Bliss, Remembered (2 page)

Still shaking her head at the folly of us all, she got up and went over to her little antique desk, opened a drawer and pulled out one of those large acetate envelopes. It was a bright purple—violet, her favorite color. I instinctively reached out my hand for the folder. You would’ve thought that I’d have learned by now. “No, no, no,” she said. “Not yet. In fact, I’ve decided that I’m gonna tell you the first part of the story.”

“This is a story?” I asked, pointing to the envelope. “You’ve written a story?”

“No, no, Teddy. Not a story story. It’s the real story that happened to me long ago that I want you to know about.”

“To you?”

“My story, yes.”

“At the Olympics?”

“That’s part of it.” She grinned—and rather mischievously, I thought. “That’s a lot of the part I’m gonna tell you.”

“Why do you wanna tell me that part?”

“Well, the first part is a lot of fun, so I decided I’d enjoy telling you that.” As she stood before me, she gently rapped the envelope on her thigh. “But the second part is more important, so I better let you read that to make sure it’s absolutely clear.”

“All right, I got it.”

“But Teddy: prepare yourself now. There’s some sex.”

That took me aback a little. “There is?”

“I hope you can abide that, Teddy. I promise not to offend your delicate sensibilities.”

“I’ll try not to blush, Mom.”

“And I’ll try not to spell it out.”

“Okay, it’s a deal.”

Her expression changed then, and in a voice so different that I thought at first she was putting me on, she spoke softly: “Some violence, too.”

I watched her closely before I realized she was serious. Even then, I wasn’t certain. “Violence? Really, Mom? Violence?”

“One day, yes.” But quickly, then: “Only let’s not get into that now. That’s a ways off.”

“Okay.”

She put a smile back on her face, reached into the envelope, pulled out a little tape recorder and handed it to me. “You gotta use this.”

“But you said you’ve already got it all written out in there.” I pointed to the acetate envelope.

“That’s true, but I’m sure I’ll flesh it out some in the telling, so it’ll be a fuller picture. Probably more scintillating, too.”

“You want me to get this transcribed afterwards?”

“You can if you want, Teddy. After I’m dead and gone, you can do whatever you want.” She sighed. “That’s the point.”

Mom wasn’t fey when she said that. Rather, her voice was suddenly very trenchant, and, of course, it made me all the more curious. “What is the story, Mom?”

“That’s what I’m gonna tell you. You don’t need a preview of coming attractions. Can you work this gizmo?”

I may not be a technological wizard, but I knew enough to push the start button, and I said, “Testing, testing,” and stopped it and pushed the little backwards arrow and played it back. Sure enough: “Testing, testing.”

“I got it,” I said. “Whatta guy.”

“Let’s go outside,” Mom said, leading me out the French doors to where she kept a pretty little garden—flush with rhododendron, which had always been her flower of preference. It was a soft summer’s day, terribly quiet. She sat down and smiled at me in something of a conspiratorial way. It even left me a little uneasy, because it was obvious she had something up her sleeve. Sex, okay. But violence? My mother?

“When does the story start?” I said, laying the little tape recorder down on the table next to her.

“Nineteen thirty-four,” she said. “When I was sixteen, on the Eastern Shore. But, really, Teddy, you’ll see that this moves on from the damn Depression and becomes the last story about the war.”

“World War Two?”

“Yeah. It’s the absolute very last story about World War Two. I gotta believe all the others have already been told by now.”

Truth be told, I never knew all that much about my mother’s life Back East. She and Daddy moved to Missoula, Montana, when she was still carrying me, and so I—and, too, my younger sister, Helen—simply had no connection with that part of her life, where she was brought up, in Chestertown, Maryland, which is on the Chester River off the upper reach of the Chesapeake Bay.

Even if she wouldn’t talk about it, Mom was proud of having been on the Olympic team. Of course, she was always quick to add: “I wasn’t good enough to win a medal”—and that invariably concluded the conversation. As I got older and learned more about Hitler and the important political implications of those Nazi Games, I asked her more about them, but she always managed to be evasive on the subject. The one time I really pressed her on it was when I was in high school and was assigned to write a composition about something interesting that somebody in the family had done. But she brushed me off again. “You gotta remember, Teddy, I was only a wide-eyed little girl from the Eastern Shore, and I couldn’t’ve cared less about the politics.”

It rather left me in the lurch, though, because what I really wanted to write about was how my father had been wounded at Guadalcanal in the summer of 1942. However, Mom had always told me that, like so many of the men who’d fought in the war, Daddy wanted to forget about it, and so I was instructed never even to approach him on the subject.

So, Guadalcanal was out and the Nazi Olympics were out, and I ended up writing my paper on how my grandfather, whom I’d never even known, had won a music contest when he was a boy, playing the accordian. I didn’t even appreciate the significance of this achievement. Mother had to explain it to me, how everybody always looked down on the accordian, and disparingly dismissed it as a “squeeze box.” Apparently, however, my grandfather was a downright whiz with the instrument, and when he came up against all those other kids playing their fancy pianos and violins and cellos, the judges were unable to deny him his due. It was a big deal in Chestertown at the time, and it remained prominent in my mother’s family folklore, but frankly, to me, it seemed awfully insignificant compared to the Berlin Olympics and Guadalcanal. But, there you go: any port in a storm.

Once Mother got me settled in her garden and was convinced that I was actually capable of operating the little tape recorder, she went back and fetched a pitcher of iced tea. It was obvious to me by now that she was laying in for the long haul. Before she began talking, though, she looked over at me and broke into this glorious, even beatific smile.

“What’s so funny?” I asked.

“Oh, nothing really. I’m just remembering, and it makes me happy.” She stopped and pointed again at the tape recorder. “Now, you sure that’s working?”

I left nothing to chance. I played the rewind: “. . . makes me happy. Now, you sure that’s working?”

Satisfied, then, Mom sat back and began.

Teddy, the house I grew up in wasn’t right in Chestertown. It was a few miles out of town, toward the Bay. The lawn backed right down onto the river. The Chester River. This long, sloping lawn. Lord, but it was a wonderful place to play. We had a dock there, and Daddy always had a boat. We had some land, too. I can’t remember how many acres, but Daddy sold most of it when I was a little girl. See, my father’s side of the family had a little money, and he didn’t want to bother with farming. You had to look after the tenants, the tenant farmers.

There was an old house on the property where the tenants had lived. You wouldn’t have known it was there, that old tenant house, tucked away behind where the river bends. After Daddy sold the farmland, we just stored stuff in there, but when the hard times came, the Depression in ’29, there was an old colored man—excuse me, we called the black people colored then, and it just slipped into my conversation, remembering . . .

Well, Teddy, isn’t that white of you . . .

There was an old black man . . . an African American. Well, he seemed old to me. Probably wasn’t over sixty. Certainly nowhere near as old as I am now, that’s for sure. And maybe not even as old as you. His name was Gentry. That was his first name, Gentry. Gentry Trappe. There was the town of Trappe, Maryland, farther down the Shore in Talbot County, and I suppose Gentry Trappe’s family had been slaves way back and just took that name, or there were people named Trappe they named the town after who owned his ancestors when they were slaves. Anyway, Gentry Trappe was a wonderful old fellow, quite distinguished in his way. I always called him “Mr. Trappe.” Poor man—his wife had died in the flu epidemic of 1918. You familiar with that?

Terrible thing. It was right about the time I was born. Well, Gentry Trappe never remarried and his children grew up, and then he lost his job in the Depression. Daddy had known him forever, and so he said, “Gentry, why don’t you come and live in the old tenant’s house on my place?”

And he said, “Oh, Mr. Robert, I couldn’t afford anything like that.”

But my father explained that he thought it’d be a good idea to have someone in the house, just to be on the property, to look after the two of his ladies—that’s my mother and me—when he was away on business. Your grandfather was the sweetest man, Teddy. There was no justice in such a model of goodness being killed. We always think of the mother’s milk of kindness, but I believe, if there’s any kindness in me, it came more from my daddy than Mom.

Daddy knew Mr. Trappe would want to plant a little garden, and all he asked in the way of rent was that when the sweet corn crop came in, he’d give us a dozen ears or so, and some peaches and maybe a dozen of those good Eastern Shore tomatoes. One thing I remember about my father. He’d dig into a tomato like it was an apple. Just take a big bite. All that juice and those little orange seeds running down his chin. I can see that now. I was never that partial myself to tomatoes. I like tomato soup and tomato sauce and tomato ketchup more than plain tomatoes themselves. Must have somethin’ to do with rememberin’ the juice runnin’ down Daddy’s chin.

Anyway, that was the deal Daddy struck with Gentry Trappe. A little produce would be rent enough if he’d keep an eye on the two gals. So he lived there on the property during all this time I’m tellin’ you about.

Sorry, Teddy, I’m getting off the track. It’s your job to keep me on the straight and narrow here.

Thank you. Daddy’s family did have a little money. My grandfather had started a nice little insurance office in Chestertown, servicing most of Kent County and some of Queen Anne’s, too, right across the river. It was thriving—you know, for that neck of the woods. And Daddy followed in his father’s footsteps. Stringfellow and Son Insurance, it became. Right there on Cross Street, the main drag in Chestertown. And the main drag was about the only drag then.

Now, Mother, her family didn’t have a pot to piss in. They were farmers. Corn. The Eastern Shore corn is a sweet white corn, and it’s the best there is, but the DeHavenons didn’t have that much land, and I suppose it wasn’t the best, either. All during the Depression, Mother had to help her folks out. But Daddy understood. We were veryfortunate—relatively. I think everybody was more understanding, more generous, during the Depression. And the good thing about insurance then was that it was the one thing—well, after their mortgages—that people would try their damndest to keep up. Your insurance. If nothing else, if you had a life policy, it would pay for your funeral. You’d be surprised how that mattered to a lot of folks.

Here, I ask you to keep me on point. That’s what they say now in business, don’t they—“on point”?

Well, I urged you to stop my digressions, and promptly, Teddy, promptly you encourage them.