Landscape: Memory (26 page)
Authors: Matthew Stadler,Columbia University. Writing Division
Tags: #Young men
Mr. Brown says poetry began for memory, to give meter and rhyme so troubadours could remember more and more without it being written. They sang it out in every town. They sang whole songs of news, and all of it remembered in an instant. One reading and they were off on their sturdy horses, galloping over muddy fields, through thick forests full of druids and elves, and into the smoky thatched towns to sing the news.
5 SEPTEMBER 1915
Pruinae perniciosior natura, quoniam lapsa persidit gelatque ac ne aura quidem ulla depellitur, quia nonjit nisi inmoto aere et sereno. Proprium tamen siderationis est sub ortu canis siccitatum vapor, cum insita ac novellae arbores moriuntur.
I run it through my head like a vacuum, sweeping things clean of meaning. It's an incantation. A musty psalm lifting the burdens from my mind.
Sarmenta out palearum acervos et evulsas herbasjruticesque per vineas camposque, cum timebis, incendito, Jumus medebitur his.
Frost high in the hills one night late, very late, while walking. I hear a song at night in the wind chimes. Duncan sleeps heavy. He talks in his sleep, saying things I've said over and over in an odd voice not quite his and not mine. A night bird is singing to the chimes, calling a very soft warble into the black stars and I'm awake, listening to these voices, Duncan, the bird and the bell.
There's a density that frightens me, words carrying so many unwelcome thoughts dragging along with them. Or a single simple person, Duncan, becoming so many things, layers and layers of need or feeling or expectations that reside in his body for me. There is his body, simply his body, and so much is there when I'm looking. It drags out from my center like those awful fears I have of every surface dissolving. Or, equally, of every surface freezing shut. I become frightened by the stillness. Fear starts in me when the world is clear and fixed.
Dear Robert,
Wasn't it Abbeville? I'm quite certain of it, in fact. We'd made up that silly song while walking during a summer there. Father took us for a holiday. I'd a lad from Abbeville up on the table and he kept on and on about the river and the cathedral. It was some sort of delirium and he was out and dead before I could ask him about the "mousy plum" which I'm certain was the name of a small cafe (or our innocent reading of some French name). How long ago it all seems.
We've a pond back of the line much like Cooperstown.
I
was the better swimmer, wasn't I?I was at the Albert Hall in a lovely clean suit just ten hours ago. Truly. I'd tickets for a Gilbert and Sullivan, a matinee shortly before my leave was up. I met a sweet young woman who kept on about a stomach ailment, hoping, I suspect, that I'd offer some professional advice. We sat in those plush velvet chairs, smelling of rosewater and soap, the whole building still standing. How could they ever understand this, this table of blood, this graveyard?
You stopped at the brow of the hill to put the drag on, and looked up to see where you were:—and there lay beneath you, far as the eye could reach on either side, this wonderful valley of the Somme—with line on line of tufted aspen and tall poplar, making the blue distances more exquisite in bloom by the gleam of their leaves; and in the midst of it, by the glittering of the divided streams of its river, layed the clustered mossy roofs of Abbeville, like a purple flake of cloud, with the precipitous mass of the Cathedral towers rising mountainous through them, and here and there, in the midst of them, spaces of garden close-set with pure green trees, bossy and perfect.
So you trotted down the hill between bright chalk banks, with a cottage or two nestled into their recesses, and little round children rolling about like apples before the doors, and at the bottom you came into a space of open park ground, divided by stately avenues of chestnut and acacia,—with long banks of outwork and massive walls of bastion seen beyond—then came the hollow thunder of the drawbridge and shadow of the gate—and in an instant, you were in the gay streets of a populous yet peaceful city—a fellowship of ancient houses set beside each other, with all the active companionship of business and sociableness of old friends, and yet each with the staid and self-possessed look of country houses surrounded by hereditary fields—or country cottages nested in forgotten glens,— each with its own character and fearlessly independent ways—its own steep gable, narrow or wide—its special little peaked windows set this way and that as the fancy took them,—its most particular odd corners, and outs and ins of wall to make the most of the ground and sunshine, —its own turret staircase, in the inner angle of the courtyard,—its own designs and fancies in carving of bracket and beam—its only bridge over the clear branchlet of the Somme that rippled at its garden gate.
All that's gone—and most of Abbeville is like most of London—rows of houses all alike, with an heap of brickbats at the end of it.
6 SEPTEMBER 1915
I watched the military drills from up on a little knoll above the field. Duncan's in charge of some sort of unit, getting to march all around them and yell this or that and run ahead and mind the diagonals and all that sort of thing that people in charge do with a flock of able-bodied young men. It made me sad to see him having such a time of it, like when I watched him running off into the rain that day up on the ridge in Bolinas.
Flora's dance will be next week, in the Grove, where we went through the mysteries of registration. I'll be carried about in my diaper as the infant Spring. I won't have to do all that hysterical spinning and leaping like we tried the first time.
12 SEPTEMBER 1915
Maybe from it being so warm and dusty, I was nearly sleeping, but very much present. It's that Latin, really, especially in Mr. Deutsch's steady even meter.
''Fuere ah his et cognomina antiquis."
From trees? I rather like the idea. It's best days like today when he turns the lights off and shows projections through the magic lantern.
"Frondicio militi illi qui praeclara Jacinora Volturnum transnatans Jronde inposita adversus Hannibalem edidit."
I fancy Duncan's of the same stuff as Frondicio, the sort who'd think to use a screen of foliage and be ripe to jump in any river. The pictures show the ancients to be so handsome, all with their fine straight noses and beautiful bodies. Father says they liked boys, and even made sex a part of the program of education. The words are so solid and simple to me. I imagine their simplicity comes from my inadequate understanding. It is new to me, and so each word has clear meaning. It's a great relief.
''Stolonum Liciniae genti,"
washing like water easy over me. Mr. Deutsch does love to read,
"ha appellatur in ipsis arboribusjruticatio inutilis, unde et pampinatio inventa primo Stoloni dedit nomen."
And oh, the smooth hands running rough over me in that sylvan grove, there by where Miss Tartaine sealed our fates. We had quite the audience, as Flora's made more friends than the entire population of Lowell, it seems, upperclassmen with pipes and women who wore pants. I was so delightfully bare and given the simplest of parts, the violent beauty of Spring's grand assertion having been stricken from the program. "Work in Progress" it was entitled this time around.
And Duncan's hands rougher still, pushing and pulling me furiously about the bed, us sweating so slick we slide across each other's bare skin and stuck together at our mouths and legs entangled. I'm blind and possessed now each night with the desperate hunger of it all, and not a conscious thought in my head, the whole of me filled by the indistinct all of it rushing through our skins and the musty slobbery slick push of him into me. I can't think past the roar rolling out my body, of sinking our soaked soft bodies as completely into each other as time will allow, then empty. Still and empty. The window is open to the night air. That soft sound is in me, and sleep. I am so simple, and nodding. A loll and lull all in me, and so soft and small all warm in flannel, the lull of song. (Mother's voice soft in song. I'm so small and warm and nodding, wrapped in warm flannel. And tiny little fishermen sailed, she sang, all on a moonlit sea, sailed out inside a wooden shoe, she sang, Winky and Blinky the dog.)
15 SEPTEMBER 1915
I've felt better since saying those confusing things I said to Duncan a week ago. I have no idea why. I don't know what more to say to him. I will not, I imagine, find the words to make myself clear. I won't find words that satisfy me.
"I worry about this," for instance, is just wrong. "This worries me" gets closer. It suggests that I'm unable to stop the worrying. But it also looks to me like some "thing" hovering around me, kneading my flesh and soul like bread dough, with an evil grin on its amorphous face. "I'm worried with it" feels better because' it doesn't assign blame. Because "it" and "I" are together there is "worry." It's like a meteorological condition. The wet ocean air made cold condenses into rain. Just as I have blown in among these thoughts and become worry. Worry. Worry. Now that ugly sound has begun to fall apart. Really, what is there that ought to be held inside that sound? Is "worry" a physical feeling somewhere inside the brain? Is it a fidgeting of the limbs? A slight trembling below the throat that rumbles intermittently, hardly noticed until some still, silent moment? It worries me, this endless train of thoughts. It's a thread I began to pull, and now it's all unraveling.
When it tugs at Duncan I start to fall apart. There are questions I cannot ask. It's like walking a mine field, fearing that the depths of this tender land will rip open and reveal something unfathomable. I stammer and stutter in the face of so many wrong things to say. I groan in my throat, that pure sound with my mouth pushed against his neck. I give that sound to him, fearing the dangerous words. I give him my tongue, often just to look at with my mouth open and empty, like I am speaking but no word could possibly fit. Maybe my throat rumbles like a baby's. I give him my tongue across his closed eyes and over his nose and lips. It says so much more by touch than by the words it could make.
I give him my body and only then do I feel a sense of clarity. It is our way of speaking, the only language that can carry whatever it is we're trying to say.
20 SEPTEMBER 19I 5
"Wax: grand hg teday!! Ten, two, fire. 55. D.'' This is a note Mr. Dunphy left me, right with my laundry so I know it's for me. He's afflicted with some disorder, Mrs. D. tells me.
Robert,
Today the aeroplanes came and dropped chocolates. We're stacked corpses up to make parapets, covered by thin mud. Hands fall out to wave or brush across one's face when the artillery shakes the dirt down. They shell the middle ground into nothing and launch the gas and we follow, endless waves of men stumbling into a stinking muddy grave.
A photo in the news. A bullet, many. Mortar ripping through a line of men. It will end as simply as it began, with a photo in the news.
I lost to Unt in tennis today, finishing up the match by launching the salty little felt ball over the fences and leaping the net for a victory hug. Unt has a general recreation course in the Ladies' Physical Education program, and Mr. Wilson generously allowed us to recreate together this week, setting us up with equipment and a brief review of the rules up on the courts in Strawberry Canyon.
The hills up back of the university are thrilling, particularly there by the canyon. Thick green groves rise up the steep hills and then the yellow brown grasslands lift out beyond the tree-tops. We played in the early morning so the mists still hung in the trees. The sun cut clean across everything, giving a wash of warm light to the air and the sturdy buildings, jumbled about on the low stretch of hills west of us.
I held the salty felt ball up to my nose and smelled its lovely smell.
(What was that soft song she sang? I held the salty felt ball close to my nose and it rolled around so deep inside me, calling at that song ... a tiny little fisherman sailed on a moonlit sea . . . and that salty felt smell, feeling it near my nose, my wet little mouth open. Winky, I know, and Blinky the dog, and damp on my dingle and Mother's sweet song.)
29 SEPTEMBER 1915
12 OCTOBER 1915
I went to the city to get some of Father's suits, much to Mother's delight. I hadn't been at my old house since the spring and it made me feel queer. I walked along the ridge on Pacific up to Lyon, to where it all just drops off west to the Presidio and north to the Fair. The golden domes spread out like they've been there a thousand years.
There was Mother, the parlor windows open and her warbling out into the misty air. She's been attempting famous arias since she first started singing, sometime before history began. I banged in through the front door and felt even dizzier smelling the familiar smell.
"Pumpkin?" I heard her coming clip-clop on sharp-toed shoes across the hardwood floor.
"Hello, Mummy," I called back. And then there was a moment, a long familiar moment.
"You" she said, hugging me up to her bustle. "you're a perfect mess," and the moment passed. She rustled my wild, thick hair and looked me over.
"Thank you," I replied cordially. "I'm perfectly starving too."
"Oh, lovely," she went on, "what a fortunate coincidence. I'm a bit peaked as well." She looked to the kitchen thoughtfully. "Surely we can scrape up some small morsel from the larder," and she shuffled on through the dining room to find out.
I looked around the parlor to see what had changed and what was still the same. Nothing had changed. I wanted to curl up on the davenport and have tea. I wanted Father to read Melmoth .
"Fruit, tenderness?"
I peeked in over her shoulder to see what fruit it was.
"Yucko, nix on the melon." It looked fairly old and soggy, the little rind lips all curled in like an old man with his false teeth out.
" 'Yucko,' pumpkin?"
"Duncan says it, if he doesn't like something," I explained.
"He certainly didn't learn it from his father," Mother observed pointlessly.
"He didn't learn any English from his father," I said.
Mother just looked at me and curled her mouth into a disapproving frown.
"Cold roast beef?" she offered.
"Yummo. With horseradish, please, and may I have some red wine?"
"Are you perfectly serious about the wine. Maxwell? On a Tuesday afternoon?"
"A hearty red is perfect with cold beef," I tried, mimicking Mrs. Dunphy's sensible explanation from the previous afternoon.
"I'm sure it is, dearest, I was merely questioning the hour."
"Just one glass then. Surely one glass will do me no harm."
Mother got out the wine and beef and spooned a few hefty
scoops of horseradish into a dish. "Cress?" she offered, her head plunged deep into the ice box. "Yes, thank you."
We picnicked on our little lawn and discussed school, which I said was not much better, emphasizing, in particular, Hygiene and the trial of Latin conjugations. Pliny I enjoyed well enough, as it was not the boring Younger and his limitless epistles, but rather the quirky Elder and his queer little bits about magical trees and frogs with feet growing out from their mouths. But Cicero, I assured Mother, was even more tedious in the original, clacking along like a judicious cow, all moo and maw and anno domini and such sounds as a broken Italian, stumbling along over his fragmented syllables, might make.
"The dead languages only come alive in the mouth of a true lover of the tongue," Mother explained obscenely, taking a wet lump of horseradish with just a sliver of beef. "Latin is as so much dust if one has no passion for the living culture it gave voice to. Perhaps your instructor has no feeling for Cicero."
I cleansed my mouth with a sprig of cress and a splash of cold soda. "Duncan says I should try Greek."
"Or learn Latin from someone who can give it spark."
"But Professor Deutsch teaches all the courses that interest me." I sniffed at the heady wine.
"Precisely, pumpkin." And then Mother paused, to great dramatic effect. "I've taken the liberty of sending for a few catalogs from schools back East."
This was both good and bad. I rather fancied going back East, but I'd not yet gotten up the nerve to discuss it with Duncan.
"Mother," I whined unconvincingly, leaving my precise feelings quite unclear.
"Professor Wilson is still at Harvard, you know." This remark was typical.
"Fine, Mother, Duncan and I will just go study with Professor Wilson," I answered sarcastically. I was glad for her help, but it seemed she was pursuing her own little fantasies and not mine. "The point is to find a way we can be in the same program and not have to waste time with frivolities like Hygiene."
"Or Military Training," she added pointedly.
"Right."
"Your father is a Harvard alumnus, pumpkin, and that should help considerably."
"And what about Duncan?"
"I wasn't aware he was interested in Harvard, tenderness."
"He's not. That's the point. I can't just make him go there."
Mother gargled a bit of soda demurely and spit it into the grass.
"There's no need to make anyone do anything, pumpkin. I'm only suggesting you consider Harvard as a sensible alternative to a situation which you yourself have led me to believe is unsatisfactory. If Duncan finds that alternative inviting as well, then he'll have to think about arranging it. I presumed he hadn't thought about it because he saw no need to."
I pushed my finger deeper into the lawn, propping a bit of cress in the little hole I'd created by my nervous habit, filling it in with a bit of loose soil.
"The point, Mother, is that I'm not going to Harvard, or anywhere else for that matter, without Duncan."
She sat in silence for a moment, digesting this new thought.
"Isn't that rather unreasonable. Maxwell? I'd think it would be an awful burden on him."
"It isn't,'' I fairly yelled, barely getting out that crucial last syllable. "We want to be in the same program and that's what we'll arrange. Here or back East or whatever."
Our little conversation dwindled away into a palliative series of ifs and waits and maybes and sees, and we licked our plates clean and went back in to get the suits.
