Burnished, I decided, might be one beginning—a word to evoke a darkened downstairs in Nebraska, the winter end of the day, radiators ticking, a dining room of heavy, burnished wood, silver and china, shelves of violets, floral rings, napkin rings, the outside light silvered through the white curtains and around the green velvets of the plants—the napkin rings we later inherited and from time to time used in our own tract home in Redondo, the suburbs outside our little house themselves abrading endlessly at the past, and Mother pulling the rings out of the drawer radiating their dull sheen of this other primeval dining room in the heartland, setting them out on the table and trembling in a barely suppressed hysteria Father and I know well. Both of us will be standing quite still, nodding to no one in particular that everything will be fine, and Father no doubt thinking back to his own jolly family dinners, the quick Southern give and take celebrated in so many stories. But that escape is much too late now as our house is stretched and racked with the darker, older, prairie structure, burnished as Mother sets these out—I wanted to use these nice things today! Her voice will be childlike, breaking in her throat, eyes blinking wetly, the old absurd heavy floral engraving and ornate monograms now ringed around our fifties linens as she puts them about the dining table in the dining nook in front of the window through which we can see our car in the driveway and the neighbor’s small, rectangular, frosted bathroom window set in its blank field of stucco. Mother is tremulous in an old language of some vast and unidentified hurt that silences our meal down to the odd fork creaking on the Franciscan Apple pattern plates in the ghost of the mahogany luster of the room on P street, the heavy silver rings.
This and the similar brooding locales, the banister from the upstairs, the black phone in the entrance hall, the vague gray magic of the television, the colored glass squares around the front door, the violets in small pots on saucers faintly ringed with the tiny striations of their waterings and the broad-leafed plants on the coffee table in the front room that bled milk white when broken, knickknack shelves and Hummel children looking up from the dark scalloped wood lost and ecstatic, the silent snow light of the big, anger-filled rooms, this was part of the language of burnished.
BACK STAIRS—THIS is another dialect, an older tonality somehow, an earlier layer, historical and therefore more angry in its accumulation of resentments, kitchen walls and steps painted Depression-era green, worn, marked, a patina of footsteps both light and heavy, children scuttling, treads deepening, laboring, Grandmother stumping up these on a winter morning in her navy dress and heavy hose, past the empty 7UP bottles in their neat six-packs waiting to return to the Piggly Wiggly and the dark gleaming bundle of shotguns—Mother pheasant hunting with her dad and his crew along the Platte, in the cold, diffused light of the stairwell a memory of great space, of birds scattering up brilliantly toward horsetail clouds, canvas game bags blood-flecked in the fine autumn light, and the kitchen, the same light green, an oilcloth table, porch to the backyard, the alley and garage, the table where in the 1930s Grandfather wept at the fresh memory of the freight trains covered with boys looking for work trundling slowly in front of him at the crossing where he waited in his car, driving home for lunch from his steady job with the city, managing the street crews, cleaning the streets of Lincoln with a fleet of bright-orange Elgin sweepers. Then twenty years later, at lunch for blissful four-year-old me at the same table, Grandpa with a masterful slow burn traveling his solemn face as he regards the pennies-off coupon dripping mushroom soup he’s spooned up out of his bowl while Grandma shakes with laughter at the stove, a practical joke in aid of the great, unkillable angers of their marriage, I now see, turned into a skit, a wonderful joke. This same silvered light hangs in the stairwell as the light gathers around the darkened faces in old photos, the casual death sign of the double eights of the shotguns’ double barrels resting together against the pale-green wall, while out at the edge of this narrative circulate stories of Omaha friends of friends said to have been killed, like the Clutters, late-fifties prairie-horror deaths. Chased ’em around the house first, according to tart Aunt Evelyn, Grandmother’s sister, connoisseur and chronicler of death and irony, also telling of the newlyweds known somehow to the family who were lost in a tornado—Smashed ’em into a tree and killed ’em both. In this same thin unheated light I can glimpse Mother’s brother as well, in the Italian campaign at Salerno, Monte Trocchio, Monte Cassino, who had never seen his three-year-old daughter, suddenly home from the war riding beside her in the back of a car going to Artesia, New Mexico, to begin life over and she playing with a stick of gum, unwrapping it awkwardly with a three-year-old’s exquisite slowness, the highway and wind, the vast razor of sun cutting down through the car, and he grabbing the gum at last, unwrapping it in a silent frenzy, flinging the paper out the window, throwing the gum at the scared, astonished girl, the women scared, not talking, and he sitting back into the seat, looking out, not talking. Somewhere among this Midwestern hurt there also lies the mysterious trace of Mother’s first husband entangled as well along the risers, the paling light spilling from the upper story, his war bride typing carbons, tying her scarf, March slush along the sidewalks while somewhere in Sardinia this mysterious person her husband lies prone in the nose of his B-26 Marauder as the runway comes up fast, gray and running, when for no reason anyone can ever understand the bomb load detonates, blowing him out through the plexiglass and onto the tarmac crumpled soft and birdlike before the plane’s smoking and tilted wings, a lifeless doctor’s son from Lincoln and the great mystery of the resulting telegram from the War Department in Mother’s dresser drawer never mentioned or explained for years and years. In this space as well, I sense the aura of Grandfather after his stroke, grandson ushered into his hospital room—It’s all right, honey, come on in—and Grandpa sitting up in his gown, bursting into tears, crying out in ululations of stroke, the broken bits of words, inarticulate as a clown, a great Clarabelle towering in the bed, crying, seizing at, patting my hand, the back stairs.
Do you know the old language?
Rock garden in Grandfather’s backyard would be the last utterance. It’s gone now, of course, paved over, the junipers and boxwood shaded with cypress, moss, a view of the trellised back gate to the graveled alley, the flower beds along the alley, gladiolas and zinnias, I can just see him, says Mother now, recalling her father in a park or nursery coming upon a plant he coveted and methodically, studiously, a look of great innocence and rectitude coming over his face, digging at the favored bulb with his heel, leaning down coolly to pocket the pilfered glad in the roar of Mother’s anxiety, her unprotected shame here for some reason palpable in the rock garden, the cousins’ most frightening spot of all, far more than the old basement, yet drawing one to it, hidden up against the back wall of the house, looking across the small lawn to the garage with its Hudson Hornet a gleaming green lozenge hidden within and big early spring clouds floating over. Here was loneliness beyond rescue, the blank dread that has snaked with such great and stately slowness across the years to linger in one life or another; in my mid-thirties coiling back on me with a vengeance, a true Fury, the kindly one not to be trifled with or named to its face, and in the middle of this dark process finding a birthday card addressed to my seven-year-old self from Grandmother, from Nell, who seemed to understand this darkness—the card heartbreakingly addressed from the silent center of the rock garden to “a good boy,” some embattled angelic aura in her signature, the echo of her old saying bless your heart.
Publicly, Mother’s family was generous with reminiscences, often formal and occasional—speeches, women’s club programs, chronicling the past at the children’s request, an elderly aunt videotaped in a flowered dress on her La-Z-Boy, voice cracked and distant, “The children have wanted me to tell about my early years.” But the old language of the house “in earnest” makes a counterpoint to this performance, something darker and slower, more like light than sound, unremarked and unnamed, like the small lodges of the grass at the edges of the field in the Nebraska twilight, the cousins in their childhood running through dead leaves in the last dusk at Pioneer Park, raggedly singing the melody of “Walk Don’t Run” by the Ventures, chests tight with the love of dark so close underfoot in the grass, the shadowed past, the down and in of soul-making. Since so