet me. “Ah, good Minerva to have brought your bathing suit. Always we have a little swim before our drinks and dinner.”

Going inside, I saw that a large area between the house and the beach had been cleared, giving a branch-framed picture of the sea: sand, small birds, waves and distant headlands. The other walls were filled with pictures, narrow-framed line drawings, a few photographs. A wide low sofa, Elizabeth’s bed (where sometimes she slept with Judson Venable?). Big bright wool pillows. A low tile table. Lamps.

I changed into my suit in the bathroom and we went down to the beach and swam, and I was entirely enchanted. Magic water, I thought, magically light and clear, of a perfect coolness.

I am aware, speaking of Elizabeth and of her surroundings, in San Angel, that I am presenting a possibly implausible perfection. As to Elizabeth herself, I can only say that for me she did seem that impossibility, a perfect person. To put it negatively, she was a person about whom I never felt even
slightly troubled, I was never bored with her—reactions that I have experienced at one time or another with almost everyone else I have known very well (beginning, I guess, with my parents). And as for San Angel itself, and the beach there, it was at first perfect, perfectly quiet and beautiful. Later it did change considerably, but that is the later part of my story, of my return visit to Elizabeth, in her illness.

Back in the house, while I dressed Elizabeth began several processes in the kitchen. “My good Aurelia comes later to serve our dinner,” she explained. “And Judson. He will very soon be back, I think.” She added, “I hope that you will like him, as I do.”

Actually I did not like Judson very much, at first. That was in part because I assumed him to be Elizabeth’s young lover, and he seemed neither sufficiently young nor dashing for that role. Also, he speaks very softly, and infrequently, with an almost impenetrable Southern accent, which at the time I took to be a bad sign, suggestive of bigotry, if not downright stupidity.

Also, Judson is more than a little odd to look at. Tall, very thin, with a big nose and big floppy-looking ears (curiously we look somewhat alike, except for the ears; mine, like my mother’s, are quite small), as he shambled up to the porch that first night I thought, Oh, surely not. I even thought, Elizabeth, how could you?

I also distrusted Judson’s protestations as to “their” pleasure at my arrival. He said, “We’ve been most looking forward to your visit,” and the words sounded false and stilted to me: the proverbial Southern good manners. I am not notably trusting, in my reactions to people.

Aurelia, the Mexican helper (“maid” does not seem the proper word, nor did Elizabeth ever refer to her as such) Aurelia next arrived, and I did like her. She was tall and
dark and beautiful, evidently deeply fond of Elizabeth; she smiled a great deal and spoke almost not at all. (It turned out later that it was through Aurelia that Elizabeth had bought the house; it was actually in Aurelia’s name, a legal necessity, for beach-front property, but also generous on Elizabeth’s part. Aurelia’s life was to be transformed.)

The sunset that was just then commencing over the far eastern rim of the Pacific was the most splendid that I had ever seen, the wildest range of color; gorgeous, brilliant rags of color hung across the sky.