In 1950, at the age of twelve, I was in turmoil over my existence. Minor turmoil, to be sure, unshared by my playmates, parents, teachers, and minister. Nonetheless, my small chest bubbled with that vinegary anxiety that attacks us at what we like to think are crucial, fertile moments. I wanted to know why I was a twelve-year old lad in Tremainsville, New York and not some rich baron's son scouring the alpine slopes, as I'd seen in some month's National Geographic. The picture, as I remember it, of that brash-nostrilled young aristocrat easing through the luscious sunlight of a clockwork Swiss afternoon caused me no end of delicious jealousy. I began to ponder the unfairness of life and the tyranny of chance. I went so far in self-flagellation as to stay home on a Saturday afternoon, while my friends swam at the creek and drank soda, to wash the car and mow the lawn. I think I was mostly bored then, but at the time I suckled doubt and insouciance for all the spiteful milk it could give me.
The Korean War had just begun, Alger Hiss had been convicted, and my friends and I were ready to play Kill the Communist until the hostilities were over, we were sure, in July. July came and the war still refused to end at our whim. Our games palled and we found ourselves nailed to a dull and common summer. My questions went unanswered, and I spent inordinate amounts of metaphysical time kicking cans along gutters and reading Zane Grey novels (his fifty-first, The Maverick Queen, his best), waiting, waiting, waiting for some deus to descend and lift this orthodox summer off my shoulders.
My parents were no help. In 1950 I secretly loved my parents but publicly sponsored the belief, along with my friends, that we had somehow sprung unaided from the head of the world. For a time I even made myself believe I had been adopted, that my real parents were gypsies or circus bums or railroad riders (the list varied depending on the depth of my angst). Patiently I waited for my real parents to slip over the horizon, make themselves known to me, and whisk me off on the adventures I knew they were having. In the meantime I did the duties of a son to these ersatz parents, they marvelously ignorant of the fate that awaited them. Of course I would be sad when I left, but such were (as I thought them) the fortunes of life.
My father was a salesman, but a seller of books, not refrigerators or cars or toasters, a difference that, for some reason, I was proud of. He worked for Prentice-Hall selling services: books on taxes and new laws and other arcane information of use to businessmen and lawyers and, as I believed, underworld crime figures. His office was a lagoon where, for short respites, I could tie up the traumas of my life. Ensconced in his huge bird's-eye maple rocking chair with its two flattened cushions, for the rump and back, I would sit for hours and read. Situated as it was on the second floor, his office missed the usual street chatter and possessed that miraculous quiet we often ache to find the rest of our lives. When he was in there working, bringing his books up to date or doing whatever mysterious rituals he had to do, I would sometimes sit but not read, so filled with an exquisite feeling of love and affection that I could barely breathe for the happy thrumming of my heart. There we would sit, unconversant yet inextricably linked, and I watched his hunched shoulders like a priest reading an animal's guts for a sight of the future.
My mother, for her part, made good the alchemist's promise to turn lead into gold. She was not a beautiful woman no matter how much that word was stretched. Her eyes were a pitilessly dull brown -- her nostrils were wide, like chinks in some wall -- her mouth was as thin as the voices of the Sunday choir. She stood a squat five feet tall, which brought her a good foot below my father's head. She was shapeless but not fat, like a dress mannequin. Even time, with all its reagents, had not changed her monochromatic lines and less-than-captive figure. But she had the gift. From a half-acre tract of land behind the carriage house that in the spring resembled Heathcliff's blasted moor she coaxed, commanded, eked, and midwifed out of the ground a splay of creation unrivaled in the neighborhood. She had espaliered grapevines, both concord and niagara, along the fence that bordered our property. Blueberry bushes impounded one end of the garden. Raspberry canes huddled around the feet of two huge unpruned pear trees and they were hyphened by rhubarb beds.
But it was the garden that drew the prize. Out of the lead of wrinkled seeds and clumped soil came the gold of vegetables, from the evanescent lettuce to the wintering-over potato. Basil and thyme and lavender and a score of other herbs and spices were lavished between rows and in odd angles. And in the fall, when my father was away from home most often, she canned and froze her produce into ingots that she carefully and dutifully put in the storeroom downstairs. Whenever in the deepest vice of winter I needed color I would slip into the basement and gaze at the strata of food, and for a time my head would be filled with the smell of damp earth and the hiss of boiling water.
But, in the summer of 1950, I was still famished for action. Gypsy parents and communists had faded with the blistering and humid weather. The first heat wave of that summer brought hundred-degree temperatures and my parents and I retreated to the theater to watch Treasure Island in air-conditioned escape. But by mid-July it was no show. So filled was I with boredom and confusion that I could hardly unreel myself from bed in the morning and, like an English prince, divulge my itinerary for the day. I even went as far as to wish that school would start.
One day, in the rummages of that season, a moving van pulled up to the Parkinson house, an abandoned Victorian mansion just a block down from where we lived. The men, natty in their khaki uniforms and red curlicue name patches, briskly moved the cargo off the truck and into the house. Naturally we gathered to watch. No one had told us anything about anyone moving in. Like some ragged receiving line we waited patiently to see who had taken on the folly of resuscitating this grand but determinedly decaying old beldam of a house.
No owner showed his face to us, but that didn't matter. The moving men entertained us with the most marvelous collection of esoteric junk we had ever seen. Out of that van came oddments and furniture and clothing unlike any we had ever seen. Long silk robes and dresses, etched with delicate filigrees, followed gaudy red lampshades that jingled with white tassels. Small round tables, intricately carved and inlaid with ivory, dogged the heels of massive leather furniture, so massive that the moving men sprouted dark spines of sweat down the backs of their shirts. Several trunks emerged from that Aladdin truck. The trunks were not the usual flat kind, with their cheap lacquered look and skinny locks. These trunks were huge, with arched tops and strong wooden ribs and padlocks the size of my fists. We ached to know what was in them, especially the one with the painting of a dragon on it. A tongue of flame leapt from its mouth across a stark white landscape, barely constrained by the perimeter of the edges, and it had that Chinese look we'd learned about in social studies.
For hours we watched boxes moved by marked books or spices or records. We saw hutches and china closets of dark gleaming wood, flocks of chairs, paintings of everything from beautiful landscapes to what looked like a woman with her two eyes on one side of her head, a brass bedstead, an old victrola with the oversize horn, a loveseat curled into a red velvet S, a piano. We were delighted, parched ground redeemed by a gentle and limitless rain. When the moving van finally pulled away and the house again took on its superficial gloom, we knew better -- we knew the house was bursting with seeds like a pomegranate. For the first time in a long while the house did not scare us, and we passed it deliberately that night on the way home from our revels, delighted by the secret knowledge we had.
Of course it didn't remain secret for long. By dinner I had lathered my parents with the news, and they acceded to my position of authority with what I thought then to be admirable grace. They smiled, wondered out loud who had taken the house, and then slipped into the stream of their adult conversation. I could not let it go so quickly. To me it was salvation, manna, liniment. I remember lying in bed that night so vividly, the heat finally tapering off to a mild bake, the sweat trickling down my chest. I reviewed the parade of paraphernalia I had been privy to that afternoon. I lingered over each item, embellishing with my own invention where I couldn't quite remember accurately. In fact, so well did I embellish that by the time I drifted into a humid sleep I had translated our new resident into my gypsy father. A breeze came up through my window and cooled the patina of sweat, and I slept laved in a zephyr of dreams.
When we gathered the next morning we expected everything to have been a dream, but it wasn't. Workmen scrambled over the exterior of the house. Scaffolding had been erected and the picture reminded us of the building of cathedrals we'd seen in history books. Groups worked on the eaves and gutters while a small crew chipped out old brick along a snaky crack up the back of the house. Others were busy jacking up the front porch and resetting its aged spine. Men with axes and pruning shears barbered the lawn and bushes. In the next few weeks what had been a gap-toothed spinsterish wreck of a place became a coquettish Victorian beauty, the brick blushing from a good cleaning, the new granite lintels arched like sculpted eyebrows. As much as it could in a steamy July sliding into August, the mystery of the mansion took the village and shook it upside down. Out came all the small change of little boys' conjectures and adults' more considered yet no more accurate conclusions. To everyone, but especially to this cadre of excitement-starved boys, this mystery stirred us more than the ripples of the Hiss case, the slaughter of Korea.
Then it seemed to die, to go into relapse. One night, in early August, unable to sleep, I crept to my window and kneeled at it, my chin resting lightly on the sill. The Parkinson house was to my right, down the street. Suddenly, as if the dark sky was wringing it out of the stars, I heard music, the jangle of a honky-tonk piano. The only person who ever played music on our street was Mrs. Lavolier, and she had never played anything written after Chopin. My mouth tingled as if it had bitten into a lemon. Nothing else was stirring that night. And there, like that hard star pointing north, was this music slithering through the trees up to my window. I interpreted it as an invitation and for a moment all those notions I had had about my gypsy parents flooded back into me. And then it stopped. I slipped back into bed and slept.
I woke early. Normally I would have curled back into my sheets, but a stiff cool breeze rattled through my curtains and I was struck by how quiet everything was. I popped out of bed and into my clothes and, carrying my sneakers in my hand, snuck past my parents' room and out the front door, with a side trip to the kitchen for an orange. Once on the porch I slapped my feet into my sneakers and walked down the street, snapping the shards of peel into the gutter. I let the fruit, cold from the refrigerator, rail against my teeth, and I especially delighted in the succulent thickness of the juice. By the time I finished the orange I was in front of the mansion, my mouth pleasantly tingling as it had the night before.
Someone was sitting on the porch.
As I look back on it now I realize that I could have been more collected in my reaction. (After all, my parents, natural or not, had taught me the catechism of social graces.) But for being twelve I think I handled myself with admirable restraint. I simply stared. For his part the man failed to notice me. Bathed in the sunlight, the man, resplendent in a white morning suit, sat in a white wicker rocker drinking from a white porcelain cup, perfectly at ease with the fact that he had just, unannounced, dropped like a dart into the balloon of our lives. I turned on my heel. The vision of all that whiteness vaulted me through the kitchen door, careened me off the kitchen table, and down into the basement, where I lassoed my bike and, like Apollo, set out to lighten the lives of my friends with my chariot of knowledge.
By the time most fathers were off to work and the mothers had set out to do whatever it was they did, we had rendezvoused to plan our assault against the mansion. That consisted mostly of riding our bikes like hellions up and down the street in front of his house in the vague hope that he would come out and reprimand us. Our first assault melted with the rising temperature. As soon as the heat posted a few more degrees some began to voice the opinion that I was making up what I'd told them and that they'd be better off sucking down cokes at Greg's and laying chin-deep in creek water. Even though I bridled at the insult, I half-wondered if my morning vision was concocted out of stray glints off the mica-filled asphalt. I suggested we try one more foray up and down the street. This got mixed reviews and in that twelve-year old tone of voice that always promises more than it can deliver we escalated insults until our voices rattled the thick air. Then someone said, "What's that?"
A voice trilled across the road. "Boys," it said, "would you like some lemonade?"
It might as well have asked us if we wanted to be thirteen.
Leaving our bikes loosely corralled, we shuffled across the street and onto the porch. What we had been so desperately fighting for came the moment we had given up the fight. We waited nervously while footsteps resolutely walked to the front door. The door opened.
I have seen very few truly beautiful women in my life. The woman standing in the shadow of that doorframe was one of them. There was no screen door to dampen her beauty, so we got it full force. There is not much that will bring a twelve-year old to a screeching halt, but she received our sheepish looks with a grace that made us straighten our backs and ache for the lemonade she had to offer.
We walked down the long dark hallway to the kitchen, whispering like peasants in the palace. In the kitchen, with its polished maple floors and high tin-plated ceiling, we saw on the table a brood of glasses filled with lemonade. With a simple gesture she pointed them to us, and, as an added notch on the ratchet of our emotions, she unlidded the plenty of a cookie jar. So there we stood, caught between our self-consciousness and the inestimable pleasure of peanut-butter cookies and lemonade.
"So, is that all you do every day, ride up and down the street bothering people?" The way she said this did not sound insulting or shrewish.
"No," I said, more or less the spokesboy for the group. I was stuck after that. To save face, I stuffed in another cookie.
She smiled down at my embarrassment and for a moment I had the crazy sensation of her fingertips riffling through my hair. I sputtered, "There isn't much to do around here in summer 'cept swim and maybe go to the movies." I looked at my friends for confirmation, not liking to be on the limb all by myself. A few nodded their heads; that was good enough. "So, you know" (that "you know" made me wince because my parents had tried to beat it out of me and I felt foolish letting it out) "you know" (again!) "we sorta -- sort of -- just ride our bikes around and see what we can find to do. We usually end up swimming anyways." And then I added, with what I thought was marvelous courage, "That's what we we're going to do if you hadn't of called us in for these cookies." For another crazy second I thought she was my gypsy mother.
Overhead we heard footsteps. She looked up, smiled, and said to us, "Let me get him for you. He'll be delighted to meet you all." She left the kitchen. The moment she did we all looked at each other as if we were strangers waiting for the same train. The sensation did not last for long. The kitchen was invaded by a tall but stout man wearing a lavender smock over jeans and pock-marked workboots. Sure enough, he was the man I had seen sitting in the wicker throne at the edge of the morning's light. He was at least a foot taller than the woman, and his hair, white without a trace of yellow in it, fell in soft but ragged drifts over his ears and collar, a pleasant contrast to the stubble that adorned the heads of my father and his friends. "My, my," he said, "the elves are here" and sat down.
At that time we had no idea what he meant, but he seemed pleased with the allusion and we were pleased to eat all the cookies he could offer. The woman came into the kitchen from the pantry with another beaded pitcher and a separate glass for the man. He gulped his drink down with obvious pleasure, occasionally stirring the sediment with a cobra-headed swizzle stick, something we stared at in impolite fascination. When he was done he thumped the glass on the table, slapped his thighs, and smiled.
Just as I was about to say thank you he stood up and said to us, "C'mon." We followed him down the dim corridor and up the spiral staircase with its rail of braided wood. At the second floor landing he took a left; we goslings took a left. At the end of the hall he went through a door and with a momentary hesitation we trooped in behind him, mystified and entranced by possibility. This day had become glorious even if we saw nothing else but a cobra-headed swizzle stick.
The room was an office by the looks of it. He invited us to sit down. The only chair, besides the one at the desk, was one of the leather chairs we had seen the day the movers came. He sat in that. So we all flomped to the floor. It strikes me now that at the time we must have indeed looked like elves gathered around an elder, waiting.
"So," he asked us in a voice that would have gone well with campfires, "for what reason would you want to see me?"
At that moment everyone looked at me, including him, and through a dry throat I stammered out what I had told the lady downstairs. "It was all an innocent game, huh?" He nodded his head and fixed his eyes on me. "Nothing to do?" He swept his eyes across us. "And I thought you all looked so intelligent." He must have known he pricked our pride. "Be here tomorrow morning at dawn. We'll find something to do." That was our dismissal. He got up. From the great height of his purple smock, which we now saw was splattered with gaudy streaks of paint, he looked down on us and smiled. "I have work to do. Go eat cookies." With that, and a few well-placed strides, he was out of the room.
That next morning we arrived at dawn in front of his house, sleepy-eyed, woolly-headed, grousing like soldiers. Out he came in his workboots and jeans, this time with a blue workshirt on. "C'mon" was all he said, and we grumpily fell into line. He set a gluttonous pace, his long legs gobbling up road while our short ones nibbled furiously behind him. When he saw some of us begin to lag behind he turned around and came back to us. "Okay, your strength has picked your classroom for today. The stronger you get, the better our places of study."
He struck off across a field, hopped a wire fence, and headed for a clump of trees about a football field away. We filed after him. When he reached the trees he stopped. "Now, be specifically quiet because I'm going to show you something." A few more feet into the trees' shade he stopped again and told us to sit down. We were only too glad. "Once you've got your breathing under control I want you to be so quiet that you can hear everything around you. Just sit still and listen with everything."
We sat there, at first a little embarrassed to be sitting out in the middle of the woods doing nothing, and we joked and punched each other, but eventually we quieted down. Then we listened. I remember the happy surprise I felt at hearing so much: delivery trucks belching downtown, the wind soughing in the upper branches, my own breathing. But pretty soon we got antsy. He must have sensed that for, without a word to us, he rose and started off, deeper into the woods. In an instant we were off behind him, amazingly refreshed.
He took a slower pace this time and we ambled. At a copse of trees he halted, sat on a stump, and with that congressional smile of his, said, "Well, what do you want to know?"
Each of our trips, no matter how far and wide and long, always followed this pattern of rest, listening, a walking search, and a story about his life. We excavated old house ruins, found turtle eggs, watched the birth of rabbits, saw a blacksmith work, measured the depth of the lake and the height of the hills around it, created ice cream, visited the old people in the rest home, threw pots, catalogued fossils. It never occurred to us that the stories he told us about Malay and the Middle East and Africa and Greenland might be lies, and even if it had, I suspect it wouldn't have mattered. For my own part all the squelchy doubts I had about my existence dissipated under the accruing knowledge that piled high inside me, like layers of shale. What had been drought and apathy was now an arbor of rioting growth. The grapes of my boredom had borne a good wine.
On the day before school started he invited us to the house. The woman, beautiful as always, greeted us, lemonade and cookies sprouting under her hands. When he had had our fill he had us follow him upstairs. He went past his office and through a small door. We scuttled after him and found ourselves in an airy and luminous attic. His broad back wove around the scumble of old boards and boxes and came to a trunk, the trunk we had all marveled at the day the movers arrived. From this close we could see the chipped paint and barked wood but it still fascinated us like an unopened present. He pointed and said, "For a long time I've been carting this hunk around. Why? Because it contains the secret of life." He pointed at me. "Do you know what the secret of life is?" I shrugged casually, but his question burned hotter through me than he could ever know. All of us shook our heads no. He smiled, his eyes curiously distant, and patted the box as if it were a trusted pet. "Well, when you're ready for it, here it is." At that he laughed and swept us before him with the huge wings of his arms, like a mother does her brood. The next day we plunged dutifully into the first circle of school.
Throughout the year we became, at various times, thirteen, and with this added burden our contact fell away. There were girls and sports and any number of forbidden vices to investigate and we became so busy with being busy that the incandescence of the summer quickly failed. For my part I tried to keep some line open, and infrequently, more out of guilt than real desire, I found myself sitting in the kitchen with the beautiful woman and the man, trying with all the thirteen-year old guile I could muster to seem opinionated and knowing and confident.
As time passed the going came easier. Sometimes he was not there and the woman and I would sit in the darkened front room and listen to classical music, never speaking a word except for the greeting and goodbye. As I got older, as the mundane nature of life corraded my soul, I kept them like a banked ember in me, a place where I could go and feast my senses on spices and paintings and good food and to whom I could pour out all that was inchoate in me. They listened, they seldom advised, they gave me music and quiet and haven. Their house grew fine around them. The new brick flushed into the honed red of the older brick, grapevines thickened and swelled into hairy veins that coursed with fruit every spring, the trees grew taller, lopped off more of the sun, and those years of my adolescence that sent me wandering rooted the man and the woman more securely to the earth.
College came and we were forced into letters. I sent long turgid epistles of doubt and victory. They answered them, sometimes she with gentle commiseration, sometimes he with unflattering directness. As I wrestled with the new beast of my intellect, they sent me gracious balm. Each letter ambushed me with a flood of memory that racked me happily until I again floated out of my reclusive world.
And one day, as these things happen, I received news of his death. Not until much later, almost a month, when the holidays had come, did I finally make the pilgrimage back to house a block down from my own. She answered the door. I was lost for words, lost in words I couldn't say. But she, confident as ever, took my hand and led me upstairs, past his office with the chair, to the attic, where, in a pool of grey light sifted from the skylight, the trunk with the Chinese dragon sat. She offered me a key. "This is for you since you took the most pains to keep on looking."
The secret of life. He had said it was in there, though for years I'd forgotten it. I quickly knelt and slipped in the key. The lid lifted easily, rattling with the shaking of my excited hand. When I saw what was in there I looked up for her in confusion, but she had descended, and I knelt in the upper reaches of that house fulgent in pearl light, my hands shaking, my eyes dry and knotted, riven by nothing more powerful than a gentle voice saying, "Listen."