Landscape: Memory (5 page)

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15 MARCH 1915

Lincoln Beachey's monoplane collapsed into itself two thousand feet up into the cloudless sky and plunged like a cannonball down into the bay. Beachey drowned and they haven't told his fiancee for fear she will suffer psychic damage. His mother has refused to believe that he died, waiting up late into the night for his return.

This is what the newspaper said:

Beachey was on his second flight after having thrilled the spectators with a series of graceful loops and successfully had flown upside down across the blue expanse at a height of 2,000 feet, when the monoplane collapsed on the descent. Quivering for a fraction of an instant like a wounded bird, the machine, shrouded in flame and vapor, hurtled from aloft as a dead weight.

In that fraction of a moment it was apparent that Beachey, still exerting the nerve that made him famous, endeavored to direct his course for the bay. But the Taube was beyond human control.

The litter of the wreckage shot into the water between the transports
Logan
and
Crook
lying at the Fort Mason government piers. Strapped in the aluminum body of the car, Beachey disappeared beneath the waves. When the rescuers arrived a moment later there was hardly a ripple on the surface. Only a small piece of the wooden frame floated to mark the spot where the hero of the air had gone to his doom.

Just what caused the harrowing tragedy is a matter of supposition. Even experts and Beachey's mechanicians cannot definitely account for the disaster. The monoplane was faster than anything that the daring aviator had ever piloted and of a type with which he was not so familiar as with the biplane in which he had made over a thousand loops.

In looping the loop a few minutes before Beachey was evidently in complete control of the machine and also as he made the upside-down flight. It was as he straightened out for the perpendicular dive to the green that the new monoplane failed him. He had often dipped from as great a height in his biplane, but the double wings had withstood the tremendous pressure that was now exerted on the single fan of the Taube. The propeller's revolutions were reduced, for it could be plainly seen turning over.

Within 500 feet of the earth the wings could no longer hold. They wobbled and closed about the little car, from which trailed a wake of fire and smoke.

"Oh, God! Beachey is gone!" was the cry that came from thousands of blue trembling lips.

For a moment that vast ashen-faced throng stood frozen with terror.

Then hope and panic gripped them alike. Beachey, their hero, the youth who had convinced others of his often-expressed confidence that he would never be killed in his "game," they thought could not have been vanquished by the elements to which he was so closely attuned.

Mumbling hysterically, they moved in a great mass in the direction where the machine had disappeared behind the outer buildings.

"Maybe he'll land in the water! Beachey can't be killed!" were now the cries as the throng rushed toward the eastern fence. Even the guards, white-faced too, could not stem that sympathetic tide. Thousands poured through the work gates, tripping and stumbling, before the exposition police mastered the situation.

But the hope was in vain. Around the transport wharves the crowd swarmed, breathless, only to watch the grapplers and divers pry into the secret of that hideous sight concealed by the bright, placid waves.

Beachey, "the daredevil of the air," had paid the penalty for his valor.

A thrilling account, as one should expect from a first-class newspaper. And though I was actually there to witness this tragic plunge, I find my memory is pale in comparison. The actuality was so impossibly indistinct, filled with disjointed actions and bad smells. I was more aware then of the uncomfortable fit of my shoes than the "hope and panic" that gripped us.

They'll be showing films of the crash at the cinema starting tomorrow and that is what I want to see. It's so much easier to focus one's attention in a theater, and the view is better.

Mr. Taqdir, with whom Mother and Duncan and I saw the fatal crash, anticipated my incomprehension on the spot. As the crowd pushed and shoved us along through the gates, he gathered us all into his big arms and urged us to face the tragedy bravely.

"We cannot be passing it over with eyes closed," he announced resolutely. "Face this now, each of us." And we shuffled forward through the frozen throng to peer into the unchanged waters of the bay, looking, I supposed, for bubbles or blood, or the bobbing head of the dead birdman. There was nothing, the deep blue waters surging and lapping as on any other day.

I looked across the water to the steep green hills and up into the sky, empty and blue. I imagined how cold it must be high above the bay, how small and sad everything must seem from up there. A noisy flock of gulls hovered high above the esplanade, wheeling and squawking, waiting for more garbage to be dumped into the waters.

"Think now, boys. Fix in your minds what it is you will be feeling," Mr. Taqdir urged.

My mother, her chin up, stared out across the bay and nodded in solemn agreement. "Very wise, Mr. Taqdir, very wise. We mustn't bury our sadness. It's important, I think, pumpkin, to put pen to paper when we return home. I know how much this young aviator has meant to both of you." And she took Duncan's hand in her own, pulling me close with her other.

18 MARCH 1915

I got in a fight at school over the war. I said the way we fight war is stupid and we'd best take a lesson from the insects. They work in organized battalions, in direct confrontations. We used to but now we have sophisticated methods. Alphonse Bull wants to fly aeroplanes in the war and he punched me when I claimed aviators were cowards because they wouldn't fight face-to-face but resorted to tricks like flying over and dropping gas bombs.

26 MARCH 1915

We presented
Frankenstein
this evening to an audience of two, Father and Flora. Duncan ran the Victrola and lights, did all the sound effects, and played all the women in minor roles. I was the narrator, little William, an old blind man and the horrified Scotsman. Mr. Taqdir was Dr. Frankenstein and Mother played the monster.

We made Mother up beautifully, dainty and sweet like the most proper Gibson Girl, sweeping about in her best floral party dress. She was instructed to speak sweetly, with no hint of gloom or growl, and to walk firm and erect. Dr. Frankenstein, however, was more ghoulish. We made his complexion pale and darkened big bags below his eyes. I wanted a bit of stage blood to drip from his teeth but Duncan convinced me not to.

Mother murdered me near the end of Act Two.

It was a difficult scene. I insisted that she not limp or stagger or steal about like a criminal, yet she needed to appear plausibly murderous. Judging from the audience, the effect was more comic than tragic, this upstanding Gibson Girl stepping briskly across the room and strangling a rosy-cheeked boy at play in the flower box. She smiled through the killing, which was unnecessary, and released my limp body to tumble to the floor. The lights went dark as she crept offstage. Dr. Frankenstein gave vent to his agony with doglike howling. All around him his family was being ravaged by the monster. An encounter was inevitable.

"There in the starry darkness of the moonless mountain night, in the shadows of the sharp tooth of Mount Blanc, the good doctor staggered across the rugged snows to a fate he knew not yet. And in the distance, moving with a staglike swiftness, the form of a woman, much larger and more agile than a normal woman, leaping across the deadly frozen crags toward him."

The rendezvous was played out in darkness.

"Why do you hunt me?" the doctor asked, lighting, inexplicably, a cigarette. The orange tip glowed, bobbing and floating there in the indistinct night. The cigarette passed, it appeared, to the monster.

"You are as the only parent of me," she began, drawing a deep breath of smoke, illuminating her soft face in the orange glow. "You have abandoned me. I am an orphan, helpless, friendless, a monster in this cold world." She flicked a bit of ash to the floor. "You will give in to my one request, as only human decency demands."

Duncan began a distant howling, the soft cry of the glacial winds sweeping across the broken ice floes, whistling beside the jagged peaks.

"You torment me," the doctor whispered. "All I value has fallen into your hands." He took the cigarette and held it, undrawn for a moment. "To be protecting what I love most, I will have no choice. What is your request?"

"I require a mate," my mother said. "One as ugly and unwanted as I, one as ill-fit for this world." She rose and walked to the window, a sillhouette against the evening sky. "You must build me a wife."

The house was hushed as the doctor took a last drag and flicked the spent cigarette out the window.

"It is done, I have no choice," he said.

3 APRIL 1915

Today I came home from school at lunchtime, which is a very special thing and which I was allowed to do only on account of my mother asking. Mother and Father were both at home and sitting there very stiff and formal with little sandwiches with no crusts and a fruit bowl and soup already served, just sitting there and not eating really except that my father had already finished his soup.

I could tell straightaway that someone had died or something. Mother swept across the room to me, cooing pumpkin this and pumpkin that and brushing her powdered hand across my cheek. She was all done up with lavender water.

"I'm moving to Bolinas, little fish," my father announced before I'd even sat down. "Your mother will be living with Mr. Taqdir." And I just stood there and breathed while they both watched in silence. The windows were wide open onto the spring day and birds cheeped and chirped, fluttering past to the feeders. Hummingbirds hummed, poking their long noses into the honeysuckle trailing up the corner of our house and wafting spring smells in all directions. There was even a soft wind to stir the branches and I sat down with no appetite and little distinct feeling, just a vague dread and curiosity.

"Why are you living with Mr. Taqdir?" I asked my mother stupidly.

She breathed a quick breath and looked to my father, who was busy with a little sandwich. "Certainly, pumpkin," she began, turning toward me, "certainly You've aware of my fondness for Mr. Taqdir." She paused for assistance, but I sat in dumb silence, unable and unwilling to help her.

"Yes?" I prompted.

"Your father and I, dearest," she began again. "Your father and I have agreed that it would be healthy for me to explore my feelings for Mr. Taqdir, in a less encumbered atmosphere." She smiled, as if this were a gift she'd given me.

I still didn't understand, but couldn't find the words to say so. I looked at my father and he shrugged a little shrug, nodding his head to the side and brushing the crumbs from off his hands.

"They're sleeping together. Max," he said. "They're lovers. I'd rather not stick around for it." Mother crinkled her brow at him. "Anyhow, it's a beautiful time of year to be in Bolinas. I can get a lot done up there."

I realized I'd been squashing a little sandwich throughout the conversation. Its smooth dry white-bread face had turned a pasty gray in my sweaty soiled hands. It looked like my own dirty face from when I was a fat little kid. All those afternoons, I'd come running home from digging furiously in the sandy soil of the Presidio woods, starting tunnels and smoothing the walls of shallow little caves that passed for headquarters of whatever secret club we'd started that week. I was so milky-skinned and pale. Just a fat little kid with dirt on his face. I had a bunch of sort-of friends, Rolph and Skinny and Paolo, and we played our favorite games over and over, acting out the same adventures over the same ground day after day. Soldiers, Forest Fire, Man on the Moon, Tunnel to China or my favorite. Freight Train— the six or seven of us in a snaking line, our hands resting warm on the shoulders of the next boy up, running through the woods on the winding, treacherous path, just making train sounds. We could play for hours, running silly and breathless into the dusky woods, the dark evening settling in and cold fog filtering through the thick stands of cedar, mothers calling unheard into the night and us running and running, taking turns at the glory of being engine or caboose, running and laughing up Pikes Peak and over the Suicide Leap, too fast through the Chutes, and down through the wild empty woods.

* * *

I was pushing at the pasty lump in my hand. Outside the breeze kept on, soft and sweet with cedar and eucalyptus. My mouth was open but empty. I had no words. What I felt was stuck inside me, anchored, it seemed, to something in the very center, too heavy or awkward to emerge.

"We've made a choice, pumpkin," my mother assured me. "We thought it best to be honest with you."

"Will I have to get a job?" I asked, unable to think any closer to the center of the problem. I sat down at the table and put my little sandwich on my plate. Mother reached for it, to throw it away, I suppose, but I grabbed it back and stuffed it into my pocket. Father had moved on to Mother's soup, thoughtfully keeping quiet as he tipped the huge bowl up to his face. I mustered my voice.

"I'm sure it's all very adult and modern," I offered, trying to start on a positive note. "But I'm not certain what it means. Will I be living alone now?"

"I'll still be at home, pumpkin," Mother said, leaning forward as though the reassurance might die if forced to travel a longer distance. "I'll just be home less frequently. And Mr. Taqdir will be with me when I am."

"But I don't like Mr. Taqdir," I said without thinking.

"You needn't like Mr. Taqdir, sweetheart. You need only live with this change. Your affections are your own." My mother was a wall of good clear sense that I couldn't breach.

"You're abandoning me," I said to my father. But he didn't seem to notice.

"We wouldn't abandon you, pumpkin," Mother assured me, meaning her and whomever. "I'm certain you'll find the strength to be adult about all this."

I hardly felt my strengths moving in that direction. Our whole exchange seemed anything but adult. The requisite trappings of civility hung over it like heavily perfumed velvet curtains. I imagined a rabid, mangy hound, foaming through its bloodstained teeth, clipped clean with a poodle cut and decorated with a dainty bow. That was the gift I'd give at Christmas, if we had a Christmas.

"May I live in Bolinas?" I asked.

"If when school gets out you're so inclined I'll certainly make room for you," Father allowed. "But follow your own mind, Max. Don't come along just for my sake."

"Thanks," I said weakly. I fiddled with the pasty face in my pocket and pushed the spoon around my soup. Then I picked the heavy bowl up in one hand and flung it across the room, smashing it to soup-covered bits against the wall, and I ran away out the front door.

When I left the house I was in a blind fury, I suppose. I was insensitive to the bright spring day and the birds and all those smells that normally engage my attention. I could see only the few yards of ground stretched out before me and the details of our lunch playing back in my mind. Of course I thought of things I should've said or done. I should've grabbed my father and shaken him, for one. I should've screamed, "Don't call me pumpkin!" or "Mr. Taqdir is a boring creep!" Especially, I thought, I should've cried. But I didn't, and hadn't, and these were only thoughts.

I walked west through the dirty streets, moving as though in my sleep, and found my way onto the Presidio and back into the woods above the golf course. The hillside was steep and I scrambled up through a thick grove of eucalyptus, grabbing on to bushes and low scrub for handholds. There was a hidden clearing ahead through the trees and I was moving toward it. There, on the western slope of this high hill, the trees opened up around a small hollow tucked into the lip of the hillside. Nurselogs, grown thick with motherfern and saplings, bordered the little clearing. A carpet of moss covered the soft contours of the ground. The trees grew tall and thick around all sides, save a small opening to the north and west where I could look out over the rocky cliffs and into the gray-green sea. Sea birds were calling high in the branches above me and I lay back, my head propped on a pillow of moss, and watched the distant treetops swaying in the wind. It was a shelter, and a much-needed one.

I felt myself sinking back into the ground, drawn down by weariness and gravity. I felt wedded to the weight of the earth, turning on its inevitable course, its face stretching out from the tips of my fingers and toes. I drifted away, exhausted, and dreamed.

I am sick in bed with a fever. I'm just in my nightshirt and all wet from sweating. My throat is sweet and sore and I can barely breathe. My breath is shallow and slow because a lush, heavy orchid is growing in my lung. Mother puts me in an ambulance. She sits beside me and feels my heartbeat with her cool hand. She rubs me on the chest to keep me calm and stop me from breathing too deeply. I'm feeling so sweet and fragile. I can feel the flower growing, its stem pushing down deep into my belly.

The ambulance runs along the railroad tracks, over the muddy grounds of the Fair, and delivers me into the bright white operating room of the Sculpture Factory. A team of doctors or sculptors, it isn't clear which, is waiting, ready to remove the orchid from inside me. I'm placed upon a vertical rack and positioned by the workmen. I'm much bigger than before. The workmen manipulate several mechanical arms that play across me drawing lines and angles against my skin, as though measuring and marking me for the operation. They've undressed me and I'm feeling very sensitive all over. My skin feels sweet and tender and my head is going to burst from the flower pushing its petals up inside me.

The mechanical arms are peeling my skin away. They pinch at the points where the lines intersect on my body and then peel my skin back. I look down across my body at the loose skin hanging down off my abdomen like a skirt. Inside, beneath the skin, I see that I'm simply a tangled mass of metal parts, leftover beams and spikes, wire mesh, all pushed and shaped to form a body. The cool air rushes through me, fluttering the red petals of the orchid, there in my very center. It isn't painful but it makes me worry about what's inside my head. If the arm reached up and pulled the flap of my face away, would it simply uncover a mass of metal garbage? Would it just be empty air blowing through the bits and pieces, the petals of the orchid pushing up amongst them? If it was, would I see it?