Peace, p.8
Peace, page 8
Nor death, but only once. We talk of strong personalities, and they are strong, until the not-every-day when we see them as we might see one woman alone in a desert, and know that all the strength we thought we knew was only courage, only her lone song echoing among the stones; and then at last when we have understood this and made up our minds to hear the song and admire its courage and its sweetness, we wait for the next note and it does not come. The last word, with its pure tone, echoes and fades and is gone, and we realize—only then—that we do not know what it was, that we have been too intent on the melody to hear even one word. We go then to find the singer, thinking she will be standing where we last saw her. There are only bones and sand and a few faded rags.
I wrote last night, before I went to sleep, about my aunt Olivia’s painting, and her scrapbook, things I saw when I was only a boy. And last night in my bed here at the edge of this empty house (I have realized only now that I sleep and eat— when I eat—only at the edge; I had never thought of it before) I dreamed that I clambered over a wall. Where I had been, what was on the side of that wall I was leaving, I do not know. It was late evening, I think, of a winter day; the wall was before me, perhaps ten feet high, of stone plastered with stucco (or perhaps it was only mud) that was now falling away in great patches. The coping was of tile, and overhung the wall slightly, making it difficult to climb.
I dropped down on the other side. I was in a garden, I think, at any rate in a very picturesque landscape, in which there was or seemed to be so much arrangement of tree and stone and water that it could be called beautiful but not natural—though it may be that in a few places nature achieves by chance that air of orderly disorder and symmetrical unbalance. To either side of me the wall extended as far as I could see; but it seemed to me that at its extremities it curved slightly toward me, and this increased my sense of having entered an enclosure or sanctuary.
I walked over hills that were nearer and smaller than they seemed, and found between them a river of stones—stones with no water in them or through them or over them or under them at all, only the smooth, rounded, somewhat flattened bright cold stones, with here and there between them a weed, and once, floating on their surface, a dead bird. I reached a crooked little humpbacked footbridge, and found beneath it—crouched in the shadow, where he was nearly invisible—an earthenware troll with a fierce, sad face and stumpy limbs, fallen from his little pedestal. I climbed the bank of the dry river then, and took the footpath served by the bridge. I was beginning, as I walked, to be aware of myself, as I had not been earlier, and found that I was again a young man of twenty-five or so, and this was such a pleasant discovery that I congratulated myself, and thought, as I walked, What an excellent dream I am having—try not to wake up—probably never have this dream again, so make the most of it.
I did not know how old I was when I was awake, but I sensed at a level below the “conscious” thought of the dream that to wake would be a horror, that it was best to remain twenty-five and happy, walking the wandering little sanded path under the cypresses and cedars for as long as I could.
It grew steadily darker and colder, and a wind rose. I saw something bright, the only colorful thing I had seen in the garden except for the breast feathers of the dead bird, blowing across the path. I ran and caught it, and found that it was a broken paper lantern.
We now visited Macafee’s every day. If Mr. Macafee was not engaged, my aunt would go to his office for a chat, leaving me free to wander the store; because of this, my memories of it at that period begin not at the wide Main Street doors, but at the third-floor offices, offices that were at that time all of dark wood, the floors very solidly built of wide boards cemented with innumerable layers of bright varnish and laid with carpet—a plain green carpet in the outer offices, where girls in white shirtwaists worked at wooden desks, a beautiful Oriental carpet in Mr. Macafee’s own office. The doors, too, were of wood and shaped like picture frames, holding a magical glass that transformed whatever might be seen through it to a misty translucence. The rooms were paneled to a height above my head, and there was white-painted plaster above that.
Outside the office doors everything was changed, and this floor, the third floor, holding both the toy and furniture departments, was my favorite. The carpeting here was gray, but all the walls between the high windows were hung with bright carpets like the one in Mr. Macafee’s office, and more were piled in heaps as high as tables. Between them, bed jostled bed and table crowded table, giving me a vivid impression of the bustling numbers of people there were in the world, people who would in a short time require all these oak and walnut and mahogany tables, all these brass beds. Men, I noticed, always pressed the mattresses with the flat of their hands, always sat in the chairs, often pulled them up to the table and crossed their legs to see if they could, often turned them upside down to see if they were well made. Women polished the surfaces of the tables with their hands and told the clerk about their old tables or their mother’s; they only looked at the curls and furbelows of the beds, the brass morning-glories and sunflowers.
But the furniture was only the scenery on the road to the toys —there I loved and lingered. I never knew what to look at first, and this uncertainty remains, possibly the only part of my childhood still intact; I do not know now of which to write. There were soldiers, each kneeling or standing or lying on his own tiny patch of leaden grass. I was gradually acquiring an army; it included not only the living and marching, but the wounded and dead, snipers, frantic men who charged the enemies of their nation (and they were of several nations) with the bayonet, masked figures who lobbed gas grenades, artillerymen and Indian scouts, one a chief in full war bonnet who stood with folded arms, each hand grasping a hunting knife. These were five cents each; more elaborate figures, such as mounted cavalrymen, were ten.
And this was the age of the chemistry set, when all that was not glass or metal was wood, including little barrel-like wooden vials for the dry chemicals. I had a set, and longed for a larger one. The smell of new pine, or of burning sulphur, has invoked that small, stained bedroom-floor laboratory so often that I have sometimes wondered if I have not poisoned myself with its fumes, and now, when I think myself to have lived, if I do not in actuality lie still sprawled beside my candle and tiny smoking dish.
Of wooden swords and rubber daggers, guns that fired corks or water, I will say nothing; nor of the coin banks that performed so spectacularly for their pennies, or counted your money as they received it, or duplicated, with mysterious clickings and tickings, the black and beflowered safe in Mr. Macafee’s office. But I remember the ball bats, with their taped handles; all of them were, I think, branded “Louisville Slugger.” They were brand new, and so was I.
No doubt it should have been an intolerable imposition and restriction of freedom to be forced, at the sublime age of eight or early nine, to thus accompany my aunt, every day for nearly two weeks, and then often to be forced to spend a weary hour or more amusing myself among the counters. Since I did not know how children were supposed to act and feel, which is only to say that to me at that time childhood was a condition rather than a concept, I not only did not mind it but actually enjoyed it. The summer days were growing warm by then, and it was cool in the store under the big slow-turning ceiling fans, where nothing moved quickly but the dimes and quarters and receipts in their whizzing pneumatic tubes. When my aunt Olivia was finished and we had walked home again, I would change clothes and run down the street to find another boy who wanted to go to the river and swim.
The Tuesday and Thursday Nankeen Nook, when it opened, was small and interestingly crowded. There was (to begin at the end) a cashbox, into which my aunt put the money when she made sales, and which I was supposed to watch when I was present. There were two folding chairs, one for my aunt set up in front of her little worktable, and one for a student. And, of course, a large number of undecorated pieces of china, and (it having been transported from my aunt’s house at the store’s expense) my aunt’s electric kiln—then, I think, a very recent development. This last enabled my aunt to show the difference between “overglaze” and “underglaze” decoration.
And there were showcases in which to display the finished work. On the first day, my aunt brought some of her best pieces, and Mr. Macafee contributed a selection of antiques. As time progressed, all these were returned to their accustomed cabinets and cupboards, and work done in the store substituted for them. These newer pieces were signed and priced, and though —especially as the prices were rather high—my aunt sold only a few of them, they afforded her a certain amount of money (which perhaps she needed more than I realized) and a considerable amount of satisfaction.
Often customers brought their own family treasures to show her, and she, after dutifully admiring them, would demonstrate that they could, if they were willing to learn, do decorations of the type they had been taught to value. For her art was by no means limited to the Chinese scenes she favored; she could paint Redoute roses with the best, and chains of dark violets twined together by the stem to circle the rim of a soup tureen, or even to form an initial “B” or “W” on the side of a tall pitcher. (Her Chinese pictures were signed in almost invisibly small letters with her full name; but these floral designs bore, as her device, a few dusky olive leaves circumscribed by the letter “O.”)
Lessons were free, save that the student was expected to pay for her practice pieces, and after the first two or three weeks a handful of women came regularly, practicing at home between “Tuesdays and Thursdays” with materials they bought from my aunt, and carrying their best pieces back to the store with infinite care.
It was from one of these students—a Mrs. Brice—that my aunt, and Mr. Macafee, who as chance would have it was in the Nankeen Nook at the time chatting with the two women, that my aunt learned of the existence of the Chinese egg. It was, according to Mrs. Brice, an egg of very large size, and though it was possible that it was a natural egg, “from an ostrich, or one of those big-like birds,” Mrs. Brice doubted it, and the bird on her hat swayed from side to side.
“You say it’s quite old?” Mr. Macafee inquired.
“From the seventeen-hundreds is what they say. Now what there is is where somebody wrote on the bottom where you can’t see it, where it goes in the little stand. That isn’t painted on or anything, just written like with a school pen. It says, ‘Easter, Hangchow, 1799.’ Now, I didn’t say it is from American Revolution times like that, but they say it’s been in the family a long while, and that has always been wrote on the bottom.”
“There’s a story behind it,” my aunt Olivia said. “I know there is.”
Mrs. Brice said, “Well, you would have to ask Em about that. I said to her, ‘Where in heaven’s name’d you ever get that egg like that, Em?’ and she said to me it was—I don’t know, some relative of her mother’s—and he was a missionary and with the government, I think she said he was with the government, and he did some kind of business there with this Russian. Don’t ask me what a Russian was doing in China.“ She paused and looked at my aunt and Mr. Macafee to see if they believed her. ”And he gave him this egg. He had it made there, or anyway the decorations put on. It’s real pretty, but it sounds awfully mixed up to me. I told her I’d like to borrow it and try to copy it, but she won’t let it out of the house.“
“Do you think she’d sell it?” Mr. Macafee asked.
“I think she’d want a lot,” Mrs. Brice said firmly. She radiated the fact that though she was annoyed with Em for refusing to lend her the egg, still Em was a friend and friends stuck together, particularly when somebody wanted to buy something.
My aunt said, “I’ve just got to see it, Jimmy; will you take me out there?” Mrs. Brice looked properly scandalized at having heard her call Mr. Macafee “Jimmy” to his face, and in front of everybody.
I supposed, from having heard this conversation, which terminated shortly after the point at which my aunt Olivia called Mr. Macafee “Jimmy,” that they—perhaps accompanied by myself —would shortly go to view the Chinese egg. Possibly that same afternoon, after my aunt closed the Nankeen Nook; certainly within the next few days. I was, of course, mistaken.
Eager though they both were to see that rare object, it was quite impossible for them to simply “go barging out” to the owner’s farm and demand to be shown it. It would have been possible if the egg had been advertised for sale, but it had not. It would have been possible to go in a somewhat more diplomatic fashion had Mrs. Lorn, who owned it, been a friend of either. And it might even have been possible had the Lorns been utter and complete strangers (my aunt’s unfailing description of anyone she did not know and felt she could never wish to know). But the Lorns stood in the worst possible relationship: they were known by name only. They were reputed to be “nice.” They were rather remote friends of rather remote friends of my own family, and of remote friends of the Macafees as well. Guarded inquiries were made. Much information was received, a great deal of it redundant, and some of it contradictory. To summarize these intelligence reports:
The thing was the property of Mrs. Emerald Lorn, a woman somewhat, though not a great deal, older than my aunt. Mrs. Lorn was the wife of the minister of a country church—the Reverend Carl Lorn. Like many country ministers, the Reverend Lorn preached on Sunday and farmed six days a week; the Lorn farm was north and slightly west of town at a distance of nearly twelve miles, which was far enough that the Lorns, although they occasionally came to Cassionsville to shop, visited other towns almost as often and did most of their buying at a crossroads store much nearer them. Mrs. Green, whose husband rented his farm from my father, knew Mrs. Lorn, but only slightly; the Greens did not attend the Reverend Lorn’s church and, in any event, were shy of pressing their friendship upon those whom they felt to be above them. My own dear Hannah (who now, with my parents gone and the house closed, was “resting,” but who had become one of the women who sometimes came for a day or two to “help” my aunt) divulged that her half-sister Mary knew Em Lorn; but Hannah herself did not “except to see.” Stewart Blaine knew Carl Lorn quite well, having attended school with him; but the acquaintances of a husband are of little weight.
Reports of the egg itself were glowing. It was said to be not of a pure white color, but faintly and richly creamy, a detail which led Mr. Macafee to suggest that it might not be ceramic after all, but ivory and therefore (by implication) outside my aunt’s province; so that she was forced to remind him that she collected Chinese art of all kinds. And it was painted with a variety of scenes illustrating—though with a Chinese cast, as it were, and in Chinese dress—certain of the less dramatic occurrences connected with the Resurrection, including Mary Magdalen’s encounter with the risen Christ, and the final meal on the shore of Lake Tiberias. No two witnesses agreed precisely about either the number of scenes or their exact content. All coincided in saying that the artist’s rendering of Jesus and the apostles as Chinese philosophers, and His mother and Mary of Cleophas and other New Testament women as Chinese ladies with bound feet, and his running together the various scenes (so that one of the guards before the tomb—armed, as Stewart Blaine told my aunt, with a quaintly curved bow and a Manchurian headsman’s sword—was elbowing someone who might or might not be an awed native of Patmos) resulted in a confusion that, though charming, was nearly impenetrable.
For several weeks my aunt and Mr. Macafee collected these hearsay depositions, meeting frequently to exchange news and to speculate concerning the best means of securing an introduction to Mrs. Lorn. During this time I became aware, in the slow and only half-conscious way in which children recognize the existence of adult problems, of an unspoken and unresolved question which had sprung up between Mr. Macafee and my aunt. Should they bid against one another? Or should he, as a gentleman, stand aside and allow her to buy the egg at her own price if she could? Or, indeed, should she, with ladylike modesty, retire and leave the field of business to someone who undeniably was (as she was not) a businessman?
On twilit summer evenings they sat, with a good two feet of space separating them, on my aunt’s porch glider, and talked of the egg (my aunt had convinced herself that it must be one of a pair, the other of which would show the Ascension, and had written a museum in New York about it), and doubt hung in the air like a ghost between them. Were they rivals? Were they allies?
So things remained until one evening when Eleanor Bold paid my aunt a late call, arriving perhaps five minutes after Mr. Macafee had left. That Miss Bold—who was, after all, Barbara Black’s sister—should pay a call on my aunt, particularly while I was in the house, came as a considerable surprise to me; although in retrospect I can understand the dilemma into which the accident, and, later, Bobby’s death, put the Blacks—and of course to a lesser extent Eleanor and her father, the judge. For them to have held no rancor toward me and my family would have been thought unnatural by the whole town, and “told against” them. On the other hand, I had been a mere child of five, and though my aunt had been present, so had Eleanor herself and Bobby’s mother. To cut the social bonds irrevocably and irretrievably, forever, would seem rancorous, “unchristian,” and unforgiving. The accident itself was four years now in the past; and at the time Eleanor came to call on my aunt, Bobby must have been at least four months in his grave, if not more.
