The Rags of Time (30 page)

He treasured the albumen prints by early photographers Carleton Watkins and Seneca Ray Stoddard, who went out West to deliver breathtaking news of the scale at Yosemite, the great height of El Capitan, the massive trinity of Three Brothers, luminous sunlight on Lake Tahoe. I imagine (biographers are not allowed) that Fred came to love this landscape far beyond human design or estimate per bush and tree, though at times he was equally overwhelmed by the beauty of his Park, the great artwork of the Republic.

Olmsted finally allowed that he had raised his
calling from the rank of a trade, even of a handicraft, to that of a liberal profession—Art, an Art of design,
which would have pleased Vaux, but the letter, written to a lost love of Fred’s youth, was private.

 

 

I’m urged to walk in the Park each day, a short way, no Reservoir Track, though not long ago I spotted an owl near the North Pumping Station. I disobey, find my way to the Dairy, now a gift shop, where poor children were once served fresh milk, or I settle for a favorite bench looking over the field that was Seneca Village. I seldom make it as far as the Mall, where I once again wonder at the statue of Fitz-Greene Halleck set on his pedestal,
sic transit gloria
.

So, forgiveness sought. I never meant to cast Olmsted as a bronze of some note to take his place in the Park along with Lincoln, Daniel Webster, Beethoven, or the Angel of the Waters. I never meant to withhold him, just couldn’t figure where he comes in. Everywhere—that’s the trouble, public and private. I remember my mother laying out the braided strips of rag on the dining room table, then with a big needle lacing the strands together. The rug was oval and smooth. With wear the lumps appeared and a bit of unraveling, as in my dormitory room. Before she married the detective, my mother taught Latin and mathematics.

Still, there are places I must know above 96th Street, what goes on there. Someone is needed, you or a Virgil, to lead me. Olmsted said little about that territory, just, as he lay with his broken leg in a splint, that the mighty black stone should not be blasted. He had something in mind, a vision. Disabled by his injury, he watched from his window, the clearing of the impoverished land. Mary caring for him while their child was dying. The war pending.

We are at war. We tend to forget. The
Georgics
was a civil war poem. And the bees, I think they had it figured; a near-perfect society building their thyme-honored hives, stopping in midswarm to spin a story. Working hard, of course.

I tend to forget . . .

Now Cleo or my brother will say,
Professoressa
, don’t do the Walter Benjamin bit. It’s simple, really, simpler than the book Fred never could bring himself to write, the big study of our American culture, its triumphs and deficiencies. Benjamin, another moralist, master of the essay as life and death force, called his work in progress
Zentralpark,
a place he’d never seen, hoping he might get to this mythic greensward in the US of A. Fleeing the Fascists, he didn’t make it over the Pyrenees to freedom in Spain (1940), was turned back, paperwork not in order. That night he killed himself. The story of his famous lost briefcase often told:
You must understand that this briefcase is the most important thing to me. I cannot risk losing it. It is the manuscript that must be saved. It is more important than I am.

I would love to have talked with him.

You said:
It wouldn’t have worked out, you know. He would have been forty-eight. In ’40 you were a ten-year-old girl.

I know he was already honored and with no time granted. Later, but there was no later, he would have been old beyond listening to a college student who muddled her way through Grail legends in lousy translations. But just to talk with him, about old toys and the voyage incarnate of postcards, that’s all. To turn the tin key that set my clown tumbling, admire the dolls made of corn husks, folk art of our Depression. To confess the burden of my clippings and too many books and the fetish of
The Angelus,
our enslaved object, watching over us in the dining room, praying as we gobble our turkey. My acrobats risking their tricks in thin air mock her bronze immobility, their bodies unlimited. Though I would argue with him, given the nerve and the chance—You were wrong about information stealing life out of a story. That’s such a romantic notion. See, it’s all different now. You have to live it, live with the glut, the lottery prize of mechanical reproduction and still tell your story.

—Doris Lessing,
The Memoirs of a Survivor

 

 

 

She thought about Macy’s ad, young men modeling sweaters—crewnecks, cardigans with zippers, no less. Her husband needed just that, trouble with his stiff fingers. In the morning she buttoned the cuffs of his shirt before he went to the office. Christmas coming on. Everything on sale now that money was tight. A trip to 34th Street on the subway was verboten, of course. She was never to go down those steps to the C line, a promise made months back. Never venture out in a storm, however light the rain or snow.

Take a cab.
A chorus of them ordering her about, even Kate, who, on the day she turned ten, auditioned for her nursey role with comforting hugs, and on Thanksgiving pulled out a chair to settle the old lady at the festive table. Grandma imagined the Norman Rockwell poster with herself painted out, an enormous roast turkey levitating above the fix-in’s on the
Freedom from Want
table. The family assembled with her best middle-classy china, the Limoges gravy boat and the bold
B
embroidered on the Irish linen napkins.

It was ten days before Christmas when she discovered the ad.
S
he had not mentioned Macy’s, just shopping.

What I need,
he said,
is nothing you can buy.

Sounds sweet, but controlling
. She countered their hovering with therapy-speak. They were all on her case. She gave them an unlovely snort she traced back to the McCarthy trials, which only one of their three grown kids recalled from a PBS special. Why her imitation of the Senator from Wisconsin sucking air, heavy-breathing his discourteous answers? Why remember now? Her first political protest was ladylike, the flutter of a red scarf when Joe McCarthy spoke on campus. Different from family politics, surely. Her husband had been
enabling
when she read him entries in her daybook, cheering her outrage at the wars in progress. He joined in her despair that harsh judgment would never be leveled at the thugs in power. Now her anger was spent, a bad investment with little hope for a future rally. These past weeks had been
passive,
an entertainment of watching hopeful and hopeless presidential candidates, rating and berating their performance as they balked, strained for position at the starting gate. She had called him
supportive
of her effort to rewrite a book for her own satisfaction, the war story that won a prize, to find some honesty in her own history and lives imagined in the fiction. Still, it had been a good time, Thanksgiving packed away, Christmas looming. These brisk days, he no longer encouraged her to take a short turn in the Park. They set up a festival of silents. Yet another look back, movies seen when they were children, often seen again in art houses when out of college.

He said:
First seen at the Trans-Lux, Madison and 85th.

Propped in bed, they laughed once again at Charlie and Buster, delighting in the voiceless overacting, the honky-tonk sound track, fancy footwork of the great comics—the triumph of grace over klutz. The gags, famous routines—Chaplin eating his boot in
The Gold Rush,
twirling the shoelaces like spaghetti.

He said:
It was licorice, don’t you know.

For once she didn’t, but knew Keaton did his own stunts. Watching
The Great Dictator,
they were again enchanted by Charlie’s dance with the balloon globe, continents skimming the oceans, a fragile world awaiting Herr Hynkel’s flip of destruction. Alas, he crossed over to talkies. The ghetto was a pleasant stage set, and when the Jews avoiding the camps fled the city, they settled in a land of milk and honey, pet goats and darling children, costumes country cute.

In disbelief, she said:
Nineteen forty! He’s gotta be kidding.

Just making his movie.
They watched till the bitter end. Chaplin’s urgent message was delivered by the waif Paulette Goddard playing to the lens, the aura of hope in soft focus of trees and bright sky behind her:
The way of life can be free and beautiful, but we have lost the way. Greed has poisoned men’s souls—has barricaded the world with hate—has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed.

Stunned by the blind hope of patriotic spiel, they sat through the credits, through the warning: This Movie Not for Commercial Distribution. . . . She would have been eleven by the time
The Great Dictator
came to the Rialto. Had she accepted the clean cots and cozy blankets dealt out to prisoners when the timid Jewish barber was sent to a camp? Or, moved by the bleating finale, teared up at the warning of what might come?
If I had known then;
not the excuse of a grown girl, but of the director, Chaplin making amends for this ambidextrous movie. Not one of his silents—quite noisy, in fact—the story of our Charlie enacting pathos while Herr Hynkel was dealt the best routines? Chaplin, played against himself, failing as both the little guy and Hitler. It was a miscalculation. Blather and bladder of a deflated balloon.

But walking up Madison Avenue . . .
He remembered leaving the theater overcome with purpose,
I was awed or just in love with Paulette in her peasant blouse. I stopped at a bar that served me since I was fifteen, though I couldn’t buy my way into the army
.

 

 

 

A regime was established: an embrace of the ordinary. She was not to be treated like an invalid, not that you’d notice. Light cooking and trips down to the lobby—the big adventure, mailing small end-of-year checks to assorted good works, Mercy House among them, an old house in Bridgeport refurbished to help needy women getting on with their lives. She liked that Mercy was down near Seaside, the Olmsted Park her grandfather worked on, building a seawall when he was no more than a boy. She took out his studio portrait, the one in which he wears the diamond ring on the injured hand with that stub of a finger. They had moved on to Hitchcock, his dark tricks, and to a production of
Macbeth
staged in a warlike present with electronic projections. Why not tread on the Bard in old Desert Storm issue? And why not, taking care, meet friends for dinner? She insisted on
six, six-thirty, tops—
knowing she’d tire, not follow the comfortable chatter, too weary to twirl the pasta, cut the steak on her plate. Often table talk eluded her. She seemed to be somewhere else, though once, in a moment of bright recovery, she let go a less than sympathetic remark on the Murrays’ grandson in rehab. Her praise of the other child, the scholar, was lavish. That girl—no secret she was bright—now reading
The Gallic Wars.