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Hamilton Stone Review #32
Spring 2015
Nonfiction
Reamy Jansen, Nonfiction Editor

Reamy Jansen has been nonfiction editor since 2010. He writes poetry (Two Ways of Not Hearing, Finishing Line Press 2012) and nonfiction, including a memoir, Available Light, Recollections and Reflections of a Son, Hamilton Stone Editions, 2010. His memoir is also available as an ebook.

 

 

 

Liza Case
Pigs Feet and Cowboy Boots

Saturday nights were special. On Saturday nights my dad always worked and my mother never did. My dad played music on Saturday nights, leaving Mom and me free to have our own adventures. Whatever we were all doing that day, at some point in the late afternoon, my father would say, “I have to start getting ready,” and he would leave us to go take a shower, get dressed and pack his equipment. We were usually near the end of a project when he would make his departure—often right after all the groceries had been brought in from our weekly shopping trip. Mom would smile and keep on pulling potential meals out of brown paper bags, likely wondering how she would pull so little together to feed us without complaint from me. Sometimes she’d assign me a small task to take my attention away from the fact that my dad was leaving. “Here honey, you put away the cereal.” And I would do as she asked.

I knew it would do me no good to ask to go with my dad, or “Dood,” as I called him then. He was going to get in the shower and they were very strict about that. I could never see my father anything but fully dressed although I could get in the shower with my mother if I wanted to. “Because we’re both girls,” my mother explained to me when I was told I had to wait for Dood to come out of the bathroom and not go in even if I needed to use the bathroom unless it was a major emergency, in which case I should let my mother know.

“But what if I need to tell him something!” I said.

“Wait until he comes out. Then you can talk to him.”

I waited by the bathroom door that first day when the rule was enforced for what seemed like hours. When he finally emerged, I threw myself in his arms crying.

“Hey, what’s the matter, what’s wrong, kid?” he asked.

But I didn’t yet have words to explain that the idea of not being able to get to him when I needed him was just unbearable even for the length of a shower--that a closed door might as well have been the Mississippi River between us.

But I was older now, then. I was six years old already and had grown accustomed to my exile. I finished putting away the groceries with my mother and then waited patiently on the couch for my dad, knowing that when he came out he would be completely transformed. Grocery shopping dad would be gone and musician man would appear. He was always tall and good-looking, but he seemed taller and better looking on Saturday nights. Gone were the baggy, faded jeans and Docksiders. Musician man wore tight dark-blue jeans and a white, French-cuffed dress shirt that my mother pressed for him, razor sharp creases in the sleeves, and a black vest, early ‘70s style. And he always wore his cowboy boots.

They were black, with toes that pointed in at what seems in my mind to be a ninety degree angle.  They had colorful inlay on the toes and sides that I remember as being turquoise and red—as I write it, it sounds garish, but it wasn’t. They were top-of-line and the epitome of cool—gorgeous boots that any young musician today would kill to get his feet into. When he wore them my dad, who always seemed to be trying to conceal his stature and looks, allowed himself a bit of a swagger.

Once dressed, he would go down to our finished basement (part office, part playroom, part recording studio) to meticulously pack up his instruments and equipment. I would follow him and watch. I knew I had to be quiet and let him concentrate. He had to go over everything and make sure each piece was in place: extra strings for his bass and guitar, shiny plastic picks all properly tucked into the pockets of the velveteen linings of the cases, the cables for the amplifiers all neatly wound and bound securely to their handles, the mic stand broken down and all the gear carefully placed into the back of that old Chevy station wagon we had. I would follow him back and forth as he loaded everything into the car. And then he would make one last trip inside and back upstairs to say goodnight to my mom. We would see him off as if he were leaving on a long journey, complete with hugs and kisses and promises to be good. And then he would pat his shirt pocket one last time, to make sure he had his cigarettes and lighter and then he would go. I watched from the living room window until his car pulled around from the back and out of the driveway.

After Dood left, my mother would become livelier, more talkative. She could never see her worth in my father’s eyes, and always took a backseat to him when we were all together. But when we were alone she was more confident and relaxed. Now it was our time—her one evening away from the typewriter to spend with me watching television, something we both loved.

Eventually she would say, “We didn’t get any goodies at the store today, did we?”

“No, I don’t think so.” I would say and giggle.

“We need goodies. Let’s go.”

My mom and I ate a lot of goodies when my dad was out. Not that he didn’t like to have a treat, especially ice cream, but he didn’t really do it up the way Mom and I did. She and I would get into the Pontiac, the less reliable of the two vehicles, and head to Drew’s Market, which was only about a quarter of a mile away. Only the Pontiac would cut out several times on the way there.

“We’ll get there if we have to go an inch at a time,” was my mother’s constant refrain—and I suspect, her inner mantra.

And we would get there at approximately that rate. But once we arrived I was free to pick out whatever I wanted, usually Dr. Pepper, Fritos, and my favorite, a jar of pickled pigs feet.

Pickled pigs feet are a southern “delicacy.” I’ve never seen them in New York, although the unpickled variety are usually available at low-end grocery stores in Harlem. Not sure why we southerners like to pickle our pork, but in Mississippi you used to be able to buy “pickled pig lips” from a big jar on the counter of a local grocer, served in a piece of waxed paper to be eaten on the spot. We didn’t do that in Nashville in my day; the greasy, briny appendages were packaged and sold by Hormel, not made by local farmers.          

With our goodies in hand we’d head back home. That trip was downhill and usually took much less time than it had to get there. And we’d head inside and get into our nightgowns and settle in front of the big color TV in the living room for “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and the “Bob Newhart Show.” Bob Newhart was my favorite and I had named our cat Howard in honor of one of its characters. By the time “The Carol Burnett Show” came on, we would have devoured the entire jar of pig’s feet and washed them down with the last of the Dr. Pepper. Mom would be getting sleepy, so we would move into the bedroom, my parents’ bedroom, and watch it on the black and white TV they had in there. Or I would watch it. Soon Mom would close her eyes and tell me she “was listening to it.” Within minutes she would fall asleep. But I wouldn’t. I’d stay up to hear Carol sing, “I’m so glad we had this time to spend together…,” watch the local news, and the late movie, too. I was waiting up for my dad. Or trying to.

 

I don’t think I ever actually made it, but I would hear him come in. He would stand in the doorway of the bedroom, looking at us in the light of the television, or if it had gone to white noise, turn it off. I would peek at him without opening my eyes all the way, so he wouldn’t tell me to go sleep in my own room. He must have known I was awake, but he never said anything, not on Saturday nights He would just look at us for a few minutes, as if needing to assure himself we hadn’t somehow vanished in his absence. And then he would go and sit at the kitchen table and smoke cigarettes, trying to calm down from his night of loud music. Once I heard the flick of his lighter, I would fall soundly asleep.

On Sunday mornings I woke up to the sound I went to sleep to every other night, the rhythm of my mother typing a steady 90 words-per-minute on her IBM Selectric II typewriter. Dood would be asleep beside me, his arm above his head, the way he always slept, ready to fend off the bad guys if they should come.  I would climb quietly out of bed and look inside the closet. His cowboy boots would now be neatly put away, side by side, in the back, behind his black dress shoes and his brown dress shoes, a pair of rarely worn sneakers, and his Docksiders.

 

 

Chelsey Clammer
Hearted Skies

When her auntie dies, she starts seeing hearts in the sky. More than wisps or tails from a plane, more than a collection of cotton balls turning gray, warning how it's going to rain. Pour. More than just the silly shapes I pointed to when I was a kid. These hearts in the sky feel solid. Strong. Intentional. Present. How the hearts umbrella her. Protect. There's more. Look over there. Aside from the sky, hearts appear in other places. Hearts infiltrating sights, her outlook on life. Like those two bending blades of grass—the heart they form is so perfect, flourished. A symbol of growth. She took a picture to remember it. She has a whole gallery of her auntie's hearts. Yes, her auntie is up there, sending her love, its symbol. Hearts made in the sky.

 

*

 

And how death is weird. A person here, then gone. A person never going to be here again. The here today. The gone tomorrow. These are the things we know. And how we know a loved one is dead, but how we have to believe we can keep her alive in the altar of our minds. How else to go further? To continue on with life. Because life without those certain someones doesn't feel like life. A young woman I know recently died. She had such personality. Such passion. Such ways in which she worked in the world, with the world. As in: creativity. As in: language. I write about her now to keep her here. To stop her from falling from the sky. Again. It will be different this time. Because she's still here, regardless of her ashed body. This, specifically, isn't about hearts or where they're located or how they're protected, protective. It's about learning how to open my heart and being okay with letting the young woman go gone. She falls from the building. Let her fly.

 

*

 

And how souls and energies combine to create those hearts in the sky. Death sending love notes. Sending a bouquet of lively flowers. Perhaps even a telegram hug from a bear with a stranger zipped inside it, a person who is paid to do this, paid to hug people they have never met and will never see again. Of course her auntie doesn't really send her these things, but the metaphor's there—the need to continue to take care. She cares. I care for her. Her auntie cares so much that she gives this niece the present of her presence. She sees hearts. She can feel them. Thump-thumping. Alive.

 

*

 

Explanation missing. Those images in my mind, a constant stream of film, even though I wasn't there when she died. She slipped off a building just after deciding against suicide, and I want to see hearts in the sky. I want to see some sign that everything will be okay without her. But I don't. I wonder how much this has to do with yearning for an explanation that won't ever exist. Why this? There is no reason for such tragedy. Such death. Such a long distance to fall. Such a young woman splattering too soon.

 

*

 

It's difficult to put a fallen body back together. It never works. But relationships are different. Relationships can fissure and smash, like bodies, but they can be pieced back together, revived. A year before she started to see hearts, I didn't want to hear anything from her. I didn't like her. She despised me, too. Hate is such a harsh word. But sometimes truth stems from the rough. She's a tenant in the transitional housing residency where I'm a staff member hired to provide direct care to her and other homeless youth at night. The building is old. There's always something wrong with it. Always. Leaking pipes, windows won't shut, floor holes, ovens that won't get hot, toilets that won't flush. Mice. Many mice. An infestation, actually. Thus, the renovations. The organization trying to make everything better, more livable. But she still complained about whatever. This was before her hearts. I got bitchy to her over the fact of her whatevers. She got frustrated and threatened to call the health department. I told her if she didn't like living here, then leave. She didn't like that. I could tell this by the way she shook and stormed and barely muffled a screaming stream of fuck you's in her throat. This is called a clash. The bang of two stubborn heads bumping, no, bashing into one another. She didn't heart me. I didn't care enough to hear why.

 

*

 

Eventually, I told her how much she irritated me. Eventually, she told me how much I frustrated her. We came up with an agreement to stop this. "If I start getting bitchy," she said, "then tell me to stop before you start getting bitchy." Agreed. Also, mainly, the vulnerability of writing and how we shared it, shared ourselves. What this means: Two women with hot tempers found a way to be cool with each other. A fissured relationship that writing pieced back together.

 

*

 

Revived.

 

*

 

The power of writing, of poetry, of shared creativity to help us meet on equal ground. And how we finally surpassed our spite with subjects and stanzas. She writes poetry with a natural rhythm. I let the words come out willy-nilly, whenever they please, and I just follow them. She produces. I reduce. Which is to say I tighten up so there aren't so many words blocking the blow of my meaning. In other words, I'm editing. And she just keeps on creating. While we don't connect on our approaches to writing, there are some words of which we can agree. Symbols, really. And what they mean. Less than three.

<3

Her hearts and how I now see them because she let me read her writing, let me see how she poeticizes believe.

 

*

 

She hates when I call her "honey." I've only said it less than half of a half-handful of times. Which is to say twice. Each time accidental. When I do call her honey, it comes from a place of care and I wonder if she shrinks away from that endearment, because she's not used to be endeared. I see this when she sees her hearts. Loved one gone. Sprits and connection and meaning found in the sky. She shows me how to see it, how to believe in it. How even when loved ones are missing, they're right her with us. She sees this. Sees those hearts. Shares them. I believe. I think of the star tattooed on my wrist that keeps my own dead someone close. Alive. Memories that won't, can't die. I can do this. I can get through this grief. I just have to believe. Just have to take this wavering faith and aim it at the sky.

 

*

 

This is about community. About healing. This is about moving on. About dealing. This is about hearts and community and moving on and healing and dealing and facing all of those hard things we never wanted to face in the first place and how two people who didn't like each other could find each other through writing. Poetry to figure out what to do with death. And hearts. Writing as a way to open our hearts for each other, to see them beating, pulsating towards the sky, humming as we get closer to understanding the beauty inside. In life. She'd probably hate to hear me say all of that sappy stuff. Sorry, honey.

<3

 

 

 

 

 

Reamy Jansen
Shaken

He decided that it was bad for his right hand for fishing… But his left hand had always been a traitor and would not do what he called on it to do and he did not trust it.

                              Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea

 

 

A few years ago, my two sons, Paul and Gabe, and I, would compare an ever-so-slight tremble in our dominant hands, an exercise in a joint inheritance—

Their right hands would mirror my left-hand shake with a somewhat lesser version of my own, one that I now believe has since become a more pronounced and too familiar an intimate part of me: (its a presence, one that came to my notice while playing the clarinet in high school. when my fingers would hover weightlessly above the middle octaves, making me feel hip in first chair.) Now, this slight and periodic tremble will usually stop whenever I extend a finger or two ,or better, closing my hand into fist, and the trembling remains banished -rusticated- . Of course, the tremor eventually saunters back onto my digital playing field and takes its innings. Now in my early70's, I've become more of a prisoner of this most uncanny of beats, and I too frequently become a center of awkward attention when I'm sporting my plastic carrier bag—one holding text books and student essays. It jounces enough to broadcast a noticeable rattle, part of a potentially embarrassing repertory.

I switch to my right hand to quell this not inconsiderable and seemingly unstoppable rustling , with my no-longer-little-shakes morphing into quite noticeable ones. Ones so pronounced that I do my best to mute them. In fact, since the shakes seem to possess a life of their own, they're, bent on embarrassing me at will. In fact, these hand jives were an element in my retirement, as my writing on the blackboard began to look like heaps of distressed lawn furniture, And my comments—my "tortured cursive," as one of my Honors students, christened it-- on essays became more and more indecipherable and obscure. Right now, my current fear is that this digital incontinence will leap over to my ever-so- reliable and pacific right hand.

Then the game may then be up.

Of course, there's a certain pride in being a lefty_I was singled out as a "Southpaw" and certain unearthly powers were implied when I was quite young, thus my tennis tennis partner was always forced to his backhand on the first serve And baseball pitches could be equally disorienting. Of course the novelty wears off. Nevertheless, left handedness possesses a certain folkloric cache—for example, one's IQ was supposed to be higher (Or was it lower?) However, even as members of Mensa, we're likely to be maimed by household appliances, with multi-bladed blenders, and,worse, lawn mowers of whatever design can leave us fingerless or toeless— And, yes, my "traitorous left foot" seems to have gone over, or come back from, the other side. And to what degree will my left invade and occupy my right and how much influence will the occupier have throughout my body? Will my body become Ukraine? Or Crimea? Will I speak with a fake Russian accent?

In fact, odd things have begun to take place in my left foot—for instance, my shoelaces unravel at will while the right side remains tight as a noose.

Still, my "traitorous left foot," as I like to call him, may find delight in tripping me up on the stairs on my daily route to my second and third-floor classes.

But who is fooling whom? This focus on the foot is merely a diversion from what I'm afraid I can't handle, since I continue to set off more and more of a racket with my various carrier bags that hold my papers and call attention to my jumping bean of a hand. My worry, of course, is—are things going to get gradually worse? Nevertheless, as head of the rebel force,in Crimea, I avoid diagnoses. IStill. While I'm not overly worried at my college, it doesn't help that I have begun to recall my undergraduate studies in the Middle Ages, and I now remember how St. Vitus' Dance would present itself as a leit motif throughout my considerable reading of the likes of the medieval historian, C.G. Coulton. Like it or not, victims of the disease were the unwitting song-dance-men of their time.

But, wait, it gets worse, and St. Vitus turns out to be small beer when we get to Michel Foucault's master work, Madness and Civilization, and we hit the big-time With Foucault's account of the Narrenschifte, -Ship of Fools-riverboats that would cruise the Rhine with a cargo of the possessed mentally ill, who were a cargo, as they would disembark at river cities small and large and become, with their high spirited drunken antics of fist fights, falling into the river, tumbling off walls, an unwitting version of summer stock along side the theater of cruelty.

I don't believe I'd fare well with my spastic gestures. Or would I in my later years be the top act Of the wharf? Of course, one can see how I've stampeded a slight shake into something of historical proportions. But it's my hand and not yours, and I'm in my rights to puff it into something grotesque, so there. This in order to keep my little fears at bay. And little they are, as I am in perfect health—one of my doctors started intoning, "Longevity" as if she were Dr. Martin Luther King. And it's true that my dad lived a strong and determined life, although he had to stop writing in his 80's and gradually, literally, "passed away," Sleeping, sleeping some more, and then sleeping all the time at 93, which is my "guesstimate" of my sell-by date.

And,so,dear reader, did anyone consider Parkinson's when I began this essay, which over the past few years has felled-gradually and humiliating-- two of my colleagues?, My overly exercised self consciousness creates more difficulties concealing my troubles in class, and at department meetings. and Luckily, nobody seems to notice and none of my enemies—yes, one always has a few in one's institution—have gone into Monty Python village idiot routines or scenes from Hee-Haw in the privacy of their own offices. This morning I followed my usual morning coffee ritual, carefully scooping out three teaspoons of my own blend. To my dismay my right hand went totally amok, broadcasting fine, dark grains over the kitchen counter

As things may become even worse, I know it's about time for me to see a doctor.

If it will let me dial the number.

 

 

 

 

 

Dean G. Loumbas
Place and Identity in Henry James's Washington Square

 

Abstract: Place and Identity in Henry James's Washington Square

 

This essay studied place and identity and how they created literary connections to the characters and plot development in Henry James's Washington Square. Written in 1880, James transferred the areas of New York City in his Washington Square to a previous era—some forty-five years prior to the publication date. The landscapes and hardscapes both urban and rural of an earlier time place the characters of the story into a similar yet at the same time different world in the City which had markedly changed since James's youth. The subliminal and overt interactions between characters and surroundings suggest that regardless of mindset, can one ever completely separate from his or her environment?

 

Key words: place, identity.

 

 

In Henry James's 1880 novel Washington Square, the reader discovers early on that Doctor Austen Sloper, the distant and cruel father of the protagonist, his plain daughter Catherine, had moved his household in 1835 to New York City's Washington Square. (1) The area, bordered by Fourth and Seventh Streets and Fifth Avenue was in Doctor Sloper's mind as penned by James 'the ideal of quiet and genteel retirement' .(2) This area was to where a man of place--for that's how James's Sloper was perceived by others and more importantly himself--might gravitate at the correct juncture in life befitting the station to which a man of place had attained. Some forty years prior however, the same area had been a cemetery.

The placement of the Sloper family onto what had previously been the site of final internments for residents of New York in the early part of the nineteenth century draws into question the idea of place and identity related to the subsequent ideals and unfortunate misconceptions created in one's life. The contrasting image of a fashionable row of houses known as The Row built over a German cemetery at one end and more notably a potter's field for the unknown at the other as well a 'public gallows and execution ground' perhaps typified the great city's need to constantly reinvent itself. (3) The fact that the Sloper family found its way into a home built over former gravesites is telling of James's thesis for his story. The three people housed therein--Dr. Sloper, his daughter and his widowed (and childless) sister Lavinia—lived their unhappy lives through each other's missed opportunities. The inability of the three of them to extricate themselves from each other, their losses and their never-hads parallels the tomb-like existence within their home. Here the associative life James developed within the Sloper residence was not unlike a mausoleum set among the reposed, drawing the onlooker to come close, but not bidden by its residents to enter by.

It is important to note that James's central characters do not live a walled-up existence even though they shut themselves off from each other. As a child Catherine visited her other aunt's home to enjoy the company of her cousins. Of Mrs. Almond James writes that she 'lived…where the extension of the city assumed a theoretic air, where poplars grew'. (4) This area uptown of Washington Square, bearing little resemblance to its dressier neighborhoods, served as a platform of outdoor life and every day childhood games in which Catherine took part with her nine cousins. James draws the distinction in life here between Catherine, the single child of a stern father and the many progenies of her father's second sister. In her home and school life in the Square, Catherine was pigeon-holed within the grander scale of homes and social strata into which her father had moved and into which she, such as she was, was born. Plain and simple, at least in her father's eye, she moved quietly but without the grace of her dead mother. In the bustle of the great activity of Washington Square, she could hide within herself without actually hiding, much like the forgotten graveyard once beneath her now long replaced by high society's trappings. Falling within the shadows of the Square's gracefully ordered buildings and trees, Catherine would maintain a dignified life but without the dignity her father long ago hoped for her. Her beautiful mother's manner and style, so dearly revered by her father, deeply cast shadows onto Catherine along with those of the Square's stately buildings. Thusly surrounded by the eloquent architecture of the Square, she is buried in her own resignation of her perceived image, her aunt's doggedly cheerful façade transparently covering a make-something-out-of-Catherine determination and most hurtfully her father's empty gazes accompanied by shovelfuls of his epithets. Yet in enduring all of this, of her thoughts toward her father James writes Catherine 'pitied him for the sorrow she had brought upon him.' (5)

What of Catherine's life? The crux of James's plotline not only deals with Dr. Sloper's disappointments found in his beautiful wife's early death and his bitter regard for Catherine, his only child of a loving but too-short marriage, but in his need to strive for and maintain societal status. His obsession with this pinnacle perhaps is in his mind a quantifying necessity needed to override his daughter's shortcomings. By equating success in the form of his physical surroundings in Washington Square, he can rationalize his castigation of his daughter. In James's iterance of Sloper's dream of achievement—seeking the perfection in his (Sloper's) environment which was lost with his wife's death—an ecocritical viewpoint also is suggested. That James's Sloper is a physician which the very profession itself demands insight into his patients' surroundings and care suggests disregard of his own daughter's needs. In immersing her into his own goals and desired environment of Washington Square suggests to the reader that those desired characteristics can easily be disregarded as unimportant in the determination of one's own wishes. Catherine's days spent as a child playing with her many cousins in 'rural picturesqueness' find her again with joy and ease in when as an adult she attends the engagement party of her younger cousin.(6) Both episodes play out in the Almond's uptown residence which bring her fleeting solace, yet Sloper demands her correct placement in life environmentally in order for her to present with an image of a daughter befitting him and the memory of his wife. That his present ideal of the perfect environment actually is staged upon a former cemetery suggests an ecocritical irony here. By magnifying Sloper's inner quandary regarding place, society and image, James actually underscores the premise that 'culture and society are a part of, rather than apart from the natural world.'(7)   James's natural world's pocket is filled with his characterizations.

James takes Sloper from being a respected physician and adoring husband to a mournfully bitter father figure, the better of which he cannot find to bestow with any real ardor upon his daughter Catherine (named after his late wife). His wife, having presented him not only with a sizeable dowry and some family prestige also gave him a son, the brother to Catherine. Both the wife and the son, the loves and ideals of his life, had died leaving Sloper surrounded by the aura of death he faced every day not only within the confines of his fine new home but in the searching eyes of Catherine herself. Their lives within the newly-fashionable neighborhood of Greek Revival Row Houses did neither grace their home nor the Park. They haunted it, darkened by memories of the departed of those within and without. It is interesting to note that during the era of James's novel, the Park continued to rise in society as reflected by the development of such eminent architectural additions as the University of New York (NYU) built in 'an English Collegiate Gothic design, the style purposely evocative of Oxford and Cambridge…clad extravagantly in marble. (8) Such was the crypt-like splendor in which the Sloper family was enveloped, or more appropriately—sealed. Their view outward through fine glass windows toward the Square and its Park and the world gradually became overshadowed by grander and taller monuments of power, life, education and the future of the city itself

James's view on individual identity and society in his Washington Square parallels Andrew Thacker's concept of the deep, binding and at times invisible relationship between power and place. (9) Here where James sets his novel amidst the backdrop of fine masonry work and manicured greenery he pits his heroine, Catherine. The ironic placement of a plain and insecure single woman of financial means and stability within a fine home in the burgeoning fashionable section of the city accentuates the societal push of success bound to physical beauty. Enclosed by her fine brick home built by her father's need for attainment, James encapsulates her and her existence by writing she had 'no desire to shine…lurking in the background…' and holding 'a secondary place...' when 'in New York it is possible for a young girl to occupy a primary place.' (10)

So what is James' saying of society, place and identity when he inserts Catherine into a world beyond her scope, but certainly not beyond her financial means? He hits home by confronting Catherine with love. When Morris Townsend is first presented, James opts to structure the couple's introduction during the engagement party within the neutral yet pleasant and happy environment of her Aunt Almond's more rurally-situated home. The gaiety of the moment whittles away Catherine's reticence and, overpowered, she begins a transcendence in Morris's wake. Later in the evening flushed with the meeting, James through Sloper remarks 'Is it possible that this magnificent person is my child?' (11) To see Catherine experiencing the barest awakenings of awareness of admiration from a significant other in her aunt's home away from Washington Square put Sloper to thinking of the suitor's most likely ulterior motives toward his daughter—or was it jealousy that made him think so? The fact that attention could paid to Catherine at all, and in a lesser environment within the somewhat more rurally rusticated home of his sister meant having Catherine within his own status-bound home on the Square was merely pointing out to all her faults and his own ever-lessening existence in his eyes. What would the neighbors think indeed?

When one compares James's Catherine to other earlier and much later heroines of realist narrative novels such as Therese in Emile Zola's 1867 Therese Raquin or Dorothy in Caryl Phillips's 2003 A Distant Shore, immediately their relations to their respective environments surface as powerful influences on their lives. All three of these heroines suffer others within what otherwise might be construed as pleasant surroundings. Dorothy returns to her childhood English village to live. For Therese and Catherine the cities of Paris and New York circumnavigate the two women with possibilities. The determining factors of union among these three women are the influences of their geographical locations on the processes of their lives compounded by the views and ideals laid upon them by the societies that surround them. Though these three women come from different places and are within varying strata of society, they are at once stifled yet somehow propelled forward to act boldly within their own circumstances. Crushed and driven by the aggregate of the dense masonry composed of environment, society and perceived images by others, these women in varying degrees each endure, succeed and fail. Therese is driven to murder while Dorothy flails between sanity and breakdown. What brings Catherine to the forefront however, is her ability to accept and fine tune what she always has been. She ultimately embraces the strength it brought her to face not only her father, but her entombed place in society within the Square.

Returning to the original thesis of this essay, the parallel existences of the Slopers' lives in New York City above ground of a former cemetery can be encapsulated by a quote from James's own letters in which he writes 'New York is appalling, fantastically charmless and elaborately dire.' (12)Sloper, his daughter Catherine and his sister Lavinia, addressed in the household by her late husband's last name as Aunt Penniman after the character's first introduction in the novel, search to find what draws and ultimately keeps them in the city but are returned mercilessly by James to a containment rather than a life in their Row House. It is indeed an appalling life that the author created for them, even though his own personal recollections of his boyhood life in the city during the mid-nineteenth century when the novel was set were happy, carefree and full of nostalgia for a lost time and place. During the 1850's, the city was not over-populated and as put by Brian Lee, the 'brown stone' was just emerging allowing for the still-comfortable 'repose and modest luxury' of the time. (13)  By the time James was penning Washington Square in 1880 however, the insidious transformation of the city and the Square resulted in his lament of the loss of the familiar and of pleasing landmarks. His own childhood home for instance which had been torn down to make way for New York University eroded further his recall of the innocence and gentility which had permeated his childhood existence there. It is this mourning for the lost, such as one might feel when standing in a cemetery or memorial plot, which surrounds James's Slopers within the veiled and curtained windows of their red brick Row House on the Square. James through his Washington Square peels the glittering veneer of the Slopers' city and reveals the truly dark and abysmally 'appalling' and 'dire' paradox that is life lived on and as though lived in a cemetery while feigning real living. James's Washington Square teaches the reader that there can be agony in living a lie even amid sumptuous and 'fantastically charmless' surroundings.

James's expatriate existence away from New York distanced him from the city not only in miles but from any empathy for it he developed as a youth. This was brought home most pointedly during his subsequent homecoming visit years after Washington Square had been published. The return to the Square unearthed a deep sadness for James mixed with joy of what had remained intact and anger for what had replaced that which had been lost. Experiencing this duality of encounters pitched him up and down and back and forth much as a ship lost in a storm. To James now the Square was a woeful realization of the razing of his own childhood home, kindled with his ever-increasing disdain for the Square's change noting vexingly the erection of the prominent monument to questionable taste and dubious distinction in Stanford White's inscribed Roman-cum-French-influenced Arch. (14)

The buried lives James developed in Washington Square echoed his by then-increasing dislike of the city. The metropolis with its changing viewpoints and its arbitrary establishment of new pedagogical tools callously usurped and replaced the wondrous aura of its past. Sloper's own need to find place within the new society to give concrete perpetuity to his concept of personal identity and success was in many ways the direct antithesis of James's own ideals. That James chose to confront and ultimately surmount Sloper with the futility of it all away from the Square is indeed ironic as revealed during a subsequent trip to Europe. During the trip, Sloper asks Catherine when he dies to not marry the only love of her life Morris Townsend. ' 'I hope you will live a long time,' (15) said Catherine.' Did she really mean this in plain terms? Was this instead a thinly-veiled emergence of contemptuous want for this in hopes that a long life will extend and exacerbate her father's realization that he has no other choice than to accept that which he had wrought? Sloper's plea written by James is yet another threat from a lost man adrift and deserted in a foreign country far from the artificial safe haven of the Square. 'Promise me not to marry Morris Townsend after I am gone…I am altering my will.' Catherine responds coldly 'I can't promise.' (16) James urges the reader to reflect upon Catherine's rise to independence in Europe. Away from home, if she could label it as such with its shadowed brickwork and walkways of the Square, James reveals within her a moment of fulfilment with her subsequent thoughts 'She knew herself that she was obstinate, and it gave her a certain joy. She was now a middle-aged woman.' (17)  Shattering Sloper thusly far from the comfort and security of the Square for which he had worked so hard to attain, James planted the seeds of vulnerability and weakness in the now-aging doctor through Catherine frankness and overt hatred. Holding her father now in front of the very mirror he so resolutely held before her during her entire life now reflects back a sad man in front of a DaVinci-like background landscape of the Europe which James himself admired so.

 

What does this say about literature's lesson regarding place and identity? Place and identity are not static but fluid and affect each other often in circular manners. When the characters of a novel such as those in Washington Square move away from and return to places major in their lives, their previous concepts and understandings of their surroundings are at once recalled and somehow forever altered by the new experiences which expose the changes that have occurred within. This is supported by James's choice so late in the novel to bring Catherine's life from shadow to forefront. She flourishes in Europe and upon returning to her home her father recedes not only into her shadow but into that of his beautiful Row House on the Square, soon to be the very site of his deathbed. When the reader first meets the plain and forlorn Catherine early in the novel she is housed in beauty by her father who either knowingly or unwittingly pitted her against the exquisite yet highly model of her late mother, who needed no lavish surroundings to be beautiful. At the end of Washington Square James's gives Catherine a strong sense achievement even in resignation in her final transformation. He has her spurn Townsend's much-too-late second offer of marriage. As the irate Townsend leaves the house—forever as James intimates—she acquires and assumes the cool, calculated but stony splendor of the Square itself and beams it out from every paned window of what has now become her Row House while 'picking up her morsel of fancy work…again—for life as it were.' (18)

 

 

Notes

 

1. Henry James, Washington Square, 1880 (London: Penguin Books, 1984)

2. H. James, Washington Square, 1880 (London: Penguin Books, 1984), p. 393
3. A View on Cities, Washington Square 1984-2014 [17 March 2014].

4. H. James, Washington Square, 1880 (London: Penguin Books, 1984), p. 39.

5. H. James, Washington Square, 1880 (London: Penguin Books, 1984), p. 143.

6. H. James, Washington Square, 1880 (London: Penguin Books, 1984), p. 40.

7. Neal Alexander, ed., Literary Geographies Unit 3: Ecocriticism and the Novel: Graham Swift's Waterland (Nottingham: School Of English Studies, University of Nottingham, 2013), p. 21.

8. Luther S. Harris, Around Washington Square (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), p. 19.

9. Neal Alexander, ed., Literary Geographies Unit 1: Introduction: Literature and Geography (Nottingham: School Of English Studies, University of Nottingham, 2013), p. 5.

10. H. James, Washington Square, 1880 (London: Penguin Books, 1984), p. 34.

11. H. James, Washington Square, 1880 (London: Penguin Books, 1984), p. 46.
12. Leon Edel, ed. Selected Letters of Henry James (New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1955).

13. H. James, Washington Square, 1880 (London: Penguin Books, 1984), p. 17.
14. "Walking Off The Big Apple," Terry Tynes, Henry James's Uneasy Homecoming to Washington Square http://www.walkingoffthebigapple.com/2008/09/henry-james-uneasy-homecoming-to.html [25 March 2014]

15. H. James, Washington Square, 1880 (London: Penguin Books, 1984), p. 205.

16. H. James, Washington Square, 1880 (London: Penguin Books, 1984), p. 206.

17. H. James, Washington Square, 1880 (London: Penguin Books, 1984), p. 207.

18 H. James, Washington Square, 1880 (London: Penguin Books, 1984), p. 220.

 

 

Bibliography

• A View on Cities, Washington Square 1984-2014 (2014) http://www.aviewoncities.com/nyc/washingtonsquare.htm [accessed 09 April 2014].

• Alexander, Neal, ed., Literary Geographies (Nottingham: School Of English Studies, University of Nottingham, 2013).

• Edel, Leon, ed., Selected Letters of Henry James (New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1955).

• Harris, Luther S., Around Washington Square (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003).

• James, Henry, Washington Square, 1880 (London: Penguin Books, 1984).

• Phillip, Caryl, A Distant Shore, (New York: Vintage Books, 2003).

• Tynes, Terry, "Walking Off The Big Apple, Henry James's Uneasy Homecoming to Washington Square" (8 September 2008) http://www.walkingoffthebigapple.com/2008/09/henry-james-uneasy-homecoming-to.html [accessed 09 April 2014].

 

Gregg Orifici
Blistered Confessions & Incalculable Kindnesses

Reflections on a walk across Spain

Late Winter, 2011.

 

Family, home, career — blah, something missing, blah, falling apart, blah. Sometimes when everything you've built, nourished in your life seems out of joint, the only way out of stuck is to detach, lighten your load, put it on your back and hit the road.

 

 

I. Letting go

 

To my partner of many years, finally, I had to ask:

Where were you when I could have loved you? When, full of the energy of disembodied dreams, I thought your rough stained hands could massage my soul; your silence deep and rich with spirits of another world. When I imagined your outbursts were artistry…

Where were you in your own world? When I was ripe after years of wandering to grow eggplant and put up sauce like my ancestors. To bake naked on granite ledges and swim in our beautiful kitchen, with friends over easy, openhearted like a daffodil meadow turning wildflower in painted brushes and the summer wind. With my books, my knickknacks and fleeting memories finally all in one place. There where you were.

When home had many hearths and was ours and might have been—a contented sunrise of puttering in the garden, appreciating our efforts and each other, after a starry night of love—I walked across the whole of Spain without even a kiss good-bye.

My heart pried open. My future unfathomable, as the desperate recriminations of a down economy, as the elastic tug of lovers and the jagged refrain of misspeaking, of misunderstanding, constantly pulling them apart.

The Camino de Santiago. A million-step journey of letting go.

Ultreya! Clear cerulean sky, bright yellow arrows from St. Jean Pied de Port up into the mountains, Santiago bound, along with my questions, turning around and around.

 

 

II. A man called Jesus

 

Day 3. Leaving Pamplona in the hot afternoon sun, miles seeking miles. Unaccustomed feet—like roadkill walking.

Donde es el Camino? La flecha amarilla? Yellow arrows pointing the way, across the width of Spain, constant like a friend. Who knows what even you don't know. About yourself.

 

——

 

The Camino de Santiago, the Way of St. James: an indulgence for millions in the footsteps of St. Francis. Across 500 miles of Spain's northern montañas and mesetas, its cities, industrial parks and vineyards and long forgotten medieval towns. Christians and exercise nuts, nature enthusiasts and spirit seekers, history buffs, life changers—all of us walking for different reasons. As for my motivations, I'd have to say a bit of all the above.

No matter where in the world we come from or where we take our first hesitant or overeager steps, or whether we are walking for three days or months, we all come together as scallop-shelled pilgrims along the tremendous, ever-moving crucible of the Camino.

 

——

 

 

Lost in the suburbs—Rioja confused. Should I backtrack? Just then a man, a bureaucrat on break perhaps, runs out of a café—concrete and stacked with smokers, cured ham and tortilla. Still chewing a bocadillo—gesticulating, arms flailing, he grabs my backpack. We struggle in broad daylight, off balance. People passing shied into silence. A middle-aged sweaty pilgrim, exposed and ponderous, I watch my backpack run away into the concrete café, embarrassed to still be stammering at forty-five.

My dirty clothes and toilet kit, daily journal, guidebook and raingear—all inside. Could I let go of these defining things and just walk on?

No—not that kind of pilgrim. I follow. My backpack sits on a bar stool by the tortilla. Next to the man, still gesticulating, still waving his arms, but all smiles now, as he points to the seat beside him where there is coffee waiting. "Buen tipo," he keeps saying, practically hugging me onto the stool. In excited Spanish, he tells me he wants to buy me a meal. Help me get back to the Camino—find the yellow arrows. He thinks pilgrims are holy. Never had time to be one himself. He quit the church life. Not sure he believes, but begs me to say a prayer for him—when I get to Santiago.

Don't forget, the man tells me his name is—I promise not to forget—Jesus

 

 

III. Shoes blues

 

Cross legged and alone, on the gravelly edge of Frómista, under a poor excuse for a shade tree, and crazy white in the fierce meseta sun, sits a scraggly teen-aged Dane with greasy blond curls, and a straw hat weary for wear: another pilgrim finding his way across Spain. Drumsticks, harmonica and a change of clothes are all he carries. A note left behind for his parents. Huck Finn tinnitus Bob Dylan.

Bjarke's shy or young or dazed by the desert. Little could I know he would rock my world. We walk without talking in hundred-degree heat. Other pilgrims bus through this broiling flat treeless endlessness.

When I ask if he plays, a smile is born harmonica wide. With kibitzy fingers he mouths his harp like he couldn't breathe without it. Credence, Neil Young, Louis Armstrong—he knows them all—the songs of my youth, and beyond. Jethro Tull melts into sweet dreams of Patsy Cline. Elvis to Leonard Cohen. Hallelujah, hallelujah we sing, for the saint johnswort shocked to be blooming in the bleached-out soil.

Bjarke, patient, feeds me lyrics until I can sing them through and forget about the long, hard road I'm walking. Anneliese, perky German lady on a vow of silence, joins us for a stretch with a notepad of requests. She picks arugula and fennel and dandelion leaves from the side of the road. Johnny Cash is her man. Her smile's wide open all the time. For her, I walk the line.

We refill our bottles in a baked stone village shuttered up for the siesta and refuel with cheese and bread and Anneliese's greens. Then we heave our packs, loosen sternum straps and with lungs liberated, declare one love for a mile or so, our redemption song. Our feet drag on the windless scrub. Earth and wind meet fire. Prickly pears straighten their spines. Whatever life calls here home retreats inside or underground until the cool of evening comes.

My feet expand with our repertoire. Blisters bleed—by God—my shoes are killing me. I take them off, finally, to break the pain and take a walk on the wild side. I tie them to my pack. Carry on my wayward son.

Harmonica keeps pace with the descent of the sun. Boots bouncing hard and heavy, from shoulder to arm, flank to flank. Damn right I got the blues. Five more miles or we sleep on the road.

Damn right I got the blues

I got the blues to carry

The blues—and my own damn shoes.

 

 

IV. Give us this day

 

Every day I spend time alone on the path where nothing comes to mind and I am not thinking about not thinking not worrying that the clouds could drench me or the sun roast my face or about my blisters or pounded toes or what that new pain is in my thigh or why I am still fat and not losing any weight wondering if maybe I should drink less wine or whether I'm walking too slowly or if those people passing me are actually old enough to be my grandparents or what I'll do after I reach Santiago and see the priests swing the bota fumero flooding the entire cathedral with incense and how to return after this springtime sabbatical to the fervid non-walking world I call home.

I am ragged with ache but awed by the foreign and familiar world around me and what my unremarkable body can attain on this journey from the Pyrenees to the Atlantic.

Mornings I am awakened in the pilgrim hostel by the grunts of some gung ho German's calisthenics or the slash of a flashlight from a Japanese pilgrim organizing his things before sunrise penetrating my earplugs or eye mask making my own preparations sluggish and slow as I frantically try to fit everything back into my pack doing what little I can to prevent bedbugs and not be the absolute last soul out of the albergue searching for the yellow arrow painted on the road or a rock or on the side of some building and then once again put one heavy boot after the other onto the paved road or dirt track.

I keep on walking and walking but always stop to gawk at storks nesting on bell towers or hillsides of chest-high heather or to play with a stray dog that reminds me of mine back home or perhaps to see a ruin or say a prayer and rest in a small church or accept an offering left on the side of the road for passing pilgrims and somehow no matter how I feel I keep walking and if I am limping someone offers me their stick or knee brace and when I again feel stronger I pass it along.

Often I meet someone interesting and adjust my speed to walk in step for a ways and just as simply when it seems our time is through at least for the moment one of us walks faster or decides to take a break and then I am alone again until perhaps I pass a café where Camino family I haven't seen in days or weeks gathers at an outdoor table and someone calls my name and I am companioned again for a time.

I never stop until the day feels full sometimes two hours sometimes twelve and trust that when I am ready to rest for the night there will be a place for me to sleep next to a few or ninety other snoring souls and company with which to share a bottle and prepare a meal while my body my spirit revive and I scrape aside a few moments to journal about the day's adventures and the beautiful inspiring men all around me who simultaneously fill and break my heart or think about my life's hopscotching scavenger hunt and what it means to be right with the world.

 

 

V. Rosary miles

 

You couldn't help but notice him, on his knees, guidebooks and Bible splayed, praying for direction in this God forsaken, God glorying town. His gym-plumped muscles give protest to a tapered wicking shirt and khaki shorts still pressed with a crease, unstained or soused by the road. The gap in his teeth an invitation I can't resist showing him the way on what is clearly his first pilgrim day.

Jonny walks fast. With bounce and a mission, shirt off to work his tan, muscles flexed to punctuate a point. Double high five, occasional chest bump, he exhales his triumphs and tribulation: Torn between a calling to become a priest and chasing girls—walking here for a sign.

What do you think? he asks, ricocheting through an allée of poplars.

You're magnificent! comes to mind—but no. I steer clear of evolution, abortion and being gay. The history of papal fallibility, I'm sure, would be a revelation.

I smile in reply and put a reassuring hand on his shoulder. And fall in love yet again.

 

——

 

At twenty four, Jonny gets around. His devout mother, his agent de voyages, shepherding him to Catholic youth rallies from Brazil to Australia—headlining the Pope, ne plus ultra. Our Lady too has called him—several times—to Medjugorje where the Virgin appears to only a select few. A righteous place. To meet chicks, he figures out.

 

——

 

We stop at a tienda in Villar de Mazarife. Jonny buys fresh lemons and asks me to squeeze them on his head, then rub in the juice to lighten his dirty blond hair. I tell him about where I'm from—about the heirloom pears and apples I grow in Vermont.

Back on the road, Jonny teaches me to say a complete rosary: the joyful, the luminous, the sorrowful and the glorious—miles pass as the sun works its shift and distance disappears like prayer into the sweet sweat of his citrine hair.



 

 

VI. Seeing the light

 

For hundreds and hundreds of years, pilgrims from all over Europe journeyed for months facing every hardship and peril on a medieval highway in search of a miracle: the bones of an apostle carried from the holy land by angels and the wind—beyond the Pillars of Hercules to an unmarked grave at the end of the earth, Finisterre.

 

——

 

15th day. Half way?

Cold mist wraps me up and down. My feet alone separate the earth and sky as I enter Monjardin along with the rain. One soul manages to live in the village collapsed by time in a house assembled from what remains. He styles himself last of the Knights Templar. Sworn to protect the way from infidels and thieves, he sells knickknacks and souvenirs to pilgrims and passersby. He extends hospitality, too. Without fuss, electricity, running water, or even a bed.

Wind and fog and the rain conspire. Against my will I am nowhere this night, but here.

I am offered a pallet in the crawl space above the main room. When the stew is ready a few people emerge—from out of the ruins, it seems. A Romani woman tells me she watched me walking down the road and saw my inner light. She followed and prayed I would stop. Her Spanish is broken. Her scent is strong and feral, sitting closer than close.

She had a Teacher once; he passed through her village, and she followed his light to Santiago—for her he was Love.

Overcome—with what I cannot say for sure—she drapes her arms around me. Sobbing ceremoniously, minute after minute she holds me as the others spoon their food in silence, the storm tugging and testing the scraps of roof.

The fireplace drafts back into the room. She sees my light so clearly she says her heart bursts. Rain seeps in through the walls and I wonder what it looks like, my light, and if indeed there is some mysterious connection between us. She presses her breast to mine in confirmation. She grips me with rough hands all over as if to give me shape, perhaps, to keep me from moving away.

In candleshadow, dirty hands move to dirty faces. A stalemate of eating and not eating. She stares at me. I try to imagine what she sees. It seems her eyes are—her soul is waiting. I peer back for as long as I can, then look away. With the exuberance of a child, or a drunk, and with a strong whiff of crazy, or holy, she beseeches me, all the more so as I become muddled and dumb. Smoke fills the room and rises to escape through mismatched ceiling boards up into the crawl space. My refuge.

I disentangle myself from her with tired pilgrim excuses. Scrape my bowl and wipe it clean with a rag. Then withdraw through the smoky haze and silence and climb the makeshift ladder to my cave, my catechism—to await the morning.

At dawn, silent as a thief, I stumble, then hop over her on the bare floor shrouded tight in her clothes at the base of the ladder. She is peaceful, barely discernible by the coal light of the fire, as I stride out into the day newly born.

 

 

VII. Givers and takers

 

Here we are a sweating American of middle age supporting a bulging rucksack, belly hanging over a too-tight waist strap, in step with a Kiwi divorcee with a bad-luck hi-tech walking stick given to her by her ex, and a too-cool Korean ready with a pose; today's makeshift family, finding our way to Astorga.

Parched, we climb hill after hill. Conversation recedes. The countryside is spring green and glorious, but heat and distance begin to press down our spirits.

With each forward step I see more clearly a lemonade stand by the road. Our road? Dixie cups a quarter a glass—that sweet American dream I fail to convey to my unfamiliar foreign family.

Shit gets holy atop the plateau when out of the ruins of an ancient brick farmhouse, through an assembly of discarded car seats and ratty old couches stuffed with aporetic pilgrims, comes Davide—decked out in beads and flowers of braided hair, looking remarkably Christ-like, and groovy, carrying pitchers of lemonade REALLY fresh squeezed and not just—

Mangoes and papaya dip in and out of chocolate and play harmony with frolicking figs. Homemade biscuits wait patiently for a local manchego or a jam with apricots while eggs shed their hard-boiled shells and sea salt cha chas on their nakedness.

We lounge, we laugh in admiration—and disbelief. A bonafide lemonade stand, but one on steroids: Davide's joy and calling, his everyday gift to passing pilgrims.

We have our fill and then some, café, to perk us up with five types of leche. All organic, all on Davide. Un abrazo muy fuerte para todos. No quarters required. 

 

 

VIII. From each according to his ability

 

Day 22—injuries like mountains getting harder to get over. I collapse sweaty on a couch, feet up after a brazen, brain-stunning 20 miles.

Too tired to protest, when a pilgrim without a word pulls off my socks. Unflinching, he inspects my wounds, my creaky worn-out feet, ankles and knees—archaic machinery, past its prime and difficult to repair.

Medico? Infermiere? I ask.

No, camionneur, truck driver, French, retired. Five times a pilgrim, he knows what I need.

He washes my feet then rubs them with green and yellow herbs. Snips and salves, needles and threads. Keep them dry, he tells me, stuff your boots with newspaper. He gives me gauze, and pills for the pain in my knee he can tell will get worse.

A crowd of pilgrims gathers around us. Bruises and blisters, gimp legs and God knows what—all ready to be served. I try to thank him, ache to be like him. He waves me away, scrutinizing the demand.

 

——

 

The day after next, as it happens, I meet a vegetarian all the way from India, weak from walking sin carne in a meaty land, constantly clarifying: ni pollo, not eating, pescado no.

I beg her to sit. Throw my pack to the ground—thrilled, finally! on this camino of incalculable kindnesses to have something, at last, to offer.

I unpack my vegetarian survival kit, fine-tuned over decades. Mindful to fill each baggie with care, I make her a ready stash of protein powder, flax and chia seeds, l-glutamine and a mix of twenty-seven vegetables, powdered and green, energy enough for a hundred miles.

She takes the baggies, my eager explanations, and holds them away from her, like they're from another planet. She looks at me, bows almost imperceptibly. Dartquick and tentative, she places my offerings in her satchel, turns, and softsteps away without another word.



 

IX. Santiago de Compostela

 

Right knee clicking, left leg dragging. Hobbled, humbled but almost there. Stone walls, canopies of ancient trees, rockhopping streams, wild horses—so beautiful I'm almost at peace with the pain.

Friends slowwalking, willing me to make it, carrying my bag, at times, feeding me painkillers. Making me laugh, making miles pass.

It's dark; I'm ready for this walk to be finished, but can go no farther than Monte del Gozo. From here, we look down upon Santiago. Church spires penetrate the sky, pilgrim revels and dreams percolate the night, city lights blur in the mist. Starless journey's end. Horses sleepgalloping down a green sloping field.

Approaching Santiago the next day in the early light, quietly jubilant, friends appear along the way, effortlessly choreographed. We enter Cathedral Square and pass through the door of glory, embracing faster travelling camino family I thought I would never see again, tears channeling through the wrinkles of my smile.

Few words as we hug the great statue of St. James and say prayers for the future, as we are cleansed by the soaring silver incense burner set in flight by eight sturdy monks, as we wait in line, like millions of pilgrims before us, for our latin-inscribed compostelas: the Pope's indulgence of half our sins. A not-insignificant slate-cleaning and discount on the waittime of purgatory.

I cut short the celebrations that night to wander the city's streets and parks alone, to think about love, about home, to feel what I feel. I check email at an internet cafe and find a new career waiting, which seems like a dream, like destiny, but also in the scheme of things—after a month of full-on, nowhere-to-hide living, opening my heart to countless remarkable, preposterous, not fully knowable companions, myself and God included—seems anti-climatic, a bit, well, mundane.

Ultreya—onward. To the sea!

 

 

X. Confession

 

Up and over mountains across cities of stone, I walked five hundred miles in the closet. A silent chaperon.

 

No one is gay it seems on the Camino de Santiago.

Not that I was looking, really, but I must've met a thousand guys walking— Quebecois corporate warriors on leave, quirky Koreans, Brazilians in Coelho's footsteps, Italians taking their own sweet time; or bicycling—spandex and saddlebags speeding by, wives far behind; even a Don Quixote on horseback—

What a story to tell the kids! (adopted, obviously):

…we met on a spiritual path. First kissed in an ancient hermitage where Saint Francis, also a pilgrim, once slept…

What I actually found, or what found me, on the camino of otherwise consummate diversity, was one enormous closet. A baroque cache of confidences, locked, gilded and built to endure. An unconfessional, comprehensive and restricting, it walked with me, surrounded me always, sheltered me at night, privated me—after being out for so long—fundamentally.

 

——

 

By the time I reached Finisterre, I was lighter, in some ways, renewed. Worn out too at pilgim's end, lame on the Atlantic shore where, eleven centuries before, the bones of the apostle were discovered. Brought inland, a shrine was built to honor the relic of Saint James the Great, which eventually became the cathedral, as the great city of Santiago de Compostela grew up around it. But Finisterre, the site of the miracle, is the true beginning of the story, without which there would be no pilgrimage. Because of this, many pilgrims go there after Santiago as a culmination, a place to rest, to refresh in the sea and reflect on their journey.

I too made the four-hour ride. With a new friend, a tall, sinewy Dutch pilgrim I met on the bus, I found the beautiful beach where it all began. We swam and embraced the pilgrim ritual of letting go: finally setting aflame, with the help of some lighter fluid, what no longer served.

And so I was burning my shoes when love came for me at last. I had noticed him earlier, a Spanish man swimming in the waves, with a woman. His rounded muscles hummed of surfing and youth. A perfect dark diamond of chest hair trailed down to low, remarkably well-fitting shorts. When his salty brown eyes turned towards me I recoiled, each time, as if reproached. Yet hadn't I dreamed of this man since the Pyrenees? Alone at night in countless hot crowded hostels.

Hadn't I been praying for love to wash over me like a wave?

After a while, conscious of age and improbabilities, I limped out of the sea, legs worn out from walking, crutched and subdued.

 

——

 

Sheltered by rocks, each the other's solemn witness, my friend and I burned long- carried letters in the flames of our pilgrim fire. My boots too I burned for their blistering failures, though grateful they went the distance.

He was translating for me his ex's words of pain and regret when the man from the surf showed up. I was bent over, heeding the fire, and reeked of burning leather, rubber and polyester. Out of nowhere sandy feet and bulgy calves appeared, solid and essential in the Galician sun. The Spaniard asked me the question I have been waiting my whole life, it seemed, to hear: tienes un cigarillo?

I looked up at him, this stunning, smiling man, then quickly over to my friend who had stopped reading his letters and accused me with his stare: This is sacred. What's this guy doing here? What's he to you? Of course, I hadn't yet found the right moment to come out to my friend.

No, I said, eventually, to the Spaniard. Unexpected as a slap.

They both stood there, waiting. My boots threatened to smother the fire. Seguro? my dream man asked, grasping my gaze with his, giving me a moment. To be sure.

My friend cleared his throat. I knew the timing was awful, that he didn't want the ritual interrupted. I didn't either—but, what if…?

No fumo, I replied, finally, ridiculous like an apology.

The man from the surf waited another heart-stopping second. Then he shrugged perfect shoulders and said OK, turned slowly, eyes last, and walked away.

 

——

 

My friend resumed reading, now in Dutch, as he threw his letters one by one into the fire. I heard his sadness and loss. I felt it, too. My boots smoldered. I could still make out the dark luster of the young Spaniard's hair as he reached the far end of the beach, and then, disappeared over the dunes with the sun. I stood there immobilized, in some kind of trance, until my legs buckled, and I crouched down to revive the fire. I added my letters without reading them, my own pain and loss. As if nothing had just happened.

As if I didn't know God. Was a tease.

 

 

 

 

 

Steven Roiphe
Brighton Beach Memory Gap

The top floor of a Brooklyn walkup. A boy stands in the kitchen corner, hands in pockets, saucer eyes fixed on a very old woman with a wizened, shiny face. She sits at a table, shouting round-syllabled epithets in a language he doesn’t understand. Though no one living here smokes, the apartment reeks of the habit. It’s dim and all the carpets are red, and his father has warned him not to touch anything. Everything is dirty.

The family has told him, too, that she isn’t a nice lady. And while she’s never been mean to him, he believes she’s mean, sees it in the sideways glare she aims at the grownups. On him she gushes hysterical warmth, suffocating hugs, wet kisses and sharp cheek pinches. He stands as far from her as possible.

She is the matriarch. The patriarch has gone, done in by chronic illness and the hardness of this life. (He too was mean.) Though the boy has never seen his great-grandmother spend a nickel, he’s learned she’s the cash cow, that when she goes someone (always one) will be very rich. She owns this building, and the one next door. She is a crush-proof, raving moneybag, and he doesn’t know yet about money, so she is mysterious in the way of life’s truths.

He doesn’t think of her from the Oldsmobile’s back seat on the bumper-to-bumper Belt Parkway. He only remembers her when he has to, because she disgusts him and something in him hates her.

***

From a very young age, I knew what roots were. I watched Roots on television when I was seven—how could I not know?

I just didn’t think I had any.

Let me explain.

I am (American and) three-quarters Jewish, one-eighth Norwegian, and one-eighth German Christian.

My mother is North European Jewish on her father’s side, Scandinavian German on her mother’s, both her parents the nicest of people and atheists through and through. None of her family had been long in America, but both my maternal grandparents were expert assimilators. He wore cowboy hats and spoke in a drawl, she baked apple pies and kept weekly appointments at the beauty parlor. I knew they were paragons of Midwest American virtue, but also that this didn’t reflect their ethnicity.

My father’s ethnicity, much easier to decipher: Orthodox Jewish, grandparents straight from Eastern Europe to Brighton Beach, Brooklyn.

His clearer origins, I’m realizing as I write, explain why Brighton always makes me think of roots and ancestry. Of the walkup, as if my family sprang fully formed from its basement, where Uncle Irving manufactured Lucite picture frames. And I’m still scared. The odors, the shadows, and above all the noise (shouting, whining, crying) of that place—these constitute my roots, if I have any. Confronted with that horrible place, I stopped caring where I’d come from.

Which might be acceptable, except now I write historical fiction. I’ve written about early American Quakers, Maine backwoods Puritans, and Anglican survivors of Dutch torture. Never about my people.

But I can write about them. Sure I can.

I’ll start as I often do in my work, with compelling information that evokes images, characters, plot. The name of a city where my people once lived, within the Eastern European glob. Vilna—in Poland, they told me—now called Vilnius, and in Lithuania.

Except for me Vilna isn’t a real place. It is, rather, a very old photograph, encased in a heavy, botanical-motif frame, hanging on a wall of that top-floor apartment. And my great-grandmother Ida, shiny faced, Yoda-like, spouting rare intelligible English—“all gone, all gone”—gesticulating into the ether.

How do I make something of this?

Maybe by honing that memory, thinking deeper about the faded photograph that is Vilnius to me. The photo is so old it’s gray yellow, the faces and building’s facade (I think there is only one building, and possibly a fence) bleached beige where the light strikes most. Oily rainbow blotches stain the finish where it’s melded to the glass of the frame.

And what was all gone? A row of young men, maybe two rows (memory fails here), the taller ones kneeling into the photo’s fade. Some laughing, or smiling at least, like Uncle Irving and his brother Uncle Louie when they’d been drinking. Standing before, of all things, a farmhouse—there weren’t even plants in the Brighton walkups—a country house, anyway. If I had to guess, I’d date this image near the start of the twentieth century.

And these were just the men. Ida’s brothers. There must have been women, though I never asked. (I don’t think I ever asked her anything, not one question!) Maybe the women were inside the house preparing a meal, or in the nonexistent fields of the nonexistent farm, not important enough for the photo, or it just wasn’t their turn. These men were the cream of the Pussemensky clan. The ones who’d make something of it.

Except they’re gone. All gone. Because they were Jewish, and from Eastern Europe.

Another word Ida spouted: “Hitler.” I knew that word, full of menace, a name any sane person hated. A name easily associated with two dead rows of young men who left only that photo.

And even that, now, is gone. As are the ones in the walkups. Ida, of course, Irving and Louie, my psychotic grandmother Miriam, even my father, who graciously exited before drumming into me more Pussemensky oppression.

The Brighton family left me just hints of my roots. And repulsion that made me loath to learn more. An aversion to even thinking of them. Until now, when expedience dictates connection.

Connecting with my father or grandmother is hopeless; connecting with my uncles is impossible (one died when I was little, and I fled the other to preserve my sanity). But Ida—I suspect my image of her is simplistic, my fear of her a function of ignorance. And more, she’s closest to the ancient relatives I seek. A gateway to the obscure, fertile folk who preceded her. Maybe I can learn the truth about her, and so connect with them.

Explain her, as I never could have back then. Redeem her from that dark place in my mind.

***

I’ll need knowledge to take this journey, as much as I can get, so I gather the rest of what I know about Ida and her kin: Hitler wasn’t the first to decimate my family. First came the pogroms. These originated in Russia, involving men on horseback I think, with beards. The Pussemenskys I know about must have fled the pogroms, sailed to Ellis Island, married and bought houses in Brighton.

That’s all I’ve got. My childhood conception of Great-Grandma Ida’s people.

To get more, I turn (naturally) to the Internet. I google Vilnius, click its Wikipedia entry. And home in on this: “Narrow, curved streets and intimate courtyards developed in the radial layout of medieval Vilnius.” I see my ancestors, stoop backed beneath their wares, wandering cobbled streets. Like I’ve wandered Greenwich Village, a guitar strapped on my back.

Another factoid: Vilnius was a crucible for anti-Russian uprisings—in the nineteenth century, when my people lived there! I see those ancestors again, backs straight now, fighting the tsar’s hordes.

The Web page traces a fairly reliable setting. For character sketches of my forebears there, I consult Izzy Mansky, scion of the Vilna Pussemenskys, my father’s first cousin once removed. A kind, friendly Pussemensky, who used to have us over for Passover seders, but an ally of that scary bunch. Though we’ve lost touch, I know he’s interested in our roots; I have a family-tree PDF he sent my sister years ago. I glanced at it back then. But it suggests no smiling rows of brothers, just four. My memory, no surprise, has failed again. I abandon the yellowed photo, compose an engaging e-mail, and pray the octogenarian still lives. Can he tell me more about our ancestry? About Vilna? About Ida?

Ike—he’s Ike, now that we’re both adults—responds soon, at least as sorry as I that we’ve lost touch. And explodes my plan for clarity: his father, along with sister Ida, came not from Vilna city, but from a small town near it. From Svencionys, a real Sholem Aleichem shtetl, where a farm-like house might fit.

I fire back a second e-mail, full of searching questions only Ike is left to answer. Can he share memories of Ida, or of his father? Anecdotes about the emigrants? “Personality type stuff,” is how I describe what I’m after. I want to know these people, so I can write them well.

Ike doesn’t really answer. He sends a few Jewish-related spams. At first I’m hurt—he’s deflecting my request. A punishment, meant to impart tribal guilt. But my scientist wife assures me it’s generational, old folks don’t like being challenged to open up, even about others. I wait a few days, then e-mail again, asking less-enthusiastic questions.

Ike answers this time, opens up some, passes an anecdote: Because his father, trying to assimilate, shortened the family name, Ike’s birth certificate reads “Baby Possum.” (When Ike’s dad learned some English, he began using Mansky instead.) Ike offers chilling accounts of his mother, Cossacks, typhus. He even confirms my impressions—his one memory of my great-great-grandmother is a slap on the wrist.

But not much on Ida. He didn’t really know her. His relationship to her sounds a lot like mine.

Still, a revelation: Ida brought two younger siblings, as well as her mother, Ada, overseas from Lithuania. I know these people, have spent time with close relations of theirs, and the emigrants at last seem relevant. Ida brought them here, shortly before the First World War, I decide, when she was barely twenty. She rescued them from the Holocaust, and from the pogroms. Ida, now, has really done something. She’s no longer tethered to that kitchen table, staring down her kin, frightening the little ones.

***

Among the tidbits Ike gives is a book recommendation, for insight into shtetl life. Milton Meltzer’s The World of Our Fathers. I see on Amazon it’s dated, the author an eclectic historian who’s covered everything from The Incas and Poe to Emily Dickinson and the potato. A jack-of-all-trades where suffering peoples are concerned, with publications on witch trials, Seminole wars, slavery, terrorism. Not the type of history I usually research. But I tell Ike I’ll get the book.

I find it in the juvenile section of a public library, kept in the back. I charge it out and decamp for the university library, where I continue researching my latest novel—important stuff. I cull articles from scholarly journals, comb the stacks for references cited by references in award-winning tomes.

Home at my writing desk, I eye Meltzer’s book with suspicion, wondering if it’s worth my time. Growing up, I might have enjoyed this book. But now?

I open to the index, find entries for Vilna, pogroms, the Pale—read passages that anchor cyberfacts—and I’m pleasantly surprised. The World of Our Fathers is well written. It migrates to my bedside table. A break, if I will, from the great books that normally reside there.

I learn how Jews first came to Eastern Europe, about Jewish life there, about the origins of Hasidism, Zionism, the Bund. About why Jews strove to keep our identity, and how they compromised when they found they couldn’t. It’s a backdrop to Ida’s life, this little gem of a book. Information that slakes my historical thirst.

It’s okay, I suppose, that it’s just about Jews.

***

I’ll clarify. For as long as I can remember I’ve been a Jew-hating Jew. I’ve heard we aren’t rare. Hitler made us, and before him the tsars. I know implicitly I am this, as I also know I’m a homophobe and a racist (though thankfully not a bigot). I see photos of Jewish people, Jewish towns, and cringe inside. I learn names of Jewish relatives—Leib Elya, Chana, Yosef, Feyga—and I’m grateful for my Americanized first name, glad my surname sounds French. The very word “Jewish” is a joke to me. I’m way too thankful, too, for my Christian roots. I’ve moved north because I’m Norwegian. Not because I’m Lithuanian, though Svencionys gets lots of snow too.

Being a Jew-hating Jew has been, as much as Ida’s ghoulishness or Dad’s and Grandma’s abuse, why I’ve never explored my Brighton Beach roots, or written about those ancestors. I’d like to believe I can rise above self-hatred. There’s work to do. History to trace, and to imagine. Narrative to compose. A genealogical novel, compelling as only the personal can be. A memoir, maybe even.

***

Riffing off all my new knowledge, I find much more about my ancestors. I learn they were Litvaks. Lithuanian Jews, known for authoritarian dogmatism. I realize they were likely also Mitnagdim—“they who do not agree”—Orthodox Jews who opposed the joyful Hasidim. Ida’s strictness, her fractiousness, make more sense.

But Ida wasn’t just strict and fractious. In my childhood metaethical taxonomy, the woman was mean. Ruthless, even. And angry, because she suffered.

Troublesome, this. I want to feel her pain, to like her for suffering. But I can’t like the termagant at the table. It would be better for me if in response to persecution, to loss, she’d turned humble, not angry.

Angry she was, though, and I try now to understand why. I research further and decide that Vilnius—Vilna—that was an answer. What did I hear in her bleak repetition—“Vilna . . . Vilna . . . Vilna . . .” Loss, yes, but why? Was it love? And why would she love Vilna, if its people conspired to exile her?

Let’s assume it was a kind of love. Vilna is, after all, a beautiful city. And she was apt to be drawn to its charms. If there was a capital of Judaism in Ida’s very Jewish world, it was Vilna: birthplace of the Bund, home of the Zionist Committee, center of Jewish learning, literature, commerce.

Maybe Vilna, to Ida, was like New York is to me. When I was a teenager and people asked where I was from I’d say “the City.” Even when I named my Long Island town—my shtetl—I added that it’s a suburb of New York.

By my college years, I nursed an inspired distaste for the City—the dirt, the noise, the Brighton walkups. This unease grew as I lived in Manhattan during my twenties and thirties, and hardened to loathing once I’d left New York for good. But. Ask me my favorite things about the place, and I’ll rhapsodize all five boroughs. In their shadows I’ve mined hatred, but also a kind of love.

I love New York partly for the protection living near it affords. Armor against anti-Semitism I first discovered in the paper, surfacing in Europe, down South, maybe even in rural Pennsylvania. To live in Vilna’s shadow . . . for a Jew in the Pale, was that a kind of protection? There were no pogroms in Vilna. Few, if any, in all of Lithuania. Maybe Ida was like me, learning of Kishinev and the Black Hundreds as I would learn of spray-painted swastikas and Middle-Eastern terrorism, in Hebrew school. Untouched by trouble but confused by it, scared but not terrified, not humbled.

Of course, Ida’s experience went far beyond school. I imagine how I’d have felt if, as she lost Vilna during her youth, I’d lost New York.

Not so difficult, now a piece of it’s gone. Every time I visit New York, I suffer again the loss of a wonder that helped define me through the years: a toddler watching the skyline recede through our car’s rear window as we moved from Queens to the suburbs; a ten-year-old counting on that skyline to vitalize desperate moments before family visits in Manhattan; a teenager watching New York flash through my vision descending into LIRR catacombs, en route to adventure or dull summer jobs; a young man urging his best friend—both of us unlucky at the clubs—to drive back and forth with him over the Brooklyn Bridge, for the adrenalin rush of downtown rising again in the windshield.

Then I was an adult, and terrorists shattered that wonder in an instant, forever.

My great-grandmother’s terrorist threat was less catastrophic, less tailored for today’s megablockbuster market. But it was relentless, and originated much nearer by. In the years before Ida’s birth, Minsk, just a hundred miles away, was hit hard. As she came of age, trouble struck Gomel to the southeast, then much closer in Bialystok. By 1905, Ida would have been thirteen. Pogroms that year took hundreds of Jewish lives, caused millions of rubles in damage. When she was a young woman, persecution drove Jews from east and south over the borders, into shtetlach like Svencionys. Into Vilna. Proud Vilna was reshaped by pogroms, just as mighty Manhattan is disfigured by fanatic belief.

Ida wasn’t stupid, nor idealistic. She likely realized that horror would come for her and hers. And then didn’t move humbly, a suckling to the slaughter. She reacted, with rage born of love for her homeland.

Rage born of love. Sounds potent. But why rage, why anger?

I like to think I’m not stupid; I won’t claim I’m not idealistic. Still, I’ve accrued some realism with age, and I can use it to interpret her anger.

Even I, with my American zeal for happiness, I the new-world optimist, I who remain convinced, after extremists crashed jets blocks from my person, that my self and my family aren’t endangered—even I can relate to victimhood’s anger.

Was I humbled, that late-summer day? A little. Very little. Terrified, at first (I could see the towers burn from my apartment). Stunned, for weeks and months as I contemplated gaps in my sky. And then? Angry. Enough to support wars that have brought my country near ruin.

And this after a threat history may yet judge as fleeting.

The threats against Ida and her people—the pogroms, the May Laws, and at last the Nazis—these weren’t fleeting.

If Yasser Arafat (for all his ambiguousness, my childhood Osama bin Laden) had operated from New Jersey, would I have rescued my parents, moved my sister? And if I had, how much angrier, how much bitterer would I have become?

I’m speculating, of course. Dabbling in family history, comparing my life to a barely recorded past. There are no diaries, no letters written between Ida and her kin. No documents to help me understand my roots better, know my ancestors more.

This Ida I’ve got now, she’s little more than the Ida I grew up with. The old woman at the table, wedged into a corner of my mind. My adult self allows her defeat, allows her anger. I know what she lost, but not what she had.

Am I stuck, then? Does no one know Ida now, more than I do?

***

There’s territory I haven’t explored. There are other Pussemenskys, people I grew up with. Closer to me in age and experience, but old enough to have known Ida better. Randy and Heidi, my father’s younger first cousins. Uncle Louie and Aunt Freda’s kids. Strange, I hadn’t thought yet to contact them.

Or maybe not so strange. They inhabit a primeval place in my life. Whereas I’ve kept in touch with Izzy, I haven’t spoken with Randy or Heidi in many, many years.

There ran through my youth a river, a rapids of familial bad blood. A truth I learned early from the Pussemenskys: bad blood is thicker than anything. I imagine torrents rushing under a bridge, and the old saws don’t seem so tame.

The gore originated at Uncle Irving, who gleefully lived long enough to “dance on Freda’s grave.” And it flowed down into my childhood home, where over time we stopped speaking of certain relatives, Freda and Louie’s family included.

But this isn’t our river—the cousins too young to know from evil eyes and shtetl gossip, to have inherited shtetl ways. It isn’t even our bridge. I e-mail Randy and Heidi.

***

Randy responds within moments, evaporating my fear that he’d shy from reconnection. He’s a textbook long-lost cousin, and soon we’re gabbing on the phone. As are Heidi and I. The three of us, smiles we can’t wipe away, schmoozing about grownup lives.

And about Ida. Their memories add layers to mine: her brisket and her barley soup, flavored with oxtail; Sunday visits with doting Grandma in lipstick and dresses; walks to the beach, on the Avenue, to the kosher deli; tea sipped through a sugar cube held in her mouth; “Eat, eat, eat,” and always at least there was a warm challah or rye loaf; a tzedakah box, full of coins saved for Israel; Hebrew newspapers and Yiddish conversation.

I remember some of this, and some simply wasn’t there in my time. By then the challah sat stale at the end of her table. These fresh details energize me.

But what they missed is poignant too. They don’t remember cigarette smoke. My crazy chimney of a grandmother moved in below Ida during my childhood, not theirs. Randy recalls frustration, not anger and argument. Heidi remembers yelling and screaming, but blames it on Ida’s poor hearing.

Instead of odor and anger, they remember food. Nourishment.

And love. Real, nurturing love. She cared for herself, she cared for others. They weren’t clenched within inches of their lives. For them, she was fittingly emotional.

Except when she wasn’t. Both describe her as a tough bird, very difficult for their mother to get along with. Vague trouble and dark secrets pervade their narratives. Her marriage to Charles wasn’t happy—they’ve heard he was quiet and kind, not mean—and mental illness plagued the family. Heidi puts it well: the woman dealt with a lot of shit. Randy suggests she might have beaten her children.

Still, they excuse Ida’s excesses in the name of age and old-world custom. I resist my contrary opinions—I’m trying, after all, to connect with her. I don’t challenge what I might have labelled whitewash before. Instead, I allow my cousins to explain that Ida enjoyed what she had. They saw more than the anger that conquered her, once she’d grown old and confused. (Alzheimer’s, they say, and I realize I’ve never allowed her a diagnosis.) They talk about her pride in her children. Especially their father Louis, the successful son. And in her grandchildren and great-grandchildren—they heard my and my sister’s names all the time, and now I remember hearing theirs.

Simple, really. Ida loved her family. And not just the ones who were gone.

I have a fuller conception of this woman I never knew.

***

Fuller, but hardly full enough to fuel my truant autofiction. Randy and Heidi’s Ida, as nurturing as she becomes, is not yet mine, much as their loving father wasn’t. To really understand my Ida, I need to look deeper into my childhood, but even closer to home.

Randy and Heidi turn me homeward. Both tell me to speak with my mother about Ida, which spurs me to talk to my sister too.

I’ve realized all along that Mom and Lisa were involved, but their experiences seemed sacrosanct. Like me, they survived the shit Ida left in her wake. Would they agree to see her in this new light? If contacting relatives linked to the walkups is verboten, speaking of what happened in them is strictly taboo.

At first, Lisa justifies my hesitancy. She’s dumbfounded I could reach out to Heidi and Randy, though I reckon if asked she couldn’t say why. (Bad blood is thicker than reason too.) She vents hard memories much like my own.

But then highlights some of the good her little brother missed. Packages of halvah atop the fridge, Ida’s bespectacled face and ancient elbow at the bedroom window, her venerable house-dressed frame on the front stoop. Her recollection of Ida’s physique is more evocative than mine: “small but very thick . . . heavy bones.” Lisa remembers her as quieter, says that while the others raved, Ida spoke when there was something to say.

We hit upon a shared memory—the tzedakah box. It was a detail to Randy and Heidi. Now, I see what it was. A tzedakah box is not of a piece with the filth, the squalor Lisa and I remember. It’s not stale bread. I think about that box more, remember things about it. It sat in front of Ida on the kitchen table, and sometimes she held it. It was decorated with Hebrew calligraphy, with mountains, with doves and a bright menorah. I read the back of it once. It said something about trees in Jerusalem.

The money in that box would help people Ida never knew.

Another aspect of my great-grandmother appears, entwined with her anger about what she’d lost and her delight in what she’d built. She’d never been to Israel, never would go. None of her children would go. But she wanted to share its future. The woman had vision. This woman had hope.

***

My mother and I are very close. We think the same, tend to pick the same battles, notice the same slights. Growing up I was her partner in bitterness, in divorcing the Pussemenskys. I expect that her memories of them will naturally outnumber mine, but match mine in tone.

Hers, though, are so much more nuanced. A lot less hostile than I expect. Ida, it turns out, treated her nicely. Mom remembers a strong woman, stubbornly so. Not always easy to like, but compared to herself, a “mouse from a small town in Wisconsin,” this comes off well. My mother arrived in New York a little too early to join the women’s lib movement, but sensed its surge. And I sense that Ida, an older woman who preferred business to housework, served as a role model. The intractable traits are there: strict kashrut imposed upon others, her status as “boss over her kids,” along with rumors she might have henpecked my great-grandfather to death. But unlike my father’s mother Miriam, Ida is benign. She visits with tenants and passersby. Cries when Miriam unravels.

Finally, too, I’ve found some vignettes. “Your father said that basically, she brought him up”:

He said that when he was old enough to go out on his own, Ida would follow him, hiding behind parked cars so he wouldn’t see her.

 

Scary. But there’s love there, too. Then this:

 

I remember her always fighting with the oil deliveryman. She would run out as soon as he pulled up to deliver and would watch over him to make sure he didn’t cheat, and she would yell loudly at him if she thought he was pumping too much . . . I never had seen anything like this and tended to take the side of the poor elderly woman.

 

Such an odd mix of victim and enforcer! Plus, miracle of miracles, the grandame had a sense of humor:

 

My first Yom Kippur, when we got home from synagogue, we stopped in at her apartment. She had gotten home before us. (We went to a Conservative temple, not hers.) She was sitting with what looked like a cup of tea. I was pretty weak from my first fast and she said, “Here—take a drink of this,” and held up the cup to me.  I took a sip—it was whisky! I almost fell over—she got a good laugh.

Ida’s sugar cubes don’t seem so innocent now. But who can dislike a crusty old trickster? And, last of all, this:

If she was proud of someone or something, it was very evident in her body language, but not vocally. She’d puff out her chest and lift up her head and get a sort of smug smile on her face.

Wait—I knew this pose. I remember it clearly now. Maybe I needed to see it through a misshapen lens I didn’t have, growing up—through the lens of “smug”—to find it in my memory. It goes with the pride I’ve hardly recognized, but that’s cropped up all through this narrative. Ida’s anger, her joy, and her hope—I see now they constitute pride: pride of place, first in Vilna and later in New York; pride of person, not just of herself but the family around her; pride of position—she was a Jew, a survivor of the pogroms, linked through that tzedakah box with a land her survival helped birth.

Pride, I see now, is bound up with all I’ve ever known about Ida.

I reset my mind, reconceptualize her, based on what I’ve learned: Soft, but proud. Driven from home, but proud. Hounded by loss, then stricken with an illness that annihilates dignity—but still proud.

And I’m the inheritor. The camera turns to me. Can I own this pride? I feel I need to, if I’m going to write about her, about what she represents.

It helps that I know Ida more now. Helps even more that I’ve come to like her, and to fear her less. I’m thankful for her shrewdness, her cold calculation, in ways I never was growing up. Hard traits, but they saved our family’s skin. She was tough, and she was soft, in ways I aspire to be.

But I can’t accept that pride yet, and don’t know if Ida’s ready to give it. It stays close to her, won’t leave the kitchen.

To write a story I’m proud of, that’s not full of hate, I’ll have to think many more thoughts about the whole Brighton family. Before ever starting a novel, I’ll have to spend a lot more time in the walkups.

Which fills me with dread. I can’t imagine the pride I’ve found would cleave to those others, even if Ida and I allowed them it. They’d fight it every moment of the way, much harder than she did. I’m tired of Ida’s people, disinclined to enter her portal to the past. I’d much rather spend time with fictional characters. More malleable folks I’ve created.

Maybe there’s a boundary, staked out by remoteness, or misdeeds, or anger (yes, my own), beyond which pride and redemption can’t travel. And maybe my family’s reached that.

***

I’ve resolved little. To be fair, I hadn’t expected to resolve anything.

Still, I’ve connected with Ida, in ways I never could before. Connection requires only desire, an object and a spark, and Ida is sparkling like seltzer now. I want to sustain this connection, revisit it sometimes, at will. I want part of the nurturing I never got from her.

I think of one way to get it. Somehow there are slices of marble-rye bread embagged in our freezer. The only Jewish rye in Maine, I decide, and I’ve purchased it. I microwave a few slices to grandmotherly softness, spread newfangled butter and eat, eat, eat, as I think about Great-Grandma Ida.

She’s still at her table, and I’m still in the corner. But her challah’s a little fresher.

And I remember now she always sat up straight.