“How shall we ever eat them, Pauli?” he wondered in the hall, looking at the cakes lined up on a table. One by one, I thought to myself.
In late spring, you pluck a blade of tall grass, place it between your thumbs, align it, and blow. The sound you produce is unmelodious, excruciating—and triumphant.
Four bedrooms on the second floor were grouped about the hall landing. There was a bathroom, and a small study with two windows and a narrow door leading out to a balcony that arching, leaf-heavy branches kept cool in the summer. On the same floor, behind a door usually kept closed, was another part of the house and a fifth bedroom claimed by Auntie when she came for one of her visits. It was unbearably hot there in summer, glacial in winter. From a passageway outside of it, a narrow flight of steps led down to the kitchen and another flight up to the attic.
The dusty stillness of that shut-off part of the house was often broken by me, by the sound of my footsteps as I climbed the stairs to the attic, or by the dull buzz of flies trapped between screen and window in the bedroom, or by spasms of coughing and the muttering-to-herself fussing of Auntie on one of her visits, the one I feared might be without end.
She had chosen the room for herself before I was born and appeared to be gloomily satisfied with its discomforts: extremes of temperature, an iron bedstead with a thin mattress covered with stained ticking, a bare floor, and little else. Were some of the rugs she crocheted meant for the floors of her daughter’s house? How did she dispose of the ones I had seen her make?
Behind the door that closed off that uncanny space, I pictured Auntie lying on her back in her bed, her eyes opened wide and unblinking, smoking cigarettes in the dark.
I spent rainy afternoons in the attic, treading warily on the rough planks that served as flooring, hopping over the holes in which I could glimpse shadowy crossbeams where the jagged edges met, and where I feared spiders might lurk. There were five or six small rooms whose walls ended halfway up, and I could look through them to their windows that hardly let in light, they were so covered with webs and dust. Boxes were stacked everywhere. There was a huge metal birdcage, a dressmaker’s form, canes, a top hat, and a moth-eaten black dress coat. Books moldered in heaps, and trunks with lids too heavy for me to lift decayed in corners. Except for my footprints, dust covered everything.
On the top steps of a narrow flight of stairs, alongside a collection of faded postcards, were piles of National Geographic magazines. I looked through them again and again. As I turned the glossy pages, I was startled each time by the singularity of everything that lived, whether in seashells, houses, nests, temples, logs, or forests, and in the multitude of ways creatures shelter and sustain themselves.
One early afternoon—I had not yet learned to read—I was sitting on a step below the landing, an open book on my lap, inventing a story to fit the illustrations. It was raining. From the little table on which it sat in a dark corner at the foot of the staircase, I heard the telephone ringing. Uncle Elwood came from his study to answer it. “Mr. Fox?” I heard him ask in a surprised voice.
I flew up the stairs to my room, closed the door, and got under the bedclothes. Soon Uncle Elwood knocked on the door, saying the call had been from my father, Paul, who was in Newburgh, about to take a cab to Balmville. “Won’t you open your door?” he asked me.
The word father was outlandish. It held an ominous note. I was transfixed by it. It was as though I had emerged from a dark wood into the sudden glare of headlights.
Uncle Elwood persuaded me at last to come out of my room. He looked back to make sure I was following him down the stairs. After the alarm set off in me when I heard “Mr. Fox,” I felt flat and dull. In the living room I stared listlessly at a new National Geographic lying on the oak library table next to an issue of the Newburgh News, open to the page where the minister’s weekly column appeared. On top of the big radio with a pinched face formed by various dials, on which we listened to Amos and Andy, there was a bronze grouping, a lion holding its paw, lifted an inch or so above the head of a mouse. I had gazed at it often, wondering if the lion was about to pat the mouse or kill it.
I had not longed for my father. I couldn’t think how he had known where to find me.
I wandered into the hall, pausing before a large painting I had seen a thousand times, a landscape of the Hudson Valley. Dreaming my way into it, I walked among the hills, halted at a waterfall that hung from the lip of a cliff; in the glen below it there was an Indian village, feathery columns of smoke rising straight up from tepees. The painting was bathed in an autumnal light as yellow as butter, the river composed of tiny regular waves that resembled newly combed blue-gray hair, gleaming as though oiled.
I heard loud steps on the porch. My father suddenly burst through the doors carrying a big cardboard box. He didn’t see me in the shadowed hall as he looked around for a place to set down the box.
In those first few seconds, I took in everything about him; his physical awkwardness, his height—he loomed like a flagpole in the dim light—his fair curly hair all tumbled about his head, and his attire, odd to me, consisting of a wool jacket different in fabric and pattern from his trousers. He caught sight of me, dropped the box on the floor, its unsealed flaps parting to reveal a number of books, and exclaimed, “There you are!” as if I’d been missing for such a long time that he’d almost given up searching for me. Then at last!—I’d turned up in this old house.
Not much he said during the afternoon he spent with me had the troubling force of those words, and their joking acknowledgment that much time had elapsed since my birth.
I felt compelled to smile, though I didn’t know why.
I bent toward the books. I guessed by their bright colors that they were meant for me. Eventually Uncle Elwood read them all aloud: Robin Hood, King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, Tom Sawyer, Water Babies, Aesop’s Fables, A Child’s Garden of Verses, The Jungle Books, and Treasure Island.
At some happy moment, I lost all caution. When my father got down on all fours, I rode him like a pony.
It was twilight when he left. The rain had stopped. As he turned back on the bottom porch step to hold up his arm in a salute that seemed to take in the world, and before he stepped into the taxi he’d ordered to return for him, the sun emerged from a thick cloud cover and cast its reddish glow over his face as though he’d ordered that, too.
The next morning, I woke at first daylight and ran down the staircase to the living room in my nightclothes, knowing—against my wish to find him there—that I wouldn’t.
From the earliest days of my time with him, Uncle Elwood read to me every evening. A few months after my fifth birthday he began to teach me to read. From being a listener—a standing I hadn’t thought about until I had the means to change it—I became a reader.
The bookshelves in the living room held works of poetry, books about national and local history, and, as I recall, stories by Mark Twain and Rudyard Kipling, among others. I memorized “If,” a poem by Kipling, and in historical sequence the names of the American presidents. I would recite aloud the poem and the presidential roll call, to elicit a look of pride on the minister’s face.
I read a daily children’s story in the Newburgh newspaper. It was accompanied by a drawing of a rabbit wearing a jacket and waistcoat, and the central character was an American version of Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit, but plumper, far more sanguine, and never exposed to the slightest serious danger. I read the funny papers on Sunday, the Katzenjammer Kids, Moon Mullins, The Gumps, Maggie and Jiggs, and Harold Teen; the last-named I disliked intensely, for reasons I don’t recall.
I was free to read any book in the house, but what comes first to memory is my deciphering of the old postcards that lay in heaps at the top of the attic steps. Most had been mailed from foreign capitals before the Great War and