Peace, p.7
Peace, page 7
“Nothing,” I said. It was a skull, a human skull lying amid a clutter of other bones, but I remembered a time several years before when I had found the skull of some animal—perhaps a rabbit or a squirrel—under the dense rose hedge in the garden, and carried it in to my mother, who had been horrified; I said nothing and took my place at the tablecloth. We had sandwiches and olives, and celery still wet from the spigot at the sink in my aunt Olivia’s kitchen, and lemonade—no longer very cool. And cookies: hard gingersnaps I recognized as coming from the bakery. After the meal, my aunt and Professor Peacock made rubbings of the scratches on the rocks, and I watched each of them find the bones and decide—my aunt Olivia very quickly, Professor Peacock, I think, more slowly—to say nothing.
Then the professor climbed to the top of the hill again, and I sat in the sling seat and was pulled up. I expected him to lower the rope for my aunt then, but he climbed down again instead, saying that he had something to discuss with her and telling me to wait. I whistled up Ming-Sno and Sun-sun, but had only a minute or two of play with them on the hilltop before he returned and, letting down the rope for the last time, slowly drew up my aunt, with the empty picnic basket in her lap. As we were going home, while Professor Peacock was paying the conductor, I told my aunt that he had wanted me to cut the rope, too—when she was coming up. (He had not said so, but I had felt it.) But that I would not do it. She squeezed my hand, and after a moment whispered in my ear that she had left her little dish with the hen on top in the cave. “For me. Because I had olives in it—do you see, Den? And besides, it’s china.”
I pointed out that it was milk glass.
“The bottom,” she said firmly as Professor Peacock took his seat, “was china.”
The second of my aunt’s three suitors was James Macafee. To me, at the time, he seemed somewhat set apart from the others —he always brought gifts, and his gifts were never flowers (which I loathed) or candy (which I favored, since my aunt seldom ate more than one piece, leaving the rest, the vanilla opera creams and chewy chocolate-covered caramels, for me) but something substantial, a music stand or a set of ivory-yellow coolies who would press my aunt’s books together, one pushing hard with both his hands while the other leaned back against the last book, almost upsetting his wide hat. Mr. Macafee came less often than either of the others, came earlier, and left earlier. He regularly gave me coins (which neither of the others did) and once brought me a Marine Band harmonica.
I think that it was some time before I connected him with Macafee’s Department Store, which he owned. He was short, somewhat stout, and going bald young; he dressed well, in a fashion I admired more at the time than Stewart Blaine’s, the other suitor. He was, I think, genuinely kindly and genuinely fond of music, and always looked pleased when my aunt played for him and disappointed when she stopped. About forty years after the time of which I am writing, when the control of Macafee’s (no longer under that name) had more or less passed to me as a result of certain financial transactions on the part of the company, I spent the better part of an afternoon searching the store’s records for some trace of James Macafee’s administration. Eventually I unearthed a few documents, but there were far fewer associated with him than with his father (Donald Macafee, the founder)—this despite the fact that those that might have been expected to bear his name were more recent, and that he had actually controlled the store for a longer period of time. He was a shrewd bargainer; but he must have disliked signing papers, and detested any form of personal publicity.
He entertained my aunt with walks, and with rides in his Studebaker, rides that often turned into antique-hunting expeditions, for he was as ardent a collector of antiques as my aunt was of Chinese, and Chinese-related, objets d’art. On summer Sunday evenings they went to the band concerts in Wallingford Park, to which, during the time I lived with my aunt, I was forced to accompany them, she sitting between Mr. Macafee and myself, all of us on a narrow green park bench with an iron frame and wooden-slat seat and back, applauding politely at the conclusion of each selection. The bandstand stood just in front of the Civil War Memorial (a gray stone statue of a man in a forage cap and what was intended to be the baggy blue uniform of the Union Army, a soldier who held, idly now, a Springfield musket while he stood—like a workman at the margin of an excavation —on the edge of an abyss of time whose farther side was the bandstand, and whose nearer side was his own pedestal, with its granite tablet carved with the names of the town’s dead, and not, as I had supposed a few years earlier, of the men he had killed); the band was somehow a branch of the volunteer fire company.
Without rules or enforcement, seating was strictly regulated: the best dressed occupied the benches closest to the bandstand. The worst dressed of all, the very poor children and a few town loafers, did not sit in the park, but used as their bench the curb on the opposite side of Main Street. Since there was no traffic, even on Main Street, on Sunday evening, they heard the music as well as we (Mr. Macafee and my aunt Olivia always sat in the first row of benches) and missed only my fascinating close-up view of the trombonist.
The affair of the Chinese egg began, I suppose, about three weeks after I had come to live with my aunt, when, having been sent to bed, I had my reading interrupted after two hours or so by her whirlwind entrance. “Den!” she said. “Jimmy Macafee’s just gone.”
I asked if I could get up.
“Don’t be silly, it’s after bedtime for you. But guess what— I’m going to have a shop! I’m going to give demonstrations and lessons! All in Jimmy’s store. We can go down tomorrow and look at the place.”
I don’t believe I understood at all that night—mostly because I did not greatly care—just what this shop was to be or what lessons my aunt was to give there. As soon as she had left the room, I returned to my story, which concerned a princess whose lone tower stood upon a sea-washed rock, out of sight of any land. She was tended every day—on the order of her father, the king—by servants in a boat; a rowing boat, according to the picture facing the appropriate page, which supplemented its oars by mounting a very small mast carrying a single square sail painted with the royal arms. (This sail, I was happy to see, attempted to overcome the disadvantage of its diminutive size by hard work. It bellied out more enthusiastically than ever Titania’s votaress did, and this despite the wind’s blowing—as was shown by the pennant a foot above it—across its surface rather than from behind it.) It seemed rather a long way for the servants to come—the picture showed no land at all astern of the boat—yet such was their devotion to their lovely princess that they did it.
At night the princess lived all alone in her seagirt tower.
This was (of course) the result of a prophecy made at the queen’s bedside by a certain bent and crooked and hairy wizard who had come hobbling up out of the night just when the rejoicings were loudest. This wizard, who dressed in wolfskins and was said to live exclusively upon tea, had chanted:
“The little maiden you toast here
Shall live alone full many a year;
And many a wight shall seek her hand,
Though she not own a foot of land;
Earth, sea, and air
Will woo the fair,
But fire will win her.
And though her sire be a king by birth
Greater, the groom will gin gold from the earth.“
Naturally the king, though he would have liked to have a wealthy son-in-law, did not care for the sound of the word “greater,” and thus the tower on the rock. This cloistered girl’s fame spread far and wide, as was no doubt inevitable; and doubtless it occurred to a good many people that although there was no way of really knowing what was meant by “fire” in the rhyme—after the wedding it could doubtless be explained in a good many ways—it seemed quite clear that whoever won her would be a king (or better) and very rich. However, there was no place to anchor a ship within miles of the rock, and nearly everyone who tried to pay court to the unfortunate princess (whose name was Elaia) drowned.
At last (just when I was getting sleepy) the first serious lover arrived on the scene. He was extremely wellborn, being the youngest son of the king of the gnomes, and so handsome that he was entitled to a picture of his own, which showed him standing rather languidly on the rock outside the tower door—he having just that moment leaped from the stern of the king’s departing boat where he had been concealed in the bilges in the form of a mouse. He had a sword, and a shield with a big spike in the center and divisions like those on the face of a sundial marked off around the rim. Whether he indeed entered through that door or was forced, out of deference to maidenly modesty, to climb the tower and come in through a window, I no longer remember. I do recall, however, that the princess set him a number of exceedingly difficult tasks—including such things as recovering the ring of a bell from the bottom of the sea—all of which he performed with what to me was astonishing but gratifying ease. In time, of course, word of this young man’s fame reached the king, and he sailed out to pay a second visit to his daughter. He found her alone, but when he asked the whereabouts of that paragon of paladins, the youngest son of the king of the gnomes, she would say nothing but that his kisses had tasted too strongly of fresh-turned earth.
The second lover, whom I had expected to be a merman, was nothing of the sort, but an adventurous young merchant whose seamanship was such that he was able to bring his ship to the very rim of the rock (as the picture showed) and leap off dry-shod. He was not only deficient in supernatural abilities but rather short (again judging by his picture) as well, but he made up for these inadequacies with curly blond hair and a marvelous degree of cunning. At the princess’s urging he traded that well-known shrewd bargainer the fox out of his ox, leaving him a mere “f,” then exchanged the ox for a giant’s shadow, with which he so terrified the people of a seaside town that they made him their king, whereupon he went back to the giant and exchanged the shadow (now more valuable than ever, since it was the shadow of a famous conqueror) for a magical bird of ruby and amethyst, which he presented to the princess. This bird sang in such a way as to calm the sea itself and charm every hearer, though to hear its most beautiful song its owner had to set it free; this the princess did, and then charmed it back into its cage again by singing herself. When her father asked what had become of the enterprising merchant lad, she said that she had sent him away because the heavy purse hanging from his belt bruised her each time they embraced.
The third lover was, to my mind, the most impressive, and hailed from that high country we see on certain summer days, from the flying islands that sail above our shaded and murky bottomlands with an invincible serenity, so that they are to us like swans that part the surface of a pool with their snowy breasts and never think of the worms and snails living in the mud below. Getting to the island was no problem for him, and his arrival was the most impressive of all, for he landed on the roof with a bodyguard of aerial spirits, of whom those closest to him could be but faintly seen, like ghosts, men and women in form, ugly and beautiful and strange, some with long flowing beards, some in fantastic clothes, while still others, farther away, hung silhouetted in the sunlight, winged like angels. The princess required of him the heaviest tasks of all, for she made him do every kind of filthy work about her tower, clean fish in the scullery and wash dishes, empty slops and even clean her servants’ boots; but when the king asked what had become of him she would only say, “His kingdom was too insubstantial for me, all emptiness and moaning wind.”
At which point, unfortunately, my aunt called, “Den, darling, are you awake in there?”—the signal that she had come up to bed and I must put out my light and go to sleep. I do not recall that I ever finished that particular story, and it is quite likely I did not, because I felt at that time—a feeling I retained until I was old enough to study books seriously—that it was a sort of desecration to begin an evening’s reading in the middle of a story. I started fresh when I sat down to read, and if I was not held to the end, never reached it.
The next day I learned what it was my aunt had been so excited about the night before. We visited Macafee’s, and most particularly that part of the store—the Morgan Street side of the second floor—which dealt in china and silver and glassware. Here a small alcove was being remodeled, and in it, my aunt told me, she would, on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons between the hours of three and five, decorate china and teach others to do so.
At once all her other hobbies fell into contemptuous neglect, so much so that I—when it had been established that all the women who came to clean for her positively refused to do it— had to rake out the dog runs and feed their inhabitants. The carved and gilded piano in the parlor and the harp in the solarium fell mute as stones, and the scientific periodicals the mailman brought piled up, still virginal in their brown wrappers, on the foyer table. My aunt Olivia, in other words, began to paint china as she had never before in her life painted china. And she was quite good at it.
Her favorites, of course, were Chinese scenes, executed largely or entirely in a pretty shade of pale blue. She reproduced the famous willow pattern, not only in its more or less pure state (which is English), but in variations of her own—of which I particularly remember one that included a crocodile in the river. (It may be in the house somewhere; I should look for it.) Dragons were another favorite: not only blue dragons on plates and bowls and cups and vases, all incredibly sinuous and sinister, but blue and red dragons inside bowls and cups and dishes as well, some lurking in the bottom where they would not be seen until the contents were consumed, others peeking playfully over the rim, sometimes with one frightening claw braced on the handle of a teacup. These dragons, with their rococo spit curls and bandits’ mustaches, appeared, when finished, to have been extremely difficult subjects; but my aunt had so mastered her brushwork that she could execute a dragon of ordinary size (that is to say, about three inches long) in less than ten minutes.
One day—I believe it was a day or two before the breathlessly awaited Tuesday when her shop was to open—when I had spent an hour or so in watching her paint (mostly dragons), I asked her how she had learned to do them so well. After swearing me to secrecy (and I was, naturally, happy enough to swear, and would even more gladly have sworn in my own blood than on the old, falling-apart, black-letter, unreadable family Bible upon which she demanded my oath) she showed me her collection, which, so she said, she had been assembling since her girlhood. She had them pasted in a leather scrapbook whose cover writhed with yet more painted dragons, all executed by herself, and I very well remember the pause as she held the closed book on her knees, reviewing at the last possible second the advisability of making me a party to her secret.
When she opened the book, I saw colors so bright that it was as though an explosion of parrots had been released into the room. Quickly, almost as though she were ashamed, she turned the pages, giving me time only to glance at each. Mounted on the dull cream scrapbook leaves were the labels from packages of fireworks, scores and perhaps hundreds of them: tigers, zebras, brilliant apes, and fierce warriors, and, of course, dragons in myriads, twisting and flowing like gaudy smokes, lashing red Chinese characters with their begemmed tails, licking scarlet Roman letters with serpentine tongues: “KWONGYUEN HANGKEE FIRECRACKER FACTORY, MACAU.” And similar names.
But as I have said, my aunt did not restrict herself to dragons, or even to dragons and willowware. Roundheaded, white-faced, humpbacked Chinese children with grotesquely merry smiles crowded some of her pieces, and serene court personages in clothes that were themselves painted with elaborate scenes. She pointed out the emperor to me once, on a vase, and informed me that the dragon throne was vacant now—but prophesied that it would someday be filled again; this was, I suppose, at the height of the warlord period, when the death of Yuan Shih-k’ai left the Middle Kingdom leaderless. The quaint costumes and stylized faces reminded me of a gramophone record of my father’s, and I began to sing, “ ‘If you want to know who we are/We are gentlemen of Japan/Seen on many a vase and jar/Seen on many a screen and fan,’ ” marching up and down in time to the music.
“Oh, no,” my aunt said, “these are Chinese gentlemen—they’re quite different.”
I asked if there were any Chinese “close to here.” My aunt said, “Much closer than you think, Den,” and putting down her brush, she smiled prettily at me and tapped her forehead with one finger. “There is a whole empire here—rice fields and wastelands and gardens. Pagodas and glass chimes that ring in the wind, and gentle water buffaloes and thousands of millions of people.”
It is very hard for me to remember sometimes that my aunt Olivia is dead. I once heard some sort of religious—or perhaps they would call it philosophical—argument between Aaron Gold and Ted Singer in which Ted said that something was “contrary to everyday experience.” This was what we used to call “a settler.” It was intended to terminate the argument, an irrefutable and all-destroying assertion. I have thought of it since, often, and of the things that are “contrary to everyday experience.”
The most obvious one, surely, is the birth of children, or indeed of any living thing. New human beings—or, for that matter, cats or calves—simply do not appear every day; they do not spring from the ground. Perhaps only once in a lifetime an infant comes into a life as though he or she had been dropped from the sky. Most of us either have no younger brothers and sisters (I had none, and no older ones either) or are ourselves too young at the time of their birth to remember and understand.
Possibly because I have never married, I am more conscious than most that marriage is “contrary to everyday experience,” though sex is not. Male-female coupling is everyday: mature men and women in hotel rooms and motel rooms and their own apartments and homes, and apartments and homes that do not belong to them, “have intercourse”; and immature ones, too, in those places and every other conceivable and inconceivable place—on the seats of automobiles and on blankets (and no blankets) thrown on the ground, in shower stalls and in the back rows of theater balconies, on stage, in sleeping bags and, for all I know, hollow trees. But, very rarely, Melissa (who worked last summer in Woolworth’s, who wanted to be drum majorette this year—but it was Heather Trimble—Melissa whom I used to see waiting with her textbooks and notebook propped on one hip when I drove my cold-natured, reluctant old Plymouth to the plant in the mornings, waiting for the school bus that never seemed to come early or even on time) and Ted (who never got into the game unless Consolidated was fourteen points ahead; Ted ran the four-forty but who cares about the four-forty?) leave Melissa’s father’s brick ranch-style and Ted’s mother’s Apt. 14 and become four-legged two-backed four-armed (oh, be forewarned!) two-headed Ted and Lisa into which each less-than-half had vanished more or less utterly, and (though the monster is not completely indissoluble still) never to reappear. And this does not happen every day.
