Vista Del Mar. Neal Snidow

streaked March sky, all claim their own history.

      On an early evening in 1935, on a sidewalk outside the home of a fellow clubwoman where she has just attended a meeting, Nell waits silently in the gathering dusk in a stunning, howling rage, paralytic with shame, trembling as the night comes on, the street lights begin to glow, the lattice of tree branches darkening overhead, the calm interiors of the houses glowing now, for no one is there to meet her—there’s been a little mistake, a miscommunication, and no one has come to get her. But in the stark and broken language of acts and gestures that has made its own family history, she has come to the edge of what she can stand, is so beset with shame she cannot go back inside and call, ask to use the phone with a little laugh and show of comic irritation and admit to the other women she’s been overlooked, disregarded, and instead stands on the walk, minute by darkening minute radiating an agony so powerful her daughter, who comes to get her at last, who successfully interprets the mistake, the miscommunication, never forgets this event; in fact, for many years through its long, bruised half-life, she is compelled to reenact such shame, tearfully setting down the napkin rings in the determination that things will be nice, that all will be well despite the encroaching shadow and its negative, the blankness of the stucco present standing placidly outside the window where we silently eat our dinner—the rock garden.

      PONDERING THIS BROKEN prairie language of hurt and secret dwelling, I come across Gershom Scholem, contemplating Kabbalah, who notes that “The power of language is bound up in the name, and its abyss is sealed within the name. Having conjured up the ancient names day after day, we can no longer suppress their potencies.” I have always sensed those potencies and that abyss at 2626 and its dusks coming on.

      Nell often seemed in touch with cabalistic potencies of her own, antic and odd. Once she looked out the window from her house to the big Presbyterian church looming across the street. Unlike the steepled, comfortably gothic First Baptist to which she belonged a few blocks distant, this building was grand, Louis Sullivan rectilinear, flat roofed, dressed in pink and white stone like a bank, and pilastered like a courthouse adjudicating the Midwestern business of sin and redemption. Noting the steep steps leading into the sanctuary from the street, she imagined pallbearers struggling up them beneath a casket’s weight and remarked that she was glad she was not a member of that church. Why, she said, you’d go to your own funeral standing on your head.